Neville, who sold his first story in 1949 and another fifteen by 1952, concluded early on that the perimeters of the field in the 1950s were simply too close to contain the kind of work he would have to do if he wanted to grow as a writer, and accordingly he quit.

A scattering of stories has appeared over the last quarter of a century, and a couple of novels, but except for one abortive attempt to write full-time in the mid-1960s (the field simply could not absorb the kind of work he was doing), Neville has been in a state of diminished production for a long time.

Nowadays a short-short story shows up once a year or so in a magazine or original anthology; sometimes written in collaboration with his second wife, Lil, and always so astonishingly above the run of material surrounding it as to constitute an embarrassment to the other writers.

Neville, whom I do not claim to know well at all but with whom I did correspond prolifically some years ago, may be among the most intelligent of science fiction writers (only A. J. Budrys seems to have his eclecticism and his breadth) and strikes me as among the few contented people I have ever known.

In the mid-sixties as a fortieth birthday present to himself he financed a two-year attempt to establish a real position in science fiction but although many strange and wonderful stories appeared, ... rotten agenting, the limitations of the field, and a certain powerful revulsion in Neville himself that made him unable to push for entrance into something which he knew had wrecked his spirit, drove him away again and in the last dozen years of his life he produced only a scattering of short stories for the magazines and the original anthologies, none of them longer than a few thousand words.