Head! #8 Porpoise Song Contents Hello and welcome to Head! 8!

You: Cider: Ian Sorensen 2 This issue of Head! has been a long time in the mak- Doug Bell ing. First, as ever, came the cover from the wondrous Brad Foster, bringing colour into our black and white TV Towers and the Essence of Post-War 7 world at last. Then came my conrep on Year of the Humour Teledu, written mostly on the train journey home, back Christina Lake in the summer of 2007. By early 2008 we’d already fingered Randy Byers for an article, and his fascinat- Punking The Diva 10 ing reappraisal of the film Diva turned up well before Randy Byers Easter. By May, Doug had plotted and elaborated his Ballardesque account of Orbital. There should have Methuselah’s Children: The Science Fic- 12 been no stopping us! But here in Cornwall we’re a long tion Influences of Salman Rushdie or my way from any other fans, and the cut and thrust of life percieved as an allegory of the BSFA conversations about fandom that nurtures and inspires Christina Lake an interest in writing and publishing. And besides, sum- mer in our household is traditionally the season for Secret Sounds Vol. 1 14 camping, going for long walks and braving the waves. Doug Bell Not that last summer provided much opportunity for any of those activities, but we weren’t to know that The Year of the Teledu, how the new fans 17 and somehow kept failing to take advantage of the play rain and wind to get on with completing the fanzine. Christina Lake Luckily, occasional fannish conversations with friends Locs 20 in Bristol, and conventions like last October’s Cytricon You Lot revived the urge to get the fanzine out, as did the steady trickle of fanzines through our letter box. What can I Art say? Without these fanzines our wit and wisdom (such Cover - the living legend that is Brad Foster. as it is) would just be a series of one-liners on Pg 10 heading - by fanboy supreme, Steve Facebook. So, I’d like to thank Claire and Mark for the Green. Head! fully supports Steve Green for frequent and always thought-provoking issues of Ba- TAFF. Vote now, vote often. nana Wings that have kept us going when all other Pg 16, 19, 21 - artistic gems from William fanzines seemed to be in hibernation. Meanwhile, Doug Rostler, delived to Head via the hands of the managed to get on the mailing list for Prolapse, and extremely generous Sandra Bond. printed out all the issues we’d missed, leading to the Pg 6, 11, 13, 23 introducing the boy-genius discovery that fandom was alive and well in the ex- John Toon traordinary debates of the Prolapse letter column. Then there’s the continuting inspiration of Chunga with its Head! #8 is assembled, edited and collated great look and feel, and eclectic content. Not to men- in fits and starts over far too long a period of tion the arrival of fanzines from fans who have been time, by Christina Lake and Doug Bell. It is out of circulation for a while like Nic Farey and Sandra available for the Fannish Usual i.e. trade, art- Bond, the return of Plokta and the privilege of being on work, articles, locs, begging, beer and a smile. the mailing list for Bruce Gillespie’s Steam Engine Time.

Contact us at: All of which has prodded us back into undertaking the slow, incremental process of getting this fanzine out [email protected] of the computer and into your hands (or onto the [email protected] Internet if you’re reading this online). I hope you enjoy the current issue, and will help in the task of keeping Or send us presents, stuff, letters and love to: up our enthusiasm so that it won’t be so long until the next issue! 35 Gyllyng Street - Christina Falmouth Cornwall Vote Steve Green for TAFF! TR11 3EL UK March 2009 2 Porpoise Song  Conventions April 2009 This issue starts off with a report of last year’s British Eastercon Orbital. The whole experience of spending the entire weekend stuck in a hotel at Heathrow warped Doug’s fragile eggshell mind...

You: Cider: Ian Sorensen by Doug Bell

The Robing of the Bride The ‘Soft’ Death of Fandom It is Saturday night and I’m sitting on a sofa in the I’m sorting through a pile of zines with a London Pride lobby accusing Clarrie of “having the drag touch”. She in my hand. The nearby water feature’s insistent bur- laughs, but again I notice that the conversation subtly bling makes me need the loo. Lennart shocks me “I shifts back to Hinge and Bracket. I turn down the offer found a Wrinkled Shrew here earlier”. Bastard! of Unicum. Despite searching for what seems like days I fail to Fragmentation find another iconic British fanzine hidden in the enor- Faces swim past me. It’s a struggle trying to find, let mous piles of paper. My search does turn up a miss- alone meet up with everyone I want to talk to, a bit like ing issue of Not Science Fiction News, and some a Worldcon. Somewhere here is Tony Keen, but not nameless US semi-prozine with a Matt Howarth strip around the halls. I keep bumping into Colin Harvey, I’ve never seen before. Lennart’s big find still smarts. usually it seems with a sandwich in his hand. Do these Beer takes away the pain from my paper cuts, but authors never eat anything proper? getting rid of the nasty case of the mouthcrabs con- tracted from the rusty staples is another matter. I see Alison Freebairn in passing once, and occasion- ally a Michael Abbott or Spike Parsons, but still no Tony On my last night of the con my Swedish brother sticks Keen. Everything seems too difficult. It takes me until the knife in further. He abandons me just as it is his the Saturday to connect with the Bristol Group; not so round to “watch TV” in his hotel room, or that’s what the horde of Edinburgh fans - they are easy to spot in he says. Somehow the image of Lennart, naked, sit- the bar on Friday night. I even manage to catch five ting on top of piles of True Rat, Seamonsters and minutes with the rare and elusive Pam Wells, but the Wrinkled Shrews is stuck in my mind. Maybe I should one thing that still bothers me, where is Tony Keen? ask if Anders can adopt me as his sidekick instead?  Conventions 3 Head! #8 Conventions Indefinite Divisibility Wilson and Malcolm Hutchison. Before any of us can The exchange rate goes up first to five and then six get the assorted hip flasks out we have calvados in our tokens. We annoy latecomers telling them of the hands. I’m already heading deep into the hangover days of plenty and of the god who provides. They zone and can’t decide if the apple drink or my own are not impressed. Bowmore will get me there quicker. I compromise – I down the calvados, pour the whisky into my plastic Heathrow’s Surface cup and keep going. I offer the Bowmore around, We’re driving in from Slough after dropping in on Andrew groans “But I’ve got to meet John Jarrold early Christina’s brother after a long but easy drive from tomorrow.” Cornwall. I’m feeling excited about Orbital, but keep getting distracted from my navigation task by look- The Dead Plane’arium ing for people having sex in crashed cars beneath Again with the bridge. Peter Weston corners me, he’s underpasses or men stranded on islands surrounded lurking there with Greg Pickersgill and Bill Burns. “What by eight lanes of traffic. None emerge but I do worry do you think of fan-history Doug, we’re on a panel to- if having a convention in the epicentre of Ballardian gether?” alienation is a good thing. Time will tell, time will tell... Feeling like I’m just up to the big school and I’ve been cornered by the a gang of older kids who want my False Ale and Cider of The Hotel dinner money, I panic. I struggle to string a sentence The real ale bar is too hot and stuffy so we take together. The usual jumble of thoughts spill from my refuge in the large cold hanger and try out the bar mouth in an incoherent order. I talk from personal ex- there. It’s a strange place the hanger; the main perience, mostly about picking up old zines here and feature, in the middle, is a large X shaped bridge there at cons, attending panels on fanhistory at cons, over a large waterless water feature. Down there, trying to decode fandom’s mysteries and a bit about below, cheap plastic fish lurk, no doubt some grey the Bristol SF group’s history. I startle Pete with the bottom feeding variety. They look like they ought to knowledge that Tony Walsh came back to Bristol fandom glow in the dark, but as much as I wish they would, in the 80s. they don’t. I don’t know if I’ve said the right things but I soon have I order two lagers and a cider. I realise something a copy of Prolapse in my hand. The conversation has is wrong mid-pouring of the second cider. No, it moved on and we’re discussing Damon Knight and AE was two lagers and a cider I correct the server. Van Vogt. I’m nodding and laughing here, trying not to The barman looks at me oddly. Maybe I got it wrong, blow my cover as the new kid in the gang. A lot of it I glance at my companions, but they confirm that I goes over my head never having read In Search Of hadn’t. The barman pours the wrong cider away. Wonder. I’m startled, this is deep sercon territory and With a clean glass he start pouring yet another ci- probably the most SF conversation I’ve ever had at a der. Again I correct him - no, two lagers and one con...oddly I find myself loving it. Soon I’m mentally cider. Again the look. Things aren’t going well. Tim noting down books to read, and others to avoid. I re- mumbles something to me. I look at Clarrie, she solve to try harder. shrugs. I repeat the order again. 2 lagers and just one cider. But by now he’s half way through pour- As I scuttle off to the dealer’s room. I’m hoping the ing the third second cider. Tim mumbles something next time the boys will let me play with the flick knife. again. I give up...this could go on all night. A Silent Tableau We find a free sofa, and I’m sipping the cider I A bridge, a different one over the motorway. Above us didn’t want. I ask Tim what was he trying to tell me planes are still still screaming, and not being able to while I was wrangling with the barman. catch all the words in the converstaions around me I’m having flashbacks to the start of Easy Rider. Paul “I take it you didn’t see the bar manager lurking off Cockburn and Stuart Wallace are chatting over the to the left?” he replied. “He stared at you all the noise and I’m sure it is something to do with the extras time you were at the bar, and kept miming stab- on The Five Doctors DVD. In what seems like every bing you. ” window we pass are signs against a proposed third runway. Stuart mutters that they should continue until Suite Mentale there are seven of them. I’m not sure whether he’s Friday, late, and I find myself standing squashed meaning Doctors or runways. into a corner of a hot crowded bedroom with Andrew

