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Please note - this page last revised 29th July 2005 |
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GREG PICKERSGILL -
Some Notes Towards an Incomplete Version of Events
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Chapter 1: Autobiography |
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You Are
What You Like, Like What You Are, Like. |
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Well, we start off with me from, good grief, slightly over twenty years ago, and it is amazing and perhaps worrying that my writing style is virtually unchanged from that day to this. I suppose I ought to think myself lucky the Bananas didn't choose anything from my earliest fanwriting days with Peter Roberts’ MOR-FARCH number 1 (Easter 1968 - lotsa poetry and other ‘creative writing’) or even my first submitted fanwriting, two really terrible book-reviews in VECTOR 49, June 1968. Written the previous year but published after my 'debut' in MOR-FARCH (which is Cornish for 'sea cow'). Peter Roberts affected a Cornish Nationalist sentiment back in the days before such was fashionable, or even heard of; several of his fanzines had Cornish titles, though the most famous and substantial, EGG, did not. Mind you I have never looked up 'egg' in a Cornish dictionary.). Then again that issue of VECTOR also included a typical neofan's outraged letter, written well before I'd made proper contact with other fans - the Bristol (BaD) Group which included Peter Roberts. I'd had the startling realisation that all established fans were elitists and were ignoring, and by extension keeping down, all the bright new things about to come into the light. This was of course a terrible thing, as it was me they were keeping down. How often that plaint has echoed down through the years, from so many different voices. Anyway, as you’ll see if you read this collection carefully I contacted fandom in 1967 by following up an ad for the British Science Fiction Association in one of the last Compact issues of NEW WORLDS. I’ve always had an affinity for the BSFA - not always reciprocated - based at least partly on it being the door into the summer of fandom for a lone sf fan on the edge of the sea. I remember reading and re-reading endlessly those BSFA BULLETINS from Archie Mercer and my first issue of VECTOR – number 43, edited by Doreen Parker. Almost unrecognisable in both tone and format to that which exists today, that VECTOR was a wonderful thing to me, and hopelessly unpolished as those publications from a rather down period of the BSFA really were they still have more genuine charm than the semi-professional BSFA publications of today, that seem to be produced less by cheerfully enthusiastic fans than they are apprentice pieces for publishing-industry aspirants. But never mind that – back to 1984 in every sense. Do I still like any of that stuff in LIKE? Probably. The comment about Earth being the only alien planet and its implicit approval of Ballard is now highly arguable – I ceased to enjoy his 'new' work a long time ago, and while I think I like everything up to maybe CONCRETE ISLAND I really can't be bothered to make an issue of reading it. I also stopped reading John Irving, who played the same hand far too often in the end, and to tell the truth virtually all mainstream fiction remains a closed book to me now. The music I still love, some of the others mentioned I do not. I still think the Buccaneer is a wonderful aircraft, and I still hope to be more interesting. I am still frequently disappointed. And I still don’t enjoy writing that much, especially to order. Who was Anne Warren anyway? Well she was also Anne Hamill and may be something altogether different now. originally from the Cambridge University SF society, she was an excellent writer, producing a number of very good personal/opinion fanzines in the early to mid 1980s and for a while was a regular contributor to the WOMENS APA. A real personal asset to the fandom of the day, she drifted away from it all some time after the 1987 Brighton Worldcon, and is probably living in substantial comfort somewhere well away from fandom and fans. John Barfoot was a 1960s fan briefly revived in the mid-1980s by Harry Bell (who himself departed fandom soon after) who contributed entertaining stuff to FRANKS APA. FRANKS APA was an apa, incredibly enough, devised by a number of people including me, and I was its first administrator, at a Silicon (a small - less than 100 person - convention) in 1983. It was felt there wasn't enough good fanwriting going on and we contrived a forum to promote it. (An apa - an amateur publishing association - may well be compared, for good or ill, to a invitation only email list.) It flourished for a few years, eventually transmuted itself into PIECES OF EIGHT (if there ever was an explanation for that no-one told me, I was long gone by then) and may be dead by now for all I know or care. At the time we thought the name FRANK'S APA was just enormously ingenious and amusing. We were probably all drunk, for months. Eventually we discovered there'd been another apa in the US in the 1970s that had used the same ingenious name. Neither original nor clever then. |
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Messages
from Mars Made Me Do It' |
