May 2014 FAN THOL O GY “The best reason to be a fan is not to become a pro, nor to stare at pros, nor to identify with characters in stories, nor to sugar-coat one’s sermons, but as you say for the fun of it.” John Hertz, COUNTERCLOCK 16 2013 Starting in 4 3 2 1. . .” by Kim Huett [[ Published in Fan sat, his posture as upright as virtue, and surveyed his private FANZINE 0, domain. He hummed a little, the sound so deep the resonance of it February 2013 ]] made the whole room vibrate faintly. All about Fan waited his faithful servants, the angular machinery, the virgin paper, the comfortably slouched reference books. Ready for action were these silent minions, a hearty crew they were, a stout regiment, a veritable horde poised to do their master's bidding if he would but command it. Fan looked upon them and was pleased. He murmured to himself, "With the likes of these there can be no stopping me." But then Fan frowned, black shadows of unwelcome doubt crept across his stern but noble features and pooled deep within the lines of hard won experience. For long seconds the bitter stain of this darkness made non-Euclidean play with the geometry of Fan's features but with a shudder Fan composed himself and willed his face clean of all emotion. Fan, you see, was a master of the social graces and knew well how to slip neatly between this and that and disappear down pauses no larger than his thumb. It showed in the way he moved with feline grace. It showed in the way he lurked so distantly behind his faint smile and half-closed eyes. It showed in the way he wore his clothes much as the world garbed itself in field and stream. Indeed, it was whispered that that the only thing known to break through Fan's self control was the sight of his own blood. What's more, one who had known him far too long swore that when opened Fan bled dark, his blood the colour of best black ink. Fan snaked out a hand to curl his fingers around his favourite tool. The sleek lines of the mouse felt good, cool as it nestled against his palm like a good servant should. Tightening his grip Fan lifted his small, grey companion and ran it meditatively across the stubble of his chin as to slice away the recalcitrant follicles, the cursor cruising this way and that in time to his movements, searching for it knew not what. Again he spoke, "One day, oh happy day, it will be mine, oh joyous day, mine forever and all eternity. But first I need the plan, the subtle plan of many parts, the plan so cunning that even the most fox-like will not comprehend what has begun until it is far too late." The rhythm of the mouse slowed as Fan sank deeper into thought, "So. What plan and where? Not with the Worldcon. That would mean attending one of the damn things. Not with the fan funds either. I hate the touch of wet, leathery flesh. "Fan paused, "What I need is a deeper game, something vaster than empires but more subtle." And then, like the first pale light of dawn when night finally seems without end, sly satisfaction welled up to fill Fan's face from ear to curving ear. Fan stretched, "Time to get busy then."

“How to Create Your Own Fan Awards” by R. Graeme Cameron Or: The CFA or CFFA? There be the question… Fannish Art Of It began with a pleasant conversation with a fan: Selfless Selfishness FAN: “Why don’t you take your giant ego and stick it in that trophy of yours?” *** ME: “What trophy?” [[ Published October 11, 2013 in FAN: “The six-foot gilded trophy you plan to award yourself Amazing Stories someday.” http://bit.ly/1qxXGu ME: “Great idea! Thank you.” s with photos ]]

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 2 of 58 I jumped right on that soonest in typical fannish fashion. So a few years later (5:40 am, Nov 24th, 2004 to be precise) I was idly thinking as I idly bathed in my non-gilded bathtub, when an idle thought occurred to me: Americans have the FAAn Awards to celebrate and promote SF fanzine fandom, the British have the Nova Awards for the same purpose, why not create the CanFaan Awards (CFA) for Canadians? A quick four years later (2008) I came up with five categories: * Best Fan Writer * Best Fan Artist * Best Fan LocHack (Letter of Comment writer) * Best Fanzine * Hall of Fame I knew I would have to start small, with an organizational committee consisting solely of me, but how to generate publicity, how to generate interest? If I failed to do that, the reputation of the awards wouldn’t extend much further than my epidermis. “Hmm, not such a bad idea,” I thought “Why not go all the way to the ultimate in simplicity and efficiency? Why don’t I just glad-hand MYSELF each and every CanFaan award? Every year a bigger and better trophy, each more gaudy and elaborate than the one before? Sooner or later Canadian Fen would be so annoyed they’d start pubbing their own ish in droves to compete with me and deny me victory, thus confirming the viability of the awards, I LIKE this concept… no visible flaws… seems perfectly logical…hmm…” My brain went into overdrive. In a sudden outburst of energy over a 48 hour period in August 2011, I founded: * The Canadian Fanzine Fanac Awards (CFFA) (‘fanac’ is fannish slang for fannish activity), * The Canadian Fanzine Fanac Awards Society (CFFAS) (a non-registered, non-existent Society), * A CFFA Facebook site (since abandoned), * A CFFA Yahoo site (since abandoned), * And a fanzine titled THE FANACTICAL FANACTIVIST (still being published), Slan I’m good! By September I had talked Taral Wayne, multiple-Hugo-nominated and Rotsler-Award-winning Canadian fan editor and fan artist, into designing the CFFAS certificate to be given to every winner. By September I had talked Eric Chu, a member of M.A.T.C. (Monster Attack Team Canada) into designing the award, the ‘Faned’. By September I had talked Lawrence Prime of M.A.T.C. into sculpting the physical master of the ‘Faned’ based on Eric Chu’s design. September 2011 was a very productive month. Slan I’m good! Then there was the little matter of the awards, to be presented at VCON 36 in October that same year. Obviously not a lot of time to send nomination forms and ballots and such. So I didn’t. I declared a few obvious choices the winners by fiat, saves a lot of fuss and muss that does. 2011 CANADIAN FANZINE FANAC AWARD WINNERS: * Best Fan Artist: Taral Wayne * Best Fan Writer: Garth Spencer * Best LocHack: Lloyd Penney * Best Fanzine: WARP, Cathy Palmer-Lister editor * Hall of Fame: The Unknown Faned Taral for his decades of legendary fanac, Garth for his decades, including the winning of the first Fan Achievement Aurora in 1986,

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 3 of 58 Lloyd for his avalanche of locs, Cathy for the club-member interactive clubzine for the Montreal SF Association, and ‘The Unknown Faned’ for publishing Canada’s first SF fanzine in early 1936, THE CANADIAN SCIENCE FICTION FAN (Unknown because in his 1936 review Donald Wollheim neglected to mention the editor’s name!). I didn’t win anything because dozens of fans said it would be gauche of me to award myself a Faned. “And what’s wrong with that?” I replied. “Seems okay to me. Worth doing. Why not?” But I gave in, Sigh. The second year’s awards marked a significant step forward. I asked assorted fen whom they thought should win. It constituted an informal vote with a number of nominees in each category. The awards went to those who received the most recommendations. The result: 2012 CANADIAN FANZINE FANAC AWARD WINNERS: * Best Fan Artist: Scott Patri * Best Fan Writer: Taral Wayne * Best LocHack: Michael John Bertrand * Best Fanzine: SWILL, Neil Williams editor * Hall of Fame: Nils Helmer Frome Scott for his primitive yet feistily fannish illos, Taral for his excellent essays, Michael for his thoughtful locs in BCSFAzine, Neil for his provocative questioning of fandom (at the same VCON presentation he won the WORST FANZINE Elron Award for his use of the Pud-Monkey font), and Nils, the first known Canadian faned for his SUPRAMUNDANE STORIES published in 1937. I received one more suggestion for Best Fan Writer than Taral, and tied with Neil for Best Fanzine, but once again the ugly demons of humility and humbleness were forced upon me by fellow fen concerned for my reputation. Ghu dang it, I wish they’d stop that! Sadly, no actual statue of the ‘Faned’ has ever been presented, because I cannot figure out how to duplicate the thing. Every suggestion put forth so far seems to demand far too much money or far too much talent on my part to ever be feasible. Mind you, I was told about a feminist adult shop in town that crafts dildos to order, and there is a certain superficial resemblance… but I have yet to muster the courage to walk in and inquire… besides, not sure I want the Faneds to vibrate anyway… but if the price is cheap enough… hmm… Last weekend I presented the third annual CFFAS ‘Faned’ Awards at VCON 38. And this time it was the product of an honest-to-Ghu nation-wide vote! Huzzah! And genuinely representative of the entire Canadian fannish nation with the votes split evenly between the East (Ontario/Quebec) and the West (Alberta/British Columbia). No less than 90% of those voting were past or present faneds, fan artists and fan writers, thus making the faneds a true peer approval award. I couldn’t be happier. The CFF Awards have matured! “How does the voting work?” you ask. Each category has up to 10 nominees, each voter gets to vote up to three choices in each category by order of preference; first choice, second, third, with first counting for 3 points, second for 2, third for 1 point, Them as gets the most points in a given category wins. “Wait a minute,” you say. “What if the winner is everybody’s second choice? What if no-one’s first choice wins?” My answer: “Tough, I like to keep things simple. Them as gets the

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 4 of 58 most points wins, Period.” “So… how many people voted?” “Ah… well… including myself?” “Yes.” “Ummmm … nineteen.” Dead silence. Be fair, Canada’s population is about 10% of the USA, so on a per capita basis the CFFA voting stats are comparable to the American FAAN Awards… I think… maybe even better… Best of all, the results this year are hilarious. 2013 CANADIAN FANZINE FANAC AWARD WINNERS: * Best Fan Artist: Taral Wayne * Best Fan Writer: R. Graeme Cameron * Best LocHack: Lloyd Penney * Best Fanzine: SPACE CADET, R. Graeme Cameron editor * Hall of Fame: Leslie A. Croutch (1940s/50s editor of LIGHT) I won twice? Don’t blame me! Couldn’t help it, I was voted in! Quietly pleased and humbly proud I is. (Wrote that with a straight face too.) Oh, and last weekend my SPACE CADET was up for a Best Fan Publication Aurora Award. I lost. Sigh, oh well… So the moral of the story is: Never won an award? Start your own! You get out of fandom what you put in. I got mine…

“Last and First Fans” by Mark Plummer [[ Published in I’ve been fishing around for some kind of personal fan anniversary that Strange Horizons falls about now. A fanniversary as some would doubtless put it, July 1, 2013 although it’s not the term I’d generally use myself. Sadly, I seem to be http://bit.ly/1hNK0 in something of a fallow period. Ten years ago I imagine I was Gv ]] anticipating Torcon 3 [ http://torcon3.info/ ], my first North American Worldcon, but the simple anticipation doesn’t really justify commemoration. And nothing immediately springs to mind about the summer of 1993 or 1988, knocking out 20 and 25 years ago, and before that we’re into my pre-fannish history. Fortunately, there is always ANSIBLEe [ http://news.ansible.co.uk/aseries2.html ] to offer an external memory backup, and so I’m reminded that in June 2003 a committee was formed in the UK to bid for the 2014 Worldcon. I saw this happen. It was two blokes in a pub, basically. And, I should add, it’s wholly unconnected with the somewhat more substantial mostly UK committee that was formed some years later to bid (successfully if coincidentally) for the 2014 Worldcon [ http://www.loncon3.org/ ]. Ten years before that, I now realise that I must have just returned from the Mexicon 5 convention. Dave Langford’s account notes [ http://news.ansible.co.uk/a71.html#01 ] that ‘Iain Banks danced erotically with a giant inflatable Edvard Munch “Scream” doll’ which I confess I don’t specifically remember, although it does provoke somewhat maudlin thoughts as I think back to my first encounter with Banks at his – and my – first convention, Mexicon 2 in 1986. And now these Mexicon conventions are, as I noted in my first column here, ‘locked away so far back in deep time that Niall was moved to remark of [Mexicon 3], and with what I hope is mock incredulity “… information about it available online is limited to a few cryptic mentions in ANSIBLE”.’ And on a similar technological note, the June 1993 ANSIBLE reminds me [ http://news.ansible.co.uk/a71.html#04 ] that I had then also recently organised a London meeting of the British Science Fiction Association

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 5 of 58 where guest speaker John Clute regaled us with tales of the composition, assembly, and publication of the second edition of The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction: ‘He cheerily hefted a wad of paper not as thick as the SF Encyclopaedia itself, being the initial batch of faxed corrections from the Americans.’ I’m not sure I can offer a genuine explanation for why I’m so drawn to notable anniversaries, 10 years since this or 25 years since that. Maybe that’s more a question for the analyst I don’t have. It could be that in this fannish context it’s something to do with validating my own position in the community, demonstrating that I’m not a newcomer any more. And perhaps that in turn has something to do with my tendency to hang out with a lot of people who have been around the fan community so much longer than me, such that they hark back to events 40 or 50 years previously. I don’t know. The topic specifically comes to mind now, though, because I’ve decided this will be my last column for Strange Horizons and I thought it’d be kinda nice to find some anniversary to hang that on. This is the fourteenth piece, a number that in itself doesn’t seem that interesting even if Wikipedia can tell me lots of reasons why it might be. It is, for instance, the atomic number of silicon and I could try to make something out of the British convention series of that name, but that’s buried even further back in deep time than the Mexicons and was mostly before my time too. I am for some reason more drawn to the fact that a woodlouse has fourteen legs. It’s not easy writing about fandom here in 2013, not least because the term now means so many different things. There’s a letter from Marion Zimmer Bradley [ http://fancyclopedia.org/marion-zimmer-bradley ] in SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW 42 (1969) where she claimed that fandom as she – and indeed editor Dick Geis [ http://fancyclopedia.org/richard-e-geis ] – had known it in the late Forties and Fifties was dead. ‘Fandom now is just – I don’t know what it is; but I’ll be charitable and call it a mixture of commercial exploitation and name-dropping.’ From a 2013 perspective, where the similarities between those eras seem far more obvious than the differences, Bradley’s 1969 view of the world as it had been only a couple of decades earlier reminds me of a comment posted recently on The Guardian’s website: ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there, whilst wearing a hat.’ I wonder what she’d make of our wide ranging fan community as it approaches the mid-point of the second decade of the twenty-first century? When I use the word fandom I guess I’m mostly talking about what I’ve recently seen described as ‘trad fandom’, a phrase that for me conjures doubtless wholly unfair stereotypes [ http://www.trad-jazz.co.uk/ ] around boaters, banjos, and ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and so even if this one gains traction I doubt I will warm to it. In the middle of the last decade there was a vogue in some circles for ‘core fandom’, a label that never worked for me either because of the implied way it relegated everything else to the fringe. My preferred modifier for those contexts where it’s necessary to have one remains that proposed by Seattle fan Randy Byers: he suggested ‘roots fandom’ as a conscious echo of ‘roots music’ with all the associations that brings, but it never gained much currency. And so I unhelpfully stick with ‘fandom’, sometimes justifying the unadorned usage by invoking comparisons with the reason why the UK is the only country that doesn’t feel obliged to explicitly proclaim itself on its stamps. But that really requires a milieu where fandom and its various component features – fanzines, conventions, clubs and meetings and whatever – remain damonknightishly ‘what we point to when we say it’. That’s fine when we can be reasonably confident that we’ll all be pointing at the same thing – amongst the attendees of an event such as Corflu [ http://www.corflu.org ]/, say – but once you

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 6 of 58 look to something like the British Eastercon [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastercon ] or especially the Worldcon, the reality is that tasking three random fans with pointing at fandom will likely end with them pointing at book-ends, pumice stone and West Germany. A friend recently made the point that, for all that a UK Worldcon is a once-a-decade event and 2014’s Loncon 3 will be the first London Worldcon since 1965, the simple reality is that it won’t be the biggest SF fan event in the UK next year. It won’t be the biggest SF fan event in London next year. It probably won’t even be the biggest SF fan event in ExCeL next year. Ah, it wasn’t so long ago that it were all fields around here. In 1939 the American fan Jack Speer [ http://fancyclopedia.org/jack-speer ] published UP TO NOW [ http://efanzines.com/UpToNow/ ], feeling that even in a little under a decade fandom had clocked enough history to be worth documenting. He introduced the theory of numbered fandoms, a series of fannish eras each ‘with distinct characteristics and a strong identifiable focus’, although again from a 2013 perspective the distinction may well have been a slightly different style of hat. Speer updated the idea for his Fancyclopedia [ http://fancyclopedia.org/fancyclopedia-1 ] in 1944 – from which, incidentally, the preceding quote is drawn – and identified a precursor ‘eofandom’ and then three numbered eras with transitional phases. A teenage fan by the name of Robert Silverberg [ http://fancyclopedia.org/robert-silverberg ] picked up the idea in 1952 and, writing in QUANDRY [ http://fancyclopedia.org/quandry ] #25 (ed. Lee Hoffman [ http://fancyclopedia.org/lee-hoffman ]), he offered a continuation of Speer’s ideas, delimiting Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Fandom. The title of Silverberg’s article was ‘Last and First Fen’ which gives a clue to the underlying influence, and also counts as one of the very few occasions when it’s ever been genuinely justifiable to contend that the plural of ‘fan’ is ‘fen’. He went further than Speer in applying the ‘Stapledonian scheme of things’ to predict a future path. Last and First Men [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men ] (1930) described humanity passing through 18 cycles and two billion years before the sun went nova. The future of fandom was less promising from a longevity point of view: it had already passed through six cycles in the period 1930 to 1952 and thus, theorised Silverberg, only had 12 more cycles to go. A Stapledonian timeline applied to fandom would see Eighteenth (and last) Fandom manifesting in 1997 and coming to its explosive end in 2004. And so maybe fandom really did end in 2004. But then I understand – as I’ve never been able to read either of them – that Stapledon’s Starmaker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker ] (1937) can be considered a sequel to Last and First Men, so maybe we’re now entering a new era of fandom, universal in scope. Or maybe science fiction writers are no better at predicting the future than anybody else.

Revised Table of the Hooper-Katz Chronology of Science Fiction Fandom

[[ Published in Title Dates Potential Focal Important Evolutionar FLAG 6, June 2013, Point Fanzines Figures or y Andy Hooper and Groups in SF Milestones Arnie Katz, with The 1927- NAPA, THE COMET, The Lovecraft Fanclubs footnotes and Pionee 1934 THE FANTASY FAN, Circle, Forry Fanzines comments not r SCIENCE FICTION Ackerman, Walter Round Robins included here. ]] Era DIGEST, THE Gillings, Charles The SF RECLUSE, THE TIME Horning, “Lilith League TRAVELER, THE Lorraine,” Ray SF Comic TRYOUT, THE Palmer, Julius Strips VAGRANT Schwartz, Mort Talking Weissinger Pictures The 1934- FANTASY Robert Bloch, The Lithographed

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 7 of 58 Printe 1937 MAGAZINE, NOVAE British fanzines d TERRAE, THE Interplanetary The Cult of Fanzin PHANTAGRAPH, Society, Leslie Ghu Ghu e SCIENCE FICTION Croutch, Virgil Faan Fiction Era COLLECTOR, Finlay, Maurice Death SCIENCE FICTION Hanson, Milton Hoaxes & NEWS LETTER, Rothman, Conrad Mock Feuds TESSERACT Rupert, R. D. SF Swisher Conventions The Oct FANTASCIENCE John Baltadonis, The Cult of Hecto- 1937 – DIGEST, FANTASY Hannes Bok, The Foo Foo graph Aug NEWS, GOLDEN Futurians,, Erle Fan Slang Era 1940 ATOM, LE ZOMBIE, Korshak, Sam FAPA THE SATELLITE, THE Moskowitz, Mark Hall SCIENCE FICTION Reinsberg, Jack Costumes FAN, Speer, James SF Specialty SCIENTIFICTION Taurasi, Bob Small Presses Tucker, Olon Worldcon Wiggins The Sept THE ACOLYTE, Al Ashley, Louis Esperanto Warti 1940 – FANFARE, Russell Fandom me Sept FANEWSCARD, Chauvenet, Walt FIAWOL & Era 1946 FANTASY TIMES, Daugherty, Joe Slan Shacks FUTURIAN WAR Kennedy, FT Mimeography DIGEST, LIGHT, Laney, Morojo, The N3F NOVA, SPACEWAYS, Michael SF STEFNEWS, Rosenblum, Harry Anthologies VAMPIRE, VOM Warner Jr., Art Wire Widner Recorder Fanac The Sept CANADIAN Charles Burbee, The Cult of Gosh- 1946 – FANDOM, Ted Carnell, Roscoe wow Mid-19 CHANTICLEER, Claude Degler, FIJAGH & Era 50 MASQUE, Don Ford, Rog Insurgency OPERATION Phillips, Walt Hoax Fans & FANTAST, SHANGRI Liebscher, Bill SAPS L’AFFAIRES, SLANT, Rotsler, Ray The Propeller SPACEWARP, Nelson, Art Rapp, Beanie WASTEBASKET Ken Slater Relaxacons The Shaver Mystery The Early A BAS, CONFUSION, AToM, Vince THE Myth- 1951 – THE FEMIZINE, Clarke, Lee ENCHANTED Makin Mid-19 HYPHEN, OOPSLA, Hoffman, Max DUPLICATOR g 54 PEON, QUANDRY, Keasler, Dave OMPA & TAFF Era RHODOMAGNETIC Kyle, Vernon L. “Trufandom” DIGEST, SKYHOOK, McCain, Joel The Hugo VEGA Nydahl, Boyd Awards Raeburn, Shelby One-Shot Vick, Walt Willis Fanzines Worldcon Rotation The Mid-19 CRY OF THE Greg Benford, Ron Carl Brandon Golden 54– Oct NAMELESS, Bennett, Redd Clubzines Era 1963 DIMENSIONS, Boggs, Terry Carr, “First FANAC, GRUE, ODD, Harlan Ellison, Fandom” ORION, SF Ray Fisher, The Order of FIVE-YEARLY, Richard Geis, Kent St. Fantony SKYRACK, STELLAR, Moomaw, Larry Regional TRIODE, VECTOR, Shaw, Ted White Apas VOID FANCYCLOPE DIA II

