Reflections in the Shards is a collection of fan writing by Caroline Mullan, compiled by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer (with assistance from Caroline) for Dysprosium, the 2015 British National Science Fiction Convention.

Thanks to the Dysprosium committee for funding this publication.

March 2015, Fishlifter Press.

Contents

A Dream House from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 91, August 1994) 7 It seems like a lifetime… from The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 214, November 8 2010 – March 2011) Plus ça fannish change from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 134, August 1999) 9 Fire from The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 205, October 2009) 10 Scottish Referendum, 18 September from Reflections in the Shards… (TWP mailing 234, 11 July 2014) Extract from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 126, September 1998) 11 Letter to a Departed Colleague from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 168, 12 September 2003) On a Survey to Study Why Women’s Careers Stall from The Word for the World... 14 (TWP mailing 230, December 2013) Clearing the Decks from The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 225, January 2013) 14 The Necessity of Gardening from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 133, July 14 1999) Welcome a Tree from The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 182, December 2005) 15 Wibbling gently from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 184, April 2006) 15 Giving up a daily habit from Reflections in the Shards… (TWP mailing 233, June 2014) 16 The Arthur C Clarke Award and Me from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 132, 16 May 1999) Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993) from The Word for the World… (TWP 17 mailing 90, June 1994) Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962) from The Word for the World... 18 (TWP mailing 220, March 2012) Extract from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 109, October 1996) 19 Diaspora, Greg Egan (1997) from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 132, May 19 1999) Star Wars from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 139, April 2000) 19 Red Plenty, Francis Spufford (2010) from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 212, 20 May – October 2010) Diana Wynne Jones, RIP from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 214, November 20 2010 – March 2011) Women, Men, and Earthsea from The City Flogger (TWP mailing 61, November 1990) 21 Extract from The Word for the Worlds… (TWP mailing 106, April 1996) 22 Fun and Fandom from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 89, May 1994) 23 What I Did on My Holidays from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 96, February 23 1995) Intersection from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 101, October 1995) 25 Eastercon at the Adelphi from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 131, April 1999) 25 Obligations to Frogs from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 131, April 1999) 26 Extract from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 94, November 1994) 26 Extract from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 137, January 2000) 26 Meriol’s Books from The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 155, March 2002) 27 Believing is Seeing from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 121, February 1998) 28 Looking at the World through New Eyes from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 28 221, June 2012)

Observing the Landscape from The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 146, March 29 2001) Aim or Means? from Journey Planet #13 (2012) 30 Why Are We Here? from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 102, November 1995) 31 Black Easter? The Day After Judgement from TWP mailing 38 (August/September 33 1987) with introduction and coda from Banana Wings #14 (August 1999) Whither the Book Room? from Banana Wings #39 (August 2009) 37 The Eastercon Is Not Your Bitch from Banana Wings #48 (December 2011) 41

Cover: Alison Scott, 2015, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. Thanks to Flickr users agentkramer (Daniel Kramer) (chains) and Laurence Grayson (shortformvideo) (brick wall) for making their photographs available under the Creative Commons.

Caroline’s photos, more or less clockwise from the title (top right):

Boating for Coots, Valentines Park, Ilford, 2014 Cover, TWP 74, by Maureen Speller, 1992 Produce from the Garden, Ilford, 2011 Follow the Pink Blossom Road, Valentines Park, Ilford, May 2014 Caroline, about 1980 Reflections in the Shards – copyright (c) and by kind permission of Sabine Furlong, 2014 Sunset, Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, 2015 Minster Court, City of London, 2014 Spotted Eel, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, 2011 Daughter in Hat, 2002 Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Tower of London, 2014 Cedar of Lebanon, Valentines Park, Ilford, 2014 Porcupine Books, Loncon 3 Dealers’ Hall, 2014 Royal Greenwich Tall Ships Festival, Greenwich, 2014 One foot in a striped sock, 2015 Convention badges, 1986 The Dry Garden, Valentines Park, Ilford 2014 A rose, Valentines Park, Ilford 2014 Caroline in the Sea Gown, Eastercon, Central Hotel, Glasgow, 1991

A note on the purity of the text and on sources

Ventures such as this are so much easier nowadays as so many of the texts already exist in electronic form, minimising the potential to introduce new errors through inept copy- typing or scanning. We’ve used the text as it originally appeared, although there are a few exceptions. We’ve applied some style-guide standardisations which won’t affect how the text reads. In a few places we’ve made minor edits to provide context which wasn’t necessary in the original. And we’ve endeavoured to correct minor typographical errors as we don’t believe it does anybody any favours to repeat them. Thus you’re deprived of Caroline claiming at one point that she moved back to England in 1862.

Most of the shorter pieces come from various-titled contributions to The Women’s Periodical (TWP). This is an amateur press association (APA) for which see the note at the end of ‘Aim or Means?’ on page 31. It was created by Linda Pickersgill (now Krawecke) and Chris Atkinson, following the ‘Women in Fandom’ meeting at the 1982 Eastercon, Channelcon. It continues to this day, and has generated nearly 240 mailings. Caroline is a founder member.

An Introduction by Divers Hands

I have a photo of Caroline, taken at my first convention. The Anne’s opinion that ‘My idea of good company … is the convention was Mexicon 2, the place was Birmingham, and company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great the specific event was an immediately-post-opening- deal of conversation.’ The slightly older Caroline fell into ceremony panel: ‘Question Time: your questions answered: fandom with the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton; she went to wisdom on the state of life, SF and fandom.’ Caroline is buy books and found her people and her conversation. wearing a moderately chunky jumper, if perhaps not quite Whenever we talk, Caroline always has a theory. I the full Sarah Lund, and she is also moderately blurred, traditionally qualify this by saying she has a theory in the something I put down to the photographer rather than sense that Imelda Marcos has a pair of shoes, but I fear that Caroline herself. She is seated next to fan veteran, author reference may be getting a little dated. So, say Caroline has and editor Ted White who is also moderately blurred, a theory in the sense that Neil Gaiman has a Twitter although I suspect he achieved that effect all on his own. follower. Her theories span the state of life, SF and fandom– I remember that Caroline spoke with no little all things she’s passionate about. Really, she was very much enthusiasm about Megan Lindholm’s novel Wizard of the at home at that 1986 panel even if – as became apparent in Pigeons; and twenty-eight years later Caroline acted as a recent conversation about memory, and Ted Chiang’s Robin Hobb’s liaison for Loncon 3. I think this speaks to ‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’, and how that Caroline’s ongoing enthusiasm both for books and for relates to fan history – she doesn’t remember participating Doing Something within our fan culture. in it. My second specific memory of Caroline comes from If there’s an abiding sense about Caroline’s theories, five years later, at the 1991 Eastercon in Glasgow, and this I think it’s that she wants both things and all of us – the time it entails a conversation – and perhaps a little bit of a state of life, SF and fandom – to be better. Because she’s berating. She was minding her partner Brian Ameringen’s seen it be good, and knows it can still be good, and still is table in the dealers’ room and I was browsing the stock and good, and we need to have a continuing conversation – making polite conversation about something or other – she’s big on the conversation, is Caroline – about ensuring Caroline is not the world’s greatest bookseller, as I fear we evolve to remain good. And that might be about she’s too fond of talking with customers at the expense of invigorating the London fan pub meetings, or where the extracting their money – and somewhere along the line Eastercon is going, or talking about how the traditional Caroline, who I doubt knew me at the time, ended up telling model for the convention book room works in the Age of me that really I should be wearing a gopher badge and the Kindle. getting out there and volunteering. Books and Doing She writes about this stuff as well, and she’s really Something again. rather good at doing that and I wish she’d do more of it. As Since then we’ve met on numerous occasions, it is, while she has written for general circulation fanzines – conventions and pub meetings mostly, but also the annual and even produced a couple Back In The Day – much of her party at her and Brian’s house, and book shops, and all writing appears within the confines of The Women’s those places fans bump into one another. I’ve heard about Periodical and thus only reaches a small audience. Hence the young Caroline, the insanely voracious Jo-Walton-esque this collection, produced for Dysprosium where Caroline reader of a kind that I suspect makes the rest of us just a will be Fan Guest of Honour. tiny bit envious. I don’t know whether the young Caroline — Mark Plummer read Jane Austen, although I’d hazard a guess that she did, (Adapted from an article that first appeared in Dysprosium and maybe she took some inspiration from Persuasion and progress report one)

This collection happened because the Dysprosium ink for the single-colour cover, and niceties such as page committee asked me to be Fan Guest of Honour at their numbers are conspicuous by their absence. Chris Atkinson Eastercon, Mark and Claire offered to edit it, and Alison was a brilliant writer, by the way. If you ever come across a agreed to create the cover. We started very late, and it was copy of the collection it will be worth your time. only possible to do the work in the time available because Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In our the original material is available in digital form, all of us fannish lifetimes we have seen many changes in the tech- have suitable software, and the internet (Dropbox and nology around words and writing. The uses to which we Gmail, in this case) permits easy file sharing. My humble put that technology appear to be somewhat more stable. thanks to everyone involved. Most of the pieces in this collection come from I feel very privileged to be included in the company contributions to The Women’s Periodical, a women-only of Eastercon Fan Guests of Honour, and a collection of my APA founded in 1982 and still extant; the remainder from writing is icing on the cake. Collections for Fan GOHs who fanzines. I am grateful to the administrators and editors, are also fan writers is a grand fannish tradition, and putting and to my fellow APAns, for the work and companionship them together in haste may also be one. over the years. When Chris Atkinson was Fan Guest of Honour at Being able to use photographs in fanzines is a much Beccon ’87, we produced a collection of her writing, First more recent development. I acquired a mobile phone with a Solo. We started about three weeks before Easter with forty half-decent camera sometime in 2010, and developed an or so pages of hand-written foolscap. We sent these, by interest in taking photographs and using them to illustrate post, to an experimental British Telecom Gold OCR service, my writing. I took most of the photos included in Alison’s which returned a disk – although I don’t recall which magnificent cover, and most of them have been used to format, or which computer we used next. Fortunately the illustrate TWP contributions or blog entries one way or quality of the digital text was excellent, and needed little another. My thanks to Sabine Furlong and the unknown correction. (The BT person involved, who is a fan, now photographers responsible for the remainder. thinks this was somewhat suspicious, and that hand-editing My partner, Brian Ameringen, has been part of my by a human being was probably involved somewhere; but if life within and without fandom for thirty-five years; his that was so we didn’t know it at the time, nobody charged business, Porcupine Books, for twenty-five; our daughter, us any money, and we took the file at face value as the Meriol, for nearly fifteen. Without them, I would not do product of the OCR.) Whatever the reality of it, we were very what I do, nor would I be the person I am. pleased, did some light editing, printed to stencil, and ran I hope you enjoy the results of all our work. off the fanthology on a Gestetner duplicator. We used red — Caroline Mullan

‘If you talk to Caroline Mullan for long enough,’ said Dave been a real pleasure; to see a friend in a slightly different Mansfield at the Worldcon in 2014, ‘she will eventually context and community, engaging with other friends and close off all the parentheses that she has opened.’ I fannish acquaintances and some fans I hardly know – complimented him on his insight, and he explained it was although of course I’m only getting one part of the conver- not his but that he couldn’t remember who originally made sation here; to be prompted to think about reading and this observation. ‘But it’s why she is possibly the best of all reviewing and responding and connecting with people; to possible fans.’ experience some edited highlights of the past twenty years There are people in SF fandom who do things, and a or so, in fandom and in all of life that surrounds it – which rather small number of those get rewarded by being invited includes remembering and reflecting and feeling nostalgic, to be Fan Guests of Honour. There are people in SF fandom but also feeling pleased to be here now, doing what we’re who think deeply about things, and some of them get doing and trying to do it well. Caroline has devoted a lot of invited to appear on convention programme items and her time and energy to supporting the institutions of SF some of them are people you just really want to talk to in fandom, and has continually challenged and improved her the bar. Anyone who knows Caroline also knows that she’s own activities as well as what we’re doing collectively. one of the rarer people who can be found at the There are also a number of ways that we can intersection of these sets. recognise the contribution of people in SF fandom who We had published several articles of Caroline’s write well and enjoyably, and a collection of fan writing is, which arose from that intersection, about her experiences again, a relatively rare one. But a collection means being and observations and reflections and ideas for conventions able to show the range of someone’s interests and and for book selling. But, despite all that, I hadn’t fully activities, and so here you will see not only Caroline’s appreciated another intersectionality going on here. contribution to the science fiction and fannish community Expand your Venn diagram to include three rather than but a few of the other things that engage her and inspire two sets, to take account of people in SF fandom who can her enthusiasm. write really well – and you’ll still find Caroline at the centre. One appropriate response to reading any of the Fan writing is, of course, a form of conversation; and pieces in this collection would, of course, be to want to talk continuing, and refreshing, the conversation is one of the about it; that doesn’t have to be a conversation with themes that you’re most likely to encounter in any Caroline, although I suspect she’d be sorry to miss it. If interaction with Caroline herself. reading this collection inspires you not just to converse but Editing fanthologies and collections is usually a lot of to think and to do something as a result, that’s just part of fun, selecting a set of pieces that work well together. But Caroline’s contribution which we’re honouring this I’ve also found this exercise particularly fascinating as a Easter. reader: to read a lot more of Caroline’s writing, which has — Claire Brialey

A Dream House The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 91, August 1994)

It is on the side of a steep hill, one that cars cannot easily doors and surfaces are real wood and sun gleams in the climb. The house is single-storey, built of grey stone round depths of the grain. There is a separate utility room for the three sides of a courtyard garden; the fourth, north-easterly noisy appliances, a walk-in pantry, and a wine cellar. side is the side of the hill itself. The red-tile roof is shallow The hall to the front door is the other side of the pitched. The courtyard is sheltered by the house from the kitchen. The wooden floor carries through; there are worst of the summer sun and from the wind off the sea paintings on the white walls, and one beautiful sideboard which washes the foot of the hill. or dresser against one wall. A cloakroom with space for The courtyard is crazy-paved with blocks of stone coats leads off it, and there is a guest toilet. which are warm and smooth to bare feet. Creeping flowers Beyond the hall there is a guest suite: bedroom, and mosses grow between the stones, and in tubs and sitting room, and bathroom, with a separate sauna. The terracotta pots. The hillside is a rockery; there are poppies sitting room opens to the courtyard, and for this reason the and heather and herbs. There is a very small waterfall television (one would not wish to deprive one’s guests) is down the rockery, which flows without splashing into a in the bedroom. The suite is decorated and furnished in pool large enough to swim in, which in turn drains away shades of blue with white highlights, and the wood here is under the house. There is a willow by the pool, and an light oak or cherry. apple tree which grows crisp juicy apples, Cox’s Orange The north-west wing is the private wing. The Pippins the way they ought to be. At one side cane chairs windows look down over wooded hillside to the sea; the with comfortable cushions are sheltered by a canopy of shore is rocky and wild. There are two study-libraries this glass and wrought iron. Vines and honeysuckle grow up side: one is Brian’s and up to him to decorate and furnish and along the pillars and beams. The garden is perfectly (though this is not the house he would like to live in). My maintained by a beautiful dark-haired boy who never asks study library has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two walls for instructions or makes any noise. and part of a third. The desk is a long shelf which runs the All the rooms adjacent to the courtyard have glass whole length of the wall beneath the window and turns the walls which can be slid aside to open the room to the corner to run along the adjacent wall; there are shelves garden. The room facing the rockery is the main living mounted above it on the wall so that everything one needs room, and it also has glass walls open to a balcony which by way of stationery and supplies is to hand. There are two looks down over the town roofs to the sea, and across to elegant filing cabinets, a powerful computer with all the forested hills on the other side of the bay. You can sit in the trimmings, a telephone, and another sound system. There courtyard chairs on summer evenings with both walls open are two executive leather chairs on wheels. In the corner and watch the sunset over the sea, but when a gale is opposite the desk there is a comfortable armchair, and a blowing and there are thunderstorms on the horizon you coffee table. This room has blinds instead of curtains, and can close the walls behind you and cling to a wrought-iron the colour scheme is shades of grey – light wood, dark balustrade exulting in the wind. carpet – picked out with dark red. Or if not in the mood for weather, there are heavy, The master bedroom opens to the courtyard on one brocade curtains to draw against the night and an open fire side with windows overlooking the sea on the other. The to sit beside in large comfortable chairs. There are beautiful glass is one way, so when the glass walls are closed no one lamps, all different, on small, convenient tables. No can see in from the courtyard. The curtains range in shade television: the fire is the focus, but there is a radio and a from cream through yellow and fawn to gold; the cream- selection of good music and the sound system to play it. coloured carpet feels like lambswool to bare feet. A large, There are pictures on the chimney breast and the opposite high double bed with its head against a wall has at least six wall, and books in shelves on either side of the fire. The feet clear space on all three sides. Concealed controls carpet is dark green, the curtains patterned with green accessible from both sides of the bed govern the curtains, leaves on a cream ground. The fabric of the chairs is in the windows, the lights, and yet another sound system. A many shades of dark brown with accents of fawn and gold, large-screen television fit to show films on is concealed in which colours are picked up in the chinese silk rug in front the ceiling when not in use; a library of films is available to of the fire. be shown at will and the press of a button. There is a The south-east wing provides the rest of the social separate dressing room with cupboards and floor-to-ceiling space. The room next to the living room is large and light mirrors that allow you to look at yourself at all angles. The with windows looking down over the town. It is divided by bathroom has a large sunken whirlpool bath, and a an arch with folding doors that can be left open or closed at separate shower with jets from the side as well as above need. The floor and archway doors are polished wood, the (but no bidet). The carpet runs throughout the suite, and walls plain. On one side of the arch there is a kitchen, on the doors and furniture are of a particular light wood, that I other a table surrounded by upright chairs. The table is a have seen often but the name of which I do not know. polished slab of wood cut straight across the trunk of a great tree, yew perhaps, beautifully grained, still edged If in writing about a house I am writing about myself I do with bark. The chairs are all different, but all have fabric not know what anyone can tell about me, other than my seats and plain curved wooden backs. The paintings on the great desire for peace, light, and windows I can open freely wall of this room are abstracts; there are splashes of red. to the weather. The kitchen is fully equipped and very practical, but the There is so much more that I could say, but then, I

7 did not know this house until this weekend. I don’t know several more rooms on the floor below; and my why I wanted to write it now: I never have before. I did not perfectionist alter ego, the intelligent computer (à la Robert know the house before I started writing this: it has become Heinlein) who, invisible, silent and terribly well-organised, clear in my mind only as I wrote. manages all the housework and knows exactly when to tidy There is more to it than I have said of course: all the heaps and when to leave them. those paintings and books mentioned but not yet imagined;

A Small Pleasure Noted in Passing There is a problem with describing small pleasures – they need to be captured in a sentence. To take longer is to lose them... Also, part of the essence of small pleasures is their evanescence. Tonight I am drunk. The gleam of Tower Bridge’s golden finial over the Thames is a small pleasure made of a whole world of who, where, when, why... If I have to explain the moment is lost. (Written sitting beside the Thames, looking East into the sunset) The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 99, July 1995)

It seems like a lifetime… The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 214, November 2010 – March 2011)

A Census meme ran round LiveJournal a few weeks ago, of toilet (which we don’t use) in the back yard. I’ve had the snapshots of your life at each of the censuses of your last payment of my student grant, and I’m about to fail lifetime. Here are mine, slightly edited from the original, some of my Computer Science degree exams (the Business and running forward, from the year when in March I was Studies bits are okay) at the end of the worst winter of my four years old. life so far: I’ve been ill, my Dad has been ill, my bastard ex- March 1961: Living with my parents (although my boyfriend has driven me to depression and to the Dad may have been away at sea) and baby sister in a large, Samaritans to talk about suicide, and fandom is the other semi-detached house on the outskirts of Portsmouth with a side of the Irish Sea. Things aren’t as bad as they feel, and third of an acre of garden, although some is owned by the it’s about to start getting better, with help from the Student Water Board. I’m attending Mrs Pepper’s kindergarten Counsellor and the Leeds Eastercon, Yorcon II, but I don’t school, and coming home to the playroom at the back of the know that yet. I’ve started to get and read fanzines, but house and snacks made by Mrs Middleton, who has ten TWP does not yet exist – it was founded at Channelcon the children of her own but comes to our house to help Mum following year. look after us. There’s an ants’ nest in the conservatory. I March 1991: Living with Brian in a medium-sized, want to wear my summer dress with the tulip pattern even nicely-maintained house, that after five years of pay rises is though it is cold. finally affordably-mortgaged, with a small patch of grass March 1971: Living with my mother and two and some shrubs out the back, in Harrow. Still in the younger siblings in a five-bedroom, brand-new house on honeymoon first year of a two-and-a-half year stint with a the outskirts of Belfast. My bedroom is on the ground floor, specialist Lloyd’s market syndicate manager recently and I have sole use of the downstairs shower-room. My Dad bought by a large US insurance company, having not yet is still working out his penultimate Navy posting prior to realised that it is all going to go horribly wrong. Saving moving to Belfast to live with us and is only there at almost all of the new job’s 35% pay rise and additional weekends. I have no friends, and I’m being bullied in third bonuses while I have the opportunity, but not sure for year at my new secondary school for being English. I’m what. Deeply involved in organising programme for this reading twenty or more books a week from three libraries year’s Eastercon: Speculation, in Glasgow. TWP is nine and the Smithfield Market second-hand bookshops, and I years old, and its members and our intersecting activities go horse riding on Saturday mornings. I know that I read are a major part of my social life. I am having enormous fun science fiction because there is a label on a special section in all areas, and am extremely optimistic about the future. in one of the libraries. I want to be an accountant, or maybe March 2001: Living with Brian and 9-month-old a ballet dancer (I don’t have ballet lessons), but not a daughter in large, recently partly refurbished, only-just- librarian because if I was one I might not want to read still-mortgaged house with waste ground out the back, in books in the evenings. Ilford. Newly back at paid work in the London office of a March 1981: Living with two housemates and a cat small software house on a part-time basis, doing work (Mao, named for the kitten in Donald Moffitt’s The Jupiter (complex sub-system testing) well below my grade, and Theft) in a rented, shabby, cramped, three-storey terrace grateful for it because I would not have been able to cope house in Belfast with coal in the bunker and an outside with anything more demanding. Still recovering financially 8 from maternity leave, and able to live on part-time income, Trying to help a bit with the programme for this year’s but nothing to spare. Re-reading the shortlist for that year’s Eastercon, Illustrious, in Birmingham, and catch up with Clarke Award – which we gave to Perdido Street Station. the work needed done by the Science Fiction Foundation. TWP is important, and I haven’t missed a contribution yet, Still wanting to write for TWP, but conscious that it has but it is not as central as it used to be to my or any of our barely figured in my life for the last two years, and not sure lives. Gradually learning how having a child changes your what will happen next about that. In fact, not sure what my life, sure that it will change more over the years, but life will be like overall, once past this summer, though sure generally too tired to think much about the future. it will be hard work; generally optimistic; but with some March 2011: Living with Brian and 10-year-old real worries to be negotiated. daughter in large, shabby, mortgage-free house with March 2021: If we are all still alive, Meriol will be garden, in Ilford. Grieving for my mother, and to a lesser 20, I will be 63, Brian 68. For the rest, I have no idea. extent for my father because it seems as if my mother going (There are no deliberate falsehoods here, but some has made my father’s loss more real. Solvent for my age, of the memories may be true for that particular house at officially unemployed, actually feeling actively useful to the some point while I lived in it, rather than being true of the world in various ways though not being paid for any of it. March of that particular year.)

