Nowhere Fan 5

Going Nowhere Nowhere Fan 5 is the much-delayed follow-up to Nowhere Fan 4 and is like all social contacts these days electronic only. This fanzine will be following government guidelines on social distancing but needs frequent exercise and will be happy to stand in the queue for shopping. Please rinse in hot soapy water before reading. It is available as a PDF from [email protected] or online from efanzines.com. All content is written by Christina Lake, apart from Bayou Rhythms, which is by Doug Bell. The cartoon p.27 is by the illustrious Brad Foster. All Swamp Thing artwork is © DC Comics. (April 2020) ______Lockdown Lemonade

As a fanzine that owes its inspiration to utopias and dystopias, it feels like I should be running features on pandemic reading and commenting on the swiftness with which we have moved from a civil liberties society to one where the government can dictate how often we’re meant to leave our homes. But with a whole new generation discovering Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Years and post-apocalyptic punditry popping up in every newspaper and website, maybe this isn’t really the time. Doug has even postponed writing the article he promised me on demographic changes in Carrie Vaughn’s post-apocalyptic Bannerless series as it just seemed, well, too close to home in this time of disease tracking and infection maps. But I do find it intriguing to ponder this throwback moment which reminds us why we used to think it was important to have a welfare state and to act for the good of society as a whole rather than the gain of the individual. Utopias and dystopias sit on a different continuum to post-apocalyptic societal breakdown. Dystopian is lightly used for any kind of bad stuff going on, but ultimately dystopias are more about state control taken to a level which outweighs the good this control is supposed to achieve. Brave New World does the dystopian utopia rather well. The society is absurd, but it does have an intelligent and benevolent dictator behind it who can make a decent argument for the bread and circuses of this controlled society being better than the alternatives of war and disease inherent to individual liberty. There would be no pandemics in BNW, or only state sponsored ones to cull any unproductive parts of the population. But maybe Zamyatin’s We is a better analogy to our times, where the whole state is in lockdown behind a giant green wall, and there is general surveillance, not a lot of fun, and not much in the way of intelligence from the so called Benefactor aka dictator. Or is what we need really one of those confidently optimistic feminist utopias of the late nineteenth century where it seemed certain that if women ruled the world there would be no disease, but unfortunately also no sex, drugs and rock n’roll, because that’s what the men were doing to cause the diseases in the first place? But now that we have our three minutes of statutory love for the NHS each week, we are well on the way to becoming good citizens of whatever utopia/ dystopia emerges from the current pandemic. There may be a fine line between utopias and dystopias but at the moment I have to say they’re looking better than the alternative.

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The other interesting aspect to this all is discovering what we really do or don’t need in our new lives. Maybe it’s the change of season but I haven’t needed the ankle boots I recently bought for work, most of my work clothes (at least those not visible on video conferences) or most of the clothes that I might wear to go out in the evening. Alongside our increased understanding of the fragility of the food supply chain, maybe a few environmental messages are starting to get through? So, what do I have for you here? A lot of pre-apocalyptic content that has been brewing in the years (yes, it’s years) since the last issue. For example the GoH speech I wrote for Follycon, some updates on my life pre-pandemic, and a fantasia cum tribute to Randy Byers. Doug is going to write about Swamp Thing. I have some letters that might still amuse. Also a few thoughts on the Dublin Worldcon, and on future Worldcons I might have been thinking of attending back when the only obstacles were time, money and social energy.

Identity crisis 1 (November 2019)

At the end of October I was made redundant from my job working in the library at Falmouth University after 16 years. That’s a big chunk of my working life. Twice as long as my time at Wessex Water, and three times as long as my career as a linguistic abstractor in my first job way back in the 80s. A lot longer than it took to set up regional libraries at the Environment Agency and then see them dismantled again. The water industry gave me free shares, the Environment Agency gave me hangovers, Predicasts gave me my first permanent job and first experience of institutional unfairness. Falmouth University gave me an opportunity to move to Cornwall, a renewed interest in academic study and a snapshot of life in HE at an era of fast change both in the UK and at the micro level of my working environment. I started work for Falmouth College of Art, which soon became University College Falmouth, before settling on the appropriately expletive Falmouth University. Then FU handed over responsibility for the library to Falmouth Exeter Plus, which runs all the shared services on the campus from accommodation to counselling, from catering to buses, which pissed everyone off, not just because they had longer working days and less holiday, but because as a library we saw ourselves as part of the academic life of the university, not just a service industry. During my 16 years there I’ve had lots of different jobs, doing front of house for libraries at two different campuses, managing staff, teaching students, working with researchers, even arbitrating between Modern Foreign Language tutors. Lots of it was fun, especially working with students and researchers and developing elements of the library software environment. A lot of it was no fun at all. Internal politics and rivalries, frustrated staff who hated their jobs, but didn’t want to leave as there were no similar jobs elsewhere in Cornwall. Restructures and unreasonable management demands. The latter became worse when the library became a subsidiary of Student Services and we went on a “journey” to find out who would still have jobs at the end of the year. As it turned out, the answer was not me. My job was deleted, and I was offered an alternative job on a lower grade. I decided to bail out after finally getting HR to admit that I was entitled to a redundancy payout. Minimum possible, of course, but with early access to part of my pension.

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So, you’ve retired, people keep asking me? Not exactly. But good enough to have a few months off work, before looking for another job. At least that was the plan, up until a couple of days before I was due to leave. Then it turned out that the Falmouth University research team were still keen to keep hold of my expertise on repositories, Open Access and the REF, so after a short but hardly decent interval I was re-employed by Falmouth University on a temporary part-time contract to look through their REF submissions and make sure that all the necessary material was on the repository. For once being outsourced to FXPlus played in my favour as I could go back to work for Falmouth University as they weren’t the people who had made me redundant. The other question I kept getting asked was what would I do after I left work? It seemed a strange question as surely I would do all the things I never have time to do when I’m working? I’d mention research, writing, holidays, house repairs. But it felt like that wasn’t good enough. There had to be something big and different, to justify my decision to take redundancy. Luckily Doug and I were going to South Africa and Botswana in January, so that seemed to do the trick. Even though we’d have been going anyway. Then occasionally I’d mention leaving Cornwall and people get a bit surprised. Why would we want to leave? It’s such a lovely place. It is, but it’s also a long way from everywhere. Particularly a long way from Edinburgh and environs where Doug’s family live. Flights and other aspects of public transport aren’t brilliant. And there aren’t so many jobs down here for when Doug finishes his MSc in Geographic Information Systems. So it would make sense to move, even though part of me wants to stay. That was what I was thinking back in November. Now I’m just thinking that I’ll be going nowhere fast this year, and somehow the home-based projects are not looking so exciting. Though at least we did make it to Botswana in January. More of that next issue or maybe in a whole new fanzine, who knows? Which takes me neatly into:

Identity crisis 2 (Perennial)

I’ve been trying to think what kind of fanzine I’d like to write. Fast and frequent e-zine? Lovingly crafted physical object? Somewhere in between? A new issue of Head! with Doug? The mythical Banana Head? A new fanzine altogether? Or just stick with being in apas? I was in Anzapa for a while and it was fascinating and enthralling, but it took up a lot of my energy. It was hard to keep up. Two fat envelopes of fanzines arriving every two months. And all that interesting content made me want to write more, so my contributions began to get longer too. Not by Anzapa standards, but certainly compared to writing for TWP (The Women’s Periodical), my other apa. Then I ended up being administrator for TWP, so decided to take a break from Anazapa for a while to concentrate on other projects. Well, that didn’t happen. So here I am back with Nowhere Fan, in the middle of a pandemic wondering if fanzines are more or less irrelevant at a time like this? Or maybe I should I get on trend and do a podcast? Since I don’t know the answer, and I do want to get out this long-delayed issue, consider this an interim solution in search of a raison d’être. Please feel free to help me find one by sending lots of lovely locs which I will then endeavour not to leave languishing endlessly in fanzine development hell.

