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Things That I Used To
Do
Once upon a time, longer ago than seems at all possible, I
used to put out fanzines. I even used to do fanzine reviews, and you can tell
how long ago this was because at the time fanzine reviewing was still a
respectable occupation and had not yet been tainted with the cutting edge of
thinly veiled hysteria that so many people now seem to expect. For some reason
people like Eric Bentcliffe who had read very few of my reviews came to the
conclusion that my style was uniformly aggressive and anti-everything, and that
all I wanted was to criticise poor snivelling first-time faneds just for the
pure pleasure of watching them die. I even went so far as to count and classify
all the reviews I’d ever done to see exactly how they lay, and even I was
surprised to find something like eighty percent of them were pretty well
unalloyed praise and the tiny minority were the harsh criticisms Bentcliffe and
his like fixated upon. Okay, so blood is generally more fun than butter to a
jaded audience, and more attractive as critical copy in itself if you want to
prove a point, and the real trouble with all this is that it seemed to make
nasty reviewing kind of cool and in the last analysis produced Joseph Nicholas
for which I am very very sorry. But, the point of all this is, I liked a lot
more fanzines than I hated. I did a list of my top fanzines one time, which was
hard enough, but not so hard at all as trying to distinguish the truly
dreadful.
Excellent
fanzines are easy: Wrinkled Shrew, Stop Breaking Down, One-Off, Deadloss, Out Of The Blue, Epsilon; names come readily. The merely mediocre or uninteresting
take more effort: Atropos, Titan, Ardees, or K. But the
really dreadful... Viridiana... Secondhand Wave... God Almighty, there
must be others that were just too hideous to even bother unwrapping if you
could guess the contents. Never mind the top end of things; let’s do a Frank’s APA poll of the worst
fanzine of all time. I wonder how many people will find as I did that very
little of such junk has actually stayed in your memory.
from Not Jumping But Falling, Frank's APA, November
1983
TOP
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Scoria
from Fouler 3, October 1970
Fouler’s ‘Heap’ [the letter column] this issue doesn’t contain
any LOCs from the US or Canada, as you’ll have noticed. This
isn’t evidence of anti-NorMerican sentiment, but is merely
because this issue has followed so hard on the heels of the
last that people in the States and Canada will not have had
time to respond yet. Assuming they’re going/want to, that is.
Anyway, Fouler will appear on a roughly bi-monthly schedule in
the future, and the publication date will be brought forward
whenever the stock of worthy material is enough to make an
issue worthwhile. However, the kind of material we get is more
or less up to You (ghod help us), and let it be known now that
nothing will be rejected unless it is either cruddily written
or has evidence of out-and-out fugghead thot. This means that
no matter how repellent the subject matter may be—whether it’s
an inevitably useless attempt to convince me of the existence
of a blues band better than Canned Heat, or a paean of praise
for the skinhead faction—as long as it is well-written and
intelligently presented, it has a very high chance of seeing
genuine duper ink.
Whilst still on the subject of future issues, I’d like to
mention two departments we have a mind to run. A fanzine
review column, of a depth unheard of in the annals of fandom
since the demise of Pete Roberts’s Checkpoint and only
previously encountered in that greatest fanzine of them all,
Amazing Stories. We consider it vital that there should be a
viable well-known column of in-depth fanzine reviews. It
should not only help to weed the crud out of British fanzines
(all three of them) but give praise wherever it’s due to
individual writers, especially of poetry and fiction, areas
ignored by many LOCers, as evidenced by the comments on the
last issue of Fouler. Anyway, we’d like to receive all new
fanzines for potential review, well within deadline time
whenever possible.
The other project is ‘Backspace’, a reprint section of small
items from the fabulous fanzines of days past, such as Hyphen
(which ran a singularly successful column of this type itself,
upon which ‘Backspace’ is unashamedly modelled), Bastion and
many others. This unit will be wide open to guest editing, so
if you know of any Golden Oldie which will show the modern fan
what he’s missing, then by all means send it in.
TOP
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Maya 1—from Ian Williams, 6 Greta Terrace, Chester Road,
Sunderland, Co. Durham SR4 7RJ For trade, 2/- (6/- for 3),
LOC; 34pp quarto
from ‘Eyeball’, Fouler 4, December 1970
My, I thought to myself, huddled in the sweaty sheets at 8.20
in the morning, peering at Maya in the guttering light of a
brace of clapped out Ever-Readies: this is a damn good
fanzine. So I fell back into the arms of Morpheus; and in the
fullness of time, at 1 PM and in the blinding reality of
sunlight, I looked again, and stap me if I hadn’t been
reasonably right first time.
This is a bloody good first issue, is what I’m trying to say
in that last pseudo-lyrical paragraph. The best since Morfarch
1, in fact, and you all remember that one don’t you? (?) This
is without a doubt the most interesting fanzine I’ve seen for
a long time; it’s packed with the most incredible things,
good, bad, and plain lousy, but all very, very interesting.
It’s a weird kind of cross between the ‘normal’ type of first
issue—in that it has a lot of 'unknowns' and a lot of material
by Ian himself—but it’s also got a very mature feel to it,
probably due to A Graham Boak’s column, and the fact that Ian
has been around the fan thing for a while before and knows
where it’s at.
Still, to more detailed comments. It’s a fairly smart
magazine, marred only by an excess of faintness of repro and a
little cramping here and there. Too many of the shorter items
are seemingly carelessly bunged together, and it’s too easy to
get them confused. There’re a number of reasonable illos,
mostly Harry Bell reprints, but one absolutely superb one of
an arm flushing itself down a bog, which I shall doubtless
steal for Ratfandom badges if I can.
Anyway.
The actual contents, wordwise, are a little odd. I mean, a
review of Dangerous Visions was all very well eighteen months
ago, but now it’s a bit of an anachronism. Still, Brian
Stableford manages to say absolutely nothing new very well
indeed. Similarly, Mailer’s American Dream wasn’t exactly
published yesterday, but I found this a rather pleasing
inclusion in a fanzine, particularly as the review was quite
exceptionally well done, although some of Ritchie Smith’s
conclusions seemed a bit flip and suspect to me.
Ian gets in everywhere, projecting a very reasonable image of
himself as professional intellectual and part-time dwarf, and
it’s a bet that he’s going to be a major fanwriter in a very
short time. Here he’s mostly concerned with 'science fiction’
itself, and has some impossibly individual opinions to pass
on. Myself, I disagree with him almost entirely, especially
where he fliply puts down Philip Dick as ‘an introspective,
irrelevant, bore’ and dismisses the Jerry Cornelius stories
without so much as a wasted sneer. This is nothing but crass
oafishness to me, and I had difficulty in not setting fire to
the damn fanzine at those points. Still, it’s all good
controversial stuff (tho’ I’m not suggesting deliberately
so—not in so many words, anyway) and he has got a damn good
article on R A Lafferty, a much under-exposed author, and he
has realised the true worthlessness of Harlan Ellison as
Fictionaliser, so there’s hope yet.
And by god there’s more. Boak’s column, as you’d expect, is
nauseatingly good, if typical Boak. A severe change from
normal fan-politics here as the man says just what he thinks,
not what he ought to, about fandom. I don’t entirely agree,
obviously, when he says that a fanzine with typed heads, no
artwork, etc., is a cop-out, but that’s a purely personal
approach. Fouler was planned in that way, the outcome of the
toss-up between a very flash fanzine appearing twice a year,
or a neatly produced plain one once every month or so. If we
at Fouler had the money to do it, we’d make it prettier, but
we haven’t so we don’t. And I’m not saying we save any cash
the way things run now, it’s just that we produce more per
penny than otherwise. Anyway, suffice to say that Boak’s
column is the best of its kind I’ve yet seen in a modern
fanzine. He’s got a fine sense of fandom, coupled with a tough
intelligence, and provided he doesn’t sell out he’ll be well
worth reading. The only complaint I’ve got about him here is
that he doesn't give the good British fanzines enough boost,
and gives too much to a piece of generally worthless ephemera
like Seagull by mentioning it at all.
What’s left is mostly smallness, both in size and
significance. Newcomer Thom Penman contributes nothing much
that fills some 4pp, including one of those terrible
school-magazine type ‘news reports’—‘The new DEW-line designer
is called Heimdall.’ Wow. This is plain packing, and it’s a
pity Ian had to use it. (Oddly, I’ve got a quite good thing by
Thom Penman upcoming in Fouler 5.)
Then there’s the characteristic vaguely interesting trivia
from Mary Reed-Legg, which always seems to me to be
manufactured rather than written; and a remarkably trite comic
strip by Jim Marshall and Ian Penman: ‘I do not eat children,
said the stone monster, I love them’—no, it’s not paedophilia
in Comicsland, unfortunately; the infant screams, ‘Don’t love
me,’ and the spurned granite-face stomps off into the ocean
‘...crying for those who reject love.’ O god. It’s not even
particularly well drawn, and has absolutely no merit
whatsoever.
Which leaves, more or less, the poetry. Hmm. I was somewhat
amazed to find that the one I liked best, by David Barry, was
meant to be a hype. I thought it was bloody excellent, a
lament in the vein of the Liverpool Poets, and it all
illustrates that what, in the field of art, is hype to one is
dead straight to another. (See comments on last issue’s
'Unicorn' story in this ‘Heap’, for more illustration of
that.) Anyway, Ritchie Smith’s offering here shows him to be a
far better critic than poet, probably because he seems, to me,
too selfconsciously lyrical—especially in his verbalisations
of a Third Ear Band album, which vein of achievement isn’t
exactly the most successful at the best of times. Still, it’s
pretty good stuff, even if I don’t particularly care for it
myself. I’d just like to see more before committing myself.
Ian himself shows commendable restraint (or maybe cowardice,
or plain good sense) in including only one of his own poems.
Called ‘The Running Man’, it’s vaguely in the same idiom as
‘London Poem’ in this magazine, and as I’m particularly
susceptible to what someone (Merfyn Roberts, if I remember)
called ‘maudlin introverted selfpitying bullshit’ I personally
found it terrific.
And that, fundamentally, is about all. That’s a reasonable
précis of the actual contents, but it can’t communicate the
real and particular atmosphere of Maya, an undefinable
presence which marks out the truly interesting and potentially
successful fanzines out from the crap. There’s an amazing
proportion of crud to good in this issue, so the excellent
overall effect can’t really be analysed. Maybe it’s just the
sheer burning potential for the future steaming through.
Maya 2—from Ian Williams, 6 Greta Terrace, Chester Road,
Sunderland, Co. Durham SR4 7RJ For trade, 10p, LOC,
contribution; 46pp quarto
from ‘Eyeball’, Fouler 6, June 1971
Behind a somewhat grotesque but eyecatching cover lurks a
travesty of duplication. Honest to Christ, Mite, if you had to
dilute the ink why not use simple ordinary water and not piss?
I know it means getting off your arse and finding a tap but it
works out better in the end. It’s a real waste of time pushing
illegible pages, no matter how good the material. And good
material it is too, even though Mite’s obviously determined to
fuck it up with typos and even spacing errors (is this the
magazine which is going to replace Fouler?). Rambling vaguely
within, we light upon:
A G ‘Superfan’ Boak’s column which has one paragraph on p.6
which makes the whole magazine worthwhile. Otherwise he
continues to comment literately and sensibly on fandom. The
fact I can’t say any more isn’t a denigration, or even in this
case my own stupidity, just that all he says there is so
bloody right. Though I might quarrel over the fact that it’s
at all possible to improve OMPA without wholesale expulsions.
Mary Legg with personal impressions of fandom that come
through from the mid-Sixties and the heyday of ‘new wave’
fandom. Fine fannish history, ten Ratpoints to Mite for
securing this and promises of more. More of this might well
serve to give fandom a greater sense of identity and, gosh
wow, bring about a revival of hardcore faaaandom.
