The TransAtlantic Hearing Aid

1980 TAFF Report

David Langford

Published by

Ansible Editions
94 London Road, Reading, England, RG1 5AU
ae.ansible.uk

Copyright © 1985, 2015 by David Langford. All rights reserved.

This Ansible Editions ebook published May 2015. The text is taken from the 1985 print edition published by Rob Jackson’s Inca Press, with a few corrections.

Original appearances copyright © David Langford, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985.

Cover art: Jim Barker, 1985.

Interior art: Atom, Jim Barker, Brad Foster, Alexis Gilliland, Rob Hansen, Stu Shiffman, Dan Steffan, Taral, D. West.

Ebook ISBN 978-1-913451-45-5

The right of David Langford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the Author in accordance with the British Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

This free ebook version of The TransAtlantic Hearing Aid is exclusive to the unofficial TAFF website at taff.org.uk. If you enjoy reading it, a donation to TAFF is a fine way to express your appreciation.

Contents

Preliminary Bit

Travelling Hopefully
Vaster than Empires and More Slow
From Pole to Pole
The Day of the Jackpot
Running Down
Is There Life After Worldcon?
Yes! We Have Parakeet Diapers!
I Was a Worm in the Big Apple

Appendix 1: Yesterday’s Men
Appendix 2: Vital Statistics
Appendix 3: The Call of Kho-Ad
Original Appearances

Preliminary Bit

Originally I planned to spread myself in several thousand lavish words of introduction to this collected TAFF trip report... but the bulk of the wretched thing is already quite intimidating enough. And it’s gone on far too long, through nine separate fanzines and five embarrassing years, until the only humane thing left to do is stop.

Knowledgeable readers can now skip instantly to the salacious bits. For the rest of you, I’ll harden myself to record the Basic Details one last time (maddeningly familiar though they are from my TAFF bits in 5,271,009 convention booklets during my period of administrative malpractice from 1980 to 1982). Since the early 1950s TAFF, the TransAtlantic Fan Fund, has been organizing “cultural exchanges” to promote contact between European and North American SF fandom, by paying for its elected delegates’ trips from Here to the year’s major convention There, or vice-versa. Where does the money come from? Fans’ votes are compulsorily accompanied by donations; kindly conventions and other organizations have been known to scatter their bounty; all profits from eventual trip reports (like this one) also go into the kitty. Further details and further copies of this booklet are obtainable from the current administrators, whose addresses are lewdly paraded at taff.org.uk.

I was the delegate from Europe to the 38th Worldcon, Noreascon II, held in Boston from 29 August to 1 September 1980. As suggested by the somewhat, er, gradual appearance of this report, a lot of people had to push quite hard to get me there and back. Most get a mention inside, but what the hell: let’s declare an Official Dedication right here, to the following:

Jim Barker (my esteemed rival in the TAFF race), Mike Glyer, Leroy Kettle, Bob Shaw, and Victoria Vayne, for nominating me in the first place;

Stu Shiffman (and his parents), Selina Lovett (and hers), Alexis & Dolly Gilliland, Avedon Carol (and parents), Andy Porter, and Moshe Feder, for heroism beyond the call of hospitality;

Massachusetts Convention Fandom, Inc, for Noreascon II and a jolly triffic hotel room;

Rob Jackson, for publishing the bloated end-product which you now hold. (Thanks too to the publishers of original instalments, as noted at the back.)

Don’t read it all at once, now.

Dave Langford, August 1985

Travelling Hopefully

Wednesday 27 August 1980

“I shall be sick,” Hazel told me with a sort of satisfied determination. “I was sick in France and sick in Germany and sick in Austria and... well, every country in Europe except Liechtenstein.”

“You need good aim to be sick in Liechtenstein,” I agreed. We were fibrillating about the house in a highly organized panic; it was one day and 3000 miles to Noreascon; I was a little bit worried because I’d never actually travelled in a plane, and Hazel was very worried indeed because she had. This was scarcely the time to be suffering the pangs of post-convention depression (not to mention Weltschmerz, Angst and shrivelled wallet)... but attending Silicon a couple of days before had seemed a Good Idea on the theory that it would disrupt our biorhythms, and so prepare us for the appalling sensory impact of the TAFF trip. Thus it came about that, when we leapt gladly from bed on the morning of our long-awaited journey to America, we were thoroughly knackered.

On the table was the packet of peanuts we’d bought on the way to Silicon and subsequently carried all the way back. “Have a peanut,” I said to the distraught Hazel. “Think of nice thoughts. Be cheerful. Gosh, I had an interesting dream last night, I dreamt I was hiding 110mm film cartridges inside hollowed-out copies of The Complete Poetry of Robert Browning and William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, neither of which I have read. Think of that.”

“I was dreaming we were off to the Sudan,” she wailed. “Waaaaaah. If only we were.”

We quivered our way through a breakfast less hearty than a condemned man’s, Hazel carving obsessively at an orange while I sliced an apple into tiny tiny pieces. The doors and windows of 22 Northumberland Avenue were ritually sealed like the tomb of Tutankhamun. A last-minute check disclosed that my case did indeed contain 300 fanzines and books and auction material and an Astral Leauge cassette for Terry Hughes (which he was on no account to play to Jackie Lichtenberg) and a bottle of liqueur demanded by Joyce Scrivner and the Dramamine recommended by Andrew the omniscient Stephenson and the whisky I’d won as part of the Welshfandom quiz team at Silicon. (I invariably ended up prescribing myself this instead of the Dramamine, which was not cost-effective.) Also, in odd corners, we’d contrived to pack some clothes. One item of hand luggage was a John Le Carré omnibus in a protective plain-paper jacket, on which some idiot Langford had scrawled Sex-Seeräuber aus den Blutig Asteroid for the benefit of customs men. (While checking that this was properly misspelled, I found that the German for sex-appeal in women is erotische Anziehungskraft, while for men it’s Sex-Appeal. Think of that.) Last of all we packed the ex-Silicon peanuts, and with simulated heartiness explained to each other that a brisk mile’s walk to Reading station would make us vibrantly healthy and fit. As a foreseeable result, we were still grey-faced and breathless when we at last fell out of our train, as though from an iron lung, into the airport complex at Gatwick.

New readers should begin with this paragraph, and should on no account confuse themselves by prior study of the material above. We were visiting the USA to undergo Noreascon, the 1980 World SF Convention in Boston, our highly altruistic purpose being to test certain crackpot statements put about by a fellow called Columbus, and to find out whether it’s possible to achieve the hallowed state of insobriety using only American beer. (It is, but there’s a scientifically interesting time-reversal effect whereby said beer makes you ill before it makes you drunk.) The expedition was sponsored by the good old Transatlantic Fan Fund, which has been defying US regulations about undesirable aliens ever since it started (informally) in 1952: realizing my opportunity, I very swiftly arranged to be born in 1953. In the olden days it took most of the gross national product of fandom merely to boost the victim beyond the three-mile limit; as for getting back, you could only hope that a kindly US government would note the unwholesomeness of this British person and come through with a deportation order. Thus it was that such former TAFF delegates as Ken Bulmer and Peter Weston were restored to our bosoms.

By 1980, however, British fans were so rich and capitalistic that enormous lemming-like hordes made the pilgrimage to Noreascon; innumerable thronging masses flowing westwards like some great race migration; groaning DC-10s so crammed with tight-packed British bodies that the incalculable pressure converted Freddie Laker’s airline food into nodules of collapsed matter, not that it made much difference; colossal swarms of incoming British fans who blackened the sky over Boston in their numberless myriads. You may mock, but I counted at least thirty, enough to cause a marked plummet in this country’s statistics for crimes of indecency and postal fraud during the period of Noreascon. And of course the most enormous of all these hordes were Jim Barker and Harry Bell, who chose to fly over with the Langford entourage.