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My first turn as a Guest of Honour, and oh what a joy. I agonised for weeks about OKing it and eventually made the wrong decision. The committee and I were uncomfortable with each other (when I was announced as a GoH at the previous Eastercon by one of the female committee members it was in tones of mocking incredulity that one might have taken for bloody insulting), the Fan Room was rubbish (was it Ian Sorensen or Jimmy Robertson that organised it, either way it was inept), and I soon realised I'd been invited more to give them credibility in a certain area of fandom than as someone they actually admired and respected. Most of them had no idea who I was. A familiar tale, no doubt. But that aside, I still like this piece very much. It was hell to write as I had no clear concept of my audience, and no doubt very few of the convention attendees ever bothered to read it. But I can read it now and think Yes, that's me, still, that is. I still believe all that stuff. |
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I Sighted
The Boundary Of Space-Time With Vincent |
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Arg, science fiction fan foolishly admits not reading any science fiction. Tactical error or what? Can I claim hyperbole for the sake of argument? Of course not. Like many I found that as the years went by my appetite for endless amounts of scifi dwindled. Occasionally to nothing, my sense of wonder being fed by autobiographies of wierdoes such as Alexander Woolcott and Charles Bukowski and Daniel Farson, or history, or just old books about airships. But I remain an sf fan still, even though I often read more about sf than the original texts themselves; why just this week I have been enjoying, quite a great deal, Algis Budrys' collection of reviews from GALAXY magazine, BENCHMARKS, and also, incredibly, Budrys novel THE IRON THORN. And I am of course a big fan of talking squid in space. Vince Clarke was a great man, a really Big Name Fan from the 1950s, he had been an active sf reader since the '30s, but dropped out of fandom in bad personal circumstances in the early 1960s. He returned in the mid '80s and almost instantly became everyone's favourite fannish uncle (well, excepting the sour and miserable bastards that comprised much of Leeds fandom of the day anyway) and was a genuinely good influence in every way. Way back in the early Fifties Vince had written a very entertaining fan column for the British VARGO STATTEN magazine under the nom-de-fan 'Inquisitor'; those columns were reprinted in monograph formsome few years back by Plummer and Brialey - get one if you can, it's good. Vince died back in 1999, but is not forgotten. Especially by me, as he was kind enough to bequeath me his substantial collection of pre-war sf magazines, which are a great and lasting joy to me. |
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Self
Explanatory |
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Crikey. Is that me? Yes of course. there are some detail differences. The last books I read were Tim Collins' RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (excellent!) and the two Budrys books mentioned above - BENCHMARKS - brilliant, and IRON THORN - surprisingly a lot more interesting than I remember from reading the serial in IF 25 years ago. The latest records - Miles Davis' SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME (vg++), Charlie Mingus' JAZZ COMPOSERS WORKSHOP (vg++) and Wayne Shorter's JUJU (vg+). Not a damned thing there less than forty years old, but all sounds like it could have been cut last week. Other than that I'll stick with Harvey Keitel, more or less |
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Out Of The
Attic, Number 2 |
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BILLY BEAN AND HIS FUNNY MACHINE. You know I spent years of my life trying to track down information on this almost forgotten televisual gem. Now of course there are at least three websites with quite substantial notes, pictures, memories and details of it, some of them proving that my own memories were entirely faulty. There never was, alas, a struggle over eggs. Go to http://www.whirligig-tv.co.uk/tv/children/other/billybean.htm or to http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/kids1.htm for illumination. You'll also find loads of stuff on Humphrey Lestocq too. And the Bumblies. But 'Jack in the Box'...still not so certain... |
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Science
Fiction Book Club, scary or wot |
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Hard to believe I know, but information on the British SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB is hard to come by; there's nothing on the web as far as I know, though one day Real Soon Now I will be appending a URL here that will lead you to my own compilation of information and fascinating trivia. Some few years back I was in touch with a character named William Seabrook who was intending to produce an SFBC information webpage, but nothing seems to have come of it. Bill, if you're reading this... The SFBC originated from publishers Sidgwick and Jackson in 1953, the then bimonthly titles being chosen by various sf luminaries of the day. Part of the charm of SFBC - quite apart from the fact that the first 100 titles at least would comprise an excellent, and still highly readable, cross-section of the sf of the period - was the uniform presentation of the numbered series; the earliest was the dramatic bi-coloured swirly, then the predominantly white covers with 'tree rings' (the best in my view), then the rather less appealing black with white streaks. Sounds rubbish I know, but once you see them..! As with so many good things it all came to an end in the late 1960s. Well, not really, it all staggered on for a long time with a series put out by Readers Union (and, amazingly, administered by Peter Roberts, after his departure from sf fandom) but the life was gone, the covers were rubbish, they didn't even bother keeping the series numbering. I ask you, what's collectable about that then? |
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