The lettercolumn—best I’ve seen for a long time. A rather
depressing fixation on ‘science fiction’, though, from which
Holdstock stands out. An addition to his tirade against
serconism is the fact that whatever Mite and his henchmen
intend to do with Maya they’d be well advised to forget about
SF entirely, leave it to Quicksilver and Speculation, where it
can be handled properly. Maya isn’t going to say anything new,
interesting, or at all influential to the course of SF,
whereas it could contribute all three to fandom. They’re fans,
part of the scene which they can build, chronicle, make the
difference to that they sure as shit won’t make to the SF
world. SF will go on and on and on ad bloody nauseam without
them, and whilst fandom probably would too they’re at least in
a position to make some kind of impression on it—achieve
immortality, in fact, to be remembered. Thank Christ Maya
seems to be tending towards the right direction, though, with
Boak and Legg, and fine fanzine reviews by the Mite (which
include a damn good Cornelius story, by the way); and the
pointless, illiterate, turgid sercon crud by people like
Gilbert is in a small minor part of the mag (though I must
admit, shamefaced, that David Pringle’s ‘Racedeath in SF’ is a
rather good article on annihilation of self and race in SF,
which I’m glad to have read. Though it shouldn’t have been
here!). Like, it’s meaningful enough to have a regular
platform for general discussion of SF (after all, lots of fans
haven’t grown out of it yet) and have it operating on a
lighter level than Quick, or Spec; but I think the new 4M
would fill that space adequately enough, leaving Maya to
realise its full potential as a straightahead fanzine
absolutely preoccupied with fandom. (Is Maya the fanzine to
replace Fouler?)
Other gems... Thom Penman, being as boring, unreadable,
affected, contrived, and wasteful of valuable duper-paper as
only he can be when he’s trying. How charming it is to see
these children eagerly seizing great truths and laying them
down for us to marvel at, all dressed around with their
masterful grasp of Thesaurus in one hand and dictionary in the
other. The prose poem itself (and aren’t they always prose
poems?) aptly committed to paper by cock dipped in ink.
There’s a strange egoboo chain in Gannet fandom, which Mite
contributes to but does not suffer from. It entails Penman
& Mite telling Smith what a terrific imagiste he is, Smith
telling Penman what a terrific prose-stylist he is, and
everyone telling Mite what an AAA Ace feller he is. Ends up
with Smith convinced that pretty images and no sense doth
indeed a poet make, Penman confirmed in his suspicion he’s the
Zelazny of the '70s, and Mite knowing he’s got these two
callow kids wrapped round his little finger. The whole scene
does tend to break down when verbal effluent like this is
revealed to the world, though.
What else... excellent section headings and titles by diverse
hands, good Bell cartoons, and a strong taint of the Mite
himself overall. What more, what more? Ace fanzine, no doubt.
Maya 4—from Ian Maule, 59 Windsor Terrace, South
Gosforth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE3 IYL For trade, LOC,
contribution, 20p
from ‘Eyeball’, Fouler 7, September
1972
Along with Turning Worm the best current British
fanzine—sharing all the qualities of Worm, but not quite so
consistently, or, sometimes, intelligently, but then it’s
altogether a lighter piece of stuff. This issue isn’t
necessarily the best—though I doubt Mauler will ever produce a
totally superb issue; he seems to have the same editorial
block as many editors, a nagging need to put in something for
everyone (a ‘quality’ exemplified by the defunct Les Spinge
under the editorship of one Pardoe). There’s little common
ground between the articles herein, and I have the feeling
they could all have been published anywhere without any loss
at all. A good, really individual fanzine should publish only
material which could only appear in it and nowhere else, and
Maya fails by seeming to include anything that’s spelled right
and vaguely literate. Edit, Maule you fucker, edit! Still and
all, he’s refined the focus down from the days when Supermite
Williams used to include all kinds of shit—even SF-oriented—in
Maya, down to a nice fannish basis.
No doubt, Maya’s the prettiest fanzine. Stone perfect
duplication and clean layout and nice heads etc. Made me so
damn jealous I tried the same thing here, but didn’t allow for
the fucking duper. Anyway, that aside, the best thing here
is—and how it stirs me to say so:
An article by John Dennis Neilsen Hall. His best piece of work
yet—maybe he’s picked up something else since he moved in with
the Brunners besides clap and the crabs. Apart from the second
para, which is a brief flash of his old excess, it’s
exceptionally well-written, Hall having realised the true path
of fannish documentary: pick the more extreme events, get the
details and characteristics right, and then exaggerate only
slightly. If Hall only moved in fannish circles he might well,
on this showing, become a fine chronicler of events. This bit
really brings it all back; it all actually happened just like
that, and yes, we did used to talk like the second para on
p.10. Wow.
Ex-editor Williams intrudes with a typically well-written
piece, typically about nothing. If he only wrote about fandom
he’d be superb, but then fandom might not be large enough to
contain his huge talents. However, it’s a deal more memorable
than anything in Hell. Unlike Darrell Schweitzer’s thing which
I can’t recall at all and looks far too tedious to re-read.
Anyway, what’s a damn Yankee here for? Maya would be better
advised to chronicle British fandom exclusively (except for
letters) as no one does this with any capability. Same for
Piggott’s reviews of US zines, which although well done are
irrelevant to me. Piggott also likely to burn himself out with
these reviews, or at least appear too often for comfort. A
pity Ian Williams’s excellent fanzine reviewing wasn’t kept on
in Maya. Change is as good as.
Lettercolumn filled with flak aimed at me. A somewhat jarring
experience (I don’t claim to be unpanicked by adverse comment)
which makes me wish I’d been more explicit and detailed in my
original letter, and not produced a typical printed scream.
Naturally, I stand by whatever I said, and the whole thing was
worthwhile to see the bits of comment on me and Fouler that
appeared between the lines. Noted, buddies, noted. Most points
made against me are wrong, incidentally, as I’ll prove one day
in an article or something.
This fanzine really does excite me to participate in it (tho’
idly as usual I haven’t), because it’s meaningful in a way
Hell isn’t. I sense that people care what goes on in it.
Maule, for all his faults, is a good taking-care-of-business
editor who has melded the good parts of Fouler and Egg, I
believe, and created something that will in time become better
than either of them—if indeed it hasn’t already. Or, I
suppose, if Maule doesn’t pay heed, the whole thing could go
right down the drain, and what a total shitty pity that would
be.
TOP
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OK. Old readers start here. It’s the old ‘Eyeball’ again.
Richly applauded during its life, not especially missed during
its demise (where oh where was that letter from Peter Weston
saying ‘where oh where is that column written intelligently
and perceptively by master fanzine reviewer Greg
Pickersgill?’).
Anyway, back simply because I rather like doing fanzine
reviews and don’t especially want to do them full-time for
another fanzine even if no one asked me to. Not that there’s a
lot of need for another fanzine column these days, what with
every other fan doing a review section. And not just manky old
Haverings either, but often class stuff. Piggott, Williams and
Edwards have recently added their names to master fanzine
reviewer rolls alongside oldtimers like Boak and Roberts, so
there’s not a lot of need for me. Maybe I ought to slip
casually aside, content to be one of the precursors of the
current school of hard-faced reviewing, and not issue new
material to be judged unfavourably alongside current
reviewers. Maybe I would if I had any sense, but as usual ego
wins in the end as it does in the best of all fanning.
‘Eyeball’ rolls.
* * *
True Rat 1—from Leroy Kettle, 74 Eleanor Road, London
E8
Scab 1-5—from John Brosnan, Flat 1, 62 Elsham Road, London
W14
God, it’s a funny sensation looking at these two
manifestations of Ratfan egocentricity and trying to figure
something of any depth to say about them. In fact saying
anything like that about either of these Ace fanzines is not
only impossible but pernicious.
Actually, there’s not a lot of point in discussing Scab as so
few copies actually reach fandom at large, but it does have a
lot of relevance to what has become known in local circles as
The Real Idiot Debacle—the almost total and entire failure of
True Rat in the usual fannish terms. What happened, you see,
to this Kettle fanzine, the one he’s been trying to get out
ever since those weird days of Coventry in ’69 and oddly
titled fanzines like Pottage and Gollywog—A Magazine of Leroy
Kettle, is that of about sixty copies sent out only five
letters came back. Bad scene, as we say round here. Not
exactly fannish success, especially considering he’s had
virtually no response in any other accepted way, such as
trades, reviews, or anything. Quite a lot of personal spoken
comment, OK, (that’s the big disadvantage of living close to
your key readership) but that’s not a lot of good in the
files, is it?
Well, fuckit, it’s easy to see why the response wasn’t exactly
weighting down the mailman on his drear route through the
Eleanor Gardens tenements. Simply there was nothing to comment
on. It was all fall-about comedy, right through, unremitting
as a machinegun but not as effective, no way. In fact, it’s
true what Malcolm Edwards has been known to say: too much
Kettle is definitely too much Kettle. There’s a time when all
the histrionics ought to stop and unfortunately, although he
knows it well enuff himself, Mr Kettle never quite finds
himself in a position to pull the plug. Naturally and all, I
find Kettle without a doubt the most entertaining fanwriter
over the whole field of fannish writing there is. There are
those better at specific things, but his is a multiplicity of
little talents rather than one large one. I found this fanzine
totally readable, the events realistically depicted (Kettle
being one of the few fans with the Touch of fanwriting: the
ability to describe actual events with a realistic tinge of
fantasy that makes them and the characters both genuine and
larger than life) and the whole thing a general delite to the
world. The fragment-of-the-longest-con-report-ever-written was
Just Like It Really Happened (to all intents and purposes), as
was the Ratfandom party report. The satire on fannish poetic
endeavour quite staggering in its accuracy of style and
intent, and needle-sharp in its characterization of fannish
poets from Ritchie Smith to Charles Platt. The
‘Truconfessions’ of Lisa Conesa showed the results of many
hours spent trying to set up a hackwork factory in emulation
of such literary giants as Christopher M Priest and Graham
Charnock. And so and so and so on and on and on.
Which brings us to the problem of what you can say about a
fanzine like this, other than ‘far out, innit funny’.
Perceptive readers will have noticed this problem already has
the present master reviewer in its grip, and will also be the
first to loudly shout ‘Fuck all’. And more or less they’re
right, and honestly, who’s gonna bring out a sixteen page
fanzine for five LOCs?
Which is Scab’s big deal, as it’s a crummy (though in fact not
usually as crummy as True Rat in production) four-pager
entirely obsessed with Ratfandom and other London phenomenons
as seen by John Brosnan. Funny as hell, and most of it true.
Its advantage is it can be knocked out with no effort and
little money, and get one exactly the same level of praise as
that accorded a larger, similar, device. Which isn’t to say
Brosnan is generally as funny a writer as Kettle; over the
short haul maybe, but in the longer material he tends to get a
little loose, and has something of a tendency towards
irrelevant nastiness.
However, more or less factual. Scab clocks out roughly
monthly, and since the last True Rat in September ’73 there's
been little hope of a new one. Pity, really. And what more can
you say?
Magic Pudding 1—from Malcolm Edwards, 19 Ranmoor
Gardens, Harrow, Middlesex HA1 IUQ
Now, this is Class, kids. This is Class. A fine and near
perfect example of the almost lost art of the personalzine
from someone who many people thought was nothing more than a
SF creep hanging round with big name pros in order to get
himself big-deal assignments writing asshole blurbs for
Gollancz SF potboilers and £40 cheques for scurfing up fanzine
reviews for the execrable Science Fiction Monthly. But be big,
brothers; put all that aside and see that this man’s a real
fan—as if we didn’t know from his superbly fannish-tinged
editorials in Vector and (wayback) Good Old Quicksilver.
