I am about 38 years of age. I am aware of evidence appearing to indicate
that I was born in 1919, but I try not to let this temporal paradox affect
my behaviour. As Elinor Busby put it once, the most important thing about
getting older is not to get psyched out by it. I think of it by reference to
computers, influenced by Elinor herself, my guru in these matters. When
I find myself moving more hesitantly than I used to, I reprove myself
sharply. " You are acting in Old Man Mode, " I say to myself, and press the
Escape key in my mind. At once I begin to move in my normal lithe and
The fact is, I think, that the changes in one' s behaviour with age have
more to do with fear than with physical incapacity. The longer one lives,
the more falls one has, and the memory of them inhibits one' s actions more
than does any objective bodily deterioration.
I arrived at this conclusion as easily as falling off my front porch. The
porch in question has two steps leading up to a concrete platform. Between
that and the tiles of the porch proper there is an iron bar one and a half
inches square in cross section, providing a permanent weather seal under
the outer door. Well, almost permanent; in the century or so since this
house was built, the iron bar has worn down in the middle by about one
eighth of an inch.
One morning I dashed out of the front doorway to chase away a heron
which was stealing the fish from the pond in the back garden. In making
the sharp right turn my toe caught the unworn part of the iron bar and I
tripped down the steps, running faster and faster down the drive way in the
attempt to regain my balance. The attempt failed and I crashed on the side
of my face on the tarmac. There was no permanent damage but my eye
filled with blood so that I looked like something out of a horror comic, and
for weeks I went about wearing sunglasses so that people meeting me in
the street would not scream and run away in horror. No more than usual,
anyway.
The experience was worrying because it reminded me of something that
happened in Portugal. We often go to the South Coast, the Algarve, in the
autumn. The eastern end of the Algarve is Mediterranean in character,
with undertones of North Africa, but as you drive west, everything changes.
There is grass and heather instead of scrub and flowers, sheep instead of
cattle, drystone walls instead of hedgerows. There are few trees, and they
lean eastwards, clinging onto the scanty soil. Houses are few and remote.
The hills and valleys are on a larger than human scale and the sky seems
to have got bigger. There is a feeling that something important is about to
happen: as indeed, there is. . . the Atlantic Ocean.
We turned back that time without actually reaching the west coast,
because the road plunged downwards along the sides of steep slopes and
was so narrow I did not like to contemplate what I would do if I met another
car. But next autumn we took a bus tour to a place called Sagres, which is
where Henry the Navigator had his college for the captains who discovered
the rest of the world.
Here Europe comes to an end in 600 feet high black cliffs, falling sheer
to a dark and angry sea. The top is all rock outcrop, a type of terrain I
was familiar with. As a boy I was secretly proud of my ability to run along
a rocky shore, picking level landing-places several steps ahead. I didn' t try
this here, but I did move briskly towards the edge of the cliff to look down.
I caught my foot on an underestimated rock, stumbled and pitched forward
trying to regain my balance, and fell full length with my head about two
feet from the edge. What I have been wondering ever since is this: if I had
tripped a yard nearer the edge, would I have been able to throw myself
down immediately, or would I have stumbled on, qualifying for the epitaph
"Born Belfast 1919, Fell Off Europe 1985" ?
I wrote that bit before my recent trouble with an aortic
the friends who have written.
aneurysm, the same thing that killed John W. Campbell. I
am recovering well, but it will take a lot of time. . . as long as a
year. . . before I regain my energy. Meanwhile my thanks to all
MY LIFE WITH BRIAN ALDISS " You didn' t tell us about this science
fiction fandom thing, " said one of the
men from MI5. The scene was rather like one of those gentlemanly but
deadly interrogations in the BBCTV version of a John Le Carre novel.