We greeted one another with rather sickly smiles, as though congregating at the guillotine rather than the Gatwick booking desk: only John Harvey, Jim’s and Harry’s tumbril-driver, seemed unconcerned. The atmosphere of brooding dread had made its effect even on John by the time our instinctive footsteps reached the airport bar, and presently a hideous, unnatural scene transpired. Imagine Margaret Thatcher raping Norman Tebbit on the front bench of the Commons; imagine a hat-trick of Hugo awards going to Perry Rhodan novels; imagine, if you can, Rog Peyton giving away free books; perhaps then you can contemplate the thought of four case-hardened and cirrhosed British fans sitting trembling and in cold blood drinking fruit-juice.

At gate 20 I lurched through the metal-detector with an air of bravado, and the whole thing fell sideways and said Thud while red lights went on everywhere and a Customs man with large black bags under his eyes droned: “Oh dear, you’ve broken my nice detector, I’ll have to charge you for that, sir.” I had to perform an action replay, this time omitting the air of bravado.

Jim, Harry, Hazel and I stood for a long time in a departure lounge which doubled as a sauna. “My father says travelling on a plane is just like travelling on a coach,” Hazel said without conviction. “He says you can’t tell the difference.”

Jim wanted to change the subject, and mysteriously remarked that he’d dominated (sic) Joe Nicholas for GUFF. I wrote this furtively, feeling not so much, well, nervous, perish the thought, as eager to concentrate on any old trivia.... Harry offered a paltry sum for the use of my notes when we got back (“If we get back,” Hazel muttered), but blew the deal with a crack about how he was used to bad handwriting. Lots of people had warned all of us about one hidden peril of enormous altitudes and terrifying speeds: apparently one’s feet are liable to swell up. We agreed to be on our guard against this calamity. Around this time Hazel’s ultrasonic screams were interrupted by crackly noises from a hi-fi system not as good as British Rail’s: time to cringe our way abroad.

A few crowd scenes later, we sat watching a safety film about likely appalling disasters that would presently happen to us, with close-up shots of oxygen masks falling from the ceiling to dangle in the manner of giant spiders in some Hammer film, or springing from the seat-backs at astonished passengers like something out of Alien. At least they didn’t dwell on the perils of bloated feet, which were beginning to prey on our minds. Suddenly the screen went blank owing to Laker Skytrain’s version of the law of averages: we’d been put aboard 15 minutes before takeoff time, which was balanced by taking off 15 minutes after takeoff time. As we tilted up and away from England, a weak voice said from the depths of the seat next to mine: “Will you please tell my father, if we ever see him again, that one can tell we’re not in a coach....”

The high pint of airborne excitement came when I’d finally extricated myself from the safety belt, and instantly the interrupted Your Guide to Paranoia film started where it left off, with awful voices booming “Once again let me remind you to fasten your seat-belts ready for takeoff!” Lightning nervous collapse. After this came relative tedium: Hazel and I ended up sitting miles from Harry and Jim, and were spared even the mild excitement of watching Harry’s feet swell up (which, he later told us, they did). I pretended to read a book while Hazel peered gloomily, and without benefit of headphones, at our in-flight film The Black Stallion. Whenever I looked up, the screen was full of this black stallion charging over land and sea, once underwater and once – I swear – upside down.

“This film is entirely an advertisement for Lloyd’s Bank” said the dismal voice at my side.

I paid a few experimental visits to the bog, walking and otherwise comporting myself very carefully since everyone knows DC-10s aren’t too strong. This level of excitement persisted for some hours, or subjectively some months (all to do with relativity, I believe) until we were showered with Customs forms asking shrewd questions about our planned importation of “fruit, meat, snails and all living organisms”. Ambiguities in the regulations made it seem like a good moment to play safe and gobble the Silicon peanuts, but the mere thought gave a sensation of dust and ashes in the mouth (as had the Laker beef strog. substitute). I decided it was easier to be a smuggler.

America came up and hit us with a bump; we skidded and trundled along fifty or sixty miles of runway, coming to rest in the corner of JFK Airport furthest from help. Shortly before the oxygen ran out, we were rescued from this wasteland by an enormous bus-cum-hydraulic-lift last seen as a walk-on gadget in Thunderbirds. The authorities, still not wishing to let America burst on us all at once and cause culture shock, next provided an acclimatization chamber for aliens. Here we stewed in 81°F and high humidity, watching each other flow to the floor and spread out into puddles. US citizens were mere blurs as they whizzed through Immigration, while humble Brits had their names checked against a vast list of undesirables by an official who seemed unable to read passport photos without moving his lips.

As the queue oozed forward I began to develop paranoid worries about what would happen to us in the enormous American wastes yonder, and speculated aloud: “Hey, do you think Stu Shiffman will meet us? Will we even recognize him? Does he look like those pictures he draws of himself? Is he not rather a hunchbacked Mexican dwarf with only one leg?” At this point Harry and Jim pointed out a chap two places down the queue from us, who by some chance happened to be a hunchbacked dwarf. Bloody hell. I hid behind a suitcase; Harry, greatly tickled by this, wrote down the incident in exhaustive detail (a week later, it was still the only entry in his notebook). Meanwhile Hazel announced: “There’s a lady behind you with four hats on.” None of us dared look round.

We bluffed our way through customs with the possibly illicit peanuts (“Medicinal, honest”), and surged through the barrier like surfers on the crest of the crowd, and there to meet us was a large delegation of none other than Ian Williams, who said, “Welcome to America in the name of the Fanoclasts!” – Wait a minute. Of course it wasn’t Ian Williams but Stu Shiffman, who only looked very vaguely like him. (“The bulk is spread more evenly,” Hazel observed.) This sort of false recognition was to happen several times, a disconcerting side effect of jet lag or con shock, culminating in the moment of dread when I temporarily perceived one poor, misunderstood chap as being D. West. Good grief.

Outside the temperature over JFK was 90°, and the air was shaking and wriggling just the way it does in the films, and there were millions of yellow taxis (I mean cabs) crawling as far as the eye could see, and Hazel and Harry went into a fit of giggles at the sight of a four-door limousine (four, that is, on either side). The next hour was extremely hot, sweaty, blasphemous and confused owing to the Barker/Bell axis and its mad desire to fly on to Boston later that very day, with all the problems of checking baggage in again almost as soon as it had been checked out, only at a different terminal half a mile away... that sort of thing. Meanwhile I got out the sixty peculiar green tokens US fans had sent in exchange for fanzines, and found they were convertible at a ruinous rate of exchange into such drinks as an unlikely frothy pineapple juice. At last we piled damply into Stu’s travelling oven, otherwise known as a Buick: culture shock hit Harry as he struggled to get in on the passenger side only to find this big wheel sort of thing in front of the seat. “Oh,” he said intelligently.

The car was decorated with countless furry animals and dangling dolls. “This,” said Stu, forstalling comment, “is my sister’s car.” As we drove mile after mile towards the edge of the airport, our steaming bodies sweated the interior atmosphere of the car into thin fog. A passenger who shall be nameless passed remarks about how he’d expected effete and decadent US cars to be air-conditioned. A driver who shall also be nameless explained that the car was indeed air-conditioned, only the air-conditioner was broken and please to remember it was his sister’s car....

En route I began my collection of US road signs, like PED XING (surely a member of the Gang of Four) and YIELD (surely a signpost from Camelot). ENTER ONE VEHICLE AT A TIME ON GREEN sounded vaguely like musical chairs; NO STANDING ANY TIME might or might not have been aimed at pedestrians; there was a certain classic simplicity in WRONG WAY. As for STANDPIPE SIAMESE DIRECTLY BELOW, none of us Brits really dared to speculate.... Our immediate destination was that famous bit of New York whose mere mention brought a thrill to our hearts: Flushing. Stu parked the car with immense panache and knocked over a dustbin; I thought I heard a last faint murmur of “...my sister’s car...”