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The Joycean World of Irish Fan Writing

I was going to read some James White for the Irish Worldcon. Instead I read James Joyce. Well, I started reading Ulysses. Full of enthusiasm, I finished the first couple of sections quite easily as they featured Stephen Dedalus, a character I knew already from Portrait of an Artist. I was aware that I wasn’t picking up on all the allusions but there were characters, interesting language and vague stirrings of plot to keep me going. Even when the narrative voice moved over to Bloom I felt reasonably okay. But then I went on holiday to Italy a few weeks before the convention and switched to reading Ulysses on the Kindle. And found myself getting lost. For one thing, the electronic text didn’t do section breaks. It also didn’t do italics and indentations. In a text as full of quotes, allusions and foreign language words as Ulysses this lack of signage made navigating much more difficult. Maybe Ulysses isn’t the ideal holiday reading even without these textual challenges, but I wanted to persevere, not just for Ireland but because when we reached Trieste, the final destination of our holiday, it turned out we were in a very Joycean city. In fact Joyce wrote the start of Ulysses there after running away from Ireland with Nora Barnacle. He was a language teacher in Trieste for a while, and the city now celebrates him with a statue and their own Bloomsday celebrations. By the time I got to Dublin I’d read far enough through Ulysses to recognise many references in names on bars and shops, and to appreciate discovering some of the geography of the book. We even went out to Sandycove on the day after the convention to find the Martello tower which features in the opening chapter, now a museum, where Joyce spent a dramatic couple of nights before leaving Dublin for good. But maybe I should have read James White after all, as I still don’t feel I’ve got to grips with Irish fandom. I did go to the History of Irish fandom panel, hoping to gain some insight. And although I could hear the enthusiasm of the panellists, I still didn’t really learn much that was new or historical. Tommy Ferguson who was sitting next to me and Doug had a big rolled up piece of paper that maybe contained all the historical facts I needed (or was it just a big map of pubs to visit in Belfast?) but there was little chance of introducing it into the panel. No-one wanted to interrupt the flow of anecdotes, and maybe that was the point, it wasn’t about facts but love. Which leads me to wonder whether if I’d applied half the effort to Irish fan writing that I’d given to poring over interpretations of Joyce’s many parodies and stylistic borrowings, I’d wouldn’t be bemused by the Enchanted Duplicator (just another repurposing of classic literature, but with less masturbation) and old issues of Hyphen (Irish history rewritten in the form of amateur journalism filtered through the genre expectations of mid-twentieth century SF). So when/ if I ever finish Ulysses, I’ll have to get started on James White, Walt Willis and other Irish fan writers. Maybe even in time for an Irish Corflu? And here’s what I wrote about the convention itself in TWP last October, back when there was still a physical New Zealand Worldcon to consider not going to: Dublin Worldcon

Worldcons can be hard work. I love the randomness of the encounters and the re- connecting with people I’ve known in travels through fandom on three continents (Europe,

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America and Australasia). But having attended three in six years I’m beginning to feel that the quality of those encounters isn’t enough unless you are lucky or organised enough to spend time over a meal or over a drink with old acquaintances. Also as said acquaintances get older, they are less likely to be up all night in the bar. And with everyone spread across different hotels or hostels round the city you can’t even guarantee running into them. Then there’s the programme. Most of the panels I went to were very good, and I didn’t even make it to the academic programme. I saw writers whose work I enjoy (Charlie Jane Anders, Carrie Vaughan, Anne Charnock, Ada Palmer) and writers and others who I had never heard of who were often even more interesting. I supported the Fan Fund auction and the sales table and went to items featuring TAFF delegate Geri Sullivan who was a dynamic presence throughout the con (especially in the bar with her “ghoodminton” set). I queued for items I definitely wanted to see, and snuck into the back of others that weren’t too full. I did touristing in Dublin (Book of Kells and the Marsh Library). I talked to random and not so random people in the queues. I went to parties, though failed to get to the bid parties after discovering a queue for the Chinese party which made me blench and turn away after a day of queuing. I didn’t get my act together to go to any of the major events. I loved going up and down the escalators at the Convention but hated going into Martin’s bar during the day because it was so dark. I only got to Point Square once. I guess there are always choices to make. A great meal out with one set of people is at the expense of an event or party. Lunch and touristing is at the expense of programme. Point Square rules out a following event in the CCD. Sleeping rules out morning programme. Yes, first world convention problem. I know I’m lucky to be able to afford a hotel room and meals out in Dublin, and to have so many people I want to talk to, but maybe I’m beginning to come round to the way of thinking that Worldcons are too big (and expensive) for me. Also, it feels like each new Worldcon is a bit of an experiment. The Helsinki committee took a couple of days to fix their space issues. Dublin took a similar amount of time to sort out the queuing. So I’m probably not going to go to New Zealand, even though I feel a real connection to New Zealand and fans there through visiting back in the late 90s. But the Australians and New Zealanders I want to see will probably be too busy. And there will no doubt be logistical problems that haven’t yet been foreseen. And because the best day of the Dublin Worldcon was actually the party in Helsinki where they won the bid. Enthusiasm for the idea of a Worldcon held in such places as Helsinki, Dublin and Wellington doesn’t always translate into the unique experience you want the con to be. Sometimes the reverse as the more exciting the location, the more people end up torn between convention and touristing. The element I found distinctive about Helsinki was the Finnish fans excitement at hosting the convention, and about Dublin was the number of Irish people on the programme (though I did rather target Irish historical or literary panels, in the hope of boosting my understanding of Ulysses). New Zealand Worldcon ideally will have both these things - Australasian programme we don’t usually get and excitement from hosting fans, though I don’t think New Zealand has anywhere as numerous a fan base as Finland. But everyone’s experience is different - that’s also what makes it so hard to feel you’ve captured a Worldcon even when you were there. And despite all I’ve just said, I’m considering DC in 2021. If I still have any money by then!

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Bayou Rhythms by Doug Bell

“It’s raining in Washington tonight. Plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalks with leopard spots. Downtown, elderly ladies carry their houseplants out to set them on the fire-escapes, as if they were infirm relatives or boy kings.” So begins one of the most iconic stories in DC Comics’ library of many tales. “The Anatomy Lesson” marked not only Alan Moore’s writing debut on The Saga of The Swamp Thing but also his debut in a North American publication, sorta1. It’s a poetic and horrific re-imagining of one of DC’s most enduring second tier characters – Alec Holland aka the Swamp Thing. Alec may not be as well-known as Batman, Wonder Woman or Superman but he has been around almost as long as I have, and so as I approached my 50th year I got a notion to re- read it all from the beginning. Here’s what I found. Swamp Thing first appeared in the DC horror anthology House of Secrets #92. Set in the 1900s this was a one-shot tale of Alex Olsen, a scientist killed by his scheming assistant who had designs on Linda, Olsen’s wife. Alex’s body is dumped into the swamp, but re-emerges a couple of days later as a moss-encrusted monster, hell-bent on exacting revenge. Its striking gothic artwork and tight storytelling made it an instant hit with readers, with letters to the editor demanded more. But its creators Len Wein and Berni Wrightson felt they had nothing left to tell there. Wein and Wrightson eventually succumbed to demands for a reprise, but updated the story to a contemporary early 1970s setting. The Olsens became the Hollands, with the dodgy lab assistant becoming Ferrett, a thug working for the sinister Sunderland Corporation. Sunderland wanted the secret bio-restorative formulae the married couple were working on for their own profit margins. After one violent encounter with Ferrett, Alec awakens from being knocked unconscious to find Linda dead and a ticking bomb beside him. The explosion covers Alec with his bio-restorative formula and propels his burning body into the dank swamp water. As before, a monster soon re-emerges and Ferrett is doomed. And so the real Swamp Thing is born. #2 saw Holland/Swamp Thing kidnapped by the evil sorcerer-scientist Anton Arcane and whisked to his castle somewhere in a generic Eastern Europe comics land, complete with superstitious pitchfork-wielding yokels. Anton, aided by his Un-Men, is determined to unlock the secrets of Swamp Thing’s life after death as his own biological experiments have failed him. Anton and his innocent beautiful witchy looking niece Abigail become regular supporting characters throughout the rest of Swamp Thing’s history. Wrightson’s artwork

1 He really started in the previous issue “Loose Ends”, where he tidied up the previous writer’s loose ends,but let’s just pretend like the whole of comics fandom does that Moore emerged fully formed with this gem.