Produced as a means to egoboo this works splendidly, bringing
in virtually every facet of Mal’s life: home, fannish, SF fan,
convention committee member. Beautifully written, very fluid,
conversational without being colloquial, almost the written
manifestation of a pseudy little sanctimonious bourgeois with
a house in the country, a dog and a wife (loving). But, honest
kids, he’s a real Buddy and a great writer to boot.
Simply, I find it incredible that someone can range over such
a varied collection of subjects and treat them all with
respect (or, more to the point, with such a finely judged
apportioning of respect) and endow them with such interest as
Malcolm does. Musings on records, fanning, conventions,
sloshing boiling water on heaps of festering maggots, and
Peter Presford are all made to spring alive and vibrant by
Mal’s scintillating Olivetti 32. Having seen many examples of
the ‘art’ of the personalzine I can assure you this is head
and shoulders above the bulk of them, and is substantially
better than virtually all fanwriting in this country at
present. Nothing more than limitation of subject stands
between Malcolm and the highest accolades of fanwriting. No
shit, this is a fluency of expression rarely seen in these
sub-literate days. This is an incisiveness—amply demonstrated
here in Malcolm’s fanzine criticism which has all the depth of
consideration he accords to his ‘real writing’ about
‘literature’—that puts most fannish work to shame as
cack-handed muddle-headed drivel. It’s a testament to my own
inability that I can’t—as Malcolm would be able to—extract
samples or otherwise demonstrate the truth of my claims. All
there is to say is try to get hold of a copy of this, though
there aren’t many about. If you do you’re a lucky man, and if
you don’t you’ve missed some of the best fanwriting of 1973.
Cynic 6—from Graham Boak, 6 Hawks Road,
Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey KT1 3EG
Kids, I’d lately begun to worry about Mr Boak. I’d begun to
see him take on the mantle of an old and tired man, rapidly
receding into premature middle age with all the stultification
of thought, word and deed that that portends for the average
fan. Indeed, in personal confrontations I’d been more than a
little impatient with him, tending more and more to discard
him without thinking; reacting, like, without any original
action other than suspicion of decay. But I were wrong indeed,
and was proven so by the old Superfan hisself who quietly and
without fuss produced this, easily and breathtakingly the best
all-round fanzine of 1973.
Actually, I’d been so put off by Boak I greeted this with no
enthusiasm after its year-long non-appearance, and only a hint
by Peter Roberts that I was talked of inside brought me to
cracking its pages; inside was a fine fanzine, entirely to the
point, totally readable from cover to cover as a unit, free
from the superfluous and superficial bullshit saddling down
the only two other fanzines with any claims to excellence in
’73—Blunt and Zimri.
The only bad thing is the cover, a Dave Rowe atrocity. As
usual he seems to be consciously striving after an original
and distinctive style and, almost as usual, succeeding in
nothing more than hard-edged drawings almost robotic in
execution as well as aspect. A terrible cover for such a fine
fanzine, and a regrettable lapse of taste by Boak who seemed
to let such trivia as Silly Animal Fandom cloud his otherwise
sound editorial taste.
The only real article within is Jim Linwood’s piece on the
Nova Award, and indeed Fouler arch-enemy Linwood does a fine
résumé of the meaning and mechanism of the award, as well as
doing a fine question and answer piece on the more contentious
aspects of it. More or less he convinces me that the award as
it stands is valid and workable, and I was previously one of
its greatest opponents in its present form. I’d still like to
see it expanded to cover individual facets of fannish
achievement, such as Best Writer, Artist, etc., but I’m not
unwilling to concede that that may be somewhat unwieldy.
Though something like the Checkpoint Fan Poll should be
conducted on a larger and more exhaustive scale.
The bulk of the fanzine is Boak’s own writing. Whilst he
hasn’t quite got the actual Creative Spark of Malcolm Edwards
he’s without a doubt the best writer when talking about fans,
fanning, and fandom itself. Maybe it’s because fandom seems to
be something more than a transient phase with Boak (as it
appears to be with Ian Williams) or merely an interesting
adjunct to his main sphere of interest (as it seems with
Edwards); to Boak it’s the Real Thing. Something more than
rubbish, definitely. I’ve lost count of the number of telling
and practical points made by Boak in these pages; all of them
about fans and fandom, no wandering or irrelevance. Level,
controlled, literate, no great excess of style or emotion or
lunacy, all solid taking care of business. It’s a great thing
to see a man take his fanning seriously.
And the remainder, of course, is the letter column. Oddly
controlled by fringefans, but easy and interesting for all
that. Like Boak’s writing there’s no excess of anything, but
it somehow doesn’t demean this fanzine into bland tedium the
way it would Egg, for instance. There are some fanzines which
by simple virtue of their total commitment can make off with
the laurels without any spectacle or flourishing. All this
fanzine lacks is frequency.
Siddhartha 3—from Ian Williams, 6 Greta Terrace, Chester
Road, Sunderland, Co. Durham SR4 7RD
There’s something bloody repellent about this fanzine.
Maybe it’s because the little cunt had the gall to write ‘This
is the last ish you’ll get unless you do something that
impinges on my fan life’ on the copy he finally got round to
sending me, or whether the format of this magazine (this one,
dolts!) has set me up in unwanted competition with Siddhartha,
but there’s something I don’t entirely like going on here.
No doubt, Williams is a good writer. I mean, he’s won the
Checkpoint Fan Poll and all that. Fluent, he expresses himself
well and precisely. He’s sincere, meaningful, soul-searching,
introspective, outgoing, even kind of fannish sometimes. But
fuck it, I think this is a lot of conceited bullshit and in
all truth it pisses me off more than somewhat. It’s like
watching someone flashing his cock in a sort of ‘looka me I
can show everybody something’ spate; and shit, so what if it
is longer than everyone else’s, the whole thing has been a bit
ludicrous and probably embarrassing also.
All this is too sincere, meaningful, honest, and all that.
It’s like some kind of intellectual game, some crummy fucking
mental purge trip. A little game of playing fannish and being
John the Revelator and being honest (man) and all that shit
and I begin to wonder.
OK. I’m fully aware that once you start to look askance at the
‘personal’ style of fanning all kinds of doubts and shames are
going to be dragged out. How should anyone be expected to take
what I’m writing in this fanzine seriously if they can’t also
be reasonably expected to accord much the same open eyes to
Siddhartha? Why should they care? This is a line of thinking
which, if taken too far, would throw the whole concept of
fanning right away, so I’ll not pursue too closely, but
instead try to see what it is about this particular aspect of
fanwriting that turns me off.
And, of course, in my simple little fashion all I can
contribute is what I’ve already said. That Williams is too
blatant about everything. Not necessarily over-emotional, more
to the point cold and clinical about his formal
over-emotionality. This writing isn’t rubbish; it’s got all
the components of good fannish work—personality, involvement,
references to well-known people and events and things,
everything you need—but it’s all kind of mechanical. Which is
the absolute kiss of death for anything like a personalzine,
which is what this aspires to be.
Christ, I dunno. This is all perfectly readable when you shut
your brain off, but I always come away with the feeling that
I’ve somehow been trapped into watching someone masturbating.
All I can say is that I hope this feeling isn’t envy. I really
do.
Malfunction 4/Madcap 3—both from Peter Presford, 10
Dalkeith Road, South Reddish, Stockport SK5 7EY
Ya know kids, it’s a hard thing to admit that there might be
an up and coming fanzine which can take over the essential
mantle of Fouler and maybe even become a kind of focal point
of fandom—but it’s an even harder thing to do when the editor
of this likely fanzine must be revealed as one Peter B
Presford, hitherto known only as the True Illiterate of Fandom
(since the departure of Ken Eadie and Audrey Walton at least)
and also the publisher of the fanzine with the most misplaced
sense of literature and culture this side of Viridiana.
However, much as PEP may be sneered at for his sad lack of the
fundamentals of written English and his pitiable faith in
‘poetry’ that lacks even the risible qualities of the output
of William McGonagall, he is to all intents and purposes
producing a fanzine which just about could become a major
fannish force. Despite the fact he claims it to be a
repository for all the ‘crud’ Madcap is too good to print,
Malfunction is in fact one of the more entertaining and alive
British fanzines. Not at all the best, as Presford’s total
lack of critical faculties allows far too many sillinesses,
patently outplayed jests, flat quips and outright cretinacy to
creep in unstopped. But, and this is it, moving through the
shit you’ll find a real irreverence, a wild capability for
tilting at various fannish windmills—irrespective of the
rights, wrongs, facts or fictions of whatever the issue
is—and, damnitall, genuine evidence of true interest in fandom
and some concern as to its future.
Seriously, fokes. I read this fanzine eight or ten times right
through when I first got it. I admit it was a pretty boring
afternoon at work, but shit, I’ve gone through it many times
since and it’s still a nice one. I haven’t seen such potential
in years, and I can hardly wait to see how Presford goes about
wasting it. Either he’ll sink all his time and energy into the
miserable Madcap, or he’ll get the wrong end of reality and
carry on with his present ‘crud for crud’s sake’ tack.
The hell of it is that the rest of fandom isn’t quite in the
mood to take up this interesting challenge. People are too
ready to dismiss Presford as a harmless dolt and his fanzine
as irrelevant bin-lining. LOCs are a rare event in
Malfunction, and actual articles by anyone other than the
prime perpetrator are as rare as free cunts at a con. Pity.
Anyway, maybe he doesn’t want to be the editor of the Fouler
of the mid-Seventies—and I for one wouldn’t blame him if he
declined that doubtful privilege. Maybe there isn’t a need for
one—though it seems to me that in a remarkably short time this
‘new revived refurbished and revolutionary’ fandom of ours has
erected a startling number of its own idols, which to my mind
have more or less the same proportion of clay as any that
recent attempts were made to remove. Most fanzines these days
seem to have a place in them where fandom is looked at
askance, and people today seem to have greater readiness to be
nasty in just cause than in previous times. So, all that taken
for granted, there might not be any reason for a solitary
stonefisted attempt to crack whatever facades fandom erects.
In all truth I’d love to see one, though, but for warped and
twisted reasons (permutations of things in this paragraph)
most fans don’t seem to want to get behind it in the way they
did those many years ago with Fouler. Not that that’ll stop
Presford if he wants to do it, as any man who’ll carry on
Madcap in the face of such overwhelming scorn can do anything.
Ah, Madcap. A horrific fanzine. All the stupid pretensions of
Iseult, Wadezine, Free Orbit, Viridiana, Macrocosm, and every
other ‘literary’ fanzine you’ve ever seen all bodged into one
icky mass, presided over by a pair of lackwits, at least one
of whom is old enough not to be so idealistic.
I find it hard to believe that Presford and Peter Colley
(co-editor of this rubbish) believe they have the right to
continue publishing this shit. Damnit, it’s one thing to think
you’re a poet—every sensitive little punk thinks that
sometime—but at least try to get some sense of quality or
self-criticism before smearing your work all over the fanzine.
Jesus Christ, how many fans give a good goddam about poetry
anyway, and how many of them want to see it in fanzines?
Not that this is totally a poetry mag; just that Presford’s
staunch defence of his rights to publish it—he almost makes it
sound as though he’s providing a public service by printing
the stuff, whilst in fact the service would be best provided
by rejecting it—colours the whole thing. Fiction fanzines are
good when handled right; Macrocosm was more or less excellent
(Madcap does share in some measure Mac’s good appearance) for
being edited like a prozine. But it seems that for Madcap the
only criterion is naive faith and conviction and starry-eyed
aspiration, and silly old things like sense, good writing,
perception and originality play no part at all.