4 Conventions  Conventions April 2009 Appearance of Canada Colin Harvey who is stuffing his face with another I’m in the middle of a conversation with Peter Mabey ham sandwich, these wacky authors... about the Cheltenham Circle at the Canadian Worldcon Party. All the while Peter is telling me of the secret Murder history of St Fanthony, I’m clutching in my hand a sickly With a quick “Arse-end-of-a-dog” I realise that Alun maple syrup whiskey. I realised at last that this is what Harries is here grinning like a maniac standing be- I’ve been looking for all my life, deep fannish knowl- side co-conspirator Linda Krawacke in the Real Ale edge coupled with the ideal breakfast whiskey. Bar. It’s the first time that the founding members of Arse-End-Of-A-Dog Fandom have gathered to- BSFA Arabesque gether in the same room since the great schism. Fandom is fractured, we’re hived off to the top floor We nod at each other, swap pleasantries, but it is where everything is hot and claustrophobic and a long obvious that tensions still exists within this retarded way from the bar. I’m here for the programme dedi- offspring of seventies silly animal fandom. Beer is cated to 50 years of the BSFA, which Claire and Mark bought, which thaws the atmosphere somewhat, have helpfully split into bite-sized hour long chunks. It and despite discussing the Ancient Rites of The takes me two decades to realise that this has nothing Order (Fishing For Goths, The Pound Street Stomp- to do with magnetic tape, but this fanhistory stuff ers and the Miracle of The Coaster’s Coasters) our sounds fairly exciting, so I decide to stay. thoughts as always are filled with Ian Sorensen, or more specifically The Assassination of Ian Sorensen Impressions of Heathrow Considered As A Downhill Bicycle Race (© Nic The dark clouds gather as we cruise up the strip of Farey). hotels that flank the monstrous chaotic jumble that is Heathrow. Low flying aircraft tear the sky open, their “The Sorensen Issue” still grates years later. Flash- noise ressembles ancient degraded tape copies of back, it’s Eastercon at Hinckley a while ago. Whilst Grateful Dead feedback freak-outs circa 1969. We find exploring the high floors above the rotunda we dis- the car park, and the instant we’ve scuttled in through covered the presence of an unused photocopier. the down market rear entrance of the hotel, the hail Below us we could hear Ian punning away to his clatters down outside. It sounds apocalyptic, and if that hearts content, after all he had an audience; even is the end of days starting I want to be in a warm at this distance his captives’ groans are still all too hotel, sorting through a large pile of discarded zines, a audible. I can’t remember which one of the three real ale in hand with a trusty Swede at my side. of us it was who first suggested it, but we all caught on very quickly – death by Xerox. I’ve never actu- The Persistence of the Bridge ally discussed this with Ian but I’m sure this is the I meet Tobes on the Bridge. It’s late Sunday and I’m way he’d want to go – a very fannish death. In case still expecting the fish to glow. I compliment him on his you doubt my reasoning I should add the copier room party. He responds “You know a funny thing about also had a collator unit. room parties, is when you throw everyone out, you always find a Scotsman. Everyone else is usually passed We spent a while bickering over the physics of the out and ready for bed, but he’ll just want to keep on event. Would we need a ramp to get the damn drinking”. thing over the rails or if we got enough momentum behind it would it crash through the barriers? It all The Assumption of Tony Keen got very intense...so much so that some gamers At last I spot him, he does exist, and what’s more he’s from a nearby dark sweaty side room spent ten up on stage talking about books. Our paths sadly don’t minutes scowling at us before eventually deciding cross again. to slam their door shut. Alun was in the act of un- plugging the power supply when Linda pointed out The Hotel: Real Ale and Cold “There’s innocents down there”. And that’s when I’ve been in the main programme hall too long being the arguments started. distracted from panels by watching them on the giant TVs placed strategically around the place. Even the “Fuck ‘em,” replied Alun, “if they’re talking to energetic GOH speech of China Meiville and the fasci- Sorensen no-one is innocent.” nating Future London panel cannot distract me from the fact that I am now frozen. Nothing short of a warm I started to doubt the whole scheme, Linda had bar and a pint or two from the real ale bar will restore made a good point, but then so had Alun...shit! I feeling back into my limbs after sitting in that icy hall. didn’t know what to do. On the plus side Ian had On the way across the giant hanger I stumble across supplied me with much drink all these years, and

 Conventions 5 Head! #8 Conventions Bob was the very first fanzine I ever recieved. Also, Cantina band in the big airy glass hall. Well it would be I was pretty sure the whole thing would upset big and airy if it wasn’t for the fans squashed in here Yvonne, possibly. But then there was always all those trying to get a drink. Things are not going well - wav- endless jokes... ing our drink tokens at the bar staff from three rows back has failed to work. I tried to put off the decision by getting focus back onto the feasibility of getting the copier through or Just when all looks lost a hero steps forward, a man over the barrier, but Krawacke, again the voice of with the height and authority to take control of the reason, piped up “We can’t endanger all those folks situation ...Ian Sorensen. With one smooth action he down there, they’re innocent” sweeps up all our unused tokens, parts the sea of bod- ies with his commanding presence, and is instantly using Alun had already made his mind up though, “Collat- his fine abilities honed from years of cajoling school eral damage, Linda, it’s for the good of fandom”. kids into collating fanzines to negotiate a reasonable exchange rate of 4 tokens to a bottle of wine. He re- Things got a bit heated, and I had to step in, we’d turns through the wild throng like some sort of red spent so long debating the ethics of the event that wine God with his gargantuan muscley hands grasping Ian had finished telling his story and had moved on numerous glasses and bottles. Boy are we grateful, all to find another group of fans to entertain. Our win- hail the great Ian Sorensen! dow of opportunity had gone, taking with it the cosy friendship that existed in Arse-End-Of-A-Dog fandom. Departure I’m on my way home, via the in-laws on the south Epiphany of this Death coast. As we check out I can feel the weight of the We’re being welcomed with free booze and the Damon Knight in my bag. The fish still refuse to glow.

6 Conventions  Travel April 2009 It’s traditonal to have something about what we did in our holidays in the fanzine. Last June we visited Dresden and Berlin, where Christina found herself trying not to mention the war an awful lot, and wondering what Bill Bryson would have made of it all. TV Towers and the Essence of Post-War Humour by Christina Lake

I didn’t know what I was starting when I taught Doug face the German equivalent of the bus replace- his first German word. We were sitting on the bal- ment service.) Berlin was a bit of a culture shock cony of a restaurant in the suburbs of Dresden. The after orderly little Dresden. Good god, I never Euro 2008 football tournament (or “Fan Fest” as the thought I’d see Germans drinking on trains or Germans liked to call it) was in full swing and all the dressed as Goths! But then it is Berlin, home to beer gardens by the river were packed out with foot- the decadent cabarets of the Weimar republic and ball supporters and giant TV screens, so we ended mid-period David Bowie. The local transport sys- up eating overlooking the somewhat less idyllic street tem was a bit more confusing than Dresden too, scene of tram tracks and shops. As Doug sipped not helped by the fact that the tourist information what he later described as one of the best wheat centres were disguised as souvenir shops. But beers he’d ever had, he pointed down at the desti- eventually we succeeded in navigating our way to nation displayed on the front of one of the buses, Alexanderplatz where the U-Bahn began, and and asked: “What does Fernsehturm mean?” more importantly, where East Germany had built its showcase piece of modern technology (with a And so began Doug’s love affair with the TV towers little help from some Swedes smuggled in from of Germany. the West), its very own Fernsehturm.

Fernsehturm no.1 was the Dresden TV tower, a lo- After that, the Dresden TV tower was forgotten. cal landmark not far up the river from our hotel, Doug dragged me up to the top of the new standing aloof from the old half-timbered Germanic Fernsehturm on our very first evening in Berlin, houses on the far side of the river and trying to even though it was too dark to see anything but outstare the impressive 19th century iron bridge, pic- lights and our reflections in the viewing windows. turesquely named Das Blaues Wunder or The Blue But it was a very impressive array of lights, and at Wonder, which had by some miracle survived the least Doug didn’t buy the t-shirt. bombing of Dresden – possibly because it was a useful landmark for the bomber pilots. The TV tower Well, not straight away. by comparison was a latecomer on the scene, built in the 1960s as a rare sign of interest in the future There are plenty more amusing stories about Doug from a city apparently obsessed with recreating the in Germany – such as the quest for the Curry- past in the minutest detail. Wurst museum, where Doug dragged me up and down one of the most expensive shopping streets The centre of Dresden is basically one long guilt- in West Berlin, looking for this alleged monument trip. It’s full of painstakingly reconstructed buildings, to the humble curried sausage, only to discover cranes for the ongoing building work and plans, ex- later that it wasn’t due to open for another year. hibitions, films and paintings depicting the beauty of But my faith in the power of the amusing travel the old Dresden that was destroyed in the war. I anecdote recently took a beating when I was given couldn’t help feeling this unceasing emphasis on the one of Bill Bryson’s travel books, Neither Here Nor past was a little unhealthy. On the other hand, I There to read for a reading group. I expected it to wish someone had bothered to rebuild Coventry in be funny, as I’ve enjoyed Bryson’s books in the the old style instead of putting in a horrible concrete past, but unfortunately this one was a dud from shopping centre. the early 1990s, in which Bryson, presumably un- der instructions from his publishers, travels round But Doug’s admiration for the Dresden Fernsehturm Europe for six months, half-heartedly recreating was soon to fade to insignificance as we headed off a trip he did as a backpacker. on the train to Berlin (a train which contrary to stere- otype was late, and, moreover, turfed off a load of It didn’t take long for Bryson and I to part com- disgruntled Prague-bound passengers, possibly to pany:

 Travel 7 Head! #8 Travel

places he was visiting, and a lot of anecdotes that weren’t even very funny.