Entering the Shiffman parental home, we were instantly submerged in wave after wave of US hospitality, which we accepted in a happy yet glazed manner (it being about time, according to my internal clock, for me to stagger home from the pub and fall in the general direction of a bed). The house was cool and dim, and all Stu’s achievements including his Seacon Hugo nomination were commemorated on the sitting-room walls, and out at the back Mrs. Shiffman dispensed an unfailing stream of cold fruit-juice, and watermelon slices, and instructions to go upstairs and freshen up, and “eggplant zucchini” (sounded ever so much more exotic than aubergine and courgettes and things), and responses to our dazed British comments on the hugeness of US cars. You really know you’re in an alien land when you learn that any increase in petrol prices above 50¢ a gallon is monstrous, and that Americans have huge cars because they are safer on account of there being more metal and plastic between you and all the people you run into, and that weedy little British vehicles are wholly suicidal. Actually it was good fannish fun, the total informality of the Shiffmen senior being soothing to twitchy foreign nerves; I boggled myself to the point of internal haemorrhage by attempting to imagine my father (Denis G. Langford, FCA) receiving guests in the informal garb preferred by Stu’s, consisting of shorts and a pendant.

At this point the jollity of the occasion got the better of Stu himself, and shyly he confessed that, personally, he didn’t drink beer. Seeing the look on Harry’s face and feeling his TAFF chances beginning to plummet, he hastily promised to get into training. Harry sniffed, with that supercilious glint In the eye which betrays the true Gannetfan aristocrat: “Only masters can learn to drink Newcastle Brown in less than a year.” Rather than argue about this, we wandered out to study Stu’s promised View of the Empire State Building from the vantage point just down the road. There was an amazing noise in the dusk, like massive electrical corona discharges on every side, and Jim wondered whether there were rattlesnakes in the trees. (There are a lot of trees in Flushing.) It turned out to be an enormous chorus of synchronous crickets somewhere up there, presumably equipped with kilowatt amps and speakers. After a few minutes of peering towards where the Empire State should by rights have been, we gave up and contented ourselves with photographing Stu against the background of the non-view. He’d forgotten the intervening trees’ habit of wearing leaves at that time of year.

I was too sleepy to take in much more, and indeed did become comatose on a sofa while Hazel watched singing TV commercials (briefly interspersed with short flashes of programme) and discovered that US know-how can make “fruit” rhyme with “yogurt”*. Meanwhile Stu ferried an equally dazed Messrs Barker and Bell to the airport for their desperate Boston dash; by and by his mother drove us all to Stu’s apartment in Washington Heights, with hot air-blasts roaring through the windows like the exhaust of gigantic hair dryers, and a kaleidoscopic view of lights and famous places outside (it might have been less kaleidoscopic if I’d been less glazed). The East River, gosh, and Manhattan, gosh wow, and Broadway goshwowboyoboy, and Washington Heights... the name Hazel couldn’t forget was Throg’s Neck Bridge. Nobody could tell her what a throg was**. Then we were stumbling through the fannish anthill of 19 Broadway Terrace, with rapid glimpses of famous D. Potter (whom I did not mistake for D. West – she’s a tall thin advert for black-is-beautiful) and others, before falling into Stu’s home. We’d been warned that this was a truly typical NY apartment with all the ethnic trimmings such as cockroaches: Hazel and I were quite disappointed not to hear the patter of little feet all over the floor and walls. In compensation for the lack of vermin Stu had such things as a stained-glass panel depicting the great fannish beaver-god Roscoe (founded in 1947) and an evangelical light switch left by former occupants. This paradigm of American culture had a switch housing shaped like Jesus embracing a couple of small brats, with the actual switch lever sticking from a theologically debatable portion of Jesus’s body. Stu had practised his fanartistic skills by adding beaver-stigmata and propeller beanies, together with the motto Ad Luminem Ex Fiawol. Britain’s cultural ambassadors gazed in wonder at the result.

* Tumty-tumty-tumty frurt
Tumty-tumty-tum yogURT.

** This was long before Throg’s Masterclass had become a regular department in Ansible.

We continued to be hot, sticky and tired. Perceiving this, Stu offered a couple of square feet of his air-conditioned bedroom, thus becoming a True Hero of the People (Third Class) despite said air-conditioner’s habit of doing 747 impersonations for exactly as long as it took you to get used to the din, whereupon it would turn itself off so that the silence woke you up. Such was the report of an impassioned Hazel next morning: I, a veteran of slothfulness during thunderstorms, hysterical telephones and visitations of Concorde, didn’t notice a thing. Deaf fandom rules.

Thursday 28 August 1980

We took our breakfast in properly American fashion, at a nearby restaurant; here I contrived to order ham, pancakes and maple syrup with a certain airy nonchalance which slipped slightly when they all arrived on the same plate. We congratulated Stu on his wondrous abilities of clairvoyance and ESP, scientific proof having been furnished the day before when he recognized me (or so he claimed) from cartoons by Jim Barker. He responded with fannish factoids (“Taral’s a great guy only he’s got no chin”) and an attack on a Popular Tourist Fallacy: “There’s more to New York than buildings.... There’s more than one park here!” Held by his glittering eye, we meekly followed towards nearby parks, rivers and things.

Just as London fans – even Gerry Webb – don’t generally live in Buckingham Palace, so NY fandom tends not to be found in those bits of New York you see in the colour supplements. Stu’s area, Washington Heights, is comfortably sleazy, at the “uptown” end of Broadway which is miles and miles from the bright lights. Instead there are interesting spectacles like a tall sixty-degree cliff of bare earth and rock, terrifyingly overhung by buildings balanced on quantities of naked scaffolding. Street litter included hordes of torn playing cards, a scattering of abandoned TV sets and enough dog turds to befoul (as it were) occasional US claims that their streets are spotless while ours are all knee-deep. We took a short-cut through one station of the famous NY subway, which station was disguised behind a couple of tatty wooden doors set in a small cliff-face (there are numerous Heights in Washington Heights): such camouflage, plus a slight lack of signposting, may be why visitors are traditionally bewildered by the subway system. As we climbed higher the buildings did indeed give way to parks where Hazel smugly identified tulip trees and false acacias while I was charmed by the half-inch ants that crawled about still more listlessly than ourselves. The journey hadn’t yet worn off and the world still seemed dreamlike, thus possibly proving that I lack even the stamina of a Peter Roberts.

The air remained warm and viscous: such impressive Sights as the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge had a disconcerting tendency to wobble when viewed through a fug resembling that in a convention bar at 2am (though slightly less polluted). Stu proved the Hudson to be fannish by pointing out the invisible beach where, he said, famed fan Moshe Feder had held the great coming-out picnic at which he ceased to eat kosher. I was also impressed by the perils of frontier life in this raw, turbulent land, as manifested in the large and fearsome stripy insect which wouldn’t let thirsty Stu come near a drinking fountain.

Rather too soon, it was time for yet more travel. Our good host pointed us carefully at the 190th Street station and pushed; armed with much advice and an annotated map of the entire subway system furnished by kindly Andy Porter, we felt thoroughly unfitted for the venture. At least we couldn’t get the fare wrong since it was 60¢ to everywhere; the train itself was a bit disconcerting since what rolled up to the grimy platform was an enormous mass of graffiti and pavement art, with a train concealed somewhere inside it. It seems that not content with scribbling all over every square inch of the interiors, true graffiti masters spend their nights breaking into the yards and decorating each coach on the outside too.... After a period of brutal sonic assault we reached Penn Station, whence the Amtrak trains leave for Boston and where Minneapolis fan M. K. Digre should be waiting to explain what such trains looked like; and there in the booking hall was none other than David Pringle, who – No, of course it wasn’t, and Mark Digre is leaner and has bushier hair and things, and I’ve no idea at all why I kept making these mistakes.