Put it this way: all the poetry is derivative, shallow, simple
in treatment, the language obvious, the effect odious; all the
fiction is short, pointless, unfunny, unoriginal. The same
fanzine stories you’ve read a hundred times before. The
articles and book reviews and record reviews are as boring and
monotonous as all articles which aren’t based on personal
experience and offer something other than that which can be
readily found in any printed text always are. Aw fuck it,
Presford. Pack it in.
TOP
--oo0oo--
In ‘All Right Now’ [the SBD letter-column] reader G
Rippington raises in a roundabout way the question of
SF-oriented fanzines v. the fannish sort. Whilst in the past I
have been notorious for my wholehearted support of fannish
fanzines to the exclusion of all others I have recently found
in my heart a long-dormant fascination for SF, and can now see
the sense, purpose and, currently, need for a genuine honest
to god science fiction fanzine based in Britain. By that I
don’t necessarily mean a ‘critical journal’ of the sort
typified by Speculation (a fairly serious strongly SF-oriented
fanzine produced in the Sixties by a Birmingham fan named
Peter Weston, who became very friendly with a number of
professional people as a result) or, more recently, Vector,
the BSFA journal, which is more ‘serious’ than the sort of
fanzine I have in mind, and is also fairly difficult to
obtain. What I’m thinking about is a solidly ‘fannish’ fanzine
aimed entirely at SF, written by and for the science fiction
enthusiast rather the posturing critic or dilettante
intellectual. It should carry good book reviews, biographies,
interviews, checklists, bibliographies, information on buying
and selling for collectors, general news and scandal on or
about the SF scene, and, importantly, be a place for people to
talk and enthuse about science fiction, showing what they like
and why they like it, making it clear how SF affects them and
how it impinges on their lives. The people behind this sort of
fanzine would have to know fandom well, know how to produce a
good fanzine, and be intimately involved in SF—the sort of
character who could (would, habitually) carry on whole
conversations in SF terms, make esoteric jokes on SF subjects.
Older fans will doubtless remember the fanzines Mike Ashley
used to produce, before he became a Jehovah’s Witness and in a
moment of epiphany realised all he had to do was wait a few
years until a hack publisher like NEL would come along and pay
him lots of money for doing what he’d previously done for
love. His fanzines were not totally unlike the ideal I’ve
described above. The small flaw with doing a fanzine like this
is that there are few people capable of it. One would need a
very strong knowledge of SF, equal critical ability, genuine
enthusiasm about SF, wit, humour, and a generally light touch,
and if at all possible contacts in the professional world that
would yield up the sort of background material that brings the
whole business alive. These requirements cut down the possible
applicants no end. Geoff Rippington, like most other neofans
whose first fanzine is SF-oriented, has shown that enthusiasm
is not enough, and in all truth all Ashley had going for him
was a powerful memory and a lot of spare time in which to
compile interminable checklists. Kevin Williams, a Newcastle
fan, once put out a fanzine called Durfed in which, beneath a
deep layer of fifth-hand sub-sub-sub-True Rat humour, a
remarkable knowledge of SF lay. Robert Jackson and Malcolm
Edwards both have strong knowledge, good critical ability, and
excellent writing capabilities. Leroy Kettle, perhaps unknown
to many people, has a truly phenomenal depth of knowledge of
the SF field (matched only, perhaps, by my own, ho ho), a
fantastic knack for communicating his enthusiasm for it, and a
critical sense rarely communicated to fandom at large. It’s
people like this, who not only like SF but know it intimately,
can write well, and, above all, know how to produce good
fanzines, that could make a great success of a fanzine like
this in Britain right now; with the huge numbers of science
fiction enthusiasts about at the moment it could, done right,
be a Very Big Thing Indeed.
TOP
--oo0oo--
Burning
Hell—Fanzine Reviews
from Stop Breaking Down 4, March 1977
Everybody got to have some good times, everybody got to have
some bad times. In the last eight or nine months most of my
bad times have been spent at a table staring hopelessly at a
heap of fanzines and a blank page in the typewriter. Actually,
that’s a lie; often the page was filled, but filled alas! with
little of true worth. Far from producing anything meaningful
and profound, liable to shift the whole axis of fanzine fandom
in one fell shudder or even finding it in me to savage some
poor ignorant cretinous neofan with no possible idea of how to
produce a fanzine in any competent fashion, I found I was
doing nothing other than fill sheets with humdrum repetition,
third hand revelations, and even more superficial than usual
analyses. Bad scene man. No wonder that on several
occasions—even on the three or four times when all that was
required to complete this fanzine for final publication was
the review column—the main thought in my head was simply ‘Fuck
this shit’.
Now that sounds like a right lot of wank, really. Why should I
worry about whether my fanzine reviews actually say anything
either new or penetrating? Well, for a start because other
people seem to expect it of me. I find it gratifying that in
the past my fanzine reviews have been praised by people whose
commendations are valuable to me. Apart from that, I think
there could be some truth in the idea that fanzine reviewing
is the only way of establishing some standard of achievement
in fandom. And apart from that I think that if you’re going to
bother to do anything in fandom you’d bloody better get it
done to your own satisfaction first, because if you don’t what
you're issuing is substantially as insulting to your readers
as a fart in the face. So, taking all that into account, it’s
not quite such a pose as it might at first seem. But even
though I’ve more or less stated those ‘facts’, just how much
truth, or use, is contained within them? Of course, once I
started fretting along those lines it turned into weeks of
sleepless nights, and crazy notions began to pile up in my
head like so much shit in a blocked drain.
For a start I began to consider my own attitude towards
fanzines. Was I really interested in them? Did all these
tedious little pamphlets really have any bearing on the world
as I lived in it? Could it have been that, once I had
re-established myself in fandom and fanzines were pouring in
at a greater rate per week than they had previously per
sixmonth, I was becoming rapidly disenchanted with the whole
business? Were the days when I would read even a piece of
arrant nonsense like Madcap with pleasure and interest a dozen
times between breakfast and bedtime gone forever? Well,
partially at least. Whilst on reflection I found I had no
doubt of my basic fascination with fandom, I soon realised
that although I’d rather read a good fanzine than almost
anything else I was becoming more and more choosy about what
constituted a good fanzine. Too many fanzines on my pile were
the sort that I really wasn’t too fussed about reading again,
even for the purposes of review. Not that there was anything
particularly bad about them—God knows if there had been I’d
have been glad to put myself up to the task of pointing it out
to anyone who wanted to know—but they were just, well, dull is
a word that springs to mind. Tedious, mediocre, and
inconsequential are others that could equally fit. By the time
I’d figured all this out (lightning-flash revelations come
slow around this locale sometimes), I felt more than a little
pissed off with these scrappy efforts that had had me
scratching my head struggling to find some snappy comment to
make about them. Now I realise that makes me sound a bit of a
cunt who treats fanzines with disdain, but it ain’t
necessarily so. I still enjoy reading a new fanzine. No better
pleasure outside a woman’s arms etc. But sometimes they don’t
get you right by the brain and pull, do they? I know it’s
naughty of me but sometimes I feel that those editors who are
spending their time and energy putting out fanzines with such
a low stimulation index really ought to be taken out the back
to have their faces rubbed down the drains for a few minutes.
Trying is not always sufficient. Merely putting out a fanzine
is not enough. Shoot your shot and give it all you got, not
fuck around.
So by the time I’d sorted that lot out and walked around the
room a couple of times effing and blinding, I started to get
even more perverse notions. I began to wonder if John Hall was
right after all when he said fanzine reviews are a load of
shit. Or if Dave Rowe had not been entirely out of touch with
reality when he claimed that fanzine reviewers use their
platforms to expend their own personalities at the expense of
fanzine editors. I began to wonder whether all this heartbreak
was going to pay off in the long run. Maybe I should push out
the issue with a set of record reviews or a chunk of my porn
novel in place of the reviews. I mean, you know and I know
that no matter what is said, or how it is said, no one is
going to pay a blind bit of attention, especially the people
who should be those with the biggest eyes and ears, the
neofans. I began to wonder if there was such a thing as a
fanzine editor who paid the slightest bit of attention to what
was said about him in a fanzine review. It suddenly became
clear to me that progression and improvement amongst faneds is
a long and painful business that comes with long years of
experience and cannot—or often will not—be absorbed overnight
from whatever quantity or quality of reviews, articles,
guides, or whatever the hell. Now that fact just can’t be
wrong; how else can a man explain the pathetically awful
first, second, third, and even fourth issues of dull,
ill-conceived fanzines that hit the mail with dread
regularity. The good ones? Blind chance, of course.
So then, like, what’s it all for?
Well, no doubt fanzines as subject-matter provide for some of
the best and most fascinating of all fannish writing. Recently
this has been superbly exemplified by D West’s major article
in True Rat 8 (an otherwise undistinguished fanzine by a minor
member of the ‘Britain is Fine in ’79’ Committee). This was a
well-wrought piece of a quality rarely found in fanzines on
any subject down to and including science fiction. Here we see
a man with definite ideas and thoughts and the ability to
express them well, with cutting incisiveness where needed,
with pungent humour when necessary. By virtue of its subject
matter it is intensely fannish, with the super-value of being
almost essential reading for each and every one of the
fanzine’s readers. No doubt, any worthwhile article on
fanzines in a fanzine creates, simply by virtue of its
existence, one of the rare occasions when a fanzine item is of
importance and interest to every one of the readers. Of
course, there still exists the notion that no one will have
their attitudes improved or altered one jot by what is said,
though that’s no fault of either the writer’s or the
article’s. Therefore if you subscribe to the idea that
criticism (of whatever kind or level) must have a practical
purpose, must be essentially instructional no matter what,
fanzine reviewing is a waste of time.
OK. So let’s pause a moment in this nosing motion towards
trying to elevate fanzine reviewing to some sort of critical
level and examine the other side of the coin: fanzine reviews
as merely incestuous comments on our own small world and its
media. Everyone likes to read about themselves, as virtually
everyone likely to read fanzine reviews will do regularly,
occasionally, or eventually, depending on their degree of
involvement in fanzine work. And most people share an interest
in picking up on what others thought about something they’ve
read (the justification, so I’m told, for the mass of
halfwitted book-reviewing found in a certain class of
fanzine). Of course, to do even that with any realistic hope
of entertaining it has to be done with some style, flair, and
a reasonable level of perception throughout. Some sort of
contents-listing type short reviews with ‘liked A/hated B’
type crap ladled over it is really neither use nor
entertainment. So no matter what, you get back to having to
consider the beast before slaying it. The trouble, still, with
most fanzines is that they are such unappealing prey that
often enough the hunter loses interest in the game. Still and
all, even the shortest, least considered review fills up a
page or so, puts another item on the contents page, strikes
off the obligation of a letter-of-comment, and gratifies
whoever sent you the fanzine with the thought that at least
you took it out of the envelope. Big deal huh?
So where have I got to with all of this? Frankly, I’m unsure.
I, myself, personally, believe that good writing on fanzines
is the highest art in all fanzine writing and I aspire to some
sort of pinnacle within the field myself. I rarely achieve
self-set goals, but I’ll keep on keeping on. I’m still not
entirely convinced that fanzine reviewing has any practical
value; how much is there to be said anyway? Once you’ve panned
one crudzine you’ve panned them all, really. And if people
can’t recognise material of worth without having their noses
rubbed in it then maybe they don’t deserve to see it at all.
Maybe all of this muddled head-searching is consequent to the
fact that nothing especially remarkable has happened in
fanzine publishing in Britain recently. Maybe worthwhile
reviewing is too closely tied to the material under
consideration. I mean, silk purses and sow’s ear and all that.
Anyway, the hell with it, even if I had developed some
entirely new ethic or critical code of fanzine reviewing no
one’d give a damn anyway. So let’s go to the crossroads and
see what’s been going on wrong.
