He was manager of the Jabberwock Hotel in Antigua in the West Indies from 1969 to 1972, and was resident there when his first professional story ("Sixth Sense") was published in the first issue of the short-lived science fiction magazine Vision of Tomorrow in 1969.
He died at the age 73 of pleural mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs, on 4 November 2005, at the Saanich Peninsula Hospital palliative care unit.
His first novel, Mirror Image (1972), intensified the American genre's Cold War emphasis on impostors and secret invaders; in this case, the "amorphs", who are indistinguishable from terrestrials, are themselves convinced that they are human.
[2] Another of Coney's themes concerns small isolated communities, as in The Hero of Downways, Winter's Children and Fang, the Gnome.
The Celestial Steam Locomotive and Gods of the Greataway are two parts of a single tale, Cat Karina, Fang, the Gnome and King of the Scepter'd Isle are independent stories set in the same universe.