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Artist: Berni Wrightson expertly blends expressive cartoonishness with camp horror recalling nostalgically the EC Horror comics of the 50s that led to Dr Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and the resulting moral backlash responsible for the introduction of the Comics Code Authority. Much of the initial series reads more like an action adventure rather than out and out horror and involves Alec trying to get back home to his Louisiana bayou home pursued by Matt Cable of the DDI security service who is determined to discover if the monster had a role in killing his friends, the Hollands. It’s fun stuff particularly when Swampy bumps into Batman in #7, however the run descends into a monster-of-the-month affair when Wein and Wrightson leave the book halfway. There are inklings that there could be something more adult here though as Alec Holland often struggles to retain his humanity whilst in the hideous body of a swamp monster. Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing movie rekindled interest in the character with the ongoing comic book series The Saga of The Swamp Thing being launched in 1982. Solidly written by Marty Pasko, it’s raised above workmanlike by Tom Yeats detailed and expressive artwork. Much of Pasko’s run is forgettable but it shifts up a gear with the re-introduction of the now married Matt and Abigail. Time hasn’t been good to them though as they are in hiding from Uncle Anton, getting by on Abi’s waitressing tips, with Matt descending into alcoholism and visiting strip joints after being fired from the DDI. The artwork hits real heights here as Stephen Bissette and John Totleben take over from Yeas. This duo’s level of detail and willingness to experiment with page layouts makes the book cry for a writer who can really harness fully their talents. And this is where we came in. The Anatomy Lesson redefines the Swamp Thing/Alec Holland relationship entirely. It is poetically voiced over by Dr Jason Woodrue, a plant based sometimes super-hero, sometimes super-villain who goes by the name of The Floronic Man. Woodrue has been hired to dissect the captured and frozen Alec Holland for the Sunderland Corporation. Much

8 of the issue is him reporting back to the dismissive narrow-minded General Sunderland, asserting his thesis that Swamp Thing is not Alec Holland transformed into plant form, but a plant consciousness that has absorbed the memories of the dead doctor while the body was decomposing in the swamp. Just imagine the shock the Swamp Thing will have when he discovers that he’s never been human, and has been captured and tortured by Sunderland? Well after being rudely fired by his employer, Woodrue leaves the full report on his desk beside the frozen Swamp Thing’s body, before carefully switching off the refrigeration unit. We know right from the start of this tale the ending will not be good. “He’ll be pounding on the glass right now… …or not now. Maybe in a while. But he’ll be pounding and will there be blood? I like to imagine so. Yes, I rather think there will be blood.” But this is only the start of Moore’s re-imagining of Swamp Thing. He ties the character more into the DC Universe with careful and imaginative use of guest stars like the Justice League, the Demon Etrigan, The Spectre and the Phantom Stranger. The horror stays but it becomes tinged with something deeper, something more adult. We see Swamp Thing slowly come to terms with the fact that although he uses Alec Holland’s name and memories he is not human. With this realisation comes the arrival of John Constantine, the sarcastic chain- smoking Liverpudlian magician of future Hellblazer fame. Constantine guides the reluctant Swamp Thing through a series of horrific encounters, each designed to teach Alec something new about his place in the universe and develop his plant-based powers further. By guide though, I mean manipulate, as of course nothing is ever as it seems with JC. Towards the end of the arc Holland discovers the Parliament of the Trees, a collective mind of retired plant elementals who once defended The Green (i.e. the plant realm) from existential threats. Swamp Thing, it seems, is the latest and current elemental. Alec Olsen from the House of Secrets story appears as one of the retired elementals tying the original Swamp Thing story neatly into continuity. It’s not only the constant re-invention and broadening of Swamp Thing’s world and origin that makes Moore’s run remarkable, it’s the way it redefined modern mainstream. Here’s, essentially a schlocky horror comic that becomes increasingly cerebral and character-driven, causing the publishers to drop the Comics Code Authority Approval rating in favour of their own “Suggested for Mature Readers”. This was the first publication by Marvel or DC to do so and helped clear the ground for the later revolutionary Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns series. It allowed the exploration of adult themes such as Alec and Abi consummating their growing love for each other through Abi eating hallucinogenic tubers Swamp Thing creates in order to explore The Green together in “The Rite of Spring” #34. Moore’s last story arc sees Swamp Thing separated from The Green and forced to flee Earth and travel the cosmos until he can regain his powers and return home to Abi.

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By this point you can feel Moore straining at the edges of conventional comic’s narrative structure. “Loving the Alien” #60 resembles nothing published by the big two US publishers at that point, and consists of Swamp Thing drifting through the cosmos until he encounters a truly alien entity who rapes the helpless Alec Holland. Artwork throughout this story consists of large single page panels, fragments of illustration and collage all assembled by John Totleben to tell a truly alienating and frightening tale. The artist Rick Veitch was chosen to follow Alan Moore. Veitch had illustrated some of Moore’s run and had worked closely with him including throwing in the odd writing idea to his collaborator. If there is a fault with Moore’s run it comes across in the transitions between scenes with the clever overlapping images and dialogue being overused that is it comes across as too strict and formulaic. However a change of writer was to bring a much looser, organic feel to the comic. Although the purists claim Wein/Wrightson’s version is the original and therefore best, or the Moore fans that Moore’s is the best given the critical plaudits, it’s Rick Veitch’s version I imprinted on. It was the version I first discovered when I began exploring comics as an active consumer rather than as something the parents bought for you haphazardly to keep you quiet. To be honest the writing isn’t as sharp but it’s not over-written and allows Veitch’s main artist Alfredo Alcala a lot of room to show, not tell. During this period Alec Holland has returned to Earth to find that the Parliament of Trees has begun the process of replacing him with a new elemental due to his prolonged absence from The Green. Alec and Abi come up with a solution in order to save this “Sprout” from being destroyed. Alec strikes a deal with John Constantine to take over his body for a day so the pair can conceive a child, allowing the Sprout to inhabit the resulting embryo. The child they bring up together would then replace Alec naturally as the avatar of the Green when it comes into adulthood. Life is looking up in the swamp and the Hollands are allowed a little time to breathe and adapt to their new situation as Abi’s baby bump grow. But as always fate eventually intervenes, this time in the form of the DC wide crossover Invasion! one of the Artists: Stephen Bissette & company’s more successful large-scale events. In our little part John Totleben of this enormous alien invasion of Earth, the alien Dominators

10 are tasked with isolating and destroying the protector of the Green with their high-tech weaponry. Things don’t quite work as intended Swamp Thing is thrown backwards in time, though everyone in the present day believe Alec is dead. This arc serves as a companion piece to Moore’s final cosmic odyssey, this time allowing Swamp Thing to meet a rich vein of DCs historic characters including Sgt Rock, Merlin and the Shining Knight. It was also intended to be Veitch’s last story on the book, with him being replaced by Neil Gaiman and Jamie Delano. Unfortunately, #88 proved too controversial with Swamp Thing due to meet Jesus as part of his travels. Veitch refused to change his script, was fired from the series and his replacements decided sympathetically not to take up the gig. The book was put on hiatus while a replacement writer was sought but no established or up-and-coming hotshots were willing to take over the writing chores for fear of censorship. Doug Wheeler was the solution, a relative unknown who stepped in and deftly tidied up the dangling plot threads. Unfortunately, much of his remaining tenure is vastly over-written and involves a long rambling war between the Green and the Grey, a fungus-based realm similar to the Green. Wheeler faded back into obscurity replaced by the horror writer Nancy A Collins, who took the book in an entirely different direction. Now with a new baby elemental 푇푒푓é in tow, much of the action is centred on domestic life in the bayou, with lots of more traditional horror thrown in for good measure. Collins’s run is well written although lacks the high peaks of both Moore and Veitch. It is though, a much-needed palate cleanser after all the cosmic nonsense and creative disputes, and though this makes it sound like I’m damming Collins’s work with faint praise, it is entirely satisfactory in the best possible way, i.e. something good and solid that hits the right spot just when its most needed. The Saga of the Swamp Thing draws to a close with Mark Millar taking over the writing chair (along with Grant Morrison for the first four issues) aided by the artwork of Philip Hester. Hester’s work veers away from the detailed illustrations of Totleben, Veitch, Alcala et al. towards something more stylised, angular, almost cubist. It’s perfect for Millar’s long tale that takes us through to the book’s conclusion with #171. Millar, like Alan Moore, was a relatively unknown creator, at least to Americans, when he got the writing gig, and like Moore he builds on the past, re-imagining it vastly in scope of series and character. For starters a very human Alec Holland wakes deep in the South American rain forest from a long coma caused by the previous ingestion of a powerful indigenous hallucinogenic plant as part of his research studies. During his coma he had the most vivid dream where he’d dreamt the last ten years of his life as a monster, complete with wild cosmic adventures, a parliament of talking plants, and even a happy family. With madness overtaking him, he soon realises he needs to be re-united with the elemental Swamp Thing essence to survive. This, it turns out, is just the first of many tests Alec needs to pass to gain true enlightenment. Others include defeating the Parliaments from the other elemental realms of the Waves, Fire and Air. Each victory brings him new powers but makes him less connected to humanity, and closer to annihilating the human race to recreate a

