Langdon Jones (1942– ) is a British writer, editor, and musician who was associated with the influential magazine New Worlds during its New Wave period both as a contributor—beginning with the story “Storm Water Tunnel” in 1964—and in various editorial capacities. His most memorable work, most of it experimental in form and characterized by an architectural narrative style, was assembled as The Eye of the Lens (1972). He no longer writes fiction but continues to be politically involved in his local community and enjoys classical music, both as a musician and composer/arranger.
Jones’s wide taste as an editor, not dissimilar to his work as a writer, was on display in The New SF: An Original Anthology of Modern Speculative Fiction (1969), one of the most avant-garde collections during a period when experimentation was more commercially acceptable than it is today. He also collaborated with Michael Moorcock in assembling The Nature of the Catastrophe (1971), which contained a number of Jerry Cornelius stories from New Worlds written by Moorcock and others. The first published version of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone (1959) had been heavily edited because of Peake’s degenerative illness, and Jones was responsible for the reconstruction work resulting in the posthumous 1970 publication of the definitive version of the book.
“The Hall of Machines” was first published in New Worlds 180 (1968) and later appeared in The Eye of the Lens as part of the titular triptych. In the introduction to that collection, Jones writes that the set of three stories “caused [me] more difficulty than anything [I] had written before” and took fifteen months to complete. “This set was the first work of mine to abandon the conventional narrative and structure, and working on it was like trying to force a path through a jungle that was almost impenetrable…The initial idea came when I was sitting on a District Line underground train on its way to Ealing Broadway…during the part of the journey that was, in fact, above ground, the train passed something I had never noticed before—a little brick building with a notice on its door which said: INTERLOCKING MACHINE ROOM. It seems unlikely that the mental picture this evoked corresponds in any way to the reality.”
“The Hall of Machines” (1968) finds parallels between common human acts and processes and the mysterious machines of the title. It is one of those rare works that is formally experimental and, also, touches in an almost indefinable way on strong emotions. Although Jones published only about a dozen short stories, his work made an impact on, and was made possible by, the New Wave movement.