At the Amtrak ticket office I flashed a Barclaycard to the tune of $40, which through some special fare offer broke down to $26.50 for the Head of the Family and $13.50 for his Spouse. “I’m a second class citizen” rejoiced the Spouse. As for Mark, he gets short shrift in my notes because I could only hear about every fifth word he spoke, and what’s more he was travelling in a lush reserved seat of peculiar distinction while I’d only achieved plain cheapo travel. Sorry.... The Amtrak station procedure had been designed by fans of Kafka, so your uncertainty and dread mount ever higher as you gently simmer with hundreds of other victims of anomie in a largish hall, ignorant even of which platform your train will leave from. The only air conditioning – words I’d begun to look for hungrily, the way one might look for “Real Ale” at home – the only air conditioning was behind the glassed-in Amtrak booking desks, and we seriously debated the possibility of buying numerous local-journey tickets just to stay at the window and lean into its draught of cool air. Then Amtrak, masters of chaos, played their ace: the train was ready at last, and a light came on showing the way to its underground platform, and about five hundred people pulped themselves into a corridor and staircase designed for the use of anorexics walking in single file.

The train itself had the best air conditioning we’d yet encountered; we forgave Amtrak everything. There was also a bar, and they were forgiven still more. Possibly I shouldn’t have been wearing a little badge in memory of back-room work at AWRE, which said TELL ME YOUR OFFICIAL SECRETS –

BARMAN: Hey, look, you got to tell him your secrets.

AMTRAK GUARD: No I ain’t. I’m the Pope. Everyone’s got to tell me all their secrets.

(Exit LANGFORD in confusion, spilling droplets of Ballantine beer, shortly to be reissued as “Del Rey”.)

We spent the afternoon travelling northward with incredible lack of speed. At three o’clock the train crept through Stamford, where the thermometer on the State National Bank said 91° and we travellers gloated over the poor sods outside. At four, we passed Milford (Connecticut) and said Gosh to each other for scientifictional reasons: a wholly mistaken Gosh which we should have saved for Milford (Pennsylvania). Around then your narrator remembered the much-travelled peanuts from Silicon, and opened the packet, nervously expecting some fearful scourge to fly out and devastate the crops of America. Fancy bringing peanuts to the USA, like coals to Jimmy Carter. Next came the Providence cemetery where good old H. P. Lovecraft rests uneasily, brooding beneath a gibbous moon over the frightful couplet That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons be completed by August Derleth or somebody and make a packet.... The most frenzied scrutiny failed to disclose any eldritch tentacles writhing from the graves, nor even a consolatory puddle of blasphemous ichor.

Then it was Boston, a cool evening and the smell of the sea; a surprisingly calm and pleasant-looking city, considering that it was already in the first convulsions of a peculiarly gigantic Worldcon.

“I haven’t been sick yet,” said an incredulous Hazel while we waited for the taxi. But could she keep it up? Read on....

Vaster than Empires and More Slow

Thursday 28 August 1980, continued

“Copley Plaza Hotel?” said the taxi driver.

“That’s right.”

“You sure you don’t want the Copley Square?”

“No.”

“I can wait around if you like, let you check you’ve got the right place.”

“We’re fine, thanks. Copley Plaza’s the one. My notebook never lies.”

The taxi swerved appallingly towards the wrong side of the road... no, of course, the right side of the road. “Here you are. Copley Plaza. Now you see over there, that’s the Copley Square, and –” Gibbering, we thrust dollar bills at him and ran for the pavement, inspecting each other for the stigmata of Boston visitors who were inexorably marked down for Copley Square.

Our first reaction to the Copley Plaza was, indeed, to wonder ourselves whether we’d found the right place. “Gorblimey,” I breathed as I surveyed the lofty halls dripping with gigantic chandeliers. “I have seen the nineteenth century and it works.”

“Art nouveau,” explained Hazel, who is an art nouveau fan. “Art nouveau carried to the point of, er, vomit.” I deferred to her invariable good taste and kept my mouth shut. Thus, keeping close together, two shabby British fans moved furtively through the vaulted halls, casting sidelong glances at marble, mirrors and gilt; Hazel broke down altogether when confronted with furry, carpeted fire-doors which von Sacher-Masoch would have considered to be very much along the right lines.

Reaching our room somehow, we shut the door on America for a while and set about recuperating from the journey and the pattern of the upstairs carpets. But America came straight back in at the window as I peered at the most surreal hotel-room view I’ve seen. Why were there two skylines, one on top of the other? After much rubbing of eyes it turned out that next door was the John Hancock building – hundreds of feet tall, prism-shaped and mirror-surfaced, with a convincing reflection of our hotel in the sheer side facing us. I waved at the reflection and looked long and fruitlessly for the image of a far-off Langford waving back. Was this a little-known side effect of being a British tourist – not showing up in American mirrors? For a moment I wondered if we still cast shadows. It took a ridiculous time to work out that the Hancock’s wall made a 45° angle with the hotel’s, and that true to form I was searching for myself in entirely the wrong building.

This might explain my tiny vindictive grin when later informed that Hancock’s Erection was gradually sinking in soggy Boston soil. In a way, that disconcerting moment was prophetic; I seemed to spend a good deal of Noreascon looking for fannishness in the wrong place, or maybe looking for the wrong sort of fannishness.

But our first visit to the Sheraton-Boston hotel and the con proper was more encouraging: we found a system of little corridors and lobbies rather than the vast echoing chambers I’d feared, and it was only moderately and selectively crowded, so where we’d dreaded teeming anonymous hordes we were instead besieged with many familiar, repulsive faces of British fandom. It was, of course, only the Thursday night. There was time only to say preliminary helloes and hideously insult Mike Glicksohn (as required by the Unalterable Law) before Graham England decided we needed food and efficiently led us to the toilets. My plane- and New York-shocked faculties still couldn’t cope with more than whichever room or hall we actually happened to be in; it was like threading one’s way through an ultra-modern Dungeons & Dragons scenario, encountering odd people and odd creatures at intervals through the random labyrinth. The feeling became overpowering when we were suddenly confronted by idiots in contemporary combat rig, carrying lethal-looking carbines. Very science-fictional. Graham did tree impersonations until the menace was out of sight; “The right to bear weapons is the right to be free,” I intone, not without nostalgic memories of those unconvincing cardboard-and-tinsel rayguns at home cons. What fun it must be, to get up in the morning and look forward to a whole day of frightening nervous fans.

(I must mention – before some wretch like Kev Smith does – that I’m not guiltless in this area. At the second con I ever attended, I wore cheapo sunglasses adapted with LEDs to provide tiny red glowing lights at the centre of each lens. These I would suddenly switch on as I encountered fans in dim corridors; I’m still buying Bob Shaw whiskies to atone for the resulting shock to his nerves. As a means of causing alarm and despondency, this now seems relatively humane.)

Graham’s chosen eating-place was The Ground Round, a title which I correctly guessed was another hamburger euphemism. Americans seem coy about referring directly to their supposed national dish; any particularly enigmatic-sounding item on the menu always turns out to be a hamburger variant. I can’t remember much about the food (other than that I contrived to avoid the lurking burger, chiefly by ordering chicken), but I do recall the waitress being charmed by our cultured British accents.

“Say something else,” she would plead, and we would duly elocute, choosing sentences which properly showed off our vowels (e.g. “How about if you brought the beer?”), and she would quiver as though Graham’s vocal chords were plugged directly into her pleasure centres. My own cultured British tones were slightly less prized than his, possibly because they’re tainted with a trace of the Welsh, look you, bach.

“I could listen to you all night,” the waitress said lingeringly; it seemed by that time that she had.

Infatuated with this success, I went back to the Sheraton and tried my cultured mumble on Terry Hughes, who was more blasé about Brits and merely handed over a pile of TAFF dollars with the cheery comment that he’d been frightfully worried about being mugged whilst carrying this titanic three-figure sum, but now at last he could walk the streets without fear. “Gee, thanks, Terry,” I said, mentally counting the streets between me and the Copley Plaza.