11 more perfect Earth. Eventually though the new all-powerful Swamp Thing ascends to the Parliament of Worlds at peace with himself. And so the long Saga of the Swamp Thing is done. However the character returned in several subsequent series, one-shots and miniseries, with writers such as Brain K. Vaughan, Andy Diggle, Joshua Dysart, Charles Soule and even Len Wein again. The problem is that since by this point the character had gained godhood where do you go next? Vaughan tried to do something different by concentrating on the adventures of Alec’s teenage daughter Tefé, which felt like a natural continuation of the Saga and a neat way of sidestepping Millar’s overly problematic conclusion. Many readers saw this as the main character being marginalised in his own book, rather than appreciating it as the story of his natural heir. Successive creators have tried to concentrate on the theme of humanity/monstrousness but this is tired and over-used. Other realms like the Rot and the Red were created in the post- New 52 world but these are just variation on again well-worn themes.

So what has all this reading taught me if anything? Well it shows that any property, even the most unlikely throw-away character can be turned into a long-running and critically lauded series given talented creators and vision. It shows the importance of giving creative space to maverick adult creators as Swamp Thing led the way for a second wave of adult titles that included Sandman, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer and Animal Man. These books allowed their editor Karen Berger to launch DC’s mature reader imprint Vertigo. It also shows restricting creative freedom can lead to disaster such as with Rick Veitch but conversely giving too much freedom as with Millar can lead to leaving a much-loved character almost unusable. It’s also taught me to appreciate the work of colorist Tatjana Wood. Her singular and unique style ran through much of the book’s history, with her artful colour palate unifying the look of the series through its many creative teams (see back cover for a good example). Mostly though it is a sheer joy to sit and read the entirety of a character’s 50-year history, through all the highs and lows. Now it’s over what next? Maybe it’s finally time for me to re-read from the start The Legion of Super-Heroes, another series Karen Berger edited alongside Swamp Thing in the eighties…

Artist: Phil Hester

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Thy Life’s A Miracle

It took a little time to summon the emotional energy to read Thy Life’s A Miracle because I’m not yet reconciled to Randy not being around. But actually once I started, it almost felt like he was still out there, thinking and learning. I’m not saying I didn’t feel sad in places, but I also felt like I was really paying attention to Randy, and understanding him and his life much better than when I read his articles individually. It was a bit like reading William Breiding’s Rose Motel, except with someone I already knew. It was also a chance to follow the story, and piece together Randy’s life, family and friends. To appreciate his way of writing which was both diffident and smart, honest and playful, measured and enthusiastic. And how come I didn’t know that Randy’s love of turtles included catching and eating them? I’d thought it something more zen, and yet, what better way to love something than ingesting it? The sections about Randy’s visit to Yap were terrific. Only partially eclipsed by the sensitively told story of his relationship with Sharee, an ongoing saga of the love and heartbreak of a cross-continental affair. The Contario report captures brilliantly the highs and lows of that limboland of post-relationship friendship. Not represented in this collection is Randy’s brilliant tour de force Travel with the Wild Child where he accompanies his friend Tami on a quest to find reconciliation with her family. In the process Randy talks about his own hang-ups, hopes, fears and beliefs with characteristic honesty, and an openness to other people’s perspective. Much more than a trip report. And then for those who can’t get enough of Randy’s writing, try Alternative Pants, available on e- fanzines which features his trip to the UK for Novacon in Nottingham in 2010, which is the jumping off point for my own homage to Randy. The piece below is written not in Randy’s voice (I’m not clever enough for that), but in the tradition of Mark Plummer and Claire Brialey’s speculation on Novacon toilets as time travel portals, and takes place at a room party at the 2019 Heathrow Eastercon, not entirely dissimilar to one described in Mark’s hilarious ‘For Want of A Spoon’ in Banana Wings 74.

Russian Dolphin (for Randy)

Emerging from the bathroom into a room of your friends. You can’t remember which convention it is. But that’s all right. You’ve just had too much to drink and the world around you is hazy. Do they look a bit older than you remember? Let’s face it nearly all your fan friends look older than in the lens of memory where they are still in their 20s and 30s, able to drink all night, throw up and resume partying the next day. We don’t need no steenkin’ mobility scooters. Or badly cliched cultural stereotypes for that matter. Anyway these friends look like they are wearing well. They are still partying. And they are drinking some beers that you have never seen before, but are damn tasty. Who knew that the Cornish could make hoppy APAs? They all seem to have smart phones even though these friends are not and never have been part of the Plokta cabal. Though you’re not sure why the phones are so large. Maybe it’s so they can take better pictures of beer? There is much discussion of taste and flavour. These Brits are definitely becoming better educated in the ways of beer. One even gives you a whole fanzine about beer. My work here is done, I think proudly as I look at my acolytes Jim and Meike. When I took you to Belgium there was nothing in Britain

13 like the Cantillon brewery. Now they seem to have discovered a diversity of beers, a world away from the overheated but quaint sameness of British real ale. Though does every beer really need a rating? And why do they all laugh when Doug talks about something being woozy. But dank is good, I approve. But there’s a kind of weird vibe in the room. They all keep snatching sidelong looks at me. As if they don’t really know why I’m there. I begin to wonder the same thing. Aren’t I meant to be somewhere else? I thought I was in Nottingham, but there’s a picture of a plane on a runway on the wall, and someone is talking about airline pilots running through the dealers’ room. I glance down at the beer fanzine. Printed on twiltone. Very classy. There seems to be a lot of interpolations by Geri. Did she ever win TAFF? I’m almost certain she didn’t. But it seems she’s standing to go to a Worldcon in Dublin. Great idea. Even if it is being run by James Bacon. Maybe it’s all a futuristic fannish jape. Yes, it’s obvious that James will one day run an Irish Worldcon, and Geri will want to go enough to run for TAFF. Perhaps it’s magical thinking to influence the future? I check who else the imaginary TAFF winners have been. Jim Mowatt - good call. Johan Angelmark - yes, it’s about time we had a Swedish delegate. I smile at Lennart and ask why isn’t it him, but he explains he’s living in Botswana now. Claire offers me another beer so dark and caffeinated that I forget all about the weirdness as we have a conversation about the absent Anders. But I can’t help noticing that while Claire attempts to distract me, other people in the room are engaged in a strange conversation where they keep referring to something called Brexit, and then start pretending that Donald Trump is president of the US. Hahaha! Ghu help us! I decide perhaps I’d better go back to the bathroom. As I get up, I see a fanzine behind me on the bed that I hadn’t noticed. It’s got a picture of a turtle on the front. As I pick it up there’s a sudden silence in the room. Jim lunges forward and grabs it away. “Just an experiment. Not for sharing.” But not before I begin to suspect… I look at them all, waiting for someone to say something. No-one does for a moment. Then Mark picks up a bottle. “How about a bit of saison next?” he suggests. “Sure, pour me one,” I say, “I’ll be back in a sec.” “Don’t lock the door,” says Doug. “We had to rescue Lennart from there, with a spoon. Fact!”