Maybe it’s just as well Bryson didn’t get to Berlin (at least not in the book I was reading.) Berlin is such an international city, with many local languages, including Turkish and English that Bryson would have had diffi- culty feeling out of his depth; and I think even he might have found it hard to get a laugh out of the history of Berlin.

Berlin, unlike Dresden, does seem to be trying to throw aside its past and move on, but as a visitor I found it hard to get away from it. Hitler’s bunker has been de- stroyed to prevent it becoming a magnet for a new wave of Fascism, but the grandiose Prussian architecture reeks of Teutonic ambition, master races and death. Parts of the Berlin wall are still there. The no-man land between East and West may have been turned into corridors of Fernsehturm garden, but there are still the old watchtowers to re- mind you of the brutality of the Cold War, not to mention the monuments to escape attempts, and many panels ‘But that’s the glory of foreign travel as far as I am of poignant history on the walls around Checkpoint concerned,’ writes Bryson ‘I don’t want to know what Charlie. people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than Suddenly, standing at the busy intersection which was to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost once Checkpoint Charlie all those stories I was told in everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. German lessons at school came back to haunt me. My You can’t read anything, you have only the most German teacher seemed to think that her class of twelve rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t year olds might be in danger of turning into Commu- even reliably cross a street without endangering nists if she didn’t supply us with a regular diet of horror your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of stories about the East German regime and the desper- interesting guesses’ ate measures the divided people of Berlin would take to get out to the West. What struck me about this passage was that when I travel, I desperately DO want to be able to deci- If everything she said seemed to be confirmed at Check- pher the signs and know what people are talking point Charlie, the immensely popular DDR museum of- about. So much so, that for many years I wouldn’t fered a more forgiving take on life in East Berlin. It was travel anywhere where I didn’t know the language quite a nostalgia trip, a bit like the film Goodbye Lenin, (or if I didn’t know it I would make a solid endeav- in which a family attempt to recreate the old East Ger- our to learn enough to get by before I travelled many for their dying mother. In the museum you can there!) Even now I get a kick out of knowing what’s climb into a little Trabi car, listen to East German pop going on around me – in Berlin I avidly read the music, and go round the DDR house (which in truth didn’t news screens on the U-Bahn and followed the news look so different from what I experienced in the 70s). and football on the TV. My fantasy is not that of But just when I was considering that it might not have being adrift like a five year old, but to pass as a been so bad – think of all the fun I could have had or- native, or at least have enough inside knowledge ganising those Stasi files! - I started reading about all to get ahead of the average tourist. the rallies and camps you had to go on to prove you were a good citizen and wondered if I’d ever have made I accept that I’m a bit strange in this respect, but the grade. In a population where everyone spied on Bryson’s attitude did get on my nerves after a while everyone else, it’d be hard to feel totally comfortable. as he would be writing about really interesting cit- ies, but all we would get was a lot of exaggerated We heard even more about the Stasi when we went on stories about the funny foreigners. The end result a bike tour round the Cold War monuments of Berlin. was a book where I didn’t believe half of what I These tours were led by historians, and our guide Mike was told, with little insight into the cultures of the painted a pretty graphic picture of the Stasi’s activities 8 Travel  Travel April 2009 bugging visiting diplomats and rock stars, and of the people eating lunch, that it was hard to imagine the bitterness that ensued when the Stasi files were opened Berlin of book burnings that I’d been reading about up after the fall of the Berlin Wall and people discov- in the museum. But you don’t have to walk so far ered who had informed on them. It was so bad that through the leafy green woodland paths before you some people elected not to look at all to avoid per- come to another strange Russian war monument, petuating the damage from that era. Watch the film bracketed by a couple of tanks just to make the point. The Life of Others if you want to see what that aspect And then before you know it, you’re back at the of the regime looked like. It’s not so far off the world Brandenburg Gate. of A Scanner Darkly. Even a five year old would have difficulty escaping After visiting the East Side Gallery where the remain- history in Berlin, even if they didn’t understand what ing section of the Berlin Wall had been turned from a it meant. I can laugh at Doug for his love affair with symbol of oppression into a showcase for urban art the TV towers of Germany, but there is something (and, increasingly, urban graffiti), we cycled out to a iconic about these structures. The Berlin huge Russian war memorial to the dead of the Second Fernsehturm dominates Alexanderplatz, and is in- World War. It was nearly deserted, apart from a cou- escapable in most of the rest of the city. Interest- ple of Russian guys laying flowers in the mausoleum. ingly this fake symbol of Communist technological Apparently the German government is legally obliged prowess, built by Swedes, also came to be called to maintain this huge and mournful site in perpetuity the Pope’s Revenge, as when the sun shone on it, which must really piss off the Berlin tax payers. Our people could see a very Christian looking cross. Bill tour eventually took us back round to the remains of Bryson would certainly have liked that story – which the old East German parliament building, which for a shows that you can get some laughs out of Berlin while after the fall of the regime had been used for after all. But mostly when I was there I felt myself raves, making it one of the coolest Parliament build- coming over all emotional and serious. ings in the world according to our guide. It’s now be- ing pulled down in order to reconstruct the Prussian Perhaps I judged Bryson too harshly. In the face of palace that was on the site before the war. the horrors of history, you do need to find a way of laughing and moving on. Maybe that’s where the But for my money, Berlin works best where it’s not curried sausage museum comes in. Every city needs trying to recreate the past, for example the new ex- a bit of light relief, so long as it doesn’t belittle the tension on the Reichstag with its glass dome or the events that happened there, and when you’re sit- resolutely modern entertainment and shopping cen- ting in a café eating three different types of sau- tres on Potsdamer Platz. Best of all are the slightly sages it’s easy to forget about genocide and the grungy, upwardly trendy streets where former East and Berlin Wall and exercise a child-like wonder over West Berlin merge with their mixed populations, bars, the fact that there’s a special sauce just for white cafes, interesting and bizarre little shops and strange sausage! graffiti.

The last place we visited before we left was the Ger- man Resistance Memorial Centre, which I expected to be just a few panels of information celebrating those who had resisted Hitler. Instead it turned out to be the old German army HQ (as seen in the film Valkyrie) where there were 18 rooms packed with photos, post- ers, newsletters and information. Since most of it was in German, and it would have taken me a good few hours to read half the material on display, we had a quick look round and picked up some information, in- cluding facsimiles of the resistance leaflets which looked disturbingly like old fanzines.

The material in the Memorial Centre seemed to epito- mise the extremes of Berlin – the horrors of the Nazi regime and the great courage of those who stood out against it. But outside in the Tiergarten, the city looked so green and peaceful, full of joggers and cyclists and Alexanderplatz  Travel 9 Head! #8 Film

Here at Head we’ve always been impressed with Randy Byers’ writing on films. So we decided to commis- sion him to write something for us.

