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Please note - this page under continuous revision - last revised 29th July 2005 |
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Chapter 4: Editorial |
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Buddy
Punch-Bad Scene Man |
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Amazing. Here we are in 2005 and John Brosnan dead and Ian Williams might as well be. This piece was written when Brosnan and I shared, with a great deal of mutual suspicion occasionally breaking into outright hostility, a room in Elsham Road, West Kensington. A location that I probably couldn't afford to visit now, never mind live in. It was a genuinely unpleasant room, as Brosnan had no particular tendency towards tidiness and creature-comforts other than Guinness, and I was too young and stupid to know. I'd moved in there in late 1971 after getting a job with the British Museum at the newspaper Library in Colindale. Brosnan needed the money, I needed somewhere to sleep, and we knew each other through Roy Kettle and fandom. Ian Williams was once a rather good fanwriter; self-obsessed as much of his fanzine SIDDHARTHA (1972-81) was it was well-written and often very entertaining indeed. Williams had a genuine voice, and was frequently a perceptive commentator on the fannish world around him. Alas, he was drawn away from fandom in the 1980s and despite some contact again years later had lost his touch. He had been one of the central figures of Gannetfandom, despite being from Sunderland rather than Newcastle, and even if we hadn't been close friends we enjoyed each others company. Way back when. |
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Buddy
Punch |
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Moaning
At Midnight-Off the hook |
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SBD4 was a little classic, with two really excellent articles, one by Rob Holdstock (alluded to in this editorial) and the other by Graham Charnock, both of them really brilliant fanwriters in their day. Actually I'm sure Rob could still be a great fanwriter today if he didn't think it all rather beneath him as a Mythmaker. (An aside - I once wrote to the webmistress of the Official Robert Holdstock website to offer a complete Holdstock Fanwriting Bibliography and was shocked, appalled even, to receive no response. Incredible, eh.) However, the Holdstock piece referred to here is EIGHT DAYS A WEEK, a thinly fictionalised chronicle of a few days of Robert's life while finishing one fantasy novel and starting the novelisation of a justly forgotten horror movie. Great stuff, well written, evocative and entertaining, an enormously lively chunk of hyper-reality, I like it as much now as I did almost thirty years ago, and really regret both that Robert and I are no longer close friends and that I do not find his acclaimed novels interesting at all. Well, the finished works anyway, back in the day when I used to get phonecalls outlining his ideas and it all sounded terrifically entertaining and genuinely stimulating - how come none of that verve transfers to the printed page anymore. Or is it just me? However, it must seem incredible to anyone who is primariliy familiar with Robert as the MythgoMaster, not even as author of EARTHWIND or LEGEND OF THE WEREWOLF that he was once a genuine sf fan. I first met him, all endlessly tall puppydog enthusiasm of him, at the dreadul 1970 Eastercon, SciCon 70. I don't think he was there for more than an hour and we were mutually unimpressed, but over the Seventies we became great friends. He actually did quite a lot of fanwriting in a variety of places, a proportion of it fiction as you might imagine (my favourite of his short stories - TOUCH OF A VANISHED HAND - was first published in Lisa Conesa's fanzine ZIMRI in 1975) but otherwise a great deal of it was genuine and excellent fanwriting. He also produced a fanzine, MACROCOSM (three issues, 1971-72) and started off the BSFA's FOCUS writers magazine, coediting with Chris Evans in 1979-81. I've never really taken to his novels, sf, fantasy, or horror or novelization - though the 'Chris Carlsen' Berserker books are grippingly vivid (what did that guy throw away when he left the burning barn???) - but I do very much recommend his short fiction collections IN THE VALLEY OF THE STATUES and BONE FOREST. Some real gems in there, including two of my favourite sf shorts of all time. Robert Holdstock - we knew him when all he was famous for was impersonating a Martian war-machine. Fandom's loss, someone else's gain. |
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Billy
the Squid |
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Silt |
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Fandom
Stranger (extract) |
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Novelty!
Excitement!! Innovation !!! |
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I
Was There on October 22nd |
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Search
The House For Dracula |
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Search
The Sewers For Harry Lime |
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Fannish
Prozines |
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Little
Dog Gone -A Christmas Presence |
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Oh, unalloyed sentiment here. We, Catherine and I, have a very sciencefictional attachment to those devices we - our species - send off to find out and tell us things about the universe around us. Too many stories about sentient machines read in old issues of ASTOUNDING, I guess. But these sturdy little devices are projections of Us, and embody our curiosity and sense of wonder, and as such, I think, science fiction fans in particular may well have a tendency to bond with them. Don't you think it's exciting how far Voyager has gone, and reports back still? The truly distressing end of Beagle 2 makes the hopeless failure of the British government - wittering on endlessly otherwise about needing to improve the image of science and technology research in school - even more culpable, having totally failed to secure support for a genuinely all-British push into space. Spadeadam, Woomera, where art thou, indeed... |
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Fannish |
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