* * *
I suppose a damned near perfect example of the sort of
worthily dull fanzine that is the bane of fanzine reviewers
everywhere is Dave Cockfield’s Atropos, the
third issue of which came out some time ago. That, really, is
all I should say about it, for although I grabbed it eagerly
enough when it arrived I only let it slip from my grasp in
favour of re-reading Bill Millar’s excellent book on the
Coasters and, shock-horror, hardly looked at it again, even
for the purposes of review. I’m told that my negligence has
not been to my detriment, but that’s neither here nor there
because I’m vaguely ashamed not to have read Dave’s fanzine
with anything like interest. However, I find it easy enough to
rationalise away any presumed failure on my part by claiming
that any fanzine must above all attract and involve its
readers (‘a fanzine without involvement is a failure’ once
said a very wise man) because—even though it drops
unsolicited, though tacitly invited, onto one’s doormat—it
really has no intrinsic appeal greater than that held by any
newstand magazine, which one must be in one of a million ways
cajoled and coerced into buying on the promise of goodies
within. A promise rarely fulfilled as I have discovered on
many forays into Soho porn-shops. What I’m getting at is that
even though the damned thing is a fanzine and all fanzine fans
are presumed to be interested in it per se, that presumption
is something that can lead the aspiring faned well awry.
Really, if a fanzine gives every appearance, even on
inspection, of being uninteresting, there’s no reason why it
should get any more of a fair shake.
Too many faneds seem to believe that merely pubbing their ish
and cramming it with things they like is sufficient. Well, it
may be if you just want to do it for the sake of it, but if
you look on a fanzine as something which will grow and improve
with every issue this ain’t good enough. Someone like David
Griffin, for instance, who publishes a remarkably nondescript
fanzine like After the Flood which is notable only for his
persistent use of binary for issue-numbering, can wonder in
all naivety why he only gets two or three letters. After all,
he’s putting in the sort of thing he’s interested in, isn’t
he? Yeah, but maybe no one else is. You got to play to the
audience no matter what. And not just rubbish either, not just
amazing bin-lining like articles on Rosicrucianism
(Atropos 2) even though they draw actual fucking letters
of comment (Atropos 3). Which is something else that never
fails to amaze me; would any one of the people who wrote
anything to Atropos about Rosicrucianism ever have thought
spontaneously about the cult without the stimulus of the
article? No, they probably wouldn’t, and contrary to
expectations I am not going to say that is a good thing. I
don’t for one moment believe that anyone needs articles like
that in fanzines, and it’s a testament to the dimness of many
letterwriters that they often say things like ‘Coo, if not for
Jimmy Phan’s article on pig-fucking I’d never ever have
thought about it. What a fascinating etc.’ And of course
they’ll have forgotten about it in a week’s time. Makes no
impression, lasting, and is thus worthless from the beginning.
The only sort of fanzine writing that ever makes an indelible
impression is the sort of straight from the heart personalised
stuff, and don’t let anyone kid you otherwise.
Where was I? Yeah, I wonder why faneds never seem to think in
terms of drawing the reader into their fanzine, making it
deliberately attractive as a reading proposition. Why does
anyone embark on the expensive and time-consuming task of
pubbing the fucking ish and then just sling in any old crap
lying around? Who knows? Not me, said the little brown hen, or
whatever the bloody creature was.
All of which makes Dave Cockfield sound cretinous, which is a
pity ’cause he isn’t. In Atropos 3 he has at least conquered
the dreadful mock-humility of his previous editorials, and in
articles published elsewhere has shown himself an interesting
and readable commentator on fannish characters and events. But
he has, completely and totally, failed to build his own
fanzine around an interesting central core. In it he says he
thinks this was his best issue so far. No wonder, then, that
the fourth issue has been so long in appearing.
By contrast we have Leroy Kettle. For the nonce reconciled to
the fact that his way to everlasting fame may not lie along
the path trodden by such auspicious fans-into-pros as
Christopher M Priest and G Peyton Wertenbaker, Kettle plunges
onward ever onward in his ambition to become the Hugest Name
Fan since Peter Weston. His most recent step in this direction
(marathon articles in Maya and favourable reviews of appalling
stories in the Times Lit Supp notwithstanding) was to make
over his one-time personalzine True Rat into what is known by
the cognoscenti as a ‘genzine’, which doesn’t mean ‘genuine
fanzine’ as one might expect, but that it contains material by
several diverse hands other than the editor/publisher. (Stop
Breaking Down—the Neofan’s Oracle.)
And some tasty diverse hands appear here too, proof indeed
that they who ask shall receive. Would that more fanzine
editors take the trouble to request material from worthwhile
writers instead of snatching wholesale at the efforts of
brothers, cousins, and old school magazines. Graham Charnock,
Peter Roberts and D West are all tuff men with a bunch of
syllables at the best of times and most anything by them is
worth a moment’s bated breath. Unfortunately, although a grand
maxim oft expressed in several great blues lyrics is
‘Everything’s gotta change’, change is not always for the
best, and sad to say this ‘new’ True Rat is an experiment
which does not quite come off. For me at least. (Well, I bet
ya thought I was stating some kind of fucking universal law
again then, didn’t ya?)
Let’s put it this way; the shift from personalzine to genzine
is a shift in idea only, not in style. The fanzine itself,
despite the addition of a few headings and some good cartoons
by D West, looks just like the old True Rat, the essential
appearance and flavour of it remaining unchanged, giving the
curious feeling that here we have Kettle carrying off a
substantial coup in pastiche of his best buddies’ styles but
having forgotten the comic punchlines at the end. What I mean
is that for all his legendary ability to pick up and correct
the most unobtrusive typo, Kettle has yet to extend such
meticulousness to such gross items as layout. The slipshod
approach that virtually worked in favour of True Rat
(personalzine) here seems untidy and uninteresting. The worst
example of this occurs in Peter Roberts’s article, which could
well be a fascinating bit of fan history, but is laid out so
badly—for instance several lengthy quotes are hardly
distinguishable from the main text—that it looks quite
unreadable. Casual layout is one thing, careless layout is
another. And apart from that I’m far from sure articles on
fanhistory should be in True Rat anyway. I tend to think that
each fanzine has a specific character and their editors would
be well advised to select material that is in keeping with the
overall image.
Other pieces don’t suffer so badly as regards layout; Charnock
writes well, if like a nutter, and West provides one of the
best pieces of fanzine criticism I’ve ever seen.
This could be a damned fine fanzine, properly produced; but no
matter what Kettle doesn’t really need it. His own material is
lost and wasted amongst the rest and despite a great ability
to draw excellent material from ace fanwriters he seems
reluctant to work sufficiently hard to do it justice. And why
bother? He’s one of the great fanwriters. There’s enough
genzines, only one Kettle; he should do what he do do best.
And, talking of genzines, the surprise of the century is that
young Geof (sic) Rippington’s Titan is really coming up roses
after all. The fourth issue is interesting, varied, literate,
and even witty on occasion. Nicely produced, open and neat,
with lots of Terry Jeeves illos (‘Jeeves for TAFF’ says Titan,
surprise surprise). Good compilation of fanzine reviews, fan
history, book reviewing and letters. The whole thing probably
succeeds because Rippington is no great shakes as Mr
Personality and the onus is entirely on the fanzine to be
interesting and readable, and it succeeds. In fact the only
noisome patch is that occupied by Andrew Tidmarsh, the fan who
is taking old notions of criticism as self-aggrandisement to
all new heights. No one on earth sounds as portentous and
pompous as Tidmarsh in full flight and I rather tend to
dismiss him as a sort of jejune John Brunner, especially when
he opens an article branding fans as ‘childish’ in thinking
and expressions. This sort of opening invariably leads me to
wonder why, if he thinks we’re such shit, he’s allowing his
work to be published in a fanzine at all—though I grant he may
have the notion of bringing eyesight to the blind (but I don’t
want to see things his way)—and when I read later some sort of
crazy idea that the western world is causing over-population
by forcing the Third World to overproduce raw materials I
really do lose all patience. The trouble with Tidmarsh is that
he isn’t merely iconoclastic and aggravating but is fucking
dull as well. In fact I’d swear that the Andrew Tidmarsh I
once had a perfectly fascinating conversation with about Gary
Glitter singles is a completely different person.
At the last Globe I went to a curious thing happened; this
funny little woman came up and sold me a fanzine. 30p. Lots of
money especially for a Star Trek fanzine. Now I’m not so crazy
as I sound because it so happens the producer of that fanzine
is one Helen McCarthy who works in the same building as I do
and who walks right past me in the corridor occasionally. So
altogether it was as good an opportunity as any to check out
this curious sub-fandom. And curious is just about the right
word too. Similar enough to a ‘real’ fanzine to lull one into
a sense of false familiarity, some huge culture-gaps soon open
up. Not so much the mere fascination with Star Trek—which as
far as I’m concerned is not much crazier than any fascination
with SF anyway—or even the ST fiction, crosswords, and all the
rest. No, what rocked me back was the peculiar glittery
innocence of it all, a sort of Rowesque community bathed in
light and friendship where everyone helps everyone else off
and on with their Fancy-Dress and oohs and ahhs at the
appropriate times at the Fashion Shows at ST cons, and gives
an ovation for the hard-working organisers at the end, and
generally all is sweetness and light. No one gets drunk, falls
over, feels anyone else up, or feels shitty. It’s the Fashion
Shows that really knock me out, though. The descriptions of
them herein are quite lyrical, exuding an almost perverse
girlish fascination that almost but not quite slips over the
line into the tastefully erotic. OK, so I’m exaggerating a bit
but the thought is there. Actually City 3 (which is what I’m
talking about) is not too bad, considering. Considering what,
though, I’m not saying.
From the ridiculous to the sublime, great joy fell my way when
the unexpected bounty of Bryn Fortey’s Relativity 7 hit the
door-mat. The first Rel written entirely by Fortey (bar a few
letters) it hits a new high for a generally enjoyable fanzine.
Fortey’s article on his days as a boxing man is a pure
delight: vivid, punchy (pun!), and damned funny. Exactly the
kind of article I’d dearly love to publish in Stop Breaking
Down. And amazement on amazement, poetry in a fanzine that is
not merely slightly readable but fucking Good! Mr Fortey is
often a god amongst men. There’s not a lot can be said of a
fanzine like this and not a lot that needs to be. Let us enjoy
it while we can.
Another fanzine somewhat similar—in that it has formed a
distinct personality that does not need to be matched against
any sort of criteria of fannish excellence—is Richard
McMahon’s Inverted Ear Trumpet, of which 4 was the last issue,
McMahon having gafiated temporarily though due to return some
day soon with another fanzine with an equally cretinous name.
Editorial personality is the name of the game and McMahon wins
through with a genuinely funny article about going to the
dentist which may well be all lies but bloody ’ell made me
laff. Nice cartoons too, by the Howard Hughes of fandom, Paul
E Thompson. There are signs too that Richard is giving up his
pointless crusade against ‘obscenity’ in fanzines and
concentrating more on producing worthwhile fanwriting.
Glimpse and Nebula were two new wave-type fanzines that always
struck me as similar in their ‘professional’ approach, with an
emphasis on fiction, layout, subscription rates and all that.
Even so, I soon found them worth looking forward to. Glimpse 4
is, according to editor Paul Hudson, the last. Obviously he
held to his ideas of getting his fanzine to grow gradually to
full professional status somewhat too strongly, whereas David
Taylor and his gang over at Nebula have become more and more
conventionally fannish in style and format in the last few
issues. Artwork is Nebula’s strong suite, with Tony Schofield
and J Mike Barr (Jim Barker) producing the best illustrative
art I’ve seen in British fanzines ever, a pure delight. All
the fiction is crap, of course, and I didn’t read any of it;
but the columnists, particularly Brian Tawn (publisher of the
rather good fanzine Scribe), are both readable and
interesting. If these boys can keep up their standard of
artwork and columnists—and maybe produce more of the humorous
pastiches like their marvellously funny one-off ‘Dawn Patrol
Blaster Aces’—the world will be a better place. Don’t be put
off Nebula because you think of it as a fiction fanzine;
there’s too much good in it to miss.