We said cultured but increasingly inaudible things to numberless fans, most of whom seemed to the fevered brain to be British. Our very own Paul Kincaid had even insinuated himself into the vast staff of con helpers, this being about as difficult as insinuating oneself off a log: “I wrote the Noreascon press release on British Fandom,” he said with the sort of smile Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ministry of Truth hacks must have worn when they’d rewritten a particularly good bit of history. I tracked down a Noreascon Press Kit later, an imposing folder slightly less thick than The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant; there was an interesting sheet about someone called Hugo Gersbach, not written by Paul, and one about me (possibly written by Paul, since it subtly told me I was going to write a TAFF report in no time at all, coff coff), and photos by Jay Kay Klein of the guests of honour Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm and Bruce Pelz. I know they were by Jay Kay Klein because because they each had a rubber stamp saying so on the back: to discourage the Press from actually using these photos, they’d been stacked while the stamps were wet, giving each GoH an interesting tattoo on the forehead.... However, Paul’s Britfandom release was missing and I suppose I’d never know what he wrote about us all. “Since 1975, all fannish activity in the British Isles and points east has been dominated by the colossal figure of Paul Kincaid...”

Some confused while later I was bending double in order to listen to Alyson Abramowitz (who is a member neither of Tall Fandom nor of Loud Fandom) telling me all the fanzines I’d failed to send her over the last several years, when the ground began to tremble. Fans in the crowded lobby gazed this way and that with a wild surmise; some dived under tables for cover as an Unidentified Female Object thundered towards us at transphotic velocity. The impact came, as described at rather too much greater length in Lucifer’s Hammer; the resulting shockwave hurled fans to the floor and Alyson into close orbit. Painfully, I dragged my bruised body from the crater at ground zero. “Hello, Joyce,” I said.

Joyce Scrivner – for it was she – proceeded to welcome us to America with all the vast enthusiasm at her disposal. When one has been welcomed to America by Joyce one feels one has never been welcomed properly to anywhere before, and that one may never survive being welcomed to anywhere again. The greeting hug of a grizzly bear is a feeble and pallid thing compared to Joyce’s. Pausing only to introduce me to a bemused AnneLaurie Logan (with whom Joyce believes me to have some dire feud), she promised us the run of all Noreascon’s most secret room-parties. The thought of parties this early in the con was, however, too much; exhausted but happy, we staggered off into the night.

July 1981

“Look. How long is this thing going to be?”

“Well... I’m halfway down my eighth page of notes. There are only 55 pages if you don’t count the mysterious interleavings marked ‘26a’ and ‘Dunno where this fits’. The overall length isn’t the problem (since I never wear overalls); it’s a matter of Structure.”

“If you’re going to go on about ‘Structuralism and Catastrophe Theory – Its Relation To The Hugo Results’, you can stop this imaginary dialogue right here.”

“Fear not: my structural secret is that basically there isn’t going to be any. The trouble is that the TAFF experience has changed so much from the old days. Once you could travel to a Worldcon and find it a cosy refuge from the vast tossing sea of mundanity – a strange exotic island where fannish castaways had adventures as a close-knit band. The pattern of a trip report would emerge more or less naturally from such communal adventuring....”

“How do you know? You weren’t there.”

“No, but I saw the film. I mean, I read the fanzines. Now Noreascon wasn’t exactly a refuge from the vast tossing sea of mundanity; it was a tossing sea in its own right. From time to time you could shout to other lifejacketed fans as they happened to drift nearby; these meetings seemed so random that I felt helpless and at the mercy of the waves. In short, to scrap the watery metaphors before they start gurgling out of the typewriter and across the floor, Noreascon was –”

“You’re going to say it!”

“Certainly I’m going to say it.”

“But everybody says it. It’s already a cliché. Be different! Be orig–”

“Noreascon was too bloody big.”

Friday 29 August 1980

One of the decadent joys of holidaying is going out for breakfast; this morning, at a place called Brigham’s, Hazel took it upon herself to exert linguistic skills in the matter of fried eggs. “Sunny side up, basted,” she said with quiet confidence – only to be tolerantly informed that these are entirely different things. After the 15-minute lecture (with diagrams) from our helpful waitress, a chastened Hazel decided that her favourite eggs were scrambled ones. Meanwhile I scanned the restaurant for the mighty and famous but only found Barry Malzberg, who walked past moaning faintly and looking less connected with reality than his own characters.

Outside, we admired the US flags flying everywhere: how patriotic. I wondered if they were at half-mast because of the convention; it turned out that flags were flying thus throughout Massachusetts and were supposed to be staying that way until the hostages came back from Iran. (In Washington, I found later, they’d adopted still more brutal sanctions against the Ayatollah by not taking the decorations off the municipal Christmas tree.) A more homely note was struck when we re-entered the Sheraton lobby to learn from Greg Pickersgill that beer in the hotel bars cost five times as much as in shops outside. “I was in this liquor store place,” said Greg, “saying ‘God this is cheap – that’s bloody cheap,’ and the guy at the counter was saying ‘How do you live over there?’ I wanted to give him my address – maybe he’d have sent me food parcels....”

At Greg’s recommendation I stocked up with something called Michelob, which differed from most US beers in almost having a taste. At $2.85 for six largish bottles, this nearly but not quite had me wailing “How do I live over there?” (The last straw was the revelation that this was no cheap and nasty thirst-quencher, but a “premier beer” of some distinction... I was carried out in strong hysterics.) Stowing the bottles in my habitual vast shoulder-bag, I started pulling out fanzines to lighten the load. At once Roz Kaveney appeared, yet another Briton and practically the only one to have Done Something about the age-old question “Why aren’t there enough women in UK fandom?”: she grabbed Twll-Ddu 18 with the hyper-abstruse literary competition I’d included to annoy people, and proceeded to display repulsive intellectualism by looming over me and reeling off all the more obscure answers without even opening the fanzine.

The crowds were thickening as more people pressed in to register for Noreascon. “Why are we standing round here in lobbies?” I asked. “Where do the true fans hang out?” No answer came. I consulted the official map in the pocket programme: this resembled a cubist map of the Underground, and I still don’t understand it. Indeed I never found the “fan room”, which by all account didn’t much resemble convivial fan rooms at home, being instead devoted to continuous showings of Harry Andruschak Collates Fanzines. The cheap bar to which I was instinctively drawn, as a possible fannish gathering-place, turned out to be a fast-food counter with an exciting choice of two drinks, beer or large beer. It seemed that to meet fans one just had to stand around in lobbies.

One o’clock approached, and firm hands led me through new labyrinths to where a TAFF/DUFF panel was to be held (“Fans Across the Sea: Fanfund Politics”) – in a vast unfinished-looking hall called Lower Exhibit, containing partitioned-off hutches for minor programme items and, in the centre of the great bare floor, TAFF and DUFF sales tables which proved excellent places for meeting the two fans who happened to be manning them at the time. Let us not conceal the horrid truth: TAFF no longer arouses great interest at US Worldcons. I’d braced myself for the terrors of a scaled-up audience... let’s see, about 50 out of 600 at a TAFF event at the 1980 British Eastercon, meaning that with 6000 at Noreascon we could expect 500, dear God, how will we ever squeeze them all in here?

The audience numbered twenty-two (22). We could have held the event in a lift.

(This isn’t, by the way, a stricture on the Noreascon committee: though much derided, they were considerably more generous to fanfund delegates than demanded by any reflection of the enthusiasm of the membership at large. After that panel it was a relief to learn from ever-friendly Selina Lovett that hotel bills would indeed be covered by the convention, and to recall that a whole page had been devoted to each of TAFF and DUFF in the programme book.)

The panel itself woffled at great length – unmemorably, until someone brought up the old notion of weighted fanfund voting. The sending country’s votes should count more because those fans know more about the candidates; the receiving country’s votes should count more because those fans will have to put up with the cretin who’s actually elected.... Nobody really wanted to make a decision on that one, and sure enough nobody did.