I recently had the opportunity to see the movie Diva quiturs for the sheer hell of it. The characters and plot again for the first time in probably twenty years or elements are a mélange: Taiwanese music pirates in more. Luke McGuff and I braved a rainy January mirrorshades; an African-American opera diva (speak- night and, appropriately enough, an opera crowd ing heavily accented French) who refuses to record convening at McCaw Hall next door as we made because music is of the moment and not a commod- our way to Seattle’s SIFF Theater to see the film. ity; a cute teenage French-Vietnamese shoplifter who Diva was a movie I liked a lot when it came out in uses nude photos of herself to distract attention from 1981. I saw it several times back then, all in the her crimes; a free-spirited mail courier who makes theater — back before videotapes and DVDs killed the bootleg tape and steals the diva’s robe and then off the repertory theaters. pays a prostitute to wear it while they have sex to the music; a shaved-head thug called the Priest who wears Luke told me that his old friend Karen Trego, from leather and doesn’t like anything (in a terse running the days when he lived in Minneapolis, always ar- gag); and a rich French guy who is into Zen — “he gued that Diva was proto-cyberpunk. The maguffin wants to stop the wave” — and who gives a great riff that drives the plot is, as in much cyberpunk, infor- on how to properly butter your bread and then totally mation — in this case, a tape that exposes a drug tools the bad guys like some kind of upper class ninja cartel, which is furthermore confused with a boot- using the cutting edge technology of the day: a Sony legged tape of a performance by the eponymous Walkman. diva. All this information — both the incriminating evidence and the bootlegged music — wants to be “Les caprices,” says a character at one point. “What?” free. I had never thought of it that way before, but asks the American diva en anglais. “Whims,” she’s told. I could certainly see it once the idea was broached. Indeed. There’s a certain studied coolness and globalized hodgepodge and punk-zen attitude, on top of the The movie is based on a novel by the Swiss writer thriller info-plot, that seems similar to what Bill Daniel Odier, writing under the pseudonym Delacorta. Gibson in particular got up to starting around that Odier is himself an interesting figure whose first book same time as the movie came out. (I’m pretty sure was a collection of interviews with William S. Burroughs he has acknowledged the impact of Escape from and who has become a convert to Shivaic Tantrism New York and Blade Runner, so it’s easy enough to and written books on tantric sex and Buddhist and Taoist imagine further cinematic influence.) meditation techniques, as well as opening a Tantra/ Zen center in Paris. The novel Diva was part of a se- What I also hadn’t really noticed before was what ries he wrote about Gorodish and Alba, who are the a mash-up of genres it is. An erotic-art-thriller-ro- upper class ninja and the teenaged shoplifter in the mance? I guess another similarity to Gibson is the movie. In the book, Gorodish is an ex-gangster who way that the caper-thriller plot seems like an ex- has struck out on his own, and Alba is not of Vietnam- cuse or skeleton for just showing us a bunch of ese descent but a blonde, budding Lolita, just thirteen cool shit. On the artsy side, there’s an almost dadaist years old, whose platonic relationship with Gorodish is sensibility at work, throwing off snappy non-se- not completely innocent of carnal thoughts and feel- 10 Film  Film April 2009 ings, at least on her side. (This aspect of the book is Another thing the movie takes from the book is its actually captured in a different movie, Luc Besson’s fascination with surfaces and commodities, which Léon, where Natalie Portman’s 12-year-old Mathilda is another similarity with Gibson. Diva was one of harbors inappropriate feelings for the hitman played the first movies in a mini-movement in France that by Jean Reno, who like Gorodish in the book, is not came to be called the cinéma du look — all sleek interested in exploiting the vulnerable girl.) The novel and shiny and reflective, grungy at times, but with is very stripped down in its language (at least judging en eye for the designer label — Rolex (and Swatch) from the translation) and almost seems ready-made watches, Rolls Royce, Swiss tape decks, seductive for movie adaptation in its simplicity and compactness. mountains of Gitanes cigarette packs. It’s a very Still, it has its punchy lines, as when the courier’s an- sexy look, also seen in Besson’s Subway (1985) ticipation at meeting the diva is described, “His heart and Carax’s Mauvais sang (1986) and, much later, was pounding like Bartók’s sonata for two pianos and as a kind of homage, Assayas’ demonlover (2002). percussion.” Visually, it’s all about the play of light: distorted reflections, refractions, and diffractions in chrome, The movie not only modifies Gorodish and Alba and multiple mirrors, waxed floors, rain-slicked streets, moves them slightly behind the courier in the charac- the glass of pinball machines. It’s a perfect style ter hierarchy, but it also restructures the nature of the for depicting a world of shattered grand illusions. crime kingpin (effectively combining two characters from the book) and changes the Japanese record label As the lights came up in the theater at our January representatives into the enigmatic Taiwanese. Much viewing and the credits rolled over a beautiful aria, of the romantic and philosophical matter surrounding the theater manager came in and warned us that the American diva remains, however, including the a fire alarm was about to go off. Sure enough, a wabi-sabi spirit of her resistance to recording, which siren was soon shrieking a duet with the diva. It she expresses this way in the book: “No recording can seemed appropriate somehow — a melding of noise ever measure up to my standards of how a voice should and music. We stumbled outside into an inexplica- sound. But even if that were possible, I’d still be ap- ble mass of excited teenagers pouring out of the palled at the idea that a moment of magic could be opera house next door and piling into school buses reproduced tens of thousands of times. That’s not art. parked on the rain-slicked streets out front. We And there are always little imperfections that are ac- looked around for thugs in leather jackets and in- ceptable only because they’re unique; I wouldn’t want appropriate mirrorshades, but we didn’t have the them to be recorded and played over and over.” equipment to play that old tape anymore, so we moved on.

 Film 11 Head! #8 Science Fiction

Now for another article with a long, pretentious title from Christina.

Methuselah’s Children: The science fiction influences of Salman Rushdie or my life perceived as an allegory of the BSFA by Christina Lake

Last summer I ended up re-reading Salman Rushdie’s novel with his title? And why is there a whore in Mid- Midnight’s Children for an Open University assignment, night’s Children who is several hundred years old, but and in the spirit of procrastination, found myself en- doesn’t look it? tertaining all kinds of irrelevant thoughts about the book. Instead of weighing up the influences of Gunter Grass All this would be pretty tenuous if it weren’t for the fact and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as I was supposed to be that Midnight’s Children is chock full of what literature doing, I started getting obsessed by the science fiction professors like to call intertextuality. In other words, references which seemed to keep cropping up. Take nearly everything in the book is a reference to another the strange powers of the Midnight’s Children of the book (or a film). And, Rushdie did start out as a science title. Critics will tell you they’re derived from the Ara- fiction writer. I vaguely remembered that Grimus, his bian Nights, but you could just as easily look to first novel, was seen as SF by some, but hadn’t real- superhero comics when it comes to werewolves, the ised until I was doing some background reading that ability to breathe underwater or eat metal, the power the book had originated in an SF writing competition of flight, time travel and of course telepathy. In fact sponsored by Gollancz. This early flirtation with science most of the powers wouldn’t be out of place in a ran- fiction is easily forgotten in the post-fatwa political per- dom episode of Heroes. sona of Rushdie, not to mention the Booker success of Midnight’s Children. But Midnight’s Children which ap- But what really set my SF antennae tingling was when peared six years after Grimus was only Rushdie’s sec- the Reverend Mother and Alia turned up as the hero’s ond novel, published after a long period of gestation grandmother and aunt. How can that not at some level and rewriting during the 70s. I also read that Rushdie, be a reference to Dune? On the other hand, what pos- like the protagonist of one of his more recent novel sible connection could there be between Dune and Furies devoured ‘science fiction novels of … the form’s Rushdie’s extended allegory of Indian history and golden age’ in his youth in the 1960s. And there is postcolonial politics. Unlikely as it might seem, it is evidence within Midnight’s Children itself that Rushdie possible to draw some parallels. The hero Saleem, was into American comics as he writes about how one the bastard son of the British Raj and India’s Hindu of the characters based his whole career as a guru on and Muslim population, born on the stroke of midnight a Superman comic given to him by the narrator. Case of India’s independence is the end result of a breeding closed, methinks. process every bit as ambitious as the bene gesserit’s, but which in this case has led not to the Kwisach However, I doubt Rushdie was ever a member of the Haderach, but the hybrid nation of India. Saleem’s life BSFA, though maybe Peter Weston’s team of research- is anticipated and foretold in many quarters, and the ers for Prolapse, sorry Relapse, can prove otherwise. book does treat him very much as a comic messiah, But, continuing with my line of irrelevant thoughts, I or, you might say, a kind of satirical Paul MuAd Dibh. decided that if Rushdie could write a Booker prize win- Later in the book Saleem even loses his memory and ing novel by developing the conceit that his hero’s life becomes a prophet. But as to where the domineering, was an allegory of the new nation of India, simply be- matriarch, the Reverend Mother with her dreams of cause he was born in the same year as Indian inde- running a petrol station fits in, or the embittered Alia pendence, then the least I could do was write my own who sews her hatred into her sister’s children’s “romper allegory, a fanzine article in which I explore the alle- suits of despair”, it’s hard to say. I’d really need to re- gorical correspondences between my life and the Brit- read about three volumes of Dune to get anywhere ish Science Fictions Association (BSFA). True I wasn’t with this theory, but maybe someone out there can born on the actual weekend when the BSFA was founded help me? Perhaps Paul Kincaid has already written an in Kettering, but I did pop into the world exactly one essay on the subject? month previously which has to be significant. And like Rushdie’s hero I was special. My life has been studied Then there’s Methuselah’s Children, Heinlein’s novel and examined in great detail, my development noted, about another breeding programme, this time for lon- my aspirations recorded, my movements tracked. Re- gevity. Is Rushdie deliberately evoking echoes of this search papers have been written about myself and my 12 Science Fiction  Science Fiction April 2009 fellow ‘midnight’ (or in this case March) children. Sadly genre, but it’s also difficult to see him using sci- we don’t have any special powers, and there were ence fiction any differently than the other cultural more than 1,001 of us – 17,000 in fact - born not in tropes he borrows for his fiction, or doing more one hour, but over the course of a whole week in March than play with science fiction names and concepts 1958. The prosaic truth is that I am part of a govern- in his books. However, if he had written a string of ment-funded study which takes as its subjects all the successful SF novels before going on to win the people born in England, Scotland and Wales in one Booker Prize, imagine the scorn of the science fic- week in March 1958 tion community if Rushdie had turned round and denied that his work had anything to do with that But perhaps, taking myself as the typical child of 1958 sci-fi rubbish about space and aliens. While a fatwa I could stretch the facts of my life (or fellow members might not have been on the agenda, the combined of the survey cohort) to mirror the many phases of the mockery of Ansible and the corruscatingly polysyl- BSFA. Maybe I could be as fanciful as Rushdie’s hero, labic denunciation from John Clute, formerly his and suggest that my birth in (well, above) a library greatest admirer, might have driven Rushdie away foreshadowed the importance that the BSFA’s library from SF community towards the comfort of his would have in the early days of the organisation or childhood Muslim faith. And so the history of the that my early fiction high on adventure and imagina- late 20th century could all have been different. tion but low on writing skills could be seen as para- digms of the values of the SF of the early 60s. My turning away from science fiction in my teenage years might be used to represent the great lost opportuni- ties of ‘membership churn’ and my discovery of SF and fandom at university in the start of the 80s could be seen as part of the successful relaunch of the fannish branch of the BSFA to reach out to the growing number of students groups (though that last would cease to be allegory and become dangerously close to reality).

It’s more fun to imagine these things while trying to avoid writing an essay than it is to develop them into anything more coherent, but I find it quite satisfying that I share my birth year with the BSFA. Maybe I should celebrate the 50th anniversary by rejoining? Perhaps in my role as allegory it will represent a trend?

I like being part of the National Child Development Study Survey too. It means that even if I never achieve any- thing very significant I’ve contributed to what Polly Toynbee calls an ‘invaluable social history with all the missing details of ordinary lives we yearn to know about other bygone ages.’ A researcher came round the other week for the latest phase of the research and asked me a lot of questions, mainly about my health, social attitudes and leisure activities. She also ran a few tests on memory and mental alertness. The phone rang just as she was testing me how many different animals I could name in a minute. I’m not very good on animals at the best of times, but the phone completely threw me, and the only way I could recover was to channel Claire Brialey and start listing weird Australian animals (I’m not sure she believed me when I said Potoroo. Luckily the minute ran out at that point). So much for the science behind social science.