I carefully don’t lock the door. I stare at myself in the mirror for a while, just to check that I was really there. I still feel like me. I try to remember who sold me the drugs. I don’t think it was Victor. Someone knocks on the door. It’s not Doug and Lennart with a spoon, but a couple of women dressed as androids, desperate to get in. Outside, the party has got much louder. There’s music and a lot of people. I seem to be in a birthday party in some kind of Jewish chapel, and they’re playing this track by Nilsson which I haven’t heard since the 70s. “We used to carry on and drink and do the rock ‘n’ roll,” sings Nilsson. A red-headed lady comes up and kisses me. I realise it must be Lilian even though she never goes to Novacon. “We never thought we’d get older. We never thought it’d grow cold.” I shiver and plunge out into the party. I’m alive now, I think, and that’s all that matters.

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Give us back our Eastercon

I wrote about my experience as fan GoH for Follycon for Beam in an article I was really pleased with at the time, but which was largely overlooked in the controversy over Ulrika O’Brien’s far punchier polemic on the Hugos. But thinking back over the experience of being GoH, I feel a lot more joy and excitement than was apparent in my article. There were, obviously, moments of stress but I was also on a mega-high which I will probably never repeat. So thank you, Follycon, for honouring me. And I can only imagine how I would feel if I was scheduled to be Guest of Honour, like Alison Scott was for Concentric 2020, and saw that the convention would have to be cancelled. She’s gutted, and we’re gutted for her, as she would have been a fabulous guest, and I hope she gets the opportunity at a later date. Alison was one of the reasons why Doug and I finally signed up for Concentric after coming back from Botswana in January, just at the wrong moment, as it turned out. We’d dithered a long time because last year’s travel and check-in experiences had been so stressful that it coloured our whole view of the convention. But we’d learnt a lesson on our African trip – take extra time to travel if you can. On the way to Botswana we booked in extra nights at cheap airport hotels which broke the journeys to and from Cornwall and gave us a chance on the way out to drink beer with Mark & Claire (and on the way back, to place ourselves at risk of catching Coronavirus in our Terminal 4 hotel, but we didn’t realise that at the time.) Applying the same logic, I extended our Eastercon stay by two days by booking into one of the cheap business hotels in the centre of Birmingham for the Thursday and the Monday nights, a move which enabled us to book some cheap train tickets through one of the fare split websites. At last, I thought, we’ve got it right. Well, as we know now, it was definitely the wrong year to book an extra long weekend in Birmingham with non-refundable train tickets (Which, result! have now been refunded)

So this year, we’re doing Eastercon online. So far I’ve been to one programme item, the Octothorpe Podcast, which was just like a rambling but enjoyable panel in the fan lounge, and missed one Zoom party because dinner overran, and I stayed up too late in the bar. And now I’m trying to pub my ish in the middle of the convention, which actually never happens, but given the plethora of technology we now have available, easily could, if only convention breakfasts didn’t take so long. One part of my Follycon experience that was less joyful was hearing that my Guest of Honour speech had come over as a cliquey chat with my friends. I’d wanted to say something meaningful about what fandom had been like for me when I first started out as a fan, but didn’t have the confidence to do that without name-checking various people in the room. Anyway, I’m not so sure now at this distance that the speech does say anything very meaningful, but hopefully it’s an enjoyable account of how I got into fandom, and the kind of misconceptions and misgivings I had (and continue to have?) about certain aspects of SF fandom. So for those who missed it, here is a Fan GoH speech I prepared earlier.

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The Getting of Fandom

I arrived in fandom in 1980, well actually 1979. Not through the British Worldcon which had happened in Brighton in August that year, but through joining the Warwick Science Fiction & Fantasy Society. This was an interesting time to get into fandom, as the Worldcon had created a lot of enthusiasm, but also had sapped the energy of many of the most active fans of the 1970s. There was also a perception of a post-Seacon slump in fanzine production. As Rob Hansen said in Then: “The prevailing view of the state of fanzine fandom in the immediate post-Seacon period is that it was a wasteland with most of the new titles being full of book reviews, poetry and execrable amateur fiction”. This whole idea of fandom having been better in the 70s was to haunt the early years of the 80s. Fanzines, conventions, even parties weren’t as good as they once were. Fans weren’t as good either. They liked all the wrong things. Star Trek, Blakes Seven, comics, fantasy, writing fiction. Some of them were even women. None of this daunted me in the least when I wandered along to the Elephants Nest bar to join the Warwick SF group, little realising how much I fitted all these undesirable stereotypes of the new type of fan. Unaware that there was such a thing as fandom, or how long it would take me to “get” what it was all about. One reason why I was so keen to join the Warwick SF group was because they wanted people to write for their fanzine. I didn’t know much about fanzines, but I was sure I could write something, so quickly dashed off two short stories. One was called The Phallocrat Conspiracy, featuring a character named Meanwhile O'Riley, which actually I still find funny, though as an entrée into fanzines this was wrong in every way. I didn't know that fanzines in the early 80s looked down on amateur fiction, or that the Warwick SF group fanzine Fusion had been singled out as one of the worst fanzines ever by Alan Dorey, no less, and that the current editor was so proud of this accolade that he printed the review in full. Actually my first published piece of writing was for the BSFA. Matrix was reaching out to local SF groups, many of them at universities, via the club column being edited in those days by one Simon Ounsley. It would be an understatement to say that the BSFA had a bit of a poor reputation among many fans. It was “a tedious organization which rarely generated any great interest or excitement” Pete Roberts wrote in 1975. But by 1980, Alan Dorey had taken on the challenge of changing this, and Matrix had been revamped using the editorial experience of such fans as the John and Eve Harvey. I had no idea about any of this when I eagerly joined the BSFA, and for me, it was for some time the heart of what I came to know as fandom. The BSFA had a bit of a split personality too. There was the stuff about SF in Vector and Paperback Inferno, the fannish stuff in Matrix and then the writerly stuff in Focus, complete with Orbiters, postal workshops for aspiring writers. Later I joined one, which nearly went pear shaped when one of the members failed to pass on the package, with all our crits, and it had to be rescued by his mum. How could such an archaic setup possibly produce the next generation of SF writers, you might be wondering? Well, another member of my group was one Charles Stross, who was writing derivative cyberpunk, but at least it was better than my derivative attempts at space opera that I’d been writing after ODing on Blakes Seven.

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(Another thing I didn't know was wrong. Space opera... Not proper science fiction. Especially in my case as it had no science to speak of in it.). But back to fandom. The Warwick SF group had something for every type of fan. Film nights, D&D, HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy. And a library, where I was given a crash course in classic and not so classic SF, books like Mission of Gravity and Pollinators of Eden, which I would probably never have read otherwise, alongside introduction to authors who would become favourites such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delaney. And there in the mix were fanzines. I'm not sure if the group were trying to get rid of them, or just train me up to help edit their fanzine, but I was given a pile of them to read at the first meeting. I took them back to my student flat and dutifully read through them. This is nonsense, I thought. What do I care about the doings of these weird people at conventions? So I gave them back. But that wasn't good enough. I was given another pile. And this time, something hooked me into them. I'm not sure if at this remove which fanzines they were. Maybe Maya? Nabu? Wallbanger? Matrix? I do know as I found out later that they were donated by Pete Weston who just happened to live in the same road as Peter-Fred Thompson, one of the members of the group. Apart from writing for their fanzine, what made me want to join an SF group? I needed new friends, certainly, as most of my friends had graduated the year before while I did a year out in France. But why SF? Blakes Seven maybe? I was a big fan of Avon and his sarcastic put- downs. And then there were comics, which I’d gone back to reading at university, starting with Thor, Spiderwoman, Howard the Duck, then branching out into Daredevil and Iron Man and of course Batman. I'd also discovered French comics in my year abroad, many of which had science fiction content. Though, ironically the biggest influence on me starting to read comics and seeking out SF books was the music press. The NME (New Musical Express) was my reading matter of choice during my teenage years. And the NME of the time had a counter-cultural sensibility which led them to put in articles about science fiction, films and comics. Howard the Duck was one of theirs. When in France, unable to find issues of the NME, I started buying Metal Hurlant because it seemed to have the same irreverent attitude as the NME, as well as a deep and abiding interest in such writers as Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Which brings me by a roundabout way back to SF fandom. When I discovered that writing for fanzines wasn't about writing fiction, the model I reached back to was the NME, the personal, opinionated, iconoclastic and some might say egotistical rock journalism of the 1970s. That and a few columnists from the Observer, reviewers such as Clive James and James Fenton. I'd already imbibed a few principles from them too. Humour. Attitude. Criticism had to be honest and hard where necessary. Reviewing fanzines I came to believe was an important activity in the same way, and deserved the same commitment. But back in 1981 when I decided to publish my own fanzine I was still quite afraid of potential reviewers. By this time I'd graduated from Warwick University and in the absence of much in the way of job prospects for French graduates, I went to Scotland to do a post- grad in European Marketing with Languages. Once again I was a year too late on the scene, as Scotland had just held its first Eastercon, Albacon, in 1980. Although there wasn't the