My two visitors sat on the other side of my desk, apparently at ease and
drinking tea out of china cups provided by my angelic personal assistant,
Kathleen, but one had the feeling they had not entirely discounted the
The top security chiefs in London had decided that my grade of civil
servant was to be " positively vetted. " Hence the presence of these two
awfully nice chaps from Whitehall. On their first visit they had asked me a
great many highly personal questions, designed to discover any sexual
predilections, emotional entanglements, or other interests which might lead
me to serve the interests of a foreign power; viz at that time, some dozen
years ago, the USSR. Then they had gone away to compare what I had said
with the views of everyone who knew me. And now here they were back
again having found me out. My cover was blown. I blamed Brian Aldiss for
this predicament.
Evincing no more than mild surprise, I explained to the spy-catchers
that I had not mentioned my past interests in science fiction simply because
I had not been in touch with this particular literary field for more than
ten years. At one time, I explained, I had written an occasional review or
monograph, but since the troubles started in Northern Ireland in the
mid-sixties, pressure of work had left me no time for that sort of thing.
They seemed to accept this, which confirmed my suspicion that Brian Aldiss
was at the bottom of it all.
I vividly remembered the day last year when my boss and I had been
walking along a corridor in Westminster on the way to an important
meeting. My boss abruptly changed the subject we had been discussing,
namely the technicalities of voting in referenda. " Are you, by any chance, "
he said, " Ever known as Ghod? With an h? "
It turned out that yesterday evening in his branch of the Belfast Public
Library he had accidentally come across a book by one Brian Aldiss, in
which he recalled a science fiction convention at which he had met a fan
called Walt Willis who was referred to as Ghod. There was nothing to
indicate why this encounter had been particularly memorable. I explained
to my boss that according to one Bill Temple, as reported in a book by
Harry Warner, I had a godlike ability to shape destiny to provide
opportunities for puns. "Like when you were having dinner at our house,"
said my boss, "and my wife explained her dessert recipe and you said
"Souffle, souffle, catchee mousse?"
So when I got home, I phoned James White, who has all the knowledge
that hasn' t reached fanzines yet. "What memorable thing ever happened
with Brian Aldiss?"
"Well," said James, "when he visited us in Belfast you drove him up
the coast road to Cushendall, where he bought a cut glass napkin ring."
"Even more sensational than that,"I said. "It was something that
happened at a convention."
"There was the Great Confrontation at Harrogate in 1962," said James.
"I reported it in Hyphen."
I thanked him, hung up and found the 25 to 33 volume of Hyphen. The
reported was called The Long Afternoon of Harrogate. It was long, detailed
and fascinating, like all James White convention reports. (His report on his
first convention, London in 1951, would have been his first published work
if it had not turned out rather long for our hand-printed fanzine, the first
49 pages having taken the reader only as far as 8:30pm on the previous
Friday.) I noticed that in the subsequent Hyphen Brian Aldiss submitted in
admiring emulation a ten-page report on the Peterborough convention the
following year attended by Kingsley Amis. Which is, as they say, another
story. . . but is enough to demonstrate the unremitting accuracy of James's
convention reports.
The Great Confrontation at Harrogate had been with our Ian McAuley,
(the Dublin one, not the Atlanta one who tried to publicise the interlineation
Eat At Omars in the early ' Fifties). Our Ian was outraged by what he
regarded as the scientific travesties of Aldiss' s story Hothouse Planet.
There is no doubt that it is a great handicap in the appreciation of some
science fiction to know something about science. Dr. McAuley' s onslaught
was forceful, but the Aldiss defences turned out to be unexpectedly
impregnable. James reported the dialogue verbatim. . .
Ian: Aldiss, what d' you mean having men with diode valves in their
heads. . . ?
Brian: I know, I know. Totally implausible. Terrible story.
Ian: Absolutely no technical verisimilitude! How could the vacuum
be maintained
Brian: Worst story I ever wrote. Got sent out by mistake. Thought
I' d burned it.
Ian: Full of scientific boners. . .
Brian: I agree entirely. A horrible story. Lousy, should never have
seen print. I feel terrible about it, Ian.
Ian: It wasn' t a bad story. As a matter of fact it was pretty good
idea-wise. But for the one small scientific inaccuracy. . .
Brian: Can I get you another beer, Ian?