Plus ça fannish change The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 134, August 1999)

In 1979 I walked into the Metropole Hotel in Brighton, it won we’d go anyway. about one o’clock in the afternoon, the Friday before the But then for much of the Nineties an Australian August bank holiday. It was Seacon ’79 and the best Worldcon looked impossible. When I was ‘made redundant’ weekend of my life. It was my first con, my first Worldcon, in 1993, the resulting financial and employment my first contact with science fiction fandom. I was 22 years uncertainty lasted at least three years, and during that old. I had come home. period we couldn’t afford the time or money. I started I had my then-boyfriend to thank. Two years earlier, saying I’d have a party that year whether I was at Worldcon in London for a dirty weekend, he had introduced me to or at home, and even if only Brian and myself were there. Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, the specialist SF Then in 1997 Brian was finally made redundant, and we bookstore in Soho. Since then I had come to London more were able to start househunting so he could start up his than once, and taken my books home again to devour in own business. So for the next two years all our money and social isolation. In 1979, however, I stopped off at DTWaGE energy and holiday time went into buying, moving, for books to take on holiday. No, they didn’t have the book I renovating and setting up the business. And in the middle wanted. No, they didn’t know when it would come in. Why of all that of course there was a time when we thought we didn’t I try at Seacon? What’s a Seacon? I enquired, and my would have a child, and who knew how that would have fate was sealed. worked out? I went to more conventions, starting with Albacon, But we have worked our way through all of these the 1980 Eastercon in Glasgow. At Albacon I found the things. We have no child. The work on the house is paid for BSFA, which led me (via their Matrix clubs column ‘Life on (more or less). Dealing at Aussiecon will develop Brian’s Mars’) to Belfast fandom in time for my last two years business and pay for his travel (we hope). My employers there. Fanzines and APAs came later – I joined TWP at its are sufficiently flexible, and I am sufficiently well regarded, founding meeting at the 1982 Eastercon. Later that year I that I could ask for and get five weeks holiday. So I am moved to London, took up the first job of my new holding my twentieth fannish birthday party at Aussiecon computing career, found friends in London and Cambridge after all: my celebration of twenty years living the fannish among people who thought of themselves as fans. My life. relationship with a fan I had met at Albacon – a bright-eyed, But what does that mean now? intelligent, funny bloke called Brian – developed to the Not what it meant in 1979, certainly. At Seacon, for point where I moved in with him the following year. In me, fandom was the undiscovered country, the place where short, I found my life. FIAWOL, they say: fandom is a way of I could escape from the person I would otherwise be. It was life. And it was true. the empty space on the map marked here be dragons, and it So in 1989 we held my tenth fannish birthday party was a place I wanted to go. It meant freedom, exploration, in Boston, at Noreascon ’89. Andre Norton was Guest of enthusiasm, potential. I had the ocean of ideas to play in, Honour, and that was fitting because her books were and I wallowed. I took home from Seacon a sticker saying among my earliest science fiction, though she didn’t come Reality is the refuge for those who can’t handle Science to the party. Amanda Baker came – she was at her first Fiction, and stuck it on my living room wall, and believed it, Worldcon. Someone brought Sam Moskowitz along – he after a fashion, for a while. And I threw away the life I had was at his fiftieth anniversary Worldcon and fandom had before fandom without a thought or a backward glance, and indeed been his way of life! It was a splendid party. went eagerly forward to the future. So I decided to have my twentieth fannish birthday The fannish life was different in 1989. In that year party at the 1999 Worldcon. And when it turned out that we were young, still, but we had settled down. We had Australia bid for that year, we decided that, what the hell, if survived the early years of mortgages and jobs and could 9 afford conventions in the UK and holidays in the US. more and more like real life with every day that passes. Noreascon ’89 was my fourth Worldcon, Brian’s third. The And it gets worse: we know there are dragons and they are world was well understood: we had mapped the unknown real: stagnation, insecurity, ill health, unemployment, old places and found they were fun places to be. We partied, age. And they are nearer now, hovering at our gates, and ran conventions, wrote for fanzines and APAs with other we must look to our defences. We have investments to people like ourselves: childless, advancing in our careers, protect – in real life and in fandom – and the range of future having fun with the still-open possibilities of fandom and possibility is narrowing. the world. The dragons, if there were ever dragons, had But what the hell! We will throw my twentieth been pushed far away, beyond everyday bounds. fannish birthday party at Aussiecon. Friends from two Another ten years further on my fandom has decades and three continents will be there, those who are changed again. Now it is the familiar place, the known still living the fannish life. We’ll have fun. We’ll take photos, territory. The fun we had is fannish history: we are the old and show them afterward to the friends who didn’t make it. farts and our monuments litter the fannish landscape. The party will become part of our shared history, another We’re still having fun – and still making history – but there landmark in that place which started out as fandom and has is a tinge of weariness now, and we go to bed early. Some of turned out to be reality after all. our friends have children and don’t come to cons so often any more; we meet in our homes, by daylight, and not in Gosh. That was unexpected. I started to write to tell you hotel bars. There is a sense that happening fandom isn’t about our plans for Aussiecon and it turns into a meditation where we are at, any more, and the fannish life is looking on the course of my life. Oh well. I hope you liked it.

Fire The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 205, October 2009)

I love a live fire. hold events in castles and halls where we were allowed to When I was five we lived in a house with a sitting light real fires, but over the years the log piles dwindled, room fireplace, which we used on Sundays. One day a and one by one the fireplaces were taken out of use. There pigeon fell down the chimney, and covered the hearthrug is one working fireplace left that we use, at Letton Hall in with soot. Then we lived in a succession of houses with Norfolk. But one day the chimney will need a repair which electric bar fires set into the old fireplaces, but they were its owners won’t wish to pay for, and we’ll arrive to find never as good. Then we lived in some newly-built houses we’re not allowed to light that fire either. with ‘coal-effect’ gas or electric fires in fake hearths. In 1997 Brian and I moved to a house in Ilford that At Brownie and Guide camps we had live fires, and still had fireplaces in all its eight rooms. But it had only one sat round them drinking camp coffee and singing. We functioning chimney. We took seven of the fireplaces out would take turns to keep them going all weekend long. altogether, and fitted a coal-effect gas fire into the last When I first left my parents’ home I lived in a flat remaining grate. That lasted about six years before it with electric bar fires. Then I went to university and moved needed new coals, by which time we had learned about to a house with real fireplaces and no central heating. For global warming and (lack of) carbon efficiency. So now we three years I ordered a ton of coal each winter, and kept a still have the grate, but it sits empty, and we have no fire of real fire in the sitting room. There was a back boiler to heat any kind in the house. water. We would keep the fire going all day, and sit up late We still have occasional fires in our lives. We light a until the coals dwindled and collapsed into ash. The other small bonfire sometimes, for Bonfire Night, or hire a rooms still had fireplaces, but we never lit fires in them. I holiday cottage with a working fireplace. But each year the wore socks to bed in winter, and sometimes woke up in the brochures offer fewer cottages with fireplaces, and each morning to find icicles on upstairs window frames and year there is less space in the garden to lay a fire that won’t bathroom taps. damage plants. Then in 1982 I moved to England and found At Aussiecon in 1999 there was a programme item domestic fires were practically extinct, and that even when that talked about human skills. Over two-thirds of the five- they had working fireplaces most people didn’t know how hundred-strong audience could program a computer, but to lay and light fires in them. Fireplaces were becoming fewer than a hundred could lay and light a fire. We have scarce as people got used to having central heating, and lost a skill possessed by almost every human being that houses were built without them. For fifteen years I lived in ever lived until now. flats and houses without fireplaces or fires of any kind. I mourn the live fires. The Far Isles Medieval Society would sometimes

10 Scottish Referendum, 18 September Reflections in the Shards… (TWP mailing 234, July 2014)

On 18 September the residents of Scotland will be asked a and supported the British state. I’m British because my question: Scottish mother met and married my Northern Irish, Scot- ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an descended father while they were both serving officers in independent country? Yes/No’ the British Royal Navy, and bore their three children in I wanted to write a proper article about this, with research Portsmouth. I’m British because I was brought up in and reflection on what it all means to me. That didn’t England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and because when happen. Nevertheless, I want to put something on record, we lived in Malta and Singapore it was while my father was however shallow and unconsidered. on British naval service. I don’t want Scotland to become independent of the Because I’m British, when I wanted to move from rest of the UK. Belfast to London to live I could just do it; nobody asked me This is partly rational and political: on balance I for papers or required me to apply for residence. It was think that the people of all four provinces of the UK are pretty much chance that I ended up in London; it could better off integrated into a larger whole, and that a easily have been Edinburgh. And when my British relatives resource-poor Scotland of 4-5 million may struggle to chose where to live, when they chose England or Northern support its population in the manner to which they have Ireland or Scotland or Wales, being British, they were able become accustomed. (I support the UK’s continued to do so with the same freedom. We have had that range of membership of the EU for similar reasons on a larger choice because we are British, and I was and remain scale.) But there are other views and people are entitled to grateful. them. If that was all, the Scots could vote and I would If Scotland were to become an independent country accept the outcome. my family would be divided: some of us would become But it’s mostly purely personal, because I’m British, Scottish citizens while others would remain in what was and because of what being British means to me. And left of the UK, presumably on the arbitrary basis of where because it’s personal, I care. And I don’t want them to say we happen to be living on the day the split is formalised. ‘Yes’. I don’t want that. I want my family to remain British, I’m British, a citizen of a nation that binds Scotland, the UK to remain British, and being British to continue to England, Wales and Northern Ireland into one political mean being a citizen of the UK. I want the Scots to vote ‘No’. entity, dating back to 1707. I’m British because, as far back That’s all. as I know my family history, both families benefited from

I spent three weeks in Turkey once, about 1978. I stayed with aunt and uncle in Izmir, and had a boyfriend in tow. Children would make the evil eye sign at me in the street, which my aunt attributed to my blonde hair and blue eyes being marks of the devil. The food was good. I met my first chilies there: the first unfamiliar triangular green thing on the plate was crunchy and tasty; the second blew my head off. The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 190, January 2007)

Extract from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 126, September 1998)

‘And how do you like working in Holland?’ said Henk-the- from Schipol by train. I have now made four return trips to program over lunch. The Dutch give everyone nicknames; Apeldoorn, some via London City airport and some via so far they’ve tried several for me, but none has stuck yet. ‘I Stansted. Each leg of each trip consists of a taxi trip to or like it here in Apeldoorn,’ I said, ‘but I don’t like not being at from the airport, a flight, the ninety minute train journey, home.’ Everybody laughed. ‘That’s a very British way of and a walk or taxi to the destination. The timing of flights saying it,’ said Henk. ‘So what would I have said if I were available is such that it is impossible to do a full day’s work Dutch?’ said I. ‘Oh, I don’t like it here,’ said Henk, and in Apeldoorn on the day of travel, so a trip always means at everyone laughed again. But I meant what I said. The Dutch least one night away from home. I have to carry my own I have met are nice people, Apeldoorn is fine, the food is case and a heavy laptop computer for hundreds of yards good, the work much the same as it would be anywhere along airport corridors, and always arrive at my else. But I don’t like not being at home, and I hate the destination with a sore back and a stiff neck. One sits longer business of getting there and getting back again. at airports or stations than one spends travelling: only one Apeldoorn is a pleasant town, about ninety minutes flight of eight has landed on time; check-in time at Schipol 11 is two-and-a-half hours before scheduled departure, and that none of them would be more than one night away from normality is a hour’s or more delay on top. I don’t exactly home, the next one has already turned into a week. The mind sitting reading for a while, at least if I’m enjoying the problem with the politics is that our Dutch clients would book, and City and Stansted at least have comfortable much prefer me to go to Apeldoorn and stay there for three chairs, but Schipol is (currently anyway) an uncomfortable to four weeks to do the work – while I would much rather dump. Most of the stuff on sale in the duty-free shops is so stay at home, visiting occasionally or not at all. Although expensive anyway that any saving on duty is a nonsense – a my boss has backed me both internally and with the client, pair of shoes for £100, anyone? I’ve been buying alcohol I feel that I have expended political capital to do it my way, and cheese, but we’ve probably got enough for years and that I had better deliver a decent result doing it this already, and it’s heavy. way or suffer diminished credibility at work. On good days This looks like carrying on for the rest of this month, this seems to be going okay; on bad days I get very if the politics don’t go awry. I expect at least three more depressed. The jury is still out. trips, and though I hoped when I started this contribution

Letter to a Departed Colleague The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 168, September 2003)

Dear Sam (not your real name), Glad to be out of this shithole company. Glad to be out of When our managers assigned you to my team, my the rat race. All sounds like a good idea, Sam, under the peers commiserated with me. Pain to work with, they said. circumstances. Wish you all the best. Sorry you feel that Does what he wants to do, not what needs to be done. He’s way about us though. always sure he’s right, they said. Glad to be rid of him Those estimates were well light: 20 hours grew to lingered in the air. 50, then 80, and the end is not in sight. It didn’t help that But we had some work that suited you. You did it you spent 20 hours writing a specification that could not be well. You pleased me. You pleased our project manager. We programmed. The system is crap, the tools are crap, the talked about giving you a Quality Award, though we never methods are crap, I’ve been saying so for years. I don’t want did because you made one silly, high-profile slip that took to talk about it, you said. the shine off your achievement. I still rated you, though. You never did want to talk about it, whatever it was. Gave credit where credit was due. You were always sure you were right, and never prepared Then the project moved on. You coped, but you to move on from there. It’s no good being right, Sam, if you complained, a lot. Crap system, crap tools, crap methods. can’t also cope when things are wrong. You weren’t helping All true, but the rest of us suffer too. We all complain, but the rest of us cope, either. meantime we get the work done anyway, as well as we can. You bought us all drinks on your last day, a good You took time off sick with asthma, said your doctor session. We gave you a card and a gift, but you managed to reckoned the office environment was to blame, got official avoid a presentation ceremony. Not sure whether that was permission to remove your tie. The team worked weekends your idea or someone else’s, or that it was a good thing, but for a month to meet a deadline, and you did too, grudgingly. that’s what happened. A handshake and you were gone. Somewhere in there we asked you to estimate the Good riddance, said my project manager. cost of some changes we needed to make. I reviewed your Was it, Sam? It’s a sad thing to say about someone. estimates, asked you to justify them. You wouldn’t discuss And we’re already missing your contribution, such as it it, but you warranted them. I was tired, we were under was. You had your uses. pressure, I was tired of dealing with you (is that an We aren’t a good company to work for, in some excuse?). Sod it, I thought. Your work, you can take the ways, Sam. You’re right about that. But this ending isn’t all blame. I let them go through. other people’s fault. Basically you stopped, Sam. You Appraisal time – I was asked my opinion. Useful chap thought you were the only one in the right, and wouldn’t to have around, I said, though sometimes difficult to work move from there. From that place you had nowhere to go with. but out. Last month you handed in your notice. Early You’ve taught me some obvious lessons, Sam. Must retirement, on medical grounds. Hoping to buy a gîte in try harder, for one thing. But mainly, I hope that I can keep France and work outdoors a lot. Hoping getting out of the moving, keep learning. I never want anyone to say when I office will alleviate the asthma, give you some years to live. go, wherever I go, good riddance.

12

On a Survey to Study Why Women’s Careers Stall The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 230, December 2013)

This is dedicated to Jo Walton, November 2013

You asked... Thinking about my life, what is important to me?

That I enjoy my life in my body, because I will only live once. That I have companions on my journey, because otherwise I will be lonely. That I have work to do, that is not what I thought I would do when I woke in the morning. That I have work to do, that is worth the doing of it. That laughter and growing things and music and books have their spaces in my life. That there is time to write.

You asked about my ambitions for life and work. I expect a long life – my grandmother lived to be ninety-seven. My ambition is to live it well. I wish for meaningful work. My ambition is to fulfil it and move on. You ask about having children. I want to quote Khalil Ghibran: ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.’

You ask about my experience of career development and support. I have sat with friends and explored ideas long into the night. I have been told by a man who wore red socks that he would not talk to women. I have been told by a woman that my body will bar me from the company of my peers. I have been called the blonde computer.

Or are those answers about workplace culture? You ask about that too. I remember the manager who went quiet when I said calling people on weekends was unreasonable. There was the company which only asked for weekend working at the beginnings and ends of projects and in the middle sometimes too. There were the men with big bellies getting drunk in the Chinese restaurant, and congratulating themselves that they were not at home with their children. Their wives were not there to have an opinion but the company of women is not all it's cracked up to be either.

Have there been role models in my workplace? There was the woman who got sacked because she asked for the promotion she had been promised for doing her job well. There is a woman who wants to make her country work better. Is she a role model? I have never worked with her. There was the man who threw the sheaf of paper at me and told me to get out of his office. And the manager who hit the trainee programmer because they had both been working on the same program. Yes, there have been role models in my workplace. Most of them modelling roles I do not wish to undertake.

Why do women leave work? Perhaps for the same reasons that men do? Because there is no more work to be done here, so we move on. Because we look at the work on offer and decide to do something else. Because we have better things to do. Because bad work does not need doing. Because we don't want to work with these people, or perhaps, sometimes, they don't want to work with us. Because sometimes work does not matter very much beside other considerations. Because we will die, soon, and then there will be no more work.

But I don't think these were the answers you were looking for.

13 Clearing the Decks The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 225, January 2013)

That’s cheeky of you, Jenny [TWP administrator] – setting it It doesn’t do to get too literal, you see. I think I’ll as a theme just as I said I was done with it. But then I guess stick to the metaphor… that we never really are done with clearing the decks: as Back in October, my decks newly cleared for action, soon as we let our attention wander, the clutter starts the dancing began: a new job, a convention (Novacon), accumulating again, and needs clearing again… and again… some parties (ours and Jaine’s), Christmas, a week’s holiday and again… in Cyprus, and a whole brand new year to plan for. Mary But that’s true only while we are happy for the Poppins would sympathise, I feel: do you remember her phrase to remain a metaphor. Because in the original dancing the new year in, faster and faster, while the clock nautical meaning of the phrase, we clear the decks to struck twelve? prepare the ship for an encounter and for action, and the But while I’m dancing I’m glancing out of the corner action we normally envisage is one of war, or at least one of my eye. There is clutter in the corners I never did get where there is potential for hostilities. If we’re lucky there round to clearing, and there isn’t really much space for the will be peace, or a stand-off of some kind, and we may get new stuff coming in. I really don’t want the new stuff piling to enjoy some dancing on those nice, clear decks. If we are up in corners, but if there is to be space for it more old stuff unlucky there will be the thunder and smoke of guns, and has to go. So there is clearly yet more work to be done... blood running over the boards. clearing the decks.