It’s hard not to regret what Rushdie might have done for the cultural diversity of SF if he’d stuck with the

 Science Fiction 13 Head! #8 Music I was recently watching the popular BBC music comedy quiz show Never Mind The Buzzcocks, and found myself not really understanding any of the musical references or guest that appeard on it. So one day I decided to have a sit down and try and work out - just how did I manage to stray so far away from modern pop culture? Secret Sounds Vol. 1 by Doug Bell My obsession with music began in my later teen- when during the final exam that year, one of the three age years; younger than that, I never bothered with pieces chosen was Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Hen- it. This marked me out as a bit of an oddity at school, ry’s musique concrete masterpiece Symphonie pour as I’d rather be reading Michael Moorcock than talk- un Homme Seul. I briefly flirted with the idea of study- ing about Adam and the Ants. Nevertheless at sec- ing composition at university but after seeing the entry ondary school, my first year music teacher decided requirements decided this was beyond me and settled I showed enough aptitude for the subject to press- for a life of coastal geomorphology instead. gang me into learning trombone, after which I was encouraged to take O Grade and then Higher Music FLIGHTLESS BIRD (YODO-GO-A-GO-GO) exams. I knew that my playing was strong enough, By the time I started my studies at Aberdeen Univer- but felt out of my depth in other ways. My peers sity, my narrow range of musical experience had ex- had been playing their instruments for years, and panded. I taught myself to play guitar after becoming appeared to love it; I never grew to like the trom- fixated with 60s guitar acts like Cream and Jimi Hendrix. bone. In addition to my lack of knowledge of popu- I made an easy connection from musique concrete to lar music, I knew absolutely nothing about the clas- its biggest fan Frank Zappa, which in turn introduced sical stuff. All this was to change through two sepa- me to more progressive and psychedelic sounds. Dur- rate influences. ing my first day at uni I met future flatmate and band member Martin Crossley, and we bonded over Pink First of all was discovering the sun-drenched works Floyd and Hawkwind. In truth our “band”, the Aard- of the Beach Boys, a magical band for any budding vark’s Annual Picnic never did anything except practice muso to discover. Already a proto-SF-fan-nerd, this Talking Heads covers, jam and try our hand at being further marked me out as even more of a freak; “experimental”; but it was great fun and after the trom- synth pop, U2 and heavy metal were by then in at bone experience I found it thoroughly liberating. school. Those harmonies took me to a world as far removed from the mining/dormitory town where I I quickly absorbed Martin’s huge record collection, and lived as the science fiction I was reading. Not only started discovering my own bands like the Velvet Un- that, but even in some of their earlier songs like derground and the Grateful Dead. In my last year in Surfer Girl there was something more musically Aberdeen I became unhealthily obsessed with both complex going on that intrigued me. those acts, playing nothing else on guitar except Lou Reed songs and sometimes staying up all night listen- Around the same time, as part of Higher Music, we ing to Jerry Garcia’s guitar solos and quaffing whisky. had a module which involved listening to and ana- Escape from this lifestyle came in the unlikely form of lysing any piece of music written and recorded in discovering SF fandom through Pete Binfield and Sue the 20th Century. We weren’t necessarily expected Mowbray, and by my eventual decision to return home to know the piece or artist, but were required to after dropping out of an MSc at Robert Gordon’s Insti- write intelligently about it, and suggest possible tute of Technology. genres, performers or composers. As well as the weekly class listening exercises, we were allowed I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like free access to the school’s record collection and if I hadn’t stayed that extra year in Aberdeen, meeting listening room. There I discovered the delights of Pete and Sue and helping form the Aberdeen Univer- cutting-edge 20th Century classical music, which sity SF Society. I’d have probably ended up with a nice was nothing like the stuffy concertos and sympho- office job in Edinburgh, my own little flat and have nies I’d been bored shitless with during O Grade. happily spent my days listening to nothing but the Dead The sounds generated from Schoenberg, Brecht, and the Velvets. I think it’s unlikely that I’d have dis- Ives, Cage and the heavyweight genius of covered fandom, edited fanzines, gone to conventions, Stockhausen were soon etched onto my brain along- met Christina and moved to Bristol (and ultimately side Brian Wilson classic surf songs. Since this music Cornwall). This thought scares me as so much of my was dismissed by my classmates as just noise and life since the early nineties has been wrapped up with not worth bothering about, I felt over the moon fandom. 14 Music  Music April 2009 It was through Pete and Sue that I met members of psychedelia, full of sing-along-tracks with the Edinburgh SF Group when I moved home, and right timebinding names like Jenny Artichoke and The away I could tell that the vibe was different from Aber- Sky Children. Another early discovery was the deen, a bit edgier, more creative and punkier. Although Comus album First Utterance. Comus aren’t your the Dead tapes kept arriving, they were soon piling up usual early seventies folk-rock band, their subject unopened as I discovered the Misfits, the Stooges, the matter is darker and more pagan with songs about Clash and the Dead Kennedys through friends Andrew necrophilia, hanging missionaries, madness, elec- Wilson and Gary Fortune. It was also a time of great tric shock treatment and Athena worship. Cou- gigs – it seemed that nearly every one of these bands pled with demented instrumentation (slide-bass were touring. Somewhere in this mix I got heavily into and assorted woodwinds!) it is no wonder that anything on Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label they bombed on the folk circuit. Both bands are and the British Columbian band nomeansno soon re- now so firmly established in my playlist that I’ve placed Jerry and Lou as my favourites. started shelling out hard earned cash for CDs of their stuff as it feels only right after all the pleas- When I moved to Bristol my nomeansno obsession fol- ure they’ve given me. lowed me, despite going to more varied gigs than be- fore, everything from Orbital to The Strokes. I kept With all this music at my disposal, I still find my- scouring second hand shops for more Alternative Ten- self looking for new songs, bands and genres. tacles albums, but I was finding that my collecting Some discoveries don’t work - library music, home mania had taken over and I was spending less time tape experiments and Italian soundtracks don’t do listening to the music. It wasn’t that I didn’t like what I much for me. I kid myself that the purpose behind was buying, I did, but I’d gone so far down one route this obsession is that I’m going to buy some DJ that everything sounded the same to my jaded ears. equipment and put on a psych-rock night at one Despite new albums appearing, watching bands at The of the local pubs around here. With Cornwall’s Fleece and swapping CDs with friends I just wasn’t hippy population and Falmouth’s art school crowd getting excited about music anymore. it would probably work, but deep in my heart I know this will never happen, as I’d rather start It wasn’t till shortly after we moved to Cornwall that recording my own ideas from scratch. However my enthusiasm returned, through the random purchase learning editing and recording software, getting of a CD in Fopp for £5. The album? Amon Duul II’s to grips with virtual synthesisers, buying the right krautrock classic Phallus Dei. kit and learning how to mix properly is a long proc- ess and one that I find frequently slow and infuri- THE RACKET THEY MADE ating. Tracks I start, seldom get finished as I run Krautrock was a revelation to me. It fused all the ele- out of ideas and can never figure out where to go ments of punk and hippy music I loved but injected a next. healthy dose of that electronic avant-garde experimentalism that I hadn’t listened to since school. That isn’t strictly true; I do know where to go - it’s Even better it was filtered through an odd Germanic back to the internet. To download another virtual perspective that made it feel familiar but also com- synth or another obscure album or order some- pletely alien. I begged a loan of Julian Cope’s thing from one of the few record labels I still rave Krautrocksampler from Christina’s brother Simon, and about. The one I’m currently obsessed with is devoured it in one sitting. Soon Can, Tangerine Dream, Fence Records. Kraftwerk, Neu!, Popol Vuh and Ash Rah Tempel were in heavy rotation on my iPod as I discovered the mira- Fence are interesting. Part of their attraction is cle of downloading obscure and out of circulation al- despite being moderately successful they still op- bums from the hundreds of music blogs out there on erate out of the small fishing village of Anstruther the internet. The problem I quickly encountered was in Fife. Started by Kenny Anderson aka King Creo- that people weren’t posting stuff fast enough for me. I sote and made up of local friends and musicians, grew bored and restless and started downloading other over the years they’ve got a surprisingly large obscure stuff at random. After all I could just delete amount of national airplay. Although they are firmly them after one listen if I didn’t like them. planted within semi-acoustic nu-folk territory, they record and play in any style they feel like, with The British band Kaleidoscope was my first random named artists on their label including James discovery. Where Krautrock was full of long introverted Yorkston, the Pictish Trail and Lone Pigeon. I love tracks, Kaleidoscope’s music was short, snappy and the homemade nature of this label. Alongside their melodic. It was classic whimsical English pop- official CD releases, a lot of their regular output is  Music 15 Head! #8 Music recorded onto hand-packaged CD-Rs. Each internet mercially minded record-producers thought would sell order usually arrived with an accompanying hand- in the squats. written note from chief organiser the Pictish Trail, sometimes apologising for a delay to my order due The fields, villages and ports that many folk songs are to touring demands. I find that there is something set in, are filled with as many murder ballads as you quite magical about buying music direct from the would find in an average Nick Cave album. Shocking artist like this. as they may be, nothing compares to the demented psychosis of Comus. Their songs come from the seedy underbelly of a lost rural life which has much more in THE SUPERTHEORY OF SUPEREVERYTHING common thematically with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet All this has led me to more or less give up on chart than Fairport Convention. music and mainstream rock. Since school I’ve never musically fitted in, but now I feel so far out on a And Kaleidoscope? They were the pop band Syd Barrett limb that conversations about music with work col- could have helmed if he’d reined in his drug intake. leagues are almost impossible. I keep asking my- self, why I like all this obscure stuff? The answer A lot of this music is on the verge of being forgotten, came from an unlikely source - Greg Pickersgill and and is only kept alive by a handful of fanatics, bloggers the Science Fiction of 1958. or reprint record labels like Finders Keepers (I discov- ered them at the Green Man Festival by stumbling into So there I am in Kettering at Cytricon V and some their Welsh language psychedelia set in the dance tent). time over the weekend I had a conversation with The sheer strangeness and obscurity of this music Greg about old SF. I mentioned to him that although means it will be forever outside the mainstream, and I’d really enjoyed reading novels from the fifties, especially outside the media’s interest. It is a world what destroyed my suspension of disbelief wasn’t where psychedelia didn’t start with Ken Kesey and end the language, plots or attitudes but the everyday at Altamont, a place where punk wasn’t just about the technology people were using whilst flying around Sex Pistols, and a history of music where Manchester the galaxy in rocket ships. Surely futuristic socie- and Liverpool aren’t the only regional British cities worth ties with interplanetary travel, jet-packs and space- talking about. Taken together I like to think it forms a suits would invent better stuff than reel-to-reel re- secret history of pop music written by the also-rans, corders and slide rules? Greg suggested that if you the one-offs, the crackpots and the never weres, just think of these stories as not coming from our own as I like to think SF fanzines show the history of Sci- present extrapolated forward, but from a future of ence Fiction not through authors or publisher’s eyes an alternate history where this tech survived it but by fans. It is a world where Devon’s best ever punk makes more sense. band, the Cult Maniax rub shoulders with Turkish psychedelia or Cornwall’s biggest 60s freak-beat band And in a nutshell that’s what I’ve been searching The Onyx. It is a world that I’m trapped in and don’t for in music, alternate histories and alternate fu- particularly want rescuing from, just like fandom, I tures. suppose. All I need to find out now is what the Welsh word for mellotron is. Krautrock is the easiest to describe in these terms, as it sounds exactly the way it happened. It is popu- lar music made in a country where electronic experimentalism was king, and where the only way you could hear rock ‘n’ roll was by listening to radio broadcasts serving US military bases. Japanese psychedelia is similar but different. A lot of it is heavy guitar based acid rock filtered through the memories of Japanese tourists who happened on Haight-Ashbury or Swinging London at their coun- ter-cultural heights (or in the case of Les Rallizes Denudes a visit to Andy Warhol’s Factory).

