Nowhere Fan 5 Going Nowhere Nowhere Fan 5 is the much-delayed follow-up to Nowhere Fan 4 and is like all social contacts these days electronic only. This fanzine will be following government guidelines on social distancing but needs frequent exercise and will be happy to stand in the queue for shopping. Please rinse in hot soapy water before reading. It is available as a PDF from [email protected] or online from efanzines.com. All content is written by Christina Lake, apart from Bayou Rhythms, which is by Doug Bell. The cartoon p.27 is by the illustrious Brad Foster. All Swamp Thing artwork is © DC Comics. (April 2020) ___________________________________________________________________________ Lockdown Lemonade As a fanzine that owes its inspiration to utopias and dystopias, it feels like I should be running features on pandemic reading and commenting on the swiftness with which we have moved from a civil liberties society to one where the government can dictate how often we’re meant to leave our homes. But with a whole new generation discovering Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Years and post-apocalyptic punditry popping up in every newspaper and website, maybe this isn’t really the time. Doug has even postponed writing the article he promised me on demographic changes in Carrie Vaughn’s post-apocalyptic Bannerless series as it just seemed, well, too close to home in this time of disease tracking and infection maps. But I do find it intriguing to ponder this throwback moment which reminds us why we used to think it was important to have a welfare state and to act for the good of society as a whole rather than the gain of the individual. Utopias and dystopias sit on a different continuum to post-apocalyptic societal breakdown. Dystopian is lightly used for any kind of bad stuff going on, but ultimately dystopias are more about state control taken to a level which outweighs the good this control is supposed to achieve. Brave New World does the dystopian utopia rather well. The society is absurd, but it does have an intelligent and benevolent dictator behind it who can make a decent argument for the bread and circuses of this controlled society being better than the alternatives of war and disease inherent to individual liberty. There would be no pandemics in BNW, or only state sponsored ones to cull any unproductive parts of the population. But maybe Zamyatin’s We is a better analogy to our times, where the whole state is in lockdown behind a giant green wall, and there is general surveillance, not a lot of fun, and not much in the way of intelligence from the so called Benefactor aka dictator. Or is what we need really one of those confidently optimistic feminist utopias of the late nineteenth century where it seemed certain that if women ruled the world there would be no disease, but unfortunately also no sex, drugs and rock n’roll, because that’s what the men were doing to cause the diseases in the first place? But now that we have our three minutes of statutory love for the NHS each week, we are well on the way to becoming good citizens of whatever utopia/ dystopia emerges from the current pandemic. There may be a fine line between utopias and dystopias but at the moment I have to say they’re looking better than the alternative. 2 The other interesting aspect to this all is discovering what we really do or don’t need in our new lives. Maybe it’s the change of season but I haven’t needed the ankle boots I recently bought for work, most of my work clothes (at least those not visible on video conferences) or most of the clothes that I might wear to go out in the evening. Alongside our increased understanding of the fragility of the food supply chain, maybe a few environmental messages are starting to get through? So, what do I have for you here? A lot of pre-apocalyptic content that has been brewing in the years (yes, it’s years) since the last issue. For example the GoH speech I wrote for Follycon, some updates on my life pre-pandemic, and a fantasia cum tribute to Randy Byers. Doug is going to write about Swamp Thing. I have some letters that might still amuse. Also a few thoughts on the Dublin Worldcon, and on future Worldcons I might have been thinking of attending back when the only obstacles were time, money and social energy. Identity crisis 1 (November 2019) At the end of October I was made redundant from my job working in the library at Falmouth University after 16 years. That’s a big chunk of my working life. Twice as long as my time at Wessex Water, and three times as long as my career as a linguistic abstractor in my first job way back in the 80s. A lot longer than it took to set up regional libraries at the Environment Agency and then see them dismantled again. The water industry gave me free shares, the Environment Agency gave me hangovers, Predicasts gave me my first permanent job and first experience of institutional unfairness. Falmouth University gave me an opportunity to move to Cornwall, a renewed interest in academic study and a snapshot of life in HE at an era of fast change both in the UK and at the micro level of my working environment. I started work for Falmouth College of Art, which soon became University College Falmouth, before settling on the appropriately expletive Falmouth University. Then FU handed over responsibility for the library to Falmouth Exeter Plus, which runs all the shared services on the campus from accommodation to counselling, from catering to buses, which pissed everyone off, not just because they had longer working days and less holiday, but because as a library we saw ourselves as part of the academic life of the university, not just a service industry. During my 16 years there I’ve had lots of different jobs, doing front of house for libraries at two different campuses, managing staff, teaching students, working with researchers, even arbitrating between Modern Foreign Language tutors. Lots of it was fun, especially working with students and researchers and developing elements of the library software environment. A lot of it was no fun at all. Internal politics and rivalries, frustrated staff who hated their jobs, but didn’t want to leave as there were no similar jobs elsewhere in Cornwall. Restructures and unreasonable management demands. The latter became worse when the library became a subsidiary of Student Services and we went on a “journey” to find out who would still have jobs at the end of the year. As it turned out, the answer was not me. My job was deleted, and I was offered an alternative job on a lower grade. I decided to bail out after finally getting HR to admit that I was entitled to a redundancy payout. Minimum possible, of course, but with early access to part of my pension. 3 So, you’ve retired, people keep asking me? Not exactly. But good enough to have a few months off work, before looking for another job. At least that was the plan, up until a couple of days before I was due to leave. Then it turned out that the Falmouth University research team were still keen to keep hold of my expertise on repositories, Open Access and the REF, so after a short but hardly decent interval I was re-employed by Falmouth University on a temporary part-time contract to look through their REF submissions and make sure that all the necessary material was on the repository. For once being outsourced to FXPlus played in my favour as I could go back to work for Falmouth University as they weren’t the people who had made me redundant. The other question I kept getting asked was what would I do after I left work? It seemed a strange question as surely I would do all the things I never have time to do when I’m working? I’d mention research, writing, holidays, house repairs. But it felt like that wasn’t good enough. There had to be something big and different, to justify my decision to take redundancy. Luckily Doug and I were going to South Africa and Botswana in January, so that seemed to do the trick. Even though we’d have been going anyway. Then occasionally I’d mention leaving Cornwall and people get a bit surprised. Why would we want to leave? It’s such a lovely place. It is, but it’s also a long way from everywhere. Particularly a long way from Edinburgh and environs where Doug’s family live. Flights and other aspects of public transport aren’t brilliant. And there aren’t so many jobs down here for when Doug finishes his MSc in Geographic Information Systems. So it would make sense to move, even though part of me wants to stay. That was what I was thinking back in November. Now I’m just thinking that I’ll be going nowhere fast this year, and somehow the home-based projects are not looking so exciting. Though at least we did make it to Botswana in January. More of that next issue or maybe in a whole new fanzine, who knows? Which takes me neatly into: Identity crisis 2 (Perennial) I’ve been trying to think what kind of fanzine I’d like to write.