The Necessity of Gardening The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 133, July 1999)

Today, in a fit of self-indulgence, I allowed myself an hour- the same person said was a kind of honeysuckle, although I and-a-half in the garden. am not convinced; then a double-flowered white lilac; then I could have spent the time working on the SF something that is either ailanthus (tree of heaven) or Foundation’s 1998 accounts. Or I could have written you sumac – my knowledgeable friends disagree. A rose and a guys a much better and longer contribution. Or I could have honeysuckle (this one convincing) ramble through the lilac worked with Brian to assemble the last section of the cellar and the ailanthus/sumac and over the fence behind. And shelving. Or finished reading Ken MacLeod’s The Sky Road underneath the Kerria I found two plants, each a pair of tall, (which is great fun, by the way). Or unpacked another three lily-like triangular leaves growing from bulbs, which I boxes of books from the back attic. Or… but there were so carefully separated from the surrounding tangle and stuck many things I could have done that weren’t gardening. back into a weed-free part of the bed pending further There were so many things I could have done that consideration. were gardening. I could have mowed the lawn. Or I could The bed is also rich with borage, bindweed, ground have planted out the various shrubs my Mum brought over elder and ivy. I know that borage is not necessarily last weekend. Or I could have cut the Russian vine back undesirable, and I do love its bright blue flowers, but its another few feet to free the yew tree from its unwanted leaves sting me even through gloves, and I will not have it attentions. Or I could have painted all the bindweed where it can get at me. The bindweed has been known to growing through the back lawn leaf by leaf with glyphosate grow under the foundations into the lean-to. The ground gel. Or I could have cleaned out the pond. Or… elder is currently busy colonising the nearby lawn. And ivy What I actually did was dig over about one quarter is a good thing in its place, but this is not it. They all have to of the flowerbed nearest the house. go! This roughly L-shaped bed runs west/east for 12 But the reason for selecting this task, of all the tasks feet along the back of the lean-to behind the kitchen. Then awaiting action in the garden? Most immediately, because it turns a right angle to run about the same distance this is the only bed in the garden that is in shade in the south/north down the extremely dilapidated fence on the afternoon, and I don’t do sun. But also to continue the good right-hand boundary of the garden, where it stops to work of my friend Karen, who last month (friend, fool or permit the existence of the pond. The garden edge of the saint that she is) spent a day working with me in my bed is delimited by three courses of broken paving stones garden. She brought tools with her that I lack: loppers, and comprising a low, curving wall. a chipping machine. Between us we dug over that bed for The bed contains some desirable plants. At the the first time since Brian and I came to live here. We lopped extreme western end is an elderly Potentilla, which, unwanted shoots of ailanthus/sumac and lilac, uprooted pursuing the light, yearns even further westward from its cherry suckers, dug out the first layer of ground elder, roots. At the eastern edge, most southerly and closest to the pulled ivy and bindweed out of the shrubs. We took out house, is a single-flowered form of Kerria, thought a rarity three full sacks of waste for the dump, and put two more by the person who made the identification. Then a shrub through the chipping machine to help start my compost 14 heap. It was a good day’s work, but only the beginning. A At the end of an hour and a half the sun had come session one evening last week started filling another sack, round sufficiently far to the west that I could no longer rely and there’s plenty more where that came from… on the shade. I had worked my way along the back of the So, safely in the shade, armoured with sunblock, lean-to, from the Potentilla to the Kerria. There are still gloves and kneeling mat, I wielded garden fork and hand roots of weeds in there, round the roots of the shrubs and fork against my foes, lifting and sifting roots and rubble under the concrete at the edges of the bed, but none in the from the soil to the rubble sack. Aerobics anyone? Bending body of the bed. There is more to do, but there’s a TWP and stretching? What price your sterile gymnasium when contribution to be written, and I have done enough for this is an alternative? today. Everything in moderation, including gardening.

Welcome a Tree The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 182, December 2005)

I finally have a new tree in our front flower bed – Sorbus only one with any real choices to offer: Connaught Farm hupehensis, ‘Pink Pagoda’, or rowan to you and me. Hardy, Nurseries in Buckhurst Hill. If they hadn’t had something I deciduous, pollution-tolerant. White blossom in spring, could be happy with it would have had to be mail order, or pink berries in autumn that cling on to bare branches into bought so far away I’d have had to plant it myself. Various the winter. Container-grown, less than eight feet tall, it alternatives were offered. Acers various – rejected as too should stay small enough for long enough to leave tender and/or too expensive and/or too small. Amelianchor unmolested the telephone wires that run overhead. The – spring blossom and red leaves in autumn but probably berries falling on the path will be the main drawback, but I not going to be happy in a windy, street-side bed exposed think I can bear that for a couple of weeks every year. Even to full sun. A weeping purple birch (Betula purpurea), small and newly-planted, it looks spectacular with the late- which would have been lovely, but my new next door autumn sun behind it. neighbour is allergic to birch pollen, and it would be unkind The nursery planted it, in late October. It has to plant a birch upwind of her. I looked longingly at a company in the bed: a privet clipped into a ball, a small beautiful Swamp Sequoia that was already far too large, Hebe, some lavender. It replaces a laburnum that fell down and an equally beautiful ornamental lilac that was too suddenly one spring day last year – or was it the year tender and too small. If I ever win the million on the before? No matter. It is nice to have a tree again. premium bonds I want a garden large enough to plant trees It’s hard to buy a tree locally. Various garden centres in. But that’s in my dreams. In my real life Sorbus ‘Pink have shrubs and small trees, but this one came from the Pagoda’ should do nicely. Wish it well.

Wibbling gently The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 184, April 2006)

It was nice on Sunday (19 March), i.e. not cold or wet, for the front bay window down through the lid, which provides the first time this year. This had several desirable effects. I an additional source of water. got to hang out washing for the first time since November. I Bad: But that leaves the butt with no overflow got to reassemble the compost bins that had been quietly mechanism (which would be provided by fitting the discorporating all winter. We enjoyed those rather missing connector to the main downpipe, if we had the beautiful, few, crocuses that survived the squirrels. And connector). Meriol and I got to play in the garden. Good: But at least it's sitting there waiting to collect We also got round to the new (second-hand) water rain. butt that has been waiting all winter to be connected. This Bad: But if it fills while I sort out the missing was a mixed experience. connector I may have to empty it again in order to fit the Bad: One piece is missing from the connector pack, connector. so I couldn't connect it to the downpipe from the third-floor God, it's hard to be green! And of course it's been gutters. mostly dry again ever since. Good: But I could and did feed the drainpipe from

15 Giving up a daily habit Reflections in the Shards… (TWP mailing 233, June 2014)

One of the uses I have for a few weeks of relative leisure is doing. The 15 minutes that I waste on these every day will to taper off a daily habit. be replaced by a few minutes of internet browsing from I have read The Guardian most days, and paid for it time to time, and that will be that. most days, since I left home at the age of 19, and I am now The items I spend too much time on are another 56, so that’s over 35 years. But I’m giving it up. My current matter. These are the articles I really enjoy reading: by subscription expires in July, and I will not be renewing it. favourite journalists such as Deborah Orr and Peter Wilby; It’s not because I don’t believe in the value of The and on interesting subjects such as the state of the Guardian. This quote is from Richard Hoggart’s obituary (in economy and our education and health systems, and the The Guardian of course) in April 2014: issues arising from changes in how we live. These I do not A newspaper such as this has to have above want to give up, and probably will not. I will spare time for all a hinterland, a background, body, bottom, the purpose, and read them for free, via the internet, sitting moral texture, rather than merely a daily at my desk or on the sofa with my tablet. When I don’t have succession of rhetorical ‘ooh-ahs’. It says time, I won’t read that day’s articles at all, and nobody will implicitly: 'There is more to life...’ be any the worse off. And indeed there is, and indeed it does. But the There is of course the issue of freeloading. I have newspaper’s current expression of that hinterland is not considered this. Am I morally entitled to read The Guardian working for me. I’m sorry, and I’ve been thinking about without paying for it? And my answer is, probably not, in a why not, and there seem to be several factors. perfect world. But in this imperfect world, and for the time The newspaper gives me two kinds of benefit: one being, the owners and editors of the newspaper are arising from the items I spend no time on, and the other choosing to make its words and pictures available to me from items I spend too much time on. without requesting reciprocal payment, and I will take The items I spend no time on include most of the advantage of the opportunity without guilt. My purchase of news, and almost all of the features, where once I have read the paper over the past ten years has helped fund the the headline I may well not need the rest. These are the transition from what it once was to what it is now. In some words that tell me about who is dying, where; who said future time something will change again, and I will change what to whom that is exercising the minds and pens of my practice accordingly. remote elites; talk about pretty clothes and houses; recipes So for now I will read – or not – at my whim: each for dishes I won’t cook; interviews with actors and day, or once a week, or not at all, however it turns out. And politicians whose names I do not recognise; and reviews of however it turns out, there will be no wodge of paper exhibitions, films and plays that I will never see. In future manufactured, printed, distributed and recycled for the these words, or words like them, will come to me for free, benefit of this one reader’s single hour. on the free papers picked up on trains, and via the internet And if there is time to be spared from reading the on my phone or at my desk, to be read, if I read them at all, paper, I intend to use that time to read books instead. only when I have time to ignore other things that need

The Arthur C Clarke Award and Me The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 132, May 1999)

This year’s Arthur C Clarke Award [for the best science slope of its lifetime growth curve. fiction book published in the UK in the previous calendar I’m one of the judges for 1999. year] was presented at the Science Museum to Tricia The thought is partly appealing, partly appalling. Sullivan’s Dreaming in Smoke. Four of the six nominees attended the ceremony, including Sullivan herself, Chris The appalling parts are these: Priest, Alison Sinclair and Ken MacLeod. The guest list I will have to read about fifty books, mostly between probably reads like a ‘who’s who’ in British SF: authors, Christmas and Easter next year. Many I would probably publishers, editors, critics, journalists, and fans. The judges’ read anyway, if not quite so concentrated in time or so decision was hard-fought and provided an entertaining line close to the year of their publication, but many will be of gossip to enliven the occasion. The wine was good and books I would not choose to read and will not enjoy. plentiful. The Science Museum, where the ceremony has I will have to find the time. been held for several years now, is actually investing in the I will have to argue the merits of my choices with Award, and has decided to appoint a judge next year. This is four other people, three of whom are complete strangers. a major boost to the award’s social credibility. Arthur These people probably won’t agree with me, and I will have Clarke himself is still interested, healthy and writing to grin and bear it when my choices are not shortlisted and science fiction. Clearly, the award is still on the upward my favourite does not win. 16 I will have to find the time. it is a wonderful opportunity to do the things I like doing I will have to put up with being condescended to by best. people who don’t reckon mere fans should have any say in So on balance, I’m looking forward to it, a lot. these matters. And I will have to find the time. Postscript 1: Partly because I’ve known for a few months that this is something I would be doing next year, this year The appealing parts are these: I’d read none of the shortlisted books. I do have books by I will have to read about fifty books, mostly between Sullivan, Priest, Sinclair and Barnes unread on my shelves, Christmas and Easter next year. Some of them will be books but I guess I might not get to catch up with these particular I would not choose to read and will really enjoy and will be titles for a while. On the other hand, since eligibility is glad to have been introduced to. based on year of UK publication, where books are I will have to find the time to do something I really published first in the US or elsewhere I can read ahead – enjoy doing: reading science fiction. I’ve already started Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. I relish the chance to have a say in the award. I So, since I’ll probably want to take notes as I read, look out reckon I am pretty well read in SF, and in related and for book reviews coming to future issues of TWP. unrelated fields, and well qualified to judge. But I have no professional or political axes to grind when making my Postscript 2: Oh, and in case you were wondering, Diaspora judgement. I’ll be voting based on what meets my criteria is not eligible. I wrote the piece here because when I for good SF and presses my buttons. It pleases me that a finished the book I was so tickled by the concept of visiting science fiction reader gets to vote for these and no other 267,904,176,383,054 universes and then deciding that the reasons. best thing you could do with the rest of your life was I will meet new people and read new books and will examine your own nature that I wrote it down. have plentiful opportunity to discuss them. In other words,

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993) The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 90, June 1994)

As with many a good SF book the publishers of this one Earthseed. It is a dream of a community that will survive have tried to pretend it is not science fiction. Parable of the the disintegrating Earth to reach for the stars. Almost the Sower, the dust jacket says, and then you turn the book oldest science fiction dream of all, dreamed on one of the upside down to read the words A Novel printed upside oldest of human roads. down. But it is science fiction: dystopian California in 2025; So Lauren and her companions, soon to become and the artifice grates. disciples, travel North. They survive violence and The book’s narrator and main character, Lauren earthquake. They gather companions from among the Olamina, is a partially educated girl who grows from fifteen damaged and the lonely, some by chance, some by intent. to eighteen in the course of the book. She is black, which They all turn out to be really good folks, these new matters, but this is not the book’s main issue. More companions: however damaged, they prove themselves importantly, she is handicapped by empathy: she feels trustworthy, self-sacrificing, capable of love. They find it others’ pain in her own body. She is very bright, very self- too: man and woman, woman and woman, woman and obsessed, and in some ways very mature while in others child, man and child, there is love among the ruins for them very young. Butler sustains Lauren’s tone of voice perfectly all, including Lauren. (Except for the ones that die.) Finally, across the three years: an impressive narrative too, there is hope for a home for the survivors, in a place achievement. they decide to call Acorn. Lauren grows up in a walled enclave in a Heinlein would have been proud of Lauren, and of disintegrating California, among ordinary people with Butler. houses and gardens who have managed to hang on to them, Here, brought up to date in an almost contemporary for a while. She knows it won’t last, and makes world, is the old Heinleinian fable. Civilisation destroys preparations in secret, but her community refuses to face itself. The seeds of the future are sowed by the wise in the the reality she sees. When the end comes Lauren gets out wreck of the present. Partly an awful warning of things to safely, but her family, her lover, the rest of the community come, this fable, partly a parable of hope for a are not so well prepared, or so lucky. They die, mostly. disintegrating world. Lauren joins up with two random survivors, and But we are wise, these days. Heinlein’s folk built they go North. Many refugees are heading North, looking walls to hold off the world; the story happened within the for country where water is cheaper than food, where there walls. We know now that the walls we build will not hold, is work. There are all the extremes of wealth and poverty and that most of us will be among the poor struggling on that road. (We are accustomed to that these days, we outside the gates. (The disintegration of Yugoslavia taught who have watched live television coverage of bedraggled us that, if we did not know it before.) Butler knows that too, refugees on Yugoslavian and Rwandan roads.) which is why she has written this story in this voice, to this But Lauren wants more than the other refugees. She end. This is what it is like to become the dispossessed. is a prophet, and she has a dream. She calls her dream Lauren dreams of Earthseed, a community of the 17 dispossessed, the blacks and the latinos, the weak and the For – unless we are saints – when we have nothing, damaged, the women and the children, the ones who we do not have love either. started close to the bottom of the heap in a damaged and damaging world. On the road she can dream her dreams, Postscript: Another interesting theme of this book that I for a little while. On the road she and her friends can love don’t have time to explore is about how it feels to be one another. But the story must end before the walls are American. There are no non-US characters in the book, but built anew, for once settled Lauren and her people will be Japanese, French and Canadian organisations are all inside the gates, looking out. They will be in possession. mentioned in passing as instrumental in the disintegration And that is a different story, not one that can be told in this of the US. There seems to be a kind of unexamined national voice. paranoia and, again, Lauren’s voice is so successful that I That story does not believe in love. cannot tell whether this attitude is Butler’s own or Lauren’s. Odd, and slightly worrying to a non-US reader. And here at the last is the question. Is it Lauren who tells Another thing: The book is nicely produced, from a this story with this voice, who believes in love? Or is it publisher called Four Walls Eight Windows that I have Butler herself who cannot bear to write a world without it? never heard of. Unfortunately, the quotation marks It matters, because this is the aspect that does not work, throughout the book are all awry, opening and closing that makes the book more a romance than a novel. This is more or less at random. This can be very disconcerting, and what others writing today deal with that Butler, in this damages the reader’s concentration, to the book’s book, does not. detriment.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962) The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 220, March 2012)

I reread this, in its 50th anniversary year. Later I will go communication, which may, and frequently does, require looking for critical perspective, but I wanted to write this highly tactile contact involving hands, skin and sexual first from my own reaction to the book. organs as well as scent, voice, eye and ear. She deals with a variety of moral and ethical issues, while involved in In some indefinite but not actually very far future the complex personal relationships with humans, animals and human race has been uplifted, after a fashion, following the aliens. She bears and is involved with rearing many visitation of superior aliens. After an initial period of children, human and otherwise, but in her memoir violent confusion, everybody is much happier and better privileges the life of the mind over the life of the family. She behaved as a result, and there is no longer any hunger or is concerned with the fate of humans and other races, and war. Members of a class of specially educated and thinks it possible that her way of life will last only a few temperamentally suited persons have the power to travel generations, but does not seem overly concerned about between galaxies, spending the travel period in a kind of this: her class is conditioned to a strong ethic of non- meditative hibernation, and benefiting from relativistic interference, and this extends to her own species. effects to remain young relative to those who remain The narrator does not introduce herself directly. She behind on Earth. The narrator is a professional speaks familiarly to us, as persons concerned with her communicator, a successful and respected member of this concerns and thoughts. We do eventually learn her name, class, and late in life writes her memoirs. but only when used by others in reports of direct speech. Expeditions are expensive and problematic, Her tone of voice throughout is meditative, detached, requiring that choices be made as to the nature of the team, analytic, which separates her readers to some extent from approach to research, selection and use of resources. There shocking events and strong emotions. The language is is conflict between various strands of human interests: plain, but this does not always mean that it is research, exploitation, defence; there are rumours of wars unambiguous: some passages are cryptic and incomplete, elsewhere in distant galaxies. Our narrator’s memoirs are leaving much to be inferred by the reader. The memoir mostly concerned with a variety of encounters with aliens ends abruptly, leaving research in progress and and other species of many forms, with many varying relationships unresolved. This is an entirely satisfactory results. Much human energy is expended on establishing and fitting end. Life, after all, goes on.

I bought a book by ‘Ouida’ (Maria Louise Ramé) some years ago, but when I picked it up to read it I found it so turgid that I stopped. The Victorians were just as prone as we are to badly-written fat fantasies – it’s just that they could set them in far-off bits of empire instead of having to invent other worlds. The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 139, April 2000)

18 Extract from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 109, October 1996)

...lived according to his own lights, ‘observing with read The Man Kzin Wars, though with much less delight, but amusement and occasionally wonder the behaviour of the it was fun to read the Foundation article about Larry new friends he found [in] San Francisco.’ Now Le Guin’s Niven’s warriors by John Newsinger in the same issue. It father was an anthropologist; and her mother wrote a book was a good conversation. I wish it could have gone on about Ishi (Ishi in Two Worlds, by Theodora Kroeber), longer, but of course, it will resume next time I read a book which was published at about the same time as Le Guin by or about Le Guin, or Niven, or anyone else. started becoming known for her fiction; and there’s a long I still read SF for many reasons: there is that sense of essay about California in Dancing at The Edge of the World, wonder that I can’t clearly define but still sometimes feel; and another about her mother; and the article by Robert there are some very good books being written; and, Maslen traces the influence of Ishi on Le Guin’s writing although much of it is crap, it is my kind of crap. But the from Rocannon’s World onwards. reason why science fiction still fascinates, after reading in I long to talk about these books, and the delight I the genre for thirty years, is this continuing conversation found in them. It was wonderful to read across 25 years of happening both within and without the books Le Guin’s career in one week, and the Maslen article while themselves. that knowledge was fresh in my mind. And in between I

Diaspora, Greg Egan (1997) The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 132, May 1999)

This book tends to infodump. The mass-market paperback can’t understand), and travels through comprises 360 pages of ostensible novel, 12 pages of 267,904,176,383,054 universes. At the end we leave ver, as glossary, and two pages of reference. But I reckon that at the sole happy (!) resident of the 267,904,176,383,054th least 200 pages of the novel consist of technical infodump universe, starting to examine the nature of ver’s own of one kind or another. consciousness. The main viewpoint character is a humanly I think this is a joke. conscious, genderless software construct called Yatima. In I think it was worth reading. the course of the novel ve observes the extinction of Until I talked to people at Seccon about it, to be humanity in the flesh, encounters three sentient species honest, I was not quite sure. (one ve can’t talk to, one who won’t talk to ver, and one ve

Star Wars The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 139, April 2000)

On Friday we went to a Barbican Card Members preview (however unconsciously) by Tenniel’s caterpillar for Alice reception of the Star Wars exhibit of art, props and in Wonderland. costumes from the films. This made a bit of a change from The presenter made grand claims for the film- the pub! They served a decent glass of wine, with olives and makers’ originality of vision that Brian and I don’t think are other nibbles. There was a short talk about the exhibition, quite justified – much of the visual stuff would go by an untrained presenter not helped by unreliable tech unremarked at a convention art show, for example – but it (sound familiar?), and a free copy of a film magazine. is clear that the people who made the films must have had a The exhibit itself is pretty good fun, even if you are wonderful time. not particularly a Star Wars fanatic (which we are not – There’s much more material related to Episode 1 we’ve never bothered to see The Phantom Menace). There than the earlier trilogy. That’s partly because they had are paintings, drawings and models at various stages of more stuff available (‘were more archivally minded’) and development, and lots of video and audio clips of people partly, I suspect, because LucasFilms gets more who were involved talking about how it was done. My promotional value for the current film. The exhibit favourite bit was how the sound of Jabba the Hutt’s voice certainly inspired in me a wish to see the film that I had not was achieved, and an early drawing of him clearly inspired had before.

