D. R. Smith
(1917 - September 24, 1999)
Donald Raymond Smith was a UK fan from Nuneaton active from the 1930s until the 1960s. He was famously reclusive and never attended a convention or visited other fans to the point where some thought he didn't exist and was simply a penname for somebody else. He was known as the Sage of Nuneaton and invariably bylined D. R. Smith.
In 1935 he learned of the existence of Nuneaton chapter of the Science Fiction League. He contacted the group and received a reply from Maurice K. Hanson. They would become lifelong friends. In March 1936 the Nuneaton group produced the first issue of Novae Terrae. There would be 29 issues in total and Smith would appear in all but two, his contributions often acerbic. Writing in 1944, John F. Burke said of Smith:
He has annoyed more people than I would care to annoy. John Russell Fearn threatened a libel action. Sam Youd, being one of Smith's most ardent disciples for many years, fell out with him because he showed no signs of sharing Sam's political view; Sam is like that. Doug Webster, I think, found the views of Smith too much to endure, probably because Don exhibited no social consciousness.
The Nuneaton group broke up in August 1937 leaving Smith as the only remaining fan in the town.
He worked as a draughtsman designing machine tools, a reserved occupation during the Second World War so he wasn't called up. Eric Needham visited him in 1942 as reported in Fantast #14:
D.R. is perhaps the most typical fan I have ever encountered. Formerly the prize was divided between Arthur Clarke and Maurice Hanson, but D.R. is even more fannish than those two, which is saying something... He wears spectacles and a preoccupied look. Affects unconventional clothes. His hair, a rich mouse in colour, dangles limply over his forehead, and the general contour of his face is longish-oval. Runs to about 5ft 10ins in height, and moderately well-built, possibly 150lbs. ... Don speaks in quick jerks, almost like a road drill, and also has an odd laugh which is a curious cross between a gurgle and a guffaw. Like most people in the Midlands, he has no appreciable accent. ... The little house is full of books. Books are everywhere and the few bookshelves are crammed. D.R. certainly varies his reading. His collection covers practically everything readable – fictional, classical, technical and pornographic. There were even some SF books there. He told me he had a collection and a typewriter, but I never got around to seeing them.
Starting in 1941, Smith began publishing a work of fan fiction in the modern sense. 'The Road to Fame' featured characters from the works of H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. E. Smith and John W. Campbell as well as other authors less well remembered in the 21st century. It was originally conceived as a serial with a different author writing each part. Smith wrote part one which was published in Fantast #9 in March of 1941 and seemingly nobody else wanted to take up the baton so he wrote the subsequent parts too. A collected edition was published by Bill Evans for FAPA in 1953 and there have been subsequent editions, mostly recently an ebook from Ansible Editions in 2021. In his introduction to the latter, Rob Hansen said he thought it 'the first significant piece of IP fan fiction from an SF fan in the UK, possibly the first ever'.
Smith joined the British Fantasy Society in 1942 and became its secretary, editing more than two dozen issues of its bulletin. He continued to contribute to other fanzines through the 1950s, appearing in the letter column of Hyphen and with contributions to New Futurian. He was a member of the BSFA and had a letter in Vector #38 in January 1966.
He had an older brother called Leslie who may also have been a fan. That at least is the impression given by Eric Needham when he visited D. R. in 1942. Leslie lived with D. R, his sister and mother in Nuneaton. At this remove it's impossible to tell whether this is the same Leslie Smith who attended the Second British Convention.
- Rob Hansen's profile of Smith was written for Peter Weston's Relapse but never appeared there. It is published as a standalone supplement on the Relapse page of the efanzines.com website.
- 'The Road to Fame' ebook published by Ansible Editions in June 2021
| Person | 1917—1999 |
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