What can one say about Triode that hasn’t been said before?
About ten or twelve years before, more or less. A peculiar
dinosaur existing in a sheltered corner of the North-West
where scant sign of the 1970s has penetrated, whenever
contemporary fans (I can’t quite bring myself to call editors
Terry Jeeves and Eric Bentcliffe ‘contemporary fans’) write
for it they always seem to adopt a slightly peculiar style
that reeks of the most jocular affectations of British fandom
of the late Fifties, the school brought up on The Goon Show
and copies of Punch. Thus Robert Jackson, in writing about a
rock-band causing alarm in the countryside by practising at
night, rather makes the whole thing sound like something
taking place in a different century to this one and, worse,
makes it sound as though he is totally unfamiliar with the
whole thing. I dunno. And Tom Perry’s affection for puns is,
to say the least, over-indulged. It somehow pains me to think
that people like Mike Glicksohn and Terry Hughes think this
fanzine is fannish fandom incarnate.
And here we are at last with the big one. Maya. My initial
reaction to Maya is inevitably that it is too cold, too
professional, without even the glaring fault of publishing
awful fiction perpetrated by other quasi-professional fanzines
such as Nebula. But when it is filled, as this issue is, with
what are manifestly excellent articles laid out and
illustrated in fine style, I begin to reconsider. Could it be,
I wonder, that my reaction is merely a subconscious cover for
my actual realisation that Maya is really just another fanzine
essentially, something within the field to which I myself
contribute, but at the same time so far above my abilities in
its appearance, the quality of its contributors, its drawing
power for same, and its depressingly healthy and clearminded
intellectual attitude? Do I recognise this and recoil from it
in awe? Is this fanzine just too good and to save my eyes I
search for some trace of flaw, some evidence that it is not a
fanzine at all and I need not judge my own efforts against it
any more than I would against Let It Rock, Whitehouse, or
F&SF? Maybe, maybe. I can never quite make up my mind.
Having said that, Maya 12/13 probably seems so supernaturally
good because of its material: superb examples of fanwriting by
Peter Weston (making it clear once and for all what a
destructive influence Charles Platt was on fandom in the
’60s), Larry Chortle on how to be a failed pornographer, and
Malcolm Edwards writing fanzine reviews just like as though
he’d read the fanzines concerned. Remarkable stuff. Two years
ago Maya was merely a promising fanzine; nowadays if only
Robert Jackson could insert a bit of genuine editorial
personality I’d give it the Goddamned Nova Award with my own
two hands.
TOP
--oo0oo--
Big Fat Book
from Rastus Johnson’s Cakewalk 1, September
1993
Got the new edition of the SF Encyclopaedia a couple of months
back. Mad keen as usual. On the phone to Peyton at Andromeda,
credit cards flying in all directions. Despite much snuffling
of dissatisfaction from the other end ('Bloody Edward Mackin
still not in,’ says Roger) eagerly await package and tear it
open with carving knife as usual—Andromeda mailroom may be
slow but they put together a package sturdier than an Anderson
shelter.
What a big book: Ian Williams must be loving it; it’s as heavy
as half a dozen pelicans. Despite that, my first impressions
are poor. In a blatant effort to make the thing
academic-friendly they have dumped all the illustrations,
making it look stark indeed compared to 1979. This seems a
shame when one considers just how much of SF is involved with
images, and how many of the entries concern artists. If this
is the price to be paid for ‘respectability’ it is doubly too
high, as not only are the illustrations necessary but there’s
been little sign this sop has paid off in serious reviews.
(The only one I encountered was on the terrible Radio 4 ‘arts’
programme Kaleidoscope and it was frankly embarrassing.) The
page layout isn’t especially welcoming either; the columns are
wide, leading between lines narrow, and the typeface
unattractive. I found it hard to adjust to and unpleasant to
read. It put me off so much it wasn’t for some time that I
realised that a well-used tome around here—the Guinness
Encyclopaedia of Popular Music—has almost the same
characteristics, having slightly wider columns but a smaller,
neater typeface and wider leading. The effect is totally
different, and as I had found the Guinness readable from the
first, it took over a week to realise the comparative
similarity.
However, what gems of knowledge lurk within. Well, bloody
hell, no Vance Aandahl for a start. Probably only got into the
1979 because then-assistant Malcolm Edwards still had a few
vestiges of fannish humour left in him. Still, Aandahl
deserved an entry anyway and it is signal that he is not here
now. You will also search in vain for Joel Townsley Rogers,
David Redd, T P Caravan, Will Mohler, Holley Cantine, Robert
Presslie, Lee Brown Coye, Bert Tanner, Mel Hunter, George
Salter and any one of a score or more that I have paged in
vain so far. You will find out, though remarkably little in
some cases, about some extremely minor characters who are
present by virtue of their one foray in the realms of
scientifiction being stuck for a brief guttering moment
between wood or pasteboard. Never mind, editorial theory says,
that Soandso was the one bright spark that justified the
existence of any number of issues of Average Imagination
Stories, he didn’t get a book reprint so that’s him out for a
start then. Oh, the injustice of it all.
I doubt whether it would do much good complaining either; the
editors’ enthusiasm for the magazines is such that they have
had all the entries re-written in a more compact form, doing
away with all that ‘Collectors Should Note’ biblio finickiness
from 1979. The justification for this is Astounding, if not
Amazing. There are, apparently, now so many other publications
where detailed information on the SF magazines can be had that
it isn’t necessary to be so meticulous in the SFE. Well, lordy
lordy, another secret of the universe revealed. Is it the
Austral Leueg at work again, or just a load of evasion about
space problems? Or am I the only SF magazine collector who
thinks that there is only one word and that is the wonderful
Tymn/Ashley Science Fiction, Fantasy And Weird Magazines which
not only costs a fortune (£85 in 1987!) but is also
startlingly difficult to get, as Greenwood Press publish
primarily for sale to institutions and can’t really grasp the
idea that individuals might want to buy their books. Perfect
in every detail as in this case they certainly are. But then
again, maybe Grafton put out an A-format paperback that I
haven’t noticed. Maybe not.
But then I guess the editors assume that the average SF reader
of today knows nothing about the magazines and cares less.
After all, would an Interzone reader (and we’re really
desperately narrowing down the focus here) even recognize a
1951 Other Worlds as being, essentially, the same thing? Never
mind the sort of literary farts who enthuse over, say, Terry
Pratchett or Robert Holdstock. Isn’t it, though, the
responsibility of reference works to ensure that the magazines
and the writers they fostered are not covertly shunted off to
the shredder of history?
As it happened, the day after getting my copy the movie Phase
IV showed on TV... somehow Peter Nicholls’s write-up in the
SFE doesn’t seem like it was of the same film. If there’s one
positive thing to be said for the film—among several,
actually; it was better than I expected—it is that it is about
science, scientific method, and investigation, the same sort
of ‘what’s going on?’ viewpoint of, say, Quatermass. Nicholls
makes a specific point of saying that it is not any of these
things. Crikey, I thought, looking up a few more. Now, it
appears that since 1979 the majority of film entries have been
done by Peter Nicholls, and he appears to have laid editorial
hands on the residual 1979 entries by John Brosnan too. It
also appears to me that he might not have, well, actually seen
some of them. Now this is intuition, I know, but often the
write-up reads like a distillation of others’ commentaries. A
consequence of ‘encyclopaedia style’? Perhaps not. It just
seems to me that there are too many instances where the
general tone of the film as perceived by Nicholls is quite
different from my own memories. Mind you, that being said
there are many quite spot-on bits where it all rings true and
there are genuine flashes of illumination. I dunno. Is there
anything wrong with cribbing it anyway? Has John Clute really
read all those terrible books by dreary nonentities? One
rather hopes not; life is too short.
Well, gosh wow anyhow. Despite the lack of pictures there’s
lots of knowledge and a genuine quantitative increase in
information over the first edition (even allowing for those
who have been dumped by the wayside). Pretty much all the
‘new’ writers are in and written up in adequate detail; it’s
definitely up to date to the end of 1992 and it is said there
is some 1993 detail in there as well. Good lordy, computer
typesetting, what a miracle.
So I can now tell you all about Harry Turtledove without
having read one tedious word of his overblown prose. Or is it
Ian McDonald I’m thinking about? Actually, I couldn’t care
less. Reference books, I love ’em. Novels are a fucking bore.
TOP
--oo0oo--
Now, Then
from Rastus Johnson’s Cakewalk 2, November
1993
This is not a review of Rob Hansen’s latest issue of Then, his
history of fandom covering, this time, the 1970s. I’m saying
that to keep things in perspective, as I’m going to make
comments about it that I think are valid but certainly don’t
constitute a real piece of reasoned criticism of the sort that
this work deserves. I hope someone else will be doing that,
but I can tell you here it won’t be Don West repeating his
work on earlier volumes, as published in Critical Wave a
couple of years ago. That’s because Don, as well as thinking
he said pretty much all he needed to on that occasion, has the
same problem with Then—The Seventies as I do. He can’t read
it.
There’s hardly anything more interesting to your average
actifan than mentions of his own name, and Then is studded
with mine, but I’ve tried and tried and my eyes are just
glazing over at the approach of Hansen’s steppe-like prose. It
just stretches off into infinity on all sides, littered like
some World War Two battlefield with the relics of past
conflicts and daring pushes, signs here and there to mark the
passing of full-strength combat teams of great initiative and
élan, but all seen through a sort of grey mist that renders
everything colourless and drab. The writing has no drive or
intrinsic interest. His misconceived use of ‘scene-settings’
from the real world at chapter-openings gives something like
the Yom Kippur War the same emotional weight as Ian Maule
moving to London.
Using those links to ‘reality’ is a dodgy process in itself.
The real world, I think, is in fact irrelevant except for its
impact on fans themselves. That might be profitably explored
perhaps in the forthcoming Eighties volume where Hansen might
examine the upsurge of comparatively wealthy fans leading to a
convention boom and decline of interest in publishing
fanactivity.
Obviously I’ve read bits and pieces of it, enough to see where
he’s wrong in detail and emphasis, and I’ve tried to
distinguish whether he this time follows through the story any
better than he did in the original The Story So Far which
continually had me asking, with mounting frustration, ‘And
what bloody happened next?’ This is near impossible to do
because there’s no index; and the whole thing is so badly
produced anyway, the conceit of the quarto format lending
nothing to readability. An index is absolutely essential and
easy to achieve using any sensible word-processing
package—easy but time-consuming to achieve using paper and
pencil, come to that—and the sort of work that ought to have
been done for this assumed serious effort. Another reason that
following lines of thought through Then is hard is the
continual chaff and clutter of detail larded into it. Does
anyone really need to be reminded here about Ben Burr and
Benzine for example? I don’t mean that we shouldn’t know about
his/its brief flicker, but not in this way. This is incidental
detail in every sense. It’s the sort of thing that should be
presented in a chronology of people, fanzines, and small
events done separately but cross-referenced to the main thrust
of the narrative.
I recall, from the discussions that Robert Hansen and I had
years ago, even before he did the basic work on The Story So
Far, that we theorised that what might be needed was a primary
basic outline history that would be elaborated on later with
proper detail and analysis. Well, I thought that’s what The
Story So Far was. What we have here is more of the same writ
larger. There’s no analysis or evaluation at all, and many of
the same faults in the primary work still exist—questions
unanswered, no index and so on.