Title Dates Potential Important Evolutionary Focal Point Figures or Milestones Fanzines Groups in SF The 1964 to ALGOL, John Bangsund, The New Mid-197 AUSTRALIAN SF Buck Coulson , Breendoggle Wave 0 REVIEW, ERG, John-Henri Coventry & the Era INNUENDO, THE Holmberg, Terry SCA MENTOR, NOPE, Jeeves, “Ted “Fanzine PSYCHOTIC/SFR Johnstone,” Fred Fandom” , QUIP, RUNE, Patten, Bruce Monster SCOTTISHE, Pelz, Bob Shaw, Fandom WARHOON, Takumi Shibano, Underground

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 8 of 58 YANDRO Bjo Trimble, Paul Comics Williams Star Trek Youth Culture The 1971 BOONFARK, John D. Berry, Bill DUFF & GUFF Trufan –Early CHECKPOINT, Bowers, rich Ensmalled Rebellio 1983 DNQ, EGOBOO, brown, Avedon Fanzines n Era ENERGUMEN, Carol, Gary FAAn & Nova FOCAL POINT, Farber, Tim Kirk, Awards FOULER, Malcolm Edwards, Masquerade GRANFALLOON, Bruce Gillespie, Fandom JANUS, KHATRU, Mike Glicksohn, Role-playing MAYA, MOTA, OUTWORLDS, Joseph Nicholas, Games PONG, SF Ross Pavlac, Greg Locus & COMMENTARY, Pickersgill, Stu Semi-Prozines SPAN INQ, Shiffman, Paul Slash Fiction STARLING, Skelton, Dan Fanzines TITLE Steffan, Susan Star Wars Wood The 1983 – ANSIBLE, Brian Earl Brown, Anime & Great 1990 ANVIL, CHEAP Mike Glyer, Comicon War TRUTH, FILE Jeanne Gomoll, Boutique Era 770, FTT, Rob Hansen, Conventions HOLIER THAN Arthur Hlavaty, Corflu, Ditto & THOU, IZZARD, Lucy Huntzinger, fwa LAN’S Dave Langford, P Cyberpunk LANTERN, & T Personal MIMOSA, PULP, STICKY Nielsen-Haden, Computing QUARTERS, Larry Tucker, Pat Science Fiction TRAP DOOR, Virzi, D. West, Satire WING WINDOW, Leah Zeldes Videotaped WIZ Fanac The 1990 – APPARATCHIK, Victor Gonzalez, The Carl Desktop 1997 ATTITUDE, Ian Gunn, Arnie Brandon Publishi BLAT, BOB, Katz, Christina Society ng CHALLENGER, Lake, Robert Desktop Era CRITICAL WAVE, Lichtman, Lloyd Publishing FOLLY, IDEA, Penney, Ian For Profit LAGOON, NOVA Sorenson, Steve Conventions EXPRESS, Stiles, Geri Furry Fandom RASTUS JOHNSON’S Sullivan, Martin Gay Fandom CAKEWALK, Tudor, Pam Wells The Tiptree STET, TAND, Awards THYME Worldcon Fan Lounges The 1998 – BANANA Claire Brialey, Bill Academic Zine Internet 2008 WINGS, BENTO, Burns, Alison Archives Publishi CHUNGA, EI, Freebairn, Earl Comic Book ng Era EMERALD CITY, Kemp, Joseph Cinema HEAD, PLOKTA, Major, Cheryl Email Fanzines PROLAPSE, Morgan, Curt Fannish QUASIQUOTE, Phillips, Alison Websites STEAM ENGINE Scott, Steven H. Steampunk TIME, VEGAS FAN WEEKLY, Silver, Alan Fandom WABE, ZOO Stewart, Peter Tolkien on Film NATION Weston Virtual Con Suites The 2009 - A MEARA FOR James Bacon, Decline of local New Present OBSERVERS, Warren Buff, John sf clubs Media ASKANCE, Coxon, Randy Fanac via Era BEAM, BROKEN Byers, Chris Social Media TOYS, E-DITTO, Garcia, Jacq Gender Parity FANSTUFF, FILE Monahan, Jim Graying of 770.COM, Mowatt, Mark Fandom JOURNEY Plummer, John Media Reboots PLANET, RELAPSE, Purcell, España Self-Published SENSE OF Sherriff, Taral SF WONDER Wayne, Bill Wright The Undead STORIES Renaissance

“A Life in Science Fiction” by Chris Nelson A leading authority on Australian science fiction, the librarian and bibliographer Graham Stone, died November 16 after being incapacitated by a serious illness in January. Graham Brice Stone was born in Adelaide on January 7, 1926, the

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 9 of 58 youngest of Jeannie and Nelson Stone’s three surviving sons. His father was an electrical linesman and, later, a telephone technician with the Postmaster-General’s Department until his death in 1933. His mother received a small pension but it was not enough to support herself and the boys during the Depression. They moved to another suburb, where she ran a boarding house and then a rental library. Both of his brothers left to look for work in Sydney. By this time Stone had already developed what would become a lifelong interest in science fiction, via futuristic tales appearing in the weekly English story papers like The Champion and The Modern Boy. He followed the comic strip adventures of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, too, but also found adult works by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells at home. He sought out more in the local Mechanics Institute and rental libraries, finding the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Wyndham, and others. The vast interstellar vistas of his reading contrasted sharply in the young boy’s eyes to his surrounds in suburban Adelaide. In late 1939, however, he and his mother also moved to Sydney and Stone was elated at finding “civilization” at last—and an abundance of imported science fiction. Through a bookseller he was contacted in 1940 by Bert Castellari, one of a small group of schoolboys who had founded a Science Fiction club the year before. Stone soon joined in the activities of their Futurian Society of Sydney with enthusiasm, but before long the older members were called up for military service and the Society became dormant. Stone would have liked to have pursued a career in journalism and worked as a copy boy for the Sun and Sunday Sun newspapers for 15 months until his mother took him back to Adelaide in 1944. There, he joined the Citizen Air Force and later the RAAF, becoming an Equipment Assistant stationed variously in Townsville, Melbourne, and Laverton. He gained the rank of Leading Aircraftman before seeking discharge in 1947 to begin university studies. Returning to Sydney, he studied, contributed to trade journals, helped to revive the Futurian Society of Sydney, and served as its Secretary in 1948. He also became involved with the Book Collectors Society after meeting Stan Larnach, who was compiling a bibliography of early Australian fantastic fiction. Stone retained close links to both societies until his death. In 1951 Stone established another body on his own, the Australian Science Fiction Society, in order to contact all known fans across the country and keep them up-to-date through a regular newsletter. This contributed to a resurgence of interest in local SF circles, and the next year, the first Australian science fiction convention was held in Sydney in March, with Stone as Convention Secretary. Annual conventions continued in Sydney to 1955, each attracting more people to the SF scene. One was Joy Anderson, whom Stone married in 1956. Unfortunately, factions had grown in the SF community after an acrimonious split occurred in 1954. Stone contributed to these events; he was never shy about expressing his views and dissent was not uncommon among SF fans of the day— Graham, Joy, and a number of others were also involved in The Push. The conventions moved to Melbourne and activities in Sydney dwindled. Stone maintained the FSS library and his SCIENCE FICTION NEWS (1953-1959) kept fans in touch. He also published an index to the Australian SF magazines (a slim volume) and wrote or compiled material for several then current ones, Future Science Fiction, Popular Science Fiction and Science-Fiction Monthly. In 1962, Stone was awarded his B.A. from the University of Sydney. He had been working for the Public Library of New South Wales for over a decade when an opportunity for him to join the National Library in Canberra arose in 1964. His marriage to Joy was over by then and

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 10 of 58 they divorced the following year. At the National Library, Stone was placed in the Bibliographical Section before becoming a cataloguer in the Film Collection, work he greatly enjoyed. In 1965, he married again, to Patricia Cowper, and gained a stepson. The couple added a daughter to their family in 1968. Stone’s period in Canberra was very productive for his SF research also. He published two editions of his Australian Science Fiction Index in 1964 and 1968, the Journal of the Australian Science Fiction Association (1965-1970), the first edition of his Index to British Science Fiction Magazines 1934-1953 (in seven parts, 1968-1975) and an index of book reviews (1973). He also contributed reviews of SF books to The Canberra Times for five years from 1972 and commenced a second series of SCIENCE FICTION NEWS in 1969 which continued, irregularly, until his death. With a promotion in 1972 Stone became responsible for the overall operation of the NLA’s Film Division, including a lending service of 40,000 film loans a year. Unsuccessful for a further promotion late the next year, however, he decided to resign. He also separated from Pat, in 1976, and returned to Sydney, where he assisted with another revival of the Futurian Society and began selling secondhand books. He also set himself the task of searching past newspapers and magazines to locate previously unidentified works of Australian science fiction—a long and arduous task which yielded significant discoveries. He recorded the results of this work much later, in Notes on Australian Science Fiction (2001) and his magnum opus, Australian Science Fiction Bibliography (2004). He updated and revised the latter twice, the final edition in 2010 reaching over 320 pages of listings in two columns of fine print. He also published facsimile editions of some of the early novels he had uncovered, restoring recognition to innovative Australian writers of the genre. In addition to researching, writing, and publishing his later books, he also physically bound every copy. Stone generously contributed Australian content to many other reference works in the genre and was recognised as an expert in the field. He received the A. Bertram Chandler Award for Outstanding Achievement in Science Fiction from the Australian SF Foundation in 1999. Graham collapsed in January from what was diagnosed as tubercular encephalitis. Transferred from hospital to a nursing home in Bronte, he later suffered a stroke and died at the Prince of Wales Private Hospital in Randwick. He is survived by his stepson, daughter, and five grandchildren.

“The Calm Before the Storm?” by Steven Silver, Bill Burns, Moshe Feder, Graham Charnock [[ On a mailing list Bill Burns: with a membership The Hugos are rapidly becoming a contest to see who has the largest of people with an number of rabid blog followers. The Fan categories clearly show this. interest in fanzines, the announcement Steven H. Silver: during Worldcon of While I generally agree with this statement, when it comes to this the winners in the year's Fan Writer category, I'll note that there are two nominees I Hugo Award Fan would consider bloggers and the vote tallies resulted in one winning categories always and the other coming in fourth. results in comments. This edited The vote breakdown for first place went: conversation Roberts (blogger) 185 occurred Sept. 3, Silver (fanzine fan) 182 2013. ]] Oshiro (blogger) 147 No Award 131

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 11 of 58 Garcia (fanzine fan) 105 Bacon (fanzine fan) 82 Round two: Roberts (blogger) 194 Silver (fanzine fan) 193 Oshiro (blogger) 151 Garcia (fanzine fan) 137 No Award 133 Round three: Silver (fanzine fan) 196 Roberts (blogger) 194 Oshiro (blogger) 151 Garcia (fanzine fan) 137 Round four: Silver (fanzine fan) 245 Roberts (blogger) 220 Oshiro (blogger) 167 Round five: Roberts (blogger) 285 Silver (fanzine fan) 267 Bill Burns: It will be interesting to see what happens next year. I'd be interested to see statistics for each Hugo category listing the number of voters who marked only a single nominee. Moshe Feder: (Kim) Stan(ley Robinson)'s book is brilliant, deep, completely engaging, beautifully written and structured, and of lasting value, To me, it was the epitome of what a Hugo winner should be, which makes this year's best-novel outcome one of the most egregious injustices in the award's history. Graham Charnock: I agree, Blogs are destroying our lives in all so many ways. I was talking with Roy Kettle and Brian Parker about this lately and Brian thought they were the best thing since dog's bollocks (admittedly the dog's bollocks served up by the pub we were in at the time were not very appetizing) whilst Roy agreed with me that they were mostly unnecessary and even when very good, not very good at all. People seem to like them and subscribe to them in the way they might do to any mindless feed from someone who shares a very small thing in common, like a rabid Daily Mail Reporter who doesn't understand why we should stop Assad killing thousands, or someone with a fetish about dogs. People tell me it is very easy to build up a big blog following, but I can't imagine anyone in the optimum catchment area of 30somethings being interested in the words of wisdom of an old man who knows better than them. Blogs so much remind me of that scene in Life of Brian when they are following him because of his shoes and his gourd. Can we do nothing to remove this pernicious evil from our lives? A good first step might be to devise a genetic programme to strip people of their sense of their own sense of self-importance.

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 12 of 58 “Space Time Story” by Greg Pickersgill [[ Published in Its a strange world. There I am, cramped up in the walk-in attic, BANANA giving thanks to a memory of a Jet-Ace Logan story in an issue of WINGS 52, April Thriller Picture Library, from the back way back early 1960s. The 2013 ]] opening splash page of the tale shows our hero somehow hovering in space on the end of a long pole which is balanced on Moon and upending Earth. The strapline says something like "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." Well, OK, I admit it, I just now looked that paraphrased quote from Archimedes up on Wikiquote because even though I still have that ish of TPL you can't find anything in this damned attic. The thing was, I was trying to move a shelf. Without taking all the stuff off it. If I had taken all the stuff off it I would not have had room to move. Or even get out of the attic. I needed to move the shelf because I needed to move the duplicator. It was about that time. The duplicator had been there for twenty years, untouched, unmoved. It had become one with the mass of paper and shelving around it, actually now as much a support for the shelf above it as anything other. And in truth its days as anything other, a printing device, were over. There was scant chance I would ever produce anything that needed more than a handful of copies ever again, and if I did it wasn't going to be on a hand-cranked ink-fed stencil duplicator. Where would I get the materials, for a start (actually, I know from where, another attic, but that's another distressing story). I had had the duper for a long time. I don't know from when exactly to the week, but it would have been some short time before September 1972, because I know that the first fanzine produced on it was FOULER 7, of that date. It all came about in a terribly fannish manner; after I had moved to London in July 1971 I was part of Ratfandom, an apparently energetic group of fans that was active for a period up to about April 1974, when as things do it fell apart. In a terribly terribly faanish manner we had set about the idea of acquiring a duplicator, for all the obvious reasons. This plan even went so far as what were then entertaining but in retrospect quite stupid discussions about which terrible terribly faaaanish name we should be calling this new 'press'. Actually I think it was only me and Rob Holdstock (as he was then known) who took this seriously. People like Malcolm Edwards just stared out of the window and dreamed of a golden future when all this would not even be blue remembered hills. Vug Publications, it was eventually called, the name derived in some complex manner from the Vugs in Dick's GAME PLAYERS OF TITAN, the concept being that we too in our might would make the common herd dance attendance to our tune, ho ho. And it was also thought funny that 'vug' was a Cornish miners' term for holes or gaps in rock. It all made more sense at the time, or maybe it was just the discovery of genuine Australian Fosters lager that made it all seem so delightful. One will never know. Anyway, we made use of the Exchange and Mart (which older viewers may remember as a sort of newsprint Ebay - hard to imagine now) and located a suitable duplicator somewhere, for which we pooled money - a fiver apiece as I remember, quite a lot when I consider I was only being paid £56 a month at the time - and somehow in some baffling manner Rob Holdstock borrowed a car and we drove to somewhere in the outer suburbs of London and bought a hand-cranked Gestetner from someone. Who, where, when, how - all gone in the passing of time, and not even a footnote in history now. I do remember though, that it was a right performance getting the thing to work properly. Endless experimentation and cranking out test-sheets, endless anxiety too about the cost thereof, ink seemed expensive. The damned thing just didn't seem to work properly - the printed copies were abnormally faint no matter how much ink was loaded into it. Feverish modifications were

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 13 of 58 applied, like wrapping the rubber roller with paper to increase the pressure between it and the stencil-drum. All that seemed to achieve was a progressive slowing down to the point of jamming no matter how fast or slow the cranking was applied. In retrospect it seems incredible that it took me so long to realise that there was nothing actually wrong with the duper, it was my typewriter that was the problem. A fairly crappy Olivetti Lettera 32 (a design classic, apparently, but rubbish to work with) it just wasn't cutting the stencils properly. Dismalness. Next step, for me anyway, was to take the useless typer to an office equipment shop and trade it in for something better, a semi-portable which grew increasingly less portable as the walk back to the dreadful single room I shared with John Brosnan progressed, but which actually served well for many years and many projects thereafter. (It too had once had its space in the attic, but was long since disposed of, being easier to move. One day we'll regret all this, when the great solar storm destroys all our intricate electronic kit.) Anyway, the first fanzine produced by that Gestetner was FOULER 7, dated September 1972, last of its perhaps misconceived line. A better record-keeper would know exactly to the time and date what other fanzines were run off on it, but I don't. Perhaps issues of Leroy Kettle's TRUE RAT. Certainly the first issue of John Jarrold's PREVERT (and it's hard to believe now he was just a fan once upon a time) and issues of Rob Hansen's EPSILON, some Brian Parker stuff, early issues of Chris Priest's DEADLOSS (much easier somehow to remember Chris as a fan, much more so than John Jarrold or even Rob Holdstock now - why is this?) and well, all sorts of other stuff, some of which was worth reading at the time or even now. Maybe I should search through likely titles of the period looking for dupering credits - idle curiosity, its a hobby. There were of course whole runs of my own fanzines RITBLAT (yes both issues!) and STOP BREAKING DOWN and lots of book catalogues during my various ventures into being a secondhand scifi dealer. Many many pages. The machine certainly provided me good service, even though in reality I only own 20percent of it. If any surviving members of Vug Publications want their fivers back (at 1972 levels) I suppose now is as good a time as any. Would Malcolm dare put his hand out? One wonders. Vug Publications died a rapid death, as I recall. I think, though cannot be sure, that the only thing ever to carry it as a byline was the first issue of Holdstock's MACROCOSM, which wasn't actually produced on the supposedly communal Gestetner at all. Incidentally, I thought it rather sad that at the end of the 2012 Novacon one of the last fanzines left on the giveaway table was an issue of MACROCOSM; how to interpret that, I would not claim to know, but it surprised me. I don't know where it came from, but I took it myself to save it from the bin. Where was I. In the attic, contemplating Jet-Ace Logan and Archimedes. You see, if you have been reading carefully you will remember here that the duplicator had become one with its surroundings. In order to move it - difficult enough when on one's knees and with only the effective use of one hand anyway because of having to do all this sideways, if you can imagine it - I had to lever up the laden shelf resting on it, using a pick-handle (we have them everywhere) as a lever and a stack of Golden Wonder Books as a fulcrum (protected only by a handkerchief, which gave the whole operation yet another frisson of anxiety) I managed to raise the shelf in tiny increments, holding down the lever with my right elbow while painfully edging out the suddenly even more massively heavy than remembered duper with my left hand. This went on for some time, and Catherine kept asking why I was making so much noise. It was mostly abuse at the general state of the universe. You might wonder why Catherine was not in there helping with this excavation, especially

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 14 of 58 as she has encouraged the disposal of the machine for many years. Well, that means you know nothing of this particular attic. Anyway, even this, like all else, passed. I got the thing dislodged and the shelf subsided, worryingly but not alarmingly. The Golden Wonder Books took some of its weight, not ideal and a problem to be fixed later after some rest and recuperation. Of course I was now trapped in the attic by the duplicator. But I have overcome boxes of prewar Astounding and Wonder Stories and BRE F&SF before now, and eventually got it out and down the narrow stair to the hallway, where of course it sat for best part of a week getting in the way before going to the tip. Sitting in the hallway, of course, it was before my very eyes several times a day, not semi-forgotten in the attic where it had been for almost exactly twenty years and six months to the day. I kept looking at it. I have a sentimental attachment to it, I said to Catherine. It reminds me of so many things, so many people, so many fanzines and so many activities and aspirations. But its useless, she repeated, you'd never use it again, its just taking up two cubic feet of space which we need, even if it was holding up the shelf as well, she added, prempting my immediate thought of why simply putting it back into the attic might be a good idea. I have a cultural attachment to it, I explained; the duper, its a iconic fannish thing. I went on at length, almost quoting parts of THE ENCHANTED DUPLICATOR including the final lines which to this day with all my cynicism about fandom can bring a tear to my eye. Its something left after the fact, anyway, all that other stuff, all those fanzines, all those people, all gone and probably forgotten, all detached from each other and everything. This device alone remains. Cultural sentiment, I said, then almost immediately, no, cultural sediment. It just remains, really, doesn't it. Its no actual *use*. I went and stared at it again for a moment, and then watched Catherine carry it out to the car and thence to the tip. The most disappointing part of the whole proceedings was that the couple of cubic feet of space gained was filled instantly and I don't even really know by what. Looking in at the attic now nothing appears changed, different or better. If anything that shelf looks slightly less stable. Sometimes cultural sediment may be there for a purpose. “Roger Ebert, Death of a Gafiate” by Leah Zeldes Smith [[ Published in The The death of Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago film critic Roger Ebert Clubhouse, April 5, has already been eulogized far and wide. Most of the accolades 2013 with photos concentrate, rightfully so, on Ebert’s storied career as a newspaperman http://bit.ly/1jEBfm and critic and his well-written reviews and essays. C ]] But here in the microcosm, we can remember him a little differently, because as a youth in Urbana, Ill., Ebert was pure goshwow fanboy. He sent locs to prozines, complaining that too many of their covers featured semi-nude women, “You seem to be in a sort of a rut,” Ebert wrote to Future magazine in 1958. :”You’ve had a girl on the cover of the last five issues — this may have been ok for TWS [Thrilling Wonder Stories], but not for good ol’ Future, Don’t feel too badly — Infinity has had girls on all but one of its seventeen covers! Astounding has had one girl in the last twenty-seven issues, and she was a scientist with a turtle-neck sweater and a jacket on.” Once he found fandom, the young Ebert plunged in, He bummed rides to Midwestcon, the Cincinnati relaxacon, with Bob Tucker, where he went around with a wastebasket on his head. And fandom can take credit for his subsequent career. Ebert wrote for fanzines, including Dick Lupoff’s XERO, Ben Solon’s NYARLAHOTEP and Bill Bowers’ STAR*DUST, as well as his own dittoed zine, STYMIE. Although most of the examples I can find seem

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 15 of 58 to be poetry, Ebert acknowledged fandom for teaching him his craft. Like many of us, Ebert found his way into fandom in the pages of Amazing Stories, where “The Clubhouse” featured fanzine reviews. “I sent off a dime to Buck and Juanita Coulson for a copy of YANDRO,” he recalled. “This was one of the most important and formative acts of my life…. It was in the virtual world of science fiction fandom that I started to learn to be a writer and a critic….” “Today I can see my name on a full-page ad for a movie with disinterest,” the famed critic wrote, “but what Harry Warner or Buck Coulson had to say about me — well, that was important.” In the 1970s, Ebert sold a couple SF stories to Amazing and its sister magazine, Fantastic. He did not, however, stay connected to fandom once he grew up and became a famous film critic. I’m told that various Chicago conventions tried to induce him to attend, and he was never interested, but he was ours once, and always remembered it as affectionately as those of us who still pub our ish: “In the mimeographed pages of a fanzine … there existed a rare and wonderful discourse, and it was a privilege to be part of it.”

