David Irvine Masson was a British science-fiction writer and librarian.
Background
His father, Sir Irvine Masson, was a Professor of Chemistry at Durham and Vice-Chancellor at Sheffield, his grandfather, Sir David O. Masson, emigrated to Australia and became Professor of Chemistry at Melbourne while his great-grandfather David M. Masson was Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh, wrote a biography of John Milton and was a friend of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill.
Career
Born in Edinburgh, Masson came from a distinguished family of academics and thinkers. lieutenant was no great surprise, therefore, when Masson himself began a career in higher education. Following his graduation from Merton College, Oxford, with a degree in English language and literature he took on the post of assistant librarian at the University of Leeds in 1938.
Except for a stint in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War from 1940-1946, Masson remained a librarian for the rest of his working life.
lieutenant was during his 23 years at Leeds that he wrote his most well known short stories. Traveller"s Rest, published in 1965 in New Worlds magazine, introduced Masson to his audience.
A study in the uselessness of war focusing on a soldier"s perceptions of reality in combat, perhaps influenced by his own experiences twenty years earlier. Six more stories followed, including A Two-Timer, the tale of a 17th Century man"s revulsion at the modern, 20th Century world, he finds himself in, before Masson ended his relationship with New Worlds.
These seven stories were collected as The Caltraps of Time in 1968.
Just three more short stories followed after 1968. These were included in the 2003 re-issue of Caltraps. Masson also wrote several articles on the functions and effects of phonetic sound-patterning in poetry between 1951 and 1991.
He died in Leeds on 27 February 2007.