Hansen may yet insist that this is groundbreaking work and the
True History is yet to come. This seems to me unlikely. The
very way that he has done it discourages further in-depth
work. It seems like the full story—and, judging from the
letters included here about previous issues, is being taken as
that. The form he’s chosen—the straightforward narrative—has
changed what he wanted to do. If it had been a heavily
annotated indexed chronology, for example, that would have
genuinely served as a skeleton around which to build, with
many diverse hands if appropriate, something more
investigative and interpretative. This flat story, though, is
a closed question. This looks like the Standard Reference, and
who else other than Hansen has the working notes to go over
the job again? And the more time passes the more stories and
memories will fade, the events will become legends, the people
gods or demons, or just dead. Nothing will be added. It
reminds me, prosaically, of Halliwell’s Television Companion,
a terrible piece of junk issued in the Seventies purporting to
be an Encyclopaedia of TV. It was completely useless to either
the enthusiast or the common browser, didn’t sell a damn
despite a later updating, and the whole idea has been wiped
out of possibility because well, Halliwell did one, didn’t he,
so there’s no need for another, and it didn’t sell anyway so
nobody wants it, and anyway it’s Been Done. Which is what
people will think about Then. Fanhistory? Been Done.
TOP
--oo0oo--
The Best Fanzines -
i) All Our Sixties
posted to Memoryhole elist, 6 February 1999
On Friday, 05 Feb 1999 17:02:11, Bill Bowers wrote: If
you were to be stranded on a Fannish Desert Island, which ten
titles from each fannish decade would you chose to take with
you? Naturally, since it was My Entry Decade, I’d like to
start with the 1960s.
Bloody Hell—I love lists! I can’t resist this at all so I
flung an enquiry into the Memory Hole and came up with 517
individual titles published in the Sixties, with 1,909 issues
between them. While I’m pretty sure MH has at least 90% of the
British fanzines published in the Sixties I know I don’t have
half of what was published in Europe and Australia, and less
than that of American material. Anyway, there were a lot of
fanzines in them days.
But the list provided a fine aide-memoire, particularly useful
to me as I didn’t really become aware as a fan until 1967, and
even after that until at least the end of the decade I saw few
US fanzines.
Given that, a fair amount of the calculation used in my
assessment of them for Desert Island (or Time Capsule)
qualification is based on reading them after the fact. So, in
alphabetical order:
Badinage—5 issues 1967-68, produced by the Bristol and
District SF group, usually edited by Graham Boak (and whatever
happened to etc. etc.). The first ‘real’ fanzine I saw from
beginning to end, parts of it still enchant me, parts now seem
appallingly ill-written and well deserving of the negative
criticism such as T E White heaped upon it at the time. But
still, in a way it’s one of the things that pops into my mind
when I hear the word ‘fanzine’.
Bete Noir/Cockatrice/Discord/Newhom Review/Retrograde/
Spirochaete—lots of issues, all the time, Redd Boggs.
Cheating, I know, to put these all together, but I doubt even
Boggs would claim they weren’t all of a piece. It’s a
well-informed, literate, adult mind talking to us. Just
endlessly interesting. What more do you want?
Habakkuk—8 issues, five in 1960, 3 in ’66/’67—Bill Donaho.
There were two issues of the second series put though OMPA in
1966, and I was given copies by Beryl Mercer soon after I
became fannish. It was a revelation in every sense of the
word. I’ve often cited getting copies of Hyphen as the time
that I became convinced that fanzines would be worthwhile, and
normally I believe it myself, but I now realise that these
issues of Habakkuk, exceptionally well produced, incredibly
varied in content, all as cosmopolitan and intellectual as
hell, were what really turned the switch. The earlier series
is almost as good (the recent third series, good as it is, is
a third placer) but the second series is really brilliant.
Wish I’d done that.
Hyphen—12 issues, 1960-65. Well, it has of course been said.
Funnily enough I didn’t see these issues actually in the
Sixties, not for years—decades—later, in fact. My epiphanitic
contact was with issues of ‘-’ from the Fifties, when it was
at its best. But there was no bad period for this fanzine.
Les Spinge—the Dave Hale issues, numbers 7-14, 1961-65. Again,
something I read after the fact. LS had an extremely varied
profile, with this as the top of its curve (and the ends of
that line being pretty low down before and after). Hale
produced big (up to 100 pages) well-produced, intelligently
edited fanzines—sort of British Habakkuks to my mind. Some
brilliant writing—I well remember a Charlie Smith conreport
that somehow makes every convention I have ever actually
attended seem pale by comparison—and excellent layout.
Quip—10 issues (?), 1965-68(?). Arnie Katz, Lenny
Bailes, and lots of other guys. We’re still in big substantial
genzine country here, with high production values, careful
editing, attention to detail, but with a load of determined
fannishness folded in at every opportunity. Of course I didn’t
read these at the time—not until the late Eighties in fact—but
bloody hell it must have been great to get this come through
your letterbox in 1967!
Smoke—4 issues, 1960-63, edited by George Locke. Incredibly
British, crammed pages, small type, top-of-the-head layout,
but full of fascinating things that should appeal to any
genuine science fiction fan: books, magazines, fanzines,
fanfiction, gossip, letters. What else is there that makes up
a good fanzine? It’s a real shame that Locke went completely
off fandom to become a rare-book dealer—but if you can get
hold of a copy of his annotated library list Spectrum of
Fantasy (Ferret, 1980) it will entrance you.
Speculation (also Zenith)—24 issues, 1963-69—edited by Peter
Weston. Quite simply one of the best fanzines about science
fiction ever, and one that I find bears endless rereading.
It’s all just endlessly interesting in a sort of po-faced way,
full of useful knowledge and commentary. A very British
version of Geis’s magazines, without the strange professional
fannishness that flourished in them, but much more orderly and
readable than anything Geis ever did.
Warhoon—16 issues, 1961-69, edited by Richard Bergeron. Just
brilliant stuff, like Redd Boggs’s fanzines at greater length
(though Boggs is always my preference) and full of informed
commentary of damned near everything. Even things I’m not
interested in seem fascinating. And in the later issues
Bergeron’s graphics are fantastic. This man’s departure from
fandom was a tremendous loss in every regard.
So there’s my top ten of the Sixties. It’s worth remarking
that some fanzines that mightily impressed me at the time are
not in this list—Phile, Beyond, Morfarch, Con, for example.
They’re all British fanzines that really are overshadowed by
the presence of Charles Platt and his associates for whom
fannishness in any form (even genuine enthusiasm untempered by
cynicism) was anathema. It seemed to make sense to me at the
time, and I sought to emulate them in a way for a while, but
in the end it was Hyphen and Habakkuk that really lit the road
to travel.
ii) The Seventies
posted to Memoryhole elist, 25 February 1999
I’ve churned the 1970s around in the MemoryHole database
and come up with 506 fanzine titles. Scanning through them was
a bit of a depressing experience. Using Bill Bowers’s original
criteria of ‘favourite’ rather than best (and apologies for
perhaps muddying the water by using ‘best’ in my roundup of
the Sixties message) I found remarkably little that made my
little heart lift. OK, there’s lots of Good Fanzines, things
I’d put forward as Excellent Examples of good fanning to
anyone who wanted them, but not a hell of a whole lot that
made me go all misty-eyed and long for the days of say, The
Next Best Thing to Perfect Legs (an obscure Merf Adamson
fanzine, FYI).
I came up with a shortlist of 16 titles (19 originally, but I
dropped three as being only really-marginally Seventies
fanzines) from which I selected the following Top Ten (in
alphabetical order):
Dr Faustenstein–David Redd—3 issues, Feb ’79-Jan ’80.
Haverfordwest’s Greatest Living Fanwriter—honestly, the only
other fan in West Wales. He’s never written enough either
fannishly or professionally, and this is his only 'real'
fanzine. It’s just got charm, and it’s genuinely interesting
on a whole variety of topics.
Four Star Extra—Katzes and Kunkels—7 issues (I have only 3-7,
all 1978). Not especially fannish except in tone, just really
great fan-type writing about things that really fascinated
me—I always remember the ‘sex’ issue with great fondness.
It Comes in the Mail—Ned Brooks—28 issues, ’72-’78. I have to
be honest, I didn’t really pay much attention to this at the
time, but reread it some years ago after getting and really
liking Ned's It Goes On the Shelf. Wow, it was really good!
OK, I’m a list fan, I have no regrets. Especially for lists of
fanzines and books and idle gossip and news, which is
essentially what this is. Pleasant, in the most commendable
way.
Maya—Williams, Maule, and Jackson, variously—15 issues,
’70-’78. OK, the first two Ian Williams issues are a bit crap,
the next few edited by Ian Maule are a bit Ian Maule (you know
what I mean...) but when Rob Jackson took over from issue 7 it
was a whole new deal. I used to roundly criticise Jackson’s
Maya for having ideas above its station productionwise (too
much of a Sunday Supplement, I would say facilely) but like an
idiot I was ignoring the incredibly high quality of the
writing therein in my criticism of the overall apparently
unfannish package. Now of course any idiot with DTP software
(even me) could do it, but that doesn’t detract from Rob’s
effort and skill then, or, more importantly, his highly
motivated editorial determination, getting fine material from
a lot of brilliant fanwriters which is as readable and
interesting today as ever.
One-Off—David Bridges—8 issues, April ’76-Easter ’80. A nut or
what? Bridges sprang from nowhere with a genuinely individual
consciousness and fanzine style—the first two issues of O-O
are amongst the most entertaining and enjoyable fanzines I’ve
ever read. It became a bit more conventional after that—I’m
using ‘conventional’ loosely here you realize—and by the end
was identifiably a ‘fanzine’, but still excellent. Bridges
went totally bonkers after that—ended up locking himself in
the house with the door barricaded, making a brain out of
string, marrying an American, moving to Texas. Sad. But
One-Off was great!
SF Commentary—Bruce Gillespie—at least 46 issues between
’70-’79. OK, sometimes the production and general presentation
is crap (and sometimes perfect) but the content—for science
fiction fans—is indispensable. Some brilliant writing, some
brilliant ideas. What can I say?
Siddhartha—Ian Williams—8 issues, ’72-’77. Williams was a bit
of a dead loss as a genzine editor but as a writer—and this is
a personalzine—he may be a forgotten genius of British fandom.
OK, he takes himself far too seriously here and there, but he
writes with wit, charm, and perception (even when he’s wrong,
if you see what I mean). It’s a shame he isn’t still
active—apparently his wife thinks fandom is a waste of time.
Speculation—Peter Weston—9 issues, ’70-’73. Well, obviously
Spec was just as good in the Seventies as it was in the
Sixties. No more need be said. Steve Green’s idea of a Best of
Speculation would be well within Peter Weston's lunch-money
budget, but unfortunately Weston has a peculiar view of his
fanwork these days, and tends to think it of no continuing
value. In fact Weston has a peculiar view of fanning all
round—almost like an elderly Mike Ashley or Don West he seems
to believe that if it isn’t being done Here and Now it is of
no value. Even great faneditors can be completely wrong
sometimes.
Twll-Ddu—David Langford—16 issues, ’76-’79. Really brilliant
funny stuff (with some serious commentary now and then) about
almost daily events in British fandom. My favourite period of
Langford writing. I was also tempted to include the sercon
fanzine he did with Kevin Smith at roughly the same time
(Drilkjis) but something’s got to go. For all that, Kevin
Smith’s Dot (8 issues, ’77-’79) is a pretty good contender
too. Smith is really up there with Bergeron as a great loss to
fandom.