“Murder in Seattle” by Jim Mowatt [[ Jim Mowatt It was around midnight. A cool temperate Saturday evening in Seattle visited Canada and The party was buzzing along happily and then suddenly everything the United States as stopped. We were drawn into the main living space by some strange 2013 TAFF (Trans nascent sense of catastrophe. She was lying there, face down. That Atlantic Fan Fund) beautiful skull, smashed, exposing a mass of bone and blood. Beside delegate to the 2013 Worldcon held her lay the instrument of her demise. It was the Hugo Fanzine award Labour Day from the 2007 Worldcon in Japan. Featuring the pointy headed weekend in San Ultraman standing by the iconic pointy spaceship it certainly contained Antonio, Texas ]] enough edges to do serious damage. The police arrived and bustled around a little. Accidental death they said. She was probably dazzled by the gleam of the object and fell onto the pointy headed alien that so tragically ended her life. It all sounded quite plausible and everyone nodded solemnly as the police officer related his conclusions telling us that it was the pointy end what done it and we should possibly think about sticking some kind of foam hat on that thing to prevent accidents of a similar nature. With a flourish of the pen, he closed his notebook and swished his way through the front door and out into the night. Vijay was then tidied away and Denys began furiously washing the floor trying to get rid of the bloodstains. The party restarted, muted at first but, in stages, returning to its former buzz. I felt uncomfortable with the conclusions of the police. Vijay would have needed to have tripped on the flat surface, fallen backwards onto the Hugo award, staggered forward, fallen backwards again impaling herself for a second time and then twisted around onto her front as she hit the ground. An unlikely sequence of events. Looking for answers I descended into the basement. I found Andy Hooper down there. There was a circle of people all listening intently to one of his stories. He finished as I approached and welcomed me into the circle. “Andy”, says I. “I’m still a little disturbed by the whole Vijay thing. My little grey cells are bothering me. I think someone killed her and my curiosity keeps prodding away inside my head wanting to know the whys and wherefores.” “It’s entirely possible that she was murdered” says Andy. “She led a complicated life. Possibly you should talk to her partner, maybe you should also talk to Ulrika. I’m not accusing anyone” says Andy “but there’s a tangled web there. It might be worth digging around a little.” I took his advice and found Ulrika on the sofa by the window. I’d met her a couple of times. The previous day she and Mary Kay Kare had taken me to Whidbey Island fair. Prior to that I’d met her on her TAFF trip in 1998. I seem to remember delivering Ulrika and Hal to Mike Ford’s

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 16 of 58 house in Leeds, way back then. Unfortunately my memory is an untrustworthy creature so this may or may not be true. Ulrika admitted that she had admired the Hugo statuette but was fairly sure that at no time had she embedded it into Vijay’s skull. “I hear what you’re saying” says I “but the fact remains that you and she were known to have had strong words concerning TAFF administration”. I know, it might not seem much of a motive to you, dear reader, but to we fan fund types this is serious stuff. “Jim”, she said in that voice she uses which grasps you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you around a little. “Stop talking nonsense. I did not kill that woman.” Her argument hadn’t exactly convinced me but I decided to explore other avenues. There was Victor Gonzales talking continuously at high speed. I remember, many years ago, Victor and I had an exchange on the Usenet Newsgroups which led to him referring to me in a fanzine article as a retarded truck driver. I was hurt and appalled. How could he say such things. I was actually a bus driver. Victor denied having killed Vijay and then rapidly moved on to the subject of fannish collections. Bill Burns has been babysitting Gary Farber’s collection for around three decades it seems. The conversation then moved on to discussion of many other fine fannish collections and I knew, as that fanatical gleam became glaringly apparent in almost every eye in the room, that it would be some considerable time before I could drag the topic back to the dead body that had previously been sprawled across the living room floor. If a dead body turns up and foul play is suspected then one would usually look toward their nearest and dearest as being the likely cause of this absence of life. In this case however Vijay’s partner Soren was terribly frail, having suffered a stroke. I didn’t feel he would be able to lift the murder weapon and certainly couldn’t cave in her skull with it. There was a younger chap in a chain mail shirt. He was sobbing uncontrollably. I tried to question him but he was mostly incoherent. He emitted strange noises and some distorted sentence that sounded like a cross between how sad he was at Vijay’s death and did I know how long it took to make his chain mail shirt. Most peculiar. There were a couple of people that I felt absolutely couldn’t have committed the murder. One was mild mannered carl juarez and the other was thoroughly likeable Randy Byers, the owner of the murder weapon and the host of that party. Randy drove me to the airport after the revels had wound down. “All a bit disturbing about Vijay wasn’t it”, says I. “Yes”, says Randy, “a tragic accident. If only she had asked before touching it then maybe the accident wouldn’t have happened.” I looked across at Randy - had he really said that? A chill ran through me. Surely I couldn’t be so wrong about Randy. Surely he wouldn’t, couldn’t hurt anyone. He half turned and smiled. “Nearly there now, soon have you on the plane to California”. No, I couldn’t believe it. He’s far too nice. Maybe it was just an accident after all.

“A Song of Nerds of Nerds and Rabbis by Andy Hooper [[ Published in Parents, teachers and clergy all hold out hope that we will collectively FLAG 8, Aug, 2013 “grow up” one day, leave aside our childish pastimes and acquire some ]] kind of responsible, professional expertise that can be of use to society. But at this point, I begin to doubt that’s ever going to happen, to me or to most of my peers. There is a part of my brain that is forever directed toward self-indulgent amusements, hobbies and other nominal “wastes of time,” making any pretension toward genuinely responsible work, let alone a career, an extended exercise in self-delusion. But there aren’t any other grown-ups for us to appeal to. We’re all we’ve got. I hope you paid attention to those lectures involving important disciplines like engineering and chemistry and materials science, because you’re in charge now, and if you’re still playing Tomb Raider

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 17 of 58 10 hours a day, we really have no one to turn to. Thoughts much like these were going through my mind as Carrie and I pulled up to the convalescent center where Stu Shiffman has been living this summer. He continues to make strides in his recovery from the stroke he suffered in June of 2012. And we gathered on the afternoon of July 18th to celebrate something truly remarkable. After 25 years in love, Stu Shiffman and Andi Shechter are going to get married. And they had invited their friends to gather for their version of a traditional Ashkenazi betrothal known as a Tenaim. We assembled in the garden-like courtyard of the center, where a dapper Stu and a trembling Andi were waiting to greet us. We munched on lovely hummus and other snacks as friends trickled in, everyone reveling in this summer’s spectacularly fine weather. It isn’t always easy to recognize one another without our layers of fleece and rain-proof nylon, so various longtime friends blinked and laughed as they suddenly recognized one another in their summer plumage. The learned and lovely Rabbi Jessica K. Marshall (twice winner of the “Puget Sound’s Hottest Rabbi” poll) presided over the ceremony, explaining the history and function of the Tenaim. Not too surprisingly, the real heart of the ceremony is the signing of a contract to marry. In the past, of course, many such marriages were arranged when the parties were still young children. Clearly, Stuart and Andi had been resistant to those patriarchal assumptions, which explains why their “courtship” has now lasted a quarter-century. There was just a slightly bittersweet feeling to the event, because the four people who would have loved it the most, Andi and Stu’s parents, are no longer with us. But they were clearly very much on the betrothed’s minds as they explained their feelings and reasons for getting married. For Stu to speak to us requires coordination with a valve attached to his ventilator, and he has to wait for it to “reinflate” him between sentences. This is obviously frustrating to him, but hearing his voice again at all was like a miracle, and many of us were crying by the end of the ceremony. We also noticed how many of the staff had quietly come outside to watch the proceedings; clearly, working with Stu and Andi had made an impression on them as well. Fans can never act like grown-ups for too long, of course. After the prayers, and songs, and a few memories of Andi and Stu from friends who have known them the longest, we fell to chattering among ourselves as the Tenaim document was signed and witnessed. A conversation on memorable marriage ceremonies soon turned to the recently completed third season of the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones, and the notorious “Red Wedding” of the Starks. People were generally over the shock now, and were metaphorically rubbing their hands in anticipation of the nuptials of the notorious King Joffrey Baratheon. People fairly cackled, speculating which character would be the next to take the big dirt nap. This group of skeevy, snickering fan boys and girls included a celebrated space scientist, a well-known book designer, some card-carrying systems wonks, and several more working writers, publishers and academics . Not one of them had on white socks or had repaired their glasses with adhesive tape, but if you closed your eyes, you could see all the trappings of our feculent subculture, down to the “Beam Me Up Scotty, There’s No Intelligent Life Down Here” T-shirt. The truth is, we always associated adulthood, being “grown-up,” with the mundane. I think we all secretly hoped that by concentrating on fannish activities like reading science fiction, watching it on TV and in movies, publishing fanzines and organizing conventions, we would remain young ourselves, and avoid the limits of a life defined by such mundane details as work, family and reality. All we really succeeded in doing was redefining the fantastic as something mainstream. As Taral Wayne recently pointed out in his fanzine BROKEN TOYS, at one time fans were desperate to see Fandom grow – and we never anticipated how it would dilute the experience to share

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 18 of 58 it with so many. Nerd culture is now everywhere. Does this then mean, by the perverse logic of cultural non-conformity, that nerds are actually uncool again? It’s too late to turn back now. The background shared by George R.R. Martin and the two principle writers of the Game of Thrones TV show (and Jo Walton too, I believe) is that all three of them spent hundreds of hours creating and playing Dungeons and Dragons adventures while developing their voices as writers. That helped create an idiom which made George’s novels irresistible to his TV collaborators, and now has millions of readers and watchers hanging on the fate of characters like the Imp, the Hound, and the Dragon-Borne. I just hope that we can find a few minutes here and there to think about climate change and chronic poverty between debates on Dragons and the true parentage of John Snow. Just occasionally, it’s fun pretending to be a grown-up too.

“Update From 21MM392” by Art Widner [[ Art Widner, born I movd recently, only 4 mi from Anchor Bay & my old self-bilt in September, 1917, “recycled octagon” where I partially solvd the book problem while is a member of the building. My sons frends who were a bunch of hippies, put up the retrospectively posts & beams wch they got from old barns, an old wooden brij near named First Philo in the Anderson Valley, etc. The hippies who movd up here Fandom of the 1930s. Art's spelling when the H8 Ashbury broke up, had developd a habit of bilding way is his own and is over strength, since the Mendocino Bilding code kept red tagging their reproduced here huts, cabins, geodesic domes etc, trying to drive them back to the city verbatim. His or anywhere but here. (1975). signature is a salute I hadn’t pland it, but the octagon almost precisely faced the 4 pts of to pulp magazine the compass, with 4 fixt 6x6 windows facing south & the ocean. So I author Neil R. had abt a 500 sq’ ballroom to cut up as I wisht. I put in 2x6 T&G Jones's Professor Jameson and the flooring & particle bd over that, then div the octagon in haf, then a qtr Zoromes. for a bedrm, & the remaining qtr for bath & kitchen, abt wch mor some othr tym….. Post in a mailing list, Oct. 4, 2013. ]] Back to the bks (U thot id never get there, didn’t U?) I decided that the bedrm-great rm wall wd also be a bookcase. Since I had 16’ ceilings, I simply got 3 4x8 pieces of ¾” plywood & went from there. This was b4 the San Francisco culture vultures came up & made off w every scrap of butifl old lumber, so I had a lot of 1x6 to make supports & shelves from. I fashiond shelves of various hites to fit the bks using both sides of the plywood. I still had 6-7’ to go b4 I hit the great 12x12 mother honcho center post that held everything up, including 8 4x14 roof beams that came out of the brij, so I fashiond a doorway on the other side & another bookase, only 12” deep, to hold all my oversize atlases, art bks, etc. I just know that Ted White is gonna bust in about here w “How the hell did U get the ends of 8 4bys to fit on top of a 12x12 post?” Well Meyer, twas like this: The bull goose hippie who told the rest of us what to do & how to do it, was a junkie jenius who figurd things out as he went along. When he came to the centerpost & beams, he blinkt a few time & sent for his farmacist bro down in the city to bring him a pkg of smack & went on the nod for few days while the rest of us sat around and thiddled our twums. No problem that a few brewskis & a caldron of spageti & meatballs cdnt cure. When he came back to this planet he liberated a piece of 1/4” shipsteel plate from somewhere & cut it into an 8 point star, drild holes, & placed it on top of the post & bolted the ends of the 4bys to it. Not done yet. Y did i leave my beloved octagon that had so much of myself in it? Well, meyer, its at the end of a long ¼ mile driveway, wch is off a very long road that goes up & up & up & disappears into the mountain. About a year ago i rote my obit “release” in YHOS 66 & QUARO 49, & then did some plain & fancy thinking about the

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 19 of 58 future. Since my legs & balance r going, I’ll probly fall agen & myt not b as lucky as previously. Now have mobile fone so I can call 911, but if thers serious injury or I pass out, it myt leave the emergency crew driving all over the forest looking for me. Mendocino County is bigger than Rhode Island or Delaware & mostly mountainous. The octagon, xept for the tax man, is hard to find. Kaiser-Permanente is 75m away in Santa Rosa. So I moved “downtown” where The RCMS (Redwood Coast Med Services) is only 2 blox away. To say nothing of 2 suprmkts, great bookstore & many other city benefits, altho its still not much morn a vilaj. I got a deal on a nice new mfg home in a mobile home park (only a few trailers) wch goes by the grandiose title of “Ocean View Estates.” Even tho it has 2 bedrms, 2ba, denoffice, & a huge walkin closet & generous living rm, my library is a problem. Not only do I havta find places for the giant 8’ wall of books, but much mor that have accumulatd since I bilt same. Even tho ive been finding small bookcases at Pay’n’Take, the great local flea mkt, & grandson Ethan has bilt me a large one for the den, ive bn forced to dublshelve, altho I’d rather not. Enuf digression, tho ther’s much mor to xplain. Send for my SAPzine, QUARO. 21MM392

“The Worldcon I Saw” by John Hertz [[ Published in FILE LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention 770 163, 29 August – 2 September 2013 http://bit.ly/1gx3e3 R ]] Marriott Riverwalk & Rivercenter Hotels; Convention Center; San Antonio, Texas Guests Ellen Datlow, James Gunn, Willie Siros, Norman Spinrad, Darrell Sweet (posthumous); Special Guests Leslie Fish, Joe Lansdale; Toastmaster Paul Cornell. Attendance 4,300; Art Show sales $46,000 by 90 artists. Chair, Randall Shepherd. Lonestarcon II was here in 1997. So was I, I remember the Alamo. The Convention Center had been remodeled and named for long-time United States Representative Henry B. González after his death in 2000. Lonestarcon I was the 1985 NASFiC (North America Science Fiction Convention, held when the Worldcon is overseas). The U.S. National Aeronautics & Space Administration kindly sent an exhibit, astronaut Cady Coleman, and engineer Heather Paul. In the Exhibit Hall two NASA suits stood next to the Heinlein Society. I said the title Have Space Suit, Will Travel didn’t really depend on knowing Have Gun (24 episodes by Gene Roddenberry). We celebrated the 50th anniversary of Glory Road. On Sunday at 3:30 a.m. I heard Kathy Mar sing Starship and Haiku”. The newszine, of course La Estrella Solitaria (Spanish, “the solitary star”), kindly printed a contribution of mine. The lone star rises A third time shining on us As we reach for space. A fine Lonestarcon III feature was a First Worldcon ribbon. To wear it invited explanation. They ran out and had to be re-ordered. We all groan how weak we are at making things known, pointing, telling, responding. On another tentacle I’m continually amazed how people don’t ask, don’t look. Let’s for ourselves not fall into that. We’ve a lot more now of the diversity we’d been crying for. Not enough, but a lot more. We can assume even less that others know what’s happening with us or we with them. This can be frightening, but what a grand problem to have. In both Jane Austen and Will Shakespeare the moral — if great art

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 20 of 58 has a moral — seems to be Don’t make windows into mirrors. The Art Show kindly gave ten pegboard panels for the Rotsler Award exhibit. It’s all reproductions, nothing for sale; should it be in the Art Show? I dunno. It was in the Exhibit Hall at Denvention III, the year Spike provided that black foam-core. Anyway this was my first task. The Cadys, Ctein, Alice Hescox, the Howes helped. So did half a dozen volunteers three or four at a time. I asked if they knew fanzines. They said no. I said “Just what I want.” They said “What?” I said “I know too much.” We were kneeling on the floor, as one does. I told them “Pick out drawings you find visually appealing, regardless of back-stories and in-jokes.” They strengthened the exhibit, which as Don Fitch says of the Fanzine Lounge has two faces, one looking in, one looking out. Jill Eastlake was Masquerade Director. I was chief hall-costume judge, and a Workmanship Judge during the show. There’s Denvention III again. I found Jill and asked if we had Masquerade awards for entries made at the con. She said “No, go for it.” We couldn’t arrange a $1.98 Extravaganza room, as Lunacon sometimes has, with fabric, scissors, paper, glue, but we got announcements into the Stars. This year there was no giant saguaro cactus made from balloons to welcome us — but speaking of built-at-con Masquerade entries — I’ll get to that. The Pocket Program credited mine for L.A.con II which actually fit in people’s pockets — I’d gone round measuring pockets — and this one at 4 x 6 x 1/2” was almost pocketable. It did have a cross-index by participants, although a little strange if you didn’t know to look for Karen Haber between Silverberg and Siros. No participant biographies there or in the Program Book. They could be dug up if you knew to get and could manage the superduper computer software. No grid. Teddy Harvía’s wife Diana Thayer edited the Program Book, with a dozen swell Andrew Porter photos, drawings by Ulrika O’Brien and Franz Miklis as well as Brad Foster, Alexis Gilliland, Harvía, Bill Rotsler, Steve Stiles, and (yes!) Sherlock, a Texas Fan History section by Siros and Robert Taylor, and winners of a 2012 Humans in Space youth poetry contest including two poems by teens from Macedonia. Darrell Sweet died in December 2011. By present custom he was not replaced as Guest of Honor; on the contrary. The cover for the Program Book — which did say “World Science Fiction Convention” — was his: as it happened he’d painted a superb Isle of the Dead, in careful homage to the Böcklin painting (five versions 1880-1888) that inspired Rachmaninoff (1908) and Zelazny (1969). The Art Show mounted an extensive display. By “first task” I mean of course on-site. Everything I did for the con, or was thwarted by people or circumstances from doing, took hours earlier, and was as naught beside con committee members with substantial responsibility (incidentally, Marija Trajanoska rhymed “responsibility”). Isn’t that the way? Culling decades of Rotsler winners’ art, the Renovation exhibit having been lost during take-down, a rehab to which I couldn’t get for Chicon VII. Thinking and re-reading fast when Lonestarcon III confirmed at the last minute I’d lead three Classics of S-F discussions and what did I want? Reviewing labels for the Christine Valada Portrait Project. I’m not boasting, you did as much or more. I hadn’t built any Masquerade entries or turned in any novels or counted any Hugo ballots. Thursday 2 p.m., The Glass Bead Game, Hesse’s masterpiece, the first and for fifty years the only Nobel Prize SF novel. Conferring before the con with the Los Angeles office of the Goethe Institute about the Savill and Ziolkowski translations — the Institute sent me a copy of an article from Monatshefte — I found myself talking with the Director — who is Persian. The Institute supports German cultural studies worldwide; Monatshefte (“monthly notebooks”; Univ.