19

Red Plenty, Francis Spufford (2010) The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 212, May – October 2010)

This is a strange and extraordinary book. particular pleasure in stories dealing explicitly with science It is an historical novel: its scope and subject forty (‘From the Photograph, 1961’; ‘The Unified System, 1970’) years (Thirties to Sixties) of the Soviet Union’s economic and economics (‘Shadow Prices, 1960’; ‘The Method of policies, of a state’s ambition to provide for its people. Balances, 1963’), but I single these out for special mention It is a fairy tale, in a manner of speaking, Russian only because stories that engage with these disciplines are style, starting ‘once upon a time’, and ending in ambiguity. so rare elsewhere in literature. It is science fiction, that asks ‘what if’ we try to Spufford, however, clearly feels that it is a strange provide for our people by this means? And tells the story in thing to try to do all of these things in one book. He explains order to work through the consequences of asking that why it is all three of these things, speaking to us directly as question. he introduces each section in turn. He also provides fifty So, as a reader in all three genres, familiar with some pages of footnotes, to distinguish very precisely between of the ways in which they may be combined for the the information that came to him from his research and his purposes of story telling, I had little difficulty and use of it to tell his story. So this book is both a fiction and a enormous enjoyment in reading this book, delighting in textbook, of sorts, for Spufford’s purpose and his chosen sentences, scenes, chapters and the book as a whole. It is form are explicitly educational (tell them what you are constructed as a collection of short stories, snapshots of going to tell them, then tell them…). Although at the end he people and ideas caught in the moment, each precisely does not draw conclusions for us, but leaves us to reflect on delineated, and all of them excellent in their own right. For what we have read, and to make up our own minds what me, the central story of ‘Midsummer Night, 1962’ is a near- reading it has meant to us. perfect fusion of subject and literary form, and speaks very You should read this book. strongly to the meaning of my own life. I also took

Diana Wynne Jones, RIP The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 214, November 2010 – March 2011)

Behind me on my bookcase are thirty-seven books by Diana still. Wynne Jones; over on the paperback shelves by the door Her books are powerful and unsettling. Children, and there are nine more. I have her first published book, childlike adults, find themselves in strange and difficult Changeover from 1971, and her last (at time of writing), circumstances. Members of their families betray them, or Enchanted Glass from 2010, and nearly all that came are absent, but families are nevertheless fundamental. They between. Most came to me at random over the years, to be meet with gods and strangers, or are gods themselves read (or re-read) as soon as seen: a mix of editions, unknowing. They must make journeys, they must act, and hardback and paperback, second-hand and new. Some they must learn; but journeys do not have final came only in adulthood when I could afford collectors’ destinations, and actions and lessons are often ambiguous. prices: Changeover; her first children’s book, Wilkins’ Tooth; Lost things are sometimes found, but the finding is rarely a and the NESFA press special, Everard’s Ride, published to solution. Battles are fought, but not always won, and celebrate her as Guest of Honour at Boskone in 1995. sometimes it has to be enough just to have survived. Some The six books she published between 1974 and 1977 of her characters do not even manage that much. For the are the first two Dalemark books, Cart and Cwidder and survivors, the ends of books are not the ends of stories, but Drowned Ammet; the first Chrestomanci book, Charmed places where characters stand still for a while, and look Life; and the standalones: Dogsbody, The Ogre Downstairs forward to dealing with altered realities. and The Eight Days of Luke. I think I read Dogsbody first, I don’t know how or why books with these and then the rest quite quickly. Those early books of hers characteristics can remain challenging but become turned out to be incredibly important to me, and I read and comforting at the same time. Perhaps to re-read such stuff re-read each of these six many times. I then bought and is to recognise that one has survived or is challenged by read every book she published for the next thirty years, and another round of one’s own uncertainties, one’s own re-read many of them, too – particularly The Spellcoats and ambiguities. Perhaps it is significant that I particularly The Homeward Bounders. From time to time I re-read them remember re-reading them in times of emotional difficulty

20 and worldly uncertainty: I re-read my way through the At Boskone in 1995 Brian and I helped to provide Chrestomanci books when I lost a job in 1993; and picked some social buffering for Diana against the vicissitudes of up Howl’s Moving Castle and its sequels when I lost a child being Guest of Honour in a strange land. And I remember a in 1998. While thinking about writing this, I started re- conversation in the lobby with Diana and Neil Gaiman, reading Dogsbody again. Witch Week and The Time of the talking about James Branch Cabell and the legacy of books. Ghost are looking at me from the shelf… And one summer day in 2003, when Meriol was not I don’t want to make great claims of friendship or quite three years old, walking in a flowering meadow in the personal knowledge of Diana. We were friendly morning, we picked a posy of forty different wild flowers to acquaintances for many years, meeting and talking at give Diana when we visited in the afternoon. We were conventions, and we have – had – some mutual friends. But welcomed, and drank tea at her kitchen table, and talked, I have some specific, personal memories. while Meriol rearranged the cushions in her living room She took a writer’s workshop at the 1994 Eastercon, and thumped the keys on her grand piano. We had a lovely and told me – quite correctly – that it was obvious from my afternoon, but before we left the flowers had wilted in their story that I had never had a child. vase. My friend Roger bought a catamaran and named her Diana was ill for a long time before she died, but I Chrestomanci. Diana came to Portsmouth for the day to was too preoccupied by my own mother’s illness to pay launch the boat, and claimed her travel jinx was proper attention to hers. Mutual friends kept me informed, responsible for stranding us on a sandbank. and I sent verbal messages of goodwill, but I couldn’t – She came to one of our parties at the Asylum, and at wouldn’t? – find time in busy days to write to her while she one point sat on the spare bed signing books, while we was alive. Diana died on 26 March 2011, of liver cancer. On talked our way along the titles on my shelf. (The inscription the internet and in the press and in private conversations in Power of Three says, prosaically: ‘To Caroline with all there has been an incredible outpouring of grief and best wishes (this took 8 years to write).’ In Archers Goon remembrance from people who loved her and loved her she says: ‘This one, the characters all did as they wanted – I books. It is too late, but I have a little time, now, to write. So had nothing to do with it.’ And in Changeover she says: here is mine. ‘With lots of love – very drunken’!)

Women, Men, and Earthsea The City Flogger (TWP mailing 61, November 1990)

Ursula Le Guin in conversation with Lisa Tuttle at the ICA speech and all his power attempting to restore it. Now, in looked like a fallen leaf, a Wise Woman, grey-haired, in Tehanu Tenar, a farmer's widow, gives Ged shelter as autumn colours, brown and gold. Lisa wore scarlet. They Earthsea begins to recover hope and health. sat there on the stage, the older woman and the younger Tehanu is not a story of Courts and warships and one. wizards and heroes, but of the underside of Earthsea, of the (I played for a while, writing this, with metaphors of islands ravaged by warriors and despised by wizards, and the Goddess, in Her triple aspect as young girl, mother, and of the women with their children and their weak magic. crone, powerful in her wisdom and wise with the lore of The landscape of this tale is not the cold stone walls of the women. But it doesn't fit, for there are no myths about School on Roke, or the secret maze of The Tombs of Atuan, vigorous women who are not young and have no children or the lonely sea and blighted shore of The Farthest Shore, and yet are wise, nor of mothers gaining wisdom through but the marketplace, the farmhouse kitchen and the study and research in their middle years. Myths were vegetable garden, and the paths through the village and before words were written by women or could be read by over the fields to the woods where the nuts are gathered in women.) autumn. The pain in this tale is not the despair that is death The conversation was of women, and power, and, to the soul of a wizard, but the pain of children hurt and specifically, of Tehanu, the Last Book of Earthsea. Tehanu is living, hurting, every day, and women who cannot protect the fourth leg that steadies the unstable tripod, but is them but only hope to heal. carved from the wood of another tree by one who finds a This tale is not of men's power, nor does it talk of different kind of pattern in the grain. She had not intended spells and souls. It is a tale of the power of women who to wait so long, Ursula said, but the book would not be have no power. It tells of the words spoken by women that written earlier, though in the early Seventies she tried. She men cannot hear, even when they are those of the language needed twenty years reading and thought, about language, of men. In this tale men cannot hear the True Name of a culture, feminism, before Tehanu could be written. man spoken by a woman; the woman looks into the eyes of the dragon where a man cannot; men can kill and maim, A Wizard of Earthsea is the tale of Ged, a boy, as he becomes but women can heal, and hope. a wizard, a speaker of the Language of the Making which In the first three books of Earthsea magic is gives him power over all things living and dead. In The knowledge is the Language of the Making is power is good Tombs of Atuan Ged rescues a young Priestess, Tenar, from is open only to men. Only men become Mages, schooled on the Tombs, and brings her to Earthsea. In The Farthest Roke, celibate, wielding power over kings and peasants Shore the magic of Earthsea is waning, and Ged loses all his alike. Women are weak: as weak as women's magic, they 21 say on the Islands of Earthsea; and women are despised, granted by others and at their sufferance – is the only kind and women cannot learn, are not taught, the Language of of power that any of us have, men and women alike, over the Making. And when the magic goes away, men's power – anything other than our own selves. And power over one's men's language – is lost with it. own self is the only power that matters. Tenar knows In the fourth book of Earthsea nothing has changed, herself, and she is wise, not because she is, but because she save only the telling. For Tehanu tells the story of Tenar, has lived her life, and learned. the heroine of The Tombs of Atuan, who was schooled by You can draw this conclusion, that wisdom lies in Ogion the Mage of Gont, who was schooled in the Language turning away from power to live within one's own self, of the Making, the language of power, the language of men... from all four of the books of Earthsea: And who has rejected Ogion's teaching and turned away, Only in silence the word, and married, and borne children, and been widowed, and only in dark the light, lives alone. And tells Ogion's true name to a wizard and is only in dying life: not heard. And can look into the eyes of dragons. And who bright the hawk's flight can heal Ged of his silence, of his celibacy, of his Magehood, on the empty sky. and make him human again. For she is a wise woman, and knows that the wisdom, the language, the power of women On the stage at the ICA sat two women, one older, one has nothing to do with the wisdom, the language, the power younger, before an audience of fifty or so women and of men. perhaps five men. Two women: Ursula, who needed twenty In Tehanu Tenar is powerless. She has rejected the years of learning and reading to write the book Tehanu; power that men bestowed on her by offering her learning, Lisa, who has produced books but not children. And I heard has lost the power conferred by the status of wife, has these two agree that women are not heard by men when never had a mother's influence over powerful children. they speak, and must reject men and all that they are to Poor kinds of power, said Ursula, and Lisa agreed, granted become wise. to women by men and at their sufferance. But that – power And I was dismayed.

Extract from The Word for the Worlds… (TWP mailing 106, April 1996) he told me he wants to promote me to Analysts Team The Word for the Worlds is from Caroline Mullan, Leader: to be the person who organises the work rather reluctantly dragging herself from Kim Stanley Robinson’s than the person who does the work. A challenge, right. An Blue Mars to get something done for TWP. I want to go and opportunity. Both of these things, and also more work and live on post-patriarchal Mars, in a house hollowed out of more stress I’m not sure I can handle right now. Oh well, the rock of an extinct volcano, where I can wear wings to fly we’ll just have to see how we go. Apart from not wanting to to work in a terraforming co-operative, and link into the be there at all, it wasn’t a bad week. Just very long on sense solar-system-wide communications network via an of strain and very short on sense of wonder. artificial intelligence worn on my wrist. … I considered Perhaps the main reason why I find sense of wonder renaming this APAzine after an as-yet-non-existent town on on Blue Mars is the feeling that for Robinson’s characters, Mars called Nuannaarpoq, which Kim Stanley Robinson on partly-terraformed Mars and on the partially-wrecked says (page 309) is Inuit for ‘taking extravagant pleasure in Earth, people’s work is properly integrated with their lives. being alive’. I wonder if the Inuit can say ‘taking The work itself matters, and is itself alive: people are extravagant pleasure in science fiction’? absorbed for years or decades with making gardens or Just as well to have science fiction available, since constitutions or world-girdling oceans on Mars, or on Earth real life is not especially conducive to extravagant pleasure with rebuilding Trinidad or diving for salvage from right now. Yesterday I expected to spend two-and-a- drowned Sheerness. … Of course, it would not feel like that quarter hours on five trains, visiting my friend Violet in for everyone all the time, or even anyone all the time (and Weybridge for the afternoon, and returning to East Robinson finesses the economics of the whole system, as I Finchley to meet Brian, his parents, his sister and her suspect he does most if not all of the science, in the most husband for dinner in the evening. Instead, for 45 minutes disarming and misleading way) but the book is engaged with Violet I had over four-and-a-half hours journey time with those who are while they are, and the result is on eight trains; time for 270 pages of Blue Mars! In which exhilarating. travel from Earth to Mars takes only three days! The nearest I ever get to this sense of engagement on And this was the Saturday after the week in which I this Earth now is in my involvement with science fiction: went back to work after Evolution. Except that the previous with running conventions, writing for APAs and fanzines, weekend I was called in from holiday to do two days work and reading and talking about books. Not in my paid on Friday and Saturday, with an hour or so on Sunday to employment. Once I was interested in my paid work for its top it off. So when I went back to work on Wednesday I was own sake, but this is no longer possible since I realised how almost as tired and fed up as when I left. And I was still in little a single program or even a single system actually that precarious mood where you might shout at the next matters to anyone, and how little an individual’s effort at person who annoys you or might burst into tears at any that level matters. Once I was interested in the challenge of second. ‘So I’ll try and postpone the nervous breakdown management, indeed met with some initial success, but I’ve until June,’ I told my boss, ‘but don’t count on it.’ And then been punished too often recently for failure at that game. 22 And besides, I can see too many over-stressed people So I’m going to get involved in hotel liaison for the already groaning under that yoke: I don’t feel the need to next few Eastercons, working with Chris Bell and the be one of them. Adelphi, and with Pat McMurray and the Radisson Perhaps in future I could be interested in the whole Edwardian, doing the real life business necessary for my enterprise, to the point of perhaps justifying total fandom to keep happening. And I shall go on writing, and immersion in the work – the way I managed to be for reading, and running individual programme items at Beccon, or for the Intersection dealers’ room, or have been conventions. And if work ever slackens off and I can find a for certain small work projects in the past – but this does suitable course, I may go back to University and see if I not yet seem possible. For now I feel trapped in the drear can’t run my life through some more interesting channels wastelands of middle management, coping the best I can in for a while. the shitty situations set up for me, frustrated in my inability But meanwhile, I will go back to work tomorrow, to change them. I can’t see a goal, don’t have a map, and trying to postpone that nervous breakdown so that it never don’t trust the people trying to give me directions. happens.

Fun and Fandom The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 89, May 1994)

Sou’Wester was fun. I went wearing lots of hats: bar. There were a goodly number of fanzines around (and Sou’Wester Registration Manager (I fired myself for more since). There was a successful bid for the 1996 incompetence, but not until Monday after all the work was Eastercon by people who seemed reasonably organised and done); Sou’Wester programme participant; dealer’s eager to do a good job. assistant; Friends of Foundation proto-trustee; Intersection Even more unexpectedly, there seemed to be an dealers’ room organiser. I think that’s all. absence of much of the normal backbiting and griping that Anyway, I spent Thursday through Saturday buzzing one expects at cons, particularly Eastercons. Now, this around like the proverbial fly switching hats from hour to could have been because people who would have griped hour and hugely enjoying myself. Sunday and Monday were had not bothered to come. Or my perception could have quite a lot more relaxed and I was able to leave most of the been a side-effect of my being so busy, and it could all have hats in my room. Retiring to a four-poster bed each night been business as usual without my noticing, but I don’t was a slightly exotic touch which added measurably to my think so. And judging from what other people have said and enjoyment of the convention. written since this is a general feeling. And, even more Everyone else seemed to be having a good time too; positively, there seemed to be a genuine enthusiasm for and by most of my personal measures, and somewhat fandom and its possibilities such as I have not felt for some contrary to my expectations, the con was a success. There months, or even years. were few security problems. The hotel food and beer were Which makes me very happy and I hope we can keep better than okay. The programme seemed reasonable and I this mood going through Confabulation, Intersection and got to a couple of items other than those I was involved Evolution. But even if we can’t it has been nice to have it for with. Conversations spread from the programme into the a little while.

What I Did on My Holidays The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 96, February 1995)

For one thing I think I may have encountered a saint. Mummy’s lap. I think her mother – who never once slapped Did I mention we were going to Boskone? That’s an her and never once raised her voice – probably qualifies as Eastercon-sized convention in Framingham, Massachusetts, a saint. But I wish they had fed her sleeping pills all the and going to Boskone involves two transatlantic flights: one same. there, one back. Well, coming back there was a three-year old child in the row of seats just across the aisle, a child We were both exhausted when we got to the Sheraton Tara who did not like flying. Despite the near-full-time attention in Framingham on Wednesday evening. Not because of the of three adults, she screamed as near non-stop as any child journey, which was about as easy as a transatlantic flight can for what must have been five solid hours. She kept a can be, but because both of us worked long hours trying to whole cabin full of weary overnight travellers awake and meet deadlines before we left. I was getting home at seven unbearably irritated for all that time. She screamed, she or eight, and Brian at eight or nine almost every night for howled, she drummed her feet upon the floor, she wouldn’t the ten days before we left, and we had Intersection eat, she wouldn’t sleep, she wouldn’t settle down in deadlines to meet before the con, so we were working the

23 weekends too. We knew we would be tired, so we went bought for our hotel room’s filter machine later proved straight to the con hotel from the airport, expecting to have very nice. But some of the shine was taken off the day when a quiet day on our own on Thursday before the con began on returning the car we found a dent on the boot, and got on Friday. charged the $100 insurance deductible for the damage on The Framingham Sheraton Tara is a large, expensive top of the cost of the hire. (by fannish standards), six-storey, six-hundred room hotel We took the con easy: no very late nights, no early quite a long way from anywhere except one hamburger breakfasts (though having to pay separately for breakfast place. It has a mock-Tudor facade with mock-Norman helped us with the latter). Despite this we both felt tetchy, gatehouse towers stuck on the front, dresses its hall-porter headachy and tired most of the weekend. About Sunday we as a Beefeater (I kid you not), and in its ersatz-Irish pub it figured out that this had a lot to do with being severely serves shepherd’s pie made of beef, and surf-and-turf the dehydrated, despite having drunk very little alcohol way they make it in Limerick! On the other hand it was relative to a normal Eastercon. This seemed to be because comfortable enough, and by British standards the food was the climate is basically very dry, and of course was not adequate in quality and generous in quantity. helped by massive air-conditioning. Thereafter we took to On Thursday we discovered that Diana Wynne Jones drinking lots of iced water (me) and fizzy drinks (Brian), (who was Guest of Honour) and Chris Bell had been which helped, and felt quite a bit better. (No one had ever delivered to the hotel the night before, and abandoned until pointed out this particular reason for having a con-suite to Friday. We thought this was a bit naff of the committee, but me before, and it might also help explain why so many it did mean we could spend the day together. We hired a Americans do not drink alcohol at conventions.) car for the day and I drove us into Boston. Diana was not in As usual Brian spent much of his time in the very good shape – she has recently had major surgery – so (excellent) dealers’ room. This time so did I, though I was we took it very easy. But it was a lovely day: almost warm mostly talking to dealers and artists about Intersection (I enough to leave coats in the car. We strolled around the took several deposits for tables) rather than buying books. I Copley Bay area, browsing in small boutiques and sat on the Intersection table for a while one day, and spent bookshops. We had coffee in Sonsie’s, where the girl a fair amount of time talking about the con to US serving took a fancy to us and gave us free and enormous conrunners. Neither Brian nor I went to much programme, cookies to go with our coffee. Looking for somewhere to eat and when we did go to see The Nightmare Before Christmas where Diana would not have to worry about her allergy to one night it was interrupted so often by fire alarms that by milk-products, we ordered a Japanese lunch before mutual consent we left, agreeing it deserved to be watched realising the effect of soya on Chris Bell, who is allergic to properly in some future, more favourable, circumstances. beans! In Avenue Victor Hugo, which has bookshelves Diana’s Guest of Honour speech, on the rules writers are stretching floor to 12-foot ceiling, we bought the first of the supposed to keep to, was good. The banquet was fair value, week’s many books. It was cold, but the sun shone, and four courses for $28 a head, which was just as well really. Boston basked. One very noticeable aspect of the con – which was Driving back to Framingham I concluded I could be the 32nd Boskone! – was the absence of people between ten seduced by the delights of motoring American-style, years of age and thirty. This has a lot to do with the history despite the stresses of potholes, tolls, right-hand drive and of Massachusetts fandom over the past ten years in unfamiliar rules of the road. Our huge, red-leather- particular, but to a lesser extent is also apparently a feature upholstered car had automatic gearbox and cruise-control, of US fandom these days. A bit worrying that. several steps up from even my late-lamented Citroen, and Anyway, the con closed down on Monday, as cons do. we glided serenely along Mass Pike commenting on New We got a lift into Boston from Sharon Sbarsky, and spent England’s similarities to and differences from home the afternoon at the NESFA (New England Science Fiction without a care in the world. Association) clubhouse. This had a library, an office and a At least until we got lost in Framingham in the dark, big storage room, and was altogether very satisfactory as a and lost a hubcap bumping over an invisible kerb. But we base for running conventions, publishing, producing found ourselves again eventually, without further mishap, fanzines and hanging out with fans. and retired early to our respective beds. Then we went to stay for three days with Chip and The next day Brian and I used the last couple of Davey Hitchcock, spent the days book shopping and the hours of car-hire to do a quick dash round to the New evenings eating good food. We took Chip and Davey out to England Mobile book-fair, a remainder- and discount-book their favourite restaurant, which on Wednesdays does a warehouse about ten miles from the hotel. Our joint bill of wine-list in half-glasses so that you can try a number of about $50 was very light by the standards of Massachusetts different wines. A very nice idea, and one we took full fandom, whose reminiscences included accounts of advantage of. I spent a few hours in Filene’s department spending hundreds of dollars at a time, but we felt we had store and, although I bought nothing in the famous done well enough. Next door there was a coffee house, an basement, I was gratified to get a new suit marked down example of a fairly new-fashioned breed, with three from $200 to $67! And even more gratified when I realised different flavours of coffee to taste and a choice of about that, at least in Filene’s, I qualify (just) as petite! thirty kinds of beans they would mix and grind to suit your On Thursday we posted eight boxes of books home tastes. I did not at all care for my taste of raspberry- in mailsacks, said a reluctant goodbye to Chip, Davey and flavoured coffee, but the Kenyan and Columbian coffee we Boston, and came home.