It continues...French 60s Go-Go music is a poppy commercial fluff that always makes me want to dance. It is not the heavy stoner rock that real Pa- risian hippies were rioting to in 68, but what com- 16 Music  Conventions April 2009 Back in July 2007 I went to the Year of the Teledu, a new style DIY convention, on what turned out to be the wettest weekend of the summer, when freak rainstorms threw all the transport system into disarray, causing flood damage in various parts of the country. I’d started out from Cornwall a day in advance to get a cheap train fare, and so arrived in Leicester just ahead of the floods, but also ahead of anyone else I knew, leading me to wonder whether I should really be there The Year of the Teledu, or how the new fans play by Christina Lake How easy it is after 27 years in fandom still to feel like Feeling all participated up with my near-miss at a neo. All it takes is an unfamiliar convention and the nuntoriety, I purchase myself a Beer of the Teledu – absence of my support team. Doug is back home in bottled beer, specially labelled for the convention. Cornwall. Lilian Edwards, substitute room-mate for the occasion, is stuck somewhere in the flooded transport But I still can’t see anyone to join for a relaxing chat. system of Southern England. Everyone but me seems to have something to do, so I sit down at a table and try to look friendly and self- The convention is still being assembled; everyone looks sufficient. active, co-operative. A convention 2.0 air of participa- tory zeal pervades the atmosphere. Mark & Claire, and Here I am, I reflect, in a piece of function space which Ang are folding raffle tickets for the fan fund tombola. looks like it’s designed to connect the restaurant to (See, people I know. No need to feel scared after all). the conference facilities, watching it gradually being I ask if they need any help. They assure me they have made-over into a fan room, furniture being colonised it under control. I drift on. Discover the bar. Consider by flyers, walls annexed for programme information. whether I’m sufficiently within my comfort zone to get I have three different badges dangling from a metal a drink. Or indeed, whether getting a drink would help chain, two telling people who I am, and one telling me find my comfort zone. them that I don’t wish to know the ending of the latest Harry Potter book. Beyond the bar is the programme room. Reports filter back. “They’re racing badgers on spacehoppers!” “Jim’s I’m 49, and I don’t know if this is what my life is just tied Judith to the chair” “They’re all singing.” meant to be like. That must be the Jim de Liscard programme item. That must be that zany fun I’ve heard so much about. Luckily visiting American Ryan sees through my pose of studied nonchalance. He clears all the flyers off I venture in. my table, wipes the surface with his t-shirt and starts to lay out a pack of colourful cards. “This never fails,” Judith escapes, clearing the stage for Just a Minute he promises. “You’ll see, there’ll soon be a crowd Teledu-style on the subjects of badgers, mushrooms round us.” He teaches me to play. You have to pick and, just to wind up those who thought they’d spotted out a set of cards where the patterns and colours a sequence, Cartesian Dualism. Jess, who defies are all the same, or all different. Same is not too fannish stereotypes by being a fitness instructor, and difficult. All different is harder to get my head round. Abi Brown who has metamorphosed startlingly into a Ryan lets me collect more sets than by rights I should, Marian Monroe-esque blonde are in the hot seat. Only but no admiring crowd gather around. prerequisite for enjoyment is familiarity with the Badger song. Luckily it’s not difficult to pick up. By the time When all the cards are done, I look up and see that Abi’s sung it unaccompanied, then led the audience in while I was concentrating on colours and patterns, a rendition to the tune of Jerusalem, I’m up with the the final touch of fannishness has been applied to programme. I’m so there at getting it. The trick is to the area: yes, a group of fans has been installed. join it. That’s the trick. I go over to join Yvonne Rowse, Julia Daly, DougS, Jim has nun costumes and I want to dress up as a nun. Julian Headlong and Max. Julia is drinking the Cider I nearly jump up and volunteer, but the moment passes. of the Teledu. “This is horrible,” she complains. “It No-one there to egg me on. Damm! I watch in envy as doesn’t taste like cider.” I give it a try. Yes, it has that the nun volunteers – Tobes et al (well, male nuns are quintessential cider taste that I know and don’t es- funnier) – cavort on the dancefloor, get photographed pecially love from my days of scrumpy, farm cider and then fall down dramatically as they’re bowled over tastings in Bristol. in Nun Pin Bowling. “What sort of ciders do you like?” I ask..  Conventions 17 Head! #8 Conventions “All the usual ones – you know, Strongbow, confident enough, and the moment passes. Merrydown.” It all begins to make sense. Still at least the MP3 disco is easy to join in – just connect your MP3 player to the computer and cue up Ryan who does like the cider joins us. It turns out your music. Alternatively join the people on the that he was once a slave-owner. Or rather he pur- dancefloor. I dance to the Dead Kennedys, then realise chased a female slave at the Worldcon slave auc- I can make my own glo-stick jewellery from the mate- tion, not for any of the obvious purposes, he hastily rial left out on the table and do so. After a few number, assures us, but to answer all his stupid questions Lilian & I find an even better method of joining in the about British culture. disco – get on space hoppers at the back of the room and bounce along to the music while talking. Several We riff on all the misleading answers his slave could people who can’t see the space hoppers come over – have made up, and then when that gets tired, who thinking we’re indulging in a very energetic form of might fit his description of “a tall academic, thinner dancing – and return to take photos. I begin to wish I’d than the fannish average woman”. Ryan is still in- brought my camera. This is turning out to be a very sisting that actually he prefers the fannish aver- photogenic sort of convention. age, when John Coxon arrives with a stack of fanzines which call into question any concept of the I leave Lilian to flirt with an admirer and go for a last fannish average. drink in the fan room with Mark & Claire who have finally finished setting up the tombola table. The room It’s all going rather well. I have drinking buddies, has now sprouted a great deal of plastic blow-up fur- fanzine and even some people who want to go and niture, and a number of congenial conversations. The eat. The car park no longer looks like a swimming feeling of not belonging has, if not gone, then at least pool, but even so, no-one is foolish enough to sug- receded. gest leaving the hotel. Instead we adjourn to the restaurant, which is handily placed to watch for fans Lilian doesn’t wake up for breakfast. No surprise there! arriving, while Julian tells the epic story of his es- So I venture down without her. The conversation round cape from a flood-struck Swindon. Soon we are the breakfast table is dominated by plans to acquire joined by Ian Sorensen, trailed by an incredulous copies of the new Harry Potter book from the book- member of hotel staff, determined to find out which shops, read immediately using fannish power-reading poor woman is his wife. No-one owns up, though faculties honed through many years of tackling Neal Yvonne kindly agrees to adopt him. Stephenson novels, in order to ensure it’s completed before someone inadvertently gives away the ending. Lilian, having detoured via London and other parts Flick sits there looking smug, as she’s already read it of Southern England, turns up just in time to get online, and can therefore devote her day to corsetry food ahead of everyone else, and drink Ian’s wine. and stationery porn as is fitting.

