David I. Masson, author of The Caltraps of Time, was born in Edinburgh in 1915. He was at Merton College, Oxford, from 1934 to 1938, where he read English Language & Literature. During World War 2 he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Mediterranean areas, chiefly North Africa and Italy. His career was as a university librarian, first at Leeds, then in charge of rare-book (and mss) collections, at Liverpool, then Leeds. He married in 1950: one daughter, three grandchildren. Between 1951 and 1991 he published many articles on the functions and effects of phonetic sound-patterning in poetry (especially in the work of Rilke). His published works include three articles with the Princeton University Press publication Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965). Also notable is his Poetic Sound-Patterning Reconsidered (Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, May 1976).

During the 1960s he published seven short stories in New Worlds SF, beginning with the truly remarkable "Traveller's Rest" in 1965. All seven were collected in the now rare first edition of The Caltraps of Time (Faber & Faber, 1968). The three later stories added to Cosmos' expanded edition appeared in original SF anthologies early in the 1970s.

Masson is keenly interested in the sciences, and until recent years was an amateur stoneware potter. He describes himself as an environmentalist, with hopes for the Gaia mechanism.

David Masson's highly individual narrative voice (or voices -- his gift for pastiche is shown to perfection in the 17th-century narration of his story A Two-Timer) has made him that unusual figure, a noted SF author whose fame rests on a single collection of short fiction: The Caltraps of Time.

Available
The Caltraps of Time