17 same sense of exhaustion, there were lots of stresses and strains, leading to splits between rival factions, to which I was, of course, oblivious. In September 1980, I went to my first convention, Hitchercon 1 in Glasgow. By this time I'd read a number of fanzines, and had preconceptions about conventions. The room parties. The exploits in the bar. The mighty giants of fandom. But the only name I recognised from the fans attending was Joy Hibbert who was doing registration. I knew no-one so did what all new fans do, went to the programme. This was a good move as the GoH was Douglas Adams who was very amusing and approachable. I remember being surprised at how much the fans were able to get involved from the audience, and how articulate and Scottish they all sounded. And somewhere during the day I met Ian Sorensen. He didn't know anyone either, but that didn't put him off. Anyway, after the convention, Ian and I started going to the Friends of Kilgore Trout, the Glasgow SF Group. Ian did a round trip to Hamilton to pick me up, and soon added another fan to his taxi service - Lilian Edwards who lived out in East Kilbride.

Dragonburst was the name of my first fanzine and I was already feeling defensive about it before it was published. Lilian hated the name. But I had a cover with a dragon on it, drawn by someone in my flat at university, and I was determined to use it. Written in April & July 1981, under the influence of the various fanzines that Lilian and I used to read when we went round to the flat of the fake Bob Shaw. The conceit that Dragonburst was a successor to another fanzine was more a way of playing with the format than a serious attempt at fooling anybody. It harked back to many of the comics of my childhood, where names lingered on somewhere in the masthead. The price tag on the front was part of the same game, as I don’t think I seriously expected anyone to buy it. There is also an element of distancing going on, as not only am I claiming that I previously produced a fanzine, but also by slapping across the “Specially reprinted” label, I’m making out that the fanzine has been doing the rounds for a while. Indeed, to add verisimilitude there are even made-up locs on the issue itself in which various members of Trout enjoy a few in-jokes, and I critique my own editorial stance under a pseudonym. In my editorial I bemoaned what I considered a dogmatic emphasis on standards from some fanzine fans, declaring that “the more professional fanzines have to be, the less fun they are.” This anxiety shows how far I had been influenced by the fanzines of the day. Two fans evidently loomed large in my consciousness at the time – “Joe” Nicholas and Alan Dorey, both of whom get mentioned a number of times, and were clearly for me the epitome of fannishness and the gatekeepers of the fanzine literati. On the other hand, I was also attracted to the fannish style of humour and more embarrassed to be publishing fiction than jokes from Ian Sorensen. I also wrote about Batman comics and some mock twelfth century history about Eleanor of Aquitaine (only marred by my inability to spell twelfth and

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Aquitaine correctly). All in all a bit of a mixed debut but an interesting artefact of my transition from Christina the wannabe SF writer to Christina the fan. Luckily I didn't know about the views of more severe critics than Alan Dorey and Joseph Nicholas. D West was still writing fanzine reviews then, but because they didn't appear in the BSFA I didn't know much about them. I was amazed to get a loc from Joseph Nicholas which didn’t totally tear me to shreds. Though he did explain that I had misunderstood his attitude to fanzines: “To worry overmuch about layout and such, as you seem to think I did, is an American trait, and one that seems to have been taken to such an extreme that no-one cares about the quality of the writing at all”. But then he scared me all over again by saying “Nothing less than the best has ever been remotely acceptable by anyone.” Actually, I was much happier with the content of my second fanzine Music From A Fire, but still wary of criticism. By the time I published the third issue: Sorgenkind, I was feeling much more relaxed and experimental, aided by access to affordable photocopying courtesy of Brian Ameringen. One reason for the growing confidence was that I had begun to publish This Never Happens with Lilian Edwards. Lilian as a comics fan knew what a fanzine should look like, and it was not the duplicated quarto productions favoured by experienced fans of the day. She saw fanzines as being about art as much as about writing, and was not afraid to add her own drawings or use the illustrations to make the layout work. The first issue had a few technical problems with the production, but we did have a real cover, from comics artist Dave Harwood who just happened to live down the road from my parents’ home in Southend. We also had enthusiasm, and some ability with writing. We also developed a way of co-writing and coming up with fun concepts together. Much as Plokta would in later years the process of producing the fanzine was as much part of the enjoyment as the finished product. Not that we didn't have ambitions for our fanzine. We wanted to be at least as good as Second-Hand Wave (edited by Alan Ferguson and Trevor Briggs). Rob Hansen surmised that “Second Hand Wave was to become in some way the flagship fanzine of those fans who had come into fandom in the wake of Faircon ’78 and Seacon ’79.” He, like other established fans, seemed bemused by its popularity but as we (well, probably Lilian) wrote in This Never Happens 5 “The beauty of Second Hand Wave as a first fanzine was its accessibility to new fans, its ability to convey the warmth and texture of fannishness without its exclusivity and alienating tendencies.” I think we felt a sense of kinship as the fanzine was also co-edited and didn’t confine itself to the traditional areas of fan writing. It also featured a lot of art from house artist Pete Lyon, as well as others such as Grant Canfield (names all unknown to me at that point). My first fanzine review column appeared in This Never Happens 2, but it was more about trying to be clever, than any attempt at serious criticism. Apparently gender bias annoyed me, as did fannish elitism. On Abi Frost and Roz Kaveney’s New River Blues I wrote that it was: “The only fanzine where the editor analyses the letters, not the loccers the zine. The only one to quote Milton not song lyrics. It’s full of Abi Frost creating fannish elites with the simple phrase: “You are not it”. It’s fascinating, infuriating, well-written and totally pitiless.”

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I also reveal my debt to the NME all over again in my response to Tappen which had somewhere been labelled “fanzine of the millenium” (early example of my inability to spell millennium), and so I deemed it worth criticising in line with the ancient NME proverb, “Kick them when they’re on top”. I also describe Leroy Kettle’s column as boring and unfunny and full of innuendo and sexist clichés. Sorry, Roy! There was a lot about fandom I didn’t get, and plenty I was ready to challenge from my standpoint of being female and not part of the in crowd. I didn’t take kindly to being told how I should conduct my fanac, nor admit readily that there were plenty of good writers out there, much better than me. Receiving art from Dave Harwood was one of the joys of producing TNH, especially when he started to draw the comic strip Snakes 2 for us, much improving on the scripts Lilian and I sent him with his skilful artwork and visual gags. Comics by this time were on the cusp of becoming cool, but this hadn’t always been the case. Dave Harwood wrote about joining the BSFA in 1977 and being told “(comic fans) belong in the same group as the Trekkies, Dr Who fans, UFO believers and other fools. You are not wanted in SF fandom unless you can put aside these childish things and grow up intellectually”. But anyway the attitude to comics within SF fandom was changing in the 80s. London fans such as Rob Hansen often went to the monthly Westminster comics marts where Lilian and I used to enjoy hanging out with the British comics writers Dave Harwood introduced us to.

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The other factor in my growing confidence as a fanzine editor was TWP. TWP or The Women’s Periodical was an apa formed by Linda Pickersgill and Chris Atkinson in 1982 after a “Women in Fandom” meeting at the Eastercon. The idea was to help women in fandom get to know each other and become more confident with writing. At first I was worried about the commitment as it involved contributing a zine every 6 weeks, but of course there was never any question that I wouldn’t join. TWP gave me a social group, women from different areas of fandom whose lives and aspirations I could share. Some I knew already, others I got to know largely through TWP. By TWP 6 there were already 28 members and the apa was well on the way to needing a waiting list. TWP triggered a short age of apa- mania in British fandom. This was a surprise to everyone as when Britain’s longest running apa OMPA finally gave up the ghost in 1978, no-one expected a revival. But TWP was followed by the prestigious Frank’s Apa (so prestigious that I never got an invite), The Organisation, PAPA , SLAPA and even an apa for soft toys (GetStuffed).