24 Intersection The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 101, October 1995)

Intersection seems already to have receded into the haze of large party, and that others felt the same way. Which is how I conventions that were. Reactions to it among the people I think Worldcons should feel. And I was in the gripe session have spoken to since have been as mixed as you would for half an hour and… heard no serious gripes. More expect, ranging from ‘never again’ (Ian Sorenson), through importantly, perhaps, there were only perhaps 150 people ‘we’ll have to do it better if we want to do it again’ (me) to there. By contrast, Conspiracy’s gripe session packed out a ‘vote Cardiff for 2003’ (various, possibly apocryphal, but large room with very angry people and went on for three indicative of extreme enthusiasm). In my corner of fandom hours! the (more or less cautious) positive opinions well outweigh Experienced US Worldcon runners I have spoken with the negative so far, and [I only know one] case of apparent reckon we were a better than average Worldcon. burnout. I enjoyed myself immensely and would not have I can’t pronounce on 4,800 people’s experience and missed it for the world. (Lunch with Samuel Delany was a won’t presume to try. But I will make two personal high point, but not the only one.) observations: I felt throughout the convention that I was at a But we’ll have to do it better if we do it again.

Eastercon at the Adelphi The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 131, April 1999)

The M6 was dreadful, as usual – the very worst thing about Cruttenden’s very small and very quiet party was legal, cons at the Adelphi. But after that I thoroughly enjoyed with punch bowl lent and ingredients bought from the myself, as usual. People were nice to me. I ate and drank hotel, which made being thrown out very galling. well, except for the bottle of Adelphi whiskey I brought I saw TAFF delegate Vijay Bowen imitate the action with me to the con that wasn’t actually very nice. (I left it of a caterpillar (which requires the very opposite of empty on the hotel’s registration desk on Monday night.) stiffening the sinews): superb. Must remember the very nice South American restaurant I achieved a triumph d’escalier and thought of a Valparaiso on the Thursday, Friday or Saturday of a future funny thing to say at the right time to say it, and said it, and Eastercon at the Adelphi, or even write before the con and everybody laughed (and Alison quoted it in her at-con tell them to open on Sunday and Monday as well. fanzine). The TWP party was fun; I put faces and voices to I enjoyed Captain Tartan and thought it was only names. And learned something about growing up Quaker. about twenty minutes too long (best single line: ‘…and I am I chaired a panel of Jeff Noon, Dick Jude and John the spirit of mud!’ delivered with utmost conviction and Jarrold. It went well enough but it didn’t catch fire, and I perfect timing by Bridget Wilkinson). Congratulations to never found out why science fiction should storm the the people who helped cut it from three hours! mainstream (except to give Noon some literary credibility I missed the masquerade. and access to wider markets, which isn’t a very good I sold some books for Brian. reason…). I bought a few books. I was thrown out of a room party on Saturday night, That was another Eastercon, that was. Please sir, I along with half the convention. For the illegal parties this want some more! was a shame but within the hotel’s rights. But Arthur And the energy to enjoy them with, too, please.

Cognitive Dissonance The cover of the bodice-ripper in the remainder shop shows a crinoline-clad woman with half-bare breasts in the passionate embrace of a muscular man wearing nothing but knee-breeches. I don’t know why it catches my attention, but it does. I take it down from the shelf and look at the plot summary on the back. Imperial archaeologist (female) being transported by starship to colony planet gets into trouble using a time machine and has to be rescued by the starship captain (male), who by doing so gets himself into trouble with the Interstellar Emperor.... ! The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 107, May 1996) 25 Obligations to Frogs The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 131, April 1999)

Do I have any ethical obligations to frogs? But I really am not sure that the puddle is large We have, if you wish to be generous, a pond. If you enough to support a colony of frogs. And although there are wish to be accurate we have a puddle with stones around it, plenty of roads where they can get squashed by cars, I don’t in which bright yellow-and-brown irises grow. think there are any other ponds in the near neighbourhood Judith Hanna and Joseph Nicholas have a pond, and for them to migrate to. So now I am feeling guilty in case I at one of their parties, in a fit of something, I went fishing have accidentally introduced these frogs to an ecosystem with a jar and brought home frogspawn for the puddle. which will not support them, thus condemning the Which dissolved into tadpoles, as it should, and accordingly potential subspecies protoilfordiana to extinction before there are tadpoles in the puddle – I have seen at least three they have even got going. in view at once – hopefully growing into frogs. The idea is But since for now they are still tadpoles, I can that they will grow up and eat slugs, because that is what postpone worrying for a while. frogs do.

Extract from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 94, November 1994)

As several TWP people already know, I have recently, for would be a way of saying thank you, of passing on the love the first time in my life, begun to think seriously about they gave me and still give me. It would be an expression of having a child. I still don’t want a baby. My thinking is … I hope. love and value my family. I would be pleased if in twenty or But a baby? The thought makes me afraid. I don’t thirty years time a child of mine had grown up and felt the know if I could cope with a baby, then a child, in today’s same. I would like to give my parents a grandchild, world. That is an expression of despair. especially since neither of my siblings looks like doing so; it

Extract from The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 137, January 2000)

To anyone who is shocked by the next bit. Sit down, take There seem to be some common questions, some deep breaths, and remind yourselves that there’s especially from people who have children of their own, so: nowt so queer as folks. Q. Is everything all right? A. As far as anyone can tell so far (about 18 weeks as I write). Things Will Be Different Now Q. Boy or girl? A. We decided not to know just yet, thank you. Particularly for us. Brian and I are expecting a baby in June. Q. When will you give up work? A. Sometime in May, And so far it is all going very well, thank you for asking. exactly when depends on how work goes in the meantime. There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? At least not for you Q. When will you go back to work? A. Don’t know. It – you’re not having the baby. Us? We’re scared shitless, and will depend on how well I take to motherhood (shudder…). very happy. But I can take up to a year without losing my job and I have Not much in favour of bald public announcements of no particular reason to hurry back. At this stage, after things like this, but the nature of an APA forces it rather. You Easter 2001 sounds good. guys come after close family, a handful of privileged That’s about all for the future, I think. Meantime friends, and several dozen medics, pharmacists, masseurs, though, this bloody trapped nerve has been much worse and shop assistants in shops that sell maternity gear of than otherwise due to the number of treatments and various kinds. (In fact, one of the slightly boggling things is palliatives you can’t have if you are pregnant. When the how many people need to know you are pregnant in order chiropractor has finally got it out of the way and I can go to provide – or not provide! – services of various kinds. Oh back to living a more-or-less normal life for the rest of the well.) pregnancy, I’ll be a lot happier.

26 Meriol’s Books The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 155, March 2002)

Meriol has very definite opinions on books. Some she asks Letters and First Book of Words, using bright photographs of for time and time again, and will look through by herself. real objects, animals and people. And a nice little board Some she will listen to once or twice. Some she will not book, that appears as if tissue paper collages have been allow to be read to her at all. I don’t know what her criteria photographed, is Tiger, illustrated by Bettina Paterson. are except that, for now, a book is of no interest unless it Meriol likes Maisie’s Big Flap Book and other board, has pictures. She will listen to quite long stories, providing flap and pull-tab books featuring Maisie™ Mouse and her there are pictures on every page. She points to and names chums. We prefer these to the products of the Thomas the clocks, balls, ducks, dogs, bears, and horses (‘eeyore’) Tank Engine and Friends™ franchise, which are okay, and whenever they appear, and will turn through the pages of a Eric Hill’s Spot the dog, which are not really very book looking for these. interesting. And the babies in Jan Ormerod’s Peek-a-Boo! The range of books available for children now is and I Spy You! are still amusing a year after first reading. enormous in both quantity and quality. Meriol already has Jippy: a Big Driver Book by Ian Pillinger features a eighty or so books of her own, mostly bought cheaply from multi-coloured off-roader and some cute animals on a charity and remainder shops, and every few weeks we mountain. The boards have been shaped round the picture borrow seven books from the library. Unless otherwise of Jippy. ‘A tough off-roader known as Jippy / Is as bold as indicated, all these are both written and drawn by the she is nippy. / Although it’s steep she must not slip. / Her author. big fat tyres will always grip. / She keeps going. She won’t Sandra Boynton’s board books are firm favourites. stop. / Up the mountain, right to the top.’ A Visit to the Park Hippos Go Berserk! counts the hippos arriving at an all-night by Heather Lynn Parlane features holes cut round a pair of party, and then leaving again next day. It has probably been plastic rolling eyes stuck to the back page. A different read to her more than once a day for nearly a year. Horns crudely-drawn animal has these eyes on each page: and Tails was renewed at the library three times and read chicken, dog, bear, rabbit, each doing something different in several times a day for twelve weeks before I thought that the park. These books have no merit evident to me, though keeping it any longer was unfair to other children. I’m sure Meriol obviously finds something there. I would still be reading it, except that I haven’t seen it again Lulu and the Flying Babies by Posy Simmonds is since and can’t buy a copy in this country. More recently wonderful. Lulu wants to play in the park, and is angry Doggies: a Counting and Barking Book and Opposites find when taken to the museum. But there she meets a pair of favour. Brian and I like them too, which is just as well putti, who take her flying into the pictures: they splash in really. the sea, growl at a tiger, get lost in a dark, scary wood... We Get Into Bed by Virginia Miller is Meriol’s going-to- love this one. sleep book. She liked this tale of small bear Bartholomew The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr is odd. not wanting to go to bed, so when we wanted a book for a The tiger comes to tea and eats and drinks everything in bed-time ritual we chose this one. We still read it every the kitchen, so Sophie and her parents have to have supper night, though I think we might try varying this after Easter. in a café. The words are threatening, but the pictures show Oddly, the other books in the series have not appealed at Sophie completely infatuated with a companionable tiger. all. Another series featuring parent and baby bear is by Meriol likes books about everyday life with dogs and John Prater, and she likes these. agas by Sarah Garland, including In the Park and In the The Many Faces of the Face is one of four books of art Garden. She also likes some of the Kipper books by Mick for children edited by Brigitte Baumbusch, and is one of Butterworth. Meriol’s favourite books. She particularly likes a portrait of Meriol’s interest in poetry is mixed. Hailstones and a Gypsy woman by Modigliani, though Mona Lisa and Halibut Bones by Mary O’Neill is a sequence of poems about Picasso’s Seated Woman do not detain her long. The other colours. I love reading this one, and Meriol has listened books (Looking at Nature, Figuring Figures and Animals politely several times, although she has never yet asked for Observed) have been read once or twice, but are normally it and has pushed it away on occasion. She likes some of the pushed away. Sometimes she will look at pictures in The poems in A Children’s Book of Verse selected by Marjorie Art Book, a kind of pictorial dictionary of artists published Rogers and nicely illustrated by Eric Kincaid. She does ask by Phaidon, that is kept at my bedside. for First Songs and Rhymes by Jenny Wood from These days there are whole series of books by Mothercare, though. And several board books with publishers claiming to have designed the books for abbreviated versions of stories by Dr Seuss have amused. educational purposes. Meriol likes finding the duck on every And finally, Dr Miriam Stoppard’s Test Your Child is a page of the Usborne books about Appletree Farm. She also book for parents interested in assessing their children’s likes the crudely drawn world of the child in My Day and My development, not a children’s book at all. But it has lots and Night by Siobhan Dodds, published as ‘Early Worms’ books. lots of photographs of babies and small children, and And she adores Chicken, Chips and Peas and Fast Fox, Slow Meriol has spent hours looking at them. Dog, ‘first readers’ by Allan Ahlberg, illustrated by André So, that’s some of a modern baby’s first books. Not Amstutz, which feature Slow Dog frustrating Fast Fox’s all the good ones, even fewer of the bad ones. It’s been fun attempts to eat Mother Hen’s chickens. so far. As for next year? Beatrix Potter, A A Milne, Dr Not all ‘educational’ books come in series though, and Seuss… whatever the future holds, I’m looking forward to some are very nice. Dorling Kindersley publish First Book of it. 27 Believing is Seeing The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 121, February 1998)

Everyone knows it, if they know anything. It is one of the paintings and sculptures that were dumb. Turned left into a most famous paintings in the world, right up there with small dead-end room holding small objects of no interest. Mona Lisa and… Turned back… And what? What other paintings can you name so … and across the width of the gallery Guernica casually, so sure that no artist’s name, no qualifier, no screamed at us from the adjacent hall. adjective is needed to tell your reader or your hearer what Their tongues are knife-blades in their throats. you are talking about. Let’s face it: in the world of Disney The horse, the woman, the minotaur, all screaming. and Coca Cola mere paintings just don’t hack it. Except Chaos. The world shattered. All colour leached away, all Mona Lisa. And perhaps Guernica. order gone awry. There is nothing whole. There is no Everyone knows Guernica, Picasso’s masterpiece of connection. There is no meaning. Only the screaming. the Spanish Civil War. No one knows much more – or I didn’t. I’ve seen details of it a thousand times, and so have Except one face, one man’s face, swoops down, hovers, you, on postcards and posters, in newspapers and silent and intent. Sees, is witness, mute, puzzled perhaps, magazines, in homage and discussion and reference and his mouth an open ‘o’. The artist? The observer? The one history and diplomatic rows over where to house it and who makes sense of it all? whether to lend it and what it all means. It is an icon of the The painting is huge. It swallows the world. I stand Twentieth Century. As revered and as disregarded as any shivering before it, in memory, shivering still. other image of our times. ‘It’s about the Germans and the Spanish, isn’t it?’ said We went to Madrid for the weekend, casually, on an my colleague at work. ‘It’s a long time since I looked at a Air Miles special half-price deal: free flights, cheap hotel. picture. I’m sorry I don’t remember the details.’ It’s not Not going to Madrid, particularly; more going away, getting about the Germans and the Spanish, or else it is about them away from it all. We booked the weekend first and found and much, much more. Who knows? Who cares? I am out how to spend it afterwards. Not second-hand book already forgetting the details. Is the woman’s tongue a knife shopping for English-language books, that’s for sure, in her throat? What exactly is the expression on the face of though we tried. But the food was good, the sun shone, the observer? What makes this picture so shocking, that I there are Dalís at the Reina Sofia, Goyas in the Prado, and shiver, still, two days later? I don’t know. I will forget the three hundred years of European art at the Thyssen- details. Bornemisza. But I went to Madrid and saw Guernica. Me, myself. So we went to see the Dalí’s in the Reina Sofía and And it screamed. I believe, now that I have seen it. It is real found that Guernica was hanging there. for me now, not an icon, not a symbol. And I will never It screams. forget. We strolled down a long gallery, looking casually at

Looking at the World through New Eyes The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 221, June 2012)

On Saturday afternoon [21st April, three days after the different colours of the leaves in the shrubbery beyond the second operation, on my left eye] something happened. I window, glistening with raindrops in the bright sunlight; looked up from my meal and I saw the world in three and across the road there was a tree coming into new, dimensions. green leaf, and red tiles on the roof of the nearby house. You may be used to this. I'm not. Nothing I hadn't seen a hundred, a thousand times before. It was a perfectly ordinary day, and the view nothing But this time I saw it all anew, everything standing out of the ordinary (for fannish values of ordinary). It had out in its own place in the picture, with other things before been raining, but the rain had stopped and the sun was or beside or behind, clearly placed between me and the shining from a hazy blue sky. Across the room my friend horizon marked by that tree and that roof. was seated, leaning back in his chair. Literally, and figuratively, I looked at the world with There was pale gold sherry in the crystal decanter on new eyes. It was extraordinary. It was wonderful. I hope I the table, and a harp on the floor. There were several never forget.

28

Observing the Landscape The Word for the World... (TWP mailing 146, March 2001)

I walk one mile to the child-minder and another half-mile £2,995 ONO, and here’s a pallet of tiles waiting to be used on to Redbridge Underground station through a constantly a new roof. And finally at the approaches to the station changing suburban landscape. they’ve resurfaced the cycle path and taken a chainsaw to Some movements may appear anywhere on the the shrubbery. route. Road works have no sooner been cleared from one And along the pavements, in the parks and playing stretch of road or pavement than they reappear on another, fields and in the gardens, the plants and trees show the and if it’s not the gas it’s the telephone, or the water, or the cycle of the year. Over the past few weeks I have seen electricity, or… they just dig holes in the road. Works often viburnum in full flower, the hawthorns have come into affect the traffic, so that on some mornings cars sweep by blossom, crocuses have flowered, and in every surviving with a hundred yards of road to themselves, while on garden there are daily-changing signs of spring as leaves others a queue at the lights is backed halfway up the hill. emerge and buds break. Scaffolding is going up on a house over here, coming down I say surviving, because in this once-leafy suburb the from the one round the corner. Across the road a new skip gardens aren’t what they used to be. Or, perhaps, I should grows its mountain of rubble and battered furniture, but have said: the gardens aren’t what they were designed to the one with the red velvet sofa perched precariously on be. Let me explain. top has been taken away. The car with flat tyres that was The streets I walk along were built after the second parked on the pavement last week is gone now, but this world war on the grounds of half-a-dozen large houses that week the stretch limousine is back on its block-paved were pulled down for the purpose. There are, here and forecourt. there, some large, mature trees of forest species: large Close to home, at the bottom of the hill, there are pines, oaks, a monkey-puzzle or two. These are trees that blocks of flats, shops and offices, and the landscape is no one with sense would ever plant within a hundred feet almost urban. Posters on bus stops advertise their of a house, though I can’t say for sure whether they are forgettable products to a gaggle of sullen folk or, if a bus survivors of the large estates or were planted by new has just left, to no one at all. The fly posters on the windows residents lacking sense. Whatever, it is not a surprise to see of empty shops trumpet their endless succession of gigs. the likes of these cut down, even if it is a pity that several The boards outside the red-brick office block and the should have gone just in the four months I have been doing church converted to offices display their changing lists of this walk. tenants (though some – Abbey National, the Labour Party, Nor is it a surprise that the gardens are vanishing. Weight Watchers – remain so far constant). These streets were developed wholesale, for families Then we leave the offices behind and move into whose breadwinners commuted by bus and rail to pay for bedsitland. On the left, once-handsome houses have been decent-sized single-family houses with front and back divided into small flats and bedsits, and the ‘For Sale’, ‘To gardens. Gardens that, in those long-ago days when people Let’ and ‘Let By’ signs pop up and down like skittles. On the lived in families and before every family owned a car, were right, even larger houses are used as doctors’ surgeries or cultivated at weekends and in the evenings. Gardens where knocked together into nursing homes. Both sides regularly paths ran from front doors, between lawns, shrubbery and feature furniture on the pavement and neglected cars. At flower beds, to gates in boundary walls or hedges. Gardens one house the tenants change so frequently there’s always large enough to make a drive down one side when families some unwanted appliance – a doorless fridge, a gas stove bought their first car, assuming that they didn’t just park without burners, a toilet pan – sitting beside the bins. their cars, as some still do, in streets wide enough for the As we go first up the hill and then down again the purpose. Here and there, even now, you can still see such a other side we move into less commercial territory. The garden. Here and there you can even see one where the church on the right advertises its services: playgroup, garden is maintained, where the lawn is mowed, the roses refugees’ drop-in, salvation. Then school playing fields and shrubbery pruned, the bulbs and bedding plants still border a large area of meadow and shrubbery that is set out in spring behind their boundary walls and neat apparently completely unused and under discussion as a hedges. Only here and there, mind: there are perhaps a site on which to build umpteen hundred houses. dozen such along my mile’s walk. I give thanks for them On the left the houses are much less likely to have every day. been converted to flats, and ‘For Sale’ and ‘To Let’ signs less There are perhaps another dozen where the basic in evidence, but change is still evident from week to week. plan of the garden remains unchanged from that time, but Here is a heap of brick that used to be a boundary wall, where the garden is overgrown and the boundaries not while over there the fence is wonky where a car has maintained. These are eyesores, but there are still trees, bumped it and gone its way. Last week’s tree stump has birds in the shrubbery, and leaves and flowers in their been grubbed up leaving a hole in the pavement, but across seasons. the road a new-planted sapling pokes bravely from last Much commoner are the next generation of gardens, week’s hole in the pavement. That shrub has been pruned, made by people who still owned their own houses, and that one grubbed up, and there the whole front garden valued their cars, but no longer wished to spend weekends flattened and put to block paving. Here’s a car for sale, gardening. These still have walls or hedges, still distinguish 29 between path and driveway, and still sometimes have I don’t. working gates. The ground is laid to crazy-paving or So every week this year I have paused in sorrow and flagstones. There is usually a small flower bed in front of a disappointment passing someone’s house where the tree window or along an edge, or an evergreen or two, or some has been cut down or the shrubbery grubbed out. Three big shrubbery. There is sometimes a dustbin shelter. These evergreens where the birds sang as you passed – they are gardens also exist in various states of repair and tidiness. gone. An enormous pine, twice the height of the house it They can be very nice to look at when well designed and stood beside – only a stump now. A shrubbery with a small maintained, or if they feature an unusually good shrub or cotoneaster – its bright berries will never cheer a drear small tree. When neglected, as most of them are, they look winter morning or feed a bird again. A nicely manicured drear. lawn with roses and bulbs coming into leaf in the The next generation of house- and flat-owners did surrounding beds – vanished under block paving. worse. They wanted off-street parking, or no-maintenance And back gardens glimpsed through gaps in fences frontages, and neither spent money nor took care. They and down side alleys show concrete, paving, weeds and knocked down front walls, stripped out shrubbery, cut neglected lawns. I fear the back gardens are – albeit more down trees (sometimes without bothering to remove the slowly – going the same way. stump) and poured concrete, often badly. If they left a strip The council maintains rosebeds, trees along some of of flowerbed it grows weeds and rubbish. If they left a fence the pavements, shrubbery alongside pathways – good for or wall it has since become dilapidated. Most of these are in them! But recently for every young tree in the pavement bedsitland, but they crop up occasionally on even there must have been two or three lost from front gardens. otherwise nice streets. And sometimes people cut down the street trees – with or The current generation wants off-street parking for without permission! – to gain vehicle access to the roads. I two or more cars and no-maintenance frontages. They fear that at this rate in a few years’ time all the remaining knock down front walls, strip out shrubbery, cut down variety of the seasons and support for birds will have trees (though they remove the stump) and lay block paving. vanished under concrete and block paving. And if that is Some put shrubs or bulbs in pots. Most of them don’t. The true in Ilford, where there is enough space for both the cars result looks good, if they remember to spray weed killer and the trees, how long before there are no trees at all and occasionally. And if you like your landscapes barren. there is no suburbia – no rus-in-urbe – any more?

