Unreliable Narrator #3 the Worldhood of the World (As Such)

Vienna Calling The Nordessey, Part 1 Unreliable Narrator #3 The Worldhood of The World (as such) In the run-up to Loncon, Christina and I published an issue of Head! on the spur of the moment. The articles and artwork had been sitting around in our computers for a while, we just hadn’t the time to pull them together into one place and publish them. Picking up the zine from the printers felt good, it felt right. I wanted to do more of this sort of thing. The last issue of this zine appeared for Corfu XXX in Portland. So much has happened since that sunny Spring weekend that’s taken me away from fanzine writing. I’ve been through a re-structure at work, become a manager, been on sabbatical, taken up cycling, attended Worldcon in London, and been on the committees for both Novacon and Corflu. It’s become obvious to me that if I want to do more fanzines I need to clear some of the other things from my life. My career I can’t jettison, unless someone out there wants to pay me to do fanzines. And I’m definitely not going to give up my obsession with cycling, not only is it my only form of exercise, but it’s one of the few things on TV that I actually enjoy watching. Other areas of my life need a bit of a sort out. One is convention running. Working on publications and programmes is something that doesn’t come easily to me, and having worked on an Eastercon, a Corflu and a Novacon I can definitely say con-running is something I don’t want to do any more. It’s not only con-running I need to cut out, there’s other stuff too. I play too much video games, watch too much crap TV and spend too long online or answering emails in the evenings. This zine is based around three days in Vienna that I had at the start of my sabbatical. It’s my intention to serialise the rest of the trip in future issues of Unreliable Narrator alongside all the other things I want to write about. My reason for doing this is because I don’t want to lose momentum post-Tynecon, I need something to keep my publishing otherwise I will slump back on the sofa, job done for another couple of years, and that’s something I don’t want to do. - Doug Unreliable Narrator #3: Vienna Calling is brought to you by the letters P and Q, the number 23…and the smell of fresh herring. Unreliable Narrator is a Bigfoot Viking Production, and (c) Doug Bell 2015. To counteract the large amount of dead European classical composers mentioned in my trip report, this zine was produced to a soundtrack supplied by Goat, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, The Phantom Band, Wilco and King Creosote. Locs, fanzines in trade, Imperial Black Saisons, retro Belgian cycling memorabilia and bootlegs of modern psychedelic bands to: [email protected] or [email protected] This zine was published for and launched at Tynecon III: The Corflu in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, March 2015. - !2 - The Nordyssey, Part 1: Vienna Calling I’ve struggled to write this intro; this is the umpteenth version I’ve written over the last week. I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that no matter how flawed, no matter how it doesn’t say what I need it to say, that I just have to put the words down on paper and move on. So here goes - just over two years ago I was an absolute fucking wreck. My life started going off the rails when my mother died of lung cancer. The way the illness quickly progressed was a shock, and after the funeral was done I should have taken a couple of weeks to come to terms with everything that happened. Instead I avoided facing up to the situation, and did what felt natural by diving straight back to work and getting on with life. On top of my own usual workload of producing statistics, writing reports and managing a small team of staff, I also became a key member of a small team designing and launching a university- wide reporting system. It was stimulating and challenging work, and kept my mind suitably diverted. The workload was heavy and the pressure to deliver high, and by not having allowed myself the space to come to terms with what had happened by the time I was flying out to Portland for Corflu I realised I was in trouble. I felt physically, emotionally and intellectually wrung out. That holiday was the first time I’d stood still for a long time, and despite being shattered I found that I just could not switch my mind off. On the last night in North America, Andy Hooper and Carrie Root hosted a select party for the small number of Brits passing through town. It was a relaxed affair, with a nice dead dog post- convention vibe. I have a vivid memory of chatting to Andy over a beer about baseball and realising how much I really didn’t want this holiday to end – not only because of the great friends I’d miss, but due to a deep primal fear I had about returning to the status quo once home. I knew that if I didn’t do something drastic soon that I would be setting myself up for big fall. Back at work I shocked my colleagues by immediately asking my boss for a three month sabbatical. I wanted to get away and do some travelling, as well as have a month visiting my family in Scotland, and spending some time relaxing in Cornwall before returning to work. Employers get a lot of stick for the way they treat their staff, but I found both my manager and the senior management team at the university nothing but supportive, for which I am extremely grateful. With a letter in my hand from HR confirming my official absence from September to December, I could begin planning my trip through Northern Europe. I wanted to travel by train through Norway to the Arctic Circle, then cut across the top of Sweden to Finland. Over the border I’d travel down to Helsinki, cross the Baltic by ferry, and then push on to the Baltic states, Poland, Germany and Denmark, before flying home from Stockholm. It was all do-able, just the cost of staying Norway threatened to bankrupt me. So it was back to the drawing board. I still wanted to travel through some of the Nordic countries, but where else? Well, one of the cities I’ve been desperate to visit for a long time was Vienna. Just like most places I’ve never been, my impressions of the city were formed by what I knew of it from music, film and literature – mostly Schoenberg, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, John Irving’s books, The Third Man and Falco have a lot of the blame too. Once Vienna was locked down, the rest of the planning came easy – I’d just journey north until I reached Finland. Along the way there would be culture, sport, trains, boats and a convention thrown in for good measure. It’d be the biggest trip of my life so far, a journey into the heart of Northern Europe – a Nordessey, if you will. So I left work on the Tuesday, packed Wednesday and travelled up to London on the Thursday to meet Mark Plummer and Claire Brialey and a whole bunch of London SF fans at the First Thursday for a pre-trip night of drinking and fannish gossip. The next morning, slightly hung-over, Christina waved me off to Gatwick airport from a train platform somewhere deep in darkest Croydon. - !3 - Welcome To Wiener-Schnitzel, Can I Take You're Order? Friday 4, October 2013 It's a bright autumnal afternoon as the bus pulls out of Vienna airport. For the last fifteen minutes I’ve been standing in the cold sunlight, freezing my balls off; it reminds me of a summer’s day in Aberdeen. Now safely tucked away in the warm bus, feelings are slowly returning to my hands and feet. It’s an odd sensation, as currently my body doesn’t know what it wants to do as I am also caked in sweat. I don’t feel like I’m ill, and it can’t be from lugging a backpack around as I’ve only recently picked it up from baggage reclaim. All I know is that since arriving at Gatwick Airport my body has been overheating drastically. How on earth can you be roasting and freezing at the same time? The journey into the city is uninspiring, mostly consisting of grey, efficient Teutonic autobahn. On the outskirts of the city, buildings appear. None hint at Vienna’s much rhapsodised architectural splendours or of the capital’s place in the history of western culture, although maybe the enormous oil/gas refinery with miles of steaming interconnected pipe-work might make the ghost of Freud moderately excited. As the last of the refinery whizzes by I think I catch sight of an abandoned water-park nestled right next door to the vast industrial complex. Maybe I dreamt it. The bus dumps me in Schwedenplatz, and though I had carefully pre-planned my metro route to the hostel before leaving the airport I hadn’t figured it’d be hard to find the entrance to the underground.

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