Anyway, by the mid-80s I was getting on pretty well in fandom, and fandom had taken over most of my social life. Even so, there were still a few things that baffled me, such as the 50s fandom revival. If my years of reading the NME had prepared me for KTF, nothing in my cultural values helped me understand The Enchanted Duplicator. I didn’t then and still don’t get allegory or Faan fiction. I was living in Orpington when Vince Clarke re-emerged and so I briefly became part of his version of KTF (Kent TruFandom). Vince had a lot of enthusiasm and fannish knowledge and he wrote lovely supportive letters to my fanzine, as well as publishing a good fanzine of his own, even if I didn’t totally understand his antipathy to fannish criticism. I also didn’t understand the cult of Walt Willis or that fandom had deeper roots than the previous generation. In 1988 I wrote: Increasingly the only authentic focus to fanzine fandom seems to be the Fifties fans – Clarke, Harris, Willis et al and their support group of the Neilsen-Haydens on one side of the Atlantic and Rob Hansen and Avedon Carol on the other. This is unfortunate because although fifties fandom does what it does very nicely, what it does is basicially all fictionalising around fannish myths out of their own lives. If you read Chuch Harris it seems to be all semi-clad women waving pom-poms (and wearing the names of some of my friends). If 50s fandom was problematic to my sense of what fandom was all about, I simply didn’t even consider the 60s which conventional wisdom had written off as sercon. By this time, I’d accepted that sercon was a dirty word, synonymous with being no fun, so also didn’t appreciate the valuable work that Peter Weston had done in the 60s and 70s with Speculation. My only window into fan history was when Peter Fred Thompson and I did a display on early Leeds fandom for the fan room at Conspiracy at the 1987 Worldcon. But as far as I was concerned, this was just history, and nothing to do with the fandom I knew. Lilian and I stood for TAFF in 1988, generating a lot of controversy over our joint candidature, but riding to a convincing victory, especially in America. Our success in the UK probably came from knowing a lot of people in different parts of fandom and getting them to vote. The US was more of a surprise as even though we traded fanzines with various American fans we didn’t have a huge mailing list. We assumed at the time that it was men

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(voting with their dicks) for two women. But it could just as easily have been women fans interested in what women in the UK were up to – given that there hadn’t been a female British TAFF delegate since Ethel Lindsay in 1962. For our TAFF campaign we ditched the creative colours, comic strips and A5 format of This Never Happens, for, you’ve guessed it, a quarto duplicated fanzine. The Caprician seemed a natural step at the time. It took us away from the article format of This Never Happens to a more free-flowing, gossipy zine. It was quicker and cheaper to produce. But maybe it also marked something of a transition from our self-image as newcomers in fandom to an acceptance of fannish norms, or assimilation into the culture of fanzines? When we came back we fully intended to publish an all-singing and dancing version of the TAFF trip report, but living at opposite ends of the country – Bristol and Edinburgh as we were at that stage – it was hard to get together frequently enough to generate the peculiar gestalt magic that had kept TNH going for so long. We did do one last issue of TNH post- TAFF in 1991. But by the end of the decade we were like the 70s fans at the start of the 80s. Convinced that fandom wasn’t as good as it used to be. By then, I’d come a long way from that naïve fan who joined the Warwick SF group in 1979 and then went on to have an extraordinary decade of living, breathing and dreaming fandom. Fandom allowed me to make friends all round the world and travel to different continents and socialise with amazing people. So, do I feel bad that now, thirty years further on, fandom has stopped being a way of life for me, and is at times, barely even a goddamn hobby? No, because although I’m still a fan, I’ve finally come to understand that being more relaxed about fandom is not a betrayal of my early ideals over the importance of fandom, fanzines and the fannish way of life, but more a recognition that taking fandom too seriously can be detrimental to your mental health. Fandom is not and never has been a utopian world or idealised society. Fans are not slans, or better people than the rest of the world. Fandom is a hobby and can be done in a multiple of different ways, most of which involve not listening to people who think they know best, but also respecting the traditions and history of those already there. Fandom often develops through one generation rejecting another generation’s practices to make some space to do things differently. I’ve seen fanzines which were so central to my way of doing fandom become e-zines and blogs; I’ve seen apas dwindle into insignificance again (at least in the UK) and I’ve seen conventions embrace gender parity and concepts of safe space that were never considered necessary when I first become a fan (even though they clearly were). But also generations and practices merge into one another, through the overlap of people, the ebb and flow of fandom, the disappearance and return of different groups of fans, the exchange of ideas between countries and continents. Who would have thought when I first realised I’d missed the 1979 Brighton Worldcon that I would go to a Worldcon in Helsinki? That Helsinki would even be able to host such an event, and that it would be one of the largest Worldcons ever, and from my perspective one of the more enjoyable, bringing together fans from many parts of the world. I still might not “get” fandom in all its glory, but I do know what I get from it – friendship, fanzines and the chance to stand up in front of a group of people and tell them all about my life as a fan.

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Noughts and Crosses Revisited

Way back when I wrote a review of Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman for Nowhere Fan 1. Now there is a TV version which goes some way to addressing what had dissatisfied me about the book, my inability to really visualise the reverse racism. The series creates a wealthy black culture, using clothing, hairstyle, music and architecture to make the dominant characters feel properly African, and uses the grim two up two downs of urban suburbs to make the white characters seem more like an underclass (though they could have done more to make the accents seem less posh). But there are a few missteps. Along with their political power the African characters also seem to have power over the climate, so that it’s always sunny by the pool, even though it’s meant to be London. And why would there be a New Francistown, when Francistown is a British colonial name (not that I would even have noticed this if I hadn’t been through Francistown on our Botswanan trip)? The other element that comes across well is the insidiousness of the whole apartheid ideology, the warnings against racial mixing, couched in slogans like diversity not homogeneity, strength in difference. Apartheid resonances are emphasised by the fact that it’s filmed in South Africa (the military academy seems to be the castle in Cape Town or one very like it) and some of the cast sound a little bit Afrikaans (or am I imagining this?). But on the other hand, as Lilian pointed out, the British whites are not living in the extreme poverty of the blacks under apartheid. They’re not being cleared out of their homes for the ruling race to come in and redevelop the area (as happened in District Six in Cape Town). The series hints that the Apricans (as they’re called) have been in England for a long time, as they took over in an era of Civil War and plague (so possibly the 17th century?). This would fit with the other bit of reverse colonialism that seems to be going on here, that is the clear parallels between the liberation army of the series and the IRA. It’s a colony at war with its colonial overlords, not one that is so deprived that it can’t fight back. The terrorist militia army is also the most annoying aspect of the series. Well, no the posh blond brother Jude is actually the most annoying. He flounces around all angry and entitled. His mother (rightly) ignores him. His father tries and fails to stop him being stupid. I was very happy when his mother finally slapped him. But his radicalisation and where it leads continues to seem to be more born out of pique than oppression and the actions that follow seem just annoying and unbelievable. I wanted to like this adaptation more, and did for a while, but by the end I just was not convinced, particularly when it comes to the bullying of a black girl by white guys. This didn’t feel like reverse privilege but just business as usual. What I would have liked to see explored further was why the supposedly intelligent politician Kamal feels the only way to defend his values is to provoke confrontation and suppress the white population. There’s a brief hint that this is the kind of attitude promoted by his elite university in fictional Aprica, and certainly racist attitudes are enshrined in the university classes we see Sephie attend. Maybe I wanted more questioning of the ideology and less of the personal romances; more subtlety and less confrontation, and certainly less stupidity on the part of all protagonists. But you might say, that is like real life, and the colonial history of South Africa certainly proves that true. Unfortunately the white resistance has no-one as inspirational as Mandela to leaven the bleakness of their actions.

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News from Nowhere: a letter column

Here are some sound bites from the faraway world of 2017 & 2018 when all we had to worry about was Brexit, which pub to go to at the Helsinki Worldcon, and how to avoid all the tourists in Tallinn. I particularly enjoyed hearing everyone’s experiences of learning languages. And where better to start than with the impressive linguistic resumé of Fred Lerner.