I wonder idly if a DIY convention needs an Opening Yvonne reports that her ex-husband, child and dog who Ceremony, and if so, whether I should be there. set out for Cornwall yesterday have made it as far as But by the time we’ve all finished eating and sorted Bristol after spending the night on the M5. Back up in out payment, the point becomes moot. Instead I the bedroom watching Sky TV News with Lilian, I con- catch Grumpy Old Fans where it is conclusively clude it’s going to be a quiet weekend in Cornwall with proven that what fans hate most is other fans. This all the summer holiday traffic stuck on the road, and is sealed by a virtuoso rant from Jess who man- the train line from the Midlands to Bristol still out of ages to find something to complain about in every action. member of the audience with increasingly desper- ate invention (my fault is that my top is too shiny). After watching for the third time a clip of a car towing Second comes town planners which is pulled back a boat attempting to do a U-turn on the M5, I decide from the brink of parochialism by a brilliant per- there is no new news and go and look for the Teledu formance from Kari on the Cambridge programme book group discussion on Margaret Atwood’s The of building houses for Londoners who should by Handmaid’s Tale. I find that our allocated programme rights live in London (or on trains). Again I feel room is some kind of corporate suite with big office myself on the brink of being participatory. I love the chairs that you can spin till you’re dizzy. It’s a good way people run up to the microphone just like in way to release the inhibitions, and so we begin the improvised comedy. I wish I’d done my rant about discussion encounter group style by outlining our rela- chavs and seagulls, but again I’m too slow, not quite tionship with the book. Geneva Melzack as moderator

18 Conventions  Conventions April 2009 throws in a number of questions about the book, but in the end, it comes down to these: is it still as resonant as it was, is it credible and is it SF? Abi Brown who first read the book at age nine, still finds it scary. For me, it lacked some of its original impact, but the set- up with its hard-line religious fanaticism and disempowering of women feels disturbingly contem- porary, and reminds me in places of Reading Lolita in Tehran, an account of life for women in Iran after the revolution. All the same, I have difficulty believing that a society would develop in the way that Margaret Atwood describes. Atwood justifies her future world by stating that everything she writes about in the book really happened or is happening somewhere in the world, but to be convincing the developments still have to be presented as believable for the society and char- acters they happen to, and for me they weren’t. As for SF: Claire is definite that the book counts as SF. I’m less sure; it is a book of ideas in the best SF tradition, but it’s not written with an SF sensibility, unless you make SF stand for Speculative Fiction.

Book group has got me into literary mode and sets me up just fine for the next programme item on 1880s magazines, where the presenter compares Girls Own selves on the positive or negative end of the circle - with Jackie to good effect. In the 1880s girls were be- or if you’re me, somewhere in the middle. Unfortu- ing trained up to be resourceful, plucky and adventur- nately, with Torchwood, somewhere in the middle ous. In the 1970s girls just wanted to know what make- can make you the most positive person in the room – up to wear and how far to go on a first date. which is probably how I come to end up defending Rees. Kari surprises us all by voting in Owen as a Lilian and I go for lunch – sandwiches in the hotel res- good actor; he’s very good at being nasty, she main- taurant, surrounded by people speed-reading Harry tains – why else do we all hate him so much? She Potter novels - and talk each other into trying a spot of has a point. Are the Torchwood team competent at fencing. I’ve never done any fencing, and still imagine their job? Everyone bunches into the negative corner. it as the rather dashing sport of 18th century gentle- Some of us blame Captain Jack’s recruitment crite- men. Instead, we’re fitted into sweaty protective clothing ria, or the fact that he’s a maverick not a leader. Af- and given a crash course in the basic movements, which ter an energetic half hour or so I feel we’ve had a largely seem to consist of bending your knee and thrust- surprisingly good discussion about Torchwood and ing forward with a bendy metal stick. No acrobatics or gone beyond the kneejerk reactions of fans over-in- fancy sword play. Lilian and I then duel to the death vested in their own concept of the series to a realistic (well, best of three) and return our gear to let some- assessment of what went wrong. one else have a turn. While all this is going on, I’ve been missing out on All this duelling has made Lilian feel sporty and she making chocolate aliens with Julia. The room is strewn starts comparing yoga postures with Kari. They’re both with abandoned sweets and bits of chocolate. Julia very good, despite Kari’s ski-ing injuries (sustained, invites us to use the leftovers to make our own al- she says, from an over-competitive Cambridge fan). iens. Lilian makes a psychotic mermaid (“Self-por- However neither can compete with the infeasibly sup- trait?” suggest both Julia and Alison Scott without even ple Jess, who takes over the master-class, leaving me conferring). Ken from the Bristol SF group makes an on the sidelines wondering why my body doesn’t bend out-of-condition K9 which inspires a delegation from that way. a new SF group in Cambridge (suitable for 16 year old s the woman explains) to make chocolate daleks. Torchwood – Vote with your Arse is the evocative name of the next programme item. And that’s exactly what It’s all go on the programme front, and next up is the we do. The chairs in the room are laid out in a semi- pub quiz. I join a team with Geneva & Zara, Ang, circle and for each question Abi asks, we position our- Lilian & James Shields. We’re in the lead after three  Conventions 19 Head! #8 Conventions rounds, but it all comes to naught when we do badly shirt, a little yellow Taral Wayne number from the first on the song lyric round, in spite of Ang’s phenom- Ditto in Toronto. It reaps no admiring glances, because enal but fallible ability to sing through to the main the order of the day is to put all your convention badges part of any tune. Then we crash and burn on Gen- on at once and walk around bowed down under the eral Knowledge as it contains too much geography weight of convention memorabilia. Unless you’re Abi (where is Doug when we need him?) Brown who just looks at the badges and works out how many of the conventions happened before she was born. Somewhere amidst all the excitement I manage to “Well, you could always borrow your dad’s,” suggests squeeze in more hotel food, and share a bottle of someone. But Abi is not impressed. She still has Harry wine with Lilian. This sets us up nicely for the caba- Potter to read. I go and look in on the “finding your ret which is actually much better than I expected. inner Brownie” activity, but it all looks too serious with Liam Proven lets out all his insecurities in a piece of children sitting in circles doing creative or maybe scien- emo comedy. Ang really does deliver a section of tific things. I prefer to stand at the edge and reminisce her GUFF trip report through the medium of inter- over brownie songs with Julia. pretive dance and the super-supple Jess inevitably wins at Twister. Finally, various auction items are Having spent the past two days watching transport chaos adjudicated through a series of challenges which on Sky TV, it’s somewhat surprising that I don’t think to involve people rushing round the hotel trying to get check the situation for my homeward journey. Instead I hold of tomatoes, nylons or other unlikely objects. rush off to Leicester Railway station, catch a train to Ryan proves that man can juggle like a machine, Birmingham and only there discover that I am going to and Mike Scott surprisingly wins a duel. have to be routed via London! I catch the slowest Virgin Train ever down to London. It stops in Nuneaton (which By this stage it would have been nice to retire qui- I passed through an hour earlier) to restock the buffet etly to the bar, but popular opinion (or was it just and in Milton Keynes to offload an emergency patient. I Lilian?) sweeps me along into Would I lie to you, expect all trains to Cornwall to have long since left, so where fans tell tall stories about their past, and we am surprised and extremely relieved to find one for have to guess if they’re true or false. Most of them Penzance sitting on the platform at Paddington. Another are true, or true with a few small details changed 4 hours and I’m home. to make them more believable. Reality, as ever, is stranger than anything we can invent. Postscript I did enjoy Year of the Teledu, despite my initial fears Which takes me nicely on to Torchwood about not fitting in. The programme formats were wobblevision. It’s listed on the programme, but I innovatory and often worked much better than the stand- have no idea what it means. Lilian and I find out ard panel; there was a chance to meet new people, the hard way when we turn up at the Torchwood and a general atmosphere of good will and amiability. table at the right (or wrong) time to be included in Maybe there was a bit too much emphasis on being up the draw for parts. The part of Captain Jack goes and doing things – but at least that’s better than the to a woman dressed as Captain Jack; the rest of opposite. It had that dynamism that you often get at the parts are handed out entirely at random. Lilian small conventions where everyone gets a chance to gets Tosh. I get Pizza Delivery girl. The director contribute and events generate their own continuity and calls up the characters he needs, and reproduces jokes. For a short while I half-felt I belonged to this the episode in a series of tableaux. It soon becomes community, but now over a year on, and far away in clear that Pizza Delivery girl is not going to have a Cornwall I wonder if I was just playing at being part of very big part. In fact she’s not on till the last scene it all? Maybe I’m not active enough in the right places – when Cybergirl (renamed Cider Girl by this time) whatever they are - LJ, parties, Sproutlore, other con- takes over the body of Pizza Delivery Girl. At last ventions? - to keep up a profile in this new distributed, it’s my big moment. I leap onto stage ready to act, self-defining community? I need some glue to stick me and zam! the strap of my dress breaks. I’m so busy back into fandom. Doug seems to have found that with trying to deal with this that the scene’s over before fan history and various mailing lists, but I don’t know I’ve had time to do much staggering round the stage. where I belong any more. The lesson of Teledu is that It’s a wrap! We all leave with a deeper and more you just need to participate and you’ll find fun and friend- profound understanding of the true crapness that ship. But maybe it’s a bit like everything else about the is the Cybergirl episode. Internet - there’s too much choice and not enough fo- cus, so that you can enjoy the experience and the crazy Next morning I’m due to leave before 12.00 and so inventiveness of it all without necessarily being hooked have very little time to wear my fannish pride t- in to anything. 20 Conventions  Letters April 2009 into a serial writers’ group junkie. Doug reviews some weird music, and Christina comes up with a bit of nonsense about the science fiction gene. No letters occur, but there’s a good Brad Foster cover.

