From EDWARD JAMES
I have admired John Gribbin’s work for a long time; I even wrote the
entry on him in the latest edition of Twentieth-Century Science Fiction
Writers (Chicago, 1991). But I had never realised (until Feedback, 9 January)
that he had written the limerick about the fencer called Fisk. James Coleman,
in Relativity for the Layman (which I bought in 1959; first edition 1954),
calls it a ‘now-famous limerick’, which implies that it was written several
years before 1954. Since Gribbin was born in 1946, it is hardly likely that
he was much older than 3 or 4 when he wrote it. My admiration for this prodigiously
prolific man grows daily.
Edward James University of York
