Michael Butterworth is a UK author, publisher and editor. He was a key part of the UK New Wave of Science Fiction in the 1960s, contributing fiction to New Worlds and other publications. In 1975 he founded Savoy Books with David Britton, co-authoring Britton’s controversial novel Lord Horror. In 2009 he launched the contemporary visual art and writing journal ‘Corridor8’. His latest works are the eponymously titled Butterworth (NULL23, 2019) – a collection of his New Wave-era fiction – and a novel, My Servant the Wind (also NULL23), based on his 1971 writing notebooks, which develops themes found in his early writing and Complete Poems.

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Bookstore, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast, and editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line Magazine. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of Worlds of IF & Galaxy Magazines. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.

JPG – On top of being the author of many books (SF and otherwise), you’ve also had a tremendous output as an editor. How have these two roles played off each other, or interfered with each other, and how have you found a balance between the two?

MB – They are not separate. I started publishing and editing magazines and later books when J. G. Ballard, who collaborated with me on two pieces of fiction for New Worlds, told me I needed to be more prolific. I’m not a prolific writer, or wasn’t then, so I began exploring the idea of publishing. I published work that I liked, and discovered I could move between the two literary forms in alternation, and that they fed off one another, and writing and publishing are all the stronger for it. The only sense in which they ‘interfered’ with one another is that I sometimes got impatient with the view that a publisher is not a creative entity. I felt that I was not being properly assessed as a writer, and that my contribution to the New Wave of SF, and the direction in which I eventually took it with Savoy Books, was being overlooked. I still feel that only parts of my career have been seen, and that the dots haven’t been joined. I am using past tense because, apart from a couple of Savoy projects, still ongoing, publishing may have finally run its course with me, and I’m busy writing. But never say never.