Aim or Means? Journey Planet #13 (2012)

We are talking about panel parity. Equal numbers of men not be distracted by the men. Oh, the arguments for and and women on SFF convention panels. Or a shorthand term against; the hurt of men excluded; the anger of the for the collective effort to achieve that goal. ideologically opposed; the self-doubt of those not sure In the early 1980s, in my first fine flush of careless there should be a woman-only space in fandom; the range rapture in and around British SF fandom, it didn’t matter to of different reasons for thinking that there should (or me that most of the people there were men. I was a should not) be one. But it was this same discussion that we feminist; but in fandom, for me at that point, gender was are having now: when the default is male, how and where irrelevant. The content of the conversation was what can women’s voices be heard? Fandom changed, and the mattered: I would talk to or listen to anyone providing they APA thrived: we women took our fair place (some of us were talking about SF, or talking about the world with SF thought, though some said, at times, a disproportionate available for reference. Gender parity? The question did not place) in the conversation. For a long time there seemed no arise. If it had… need to have the argument at every convention. And now In those years perhaps 10-20% of the people at we have come to the point where an Eastercon can be 50% British cons were women, and many of the women came female. attached to men: ‘Oh, I’m only here with my husband / And now we can press for gender parity on panels boyfriend – I’m not really very interested in SF.’ Even when because we are truly half the membership. Should we have the woman was there for the SF, and there were quite a few it? of us, it was never long before men outnumbered us in any My first, surprised answer was ‘no’, because I conversation. Once, I sat down to talk to another woman, thought that British SF fandom had no need of it; that we and twenty minutes later there were two conversations, had had this discussion, some years ago, this point had each involving one woman and several men. Imagine the been won without needing to use this particular tactic, and gender-proportionate panels of those years: with no we had moved on. My second answer was also ‘no’, because women at all; a sole woman with nothing to say; or the sole I still think there are good reasons to have some single-sex woman with something to say, but always the sole woman. spaces on convention panels as well as in other places (and We needed to do something about that, and so we yes, I am still a member of The Women’s Periodical). And did. We started having women-only con committees, and my third answer was still ‘no’, because for me, all else being active discussion about women in fandom. At the Eastercon equal, the content of the conversation still trumps the in 1982 was founded The Women’s Periodical, a British APA gender of the participants. for women only, where women could talk to each other and But at this point I paused, and looked around to the 30 wider world, and discovered (should I have been (For the record: There is also the logically-consistent surprised?) that, still or once again, all else is not equal. proposal that we should have only all-female panels until There are new British SF fandoms (perhaps not grown out the historical imbalance has been redressed. To that of the old ones?) having this debate. Perhaps new proposal I still say ‘no’. There needs to be a degree of generations in this old fandom have fallen back once again balance within each generation. The past has not been fair to the male default (it has happened so many times, and I to women; we will not redress that injustice for a new have been busy elsewhere of recent years). Perhaps even generation by being unfair to men.) within this old fandom we need to have the discussion once again. Note: APA: Originally an acronym for ‘Amateur Press Gender parity on panels is not an aim; it is a means. Association’, coined in the 1890s, and in wide use within SF The aim is that both women’s and men’s voices should be fandom since the 1930s. An APA is a group of people who heard and valued, in all the forums where the human periodically produce individual pages or fanzines that are conversation takes place. And since this aim is not realised sent to a central administrator for collation and without thought and work and care that it should be so, we distribution to all members of the group. See may well need this new conversation, and this new tactic, http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Amateur+Press for this new era. +Association for further information. So I changed my mind.

Why Are We Here? The Word for the World… (TWP mailing 102, November 1995)

Well, why not? Interzone and SFX might exist. Someone else who once Less flippantly, if SF fandom as we know it did not produced a fanzine to give away probably got sponsorship exist, why would we invent it? after a few issues, went glossy, and started paying Think what we do have here – we, the plain folk of themselves. We might have APAs. But would we have the fandom; we who do things. We read and discuss and review culture of fandom that gives us all of these and more the books. We write slash and essays and what we did on besides? our holidays, for APAs and fanzines and convention How odd that we are here, doing this. How easy it publications. We run the conventions, make and show the would be to be somewhere else, caring about something costumes, write and sing and play the filk, create and play else or nothing at all. Many people don’t have a fandom, any the silly games. We sit in the bar and gossip about our kind of fandom. Many people don’t seem to need or want doings. We tell stories of things that happened before we the kind of thing we have here. There are many things we were here. We marry each other and live with each other could do that are a bit like fandom, some of the time. There and take care of each other and fall out with each other and are things we could do that are a lot like fandom a lot of the divorce each other. We argue fiercely about what is right time. Would we invent fandom if we did not already have for us to do and how to do it. It matters. We care. Science it? Or would we all go and do something else instead? fiction? What’s that? This is fandom! And could we lose it? It’s hard to think of a reason why we would reinvent Mike Scott, writing in Zorn about conventions, thinks it, if we didn’t already have it. Easy to think of reasons why we could lose conventions. I think we could lose not. Not to spend tens or hundreds of pounds a year conventions too, and I think that if we lost conventions we travelling across country and staying in hotels. Not to give would lose much of the rest quite quickly. It would really be convention committees our money to play their games. Not quite easy. (however much we want to meet them) to hear this or that All we need to do is sit back and let other people do author on a panel. Not for the chance to spend money on it for us, for their reasons and not for ours. genre paperbacks and beeblebears. Not to produce and trade fanzines with other producers and traders of So Why Go To Worldcons? fanzines. If SF fandom as we know it did not exist, would we or invent it? Could we? Would we know what we lacked? How Not to Lose Our Conventions Would we lack? We can look around the world and see what we Gary Farber says there are many reasons for going to might do if we didn’t have fandom. We might invent Worldcons, and programme is only one of them. Bernie something like Trek cons, or Festivals of Fantastic Films, or Peek and others say only the programme matters. Oliver Doctor Who extravaganzas, with exhibits, a video or film Grüter-Andrew says how you do it is more important than programme, and some dealers to sell us expensive tat. Or what you do. The arguments – in fanzines and at perhaps we’d have something like the Hay-on-Wye literary conventions and on the internet – rage back and forth, festival, letting us hang around a few celebrities appearing coming to no conclusion. I have come to a conclusion. briefly in public, their appearance fees paid for by charging Never mind the width, feel the quality of participation. The the punters. We might have fanzines, of a kind; Locus and thing that matters, in my not-so-humble opinion, is the 31 quality of participation. In conventions, in fanzines, on the feedback loops into fandom are virtuous: more net. Of course, this begs the question of how to measure participation, more personal connections, more ideas and quality. shared experiences fed back into fannish culture to seed So I would like to propose a Convention Charter. Not future conventions, and parties and local group meetings to justify bureaucracy or to bind con committees or con and fanzines and costumes and filks... members to things they don’t want to do, but to provide a And this is true whether fiawol* or fijagh†, whether focus for thinking about the whole experience of SF we go to cons for the programme or to sit in the bar, conventions: why they are important to fandom, why we go whether we are fanzine fans or costumers or professional to them, and why we run them. There are only three authors. articles. Oh, and we’re still talking about fandom, so none of And finally, although in the terms of the NESFA them have anything to do with SF. Zoocon‡ game all three feed back into the total amount of goodwill and hence people points available to fandom to do Article 1 fannish things, none of them has anything very much to do An SF convention asks members to pay to come to the with money, nor very much with organisation, nor, perhaps convention, which they will share with others who have done regrettably, with SF. the same. But all three are about the quality of the fandom we This says that nobody should come to a con purely as have. a passive consumer, nor should a con sell itself on that basis to anyone. It tries to make clear that a con should be I want more. And the SF too. approached as a co-operative enterprise, by the con committee, by the members, and by SF professionals Bibliography attending as writers, dealers, artists, or whatever. An SF con Notable contributions to this were made by (among other is not a product sold and bought: it is something made by material): The State We’re In by Will Hutton (thanks to its participants out of their shared experiences. It also says Bridget Wilkinson for lending it); The Wrong Leggings by that you get something better-than-mundane out only Lilian Edwards, Zorn #3 edited by Mike Scott, Waxen Wings when you are prepared to put something in! by Claire Brialey, and Attitude #6 edited by Pam Wells, John Dallman and Michael Abbott, together with several other Article 2 fanzines received before, during and after Intersection; the An SF convention provides intimate spaces where members Novacon 25 Programme Book; and the internet discussion can make and maintain personal connections. groups run by Tim Illingworth, Intersmof and Intercom. This says that an SF con must provide the spaces – Several private and semi-public conversations at various both in time and in the facility used – where people who parties and conventions also contributed, but failing either don’t contribute publicly to the con can participate slow glass with sound or big brother’s recordings you’ll privately. This is where the seven-hour conversation with have to take my word for these. Banana Skins 1 by Mark someone we’ve never talked to before happens, which Plummer arrived this evening and made me laugh. could not have happened anywhere else. And isn’t this a major part of what we come to conventions for? This is why the bar and the con-suite, the concourse and the hotel corridors, and on the programme the workshops and the kaffeeklatches, are so important. This is why a bad facility can wreck an otherwise good con and a good facility can rescue a bad one.

Article 3 An SF convention attempts to provide public experiences that members can share with strangers who may in time become friends. This provides for the public face of a con – and here is where programme, art show, dealers’ room – and for that matter the city and the hotel (again!) come in. This is the common stream which shapes our culture and feeds all our private experiences. This public face provides the ideas and the artefacts, the shared memories, the stories, and the jokes, which are so much of fannish culture.

There are many points that can be made on the back of these three articles (maybe some other time). But here the important point is that the mix of these three at any * Fandom is a way of life. particular convention defines the quality of it for its † Fandom is just a goddamn hobby. participants – according to their varying tastes – and ‡ NESFA is the New England Science Fiction Association. It provide a measure of that quality which makes it fit for publishes books. One of its books is If I Ran the Zoocon, a fandom. No SF convention of the kind we run is considered con-running role playing game. Teams in the game have to successful unless all three aspects work at least to some run the Zoocon with resources of money, people and degree. If they all work well enough, for enough of us (as, goodwill. You need enough of all three to run a successful amazingly, they seem to have done at Intersection) then the con. Play it sometime – it’s fun. 32 Black Easter? The Day After Judgement TWP mailing 38 (August/September 1987) with introduction and coda from Banana Wings #14 (August 1999)

‘Black Easter? The Day After Judgement’ was written in stamp on the Eastercon, not to be associated in people’s August 1987 for an APA. The first few months’ recovery time minds with Channelcon, Seacon ’84 and Conspiracy. had given me some perspective on my first attempt at Here we hesitated. The hotel was a Metropole. It was running an Eastercon, but writing for an APA allowed me to miles from a city centre. It had never hosted a science exhibit the self-pity I would certainly have edited out of any fiction convention of any kind (though it was due to host a article for a wider forum. Reactions to the article varied. Star Trek convention in May 1986). And, worst of all, From silence, through sympathy, to ‘get a life, it was only a Contravention were bidding the hotel in 1986. But the convention’. choice in the end, though not simple, was straightforward; Only a convention. we bid the Birmingham Metropole, or we did not bid at all. Eastercons have been running for over fifty years, We decided to bid. We knew there would be more years for the people who run them than for the people problems with the hotel and its location. We knew we who attend them. Beccon ’87 was one of the Eastercons. I’m would have problems with estimating numbers in a one of the people who ran it. I’ve been going to Eastercons Worldcon year. We made careful calculations, erring on the since 1980. Started running them with Beccon, which means side of caution, and eventually drew up our budgets on the from 1985. More or less stopped after Evolution in 1996. If basis of 800 members, smaller than an Albacon, less then you ever take up conrunning at all, ten years’ active twice the size of a Novacon. We had a good idea that some – involvement in running Eastercons is fairly normal; some or even many – fans would not be able to afford two major people do much less, few do much more. conventions in one year. But we also knew that 300 people Many more people attend Eastercons than run them. had enjoyed previous Beccons, and would be likely to come Beccon’s committee was fourteen strong. About 700 people to a Beccon Eastercon. We thought that being in turned up at the con, of whom over a quarter contributed Birmingham neither Londoners nor Glaswegians would actively in some way. There may be as many as 3,000 people find travel expensive. And we thought that we would not in the UK who consider going to Eastercons a fairly normal suffer from the kind of ill-will which showed signs of thing to do. Everyone who has ever attended an Eastercon making Yorcon the smallest Eastercon in years. People who has an opinion about them. had never come to Beccon would come to an Eastercon, and —Caroline Mullan1999 those few who hadn’t enjoyed earlier Beccons would find a different kind of convention that they would (we hoped) be We started to consider bidding to run an Eastercon for able to enjoy. several reasons. Beccons had outgrown their own success: How naïve that sounds now. How wrong we were. there were 300 people at Beccon ’85. If we had attempted to run another small Beccon, we would have had to hold ***Digression*** down the numbers to what the hotel could hold and a In 1985 I went to Yorcon with the most gloomy expectations. single programme stream and a small bookroom satisfy. It The attitude of the committee worried me. Several of my did not seem possible to run another con of the same type friends were so offended – by the committee’s collective without disappointing people, either by limiting attitude in general, or, in a couple of cases, by the actions of a membership or by changing the style of the convention. particular member of the committee – that they did not Neither option seemed satisfactory to us. Besides, on our intend to go to the convention at all. I had liked the style of normal two-year schedule the next Beccon was due in the convention’s publications, but not their content. In the 1987, and a small convention in the South of England in end, I comforted myself with the thought that most people July of a Worldcon year was obviously not sensible. And, as would change their minds in the end, and went. I did not it became clear who was and was not involved in running want to let any of this deprive me of an Eastercon, and the Worldcon, we wondered who would run an Eastercon besides, we were going to launch the Beccon bid. in 1987 if we did not bid. I had a wonderful time at Yorcon. It seemed at the time that to bid the 1987 Eastercon The fan room programme was excellent; the art show would provide us with the opportunity to do something was good, and it was my choice not to watch the several films new, to do things we could not do in a small hotel with few that I would have liked to have seen. I missed Timothy people with a very small budget. We had, we thought, some Archer, having seen it at Mexicon, and because I was new ideas to offer to an Eastercon, and some new enthusi- involved in a conversation at the time. I went to some asm, a change after several years of the Eastercon rotating excellent room parties and talked to some extremely round the same three cities and the same groups of people. interesting people. And it would mean there would be an Eastercon in 1987. And that was all. Overall, Yorcon was a very poor So we started to look for a site, and to put ideas convention: there was almost nothing on the main together. For a long time the only thing that mattered was programme that I wished to see, and what I did see was site-selection, but that is another tale. Suffice it to say that poorly organised and poorly presented and mostly boring. one by one we narrowed down the possibilities to the Whenever I asked people whether something they had seen Birmingham and Brighton Metropoles, and we did not want on the main programme was any good they told the same to go to the Brighton Metropole. We wanted to put our own tale (with the notable exception of Timothy Archer). 33 I was fortunate. There was one area of the convention stream convention that would explore all aspects of science that ran supremely well, and it was a part that I was fiction and fandom. We would not have a main stream for interested in. Many of my friends were less fortunate: the con large audiences and an alternative for lesser ones, but was much better than they expected, but they were bored. several streams, equal in esteem, planned so that people There was ill-will towards the committee; but, though could choose between contrasting types of item, with perhaps I remember too kindly, I do not think there was audience size no object. The serious discussion of SF, malice, and I don’t think that anyone failed to credit the con science and fandom would be interspersed with the silly with the things it had done well. and not-so-silly games for which Beccon is well-known. ***End of Digression*** Standard Eastercon items (the fancy dress, the bidding sessions) would mix with Beccon favourites (the fireworks, At Yorcon we discovered the existence of a competing bid, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, a play), and with some things that organised in Leeds to be held in Harrogate. We were were (as far as we knew) completely new (Keith Roberts surprised – we had heard no whisper of another 1987 bid. reading his favourite poetry, the Ghost of Honour). There Apparently the surprise was mutual: they hadn’t heard of would be workshops to involve small groups of people in us! Yorcon went well for Beccon. We had flyers, receipt highly-focused activity, and there would be major items books, tables; the Harrogate bid was evident only in the which would bring a substantial proportion of the very pretty rainbow-badges worn by some Leeds fans. We convention into one item. There would be a film collected dozens of pre-supporting memberships, and a programme that would use the 35MM facilities of the good deal of comment along the lines that a Beccon cinema to show films that cannot normally be shown at Eastercon was a wonderful idea. conventions. Above all, we planned a convention that The only shadow was the result of the 1986 bidding people could get involved with. session; not that Albacon had won the bid, but the reaction We were ambitious. We knew we couldn’t please any displayed by certain people to its winning. A reaction that of the people all of the time, but we wanted to please most was not wholly new – I had seen the same feelings people with something, and we thought we were displayed when Glasgow won the bid over London for 1983 sufficiently varied to do that. We wanted to do things that – but with a new (to me) element that foreshadowed the previous Beccons were too small to do (the fancy dress and scenes at Beccon over the Follycon/Norwescon and the play), and things that the Worldcon could not or would Contrivance bids. At the time this didn’t bother me in not do because it would be too big (the workshops). I don’t relation to Beccon. I had no idea that in certain people’s think we realised then that there would be some people we minds we were already firmly aligned on the wrong side of couldn’t please at all, no matter what we did. a fence I did not realise existed. There were other reasons for some of the things we Nor did I discover this over the next year. I discussed did. We ran a 24-hour film programme partly so members what I wanted to do at Beccon with several people who of the convention would be legally entitled to be on the disagreed with my ideas, but, I think, at least understood premises even though not resident in the hotel – a and respected my thoughts about the convention. Some, at necessary consideration when there is no cheap the time, said that they would certainly be there, and would accommodation nearby. We initially rejected the idea of a help if they could. We heard almost nothing from or about banquet altogether, but when we thought of Christmas the Harrogate bid, which eventually, almost at the last Dinner we found advantages in terms of providing variety minute, collapsed. One major unexpected drawback was in the hotel, and a lead-in to the awards ceremony. We also the declaration of Conception, to be held in Leeds in thought that hotels serve Christmas dinners fifty times a February 1987, to celebrate 50 years of fandom and year, it’s a relatively cheap meal (the 1981 Eastercon conventions. After discussion, we scrapped our half-formed Banquet also cost £8 a head; a banquet with any other plans to celebrate 50 years of British fandom. Conception menu would have been £12 or more), and that the had a better ‘right’ to the celebration, we thought, and we Metropole was unlikely to muck it up as badly as some didn’t want to duplicate what they would do. We worried banquets have been in the past. (rightly) about another 1987 convention ‘competing’ for A couple of weeks after Albacon some of the Beccon fans’ time and money, but there was nothing we could do committee went to UFP, the Star Trek convention that was about it. (Incidentally, as individuals, most of us later went the first con to be held in the Metropole Hotel. With 400 to Conception, and enjoyed it.) people, mostly tucked away in one of the three video We went to Albacon, knowing that the Harrogate bid programmes or the cinema, the hotel seemed very empty, would not be presented, confident that we had planned a and although the quality of the hot food was good, it was good, varied convention, but worried that without a expensive and poorly served, there was little choice, and competing bid we would not get the chance to explain our the sandwiches were expensive and very boring. There ideas to people. We were right to be worried: there were were problems with security, and with hotel staff treating almost no questions at the bidding session, and those few convention members as second-class citizens. The hotel there were concentrated on the hoary old problems (such was full of businessmen, who spent the days in the NEC, as the one about two keys for rooms occupied by two and most of the women in the hotel bar were whores. We people) which no con committee I know of has ever had came away with pages of notes on how to do things better, any control over, try we never so hard. Of course, many and what we needed to discuss with the hotel. people didn’t bother attending the bidding session, We were quite sure that we could do better. Many of knowing that Beccon was fore-ordained. But we took over a the problems were at least partly the fault of the UFP hundred memberships at Albacon, and several key people committee, and most of the rest were the result of the agreed to take part in programme items or to help with the shared occupation of the hotel. We were confident of our con in various ways, so we went home happy. ability to get what we wanted from the hotel, the only We planned a good Eastercon, a varied and multi- residents of the hotel over Easter weekend would be 34 members of Beccon, we were going to be larger than UFP. fulfilling prophecy was in force in some circles: No one There wasn’t a lot we could do about the size of the rooms (read: none of my friends!) is going to Beccon, so Beccon isn’t and the location of the hotel, but we thought our plans for going to be worth going to, so I won’t go to Beccon. the usage of rooms was better than the Trek con’s and that And Beccon found that it couldn’t put panels greater numbers would take care of the rest. together because people weren’t going to Beccon. And Things went fairly smoothly for the next few months. some of the people who were going refused to appear on Despite a friendly hotel manager, we had the usual the programme, and a couple of people backed out of things problems with the hotel not answering letters, and not they had said they would do. So some of the spaces in the wanting to discuss matters months in advance, but what we programme for panels and talks about science fiction and did get out of him was eventually satisfactory. (Digression fandom were replaced by the silly games that other people for those not into conrunning: hotels normally make all the were willing to organise and play. arrangements for a business convention only a few weeks Around about Christmas it should have been clear in advance. Con committees needing discussions and that this was happening, and we probably should have decisions over a longer time-scale tend to confuse them. redesigned the convention – particularly the use of rooms – This is quite normal for all science fiction conventions to restore the balance. With hindsight, it is clear that we except Glasgow ones.) Membership was going well, and the could have done a great deal to salvage the situation, to programme was coming together, except for films, which persuade people to attend, to sell the idea that we had of got tied up in Harris Films’ collapse and subsequent chaos the con to people who would have been interested and in the film hire business. interesting. But by that stage we lacked the energy, we Then things started going a little awry. A couple of lacked the imagination and we lacked the enthusiasm to do people backed out of previously firm commitments for very much about it. And when, eventually, the whole thing personal reasons. More told us that they were not sure they was shaken out, we found we lacked a whole thread of the would be at Beccon – and if they were there, commitments convention, and by that time it really was too late. to Worldcon or elsewhere meant that they could not, or But we still had a very strong programme. We had a would not, do anything for us. Some people decided that whole thread based on Keith Roberts, including the play going to Conception meant they could not afford Beccon. based on one of his stories. We had Jane Gaskell and Ian The friendly hotel manager left, and his replacement gave Watson, John Halas and George Stone, Dave Hardy and the us a great deal of hassle and worry. Ghost of Honour. We had workshops, games, auctions, a Meanwhile, around fandom, still amidst the general good film programme and all the usual extras. We looked at enthusiasm among the fans I knew best, I was noticing the curves of Eastercon membership over time in occasional indirect signs of hostility. One person told me Conrunner (a conrunners’ fanzine produced by Ian that he wasn’t going to be at Beccon because we were going Sorensen), and we were running a little ahead of them, and to be utterly frivolous; another that he wasn’t going to be we still reckoned we would get 800 or more members. And there because we were unremittingly serious. I was asked we were into the run-up period, when we were confirming about the rumour that we were banning smoking at what we’d got and hustling for what we hadn’t, producing Beccon. I was told that we were ‘elitist’ because we had the the programme book and still having problems with the impudence to hold an Eastercon away from a city centre, hotel. and arranging a banquet proved it. In a conversation On top of all of this, many of us were coping with overheard at the One Tun, it appeared that upstart, anti- private stress; Brian and I and a couple of others were fannish Beccon was taking over ‘our’ Eastercon. dealing with increased pressure at work. I wasn’t able to I didn’t want to make too much of these in receive telephone calls at the office, or use the telephone themselves trivial incidents. Rumours do spread, regard- for more than the shortest outgoing call. Someone else was less of one’s real intentions, and should be disregarded. But moving house, and others had different pressures. Most of the tones of voice I heard were not friendly, and I started to us, I believe, were at the limits of our tolerance. Something lose sleep. Why should anyone think we would want to ban would have given way if we’d had to carry on for much smoking? Have signs up limiting smoking to half of each longer. hall, yes, we intended to do that, and we did it, but ban it In the final weeks it became clear that Conrunner’s altogether? How could we have done so, even if we had curves did not apply, that we had taken our memberships wished to? Why should anyone think that we would choose early in the year, and were not going to follow the usual to run an Eastercon in an isolated hotel? If there had been a Eastercon pattern of picking up a quarter of the final city-centre hotel available that suited our needs we would membership in the last six weeks before the con. have tried for it, but there wasn’t. Why should anyone think Other things had come right. The unfriendly that because we had run small conventions in a light- banqueting manager had been replaced, and we had a hearted style we would run an Eastercon in precisely the reasonable contract with the hotel. The Ops structure was same style? Much of the point of bidding an Eastercon was in place, and the programme as printed was virtually intact. to do things we felt unable to do before. And upstart? Anti- On the Sunday before the convention we had a satisfactory fannish? Why on Earth... final meeting with the banqueting manager. We were all set My own impressions were reinforced by other to go. people. Why do some people hate Beccon so much, How was the convention? You tell me: I spent much someone asked me? I didn’t know. They weren’t telling me. of the time finding out that a hotel does not consider itself They still haven’t. bound by a contract, and dealing with the consequences. I think that if we had been planning to run a But that is a tale for another article, maybe for Conrunnner. Mexicon, some people would have been antagonistic I know we had some successes. I know we had some because it was Beccon that organised it. failures. And I know that a lot of people disagree about Whatever the causes, the effects were clear. A self- which was which, which is fair enough. The general 35 impression I got is that people who got involved in the con thought I had become cynical, that fandom could not by and large had a fairly good time, but the people who sat disappoint me again. But now I’ve found that I had merely in the bar with their (largely absent) friends didn’t. I am become more cynically naïve. sorry for and about the latter group, but I refuse to accept Now, when I am feeling paranoid, I know that there responsibility for them. They made their own convention, it are people who consider my existence, my thoughts and wasn’t the one I had a hand in. feelings to be hostile, unfannish, unacceptable; that Beccon How do I feel about the con? I have very mixed is the enemy of fandom as these people know it, and that I feelings. I think we achieved a good part of what we set out am tarred with the Beccon-brush. Sometimes in the to do, but that our failure to respond to changing Wellington in the past few months I’ve avoided people circumstances negated much of what we did achieve. I because I was afraid they’d look at me, and say Beccon, and would run the same con again, but in a different way, and it turn away. would feel different to the participants. On the whole, I can It would be easy, sometimes, to say that we were forgive myself and the committee for our mistakes. Not the wrong, that it was all a disaster, to repent and be received glorious Easter I had hoped for, but not Black Easter either. back into the fannish fold. But I had a large part in Beccon, And the day after judgement, when the verdict is the con was shaped by my ideas, and I will not repudiate it. known and the consequences faced? And there is no church of fandom to cry me heretic. A quote: When I am not feeling paranoid, I know that this is I was amazed to be told after last Beccon, ‘It was paranoia. great, everyone thought so,’ and by just as many, I hope it is paranoia. ‘It was awful, everyone thought so.’ Sometimes I wonder. Mike Moir, Albacon Report, Matrix #71 — Caroline Mullan1987 Quite so. One of the wise sayings among conrunners is that So yes, Beccon was a convention, like other conventions. But you learn when people don’t enjoy themselves, but not it was also a dream, and in particular it was my dream. I had when they do. I think that’s wrong. People who enjoyed a love affair with fandom, and Beccon was its consummation. Beccon have told me so, to my face and in print. Many more I put more effort into Beccon, cared more about it, than have told us which bits they thought we did right and what almost anything else I have ever done, before or since. And we did wrong. Several other people who I am fairly sure did suffered for it, as the lover does when the love-affair is one- not enjoy themselves have avoided the subject in my sided. And wrote about it, justifying myself after the event, as presence – on the whole, I think (I am not sure) I prefer one does. And find myself embarrassed, now, to see how them to do so. Several have been very uncomplimentary in foolish I was when I was young. print, and of course, they are perfectly entitled to be. I survived my broken heart and my paranoia, and But... helped run several more Eastercons, though I never fell in One of the biggest mistakes we made was not to say, love again. Eastercons still happen, so far. So why does it loudly and often, what it was that we tried to do and why. matter how I felt then? Why tell you now in Banana Wings We knew why we did things, but found it difficult to say so the story of my calf-love? clearly: high ideals ring false on paper, and people are For readers who are conrunners, because I am not the cynical. I find it hard to accept blame for things that we had only foolish conrunner, nor was Beccon the only Eastercon. no control over while all our successes are ascribed to our Much of the grief – all? – that I thought was unique to Beccon luck and not to our judgement. People assumed – and are is normal for Eastercons. Eastercons are always loved by still assuming – that they know what we were doing, even some and reviled by others; always well-organised in some though we didn’t tell them, and I don’t think there are any areas, poorly in others; always successful for some of their telepaths in fandom. participants and not for others; would always benefit from I think we made a mistake in assuming that fandom more time and more commitment than is actually available. is full of goodwill. There is quite a lot of it around as it And on most Eastercon committees there are one or two happens, and most of us have been beneficiaries of it at people who identify more closely with the convention, and some time or another, but you can’t assume it’s there all the feel its failures more keenly, than the others. This is the time, or for everyone, and you can’t hope for people to give conrunners’ condition, and there is no help for it (just like life, you credit for trying. really). But maybe it will help to know that this is true for all Maybe if I was a telepath I would have known these conventions, not just your convention. You are not alone. fairly obvious points years ago, and saved myself a lot of But for the rest of you: you who would never dream of grief, but I’m not, and I didn’t. But now I know. running a convention and you who will write to Banana And I haven’t yet forgiven fandom for shattering my Wings to tell my 1987-self to grow up and get a life; you who illusions again. I could not – still cannot – understand the will whinge when you don’t like the Eastercon hotel and hostility directed towards us by people who did not know complain when you can’t get a second key to your hotel us as individuals, who hardly acknowledged our existence room... I doubt you’ll care about a conrunner’s broken heart as a group prior to the bid; unreasonable hostility towards a or how hard it is to run an Eastercon. And you’re right, it group of people who were putting in a lot of effort and a lot really isn’t a big deal; it’s just another convention. And see, I of time, and who were taking risks, to put on an Eastercon. don’t care any more, and I don’t run Eastercons any more Of course, disillusionment is not a new feeling. At my either. But, would you care if there were no more Eastercons, first few conventions I was innocently sure that all fans I wonder? were my potential friends, that I only had to meet them to Because there aren’t many people who want to run be accepted, and of course, after a while I learned that this Eastercons in the first place. And when you’ve punished was not so, that some fans would never be my friends. But I enough of us for wanting to, there won’t be any more. still did not think that any fan would ever be my enemy. I —Caroline Mullan1999 36 Whither the Book Room? Banana Wings #39 (August 2009)

It sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? Ou sont les neiges d’antan? It was still the book room when I arrived at Seacon Whither the book room? But it’s a question I think needs in 1979 to buy books from the hundreds of ‘Book Dealers/ asking: whither the book room at UK science fiction Hucksters Tables’ in Hall 3 and Gallery at the Brighton conventions? Conference Centre. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s and well Of course, it isn’t just the book room any more. It’s into this century, at every Eastercon and Novacon (and the dealers’ room, and alongside the books there’s even at British Worldcons) the majority of tables offered jewellery, costumes, craft works, toys and games, music books. At smaller conventions you would find Ken Slater, or and videos, goth and tons of other stuff. All good stuff, all the van der Voorts, or Rog Peyton, or all three. In the welcome contributors to the conversation, but they aren’t Nineties the bookselling chains joined in sometimes, and what it was for and they aren’t why we’re here (and that’s you might find tables stocked from a local branch of why I’m not going to mention them again). We’re here for Waterstone’s or Forbidden Planet. You could buy books at the science fiction dammit, and for a long time that meant conventions: new books, second-hand books, magazines, for the books*. comics. You could pick up catalogues, subscribe to Without books – printed in ink on paper†, bound, magazines, place an order for a forthcoming book to be stored, transported and displayed for readers to find and sent to you, ask knowledgeable booksellers for buy or borrow – there would not be any science fiction. The recommendations and advice, browse book stalls stocked galaxy-spanning, mind-expanding literature that is SF was with books you had never seen for sale before, and talk to born in books, has continued for over a century in books, other browsers about the books you shared. The book and continues – alongside many other media – in books room was an essential part of the convention, and still. Books aren’t going to go away; they’re here to stay (or everybody at the con would pass through it at some point. if not that is a different conversation). But their forms are Sometime this century this changed, although up changing, and the ways we make and find them are until about 2005 (IMHO) you could be forgiven for not changing, and what happens to them at conventions is noticing. (2005 was the year of Interaction, the 63rd changing. And we need to talk about what is happening in Worldcon, in Glasgow, and Paragon 2, the 56th Eastercon, in the book room. Hinckley, and there’s some detail below for those I’ve put some of the more background and interested in specifics.) The changes that are very meditative stuff that you might find interesting about this noticeable this century can be summarised as follows: under other heads, which you can read or skip as the whim there are few or no new booksellers coming to trade at UK takes you. This bit is the polemic. conventions. We continue to lose old booksellers. We see Science fiction books were and remain incredibly increasing numbers of specialist publishers bringing their important to fandom. Conventions are organised and own stock to sell direct to readers at conventions, fanzines are produced by people who read them and write bypassing the booksellers. And the book room is no longer them and want to talk about them. Their authors are also essential and central to the convention experience. their readers, as well as our guests and our panellists and We continue to lose old booksellers, and we are not our friends in conversation in the bar. Our conversations attracting new booksellers. Why? The small (in relation to are about the books and informed by the books we share. the business world) independents – Andromeda, Fantast Our games and quizzes and costumes and films and TV and Medway, Fantasy Centre – are closing as their owners filk all reference the books. Our history is written in the retire or find business unprofitable (although in this books. And our book rooms sold them to us when you respect they share common experience with independent couldn’t get them everywhere, and continue to do so today. bookshops more generally). There are few new bookselling Will they continue to do so? businesses starting up: it is hard to sustain such a business Conventions have had book rooms for a while in the in competition with Amazon, AbeBooks and the like. The UK. Rob Hansen suggested since sometime in the 1960s, internet traders, large shop chains and supermarkets that but he didn’t know exactly (maybe someone reading this sell most books in the UK think of themselves primarily as could tell us?). Brian Ameringen, whose first con was the distributors, and do not (in general) consider the marginal first Novacon in 1972, tells me it used to be called Ken business of trading at conventions worthwhile. Slater’s Book Room, because it was just him‡. Then over the We continue to see increasing numbers of specialist years he attracted company: fans selling surplus books to publishers bringing their own stock to sell at conventions, other fans, and commercial booksellers – Andromeda, bypassing the booksellers. Specialist and occasional Fantasy Centre, At the Sign of the Dragon, Dark They Were publishers of SF and books about and related to SF, and and Golden Eyed, and many others. specialist arms of general publishers, have been taking tables at cons to sell books for many years: Interzone since * And magazines and comics too of course, but I’m just the mid-’80s, the Women’s Press, Gollancz, PS Publishing, going to let books stand for them all. Beccon Publications, NESFA, the British Science Fiction † In deference to Greg’s feelings I will refrain from talking Association, the Science Fiction Foundation, Liverpool about dead trees. University Press and many others. Unlike the booksellers, ‡ And of course other people have argued that we owe new publishers keep coming. Why? In brief, because a British fandom itself to Ken’s efforts, but that’s a different publisher selling at a convention is engaged in purchasing, topic. marketing and selling its books, works in the bar as well as 37 in the book room, and values the conventional contacts for a book that you knew you wanted and go home with a with readers and writers for all three reasons. (By contrast book you did not know you wanted. We will lose a place the poor bookseller has only one string to their bow and where people pass on books they have read to new readers. must make all their return for the costs of being at the con We will lose (perhaps have already lost) a peaceful place at on the books they sell.) the heart of the convention, where readers linger to browse Why is the book room becoming less essential and among books at rest on their journey from writer to reader. less central to the convention experience? There are more We lose altogether a longer, slower conversation among books published, and it is hard to stock a book stall with the books we might buy but choose not to (particularly material that is not more easily, more habitually and often important, this, I think, as the world increasingly organises more cheaply obtained elsewhere (especially from itself to offer only what it already knows we want). And we Amazon!). It also seems that books no longer sell will lose our links to the time when people could make themselves to browsers seeking to buy (and there is too their living buying and selling books. In short, we will lose much to discuss on that point to unpack here). Time is a some significant part of the conversation between the factor twice over: time at conventions gets scarcer and readers and writers of science fiction. busier and there is less time to spare for browsing; and as I do not think it is necessary to lose all these things. I time marches on old readers first cease to buy, and think that if we still want the book room it will be possible ultimately cease to read. None of this would matter if new for books still to be sold at conventions, and for people took up bookselling at conventions, and new fans booksellers, not publishers or writers or fans, to sell them. had only or mainly books to feed their interests in SF, and But we will have to want the books, and someone will have new readers were still accumulating piles of books, and if to want to sell them, and we will all – writers, publishers, science fiction was still scarce in the outside world. If only… readers and conrunners – have to adapt to the changes that but the world is not like that any more. And so the book will make it possible. room continues to change. Will we call for the booksellers still? And will there There is one more change coming now that has not be booksellers to answer the call? been very evident to date: the ebooks are on the march. These questions await their answers. Many of us already read them sometimes. Some of us prefer them to books printed on paper. I believe that, for the next Considering the forms of books few years at least, books will continue to be printed in ink People have probably been telling and listening to stories on paper, bound, stored, transported and displayed for since we first talked to each other at all, and we are at it readers to find and buy or borrow. But as the costs to still. Spoken stories, the shortest epigrams and jokes or the publishers of acquiring, printing and distributing books longest epics, take as long to be heard as they take to tell. In increasingly become optional, the supply of printed books the old days, and still today when we choose, the listener is will decrease. There are already SF books available only as there, committed to hearing the tale, and the storyteller ebooks, pending orders sufficient to print-on-demand. controls the telling. Once told, the tale rests until someone When readers wanting new books buy downloads to an chooses to tell it again, and there is no guarantee that the ebook reader rather than visiting a (bricks and mortar or tale is ever told twice in the same form. Indeed, some online) bookshop to obtain a printed book, how will the storytellers make a virtue of this, and work with each new book room fare then? audience, shaping their tales anew with each telling. Some predictions for what they are worth. The People started writing down their stories a long time numbers of booksellers and sales of printed books at ago, and we have books written onto clay and wax tablets, conventions will continue to decrease. The numbers of stone, silk, vellum, parchment, papyrus… If the material publishers and writers* marketing their books at will hold a mark there may be a book made from it. conventions – not necessarily printed books, and not only Sometimes only one copy of the book is made at a time; or even necessarily in the dealers’ room – will continue to sometimes scriptoriums or printing presses make many increase. There will still be dealers’ rooms at conventions, copies of the same book; sometimes books go through but you will rarely find piles and shelves of printed books multiple or variant drafts, or editions or translations. For to browse there, or a bookseller to point you at a book you all these reasons there may be variations from one copy of did not already know was there. a book to another; but we do not usually consider that Unless… these variations make different books. Perhaps formerly Unless what? Nobody knows. The world is changing the writer had some expectation that the book’s reader very fast in many ways, and maybe something will happen would start at the beginning and follow the tale straight to change the course of change. through to its end, while latterly writers have played with If the day comes that there are no more booksellers form, and written tales that make other suggestions. It is at conventions, what will we have lost? We need have no the nature of the making of fixed marks, however, that no fear that we will lose books: the cumulative activity of matter the writer’s intent or how the book is made, the tale everyone who ever wanted to write or read a book will see is finally committed to that fixed form, and does not change to that. But I think we will lose something. We will lose the thereafter. The reader, though, will read as much of that serendipitous discovery that comes when books jostle story, or as little, or as often as they will, and thus plays other books from different authors and publishers and their own part in making the book they read. eras; the accidental juxtaposition of book with Recently, we have been able to record the spoken neighbouring book; the glimpse of a cover that catches your stories, releasing the listener from the need to be present eye; the sight of a book mentioned last night in the bar that as the tale is told. The listener to an audiobook or podcast prompts you to buy. We will lose a place where you can ask has a degree of control. They may listen as if present at the telling, if they so choose. Or they may change the * And that’s another whole article in itself. experience: select a part, listen again, skip backwards and 38 forwards, pause and restart, thus departing from the that these are the books they want to read, and make them storyteller’s intent and imposing some of the listener’s self available so that they will eventually be read. Thus the upon the story. Perhaps when they listen in this way their fundamental activities of the book trade are writing, buying experience is more akin to reading a book that is read than and editing the writers’ texts to turn them into books, hearing a story told. printing and distributing the books, and marketing so that We can do everything we did before when we made people will buy the published books. and heard or read a story, but now there are new First the writer’s text is read, bought (at a price possibilities too. We have recently found some new ways of determined largely by the publisher) and edited. Then the making books: writers’ marks and storytellers’ tales may text of the book is set into (metal or digital) type, ink is now be encoded and presented to the reader digitally as pressed to paper in print runs of thousands, the paper cut ebooks and audiobooks, via computers, and the internet. It into pages, the pages bound into books, and the books seems obvious that this gives writers new tools for writing taken to a warehouse and stored for a while. After a time, and sharing their books: in digital form stories need not be the books are taken from the warehouse and delivered to linear; nor need their final form be fixed before they are booksellers and libraries, who have more warehouses of sent out into the world. Nor does a writer need (so much) their own, but (more importantly to readers) also have help from publisher and printing press to make many shops and libraries in which books are both stored and copies of their book, nor from booksellers to distribute displayed until people eventually come to buy and read those copies until they find their readers. There are also them. And while the books themselves move along this new forms of collaboration between readers and writers, chain, people are writing reviews and advertising blurbs, giving readers parts to play in shaping the final forms of organising sales events and turning up at signing sessions written stories. However, it is not quite so obvious (at least and chat shows in order to persuade readers to buy, to this writer) that there are new ways of reading: readers borrow and read the books. must still bring their own selves to engage with a writer’s In order for all of these activities to take place, trees intent, and still have the same control over their reading of are grown, felled, pulped and turned into paper. Chemicals any one version of the tale. are processed into ink. Machines are bought and Of the making and reading of books, spoken or maintained to print and bind books, and vehicles to written, heard or read, true to the storyteller’s intent or transport materials and the books themselves. People are made of your own reading, while there are stories there is employed, and taxes paid. Buildings are built, furnished, no reason there should ever be an end. maintained, heated and lit to provide workspaces for the people and storage and display spaces for the printed Sixteen stories about the making and uses of stories, books. and one about bookselling The book trade as we have known it is shaped by the  The Bravest Ever Bear by Allan Ahlberg & Paul Howard fact that the costs of printing and distribution fall primarily  Angels and Insects by A S Byatt to the publishers and the booksellers, while the benefits of  Possession by A S Byatt selling the books are shared between these, the authors  Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book? by Lauren Child and the readers. All this activity is ultimately paid for when  Nova by Samuel R Delany the book finally passes to its ultimate customer, and not  Inkheart by Cornelia Funke otherwise. And for a long time we have taken all of this  The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner activity and all of these costs for granted, because readers  A City of Bells by Elizabeth Goudge and writers needed publishers and booksellers, and publishers and booksellers needed facilities to print,  The Spellcoats by Diana Wynne Jones transport and store books.  ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ by Rudyard Kipling Before we move on, note some significant (not to  The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing mention obvious) consequences of this system for writers  The Praise Singer by Mary Renault and their readers:  ‘The Riddle of Ragnarok’ by Theodore Sturgeon  The price and availability of books to readers is strongly  ‘The Mnemone’ by Robert Sheckley influenced by the high fixed costs entailed in printing and  The Great Good Thing by Robert Townley distribution, because it is these costs that are least under  The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson publishers’ control.  The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe  The price and availability of books to readers is strongly influenced by the decisions of publishers, booksellers and Considering the necessities of bookselling as we have librarians – the intermediaries in the supply chain between known it writers and their readers – who are not necessarily (or We will take it for granted that writers will write books even usually) the books’ actual intended readers. that they hope will be read, and that readers will read  The decisions made by these intermediaries who actually books when they become available. In between the writing buy books from writers and attempt to sell books to and the reading, however, for a long, long time a great readers are strongly influenced by the necessities of these many things had to happen. first two. For a long, long time there has been a book trade, So what happens when the digital revolution comprising mainly publishers and booksellers. (It is also removes some or all of the need for intermediaries to print true that there was an earlier time when there were no and distribute printed books? What happens when the publishers or booksellers, but that was a time so long ago educational revolution increasingly throws up writers and far away that we will not consider it.) It has been the willing to write whether or not they are paid? business of the publishers to take books written by writers, Consider what now needs to happen to get the book turn them into many copies of the books, persuade people from the writer to the reader. The writer needs a computer 39 and a website; the reader needs a computer and an internet to Seacon ’79 to buy books. connection; and computers and the internet are cheaply I found there a Book Room that to my dazed eyes available to many people. When there is no need to involve filled a whole great hall, and its gallery, with tables laden an intermediary in printing and distributing printed books, with books. And all else that I have done in and around how much of the book trade is still needed? fandom has followed from there. In practice we are seeing the activities of the book Including my relationship since 1982 with my trade changing as people and businesses pose these partner, Brian Ameringen, who has been trading in second questions and come up with a wide variety of different hand SF, fantasy and horror as Porcupine Books since 1997, answers. and at conventions for longer than that. Does the writer need a publisher? Some say no; the Including this article. writer can present and market their own work direct to Including the workshop that we are running at readers, and some are doing so. Others say yes; the Novacon to discuss these issues and what they mean for SF publisher still provides vital services in editing and conventions in the UK. Please come and contribute. marketing the book. Does the book need to be typeset, printed in Considering the future of bookselling at SF conventions thousands, bound, stored, distributed? The answers are Who are the science fiction booksellers at SF cons these various: some books are now designed to be read on days? Let’s take a quick run around my memory* of the screens and may never be committed to paper at all; others book room at Paragon 2 in Hinckley in 2005. The Paragon may exist primarily in digital form, but be printed in small dealers’ room was notable for the number and variety of numbers as and when and where they can be sold; still book dealers relative to the years before and since. others continue to be printed and distributed in large Consider where those booksellers are now. numbers. (1) Ken Slater was trading there as Fantast Medway, Does the book need a publisher and a bookseller or selling new books and magazines. His health was already librarian to bring it from the writer to the reader? Ah, now fading, and in fact Ken died in 2008. His daughter Susie there’s a question! Haynes is trading as Fantast Three, is still supplying There will continue to be many answers. magazines (such as Analog and Locus), and is still bringing Ken’s old stock to conventions, but she is not acquiring new Some facts about publishing in the UK stock. Ken Slater was Guest of Honour at the 1959 The facts given here are taken from an article by John Kay, Eastercon in Birmingham, and Fan Guest of Honour jointly about something else entirely, that was published in the with his wife Joyce at the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton, Financial Times on 24 June 2009. They have not been where he ran his stall as usual throughout the con. checked, but do seem reasonable. (2) Iain Emsley, trading as Austgate, brought new The British spend two billion pounds a year (that’s books, mostly non-fiction and specialist press. He had only £2,000,000,000) buying books in the ‘consumer market’ for recently started up, hoping to build a new book business on newly-published books which includes Amazon, high street this basis; but later found he wasn’t able to keep Austgate and independent bookshops, supermarkets and book clubs. going, and no longer trades. That money buys 250 million individual books, comprising (3) Bob Wardzinski was there, trading as the Talking about 70,000 individual titles. So each title, on average, Dead. He was selling second-hand books and magazines as sells between 3,000 and 4,000 copies. a sideline to working as a teacher. At the time he hoped to So on average each book published has a budget of give up teaching and take up bookselling full time, but about £30,000 to include royalties, printing, marketing and rumour says he has given up that idea now. distribution. (4) Rog Peyton was there. Roger ran Andromeda Note that royalties, printing and distribution all (to Books as a shop and mail order bookseller for new and varying degrees) become optional for writers and second-hand books from 1971 until 2002, when the publishers in an electronic world. Only marketing remains business closed down following a complex series of adverse essential, although all of the factors that govern that are events. Rog set up in business again as Replay Books, and also changing. These facts are putting booksellers with continued trading on the internet and at conventions. Now shops out of business, and significantly and continuously he is planning to retire altogether in the near future. Rog changing the way the publishing industry operates. was Fan Guest of Honour at Orbital, the 2008 Eastercon. (5) At the Sign of the Dragon sells new and second- An autobiographical note hand books, concentrating on media-related material, and In 1979 I went to my first convention: Seacon ’79, the third has traded at conventions for over thirty years. Richard and British Worldcon, in Brighton. Marion van der Voort sold their shop in Richmond a few The man at the till at the London specialist SF years ago and moved the business to the Scottish book bookshop Dark They Were and Golden Eyed said, when I town, Wigtown, in Dumfries & Galloway. They continued to asked for a particular book: ‘We don’t have it. Try Seacon.’ trade at conventions. Marion died in 2007, and although I was confused. What was a Seacon? Richard still sells (mainly second-hand and out of print and Shortly, I had my answer: a Seacon was a place where all the SF booksellers in the world would gather to * I have tried to check what’s written here, which is to the sell books. That was enough for me. best of my memory and anecdotal knowledge, and I will be So I did not go to my first con for the Guests (Brian happy to apologise and correct any mis-statements or Aldiss, Fritz Leiber, and Harry Bell) or the panels. I did not errors of omission or commission brought to my attention. go for the Masquerade, or the film programme, or the Art I also apologise to anyone who was there who I haven’t Show. I did not go to see the Hugos awarded. I did not go to mentioned; there were some, I’m sure, including at least meet fans. I knew nothing about any of these things. I went one comics dealer who comes regularly to cons. 40 new paperbacks and magazines in the SF and fantasy fields) means of defraying the expense of attending conventions and brings books and magazines to cons, he plans to retire and disposing of duplicate books. when he is 65 in a few years time. He will close the (11) The British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) business. was there. The BSFA often takes tables in dealers’ rooms. It (6) Cold Tonnage Books is run by Andy Richards, usually runs a tombola, a lottery with ex-review books as although Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer ran the stall for prizes. It also sells the occasional books it has published. him at Paragon. Cold Tonnage has been trading in new and The BSFA recently celebrated its 50th birthday and is still second-hand books for over 20 years. Andy used to sell going strong as a not-for-profit business limited by books through shops in London, but these have closed. It’s guarantee. boring trading on the internet, Andy says, and he wants to retire. In summary, at Paragon: (7) Fantasy Centre was there. In June 2009 Fantasy There were four commercial booksellers selling new Centre celebrated 40 years in business as Europe’s only books: one has gone; one continues on a non-commercial specialist second-hand dealer in SF and fantasy with shop basis; and the other two will be going soon. premises, and closed down. There were four professional second-hand book- (8) Brian Ameringen, trading as Porcupine Books, sellers: two have gone; Porcupine and Cold Tonnage may offered second-hand SF, fantasy and horror for readers and trade for some years yet. collectors. He’s been trading at conventions for 20 years There was one fan selling second-hand books for and is relatively young. He should be around for a few years supplementary income. We will probably see them, or yet, so long as people still want to buy second-hand books. others like them, again. (9) Roger Robinson ran a compound stall. He sells There were (at least) two stalls selling and books published by himself as Beccon Publications and by marketing books on behalf of a variety of fannish and more- several other small publishers including the Science Fiction or-less-professional publishing enterprises. All still trade, Foundation. He also sells second-hand books raising funds and we have seen more like these in recent years. This for the Science Fiction Foundation. Roger is semi-retired, sector, at least, looks likely to continue bringing books to and publishes and sells books as a self-financing hobby. conventions. (10) Roger Perkins had a stall selling second-hand Long live the book room. paperbacks. Roger is a fan who does this occasionally as a