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 21 of 58 Wisconsin) is the oldest U.S. German-studies journal. The Glass Bead Game has sometimes been published in English as Magister Ludi, Latin for “Master of the Game”, a title the protagonist earns. The book’s a hall of mirrors. Its probing character studies are so deadpan, conducted by such glints, it surpasses Jane Austen and reaches the level of Jack Benny. From the audience: it posits there are things worth thinking about. Or does it? The narrator says so, but he’s unreliable; the Castilians say so, but what are we to make of them? The Game is eclectic enough to include Gabrieli and the Book of Changes. Is the book about exclusion? Is the protagonist’s death suicide? In the González lobby I met Gunn, Steven Brust, Ctein, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Thomas Recktenwald. Recktenwald had never read The Glass Bead Game in English. Brust and I realized we’d never before met. Gunn as I arrived had said he didn’t mind company; he’d been sitting alone; no entourage; no throngs. He could have had them and sometimes did. But this was a Worldcon and he needn’t. Regency Dancing at 9. To people who asked “Thursday??” I said “Originally scheduled for Monday morning at 9.” Also the sound equipment. Also a roomful of chairs. Folks found it somehow including many who’d never done it. Mary Robinette Kowal was able to attend, which we couldn’t manage at Reconstruction. Despite or because of the Prince Regent, who later became George IV, this was a colorful period. At SF cons Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels are the Massoglias’ best sellers. It was Lonestarcon II where I was dumbfounded to find a crowded Patrick O’Brian panel. Teaching an aristocratic dance form of 200 years ago to SF fans may be my bravest adventure. Except my life, except my life, except my life. In the Hospitality Suite, a sign “Brought to you by actual Tennessee volunteers. Bars kilt as needed.” Spokane and Orlando bidding parties for the 2015 Worldcon, Phoenix for the ’14 NASFiC. In the hallway I was asked “What’s that you have floating on a string?” I said “It’s a DC3 trial balloon.” Washington announced a Worldcon bid for ’17, presumably to be Discon III if it wins, a few months later. Friday 10 a.m., the preliminary Business Meeting. Most controversial topic probably a Young-Adult-Fiction Hugo. To me fiction is fiction; at Renovation my SF Classics were From the Earth to the Moon, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and The Wanderer; but what do I know? No proposal got enough support to reach the main meeting. We started a study committee. Two p.m., “Vintage Season”. Kuttner and Moore both said that after they’d married they wrote everything together. How subtle this story is. It was All-Time Best Novella in the 1999 Locus poll. From the audience: it’s on the rolling list of Ten Best. Morris Keesan read aloud the confrontation between Sue and Kleph; what a plum for two top actresses, like Anne Bancroft’s transformation of Mrs. Robinson before our eyes in The Graduate. How the authors breathe on U.S. ideas of the leisured — I keep telling you I learn a lot teaching Regency dancing. We first sympathize with, then suspect Kleph’s languid disobedience. In fact it is hard to sympathize much with anyone. Yet we are in tragedy. Gunn has called “Vintage Season” the ultimate expression of Moore’s art. My tour of the Art Show at 7, for Art Night. I was ecstatic to see Elizabeth Berrien’s wire sculpture. Her “Angel” won Best in Show; she and Sweet won awards for Body of Work; she re-appeared last year at Conclusion and Chicon VII having been very busy outside our field. Richard Hescox working with George R.R. Martin had to satisfy himself, and a visual author, and an audience full of television, a monochrome of Tyrion Lannister for the coming Subterranean Press A Clash of Kings showed this imp’s character with texture and composition. Johnna Klukas’ wood, like Berrien’s wire, remains among our most original. Foster couldn’t attend, but since he’d done

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 22 of 58 the Progress Report covers I put one in his section of the Rotsler Award exhibit. In the Sweet display I couldn’t help pointing out the painting that’s on my copy of Space Cadet (Del Rey, 1975), with his characteristic space suits — speaking of texture and composition. The display also showed his Westerns, which some of us hadn’t known. Keith Kato cooked up chili for the Heinlein Society. I took Melissa Conway there and to the Tor party. I believe we separated in New Orleans (for ’18 Worldcon). She asked if fans and pros were developing two conventions. I said, more than is healthy. Helsinki for ’15 Worldcon, plenty of herring, the fiery licorice Finns and Turks eat, reindeer paté. Jukka Halme himself was a Finn Crisp. Is there another kind? Japan confirmed its bid for ’17. Dublin announced for ’19. Saturday 2 p.m., The Dying Earth, our Vance memorial. From the audience, it’s revolutionary fantasy. Nasty protagonists, Mazirian and Liane. Terry Sisk Graybill saw to the heart: “At the last chapter you re-think the whole story.” She’d met Vance, who gave her a kazoo. Maybe it isn’t fantasy: not only the Curator at the end, but the supremacy of mathematics in the beginning. We talked of Sufficiently advanced technology can be indistinguishable from magic and cargo cults. From the audience, is Vance playing with us? I said, see This Is Me, of course he is; so? Taras Wolansky said, it’s a collection. I quoted Mike Resnick who voted for it at Millennium Philcon when it was nominated for the Best-Novel Retrospective Hugo: “If Kirinyaga is a novel, it’s a novel.” However composed, the result is organic. Its poetry went without saying. The Fan Funds auction at 3. Naomi Fisher, Down Under Fan Fund delegate in ’01, was as ever a big help. Jacq Monahan, the North America Administrator for the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund, and I the NA DUFF Administrator, had been in touch well before the con. All weekend TAFF delegate Jim Mowatt and DUFF delegate Bill Wright were in fine form. Frank Olynyk the head of Autographing sent a sheet of whiteboard signed by every autographer so far; a second, or more if needed, would await the winning bidder at the end of the con. Several of us took turns as auctioneers. I donated a Bob Eggleton space ship he’d drawn for the 1,000th issue of my fanzine (it’s weekly, folks), and an unusually-signed copy of Pebble In the Sky: when Asimov couldn’t sell a shorter version, Pohl made the sale provided Asimov would expand it to novel length, result organic: I’d asked if Pohl would sign “Frederik Pohl, accoucheur”, he signed “Godfather”; despite or because of various phone messages Leah Zeldes & Dick Smith got the book to the auction. Two days later Pohl was dead. The Masquerade. This artform we seem to have invented, as Drew Sanders says a cross between kabuki and Little Theater, is unlike anything else I know. As with the rest of our best we make it ourselves. In the 1930s a dress-up party as the name suggests, by the 1960s it had its present form, on stage; at the Worldcon it outdraws all but Hugo Night. It can be beauteous, comic, fearful, majestic, poetic. Technically demanding — there’s nearly no rehearsal, when could we? — draining, exhilarating, its lowest is good, its highest great. Peggy Kennedy invented Workmanship judging, secondary, optional, a lot of trouble all round, but valuable. The main judges, which is usually where I am if I’m part of the show, see what you see. I’ve urged that judges triangulate, one at each side and one at the back of the hall — to which I was therefore assigned at Chicon VI. What about what you can’t see? Any entry can submit to Workmanship judging backstage, in whole or in part. So there I was, with my second, Michele Weinstein, poking and prying about. We never did get out into the theater. All in a night’s work. Evolution has grown two divisions, Original and Re-Creation; three classes, Novice, Journeyman, and Master. Re-Creations aren’t meant to be original, they’re meant to be faithful; Originals may come from SF stories, or myth, or the entrants’ simmering minds. The classes are

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 23 of 58 based on experience, but anyone may “challenge up” i.e. enter a higher one. The judges have almost limitless latitude; I’ve said we’re always comparing apples to androids; there may not e.g. be a Most Dramatic in Class, or even a Best in Show — strictly speaking, except for a tie some entry would have to be best, but by custom we only give this award to one that’s outstanding — which sometimes has been a Novice. Only “AirProof” declared it was built on-site. Don Clary had made, and with Jame Cossaboon wore, swooping swirling rainbow balloon headdresses a yard high and another wide, balloon armlets, balloon girdles, and bright red balloon codpieces somewhat below the Masquerade theme “Deep in the Heart of Texas”; Great Balloons of Fire Award, Workmanship award for ingenious use of mundane substance (Novice). Judges’ Choice — this year an out-of-Class award — and Workmanship award for engineering (Journeyman) was “Stinza Nickerson, Half-Horse”, Wendy Snyder (with Heidi & Marc Tyler), an aluminum frame, foam body, rear hooves mounted on a wheel, so mobile she walked through the Exhibit Hall next day. Best Transformation (Journeyman), and Workmanship award likewise, was “A Crack in Time and Space”, Sabine Furlong. We saw how she’d built a TARDIS that would change to a console, then a crack in space, then explode; on stage it did. Best Journeyman, and Best Workmanship in Class, was “Beren and Luthien” (Re-Creation), Tim & Loretta Morgan; machine and free embroidery for Beren, beading, handmade lace, flowers made from bells, and the Two Trees of Valinor (by Sarah Elder) for Luthien, extraordinary. Most Humorous (Master) was “Public Service Announcement”, Rebecca & Kevin Hewett, Serge Mailloux, and Janice Gelb fictitiously losing an eye in a disaster to well-omened redshirts. Best Master, and Best Workmanship in Class, was until it went on known by the cover name “Redneck Martians”, a Kevin Roche – Andrew Trembley – Julie Zetterberg – Greg Sardo production, what a woman I know calls c’boy shirts and hats, gauntlets, leather appliqué, flying saucers worn on shoulder yokes, matching plaids, fringe, Spandex, copper wire, lighted tubes a-top, and glitter. Cornell had to announce the true name Saucer Country and according to report almost dropped his teeth. There was suitable choreography. Best in Show, “Otilia” (Master; Re-Creation, from Girl Genius), Aurora Celeste, proved why there are both kinds of judging. Her bearing, coloring, mask, staff, wings, wood, all cohered. Daytime Sunday. Spokane won the ’15 Worldcon, three ballots for the first time in a decade. Bobbie DuFault lived to see it. Detroit winning the ’14 NASFiC announced Fred Prophet and Roger Sims as Con Chairs Emeritus, in honor of Detention. The Rivercenter, where I was staying, had an auxiliary Housing desk in the lobby. Suzle, the Housing chief, was often there. We talked about fanziners’ contributing to conning. Luckily Bruce Pelz died before I started using that expression and might’ve urged him to call his house the Conning Tower. In the Green Room, Ricia Mainhardt talked of Bob Bloch, Bob Tucker, Julie Schwartz. JH: “You’ve said very kind things about me.” RM: “Did I? I’m sorry.” The Ricia we know and love. At the Exhibit Hall doorway often Filthy Pierre, with or without the Filth-o-phone; perhaps all weekend a sign had been there “Musician Spot”; not him only. John Purcell hosted the Fanzine Lounge. He had a mimeograph, and a typewriter — once that would have been no news — and meant to do one-shots with them, but the typer failed beyond our power of revival. WOOF was duly collated. Oddly. Chris Garcia again. I told Datlow I’d seen the best one-liner in a while, did she want to? Her exhibit builder had with a standard “delete” stroke taken out editorial leaving Achievements of her career. In the Dealers’ Room, Yasser Bahjatt was wearing Sa‘udi Arabian dress. I said “I don’t wish to be disrespectful by giving you a hall-costume award” but we talked about it and he took one. My other judges were Tina &

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 24 of 58 Byron Connell, Susan DeGuardiola, Suford Lewis, Bill Taylor. White tie for Hugo Night. Tom Veal was given the Big Heart. I thought I’d seen him heading away from the auditorium but it wasn’t my job to wrangle the recipient this year and it turned out all right. Fish sang “Hope Eyrie” through the In Memoriam section, the right art at the right moment. Coleman gave a Committee Award — only sometimes done — to Stan Schmidt. Cornell gave him a Hugo. John Picacio, man of the year, won Best Pro Artist having taken two Chesleys. Video wizard John Maizels made the most of Garcia. GRRM, looking at the statistics after Blackwater won Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form, said the Fringe fans had put him over. In the party whirl I met John Purcell’s wife Valerie. It was her first con. Monday, Monday. In the Rivercenter (I think) bar I talked with ASFA President Mitch Bentley about media, McLuhan, pro and fan art, simplicity. In the Exhibit Hall the local Lego group had finished its giant rocketship. After the tumult and shouting had died I found three visitors adrift. They’d just heard of the con and wondered if any was left. I scavenged some Program Books and Pocket Programs and answered questions. Jonathan Miles came by and helped. Did it matter that he and they were black? I dunno, but good dealers are smart. I walked the three of them out to the river, went to Dead Dog parties, and went home.

Best Fanzine Covers of 2013 [[ These six Harry Bell, INCA 9; covers can be seen Brad Foster, CHUNGA 21 (back cover); here: Dan Steffan, TRAP DOOR; http://bit.ly/1eAZ Steve Stiles, SF COMMENTARY 85 (back cover); NxZ ]] Taral, FILE 770 163; D West, RAUCOUS CAUCUS (back cover).

Honourable Mentions: Atom, Corflu XXX Progress Report 1; Ditmar, SF COMMENTARY 85; Ditmar, THE WRIGHT STUFF; Brad Foster, EXHIBITION HALL 25; Teddy Harvia, SPACE CADET 23; Mo Starkey, DRINK TANK 342; Ellen Natalie, JOURNEY PLANET 15; Photocover, BIG SKY 1; Photo covers, Jim Mowatt, TINY TAFFZINE 1-4; Alec Phillips, DRINK TANK 337; Steve Stiles, FADEAWAY 36; Steve Stiles, PIPS X; Steve Stiles, BEAM 6; Steve Stiles, THE RELUCTANT FAMULUS 91; Steve Stiles, THE RELUCTANT FAMULUS 96; Steve Stiles, CHUNGA 21; Taral, DRINK TANK 360; Taral, DRINK TANK 355; Taral, DRINK TANK 345; Taral, MOTORWAY DREAMER 8; D West, BANANA WINGS 53.

“John Harvey's Underwear” by Mark Plummer [[ Published in ‘It’s like the beer/cheese thing,’ I said to Di Young. BANANA WINGS Di assumed a pose of interested curiosity. As a professional 54 (but sorry no photos), Dec. 2013 psychotherapist she is a trained listener and so she does this very well. ]] I expanded on my theme: ‘OK, so it’d probably be perfectly all right to have a cheese that was flavoured with beer. King Ludwig Beer Cheese

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 25 of 58 is a classic Bavarian cheese ripened in fine King Ludwig dark beer for a hearty flavour. In Wales, Red Dragon (or Y-Fenni) blends smooth, firm Cheddar with Welsh brown ale and mustard seeds. There’s also a Chimay Trappiste cheese made with the famous Belgian beer. Beer cheese is a cheese spread most commonly found in Kentucky.’ (My monologue is here reported verbatim, and is not in any way enhanced by subsequent research conducted with the assistance of Mr Google. Oh no.) ‘But,’ I continued, ‘just because it’s a good thing to have cheese flavoured with beer, the converse does not apply. You wouldn’t want beer that tasted of cheese, would you? That’d be odd. Jim de Liscard’s imaginary friend, the bloke who’s a brewer, made beer that tasted of cheese although I believe that wasn’t part of the plan. It was… peculiar.’ Di still maintained her look of interested curiosity. I felt strangely compelled to lie down on the sofa and fabricate a confession to killing certain members of the Loncon 3 committee and burying them under the patio, but I resisted the urge and continued my elaboration. ‘The same is true of cheese and wine. Cheese flavoured with wine, yes. There’s that really nice Italian stuff they sell in Borough Market, Ubriaco cheese, which translates as “drunken” cheese. It comes from Treviso in Veneto. The pasteurised cows’ milk cheese is aged for around 18 months, the last six months of which involve it being soaked in local wine – a process known as “ubriacatura”. The wines used are merlot, cabernet or raboso, each giving a slightly different finish. The wine speeds up the aging process and gives a spicy, fruity afterbite. ‘So that’s all good. But wine flavoured with cheese? Not so much.’ I was definitely warming to this whole idea. ‘Now I know you’re thinking this is just a cheese thing, but not so. Roast pork with apple sauce, yes. But an apple pie with bits of pork in it? There are all sorts of flavour combinations that only work one-way.’ ‘So,’ said Di, ‘remind me again, how all this is relevant to what we were talking about, which as I recall was John Harvey’s underwear?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was talking about a conversation in the bar at Aussiecon Three in 1999 in which Eve Harvey had revealed that, perhaps while travelling and short of clean laundry, you know, in extremis, she had from time to time borrowed a pair of John’s underpants. And of course once she’d revealed this, we all wanted to know, did the arrangement run the other way? And John was really quite adamant that it didn’t. So it’s like the beer/cheese thing: it’s OK for Eve to admit that occasionally she wears John’s underwear but not vice versa.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Di. ‘I can imagine John being up for it. He seems like a liberal, open-minded kinda guy. I reckon he’d be up for experimenting.’ And that is how Di Young ended up sitting in our dining room imagining John Harvey in women’s underwear. But it’s OK, she was doing it professionally.

“Looking For Fandom - ConFusion at 40, Part 4” by Leah Zeldes Smith [[ Published in The Wherefore Fandom? Clubhouse, March Fandom does not equal “the science fiction market.” To be a fan it’s 2, 2013, http://bit.ly/1kpgFH not enough just to be a consumer of science fiction. To be part of F ]] fandom you have to participate in fandom as a community. You have to interact with other fans. You have to do fannish things. You cannot be a fan all by yourself.

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 26 of 58 I get in trouble, often, when I say things like that. I get labeled “elitist” and “exclusionary.” Yet I don’t believe it’s exclusionary to say someone isn’t part of a community they have no idea exists and probably wouldn’t want to belong to if they did. When I said it during an Immortal ConFusion panel on “Inclusion in an Expanding Fandom,” Mary Robinette Kowal got up and nearly walked off the panel, saying I wasn’t including her. Kowal’s idea of fandom, based on what she said, is that it consists of people who are fans “of” something: a TV show or an author or some other thing produced by people who get paid to do it. That’s not my fandom at all. Nor does fan mean, as blogger Astrid Nielsch insultingly defined it, a perpetrator of works based on “a comic/manga, animation, movie, TV show or game — and which are therefore derivative, and may infringe a copyright, trademark, or other right of authorship.” Nielsch goes a step further than some others who use fan as an antonym for pro, with the implication that if something isn’t salable it’s inferior. Years ago, the World Science Fiction Society revised the titles of the Hugo Awards to replace amateur, which was originally used in the highest and best sense of that term — “a person who engages in a study, sport, or other activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons” — with fan just in order to avoid any possible confusion with the secondary meaning of “lacking in experience and competence in an art or science.” Most of the fan artists and writers I know create highly original work. What makes the adjective fan apply is that they create it for the pleasure of other fans and for egoboo, rather than for commercial publication. The winners of the Hugos for Best Fan Artist and Best Fan Writer bear that out. Yet derogatory views of fandom as some kind of unsavory parasites on the professional world have, if anything, increased as fandom and general interest in SF have grown. About a dozen years ago, I was privileged to help to host a joint event combining the fanzine convention Ditto and the Timebinders’ meeting, FanHistoricon. Among those in attendance were Forry Ackerman, Jack Speer, Bob Tucker, and Art Widner, all of whom were around at fandom’s beginning, and I asked them who it was who dubbed this community fandom. None of them knew. I’ve subsequently posed the question to other early fans, including Dave Kyle and Fred Pohl, and they didn’t know either. So it’s likely we’ll never know. I think, though, that whoever it was did us a disservice. If, instead of fans, we were called, say, thusiasts (the term Bill ‘the Galactic’ Fesselmeyer used in his wonderful piece of faan fiction, “How the GRINCH Stole Worldcon“) or stfnists or some other unique word, we might today have less misunderstanding about the difference between fan in the mundane dictionary sense and fan as a term of art meaning “participant in the community that arose out of Hugo Gernsback’s creation of the Science Fiction League.” The late Susan Wood summed up my view of fandom: “We come together because we value SF. We stay because we value each other.” Bigotry is unfannish The subject came up on the ConFusion panel when I said that fandom has less influence on the professional world of science fiction than ever before. What I meant is that, from the Gernsback era through the 1980s, most pros, both writers and editors, came out of fandom. Their friends were fans and they partied with fans. And so fandom had a very direct influence, disproportionate to the market, the buyers, of science fiction. Nowadays, most pros didn’t start out as fans, and their involvement — if they have any at all — is mainly commercial. Their publisher or their agent or somebody else tells them that they’ll win more awards and sell more books if they appear at cons, so they go. They hold their books in front of them when

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 27 of 58 they’re on panels, and when they’re not on panels, they’re rarely anywhere to be seen. In these times, when SF is mainstream and people talk about it in the same way they discuss football or music, and geek culture is trendy, the fannish community is wider and less cohesive than it once was. But there is still a distinction between people who participate in the microcosm and consumers. The bulk of the “Expanding Fandom” panel was not — as I had assumed it would be — about “Big Tent” fandom, which is to say, what you might call original fandom plus all of what we used to call the “fringe fandoms” that today far outnumber us — comics fandom, media fandom, anime fandom, furry fandom et al. Instead, it was about racism and sexism. That threw me off, because the fandom I participate in is not racist and only inadvertently sexist. It is, it’s true, mostly white, and if its members are, perhaps, guilty of failure to engage in outreach, they are no more inhospitable to people of color who find their way in than they are to anybody else. Fandom is not particularly welcoming to anyone until they’ve paid their dues, but it’s much more colorblind than society at large. Indeed, the very first SF fan club, the Scienceers, founded Dec. 11, 1929, met weekly in the Harlem apartment of its president, Warren Fitzgerald, whom club member Allen Glasser described as “about thirty … a light-skinned Negro — amiable, cultured, and a fine gentleman in every sense of that word.” During the 1950s, when fandom was even whiter than it is now, a group of fans decided to see how the microcosm would react to a black fan, so they made one up; the hoax, Carl Brandon, quickly became a BNF. Tokenism, as in this panel, doesn’t strike me as a productive form of affirmative action. The panel featured one African American, Andre Batts, a comics artist who was specially invited to ConFusion, which he said was his first SF con, for this panel — he had only been to comics cons before; one Asian American, neopro Wesley Chu; moderator Jim C. Hines, who at this point may be better known for his attempts to contort into the unnatural poses of the heroines on his books’ covers than for the books themselves; Anne K. Gray, an Ann Arbor conrunner who copy edits for Subterranean Press; Kowal; and me. I note that on this panel supposedly about fandom, there was not a single person without a professional connection to the field, not even me. Not that pros can’t also be fans, but you’d think that a panel with “fandom” in the title would have somebody who wasn’t a filthy pro. That really influenced the panel, because when most of these people talked about “inclusion,” they didn’t mean who writes for fanzines or goes to Worldcon, they were talking about which pros are published, what they write about and what shows up on the big and little screens. And as I said above, fandom does not have much influence on that. Consumers may, but fandom is an infinitesimal part of the market. Fandom, as I know it, is a meritocracy, more about what you do than who you are. But what do I know? The minority to which I belong is — despite narrowly escaping genocide in recent history and still-extant bigotry in the wider world — rarely considered in that light today, and has, in any case, never been a minority within fandom. I never felt excluded because of my ethnicity or my gender. Nobody ever challenged me about my knowledge of SF. My personal struggles in gaining acceptance in fandom were documented by Walt Willis and Bob Shaw in THE ENCHANTED DUPLICATOR before I was even born. Once I, like Jophan, crossed the Jungle of Inexperience and the Desert of Indifference, the path to Trufandom became clear. Meanwhile, women probably outnumber men in fandom these days, and such sexism that exists among fans is not of the “women are

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 28 of 58 inferior” sort but more of the “women are sex objects” type, fomented by the social awkwardness of fans of both genders. I am old and long married and haven’t had to fend off unwelcome advances in years — but in my youth, the fanboys were so croggled that there were females around them at all, they had no idea of how to behave, while the femmefen were so unused to male attention that being the object of even geeky guys’ fantasies felt empowering. Today, it appears, the young men are no more suave, but the women have less forbearance for ham-fisted attempts at flattery and seduction. There was, apparently, a whole controversy in media/comics/cosplay fandom about “fake geek girls” that escaped my notice because, in the bookish fandom where I hang out, “booth babes” do not exist and conventionally beautiful people of either gender are rare. In fact, the only episode I ever saw of anything like that was in 1982, when the Chicon masquerade featured a gorgeous hunk who turned out to be an actor hired by Bridge Publications to promote Battlefield Earth. Everybody spotted him for a ringer immediately (although another actor, who signed himself “H. Ford” in the art auction, was able to blend in incognito. Yes, that H. Ford — Raiders of the Lost Ark won a Hugo that year). The second ConFusion “fan” panel, “Fandom vs. Social Media,” also wasn’t what I had expected. The description of the panel and its title didn’t jive at all, and so we agreed to ignore the latter. As moderator, I had hoped to talk about fandom online and how it is essentially a continuation of the conversation that started in the pages of Amazing Stories in the 1930s, but I was stymied by the other panelists, Michael R. Underwood and Peter V. Brett, again both pros, who seemed more interested in discussing their use of social media as a means of communicating with their readers rather than as a latter-day version of lettercols and apae.