At this point James once again demonstrates his meticulous accuracy by
regretting that he could not remember Ian' s reply to this question; though
he does record later the only occasion on which Ian was ever known to
refuse a drink. . . ( " I' ve only got two hands, mate! " )
After I' d finished reading the report I phoned James again, regretting I
hadn' t found anything that Brian was likely to have remembered all those
years. What about, I asked, that trip we made to the Spanish restaurant?
James had recounted how the offhand Spanish waiters had addressed us in
Spanish, and how Margaret and Harry Harrison floored them by replying in
purist Castilian. In revenge they made us wait ages for our food, as if they
had decided we should all starve until Brian and Harry gave up Gibraltar.
Did anything else happen, not reported?
Now I have great faith in James, owing him the homage due to anyone
who actually backs up his computer disks. It would not have surprised me
in the least to find that his comparatively terse convention reports were
backed up by voluminous notes, with an appendix including the menu of the
restaurant and the receipted bill. I recalled that remarkable sequence of
photographs taken of one spot on the earth' s surface, ranging from a view
of the planet from space to a molecular image by an electron microscope. I
waited with confidence for the great brain to zoom in on the conversation in
the Spanish restaurant.
The mountain laboured and brought forth, if not a mouse, an animal
nearly as small. " There was the kitten, " said James.
It seemed that at one point during our long wait for food we had started
passing around old photographs. James had produced one of Dave and Ruth
Kyle standing outside a convention hotel. Brian Aldiss was in it too, and he
was holding a kitten. Someone asked about it and Brian explained it was a
stray he had found outside the hotel entrance. James asked what had
happened to it. Brian looked even hungrier, if possible. He said, wolfishly,
" I ate it. "
" I said that explained his guilty look, " said James. " Shall I go on? "
James must have heard my groan and taken my assent for grunted.
" You said ' They call it the Eat-a-Puss Complex, ' and Brian said ' Oh Ghod' . "
WHEN WE SURVEY THE WONDROUS DOUBLE CROSS
A periodical with perspective like that of SFFY should be among the first
to note that since the last issue an event of unique significance to the
human race has taken place, one never forecast even in science fiction.
I mean the death of the system of ideas associated with Marxist socialism.
Nothing like this has ever happened before. Certainly there have been
other times when established beliefs were challenged, as by Galileo,
Copernicus and Darwin, but there has never been so sudden and complete a
conversion as we have seen in the past two years. It is if the Pope and all
the College of Cardinals, except the one from Cuba, had admitted the falsity
of religion and apologised to the millions it had led to waste their lives.
An Iranian newspaper last summer urged that American help should be
spurned after the earthquake that killed 30,000 people. " Even under the
rubble, our people are chanting ' Death to America' , " it claimed, according
to the London Times. I wonder why this reminds me of Joseph Nicholas.
IT' S ONLY FAANFICTION BUT I LIKE IT
Re-reading the above, I realise I underestimated science fiction
in saying it had never anticipated anything like the recent ideological
revolution. I had forgotten that as far back as 1962 there had been a story
about how the communist system was destroyed and the cold war ended
almost overnight by one issue of a science fiction magazine. I should have
remembered it because I wrote it myself.
Admittedly it was only a faanfiction story, written for fun for Ted
White' s fanzine Void: it featured a goldfish called Horace and was based on
a news item about the prozine Fantastic Universe being sold at public
auction. But it was science fiction, and helps to make a point in support of
the thesis eloquently argued by rich brown in BSFAN # 17 ( Elaine Stiles)
that in abandoning faanfiction, as fan writers have tended to do in recent
years, we are in danger of losing something of unique value.