Afterwards I found the book-dealers’ room, the size of two football pitches – the word, of course, wasn’t “book-dealer” but the sleazier-sounding “huckster”, and sure enough the few books on show were entirely lost in wads of Star Wars t-shirts, fantasy games, unicorn jewellery, Spock badges, plastic spaceships, Gandalf candles, stuffed tribbles, balsa-wood dragons, cuddly Alien dolls for the kiddies: all the things which (unlike books) make big money these days. After fighting past an endless Asimov signing queue which looped and coiled everywhere like the Midgard serpent, I managed to find several books hidden away in one corner, and duly bought some James Branch Cabell first editions as mementoes of the fading past. Here, too, Alexei Panshin sobbed at my feet, pitifully wailing “Cory needs a new pair of shoes,” until I condescended to accept a copy of SF in Dimension for a trifling sum.

At last we found Avedon Carol, a Momentous Experience. She glanced into Twll-Ddu, instantly located her letter and screamed “Oh God! You printed my snide remarks about Taral! Oh God! I’ll have to apologize!! He’s a really great artist, you know, it’s just that he’s all fucked up...” She leapt about alarmingly in an impressive, histrionic outburst of guilt, and subsequently apologized to Taral several times before he saw TD himself.

Hazel thought Avedon was really triffic; when she found Avedon was also Armenian, she wanted to take her home with us. I asked, but she said no.

Possibly as a result of Avedon’s difficulty in hearing me and vice-versa, the notes became confused at this point. Moshe Feder explained that he only has to sniff to tell Coke from Pepsi, as misreported in DNQ; Gary Farber said “Jacqueline Lichtenberg has been a pain over here for years”; Jim Barker’s Captive slideshow (the connexion is with The Prisoner, emphatically not The Capture) was performed to great hilarity though little attendance owing to the Sheraton’s refusal to allow the event’s existence to be announced on the internal PA; Paul Kincaid reappeared wearing a pretty badge from “Cranberry World”, which he swore was a museum of cranberries in Plymouth, Mass. (visions of eighteenth-dynasty mummified cranberries in individual sarcophagi); and under the inarguable leadership of Joyce, we were marched off for an evening meal.

The Bulkie was, astonishing, named after its version of the great American burger, which looked remarkably like all the other versions. Dim and crowded, The Bulkie had been overwhelmed by pillaging hordes from the con across the road, and gave us the opportunity for hour on hour of scintillant conversation, thus:

Moshe: “What did you order?”

Hazel and me: “Mumble mumble.”

Moshe: “Oh, that’s probably safe. You mustn’t ever order bagels in Boston, they’re not authentic here.”

(An hour passes.)

Rochelle Reynolds: “I CAN’T STAND IT ANY LONGER!” (She walks out.)

Lise Eisenberg: “AAAAARGH!” (She walks out.)

Me (after another interglacial period or so with no food in sight): “Suppose we protest by going on hunger strike.”

(Lise returns with a cheeseburger from elsewhere, and pointedly eats it. Rochelle returns with a couple of peculiar orange lumps.)

Rochelle Reynolds: “These are knishes! You’ve got to try them!”

Moshe: “No they’re not, they’re the wrong colour.”

Rochelle: “Why do you have to make everything a drag...?”

Moshe: “But you’re misrepresenting the knish to our guests!”

(Even longer pause. Entropy tends to a maximum; the universe cools; the stars begin to go out. Suddenly, in a flurry of motion, the food comes and we eat it and the bill comes out and Moshe is poring over piles of change to settle up....)

Rochelle: “Our American equivalent of Kevin Smith.”

Moshe looked hurt by that cruel blow, as well he might; British fans might think him more of an American equivalent of our Gerald “Boris” Lawrence (it’s the beard that does it*). I nearly called him Boris once or twice, but pity stayed my hand.

* Of course, as soon as Moshe read this, the bugger shaved it off in hope of forcing a rewrite. Ha.

Back at the Sheraton, Candice Massey (little knowing she would shortly be added to the improbably large list of Martin Hoare’s claimed conquests at this con) explained that though American to the core, she couldn’t get a US passport. I asked if she’d overthrown the government recently: “Worse than that! My parents were too cheap to buy me a birth certificate!” With awe we realized that we stood in the presence of a lady who, however precocious, was legally unborn.

Next came the great Meet the BNFs party, held in a foyer barely large enough to contain the names, let alone the fans. Here I and DUFF winner Keith Curtis combed the crowds in search of really famous fans as promised; we couldn’t even find Bruce Pelz. Slowly the hideous realization crept over us: “We have met the BNF,” I declared, “and he is us!” Keith and I swapped notes on fanfundery, and he incautiously revealed that – Australian delegate or no – his passport address is Cromer, Norfolk, UK. Suspicious, I call it. Mike Glicksohn appeared (as is his unfortunate habit) and we demanded his homage. “BNFs should wear funny hats,” he grumbled. “I don’t recognize any here.”

“There you are,” said a lady called Doris, grabbing Mike accusingly. “You left me saying you’d be right back.”

“Well um,” Mr. Glicksohn explained. “Here’s Hazel Langford, she doesn’t like Americans, ask her why.”

“Another fine mess you’ve got me into,” said the light of my life.

Famous Moshe ascended the stage – and through a small megaphone explained that BNF status was fleeting (“I don’t like that,” whispered a worried Keith) and that, possibly to make sure of this, all BNFs would now have gold stars attached to some portion of their anatomy. “And the garble BNFs I can see,” said the megaphone, “are Dave Garble the TAFF grackle and Keith Crackle garble winner.” Suddenly Keith and I were up on chairs to make a joint speech which we instantly agreed to forget and which nobody else had any chance to remember, the megaphone’s batteries plainly not having been changed since its former use by Paul Revere. Nevertheless our sheer force of personality caused someone in the audience to see the light and contribute all his worldly goods to the grackle fund. After shrewd TAFF/DUFF bargaining, the administrators pocketed 50¢ apiece and went looking for the beer, which had run out.

It certainly is a wonderful thing to be a fleeting BNF. Better not to reveal, in a family publication, where Moshe attached my coveted gold star.

With Friday evening’s parties, Noreascon took on the semblance of a real convention. There were good points: the SFWA suite, object of popular hatred at Seacon ’79, had been merged with the programme participants’ watering-hole and was happily free of security fetishists checking credentials and fingerprints. There were not-so-good things, like the way this and most parties were on the 22nd floor or thereabouts of one of the hotel’s two towers: since the towers weren’t linked above the fifth floor (improbable location of a swimming pool), and since the average TAFF emissary of 1980 had great difficulty remembering which tower he was supposed to be going up, this resulted in a great deal of extra travelling time. And there were bizarre scenes which stirred my British sense of wonder, like all those ice-filled bathtubs from which wild partygoers would snatch inexhaustible supplies of canned Coke, whilst a solitary six-pack of beer was denied fulfilment until some transatlantic sot arrived.

Party memories are mercifully few. Again I failed to communicate with Tom Disch. Me: (feeble joke). Disch: (baffled noises). Me: (louder feeble joke). Disch: (wary frown). Me: (very loud embarrassed rendition of feeble joke). Disch: (sudden distaste; turns away quickly to ask Roz about The Operation).

Then Chris Atkinson (of Malcolm Edwards fame) and Malcolm Edwards (of Chris Atkinson fame) united to tell me the one about Harlan. This was largely a monologue from Chris, to be treasured since her usual conversational approach involves cryptic remarks varied with alarming silences. “We met Harlan at the airport, and I was thinking, Gee, my Hero, and he was a tit. He was very rude and I told him not to be. We were staying with Charles Platt in New York and he had a lot of cockroaches. Now Charles wanted to pretend the car we’d hired was his own when we picked up Harlan, but first he went back to the wrong car at the airport, and halfway home I said the wrong thing about our car, and Harlan said ‘This isn’t your car then, Charles?’

“So that,” she concluded obscurely, “deflated Harlan Ellison.”