“How Not to Mend a Broken Guitar and How Not to Fast” by Graham Charnock Published in I started complaining to Pat (my wife if you don’t know) about pains in BOOMCHICKAW the chest some time ago. I wasn’t terribly worried because I knew they AHWAW! had a specific cause. It was the pain of being rejected in favour of better fan-writers like Roy Kettle. No, it was because I’d bought a guitar on ebay, as I am sometimes wont to do. I collect guitars. I have twelve or so of them; it’s kind of hard to keep track of how many sometimes. Here’s a link to my collection: http://www.cartiledgeworld.co.uk/guitars.html . This guitar was called 'The Michigan', made in the US, probably immediately post war, but I know nothing else about the make or the model. Not too much information on the web. It has a fairly crudely arched top, and is lacking a floating scratch-plate, which hints at its credential as a *jazz* type guitar, but otherwise everything looks original. I bought it as a restoration project since it was advertised on ebay as having a serious fracture of the neck at the heel joint. As well as the neck heel the fingerboard had split where it joined the body. I put a bolt through the heel and a fillet of wood to fill the fracture and it seems to be holding up okay. Don’t worry if you can’t keep up with these technical terms; not very many people can. The action is pretty high but it has a nice woody tone so I will probably use it for slide guitar with a dropped open tuning so as not to put too much pressure on the neck. I started working on it and at one stage found myself bracing the body of the guitar against my chest whilst I tried to bend the neck to

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 29 of 58 open the fracture. Spang! went something in my rib-cage, as if Sonny Liston had caught me with a body punch. After that things got really painful when coughing and breathing so I had to take serious downloads of ibruprofen to cope with it. But at least I was fairly sure of what was wrong and that it was not life-threatening. Anyway Pat insisted I go to the doctor about the chest pain fearing it might be the slowest ever developing case of heart attack recorded. Doctors are not my favourite people, and I am particularly antagonistic towards this one, since she refused to sign off a travel insurance claim (which centered around our proposed trip to Corflu Zed) on the grounds that she believed I had an underlying chronic condition: i.e. alcoholism. This was true but I couldn’t see how it would jeopardize an insurance claim, when it was actually pneumonia (a non chronic condition) that had stopped me flying. I wonder how many alcoholics fly every year without any problems. Anyway the doctor heard my story and said it could take five or six weeks to heal. Meanwhile in the surgery the question of diabetes came up. There has been an on-going struggle on the part of my doctor to diagnose whether I have diabetes or chronic liver failure or both, or neither. First of all when she looked at my notes she seemed surprised that *someone* had put a diagnosis of diabetes on my file. Wonder who did that then, considering she is supposedly a doctor and I am supposedly a patient? Then she seemed surprised that although years ago I had seen both a diabetes nurse and a dietician, and her partner, for a second opinion, I hadn't been put on any medication for it. What am I supposed to do, she's supposed to be the doctor, although dip-shit also starts with a 'd' and seems more apposite to my mind. The good news though was that apparently I had lost half an inch in height and two kilos in weight since 2009. God knows how many litres of semen have also passed under the bridge since then. And so to blood tests one fine bitter winter morning. Our clinic has a 'take a ticket, wait for your number' system. My ticket was number 47. The next patient number' on display was No. 50. I'd been to this clinic before and thus assumed there were 96 people ahead of me. On previous occasions I'd noticed how the number called clicked over at 99 to a new run of tickets. I waited for about 15 minutes before there was any change in the number called, to 51. I checked the ticket machine and it was now issuing tickets in the upper fifties to people just arriving, who would obviously get in before me if my waiting logic was not correct. I questioned it with two women behind the reception desk. One just said she didn't work there and didn’t understand me anyway. The other asked why I hadn't just gone in when my number had come up. I tried to explain to her that when my number had come up on the display, obviously sometime earlier, I hadn't even been there and had probably just been leaving home, and ticket 47 obviously hadn't yet been taken when the number had come up, because it had been there waiting for me to take it, when next patient 50 was already showing on their display. Just go in, she said, waving me away dismissively, as if I was an idiot. Boy, was I grumpy. The attitude of the *staff* was what really irked me, like they'd never had this problem (difficult to believe), or they really didn't care either way since I just appeared to be someone difficult with a problem who couldn't express it in terms they'd understand, but it was their machines causing the problem. There's a big sign outlining their and NHS's zero-tolerance policy towards insulting behaviour, but when

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 30 of 58 you are just trying to find out information and they turn on the *You crazy man. We not talk to you* mode it's a bit sickening (literally) and could be provocative if I wasn't such a nice charming individual. I'm sorry, I expect staff behind desks at NHS funded medical centres to be expected to cope with this very basic kind of situation. Maybe I should write a letter of complaint. But you probably all know I’m a mild mannered soul not given to complaining. When I finally did get in to see the technician he took my ticket and asked me why I hadn’t come in earlier when my number had been called. Any scathingingly witty riposte was beyond me at that point so I stayed silent. He asked me if I had been fasting, and I replied, yes, for twenty-four hours (I had been ill and not felt like eating). “That’s too long!” he admonished me. How can you fast for too long? Well apparently you can because it screws up your blood in terms of what they want to test it for. Who would have thought? Of course my blood test came back with the result : “Failed, must try harder ,” and at the time of writing I’m trying to steel myself up for another one, without much enthusiasm, I must say.

”The Big Nordic Tour of a Little Finnish NOFFer” by Tomi Mäntylä [[ Published in THE I started my summer vacation on a flight to Copenhagen. I marched in LYRE BIRD 6, Aug. 2013 ]] a cool slow motion from the airplane to the airport. So, it had come to this… I had been nominated the NoFF of Finland for 2012. The honour was to be the Finnish fandom ambassador to the Nordic countries. On top of the honour, I was granted an almost 300 euro grant for visiting a Nordic (non-Finnish) fandom event. I would have wanted to go to Oslo, as there I hadn’t yet been to. Unfortunately, apparently the only actual Norwegian fandom event, Norcon, had already gone for this year. As I was looking through other Nordic events I heard that the Swedish NoFFer was going to visit Fantasticon in Copenhagen. With that and me loving Copenhagen, I chose Fantasticon. However, I decided to extend the visit as my summer vacation trip, so that after the con I would visit Oslo and Stockholm too. So, there I was, riding a train from the airport to downtown, and then proceeding by foot towards my hotel. I later realized that at the airport I should have found my way to the metro, instead of the local train. By the metro, I would have made it almost to the doorstep of my hotel. However, the weather was great and I didn’t have too much luggage, so it was fun walking. Also, in a metro I wouldn’t haven’t run into this little street, aptly named for the Finnish NoFFer as Suomisvej. (“Suomi” being the Finnish word for “Finland”. The street was right next to Sveasvej, where “Svea” refers to “Sweden”.) The quaint little green street made the trip even more delightful. It pays to reserve well enough time for travels to make a note of such things. It wasn’t noon, so my room at the hotel wasn’t ready. I did get to leave my bag in the luggage room there, and they gave me tips on acquiring a local traffic ticket and on the location of the closest ATM. The metro stations were right next door to both my hotel and the Vanløse Culture Station. Furthermore the Vanløse station was the terminal station of the metro line. I reckoned this to be an easy stay, as far as not getting lost goes. When I finally ended up in my hotel room, later in the day, I found there a mesmerising amount of light switches in the hotel room. Some of them appeared to turn some of the lights on and off with some kind of complex logic and with a delay. Some again didn’t appear to have

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 31 of 58 any effect with the prevalent phases of the stars. Generally the room was as the hotel name “Cabinn Scandinavia” lead me to expect. It reminded me of a modern ship cabin of a little bit more expensive class and a little bit bigger size. Quite swell for a couple of nights stay. The Internet worked well enough. The shower was quite pathetic. In Vanløse I was lured by the scent of freshly baked croissants. I ended up buying one with marzipan filling for breakfast, accompanied by a cappuccino. I had considered asking for “kamelåså” at the con reception desk, but I wasn’t quite sure how far the Danish sense of humour stretches, and on the other hand I had no need for bike repair supplies, a file, or 1000 litres of milk. As a NoFFer I didn’t have to pay the entrance fee and they even fit me on the guest list for the night’s banquet, although one should have made a reservation a long time ago, and the list was full too. I did have to pay for the banquet, of course, but the food and company available there were well worth it. Also, it’s just these kinds of events where I find it easiest to get acquainted with the people sitting next and opposite me within speaking distance. The first piece of the programme in which I participated was “Hvad skal der ske fremover med Nordic Fan Fund?” We were four people: myself, two locals, and Johan Anglemark from Sweden. Johan and I explained the NoFF practises in Finland and Sweden. Flemmin Rasch and Knud Larn appeared to get excited considering the prospects of resurrecting the Danish noffing that had been lying dormant for a few years. At the con area I talked with very enthusiastic members of the Danish V-Association. We discussed childhood memories related to the TV series and compared it with Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars. I learned that even of V they had made a new version two years ago. I ended up purchasing both seasons of the new version on DVDs. It was something of a blind purchase. Considering that I wasn’t even aware of a new version, I had my suspicions about the series. On the other hand, not many have even heard of Charlie Jade either. I doubt it will be a bad purchase. At least the people of the V-Association appear to like it. Fantasticon was small, but good. I listened with great interest to the lectures of people well versed in the psychology of horror and monsters, or in Lovecraft’s mindset and the later authors’ signatures in the Cthulhu mythos. There were insight and input also in the questions and notes made by members of the audience, both during the lectures and after them. A few days’ visits to cons abroad broadens one’s perspective. Although the strongest impression was on how similar life is, especially between the Nordic cities, I was also left with inspiring differences. I believe I caught a scent of this also in the guest of honour, Alastair Reynolds’s words in the concluding panel discussion of Fantasticon. I posed a question from the audience, asking them what they felt they were taking with them from this visit. Alastair told about how he already had written a story taking place in a particular town, just because he had once visited that very place. The last piece of the con programme, the Dead Dog, reminded me of the last night’s banquet a lot, but less formal. Not that the banquet would have been overly stiff either. I talked with the guests of honour, Alastair Reynolds and Ellen Datlow, as well as with members of the local organizing committee. It was fun getting to know these people. Before and during the con I had felt a bit alienated by not recognizing the names of the guests of honour, where other people around me seemed to talk about them like of Elvis and Mother Theresa. Even in the Dead Dog small talk I wasn’t acquainted with the big names of Finnish fandom. The outsider hadn’t done his homework.

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 32 of 58 Nevertheless, I now know Alastair and Ellen and my own fandom universe has grown and shaped further as my own. In my perspective Finnish fandom is mostly based on the fandom associations working as parts of the university student organizations. Young people who get into scifi literature begin to yearn for this activity at the high school level, especially for the cons. At the college level, at latest, they join the associations and can be very active inside them. For some, the student life becomes life-long-learning, and fandom stays there with them. Others move into work life, but visit selected fandom activities and happenings. This said, it seems only natural that cons in Finland are arranged often in university facilites that are well equipped with auditoriums and other suitable facilities. Cons don’t differ that much from scientific conferences. Especially on the live action role-playing gaming scene it’s not so clear to say whether Knutepunkt is a conference or a convention. It appears that at least in Denmark the universities don’t host fandom associations. Instead they are run completely independently and need to find ways to invite new, young members. They do not have the Finnish style automaton for this. What in earth are the Danish students doing all their free time? Studying for their exams?! On Monday I checked out from the hotel and walked around the Copenhagen downtown. I sent a card to Terrakoti from the King’s Post Office, wondering if it’d make its way there before I was back in Turku myself. (It didn’t.) The Kongelig Postgaart was a fancy old building. I was half expecting a mounted messenger to ride out of it towards Turku with my card. I found, on a map, a place called Einhjøringens Bastion in Christianshavn. Of course a NoFFer had to pay a visit there. The NoFF does originate from Science fiction och fantasytidskriften Enhöringen. From there I continued my way towards the Little Mermaid’s statue and spotted a group of parading soldiers wearing bearskins (like the British Queen’s Guards). I wondered, how would the group respond, if they ran into a terrorist group or other threat? I imagine the big hats would come off quickly. They are real soldiers. At the Little Mermaid’s statue I was mostly interested in the (other) tourists and the sales booths surrounding it. For me, visiting here was mostly going through “the Bucket List”. It would have been interesting to ask the others, how they felt about their visit, but my introvert self overcame. Boarding the DFDS Seaways ship Crown of Scandinavia reminded me pretty much of boarding the Helsinki-Tallin and Turku-Stockholm ships. The ship itself felt familiar. Should I have awakened there from a coma, I would probably have guessed I was on a Turku-Stockholm ship. The ship stays at the harbour for some time, but for some reason the new passengers are boarded only one hour before the ship departs, so at that point the ship terminal is crowded by a slowly advancing mass of half a shipfull of people. In my experience the Helsinki-Stockholm cruise is the best. There you don’t have to crawl in a crowd in or out of the ship. Having made my way to my cabin, I calculated that there now lay ahead a 17 hours sea journey. I had paid that much extra on my ticket that I had a cabin with a window. As the ship departed, I sat in my cabin, continuing writing this report. I don’t enjoy the 24 hour cruises on the Turku-Stockholm ships, but I saw the purpose for this journey of travelling from a place to another, and therefore I enjoyed my stay onboard. Travelling by sea is an integral part of the Fennoscandic history. While I had been walking towards the ship, I had been imagining a sailor of the sail ship times, walking towards his frigate. As the ship started and the DFDS Copenhagen Terminal begun to drift by me, the

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 33 of 58 plastic window frame of my cabin and the steady motion gave me the feeling of being onboard the U.S.S. Enterprise departing from a space station. I couldn’t picture a scenario for the brass band that started playing in the ship corridor speakers, though. In Oslo harbour I was met by Herman Ellingsen, who guided me, for example, in the acquisition of a 24 hour ticket for the local transportation. Herman had kindly offered to house me the night I slept in Oslo. We took my luggage to his apartment and then toured Oslo. The first stop was the restaurant Frognerseteren at Holmenkollen, to which we rode on a scenic metro. The experience was wonderful. A scenic metro by a mountainside! At times, one could see the track we had just travelled, going along the opposite mountainside. Every now and then the metro stopped at cute little stations, lodged to the slope. Herman was a kind host. Before the 1. tirsdag meeting we visited the local scifi store, where a book caught me, as well as a plush dalek. The speaking plush dalek I just had to buy as a souvenir for Terrakoti, to befriend the Megariylitsz dragon we already had there. The 1. tirsdag meeting didn’t much differ from the Turku Scifi Mafia meetings. People who fancied science fiction had gathered in a delightful restaurant for the first Tuesday of the month. The discussion topics varied within all things imaginable, partly discussed in Norwegian, but mostly hospitably in English. Some of the regular attendees were now out of town, which might have been the cause that it appeared that the Turku Mafia people averaged younger. I have to state my satisfaction to the state of the Finnish student free-time activity culture. So, I slept at Herman’s apartment and in the morning I headed back to downtown Oslo with my luggage. There were strikes and so no one was able to leave bags in the train station deposit boxes. I had to carry my bags with me, which didn’t motivate me for greater wandering. I had a coffee in a local café and went for lunch, before I walked to the Oslo Central Railway Station to wait for my train. To my disappointment, I couldn’t find even a commercial WiFi service in the station, not to mention a free one. The train to Stockholm was spacious, with an old fashioned feel with its wood coloured interior. The train had no Internet service either. An electric outlet it did have. The Omenahotelli in Stockholm was a typical omenahotelli. “Omena” is Finnish for “apple”, which made it funny to connect my Apple computer and iPad to the Internet there, before going to sleep. In the morning I managed my bag nicely to the ship terminal deposit box. The Tallink-Silja terminal itself was nicely connected to a nearby metro station. A pilgrimage to the Gamla Staden scifi store was required at this point. There I amazed myself with my self discipline of not buying anything, although I already held for quite some time the Bladerunner book, and was lured by a Doctor Who board game. Walking around the Gamla Staden I also came across another prestigious site. This was the local equivalent to Plymouth Rock – the local Tardis equivalent by which the Econ 3 guests and guests of honour had beached with Viking ships a year ago. I did the holy rite of photography and proceeded to enjoy a cup of cappuccino and a sweet pastry in a nearby café. Finally I returned to the ship terminal to join the boarding crowd for Silja Galaxy. In my cabin I was “entertained” by the music from the disco downstairs, until midnight. On the positive side I loved the windowsill of the E-class cabin at the stern of the ship. It was just the proper size for me to sit on it, watching Stockholm vanishing from the view. Another positive surprise was that I was not harassed by the cleaning crew in the morning, before the ship was in the harbor. This was a practice I had come used to on these ships, as they stay only an

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 34 of 58 hour at the harbour and have a scarce amount of time for cleaning the cabins. Disembarking and return home was now comfortably peaceful. I returned with miscellaneous souvenirs for Terrakoti. Also NoFFing managed to network me with some people from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, even though I’m usually not so good with getting acquainted with new people during cons. I recommend the future Noffers too to send e-mail to the people in the area they are going to visit, before the trip. The funding I received would have certainly been sufficient for a return trip to Copenhagen, especially had I stayed at some local’s apartment, instead of a hotel. Here I had chosen to extend the journey as my summer vacation trip and also experience the Copenhagen-Oslo ship fare and the Oslo-Stockholm train fare. For future Finnish Noffers I have nice people to recommend, some of whom specifically gave their contact information to me, in case I should need housing in the future where they live. Apart from Oslo, I have been to these cities before, but still these kinds of trips help broaden my view of life, and especially of my home town and country. People so far have turned out to all be part of the same species, both in the Nordic countries and in southern Europe. In Finland we seem to have the biggest and most active fandom in the Nordic countries, but the poorest public transit system. Maybe we will get a maglev tram system in Turku soon.

“Travelling Through Winter” by John Newman [[ Published in Recently, on one of Jan's “field trips”, we had a great, if simple, winter PING! ]] experience. We left home at eight in the morning. I know that is not all that early, just as I know that many of you won't consider 3C a particularly low winter temperature, but it was early, and cold, for us. As we left town we passed one of our friends who was enjoying his customary morning walk, in shorts, while we were marvelling at the frost. Maldon generally doesn't have frost, but this day was different. As we drove east, down into the Muckleford valley, the frost grew thicker and more complete in its coverage. It wasn't until the next valley, where we turned south past Harcourt and headed out towards the high plains of Central Victoria, that it became wonderful. Suddenly, the sun came out. Instead of white frost and a simply chilled landscape, the scene became a sparkling wonderland. The ice crystals broke the green of the grass into myriad shards of light. Small clouds, drifting low along the shallow valleys, were perched on the gum trees like giant ghostly sheep grazing. Along the creek beds moving tendrils of cloud twisted in and out through the wattle trees, as if to show where the watercourse was beneath the frost. Or as if it had risen, to flow in the air amongst the clouds. Jan said how beautiful it was, and how pleased she was to be in a nice warm vehicle. I would have run through the frost to see that beauty. I gazed, rapt, as she drove on into the higher lands. Past Malmsbury and Kyneton, all decorated with light and ice. Then the clouds came back, and descended. The colour faded and although it wasn't dark by the time we had reached the back side of the Macedon ranges near Carlsruhe we had entered a strange type of white-out. Nothing had colour. The road was grey, and long grasses at its side formed mounds of white fluff. Behind them, white fields were spread under a dozen shades of white cloud. It was like an alien place, and Mount Macedon

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 35 of 58 was nowhere to be seen. It was Highway World. A dark ribbon populated by grey cars and trucks. All this was at only 600 metres above sea level. In 15 minutes we had descended to the coastal plain, and the sun was out again. A brilliant blue sky arched over vivid, dry green fields, red roofs, and multicoloured vehicles as we passed Sunbury and Diggers Rest. It was remarkably moving. A simple drive in the winter, with ethereal beauty, alien wilderness and welcoming, friendly normalcy. What an interesting way to start the day!