There are different kinds of faanfiction, and to my mind Bob Tucker
invented them all; as he did so much else of value in fandom. At Irish
Fandom' s first Convention, in London in 1951, we met Forry Ackerman
and when he got home he sent me several packages of old fanzines. They
included issues of Le Zombie in which Tucker recounted the adventures of a
character called Joe Fann, whom we later transmuted to Jophan. But even
before that we had been introduced to faanfiction by Bill Temple, whose
convention speeches were the equivalent of Bob Shaw' s Serious Scientific
Talks. On this occasion his lecture recounted the voyage of a spaceship
powered by what he termed mitogenetic rays. Noting the repellent effect of
onion-laden breath, Arthur Clarke had designed a spaceship consisting en-
tirely of a giant mutant onion. This was the precursor of other ingenious
space ventures by faan fiction authors, including Bob Shaw' s beer drive and
Berkeley Fandom' s Tower to the Moon made of beercans. Lee Jacobs from
the Berkeley area was at the London Convention too, and took the MS of
Temple' s talk with him. Lee was to become the chronicler of Fabulous
Burbee fandom and its mythology.
Anyone who doubts the importance of conventions to fanzine fandom
should study the connections made at the London Festival Convention of
1951, all affirmed in Quandry. The Festival was inspired by the Great
Exhibition of 1851, and designed like that one to inaugurate a new era of
peace and prosperity. It certainly worked for fandom.
So far faan fiction could be divided into two classes, fantasy and satire.
In Hyphen # 3, Bob Shaw wrote a new kind of story called SFAN! The title
derived from van Vogt' s SLAN! but the story itself was more like Heinlein' s
If This Goes On. It told of a future society in which fans were literally a
persecuted minority, because of anti-science feeling following atomic war.
The fugitive hero was betrayed to the authorities by trolley-car fans and
sentenced to death. Little did the authorities realise that the dreaded giant
executioner was actually James White, agent of a conspiracy to transport
fans to the safety of the Okefenokee Swamp, and we are left with hope of
a future in which fans are safe. All this in two and a half pages and
apparently written with complete seriousness. The story represented with
complete accuracy how fans of that era saw their position in society, and it
helped give rise to a genre called Trufan Tales, of which Vince Clarke' s
Scrooge on ice was the most notable example.
But the future in which fans were safe was now arriving, with the
increased public acceptance of science fiction. There was still a useful role
for satirical faanfiction, particularly in the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
It could perform a function like that of the play performed before the King
in Hamlet. But the increasingly disparate character of fandom diminished
its importance from that point of view.
However, when one door shuts another opens, and rich brown is quite
right in noting the historical importance of James White' s Exorcists of If.
Here is a story which is not only trufannish, but science fictional, in that
it is based on a genuine sciencefictional plot. The same applies to James' s
more recent short story about meeting the ghost of George Charters in
a supermarket. This contains an entirely new sfnal idea, about
communicating with the dead by switching off your word processor, after
completing your letter, thus consigning it to the limbo they inhabit. This
can be appreciated by people who have never heard of George Charters,
thereby enlarging its potential readership enormously. More recently
James has further expanded this concept by writing a long story based on
the legend of Merlin, who is said to have lived backwards. He has Merlin
visiting the Worldcon in Minneapolis in 2073, where he wins Third Prize in
the Masquerade Ball, and follows him backwards in time to Camelot, via the
Mermaid Tavern, which he sees as an archetypal fan group. James has
trimmed this into an 11,000 word novelette and sent it to F& SF. That was
4 months ago, so at least it has apparently given the heirs of Boucher and
McComas something to think about.
SEX DRIVE
When the Hubble telescope was fixed, the first thing it
detected was a huge comet on a collision course with
Earth. The United Nations went into secret session. Unanimous reports
from the world's scientists made it all too clear that the collision would
completely destroy the Earth and that there was nothing anyone could do to
avoid it. All the governments agreed there was no point in blighting what
remained of the life of humanity, so the terrible secret was kept until four
hours before impact, just enough time for people to make their peace with
their maker, as the old expression went. In the event, however, most
people decided that there was only one thing worth doing in that time.
Curiously there was no sadness: rather a kind of exaltation. For the first
time in history all humanity was united in the despairing ecstasy of a
climactic act of love. For all these billions of couples, the Earth Moved.
The Earth Moved, and the comet sped harmlessly by.
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated November 20, 2002. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.