The Eastercon Is Not Your Bitch Banana Wings #48 (December 2011)

Authorial note: This article contains many statements of the onto, and are doing it in their free time. You need to read bleeding obvious, and as such has the potential to offend, one this essay with this very firmly in mind – it explains a lot. way or another, almost everybody who has ever got involved The second thing you need to know is that nobody with any Eastercon; but it is written to analyse, inform and ever had to go to an Eastercon. That includes you. entertain, and I hope will be read in that spirit. And the third thing you need to know is that, regardless of who you are and why you interact with it, the Every Easter weekend for the past thirty years or so a Eastercon is not your bitch. thousand people, give or take three hundred, have joined I say again, the Eastercon is not your bitch. This the Eastercon. Each convention was funded by the means everyone. This means me, and this means you. memberships those people paid. For each Eastercon a dozen people worked their socks off for up to three years Potential and Actual Seated Eastercon Committees: Thank (and for some of them, particularly programme planners, you for wanting to run an Eastercon. We’re very grateful that means twenty-to-forty hour weeks each week for you are willing to put in the work, wish you all the best in several months before the con). Maybe a hundred will do your endeavours, and sympathise with your having to put preparatory work of some kind with programme items or up with other people’s critical opinions, including this one. costumes or technical equipment in order to help the But you need to know that the Eastercon has a history convention run. Another couple of hundred will put in running back six decades. There is a cluster of different effort on the day participating in the programme, or as communities concerned with what it is and how it is gophers or stewards. A hundred more will bring dealers’ organised, some of which have been around for almost all stock or artwork. And the rest – many of whom will have those decades and some of which just joined in recently. At done similar work in other years – will turn up and enjoy all times it is the gathering and inter-relationship of the results. currently active British science fiction clans: social, literary, So the first thing that you need to know is that scientific, artistic, technological, charitable and commercial. Eastercons are run by volunteers. Committed volunteers. Almost nobody comes to an Eastercon for just one Competent volunteers. But volunteers. Who are not being reason; we come for the synthesis of all of these. When you paid for it, are not being told what to do by a boss, are not bid to run an Eastercon, please be sure it is an Eastercon being appraised against a job specification, do not have you want to run, and be prepared to address all the specialist resources or other people to pass excess work Eastercon’s constituent communities with your ideas. Your 41 age range is 0-90 (and remember what that means for the people other than yourselves is a good start! And when you range of physical ability). You are international. You are get down to practicalities and want to schedule people onto interdisciplinary. You are intersocial. You are many things specific programme items, have you realised you need to to many people whose common factor is science fiction. see convention membership and hotel booking lists so that Making choices and playing with the form (e.g. you don’t ask people to be on items when they are not costume ball rather than masquerade) are fine; telling one going to be there? And can your planning systems cope or more of its communities its contribution is not welcome with volume of emails, and the nuances of participation: A is not. Bringing in new skills, ideas and enthusiasm is fine; will only be scheduled between 11 AM and 4 PM. B does not assuming that the way it has been done up till now is not wish to be on a panel with C. D is leaving at 3 PM on Sunday. satisfactory and needs fixing is not. Extending and E won’t know for sure she’s coming until a few days exploring the boundaries is fine; going wholly outside them beforehand. You can’t get it right, you know, but there are is not. Talking among yourselves about what you want to some things it would be nice if you didn’t get wrong. do is essential. Don’t forget to talk to the rest of us too. Programme volunteers: Thank you for wanting to Old Pharts: You probably know whether you are one. If not, contribute to the Eastercon. Your participation and your why not? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, but if ideas are valuable and useful. Please understand that you don’t know, are you sure you have been paying Eastercon programme planners working in their spare time attention?) Since the first Eastercon was held in 1948, in all deal with a couple of hundred people on a typical Eastercon probability there had already been Eastercons for several programme, and they don’t know everything about decades by the time you turned up, and you were probably everybody. They may (sorry) make mistakes and lose your younger then than you are now, too. We all hope the email down the back of the sofa – it’s a pity, but it happens, Eastercon has a future. Some of us would like it the way it so please don’t take it personally. They are happy to was when we were younger and don’t want it to change. recognise you as an interesting person, and invite you to Face it: this is not possible. You are not as young as you join the conversations that entertain and educate us, but were. The things you did because you had to sometimes they are not there to indulge your ego, promote your don’t need doing any more. There are – believe it or not – book/film/game/whatever for you, or give you free access things that need doing now that you didn’t have to worry to jointly-funded facilities to use for your own personal about. And the things you did because you wanted to when gain. They are entitled to say thank you, that isn’t you were young are not necessarily things people want to something we want to do at this Eastercon. (Can’t think do now – Eastercons themselves being an exception, of what I might be getting at? Happy to oblige: we might be course. Besides, what is the point of being a science fiction delighted to discuss the uses of bondage in science fiction fan if you cannot cope with the future arriving in your own stories, but that doesn’t mean we want you to run bondage back yard? workshops.) So if you think you have something to contribute to the Eastercon, don’t assume you are known: Young Pharts: You probably don’t know why I’ve called you make contact early, introduce yourself appropriately, and that. Never mind, we were all young once and you don’t be prepared to repeat yourself if necessary. have to stay that way (and if you want to stay around you might want to think about finding out). Meanwhile you Branded participants: There are quite a few of you*, and have attended one or two Eastercons and have opinions on your numbers and expectations and cumulative contribu- how they ought to run. Don’t think you are one? Look at tion to the Eastercon have grown over the years. The your conrep: it complained that the programme had 60 or Eastercon values the organisations and individuals whose 90 minute programme slots, or did or did not leave gaps for interests march with the Eastercon: publishers who launch lunch, or did or did not do this, that or the other that you books; dealers and artists who do business with members; would have preferred, or that this, that or the other was not people and organisations who organise talks, panels, well done. The Eastercon is not perfect, and has never awards ceremonies, workshops and sponsored parties. pleased anyone, let alone everyone. It never has and never Your combined contribution to the Eastercon is enormous, will, there are good reasons why, and when you know what but here you are still volunteers among other volunteers. those are you are in a position to complain and be listened Your event should fit into the overall Eastercon the to. If you are still complaining about things like this when committee want to run. You may be being paid and paying you’ve been to five Eastercons it’s time to think about to organise your particular event, but you are still relying running one for yourself: that way you get to find out why it on the Eastercon’s volunteer and jointly-funded resources works that way. Until then, remember that your complaints to enable it to happen. And you can’t all have your are useful only to people thinking about running them, and sponsored item in Eastercon prime time (3-10 PM Saturday, interesting only to yourselves. if you were wondering). So play nice, please, and remember that you are members, not customers, of the Eastercon. Programme Planners: See Eastercon Committees above. Then think some more about your programme. Do you Panellists: Thank you for wanting to contribute to the know who the Eastercon communities are this year, and Eastercon. Your participation is valuable and useful. But what they are talking about? Who is doing the talking and could you please remember that you have agreed to take are they coming to the convention? Will your programme part in a conversation of mutual interest for the plans engage them from the off, or will they mutter in their own corners that they don’t feel welcome? Will they come * Disclaimer: Since I am actively involved in organising to you (the BSFA, the SFF, some professionals, some fans) Eastercon events for the Science Fiction Foundation, that or are they people you have to invite? If you don’t know should perhaps be ‘us’, rather than ‘you’. But I prefer the these things, how are you going to find out? Hint: Talking to second person here to fit in with the rest of the piece. 42 entertainment and enlightenment of the audience. You had if lucky, an Eastercon committee has a choice of people to the opportunity to say no, not interested, or to ask more do particular jobs and take particular roles; more often the questions before agreeing to participate. If by chance or problem to be solved is getting the job done by anyone at negligence you have ended up on a panel that does not suit all. Polite comment and criticism of the results is you, it is only polite to join in, even if only minimally. It is warranted, for otherwise we cannot learn. Some comments rude to spend twenty minutes on a subject unrelated to the are never warranted, and these are the ones that include topic under discussion. It is rude to disengage and start personal abuse, or are based on false assumptions: that writing your conrep while the other panellists try to carry people are at fault if it doesn’t suit you personally, or that on the conversation without you. If you need the help of a being a member of the convention entitles you to command microphone to be audible to an audience, please would you its participants to your service. learn to use one before muttering inaudibly for the There are a thousand or so of us at each Eastercon. duration. And if you have agreed to moderate the panel, Some work the convention, some go to the programme, please understand that the role involves directing the some sit in the bar. The equations of place and people are discussion on behalf of the audience, and at least try to complex, there are many solutions, and not one of them is a keep it on track. good fit for everyone. Recognise that the perfect convention is not an option. Relax. Participate. Enjoy. Stewards and Gophers: Thank you for wanting to help the Eastercons are fun. Eastercons are learning Eastercon run smoothly. Your participation and your work experiences. Eastercons are worth having. are valuable and useful; we can’t run an Eastercon without The Eastercon is not your bitch. you. But we are not obliged to give you work to do just Long live the Eastercon. because you offer to do some. And anything resembling a T- shirt, a groat or a party is a recognition of your efforts and Coda an honorarium to say thank you, not an entitlement you Who is this Caroline Mullan who feels qualified to speak in can sue for. propria persona for the Eastercon? She arrived in fandom at Seacon ’79, the first Worldcon in Brighton, and has Hotel Management: Thank you for being willing to host the attended every Eastercon from 1980 to 2011. She has been Eastercon. There are several hundred people we want to reading and writing for fanzines, often about conventions, talk to, and it would be nice if they came to stay in your ever since. She was actively involved in organising hotel over the weekend, when otherwise you would be Eastercons and other conventions from 1982 until 1995, empty. So will you help us, please, with reasonable room including the programmes for Beccon ’87 and Speculation rates, bar prices that recognise the range and quantity of in 1991, with additional experience in finance, publications, what we drink, food that varies a bit from day to day, green room, convention and programme ops, newsletter, recognises a sensible variety of dietary constraints (there registration, dealers’ room and art show. She remains are, for instance, vegetarians, coeliacs, and diabetics among regularly and actively involved in organising and us), and comes at several different price points. We’re participating in the programme, and as a branded happy to give you our money for services received, but we participant in connection with her various roles in the don’t want to feel ripped off and we’d like to feel we have Science Fiction Foundation. Aware that longevity does not some choices during our four-day weekend. imply omniscience she also asked several people currently involved in running Eastercons to read it before publication Hotel Staff: We can’t have our fun without you, and we in an attempt to verify her assumptions that some truths appreciate the hard work you put in. It is nice when you do are eternal. She is pleased to report that nobody had any your jobs well around us. Bear in mind, please, that we will quibbles on that score. put a couple of hundred thousand pounds through your hotel tills over the weekend, much of which pays for your Here are some useless facts garnered from the radio over work. We do like to be treated as customers even when the last few weeks: wearing jeans and trainers, and whether or not we are The largest spider in the world is only a few inches running expense accounts. across the body. In Australia they photographed a spider the size of a human hand dragging a chicken along. It Members: And I mean all of us. You are a member of the dragged the chicken fifty yards before failing to get it Eastercon, not a customer, and not a client. Eastercon does down its one-and-a-half-inch-wide hole. not exist to serve you. It is shaped by the co-operation of a Soon there won’t be any concrete motorways. They thousand people, and under the control of none of them. build tarmac motorways when the ground is rocky, but Eastercon needs conference space and accommodation. when the ground is sandy or unstable they use concrete, Sometimes, if we are lucky, we have a choice of hotels in a which floats. But concrete is so much noisier that the given year; more often the problem is finding a suitable Department of Transport now insists that concrete hotel at all. There are not very many UK sites that can motorways be tarmaced afterwards. house us, and all of them have something wrong with them. The Del Rubio Triplets have been performing Location of the main hotel and overflow facilities, the singers for 45 years, and are hits at this year’s Edinburgh arrangements and sizes of function rooms, the state of the festival. They live in California. Their most popular facilities are all things we have to make the best of; they are number is called ‘Walk like an Egyptian’ and is quite not under the control of the convention. Complaints about incomprehensible. the state of the rooms, air conditioning or carpets should be In Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire the hedgehogs made to the hotel, not to the committee. have been losing their spines, and no one knows why. Eastercon needs organising. Each Eastercon Scorching the M25, TWP mailing 83 (May 1993) committee does the best they can for their con. Sometimes, 43