“REG and Alter Leave the Couch” by Mark Plummer [[ Published in Richard E Geis [ Strange Horizons, http://www.locusmag.com/News/2013/03/richard-e-geis-1927-2013/ ] Apr. 13, 2013 died on 4 February in Portland, Oregon. He was 85. He’d not been http://bit.ly/1kY3K much in evidence in fandom in recent years, but from the Fifties Ld ]] through to the Eighties, in the peak years of print fanzines, he was a popular and prolific fan writer and editor. He was nominated for the Hugo award 34 times [ http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/HugoNomList.html#1914 ], at least once every year from 1968 to 1986 aside from 1972, and collected 13 rockets, although for some reason many online sources cite the figures of 30 and eight respectively. Geis’s fanzines appeared in a variety of titles and formats, although they do form one continuous run. Or maybe it’s two. Either way, it started in 1953 with the first issue of PSYCHOTIC, 20 ditto’d [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator ] pages of most self-written material (I’m going on second-hand sources here as I’ve never seen a copy). PSYCHOTIC continued monthly and its page count, circulation, and influence within the fan community grew. With #17 in 1954 it switched to offset printing. In 1955, and starting with issue #21, it was reborn as SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW following a change in editorial policy to make it a more overt review of, well, science fiction. Whatever anybody else thought of the change, Geis was unhappy with it, and regretted the new direction, feeling ‘it had become more work than fun’. There were only three issues of SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW before he killed the title. After three more small circulation PSYCHOTICs – one through the Fantasy Amateur Publishing Association [ http://fancyclopedia.wikidot.com/fapa ] (#24), a single sheet (#25), and a third distributed through a group called The Cult [ http://fancyclopedia.wikidot.com/the-cult ] (#26) – he gave the unfulfilled subscription money to charity and quit publishing. For a while at least. He re-emerged in 1967, after spending the intervening years writing porn novels and getting into slot-car racing. The three issues of SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW were ret-conned away, along with – albeit seemingly less deliberately because he’d forgotten about them – the last three small circulation PSYCHOTICs, and he picked up with PSYCHOTIC #21 in November 1967. Like its forerunner incarnation, the new PSYCHOTIC grew in page count and circulation, and earned Geis his first Hugo nomination (for best fanzine) in 1968. He reported the results in the 56-page letter-sized duplicated PSYCHOTIC #27 in September 1968 – and then followed that two months later with a 70-page offset half-sized fanzine called (inevitably) SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW although bearing the sequential number 28. The new SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW proved more durable than its previous manifestation in 1955, if characteristically Geisian in growing its readership while fiddling with its format. Offset gave way to a return to letter-sized mimeo after three issues, and the fanzine won the Hugo in 1969 and 1970 in which latter year Geis was also

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 36 of 58 nominated as a fan writer. Students of narrative momentum will probably see where this is heading. With his circulation pushing 2,000, SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW #43 (March 1971) saw a switch to half-sized offset and then there was a title change to… … to RICHARD E GEIS. But first, I’ll back track a bit. I’ve not seen the earliest PSYCHOTICs from the 1950s but Ted White [ http://fancyclopedia.wikidot.com/ted-white ], looking back on them in #22 (December 1967), saw them as ‘topical and the focal point [ http://fancyclopedia.wikidot.com/focal-point ] of fannish doings’, the place ‘where we heard the news. Where the clan gathered.’ Ted saw the first death signs of that initial run in the switch to offset printing, ‘a move towards formalism and what some felt to be pretentiousness. Readers argued about it and then sighed and gave up when Dick announced an all-SF-review policy with the name change.’ The revived 1960s PSYCHOTICs, #21 onwards, were duplicated. It may seem daft to dwell on these different modes of reproduction but they really did, I feel, create a tone independent of the words that were on the page. PSYCHOTIC #21-27 mixed fannish material – fanzine reviews, convention politics, fan history – with more science fictional content, and a strong letter column featuring many prominent fans and professionals of the time. There’s really very little change with the formal switch to SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW with #28, with some columns and regular features carrying over, including Geis’s trademark bickering dialogues with his own ‘Alter-Ego’. The fannish material does gradually diminish – it’s notable that the 14 pages of letters in #34 features 22 correspondents, all of whom were to some extent professionally engaged in writing, illustrating or publishing, and including some of the biggest names of the genre (they were also all men) – but the warmth is still there as the clash between the science fiction New Wavers [ http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/new_wave ] and traditionalists is played out across its duplicated pages. The format came at a price, though. In the early 1970s Geis found he needed two full weeks to print, collate, staple, envelope, address and mail each of his eight issues a year, hence the understandable lure of offset even with the attendant implied formalism. RICHARD E GEIS, though, was different again from its various precursors, ‘a personalzine [ http://fancyclopedia.wikidot.com/personalzine ], a diary, and a journal, and a place for letters of comment. It has little structure. It is published for my benefit, mostly. No artwork, no outside contributors except, as mentioned, some interesting letters I can argue with, if some show up.’ I’d argue that it does have a structure. It’s a series of dated entries, looking at what’s in the mail, what’s on the TV, what’s in the news, book reviews, and always ‘The Nature of the Beast’, an honest, open, and direct examination of the Geis psyche of just that kind that people routinely write down and send to a few hundred of their closest friends and anybody else who’ll pay a dollar a copy. Really, it reminds me of nothing so much as the LiveJournals I was reading a decade ago, only without the friends-locks. Some of his correspondents were surprised to discover they were reading a man in his mid-forties. You can tell he saw it as a real change of direction as he started again at #1. It didn’t last long, though, only a little under four issues. Shortly before concluding what would have been REG #4, Geis changed the title to THE ALIEN CRITIC although he kept the #4 bit; and then with #5 he went to half-sized offset again for a few issues, then duplicated for a few more, then offset again, before a title change with #12 to… yes, you’ve guessed it, SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW. This last change was more than simple whim. It was brought about following legal advice in the wake of correspondence with another similarly-titled publication. Even so, Geis seemed to finally accept where his destiny lay. Apart

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 37 of 58 from a half-sized offset #13, SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW continued as a regular offset letter-sized publication with no title changes until #61, Winter 1986, when it finally ceased publication, 33 years, 109 fanzines, and between five-and-a-half- and six thousand pages after the first PSYCHOTIC in 1953. And now you know what you’re looking for if you want to track down a complete set.

“Mr. Ambassador” by Bill Wright [[ Bill Wright The trip started serendipitously. As a Premium Economy passenger, I visited the United was directed to the Business Class counter for check-in, where I found States as 2013 my wheelchair and pusher waiting for me. As a result, I was so much DUFF (Down in charity with the world that I began a conversation with my pusher, Under Fan Fund) burbling away with such confidences as “…. I am, in a sense, an delegate to the 2013 Worldcon held Ambassador from the Australian and New Zealand science fiction Labour Day communities to the World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, weekend in San Texas, where I hope to promote the cause of World science fiction Antonio, Texas ]] hegemony harmony,” … etc. Because of his rearward position, the wheelchair pusher didn’t take in much of what I was saying. But he did pick up the word ‘Ambassador’. So the next thing I know, he makes a sharp left turn and heads for the Diplomatic Customs and Security counter. Their respectful enquiries were finished in 11 minutes, compared with from 20 minutes to over an hour for the hoi polloi. Making the transpacific hop in one stride is a looong aeroplane trip, but Virgin Australia International has a modern fleet of A380 Airbuses built for comfort and, in my roomy Premium Economy seat, I enjoyed lots of tender loving care from attentive cabin crew. I was hoping the diplomatic misapprehension would continue on arrival at Los Angeles International Airport, and so it proved to be. There was one minor hassle. The U.S. Customs official gave me a meaningful look and said, “Are you sure you have nothing to declare in your checked baggage?” I thought frantically and replied, “Well, there is a Lamington Roll* in a sealed plastic container that’s for a special function.” * I was referring to an Australian High Tea in Carol Carr’s kitchen I had pre-planned in honour of Robert Lichtman who is widely acknowledged as the Sage of Fandom. Carol would supply the tea. I would supply Lamington Cake, Australia’s national confection for special occasions – see below. “Let’s have a look,” said the U.S. Customs man. I explained how I was meeting a distinguished couple in Oakland in the San Francisco Bay area overlooking Silicon Valley for a traditional Australian High Tea served with Lamington cake, then went on to describe its origins in relation to Lord Lamington, Governor of Queensland in the early twentieth century, after whom the World-Heritage-listed Lamington Rain Forest was named. Perceiving from his glazed expression that the story held his attention, I continued my animadversions, describing the Lamington cake’s connection with his late Lordship whose lavish lifestyle pre-dated Lloyd George’s pestilential taxes that were later to impoverish a great many landed gentry including Peers of the Realm. Lord Lamington’s establishment was large enough to sustain an Upstairs-Downstairs hierarchy. The Butler and the Housekeeper had Mezzanine status. Pre-eminent among the Downstairs brigade, outranking the Cook, was the Chief Confectioner. It was the Chief Confectioner who invented the Lamington cake consisting of layers of sponge cake separated by jam and cream, covered in chocolate and sprinkled with shaved coconut. The Customs official listened in rapt silence, favoured the Lamington Roll with a speculative look as if he

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 38 of 58 might confiscate the thing and take it home, before pronouncing, “Oh, Cultural.” Then he waved me through.

“Dan McCarthy (26 October 1934 – 7 August 2013)” by Murray MacLachlan Possibly the grand old man of New Zealand fandom, Dan was the major contributor to New Zealand’s apa Aotearapa over its 25-year life, and contributed to Australia’s ANZAPA for more than a decade. As a short story writer he won a number of short story prizes including a New Caledonia short story competition where his work was translated into French as part of the prize; he was also published in two small-press anthologies. Many of his oil paintings and prints are on the walls of New Zealand’s SF fans. As a cartoonist his serial “Augustus X” was in NZ’s premier SF zine, PHLOGISTON. Raised in the Dunedin suburb of Green Island, he loved Dunedin’s rugged and startling landscapes and seascapes and liked to photograph them. Employed as a draughtsman by the Dunedin City Council for many years, his legacy is Dunedin’s Cumberland St. Overbridge, an award-winning structure of sweeping curves and successful design at the limits of the possible. Friends will recall his keen eye, ever alert for the beauty and weird in everyday things, for a beautiful or unusual car or aircraft, for arcane and extraordinary writers, for the pompous who believed their own hypocrisies and so deserved to have their balloons pricked – a task Dan relished, for he had a wicked mordant wit – and, most of all, his eye for the joy and happiness of his beloved wife Christina (d. 2010) and their children Evan and Ruth, their families and loved ones. While he was a steadfast and wise friend, his light truly shone as a husband, father and grandfather. ... but these words just scratch the surface. Also to those who don’t know, you have to explain what an apazine is, usually I just say it’s what a bulletin board would be if you could only use the postal service. For Aotearapa Dan wrote 136 contributions over 30 years, a total of 780 pages. Together with ANZAPA it’s over 1,000 pages cataloguing his life, art, and opinions. Each contribution I read as a letter to his friends. In June 2013 Dan said he was edged by his older brother in many things, but was aiming on getting to age 81 because Cormac never did. Sadly that will not now come to pass. Back in August 1985 he said, “My original reason for joining [the apa] was to get to know a few people in New Zealand fandom so that I wouldn’t end up talking to myself when I went to the Conventions. (I still end up talking to myself at conventions but now it isn’t because I don’t know anyone else).” It’s all there. Being accepted in 1985 as an artist member of the Otago Art Society. Travelling to Auckland to see the Monet Exhibition. Travelling to Melbourne in 1985 for the World Science Fiction Convention. Travel to Europe after he retired, in the one big overseas trip. Dan’s artwork, his comic strips including Scruffi Kid which featured a character who looked much like Ruth, his short fiction, his unfinished projects, his concerns about his health. In some ways we were very lucky to have Dan with us for the past two decades, as he was fortunate to survive a major heart attack in the late 1980’s. In and out of hospital and on beta-blockers that he believed stifled his creativity, Dan accepted his extra years as a bonus but didn’t take them for granted. Some of those years were tough indeed (as you know full well, and I found it tough enough as a mere bystander), watching Christina suffer through her illness was almost beyond his power to endure. Here’s Dan on Dan: From 2012: “My medical file is thicker than the Shorter Oxford

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 39 of 58 Dictionary and I think they may be starting a second volume. It is a bit sobering to see how much trouble I’ve been over the past 20 years. Certainly if I was a motor vehicle I would have been long since written off as not being worth the cost of maintaining. I could suggest selling me off for parts, except that I really can’t think of anything worth salvaging.” This was followed by a comment that he didn’t want to become a tedious old man, complaining about his ills, and was afraid that was what he was becoming. Fortunately his wit and perspective allowed him to avoid that path. From 1995: “I don’t think I am very good at winters any more. I still have trouble finding the energy to get out of my own way, but at least I now feel I am being lethargic with a bit more style and confidence.” On his work at the DCC: “They can’t stop reorganising because if they did the lack of management skills would become too obvious to ignore.” “I thought I was going to be relocated from Roads into Planning but I heard that the manager of Planning said he was going to do some team-building and didn’t want McCarthy anywhere near his people.” When Dan retired, his colleagues put an inscription in the smoko room, “From this seat Dan McCarthy dispensed his wisdom and knowledge”. Dan observed, “They took care in the inscription to mis-spell “knowledge””. On his writing: “I don’t think anyone really gets into the swing of writing for the apa until they get irritated enough with someone that they forget to be tactful, somehow it all gets easier after that.” He was absolutely delighted to win the New Caledonia Embassy’s fiction award, and with his wins in the short fiction competitions at Constellation – Margaret Mahy was the judge – and at other conventions. What on Earth, the first anthology by the Writers Intensive Care Group, sold out, remaindered copies however of the second anthology Electroplasm are still in the garage at King’s Ave. On his art: “My remark about being known as someone who drew good male nudes was a bit of a throwaway line. I would really prefer to be thought of as someone who wasn’t obsessed with any particular subject matter.” “I have always been aware of the Dr. Seuss element in my own work but I didn’t think it would be obvious to anyone else.” July 1996 And a couple of quotes on life: “The fact is that we all exist in a tiny island of light surrounded by darkness. As we grow older, the light fades and we must find ways of avoiding the dark. One way of doing this is to avoid thinking too deeply about our ultimate motivation. Ultimately, all is vanity. We know this. We must accept it and cultivate our gardens.” That was in 1986, and from 1993: “If all the world is indeed a stage and we are but actors thereon, it would sometimes help a hell of a lot if the director would let us know what sort of production we are supposed to be taking part in, be it melodrama, farce, or the most banal of soap opera. There comes a point when the storyline becomes so preposterous that it becomes difficult to do anything but camp it up and play it for laughs.” These are exactly the words you’d expect from a man who, dressed in a white beard and robes, was pushed the entire length of Princes and George Streets in a wheelchair one year as part of Dunedin’s Festival Week Procession, to promote the National Association of Science Fiction. Dan was playing the now-aged but even more inventive younger brother of Richard Pearse, pioneer aviator. In NASF’s alternate history, the younger brother invented the first rocket and satellite. As Dan said, the satellite was bloody heavy! It didn’t matter

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 40 of 58 how few of the many thousands of spectators got the joke. Other memories: Watching Dan and Christina dance to Buddy Holly’s music at Natalie and my wedding. They were both beautiful dancers. Sharing a whiskey while gossiping and telling stories as Procol Harum played on the stereo. Discussing the merits of Terry Dowling’s writing, the virtues of Vance or R.A. Lafferty’s jokes when Dan and Christina stayed with us in Wellington, Christchurch, and Arrowtown. The pleasure of sharing with Dan and Christina the places such as Wilson Bay on Lake Wakatipu that are special to me; I still remember Christina saying, “Murray, it’s beautiful,” in the ingenuous way that Dan loved so much. He was a terrific friend, steadfast over 30 years of conversation, pain, and laughter, I will miss him dreadfully, and we have all been very lucky.

“Article on Yellow Paper” by Pat Charnock [[ Published in Did I ever tell you that I’ve got a thing about stationery? I wouldn’t RAUCOUS call it a fetish as such; that’s sexual, isn’t it? But I get a buzz of CAUCUS 2, June pleasure at picking up a new item, or slicing open a box of notepads 2013 ]] and file inserts. The first indication came when I was a kid, on holiday with my parents in Rye in Sussex. My Dad told me and my brother that we could have 10 shillings each to spend on special treats or a souvenir of the week. We arrived on the Saturday and by Monday I’d found my treat – a Rexel Bambi stapler. My Dad wasn’t keen and he tried to talk me out of it. I sulked, I complained. It was my treat – why couldn’t I have what I wanted? I treasured that green shiny Bambi stapler for years. Later on, when I was working in office jobs, I often managed to wangle the responsibility of ordering stationery. Imagine it – regular deliveries of brand new, pristine stationery, whole boxes of it. Then I was made membership secretary for Seacon 79, the Worldcon. I had to set up and run an office. And they actually gave me money to buy staplers. (And other stuff too, but the staplers were the things I remember.) I opted to buy Bambis – they were cheap, they weren’t terribly sturdy, but they would only be needed for a week. I bought six in a selection of colours. In later years, when I worked for a cash-strapped council that bought the cheapest products it could possibly negotiate, I was still ordering stationery for my team, but the joy had gone out of it. I started buying my own pencils and notebooks, rather than using the cheapo ones. Another convention gave me another thrill. When I was doing membership for Corflu Cobalt, I had to buy materials for the laminated badges. I could only find one suitable supplier, and I had to open an account with the company. I personally had an account with a stationery supply company! Could life get any better? (I’d just like to put on record here that the only stationery I claimed for was legitimately bought in a proper fashion and was absolutely essential for Corflu.) While we were in Portland, having a wander through the city, I spied an Office Depot and remembered an old urge. Apparently Americans produce something called legal pads, full of lined yellow paper. I’d never seen one and, egged on by Shell, I headed for the door. The shop was closing for the day, so I regretfully abandoned that idea.

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 41 of 58 But on our last day, in San Francisco, I went for a last wander through the local shopping centre. I picked up a set of wooden spoons in Safeway, so when I stir my sauces, I’ll think of Fisherman’s Wharf. I wandered into Walgreen’s and picked up a packet of travel Kleenex. The design was bright and interesting: they opened like a book. I’d bought some before and Eloise liked playing with them. Then I saw the stationery section, and the package of two yellow legal pads. So I’m sitting here, watching the Eurovision Song Contest with one eye, and writing a first draft of my Article On Yellow Paper. With a Papermate Non-Stop pencil, in case you’re interested.

“Terrorism, Civil Unrest and Noel” by Claire Brialey [[ Published in In the Venn diagram which shows Things I Like and Things Other BANANA WINGS Middle-Aged Science Fiction Fans Seem Increasingly to Like, there’s 53, Aug. 2013 ]] an intersection which includes reading crime/mystery fiction, bird-spotting, and moaning – although not necessarily all at once. This isn’t about the things which it sometimes feels that only I like, not least because it would end up as glib exaggeration – and you’d probably see right through that to the extent of not even bothering to write in. But over in the part of the diagram which does not include my enthusiasms, along with trains and the National Trust you will find gardening. I mention this only to clarify what I was doing in Antony Shepherd’s garden, with secateurs and many garden refuse sacks, and indeed with Noel Collyer and Meike. The four of us were not gardening. We weren’t even pruning. In the literal sense – insofar as that’s a meaningful distinction now that ‘literally’ can apparently also mean ‘figuratively’ – we weren’t decimating it. Quite the opposite, since only about ten per cent of the plant life (the two mature trees) was due to survive the cull. The thing is that some of us have gardens because they come with the house. Ours, for instance, contains some useful items like a garage at the bottom of it (in which to keep cardboard boxes and spare furniture), a shed part-way down it (in which to keep the lawnmower and gardening implements which we wouldn’t need if we didn’t have a garden), a washing line, and some bird and squirrel feeders. (Only one of these is actually meant to be a squirrel feeder. We are too laissez-faire about the garden to try to persuade the squirrels otherwise.) It also contains some attractive things, like trees and shrubs, and butterflies and birds, and squirrels falling off poles – and lots of things that grow, which include all the things in the attractive category and grass and weeds and many other plants besides. The garden we were now contemplating also came with the house, or at least with the ground floor flat in it, and by now it wasn’t a garden so much as lots of plant growth and some rubbish helpfully thrown over the back fence by long-ago louts. And it needed to not have either of those. So there we were, with secateurs and garden refuse sacks, and in Noel’s case (of course) with power tools. ‘You don’t write about Noel much any more,’ my mother had said the previous weekend. ‘Has he become less funny?’ No, Mum: just more careful about what he says and does in front of us. Which does mean, in some measure, less fun. But Noel successfully left British Telecom over a year ago and so, even though this means he no longer has the smallest BT van in the world to provide entertainment value, he’s much more relaxed now. Which means that anything he says about explosives, for instance, shouldn’t be considered at all threatening or angry. Since Noel left BT, he rarely feels threatening or angry, and indeed looks about ten years younger. This means that it’s easier for the rest of us to remember that

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 42 of 58 he’s not officially retired yet; he might even start work again soon. When we contemplate that Noel’s new job seems to consist of being paid to take other people (not us) to the pub, it’s probably just as well that Noel’s the one who’s got all the firearms and the rest of us are not. Noel just likes explosives. He’s got a license and everything – which is not the same, for those who follow British law, as being out on one. Noel also likes tools, of which he has many, which means that the rest of us frequently ask him to come round and help out with little jobs for which we haven’t got the right tools and indeed have no idea what the right tools are likely to be. It works both ways, of course. If Noel wants a fanzine article written about him, he can come straight to me. We’re in the garden. There’s quite a lot of it to cut down. There’s even more of it to clear up – both in order to get at the bits that need cutting down, and to get rid of all of them afterwards. Even Noel’s current selection of tools do not seem up to the task. Fortunately – or not – Noel has another idea. ‘We could blow it up,’ he suggests. ‘Or set fire to it.’ I tell Noel that he’s not allowed to blow up or set fire to anything, and indeed that these are neither the only two nor even the first two solutions to suggest for any problem. Especially when it seems quite tempting. We start to pull things up and cut things down. Meike and I compare notes on plants we are finding which we have also had, briefly, in our own gardens and which friends and relations who know about these things have removed with alacrity and extreme prejudice, explaining that we absolutely do not want their sort around here. In the main we can’t remember what any of them are called or what they actually do that is so bad, but fortunately we know what they look like. In the world at large this is known as racial profiling and we condemn it. In the garden: well, it’s a jungle out there. Although, gradually, a bit less of a jungle. Then we run out of garden refuse sacks and I briefly escape to acquire more. When I come back much more of the garden is clear, at least to the extent that much less of the garden is full of untidy things growing out of the ground; it is, however, much more full of untidy things lying on the ground waiting to be cut up small and stuffed into sacks for eventual composting. Many of them have thorns. Our secateurs feel increasingly inadequate. We think longingly of the empty skip round the corner which the builders next door have just had delivered. Suddenly the blade of Noel’s little reciprocating saw snaps right off. Noel says a rude word for approximately the fifty-seventh time that morning. He has some spares, but it causes him to reflect. ‘If we used explosives,’ he says contemplatively, ‘quite a lot of it would land in other people’s gardens.’ We remonstrate with Noel about his plans for a localised Croydon space programme. Just because many other people have apparently chosen to throw things into this garden, that doesn’t make it socially acceptable to redistribute the wealth. Noel explains that he’s not suggesting it is socially acceptable, but rather that it would be both useful and fun. Barring that… ‘We should have a bonfire,’ he asserts. We will not dwell on the variety of logical reasons we present for why this, too, would be neither socially acceptable nor safe. A head appears over the fence. Briefly we wonder if there are going to be complaints, but instead it proves to be one of the builders from next door, and he has an offer we can’t refuse. A horse’s head, incidentally, is one of the few things we didn’t find in the garden. Noel – you knew it was going to be Noel, didn’t you? –

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 43 of 58 had pointed out entirely hypothetically that if we found some human bones we could call the police and they’d take up all of the vegetation and clear the entire garden for us. I asked where on earth we might find some human bones in order to achieve this labour-saving solution and waste of public money. Noel looked at me pityingly. (He possibly thinks I need to get out more. Obviously it’s why I don’t want to.) Opening pleasantries are exchanged. The view is expressed from the other side of the fence that we have a good bit of work to do there. The view is expressed from our side of the fence – go on, guess – that fire or explosives would seem to be a good solution but have been unfairly vetoed. I’ve been in situations like this with Noel before. It’s obviously a sign of how relaxed and post-BT he is that he didn’t do his axe murderer laugh. The man next door doesn’t laugh either. At all. For a moment he looks a little disconcerted. But he ploughs gamely on. He’s planning to put up his own fence, it seems. If Antony is willing to remove his current fence this means the new one could use the fence posts much more effectively and there would be more stability and elegance all round. Hurrah! Before too long there is a pile of pieces of elderly fence panel on top of the pile of garden awaiting chopping into smaller pieces. It’s fair to say there is something of a gender divide on our side of the fence about whether this is entirely efficient. In retrospect, we certainly missed a trick not just in checking when the builders next door were anticipating putting up the new fence – but in asking whether we could put the old fence, and indeed various other items of rubbish recovered from the garden, into their skip. ‘What are the things that you can’t get buildings insurance for?’ muses Meike. ‘Because I think having Noel in your garden with explosives is another one.’ We look at the garden. We look at the fence. We look at the large number of full sacks. We don’t quite look at each other. We look at the garden again. We look at Noel. After all that it turned out that a bonfire was impractical. He’s definitely less funny than he used to be. But he is a member of the National Trust.