And now back to Jerry with another fundamental question:

Jerry Kaufman ([email protected]) I enjoyed Doug’s material about the convention you went to in Australia, but - linear person I am - I could have used more markers indicating where and when the con took place, and what it was called. I think Doug mentioned the convention’s name somewhere deep into the piece. “This Easter” in the introduction puts it at Spring 2006, right? But what city? Probably also mentioned off-handedly, but I can’t recall. But maybe both of you believe that all conventions take place in a fannish dimen- sion outside time and space, so the city and date don’t really matter?

Jerry, you are so right! Obviously everyone was just meant to know that we were in Brisbane at the Australian Natcon. Maybe we should get our- selves a managing editor to spot these omissions, rectify the typos and nag us into publishing more Curated by Christina Lake frequently. Any volunteers out there? Perhaps all this slapdashery explains why Eric When I was trying to decide whether to do a letter Lindsay seemed a bit baffled to find himself in column for this issue, I came across the following Doug’s con report: comment from Jerry Kaufman: Eric Lindsay ([email protected]) I’m wondering where the letter column is. If Peter Glad to see that you have published your ish again, Weston can publish decades old letters in Prolapse even at the expense of talking at the beach and 3, why couldn’t you have used three-year-old letters? the pub. I was surprised to see my own name oc- Or are you going to wait twenty years until the letters cur so often in your trip report, considering I am have taken on a patina of historical interest that will about a Cornwall to Rome distance away from most out-weigh their lack of timeliness? conventions in Australia. Luckily Conclave was more like a Lands End distance. I’m not sure what happened to the letters on Head! 6, but since Jerry (and Peter) have given the seal of Alas, my distance from traffic light claims have approval to old letters, I shall take heart, and publish fallen to developer’s vision of progress. Instead of some of the letters we received on Head! 7 – none of 150 km south, or 300 km north, we now have a which have reached their three year anniversary. Yet. cursed set of traffic lights at the new shopping centre a mere 6 km away. I feel like find- And for those who can’t remember, here’s the one ing an uninhabited island to live on. minute summary of Head! 7, brought to you by the reduced fanzine company Reading about a convention you have attended is always fun, even if everyone seems to attend a Doug goes through the agonies of waiting for the bar different convention. to open at his first Australian convention, while Christina worries that no-one will remember her. At least Leigh Edmonds still remembered which Simon Lake writes a novel in a 72-hours transatlantic convention we were talking about when he emailed marathon session, unaware that his sister is turning us in August last year  Letters 21 Head! #8 Letters Leigh Edmonds ([email protected]) fandom and some of my contacts got involved in it. Loved the convention report. It was rather strange Not me, though—I determined a long time ago after a about the exhortations to become writers. I spent number of failed attempts that writing fiction was defi- a lot of time pondering why everyone seemed so nitely not my thing. keen on getting me to write and some more time thinking that most fiction writers don’t get paid very I enjoyed Christina’s look at writers’ groups and the well, so why bother. The other thing I remember ideal astrological mix for them. As a Virgo I especially about that convention was the ‘rustic charm of an resonated with “a Virgo thrown in to provide that es- oil refinery’ - good description Doug - bar with acous- sential element of perfectionism” and see that my fail- tics that still had me half deaf days later. Later that ure to ever become involved in a writers’ group has year we went to a convention in Melbourne at the put a additional burden on all others of my sun sign Victoria Hotel where I had spent many pleasant with literary aspirations. hours in the bar, and did so again this time. We keep on intending to get to more conventions but That aside, my enthusiasm for a writers’ group would the facts of mundane life keep on getting in the also dissolve quickly “as the novelty value of wading way. through badly spelled items from teenagers with an uncertain grasp on grammar began to wear off.” The Robert Lichtman ([email protected]) horror! The horror! In Doug’s Australia account I sympathized with his statement that his “discomfort coupled with the high Sue Thomason (190 Coach Road, Sleights, Whitby, humid Queensland atmosphere” made him “quite North Yorks YO22 5EN) unsteady.” I’m not a fan of humid weather, either, Writing a novel in 3 days... this is one of those things and this was particularly hard on me when I lived that convinces me there are aliens among us. When in a mostly un-airconditioned commune in Tennes- I’m really on a roll, I can write about a thousand words see during the ‘70s. Until you’ve experienced it of fiction a day. Admittedly, I’m one of those people yourself, there’s really no way to describe ad- who can’t (or doesn’t) plot ahead, so a lot of that time equately the sensation of coming out of a soothing is spent waiting for my characters to make up their shower on a warm summer day—and before you minds what they’re going to do next. get even get dressed you’re sweating as though you hadn’t taken a shower at all. My normal novel writing rate seems to have settled Elsewhere Doug wrote regarding one of the fan down to about one a decade which isn’t too good. I’m panels at the convention, “Valma was disheartened quite tempted by National Novel Writing Month by the lack of young fans interested in the fannish (NaNoWriMo) but it’s always in November which is a side of life, but I assured her this wasn’t just a busy time in my present job. modern Australian fan phenomenon, a similar panel at a British convention would have drawn the same Lloyd Penney (1706-24 Eva Rd. Etobicoke, ON, size and demographic of audience.” Although I don’t Cananda, M9C 2B2) go to a lot of U.S. conventions (mostly Corflu, where I haven’t tried the NaNoWriMo, but I know mad we don’t really expect young fans), I understand fanzinista Chris Garcia has done it and written 10K from what I’ve read in the accounts of others that words in the three days alloted the last couple of years this situation also obtains here. It does make you at least. I keep to the loc column, thanks. (I had no wonder where the next generation of fans is going idea that so many Canadians took part; Simon has to come from. One Chris Garcia can’t make up for quotes from three of them.) the lack of new blood even though he does a good job of trying. Prolific word counts seem to come easy to Chris – though I didn’t know he was a novelist too. But back to Jerry: “I’m just not a costume kind of guy.” Me, either—I was living in Los Angeles when Bjo Trimble pretty Jerry Kaufman much singlehandedly invented the modern worldcon So there are competitions, as Simon relates, to write costume/masquerade and never got into it at all novels in 3 days, as well as one month. I heard from despite many of my fannish contemporaries doing Andy Hooper and Ulrika O’Brien last night that there’s so. also a 90-day novel writing thing. I don’t know if it’s a contest or simply a challenge to the participants. Both Simon Lake’s article on speedwriting fiction came Andy and Ulrika reckoned that 90 days was the perfect at an auspicious time, since shortly after I read it length of time for a novel-writing project. Me, I couldn’t one of these contests struck in some corners of do it in a year. By the way, I wondered about ”The 22 Letters  Letters April 2009 cover of the first Apple” you reproduce. You depict this all. It is now something of the expression of the as a writers’ group in the article, not an apa or pub- absent father. And my sister was the one who in- lishing co-op. Was it both? Did it publish all the stories troduced me to Second Foundation, it was, back- workshopped and distribute the publications outside wards typically, and part of no particular program the group? Or were the pubs strictly distributed to the except perhaps some sort of eccentricity on her members? Were the stories published like an apa, dis- part. It has continued that way ever since. In this tributed to members, and then critiqued? I am idly cu- I feel akin to people like Olaf Stapledon and Greg rious. Egan, who are singular writers of whom skiffy is a part. We’ll see. Apple was a writer’s workshop that thought it was an apa! We didn’t usually have a cover, but all the sub- Brad Foster ([email protected]) missions were sent to a central organiser who col- As far as the question of the origin of the Science lated and sent them out to the members. Fiction gene, I can only report from my own expe- rience that I am the only one in my own family who Doug, I loved hearing about the Trowbridge Village seems to have any sort of taste for the different. Pump Festival, though I’m not much for camping out On the other hand, my father died when I was young, or going to festivals. (If such things were presented in before I ever got a chance to really know him. But a hotel, I might be more likely to attend.) I particularly the evidence is he had some artistic talents, was liked getting current information on the doings of Eliza working on some writing, and even managed to Carthy and the rest of the Waterson:Carthy bunch. I’ve pick up a few odd little lp’s, like one of the first seen them in various combinations since the early synthesizer based recordings, so maybe we might 1980s. After I finish this letter, I’ll look for EC and the have been the kindred souls had he lived. I like to Ratcatchers material on-line, as I haven’t heard of this think we would have gotten on, comparing the lat- particular incarnation before. est odd finds with each other, wondering why none of the women in the family “got it”. Christina, I note that in your piece on the workshops you’ve done, and in your other piece on the Science Oh, and by the way, welcome back! As we all know, Fiction Gene, how you always wrap your reminiscences there’s certainly no time limits on how long it should in a thematic frame - and how you usually end it by take between issues. You just needed to get your admitting the frame was just an excuse to share your head together for a while before you could get your memories. It’s a useful skill, sweetie. HEAD together again as well. Going by all the stuff in this issue, it’s not like you were just sitting around Leigh Edmonds: going “we really should pub an ish” while doing I also enjoyed Christina’s musing on the sf gene. I’ve nothing but watching TV. also wondered about what makes some people like sf and others not. Fortunately for me, Valma has the If only you knew, Brad. If only you knew! gene and so we religiously watch Dr Who when it’s on, and other sf programs, not that there’s anything else of quality on the box these days. A couple of months back we decided to invest in the complete run of Stargate SG1 - not the best sf that’s ever been on the tv but still better than most. These days we look at the tv guide, decide that there’s nothing worth watching and take in another couple of episodes of that instead. It’s a lot more fun this time around than when it was on once a week, perhaps because we’ve become aware that there must have been a British writer on the team because no American writer can drop in the little hints of irony and understated humour that littler the show.

Paul Voermans ([email protected]) Christina, it’s good to read how you came to skiffy. The mad scientist, I’m afraid, is in my blood, since my father was one. That was always a costume melo- drama for me, with the white coat and wild hair and

 Letters 23