Fred Lerner [email protected]

Like most Americans I have acquired little proficiency in foreign languages, but after discovering that my two years of high-school German turned out to be surprisingly useful in the most unlikely places I resolved to resume my long-neglected study of that language. Other than that my attempts at language learning has been more promiscuous than focussed. As a child I acquired some prayer-book Hebrew, which I built upon during my ninth-grade year in a yeshiva. (I still remember enough that with the aid of a dictionary and a great deal of patience I can read a bit of the Bible in the original should I find myself motivated to do so.) In high school I had three years of Latin, of which I remember very little, and those two years of German. As an undergraduate I forwent the opportunity to learn a useful amount of German in favor of studying Hindi, an undertaking frustrated by the poor quality of the instruction provided and by my realisation that there is no literature worth reading in that language – all the good stuff is apparently written in Bengali or Tamil. (The only Hindi I remember is the phrase "Hati aam khata hai”, which means “The elephant is eating mangoes”. This comes in handy as a response to unsolicited telephone calls from people with Indian accents claiming to be from “Windows Technical Support”.) I also studied Anglo-Saxon and memorised the last chapter of Beowulf. I can still recall the last twelve lines or so, and am likely to recite them if provided with sufficient beer and insufficient discouragement. (I read the entire poem, in the original, to my daughter when she was three months old. Over the subsequent thirty-odd years she has managed to slough off any adverse consequences of this.) I too studied Anglo Saxon and attempted to read Beowulf in the original, but with no young minds to subvert I soon forgot it all again. After college I signed up for an evening course in Irish, only to discover that the weekly class was actually a front for an IRA recruitment campaign. While working on my doctorate I managed to acquire enough reading ability to pass a French exam, and more importantly to be able to read French books essential to my research; and I can sometimes puzzle out the odd word or phrase in other Romance or Germanic languages. The bottom line is that I count myself damned lucky that most of the people I encounter on my foreign travels speak English, often better than I do.

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But I shall plug on with my studies, cursing all the while the superfluity of articles and pronouns with which the Germans clutter up their sentences, and trying to remember always to look ahead to the end of the sentence before forming any hypotheses as to just what these people are trying to tell me. They say that this sort of mental effort is a good prophylactic against dementia – though I would not argue with anyone who maintained that German grammar is sufficiently demented to render my quest futile. At the moment I’m using learning Swedish on Duolingo as a distraction, even though I suspect I will never get the hang of Swedish prepositions. Lloyd Penney 1706-24 Eva Rd., Etobicoke, ON CANADA M9C 2B2 I remember learning some Dutch for the Dutch Worldcon in 1990…and I did use it. Once. Yvonne and I went to a theatre, and I asked for a large Coke and a medium Coke, please, in Dutch. Alstublieft. And, I did get it, and that was all we needed. Everywhere else, English was good, especially in line at the Albert Heyne stores. You did better than me. I too tried learning Dutch for the Worldcon, and then ended up not using it at all. Jerry Kaufman [email protected] Thanks for sending the pdf of your new issue. I see my snarky remark in my last letter about when your new issue would appear turned into a prediction. It was not a sign of how well I understood you, I think; it was simple arithmetic, as I recall. I would not say I know you "too well." In fact, I don't know you as well as I'd like to, or Doug, for that matter. You talk about your dreams on page 2, which are frequently about conventions. Many of my dreams are like yours - they take place in strangely laid out convention hotels, and I hunt for parties, the dealers' room, dinner companions, elevators, or my own hotel room. (The rest of my dreams are often about astounding changes at work that I then have to adapt to on the fly.) "Europe in Translation" is interesting, but of course I've never had the experience of feeling myself part of Europe. You focus on your connection to different countries based on your ability to speak their languages, even though you say you've relaxed your attitude towards getting by in non-English-speaking countries. As to that, I've studied five languages in schools - French, Latin, Spanish, Hebrew, and Portuguese - but retained only a smattering of all of them. So there's nowhere I can go and make myself understood, including in parts of the US. I enjoyed your report on the Worldcon and your travel beforehand, as I hinted above. I think I would have opted for the gin-tasting bar, but in good company, all the other places you went sounded attractive. I wonder, though, if there are places around the world similar to the Depeche Mode bar, but focusing on different performers or personalities. I'm sure there's a Beatles bar somewhere in Liverpool, but how about a Talking Heads place or a Motorhead tavern?

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I don’t know what it is about Depeche Mode that has made them so popular in Eastern Europe, but they do have quite a dedicated fan base and have made a couple of films which focus more on the fans than the band themselves. I’m sure there must be other bands who have inspired their fans to setup a tribute bar, but none so successfully as Half Man Half Biscuit whose chain of old-fashioned British pubs full of grumpy old men taking the piss out of the latest trends are ubiquitous throughout the UK. But now, back to Helsinki: William Breiding [email protected] Your account of the Helsinki worldcon wore me out and irritated me; the kind of experience you had there is exactly the kind I hate, what with all that running around and taking public transit and whatnot, and why I avoid large conventions. Your Estonian adventures, on the other hand, sounded engaging, and Mr. Coad appeared to be his usual droll self, or am I just reading in between the lines? Not at all, it was Rich and Lucy Huntzinger who made our side-trip to Tallinn so unforgettable. Lucy Huntzinger [email protected] I really enjoyed the look at your changing relationship with the idea of Europe and the evolution from feeling obliged to learn a language in order to travel somewhere to the sensible choice not to attempt Finnish. Note to self: go into drinks training next time so as not to let down the Hell Hunt staff. Joseph Nicholas [email protected] I was mildly amused by your comment, in the opening paragraph of your Helsinki travelogue, that "the briefest of shorts" I was wearing at our party more than justified your visit. One of the photographs then taken by Graham Charnock and subsequently posted to social media prompted Ulrika O'Brien to ask whether I was actually wearing anything at all, which is possibly even more amusing. In Australia, of course, tiny shorts are practically de rigueur, albeit mainly on young women, where the display of the so-called "under bum area" (all the rage in the UK a couple of years ago, as those who avidly follow Hadley Freeman's and Jess Cartner-Morley's comments on fashion in The Guardian will know) is a finely calibrated matter. We haven't been to Helsinki, so I can't say anything about that city, but we have been to Tallinn, which was very pleasant and not nearly as overrun with tourists as you make it sound. Perhaps it was the time of year -- I've just looked it up, and can scarcely believe that it was in September 2002, over fifteen years ago -- or perhaps it was that it had then still to be "discovered" by western tourists. Like you, however, we didn't spend nearly long enough there, certainly not long enough to see everything, and most of what we did see was in the Old Town; unlike you, we did see inside the Tallinn City Museum (but not the Estonian History Museum, which was closed on both of the occasions we tried). We also visited the Open Air Museum at the Italian-sounding Rocca al Mare to the west of the city, which brings together a range of reconstructed secular buildings from various regions and eras of the country, although this is perhaps mostly of interest to those who like to binge on

26 obscure architectural detail. (That's us, obviously.) The other notable highlight of our visit to Tallinn was a restaurant offering the chance to consume various potentially endangered species; I wanted to try the bear, but Judith persuaded me that the protected status of the European Brown Bear meant that I should try the elk instead. (I made another attempt to consume bear on a visit to Vilnius in Lithuania the following year, but was again diverted to something else. I forget what -- perhaps it was elk again.) Ian Millsted [email protected] I enjoyed everything in the issue. 'Europe in Translation' is the piece which provoked the most thought with me. Like you, I grew up in Essex, although in my case that was inland in a village called Danbury (which I think has been fictionalised in 'Detectorists' but I've only seen one episode so far). So your local MP back then in Southend would have been either Eurosceptic Teddy Taylor or hereditary member Paul Channon while mine was the more liberal not-out-but-I-think-everyone-knew Norman St John Stevas. I mention the politicians as an indicator of the type of place Essex was in the 80s and, EU results suggest, still is.

Yes, we had Teddy Taylor parachuted in to replace non-entity Stephen McAdden when he died. As you say, nothing much has changed in the political leanings of Essex.

IAHF: Simon Beresford, Brad W. Foster, Jay Kinney, Jennifer Steele

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Artists: Stephen Bissette and John Totleben

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