“The Great Convention Double Act” by Peter Weston [[ Published in Brian & Harry… Harry & Brian, their names went together like ham RELAPSE 21, and eggs (but which one was the ham?) with a double-act that seemed Spring 2013, with to have been around forever. Well, for fifty-five years, actually, back photos, even before Rog Peyton and I discovered fandom, but I’ll get to that in http://bit.ly/1iOSpM a moment. First, my own memories, starting in 1964. k ]] I visited Oxford that summer in my old Ford Popular, the first time I’d been to the city, and I remember spotting the road-sign for ‘Marston Street’ with a little thrill of recognition for I knew this was where a Famous Professional Science Fiction Writer lived. I’d seen the address in a book – probably the oddly-titled S pace , T ime A nd N athaniel (‘STAN’ for short) in the Birmingham Central Library in 1958, right back when I first discovered adult SF, and I’d been reading everything by Brian Aldiss ever since. I liked his first novel, T he Brightfount Diaries , about life in a bookshop, and enjoyed subsequent collections; he was someone I felt I ‘knew’, even though we’d never had any contact. By then I was producing a fanzine and the December ZENITH was a bit of a breakthrough number in which the very first shots were fired in what was to become the ‘New Wave’ controversy. Daringly, I sent a copy to Brian and he responded magnificently, beginning with the line “Although you devote overmuch space to that arch lowbrow Heinlein,

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 44 of 58 you more than recompense your readers by the thrilling spectacle of Moorcock and Jeeves bleeding and dying for their beliefs.” Now we really were in contact, and I would shortly meet him in person. Harry Harrison was another Big-Name Science Fiction Writer whose career I’d watched with great interest since ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ in the December 1957 British-edition of Astounding. I always think of that as his first SF story though in fact he’d been selling since 1951, but ‘Rat’ is the one everyone remembers. I’d followed his name through the ‘Deathworld’ sequence and other stories, including his famous short in New Worlds, ‘The Streets of Ashkelon’. Harry moved a lot in those days – Mexico, New York, London, and by 1963 he was living in Denmark. But he was a member of the BSFA (can you believe it?) which made his address available when Rog and I were sending out the second ZENITH. Harry, bless him, was one of the few people to respond, writing “it’s as stuffed with facts as an egg with meat”, so in one sense I ‘knew’ Harry even before Brian. He followed up with other LoCs and a particularly long one in my ninth issue (about ‘The Ethical Engineer’). But before that arrived I’d met him in person. The occasion was the 1965 Brumcon, held in April at the gloomy old Midland Hotel in New Street. Harry was Guest of Honour that year, and as he appeared in front of the 10-foot-high black demon figure of Mike Higgs’ backdrop (which we’d all spent the previous evening painting) Brian Aldiss shouted, “You’re casting a long shadow today, Harry!” This was the opening shot in the Brian & Harry Show which would entertain us for the next 36 hours. The highlight was Harry’s GoH address titled ‘SF Confidential’. To the uninvited accompaniment of the Salvation Army brass band playing in the street below, he launched into an unrehearsed and hilarious expose of the private lives of the American SF fraternity. Partway through Brian entered the room, late back from lunch, and with a great roar of “this pie is rotten!” Harry seized an unsold pork-pie from Brian Burgess in the front row and hurled it at Brian, narrowly missing the reporter from the Birmingham Post who observed in the next day’s paper that ‘the pie was still nestling inside its protective cellophane wrapper (British Railways issue)’. A few months later Brian and Tom Boardman bombarded Harry with pies at the second London world convention. Thus was born one of the great traditions of British fandom. But we need to go back to the previous British worldcon to find the origins of this great comic partnership, back to the shabby London of 1957. Brian wrote, “The convention was held in a terrible hotel in the Queensway district. A distinctly post-war feeling lingered. Bomb damage was still apparent. There was no mistaking the general American recoil from the ghastliness of plumbing and food, and their amazement at the prostitutes parading along the Bayswater Road. The whores had not adjusted their make-up to the new sodium lighting, and looked as if they could offer mankind nothing better than necrophilia.” It was Brian’s first foray into what he called the ‘family life’ of science fiction and he had written only a handful of short stories, mostly for Ted Carnell, which Faber collected in hard-covers around this time as STAN. He was just 32, had recently gone free-lance and as he writes in his autobiographical volume B ury My Heart At W.H. Smith , he was struggling with the twin problems of poverty and a broken marriage, but nonetheless and with some misgivings, he went to the convention anyway. Harry was also 32 but he’d been supporting himself for years by

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 45 of 58 editing, illustrating, and writing for the pulps and men’s magazines, and he knew his way round SF fandom. Married to Joan and with a young baby he’d just moved back from Mexico to New York where he’d sold ‘Rat’ to Astounding. Hearing about Dave Kyle’s plan to bring a plane-load of fans to Loncon for $100 return-tickets, he signed-up on the spot, becoming one of the 76 Americans who attended the Worldcon, where John W. Campbell was Guest-of-Honour. And somewhere in those five days Brian and Harry ‘clicked’. “What was the attraction?” I asked Brian. “You’d seem to have had nothing in common except your ages and yet you formed this enduring friendship.” He replied, “It's a good question, as much a sociological as a psychological one. In 1957, London was still bestrewed by ruins from the time of the Blitz. I was still trying to adjust to no longer being in the East, in the army. I loved the East and there was much about England I hated. I had made a disastrous marriage. I didn't know London. “Harry's situation was somewhat similar. He had sold a story to John W. Campbell and plonked the money from that down on a flight to England for himself and Joan and the small kid. We were both, in different ways, living in alien territory. We had been in different armies but we had both learnt that one way to deal with adversity was to tough it out and laugh it off. We were both tough and both felt we didn't really belong in the SF tribe at the time, though clearly we had much in common with that tribe.” After the con Brian went back to Oxford and his troubles, to complete N on-Stop from a furnished room, to buy his little house on Marston Street and eventually to meet and marry Margaret. Harry stayed in London at a “dreadful B&B” before going on to Denmark where he wrote D eathworld and its sequels. They kept in touch, but didn’t see each other again for four years until LXICon at Gloucester in 1961, where they had a fine time with GoH Kingsley Amis and the scholarly Geoff Doherty, who gave them the idea for SF Horizons, intended to be a critical magazine about science fiction. They produced two issues in 1964 & 1965. Brian continued, “In sixty-three we met again, this time in Trieste. We were there for the new Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival, and we stayed in the Grand Hotel de la Ville, which had once briefly been the British Embassy. The films were shown up in the Castelo de San Giusto. Trieste has an amazing history; there we met Joe the Jug, who guided us to the railway station where we drank slivovicz. A wonderful drink, like Jugoslavia itself. “Harry and Joan drove me over the border into Jugland (as we called it - it means Southland). It was hot, unruly, backward. At once I felt at home. We drank the local wine at a gostilna and ate oozing fat black olives. Bliss. At once, I determined I must have more of Jugland. Next year, I took Margaret and a used Land Rover to tour all Jugland and write my one travel book, C ities And Stones . We lived like gypsies and met up with Harry and Joan at a coastal town called Makarska. The arrangement had been made months before, yet we pulled into the car park within ten minutes of each other. Great fun! “Harry brought us good Danish food and some good books and we swam in what later we discovered was the town sewer, emptying into the Adriatic. Harry asked me, ‘What induced you to do this crazy trip?’ (We were away for half-a-year.) I said, ‘I was in search of those big fat black olives...’ ‘I bought them in Trieste marketplace,’ said Harry. ‘The Jugs don't grow olives like that.’ I realised to my chagrin he was more cosmopolitan than I. “After that jaunt, we often stayed with Joan and Harry. They and the kids had a house towards the north of Denmark, not so far from

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 46 of 58 Elsinore, Hamlet's castle. The Danes were great, as were the Swedes. We often stayed in Stockholm with our local pal, Sam Lundwall, who ran a magazine, Jules Verne Magasinet. A lot of very pleasant time was spent in Scandinavia, here and there. “At one time we stayed in an old wooden mansion, built in 1901, on the edge of an inlet of the Baltic. There the men stayed up half the night talking to Goran Bengtson, the Swedish culture-vulture who had just come back from staying with Philip K. Dick in California. Goran had one short-coming: he drank only Calvados. Calvados gives you terrible hangovers. In the mornings, we'd strip off, run along a little wooden pier, and dive into the Baltic. It was FREEZING! You'd die if you stayed in it for five minutes. But it did cure hangovers.” And so the partnership continued, at conventions in 1962 and 63, then on to 1965 and Loncon II, where Brian was Guest of Honour, with Harry (and pies) in attendance. That year he won a Nebula for ‘The Saliva Tree’, and already had a Hugo for H othouse . Harry’s own reputation was climbing fast, having completed B ill The Galactic Hero and other novels, and he would shortly turn in his brilliant, impassioned M ake Room! Make Room! Together they would go on to edit more than fifty anthologies – Harry said that while their writing styles were completely different, they shared identical tastes in reading. As for their convention double-act, Brian and Harry kept it running; in 1966 at Yarcon, in 1969 at the Galactic Fair, at Chessmancon, and so on to modern times. In 1971 the Brum Group was formed, and soon afterwards Harry and Brian were invited to be Joint Presidents. Forty years later they were invited as joint guests of honour at Novacon 40, though sadly Harry was unable to attend.

“A History of the Future in 100 Objects” by Fred Lerner [[ Published in In RELAPSE 21, the latest issue of Peter Weston’s fascinating fanzine LOFGEORNOST, devoted to the history of science fiction and Fandom in Britain, Andy May 2013 ]] Sawyer described his role in the planning of “Out of This World” — the science fiction exhibition mounted at the British Library from 20 May through 25 September 2011. I found this fascinating not only for its own sake, but also because such an exhibition can be understood as a definitive recognition of the cultural importance of science fiction. As one who has studied and written about this process (in my 1985 book M odern Science Fiction and the American Literary Community) I had a particular interest in the process of selecting artifacts to represent SF to the world; and there is nobody in whose judgment on such matters I would have more confidence than Andy Sawyer. One thing in his narrative especially intrigued me. “At one point,” he wrote, “stealing the format of the recent British Museum’s ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ was a working plan”. I’ve been working my way through this series, which I downloaded onto my iPod several months ago. I like to listen to it while looking out the window on long flights and train trips, or while trying to get back to sleep when some noise wakes me in the middle of the night. Each episode is just the right length (15 minutes, more or less) for the circumstances under which I listen, and each episode makes a convincing case for the importance of the artifact it describes. There’s another reason I like to listen to this program: it is a great piece of radio. Each episode concludes with an invitation to visit a website with pictures of the featured artifact, and I understand that both a lavishly-illustrated book and a television series have been spun from the original BBC Radio 4 series. I have yet to see any of these. I prefer to imagine for myself what these 100 objects look like, and I admire the facility with which narrator Neil MacGregor, the director of

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 47 of 58 the British Museum, is able to describe the æsthetic and historic impact of a visual artifact entirely through the medium of sound. I’ve done enough work in radio myself to understand the achievement that this represents. Andy wrote that he would someday like to undertake “A History of Science Fiction in 100 Objects”, and I can’t imagine anybody better qualified to do this. I’ve come up with a parallel project, one that could only be realised virtually; for it would attempt to describe objects that exist only in the imagination of the science fiction writers who devised them and the readers for whom they have become essential components of the science fictional future . What I am proposing is A History of the Future in 100 Objects — an attempt to identify and describe the hundred most significant imaginary artifacts from the science fiction literature. I’m certainly not qualified to do this on my own. There are so many classic stories I’ve never read or only dimly remember, and so many important writers of whose work I’m shamefully ignorant. I know nothing about whatever gadgets Burroughs and Stapledon may have issued to the protagonists of their novels. I have yet to read through the NESFA Press collections of Anderson and Zelazny on my bookshelves. And I know almost nothing about the growing SF literature from the non-anglophone world. Instead I would propose A History of the Future in 100 Objects as a collaborative project, in which anyone could nominate an artifact for inclusion. It might furnish a topic for convention panels, a subject for fanzine articles, and fodder for discussion over pitchers of beer. I reckon it would take some time to reach a consensus, but so what? We’ve got the entire future… To kick off the project, here are 10 objects that I think would be appropriate. They’re in alphabetic order. We can argue about their relative importance once we’ve chosen all 100. * Ansible — A communication device allowing instantaneous transmission of messages unhindered by limitations imposed by the speed of light. (Ursula Le Guin, Rocannon’s World, 1966) * Dilating door — A portal for entering a room that employs neither hinges nor a doorknob. (Robert Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon , 1942) * Lens — A bracelet provided by the godlike Arisians to members of the Galactic Patrol that gives its recipients telepathic and other paranormal powers. (E.E. Smith, Galactic Patrol, 1950), *· Paralo-Ray Gun — A non-lethal weapon that paralyses but does not permanently injure its target, although use at close range can cause significant neurological damage. (“Carey Rockwood”, Stand By for Mars and other Tom Corbett, Space Cadet novels (1952-1956), *· Positronic Robot — A humanoid robot powered by positronic energy operating through “enforced calculated neuronic paths” and governed by the Three Laws of Robotics. (Isaac Asimov, I, Robot, 1950) *· Shipstone — A compact, highly efficient device for the storage and transport of solar energy. (Robert Heinlein, Friday, 1982) *· Slow Glass — A solid transparent medium through which light travels very slowly, through which scenes from the past can be viewed. (Bob Shaw, “Light of Other Days”, 1966) *· Tardis — A machine for exploring “Time and Relative Dimensions in Space” that bears an uncanny resemblance to a British police telephone box. (BBC Television, Dr Who, 1963-present) *· Time Machine — The original vehicle for transtemporal exploration, restricted to operating in a single dimension. (H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895) * Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer —An interactive pedagogical

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 48 of 58 machine combining the features of an iPad and the Junior Woodchuck’s Handbook. (Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, 1995) (When we’ve filled our list we can establish definitive bibliographic references; the sources cited above are largely based on data from various web sources whose reliability I can’t necessarily confirm.) I don’t know that we’ll ever get a BBC radio series out of A History of the Future in 100 Objects, or a display in the British Museum. But it would make a good exhibit for the famously capacious lobby of the Tucker Fan Hotel.

FAAn, Hugo, Rotsler, Awards 2013 FAAn Awards: Best Genzine: CHUNGA, ed. Andy Hooper, Randy Byers, carl juarez Best Personal Fanzine: A MEARA FOR OBSERVERS, ed. Mike Meara Best Single Issue: TRAP DOOR 29, ed. Robert Lichtman Best Website: eFanzines.com Best Fanzine Cover: Dan Steffan, BANANA WINGS 50 Best Fan Artist: Dan Steffan Best Fan Writer: Andy Hooper Harry Warner Jr. Memorial Award for Best Letterhack: Robert Lichtman Associated Honours: Lifetime Achievement Award: Elinor Busby Past President, FWA (FanWriters of America): Roy Kettle 2013 Hugo Awards: Best Fanzine: SF SIGNAL, ed. John DeNardo, JP Frantz, and Patrick Hester Best Fancast: SF Squeecast, Elizabeth Bear, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Lynne M. Thomas, Catherynne M. Valente (Presenters) and David McHone-Chase (Technical Producer) Best Fan Writer: Tansy Rayner Roberts Best Fan Artist: Galen Dara Rotsler Award: Jim Barker http://file770.com/?p=15375

“Ding Dong the Bells Are Gonna Chime” by Randy Byers [[ Published in "Dither not," quoth John D. Berry, and who was I to argue with him? CHUNGA 21, June History was in the making, this time it was personal, and it was going 2013 ]] to be fun. Jessica and Rhonda were getting married! Now wasn't the time for second-guessing. *** 6 November 2012 was a momentous day in America, and not just because a nation with a long history of white supremacism re-elected a Black man named Barack Hussein Obama as president. It was also momentous because two states (Colorado and Washington) legalized marijuana for recreational use, and two states (Maryland and Washington) affirmed via popular vote the legality of same sex marriage. Marriage equality had never passed a popular vote in the U.S. before. It was a great day to be a Washingtonian, boy howdy. There was actual-factual dancing in the streets of Seattle that night, yah sure, you betcha! The story of marriage equality in Washington State is a surprisingly long one, some of which I didn't learn until after the election. In 1971 two men, John Singer and Paul Barwick, filed for a marriage license in Seattle and sued when they were turned down. By the time the Washington State Court of Appeals killed their lawsuit in 1974, Singer

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 49 of 58 had changed his name to Faygele ben Miriam and moved on to challenge the homophobia of the day in other ways, including suing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (of all people) for firing him for being gay. (He regularly went to his typist job at the EEOC wearing dresses.) The original marriage suit was an outlier both locally and nationally, and the big push for marriage equality didn't get going until decades later. The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage, starting in 2001. In 2004 Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to legalize it. In Washington State same-sex domestic partnerships were recognized in 2007, and two years later same-sex civil unions (with all the rights of marriage, but not the name) were legalized. The civil unions law was challenged by Referendum 71, but it passed the popular vote. This year, three years later, having established that civil unions did not in fact cause the sky to fall or the Earth to crash into the sun, the state legislature legalized same-sex marriage, and this law was again challenged, by Referendum 74, with results as described above. Dancing in the streets, baby. So 41 years after Singer and Barwick filed for a marriage license in Seattle, the law finally came around. There are now nine states — as well as the District of Columbia and two American Indian tribes — that have legalized same-sex marriage in the USA. But again, while the extension of civil liberties is the main thing, it's also important that for the first time, in two states, same-sex marriage was supported by a majority of the voting population. Civil liberties should not depend on majority acceptance, but it is hugely significant in this case that the majority voted as it did. It is a sign of a tidal shift in public opinion — one that was difficult to imagine in the relatively recent past, let alone in the more distant past of my own homophobic youth. *** I don't remember my indoctrination into homophobia. In some ways I only became conscious of my homophobia (although of course I wouldn't have called it that) when my friend Kevin Turner argued with me about gay rights in the South Salem High School library in our senior year. It was probably in the spring of 1978, right before we graduated. I don't remember what exactly Kevin was arguing for or against. I just remember that he was the first person who had ever argued with me about homosexuality, and that I was vehemently against it . Why? Given the fact that they have completely disappeared from memory, apparently my reasons were so irrational that they didn't survive contact with reality. This reality arrived in the form of carl juarez, whom I met a few months later within hours of moving into my dorm room on the University of Oregon campus. It took a little while, but not very long, before we became such close friends that he came out to me in an intense conversation that lasted into the wee hours, wherein he painfully refuted all of my ignorant, homophobic beliefs. A few months after that he talked me and our other good friend (also named Carl) into attending Norwescon in Seattle, where I met Denys Howard, who had not so much come out of the closet as dynamited the closet into smithereens. My education continued apace. By the time I moved to Seattle in 1984 I was surrounded by gays and lesbians. My therapist was gay, my hair stylist was gay, my best friend at work was gay, and many of my best friends in fandom were gay or lesbian. It quickly got to the point where people who didn't know me often assumed that I was gay too. Considering that I was basically long-term domestic partners with a gay man, this wasn't exactly surprising. The times they were a-changing, and they were a-changing me too. My political views had radicalized, and far from thinking that same-sex marriage should be legalized (which was inconceivable at the time anyway), I believed marriage was oppressive to women and should be abolished entirely. Hey, it was a popular