Vector and other British SF Association publications—at least
50 of them during the decade. Oh, what can I say; I just like
this sort of sci-fi-oriented stuff. The Malcolm Edwards period
in particular was excellent. The David Wingrove period
considerably less so. Wonder if those issues are sought after
by whatever Chung Kuo fans might exist. Good grief, nothing’s
impossible.
Well, that’s the top ten. The others on my final 16 were:
Boonfark—Dan Steffan—mostly an Eighties fanzine.
Deadloss—Chris Priest—as Boonfark.
Epsilon—Rob Hansen—a few ’70s issues, but the best were in the
Eighties.
Notes from the Chemistry Dept—Dennis Quane—at least 14 issues,
’74-’75. Another sercon fanzine, full of reviews, commentary
etc etc. How many of you remember it? Who the hell was Dennis
Quane?
Vibrator—6 issues, ’75-’77; Wrinkled Shrew—8 issues, ’74-’79.
I have real problems with a lot of what are perceived of as
‘Ratfandom’ fanzines, some of them purely personal. However,
whoever it was that said (Ted White?) that other than being a
social group there were vast differences in written fanac
approaches was right. Anyway, these two fanzines are still
readable and enjoyable. Pat and Graham Charnock probably deny
all knowledge of them.
iii) Fave Fanzines of the Eighties
posted to Memoryhole elist, 12 April 1999
Somehow (and it’s not just because I am reluctant to post a
List...) I’m finding it hard to come up with a ‘favourite’
list for the Eighties. I’m sure that’s at least in part
because during the middle Eighties I managed to convince
myself that fanzines were on the way out, and that all
meaningful fanactivity could be done Live, In Person, At
Conventions (and pub meetings, parties, etc etc). This all
seems amazingly stupid in retrospect, but also does mean that
I really didn’t connect properly with fanzine fandom in the
Eighties at all hardly.
Anyway, I went as usual to the MH permacoll databanks for
assistance, and found I had on record details of 608 separate
fanzine titles, with an amazing 2,460 issues published in the
Eighties.
OK, in no particular order (even though it might appear
alphabetical) here are my favourite Eighties fanzines... many
of which I have become truly familiar with and enthusiastic
about in the Nineties...
Boonfark—Dan Steffan—5 issues, (3-8, 1981-1983). A brilliant
fanzine full of great fanwriting—I am ashamed to say I paid
scant heed to it as it was published, but since ‘finding’ it
years later I really love it. If I hadn’t been a true fan
beforehand this would have made me one. If any fannish fanzine
from the Eighties deserves a reprint this is it.
Epsilon—Rob Hansen—12 issues (7-18, 1981-1985). An excellent
fannish fanzine—Hansen was witty, funny, and wise. He had a
particular ability to knit together various strands of
argument and comment on the issues that affected British
fandom of the day and come out with intelligent summaries and
sometimes definitive conclusions. His covers were also often
quite brilliant. A set of Epsilon is a wonderful thing.
Metaphysical Review (New Series)—Bruce Gillespie—14
issues (1-14, 1984-1989). I don’t think there’s anything I can
add to the general high opinion we all have of this fanzine
(well, all of us except Joseph Nicholas anyway...)—but I would
like to add specifically that I really love the lists...
The Monthly Monthly—The gang of Four/Robert Runte etc—12
issues (1-12, 1980-1981). Really a monthly—incredible. I never
saw this at the time but got a set via the MH project. I like
it because it’s a real sort of old-fashioned fanzine, not a
personalzine, not a fiction zine, not even really fannish.
It’s the sort of serious-minded with humour thing that might
have been published in the Thirties or Forties, when Fans Had
A Mission. A sort of Science Fiction Fan for our times. I
really recommend it.
Sikander—Irwin Hirsh—14 issues (1980-1989). Just a really good
fannish fanzine, the kind you don’t see no more hardly.
Actually you don’t. What the hell’s gone wrong?
Stomach Pump—Steve Higgins—10 issues (2-11, 1980-1986). I’m a
bit reluctant to include this as it was one of the first
venues to allow the dreadful Michael Ashley to spew biliously
over us all, but that aside I always liked it. It was alive
and lively, had a good well-edited letter column, and talked
about fans, fanzines and records. What more?
Wing Window—John D Berry—11 issues (1-11, 1981-88). A real
grown adult talking to us as if we were intelligent. Sometimes
I think this is what fandom was invented for.
Past Present and Future—Graham Stone—12 issues (I think)
(3-14, 1980-1989). A genuinely engrossing fanzine about SF—a
sort of ‘Notes and Queries’ really, wherein Stone and his
correspondents get into the byways of SF history and
information. I’m a bit vague on the bibliography because the
‘set’ I’m most familiar with is a reprint of the run done for
PEAPS by our very own Curt Phillips a few years ago. A genuine
contribution to SF history (and I mean both Stone’s original
and Curt’s reprint).
The Big Sleaze—Terry Frost—5 issues (1-5, 1987-88).
Badly produced—terrible typeface, peculiar photocopying—but
funny and interesting Australian fanzine. I have to admit I
only read through a run a matter of months ago, but it
entertained and informed me. Frost comes across with real
character—and he included in his fanzine a number of comments
and bits of history about Australia and its original
inhabitants that were wholly informative. This fanzine doesn’t
seem to have been at all well-received at the time—there’s
even a letter from John Bangsund in one issue asking to be
taken off the mailing list. But I like it a lot.
Pong—Ted White and Dan Steffan—40 issues (1-40,
1980-1982). This fanzine reads better and better as time goes
on—and one becomes somewhat distanced from the various
arguments and controversies. There were times when I actually
avoided it at the time.
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--oo0oo--
The Blue Spot
Returns
posted to Memoryhole elist, 12 October 2001
Only a moment ago in cosmic time I was standing in a sea of
fanzines, duplicate copies from the MH Permacollection,
constituting that which is known hereabouts as the Memory Hole
Recycling Section or, in darker moments, all those fucking
fanzines no one wants.
Beats me why no one wants them. There’s some good stuff here
after all—issues of Boonfark, Blat!, Trap Door, Twll-Ddu, Stop
Breaking Down, Lan’s Lantern... but as you’ve heard me say
more than once, you can’t fucking Give Them Away. And this is
a world where some guy in Reading is offering me literally
hundreds of pounds for the MHP copies of old fanzines that
contain anything, even a quote attributed to, Eric Frank
Russell. But are we surprised? No, not any more. I no longer
expect fans to be interested in fanzines, not when they’ve got
dinner parties to plan.
Anyway, look here, at this issue of Vector, the BSFA’s
magazine; it’s number 25, of March 1964. That’s 37 years back,
before some of you were born. Oh, OK, before your children
were born, then. But it’s a fascinating issue.
Look at the cover—headlining Eric Frank Russell (John
Ingham—no, not that one—would probably give me fifty quid for
this!), Harry Harrison, E C Tubb, and All The Usual Features.
It’s kinda exciting already, isn’t it, and that’s before we’ve
even admired the classic proportions of the quarto paper and
smelled the old duplicating ink. Got a cover by Eddie Jones
too. This issue is listed as published by J Michael Rosenblum,
but edited by Archie Mercer. No question it definitely looks
more like an issue of New Futurian than Archive or Amble, and
I wouldn’t mind betting that, despite Archie Mercer’s
assertion to the contrary, Mike Rosenblum had more to do with
the content than just stenciling or cranking the duper
handle—in short it almost could be an issue of NF. Which was
one of the best fanzines of all time.
The piece by EFR is titled ‘The Author’s Lot’ and is a sort of
precursor to the sort of ‘Profession of Science Fiction’
series that runs so successfully in Foundation. Indeed,
reprinting it in Foundation might not be a bad idea, as so
much that EFR has to say still bears repeating today (and
while we’re at it, reprinting a letter from Christopher Evans
that featured in Foundation 11/12 could perhaps serve as a
corrective to some of the more academically-oriented
characters that show up there these days). Whatever, I’m not
at all certain that EFR’s final assertion that SF should have
nothing intrinsically to do with ‘science’ really holds water
(he’s very much a 'speculative fiction’ man on the basis of
this) because once we abandon the whole core point of
scientific method in SF then it turns into the same useless
mush as any other made-up rubbish. But really it’s an
illuminating piece on how he regards SF and being a writer.
Well-written too, which is more than can be said of Harry
Harrison’s too conversational by half attack on the then
recently published Glory Road. HH is a bit of an arse at the
best of times, and even though I agree with him totally (he
even hints that RAH had already, even in the early Sixties,
become beyond editing) this isn’t a great piece of work. But
it probably felt like it to the readership back
then—controversy, by a real writer too.
Enormous great Ted Tubb presents us with a bit of fiction,
good grief, in Vector godhelpus, which I greet with the same
enthusiasm I hold for Dumarest Conquers Civilization or
whatever they were. I bet there was some LOCcer in the
following issue complaining about Vector pages being wasted on
fiction, and I’m inclined to say they were right. Even though
it is trailed as a ‘thought provoking concept’. Sure.
Who was Dr Peristyle anyway? I used to be very taken with
these jokey advice columns (advice regarding scifi topics
rather than, well, piles or the ingratitude of one’s
associates) as a young fan, but they seem more pompous and
self-regarding as I age. Maybe that’s just because I have an
idea they were by Michael Moorcock, who of course has become
startlingly more pompous and self-regarding as he has aged. (I
just happened to be leafing through a few of the magazine-era
New Worlds, which I loved with a slavish devotion waybackwhen,
and wow gosh, have they changed since I last looked, what a
load of self-conscious cobblers and half-witted posturing...)
There are some fascinating book reviews by such as Donald
Malcolm and Ian Mcaulay, of The Dark Light Years and Edmund
Cooper’s Transit—both reviews notable for their palpable fear
of, well, shit and sex more than anything else. SF, SF fandom,
and some reviewers in particular, were still embedded in the
social mores of the Thirties even on the edge of When Things
Changed in 1964—worrying, really, when we remember that these
were the people we expected to be looking forwards for us,
pathfinding into the new frontiers.
But it’s towards the back of the book that fannish faces
appear. The letter column is quite startling—look here,
there’s Phil Harbottle, Peter White, Vic Hallett, Charles
Platt (fannish as all hell, boyish as the day is long—what a
pity he too turned into such a boring fart), Mary Reed, Harry
Nadler, Graham Hall (with his first letter to Vector, possibly
his first to any fanzine—and how nice and enthusiastic he
seems, how delighted to be among congenial company, how unlike
his later incarnations—I wonder if Michael Moorcock can
actually be blamed for all of this?), Richard Gordon, Roderick
J Milner (yes, no question, this is the Rod Milner who may
still own a part of Birmingham’s Andromeda Bookshop, and who I
would have sworn had never had a moment’s interest in SF or
fandom (or any aspect of literature at all, come to that) in
his entire life, and here he is with a sensible and
enthusiastic letter. Good grief, illusions shattered...)
Oh it all seems like so much fun... Of course Vector today is
much better produced, and much of the content is far superior
in writing quality, intellectual content and presentation of
argument (fans are so much better educated now it’s definitely
intimidating to barely literate people like me) but there’s a
distinct lack of the kind of community spirit one feels from
this aged ish. We shall never, I feel, see its like again.
Whether that’s good or bad we can leave only for the ages to
decide, but I know who I am Harry.
And one more thing—listed in the New Members section at the
back of the issue is one J H Holmberg, number 0-444. Takes you
back a bit, don’t it...?
Postscript, 23rd July 2003. After I wrote this
several people enthusiastically recommended I send it to the
then current editor of the BSFA’s Matrix. Which I duly did. To
say his enthusiasm was lukewarm would be raising the
temperature more than somewhat. To be honest, the tone of his
response implied that he barely understood what I was going on
about and doubted that the average BSFA member of 2001 would
either. I fervently hope he was wrong, but anyway the piece
was not accepted for publication.
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