After I’d thought about this story, and carefully jotted it down, and thought about it some more, I began to worry that my brain was not working as well as it should. It seemed a good time to wander off to bed, after an evening (and a few hours of morning) which had been good fannish fun – as proven by the extreme illegibility of all my notes.

As I left, a few SFWA stalwarts (Diane Duane is a name which vaguely springs to mind) were standing at the door of the suite, feebly calling “Closing in five minutes! Closing in five minutes!” This proved anew that SF authors are indeed lousy prophets: the same weak chant had been audible when I wandered in, two hours before.

July 1981

“That’s it? You’re stopping the chapter here, without getting further than Friday night?”

“Early Saturday morning. You don’t read these immortal words carefully enough. This is Structure, this is. It’s what we hacks call a natural break.”

“Very suspenseful. Fandom waits agog to find out whether you were mugged as you tottered through the dark streets to the Copley Plaza....”

“Well, as a matter of fact – no, no, let’s not destroy the drama and tension.”

From Pole to Pole

Saturday 30 August 1980

In strange countries one should glut oneself to the full on strange new experiences. With this in mind, we started the day by breakfasting with Martin Hoare – someone I never usually see before opening time. He welcomed us with many a heartfelt groan, saying “Aren’t... hangovers... terrible...” but shortly cheered up enough to enumerate another half-dozen or so delightful American ladies who’d fallen victim to his seductive charms. I wondered if that famous gastric bulge made it easier for him to pass as a native and insinuate his way into their bosoms.

Hazel, meanwhile, had ordered tea and was studying the result. Her teabag had an unwell look; it was feebly drowning in a cup of lukewarm milk-and-water, a fluid which stayed resolutely off-grey despite all attempts to put the teabag out of its misery with a spoon. At last Hazel accepted defeat and tried a sip. “It’s amazing how they get it to taste of nothing at all.”

“US technology brings you germ-free tea,” I suggested, still happily assaulting a plate piled with what, at home, would have been about two and a half “full English breakfasts”. But the mention of liquids had started a train of thought in Martin’s mind. Moving in response to some ancestral rhythm, he consulted his watch. It was 9.42 in the morning. “Back home,” he said with emotion, “the pubs have just closed!”

“What I need to do is make my mark on US fans,” I said. “No, not like with Joseph. To bring them some of Britfandom’s eternal truths. I wonder...”

“They don’t know how to enjoy themselves over here,” Martin said vindictively. “What they need is more hangovers.”

Later I sat with Hazel in the Sheraton foyer, still musing on how to make some uniquely British impression on the teeming millions all around. A vague idea was stirring, brought on by famous fanartist Marc Schirmeister. (Who’d explained to me that the Nicholls Encyclopaedia of SF was a terrible, lousy book, because it was all opinionated. It is the duty of such a work to give the true facts – none of those repulsive opinions which often go so far as to hint that certain authors may not be all that good.) It was another of those fannish echoes which kept haunting me like the queasy spectre of a Novacon banquet: something in Schirm’s tone of voice, something in the pattern of his hair and beard, was strangely reminiscent of D. West. Even after four days of Noreascon, I never worked out how to break this to him gently.

The train of thought that started with D. West had barely escaped the station when the communication cord was pulled: my eye was caught by a seductive, apple-green mini-dress lowering itself onto a seat just in front of us. The contents, even viewed from behind, could be none other than Taral. Silently I searched my bag for a Twll-Ddu 18 (cover by some chap called... well well, what a coincidence), and with infinite stealth manoeuvred it all the way round his sylphlike form. There came the noise of a tiny – oops – the tiny noise of a jaw dropping. Majestically, Taral swung round, revealing himself to look so like his self-portraits that the absence of pointy ears was disconcerting. Inconspicuously, at the same time, Victoria Vayne turned from where she’d been effacing herself next to him, and contrived to look almost as realistic as Taral’s drawings of her – right down to the habitual look of alarm. Some similar recognition process, with added elements of clairvoyance and sheer guesswork, must have been going on in Taral’s mind: he presently said, “Oh, I’d have recognized you from Jim Barker’s cartoons.” Plainly he and Stu Shiffman, who’d made the same ludicrous claim, were in a conspiracy together.

In the chat that followed, Victoria continued to look alarmed while Taral told me more than I wished to know about Dotti Stefl, possibly famous infant FAAn nominee.

“Well, we have infant fans too,” I observed. “We have practically nothing else. These days, any Brit over twenty is an old fan and tired – we all sit around waiting for the dynamic infant talent to start doing something.”

Taral said, approximately, “Yes, but do your infant fans have doting mothers who by nameless means organize fanzine contributions for them and then produce the fanzine for them and subsequently wheedle scores of misguided friends into voting for the rotten results?”

“Ah,” I said noncommittally. “It’s about time for that TAFF auction,” I added decisively.

The TAFF/DUFF auction proved to be another oasis of non-hugeness in Noreascon – a far cry from Britain’s massively commercialized events where hundreds of people are gulled by unscrupulous sharks and Rog Peyton. There was no such corruption here. There was no such audience. Trapped behind a trestle table (which, overcome by the glory of the occasion, kept trying to prostrate itself), I smiled winningly at a restless gathering of 25 while people like Terry Hughes and Joyce Scrivner rushed out to play at press-gangs.

The table was covered with arcana, mostly minor: I discovered some Canadian dollar bills and personalized one with a suitably imperial signature. (“With love – Liz”). “Maybe we could auction something?” I said as the audience evaporated.

“You want to keep the good stuff until the crowd’s bigger,” Rusty Hevelin explained, sweeping everything into a pile of Good Stuff. He studied the Canadian dollar thoughtfully. “I got $20 for one of these at Kansas City.” The crowd continued to get smaller, but was reinforced as the press-gang drove in a new contingent. We settled down to auction TAFF/DUFF goodies to a replenished audience of, actually, 25. Instantly Joyce began the loathsome practice of conditional bidding (as when Number of the Beastly comes up for auction here – “20p if you tear it up!” “25p if he eats it!” “27½p if he feeds it to the hotel manager!!” “28p if he grinds it up and gives it to the hotel manager as an enema!!!” Etcetera). The lot in question was a set of brightly coloured kiddies’ spaceman transfers – decals, as they decadently call them there – “75¢ if Dave Langford takes them home and sticks them on Joe Nicholas!”

Thus British traditions were upheld. I believe some kind of consummation took place at Novacon.

One highlight was the selling of Stu’s hierophantic pole, a gold-painted cardboard prong slightly taller than me, which had played a sinister part in certain Roscoe ceremonies I’d contrived to miss, and which was now offered as a handyman’s implement with 1001 uses about the garden or bedroom. This reminded me of something: D. West... pole... Suddenly it was my duty to auction a second cassette of the New Astral Leauge Album (the first was conveyed as a Charnockian gift to Terry Hughes, who merrily mentioned that he didn’t own a player). “Side 1: The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Astral Leauge...” Instant frenzy, with Mike Glicksohn bidding frantically against all comers, against nearby chairs, against himself. After he’d been permitted to part with $10 for this “very badly recorded” (John Harvey, Melody Maker) item, we frenetically flogged everything moveable: Keith Curtis was restrained with difficulty from selling the trestle table, the creaky partitions, the floor and the audience, while I realized vast sums for an Institute of Professional Civil Servants card and a (complimentary) Omni ticket to see Arthur C. Clarke hitch his reputation to a sky elevator in London.

(This last was a mistake. The ticket fell into the hands of Robin Johnson, who later described how he’d met this strange redhaired person from Omni, and how this person had spied the ticket protruding from his pocket in an envelope with “Dave Langford” on it, and how he or she had been most hurt that anyone should have been forced to pay money for it... Oh, the drinks I had to buy Andie Oppenheimer when I got home.)

The auction over and my pointless notion for Making An Impression now fully formed, Hazel and I stole away: through the glass-walled shopping centre outside the Sheraton, down an escalator thick with roller-skate freaks who seemed to trundle up and down all day for the sheer joy and inconvenience of it, out into Boston’s broad, clean and generally un-NewYorklike streets, searching for a suitably equipped hardware shop, no, store....