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 50 of 58 belief amongst my leftist friends! Also, I had no particular interest in getting married myself. Among the fannish lesbians I was friends with was Jessica Amanda Salmonson, whom I first became aware of before encountering fandom, in the letter column of Dick Geis' fanzine, SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW, which I discovered in the bookstores I frequented as a teenager. Jessica was also a writer and anthologist whose interest in heroic fantasy coincided with my own, though I didn't share her taste for horror fiction. She was a fantastically knowledgeable bibliophile who for a few years ran a bookstore in Seattle called Aunt Violet's Bookbin, where I liked to browse (I was too poor to buy much in those days) and shoot the shit with Jessica. (She now sells books online at http://www.violetbooks.com/.) Jessica flattered me in my semi-punk days, when I bleached my hair, by saying that I looked like the protagonist of Anthony Shriek — the horror novel she was writing at the time. When I broke up with my girlfriend Robyn the first time, Jessica brought her to the next Vanguard party, where we got back together. "I was hoping for some rebound sex with Robyn," Jessica told us, "but I guess you guys can have make-up sex instead." I met Rhonda Boothe in that same era and thought of her as one of the Idaho contingent, along with Ole and Neil Kvern. Rhonda is a painter and singer. In the old days she sang in a group called Strangeness and Charm with two other fans, Charlie Spear and Judy Kaplan. I didn't know Rhonda as well as I knew Jessica, but she was certainly a familiar and friendly part of the Vanguard community. After the two of them got together and moved to Bremerton, I didn't see them as often as I used to. Occasionally they'd come into Seattle for a convention, and I visited them in Bremerton once with a friend. It was many years before I visited their house again, when I stopped by in January 2012 after a vacation out on the coast. In the meantime, however, I'd become their Facebook friends, and that's how I learned that in the wake of Referendum 74 they were planning to marry as soon as the law allowed. The law went into effect on Dec. 6 (which is when Rhonda first told me on Facebook what was going on) and it requires a three-day waiting period after a couple files for a marriage license (same as for straight couples), so the wedding was scheduled for Dec. 9. There was a flood of same-sex marriages that day, all over the state. Well, at least in the more liberal parts of the state! *** The S'Klallam Tribe had offered up to twelve same-sex couples a place (Heronswood Gardens) and the services to get married on Dec. 9. Heronswood Gardens is on Kitsap Peninsula, north of Bremerton, and so I had contacted John D. Berry about perhaps catching a ride, since Rhonda told me that he and Eileen were going to the wedding. I told John that I was dithering about whether to go or not, but he was having none of that. Thus on the morning of the 9th he and Eileen picked me up on the way to the ferry. When I got in the car I discovered that they'd already picked up Wendy Wees. "Haven't seen you in decades," she observed. Indeed, the last time I remembered seeing Wendy she was still Jessica's girlfriend, or only recently ex. Wendy, like Rhonda, is a painter (I guess Jessica has a thing for painters), and she showed us a flyer for a recent gallery show she'd done. I hadn't known she was originally from St Louis, which I learned when Eileen started talking about a historical novel she's working on about a freed slave living near St Louis. Eileen was another person I met in my first encounters with Seattle fandom in 1979. She's a writer, performance artist, and wit, and I've always been somewhat in awe of her. Amongst other things she's one of those people who I seemed to be connected to before I'd even met her, through shared acquaintances in Eugene, where she had history as one of the Radar Angels. Then again, Eileen seems to know everyone,

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 51 of 58 so if you know her you're a handshake away from the whole world. Take that, Kevin Bacon! Our driver that day, John Berry, probably doesn't need an introduction, but then again neither did Eileen, so what the hell. I would've met John around the same time as I met Eileen. They've been together as long as I've known them. John is, amongst other things, a god of typography and design in the U.S. and around the world. In fact one of the things we talked about on the drive to the wedding was John and Eileen's trips to Armenia and Hong Kong for international type conferences that he had helped to organize. On the ferry, however, we talked about marriage. John and Eileen married five years ago in a private, civil ceremony with only Wendy and her husband as witnesses. They weren't interested in doing it as a big social event, because they were only getting married for the legal advantages and protections married couples are afforded. We talked about friends who had opposed marriage in the past to the extent of not attending the wedding of Jerry Kaufman and Suzanne Tompkins because they thought marriage was a patriarchal system of control. Then they got married later themselves. We've all apparently evolved on this issue, along with our legal system. *** We arrived at Heronswood and parked in a muddy field. Gathering families and friends of the five couples marrying that day were directed to a nearby building, where we found a table of food and sparkling cider. A reporter from the North Kitsap Herald was interviewing people about the momentous occasion. Eventually Rhonda and Jessica showed up and were introduced to the woman who would be conducting the ceremony. They went over her script, making decisions about how to alter it for a same sex wedding. Meanwhile, Cliff Wind and Marilyn Holt arrived. This certainly was old home week, as I have also known Cliff and Marilyn from my first visits to Seattle, and in their case that was actually before they'd gotten together. Marilyn is one of the founders of the Clarion West writers workshop, and she is also an organic farmer, having taken over the family farm in the Poulsbo area, not too far from Heronswood. Cliff recently retired from his job at the post office and is now working harder than ever on the farm. I had assumed that they'd be at the wedding, and it had gotten me to wondering, for some odd reason, how Cliff had ended up living in Australia for a time back in the '70s. So I took the opportunity to ask him, and he explained that in 1975 he hadn't been able to find a teaching job in Seattle so he interviewed for one in Australia. While living in Perth he made contact with the local fans, and in fact he attended the very first Swancon, which was small enough to be held in writer Tony Peacey's house. This was so long ago (in 1976, to be precise) that Judith Hanna was still living in Perth, before she moved to London, and Cliff said she was one of the dozen or so people at the convention. When I mentioned this reminiscence to her on LiveJournal later, she wrote, "I seem to recall a family of baby ducklings waddling through at some stage."1 *** When the time for the wedding came, we were taken across the muddy parking lot and down a path to another building. Although it was the dead of winter and the garden was still in the process of being restored after it had been neglected by the previous owners, the setting was still beautiful, in a hushed, gloomy, moist Pacific Northwest kind of way. The ceremony was suitably strange and whimsical. Jessica busted a move as she and Rhonda walked down the aisle. The boilerplate script used by the officiant seemed weirdly out of synch with the moment — already a stale leftover of a bygone era — and there was at least one

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 52 of 58 moment when she uttered the words "between a man and a woman" and stumbled to add "or between a woman and a woman". Meanwhile, behind the curtain I was sitting next to, two staff people were chatting animatedly about something I couldn't quite make out, and a jazzy Christmas carol played softly on a radio. Jessica and Rhonda had adapted their wedding vows from the ones Tiny Tim used when he married Miss Vicki on the Tonight Show in 1969. This included the odd vow not to be puffed up. Marilyn was weeping across the aisle from me, while she and Eileen both took photos of the ceremony. There was an official photographer, too, and after the ceremony she herded us all into the garden and took pictures of the newlyweds and then of the group of us. "Give a cheer," she directed, and we let loose a ragged huzzah. After the proper papers had been signed by the married couple and the witnesses, we all walked back up the trail to the muddy parking lot and visited with Jessica and Rhonda's young, squirmy Chihuahua pup. I finally got up the nerve to give Jessica the wedding present I had decided on at the last minute: the fossil of a snail that I found in a fossil bed by a train trestle outside of Salem, Oregon when I was a young boy. "This is exactly the kind of thing I love," Jessica said, and she surprised me with a hug. I had been pretty sure the fossil would be appreciated, but it was still a huge relief that I hadn't actually made an idiot of myself. Giving gifts is not one of my strong suits. We had asked a representative of the tribe to recommend a nearby restaurant, and she laughed and suggested the bistro at the tribe's casino. "It really is the best thing in this area," she promised. When we got there, however, we found that the bistro didn't open until later, so we went to the casino buffet instead. Smoking was allowed, which now seems utterly alien to me, even as a former smoker. I drank a couple of glasses of champagne with my meal, and I talked to John and Cliff and a friend of the newlyweds named Marcie who was also from Bremerton. She works on the Navy base there, but in a civilian capacity. She was the odd person out in the group, but she seemed very friendly and relaxed about it. We chatted long after we'd stopped eating, with Jessica grousing that diabetes was restricting her choices, while Cliff ate not one, but two pieces of delicious-looking dessert. Everybody said the blintzes were great, but having recently been diagnosed as pre-diabetic I joined Jessica in abstinence. Jessica also observed, in her wonderfully morbid way, that she would probably have to die to get us all to come out to the peninsula to visit her again. Since I had been to their house less than twelve months before, I felt smugly exempt from the critique. Eventually Jessica hit her introvert's limit on people time and bolted for the car. We trailed out behind her and said our various goodbyes, and John pointed the car in the direction of the ferry docks. The miraculous event had come to an end. *** As we waited for the ferry I posted a picture of the newlyweds to Facebook with my phone. Over the next couple of days it became the most Liked and most commented-upon post I've ever made. When it got to exactly 100 Likes, I gave a little whoop. It wasn't even a particularly good photo, but everybody was so thrilled by the occasion. History was being photographed before our very eyes. Meanwhile, back in Seattle John decided the best way to get to Fremont and my house from the downtown waterfront was by way of Queen Anne Hill. This route took us past the Hilltop Ale House, of course. "Winter Beers Are Here," I read from the signboard. "Shall we stop for one?" John asked. "Yes, let's," Wendy enthused. We weren't quite ready for this special day to be over. The four of

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 53 of 58 us took a table in the pub and ordered our various pints. We gabbed on various and sundry points of past and present. Eventually Eileen and John started bickering about something so trivial I no longer remember what it was. I'm sure they were both wrong, whatever it was. "You guys weren't like this before you got married," I observed. Wendy turned to me with a fey look in her eyes and said emphatically, "Wrong!" How we laughed! Well, what do I know about marriage, old maid that I am? I'd say marriage binds not just two people, but the entire community around them, even old friends who are already long connected — if only by giving us cause to celebrate and reaffirm our common ground and common history. Even if the celebration comes in the form of affectionate bickering. So here's to Jessica and Rhonda and their house for decayed gentlewomen. It was a huge pleasure to witness the historic marriage of two old friends. Long may they bicker. And so we drank to that.

“Corflu in Hearts” by Claire Brialey [[ Guest of Honour Most Corflus choose their Guest of Honour at the opening ceremony speech, Corflu on Friday evening, by pulling a name of one of the attending members Glitter (Las Vegas, from a hat; the (usually literal) hat includes the names of all those who April 2012), haven’t done it before and are willing to participate. It’s customary but published in not obligatory for the GoH to make a speech during the communal RAUCOUS CAUCUS 2, meal on the Sunday of the convention. Last year – at the second attempt to select a Corflu member who was definitely present – my name was announced, and this is what I said a couple of days later. This is my tenth Corflu and so it seemed obvious that this speech should say something about what Corflu means to me. And although it’s equally obvious that that’s about fanzines, it’s also very much about fanzine fandom: the community, the people. I’ve been discussing with Mike Meara whether a trip report can successfully be non-linear, and so I couldn’t resist trying a non-linear Corflu Guest of Honour contribution. Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden once wrote ‘TAFF in Thirteen Paragraphs’. And since we’re in Las Vegas I only need a suit of cards and a lovely assistant to cover Corflu in a similar way. Fortunately I brought both with me, so Mark will shortly ask some of you to pick a card. These are my Corflu moments. Yours will be different, even if you’re part of some of mine. So this is about the people behind the fanzines, and there are too many fan writers and artists and editors to mention everyone I admire. But I should probably reiterate that I’ve always wanted to be Eve Harvey when I grow up. And Pat Charnock. And Geri Sullivan. But of course this is still about the fanzines too, so I need to namecheck ATTITUDE, from Pam Wells, Michael Abbott and John Dallman – the first fanzine I received regularly through the post, and the first after Ian Gunn’s STUNGUNN to which I was inspired to write letters. So it’s their fault too. 2010: Corflu Cobalt in Winchester. The second Corflu in Britain, and a con that meant we got to hang out and work with many of the other Brits who are here today, and some others who may be here virtually but who I’m missing in person. They all seemed to fit effortlessly into the Corflu community. I had a great time in Winchester too, notwithstanding the goats and gussets. I hope lots of you will be able to come to the UK for a con in

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 54 of 58 the next few years. 2003: Corflu Badger in Madison. Many things and many people were wonderful, but this was where I got to see Damien Warman and Juliette Woods again, for the third time on our third continent. Since the second time – which was at the British Eastercon the previous year – Damien had been diagnosed and treated for cancer. So wherever I’d seen him again, it was going to be pretty special. 2007: Corflu Quire in Austin. Murray Moore, as FAAn awards administrator, taught us all to do the egoboo salute – even if he can’t do it today because he can’t use that hand. I have a vision of Peter Weston and Graham Charnock arm-wrestling now, and I think I’d like not to have… But we had such a good time that the con just continued through the airport to the interchange at Houston, not quite wanting to say goodbye to Corflu. 2009: Corflu Zed in Seattle. Anyone who drinks as much coffee as I do is predisposed to love Seattle, but all the stars aligned to make it one of my favourite places in the world. We stayed with Andy Hooper and Carrie Root before the con; we met up with so many other people we wanted to see at Corflu itself; and I got to see mountains, as well as a beaver in the bathroom. Seattle fandom has become really significant for me. When Jerry Kaufman’s name came out of the hat first on Friday that seemed utterly right. I’d love to have heard his speech this year. 2011: E Corflu Vitus in Sunnyvale. We spent some wonderful days before the con with Spike and Tom Becker, tasting wine and seeing mountains. We got to hang out with Dave Hicks on his Corflu 50 trip, and he got to throw wine over my legs. I appeared in one of Andy Hooper’s plays and didn’t even have to deliver my lines with my head in a bucket. It was all, as the con’s main man would say, AWESOME. And then we all fell off a gun emplacement. 2008: Corflu Silver in Las Vegas. By then, coming to Corflu felt almost inevitable – a thing we always do unless something actively gets in the way. But there were still new things to discover, and new people: after all those years, I finally got to meet Joyce and Arnie Katz. And to see Las Vegas, which remains almost indescribable. We also began the international fan beer exchange with Randy Byers. I’ve enjoyed Corflu Glitter, but it has a Randy-shaped hole in it which no one else can fill. And for once it’s really not the beer that’s important here. 25 years ago this weekend I went to my first SF convention. It wasn’t the British Eastercon, although it was at Easter, and it wasn’t really much like a Corflu, although there were fanzines. But I went with lots of my new fan friends, including Mark, and I had fun. I was 16 and that pretty much settled what I do on my holidays. I said this is about the people who have meant I’m here today, and not all of that’s directly linked to Corflu. I couldn’t leave out Greg Pickersgill, who told me early on that he liked my fan writing, and said it publicly as well. Too many people still think of Greg as being a negative fanzine reviewer, but he far more often mentioned things he liked – and his praise and encouragement counted for a great deal with me.

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 55 of 58 So it’s perhaps unfortunate that the point at which I knew I wanted to be a fanzine fan is something I described at the time as having laid Greg’s ghost. 2005: Corflu Titanium in San Francisco. It was one of those Corflus with Potlatch a week later in the same city, so that was one reason to stick around. Another was Bruce Gillespie, over for both cons on the Bring Bruce Bayside Fund, who I’d not seen for nearly three years. But two equally important reasons were Tom Becker and Spike, who were both running Corflu and putting us up afterwards. Not to mention all the other fans we saw from the Bay Area, which I found another great place to visit. Spike, Mark and I all joined ANZAPA after talking to Bruce about it in San Francisco, and we’re all still part of that too. You must all have realised I was going to mention Mark, and I hope he realised that too; holding the cards doesn’t mean he can get out of this while I’m holding the microphone. I met Mark at my first ever fan meeting, along with my first partner, Noel Collyer, and my first Australian friend, Ian Gunn. Mark was one of the group of friends at my first convention. If it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t have gone to my first Corflu, or the second one, and I very much doubt I’d be on the verge of publishing issue 50 of a genzine. Maybe it’s a fanzine fan thing, but what first attracted me to Mark was his fan writing – and I still wish I could do it the way he does. 1998: Corflu UK in Leeds. My first Corflu, and I mostly did it wrong. But I met a lot of fans from this continent who are still on our mailing list today. And although I felt I was still only on the edge of fanzine fandom, I also knew it was something I really wanted to be part of and fit into. 2002: Corflu Valentine in Annapolis. My first Corflu in the US, and I’m here because of friendship. Nic Farey is running the con and we’ve really been wanting to get to a ‘real’ (US) Corflu; so everything came together. The same desire to make things go right at Nic’s Corflu leads to me singing, in public, as part of an Ian Sorensen musical. If anyone needs that help from me again, I’m afraid even friendship only goes so far once. And that’s why I’m here today. That’s my Corflu story. It could have been told in any order, and of course it’s not the full story. But it’s already too long, whimsical and sentimental, which will surprise absolutely no one who’s read my fan writing. This was, of course, also my Corflu in Hearts – although I couldn’t mention even all the people in the room who matter to me. It could have been any of you standing here today, and that’s one of the things I love about Corflu. Right now, 25 years since my first convention, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. And I hope very much to see you next year.

“Adrift in Space” by Earl Kemp [[ Published as a I have always lived in a fantasy world. I know this to be true because post to a mailing there is no way the reality could have actually happened. I grew up in list, Sept. 2, 2013 ]] a strange, foreign place where people neither read nor wrote, and spoke a bizarre form of English that was difficult even for them to understand. Alone, I found myself surrounded by fantasy. Pulp magazines saved whatever there was of me for the future. I walked the yellow brick road with Toto and swung, with Cheetah, on Tarzan’s vines. I knew

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 56 of 58 what the Shadow knew and, with John Carter, kicked the red sands of Mars off our flipflops (before Arthur C. Clarke got there), and papa Hugo gave me a future target out there somewhere lost in space. In the early 1950s I began to feel my feet touch ground for the first time, or at least to recognize that might be happening. And the mentors found me, the ones I didn’t force myself upon at any rate. I remember being pushy and obnoxious and intruding without invitation into the faces of my designated heroes. It is a miracle they survived my presence, much less, for reasons I’ve never comprehended, actually working to make me much more than I ever was, tenuously hanging onto false realities with fragile, gossamer threads stretching way beyond eternity. A list of who they were and what they did for (never to) me would read like Science Fiction’s all-time Who’s Who but I would be negligent if I did not give credit to some of them, especially now as they resurface from the past and make their presence known to me once again. (And apologies to those masses my poor memory neglects here.) I’ve already mentioned papa Hugo, but his sons Sam Moskowitz and Ed Wood (not the movie nut even though he, too, was personally involved in making me me), were also there. The dearly beloved Robert Bloch and his twin brother Bob Tucker. The ever-lovely Bea Mahaffey and her crotchety boss, nut-fringe Ray Palmer. Margaret Brundage. My gaggle of supporters from the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club who pushed me way beyond my capabilities for a solid decade. The boys of Advent and the Diktys of Shasta. The Midwest Nomad fans like Doc Barrett and the adorable Leigh Brackett, and my brother Howard DeVore and my sister Martha Beck, Nick and Noreen Falasca, Honey Wood, Roger Graham. Dirce Archer, Kelly Freas, Sky Miller, Ed Emshwiller, Doc Lowndes, Hugh Hefner, Frank Robinson (and Dave Kyle who lets me sit wherever I want to) and, by no means least, the irascible William Hamling who, alone, propelled me orgasmicly into outer space, with a little help from Frances Yerxa and her son Richard. And here we are, finally, in 2013, and John Coker (and my Science Fiction son Terry) tells me that I’ve been inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame, along with a host of my best friends and at least a few old loves of my lives, coddled at last, snuggled warm in the arms of posterity where I never fantasized that I might, finally, reside. Home! From the bottom of my heart I thank First Fandom, Bob Madle, and old Chicago icon Erle (no relation) Korshak for championing me so thoroughly, and welcoming me among the people I have always loved the most.

Some of The Best Fan Writing of 2013: Page 57 of 58 Table of Contents Starting in 4 3 2 1. . .” by Kim Huett...... 2 “How to Create Your Own Fan Awards” by R. Graeme Cameron...... 2 “Last and First Fans” by Mark Plummer...... 5 Revised Table of the Hooper-Katz Chronology of Science Fiction Fandom...... 7 “A Life in Science Fiction” by Chris Nelson...... 9 “The Calm Before the Storm?” by Steven Silver, Bill Burns, Moshe Feder, Graham Charnock ...... 11 “Space Time Story” by Greg Pickersgill...... 13 “Roger Ebert, Death of a Gafiate” by Leah Zeldes Smith...... 15 “Murder in Seattle” by Jim Mowatt...... 16 “A Song of Nerds of Nerds and Rabbis by Andy Hooper...... 17 “Update From 21MM392” by Art Widner...... 19 “The Worldcon I Saw” by John Hertz...... 20 Best Fanzine Covers of 2013...... 25 “John Harvey's Underwear” by Mark Plummer...... 25 “Looking For Fandom - ConFusion at 40, Part 4” by Leah Zeldes Smith...... 26 “How Not to Mend a Broken Guitar and How Not to Fast” by Graham Charnock...... 29 ”The Big Nordic Tour of a Little Finnish NOFFer” by Tomi Mäntylä...... 31 “Travelling Through Winter” by John Newman...... 35 “REG and Alter Leave the Couch” by Mark Plummer...... 36 “Mr. Ambassador” by Bill Wright...... 38 “Dan McCarthy (26 October 1934 – 7 August 2013)” by Murray MacLachlan...... 39 “Article on Yellow Paper” by Pat Charnock...... 41 “Terrorism, Civil Unrest and Noel” by Claire Brialey...... 42 “The Great Convention Double Act” by Peter Weston...... 44 “A History of the Future in 100 Objects” by Fred Lerner...... 47 FAAn, Hugo, Rotsler, Awards...... 49 “Ding Dong the Bells Are Gonna Chime” by Randy Byers...... 49 “Corflu in Hearts” by Claire Brialey...... 54 “Adrift in Space” by Earl Kemp...... 56 ** *** ***** Editor: Murray Moore 1065 Henley Road, Mississauga Ontario L4Y 1C8 Canada ***** Published for the attendees of Corflu 31 May 2-4, 2014, in Richmond, Virginia, United States ***** FANTHOLOGY 2013 is © Murray Moore All rights reserved, and revert to authors and artists upon publication

Some of The Best Fan Writing of The Year: Page 58 of 58