Sunday 24 May 1981

“Now if I win TAFF,” said Gregory, “I won’t fuck around in the SFWA room all the time the way you did. Bloody hell. I’d have an exhibition, a display of British fandom to tell all those cretins what they’re missing – tell them how much better fandom is over here...”

“Yes But,” I mumbled. And after a bit: “Yes, but they’d never see it; display space cost money at Noreascon anyway, expect possibly in the fan room, and no one ever seemed to find the fan room. I certainly didn’t.”

This being the Greg and Linda Pickersgill Spring Bank Holiday Piss-up, the actual conversation was less to the point, and the faculty of memory completely blunted. To continue the reconstruction:

“Bloody hell,” said Greg, “I’d take it out into the corridors, I’d have this display ready to set up anywhere and I’d rub their noses in it, not arse around the way you did.”

Unfortunately we were denied the chance to see how Greg’s supreme tact and diplomacy would have conveyed the wonders of British fandom to the heathen... but that, Best Beloved, is another story.

Saturday 30 August 1980, continued

The five-foot broom handle cost $2.79, which of course meant I had to pay $2.93, the local equivalent of VAT (Massachusetts Sales Tax) being invariably kept as a surprise rather than included in the price tag. Now at last I was ready to answer certain queries of Avedon’s about the Astral Leauge; and I suspected I had a conversation piece more arresting than any mere display. Almost too arresting, I thought as I avoided the eye of a vast and flabby US Cop laden with bazookas, howitzers and tactical nuclear weaponry.

“Feel pretty damn silly carrying this,” I muttered in a backsliding way.

“You’ve been silly for years,” said the ever-reassuring Hazel as we plunged back again into the surging, anonymous crowds of Noreascon.

Duty called again, this time taking on the repellent form of a panel titled “The Alien Viewpoint: North American Fandom from an Overseas Perspective – How We Look to Them”. Vaguely resentful of being “them” – didn’t they know yet that they were “them”? – I counted the audience while Pascal Thomas was giving the history of French fandom since Agincourt (or possibly Keith Curtis was describing Aussie fandom since the first GUFF trips to Botanybaycon). By a weird and fascinating coincidence, there was precisely one audience member for each word of the event’s title: take that, Koestler! Familiar questions came up; I recall being asked whether fans in my strange alien land conformed to the stereotype of being social misfits, and tediously suggesting that this, though true, was not so much a cause of entering fandom as an effect. When I mention that this was the wittiest remark of the session, you’ll appreciate that the sparkling repartee had gone a bit flat – probably since there were next to no Americans present to writhe (as intended) at the searing home truths from abroad.

Afterwards I was waylaid in the great bare Lower Exhibit Hall by unexpectedly huge Mass. fan Ron Salomon – whose letters, so often featured in the WAHF column of Twll-Ddu, had somehow conveyed the impression of greater slimness. He asked about the broomstick – the Astral Pole – I was almost nonchalantly carrying, and I told him all, fearful lest he call me a cretin. Instead he presented me with a practically genuine Boston Red Sox helmet he’d secreted about his person, and insisted on photographing me with this and the pole appropriately disposed. Only later did I wonder whether his insistence on this picture might have been a subtle way of indicating that I was a cretin.

But the venture into poleish jokes was rather a success. People would ask about it, and I would explain the Astral Leauge Initiation – you know, the one where you involve yourself with the pole in a manner not convenient to describe, emerging either with aplomb and Astral Mastery or with a hernia. (If you emerge with a broken pole you are Rob Holdstock, a contingency which did not arise at Noreascon.) “It’s impossible!” I remember the people in the Ops room saying after my luridly graphic description of the stresses involved. “It’s impossible!” they said again after I’d demonstrated. “OK, I’ll try it...” said all too many incautious fans. From this ordeal one could continue painlessly with such intriguing snippets as the fact that the Leauge was founded in the US bicentennial year; one could teach them devotional hymns of that vintage (“When dinosaurs did rule the earth/The Leauge was yet to be –/ But now we stretch from pole to pole/In Cosmic Harmoneee!”), and imperceptibly digress into a series of gripping Britfannish anecdotes. Best of all, the audience was a captive one, either struggling to extricate itself from the pole’s embraces, or – after failing, or succeeding – simply lying helpless.

If only I knew what Schadenfreude meant.

In this manner I fell into conversation with countless strangers (something normally as inviting as falling into a cesspit) and imparted the truths of our fandom. Admittedly some fans could not, as they say, bear very much reality: after her semi-abortive assault on the pole, six-foot-six D. Potter towered creakily over me and pleaded guilty but arthritic. Avedon was next to try, her failure being characteristically many times more spectacular than most successes (Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, etc). When the concussed bystanders had been removed, she offered to try again at some more convenient time and place such as 5am on Monday morning under a table in the SFWA suite. Momentarily I doubted her sincerity.

Internal pangs were felt, not all of them caused by astral manifestations, and we allowed Joyce to lead us and the Bushyagers and Jon Stopa off for food – Hazel first extracting a promise that Joyce would restrain herself from coaxing tardy waiters (as on Friday night) in tones calculated to wring cries of protest from the occupants of passing Concordes. Luckily tonight’s noshery (“Hillary’s”) boasted paper napkins, plates, waiters, food and other luxuries we’d had trouble finding on the night before: beguiled by this relative poshness, I ordered a dish whose menu description was a veritable prose poem, a feast of words, a half-page of culinary pornography which set me dribbling uncontrollably.

It turned out to be a hamburger.

The subject of writers’ workshops somehow came up (the hamburger merely threatened to): Joyce mentioned with a capacious shudder that she’d done time at Clarion, and, not knowing she’d had this writing career, I asked about the effect on her writing career.

“Horrible!”

“I suppose Harlan shouted at you and demoralized you utterly,” I said at random, mouth full of burger-by-any-other-name.

Linda: “That’s just what happened!”

Joyce: “He took an intense dislike to me and spent half an hour telling me how useless I was right in the middle of everyone.” She shuddered again, and offered Hazel a taste from her plate. There was a pause. Then a muffled consultation. Then Hazel wailed: “I’ve just eaten a scallop! I thought Joyce said a shallot! I’ve just eaten a small, rubbery sea creature –” Words cannot express the loathing in her tones.

I too was eating around, or whatever is the correct analogy to sleeping around, Linda having hurled me many a scrap from her plate. Only the tiny, crimson heart of her six-inch cubical steak seemed to appeal: in due course I gobbled all the rest – all of it that was actually cooked. Gratefully I told Linda she’d saved me from disappointment by letting me nibble her alms. This appeared to worry her vaguely.

Onward, to the AntiMasquerade party – whose humane purpose and timing should be sufficiently obvious. Someone called Robert Whitaker, mysteriously divining that I like R.A. Lafferty, drew me aside and in a low monotone imparted the plots of all Lafferty’s unpublished works – including one said to be unpublishable, 56 characters being introduced and briefly biographized before chapter 2. Just like a TAFF report, really.... By now the uproar was such that Avedon, tiring of my witty ripostes of “What?” to her profound comments such as “What?”, decided to teach me sign language. Fingertips of vertical right hand drop to touch horizontal left hand: “Stand.” The same, only upside-down: “Understand.” The same as that, but this time the fingertips fail to connect: “Misunderstand.” I was struggling to look convinced by this when I noticed the very weird Gil Gaier making signs of his own at me, from across the room. So uncontrollable were his giggles that, although he refused to translate, I deduced these signs to be secretly disgusting.

“Gaier doesn’t need sign language to be disgusting,” our Lafferty expert reminded us.

“Here’s a good one,” said Avedon exuberantly, and moved a hand horizontally in front of her eyes as though wiping her contact lenses with its edge. “Pasteurize.”

I fled screaming.

At a gathering of unfamous-looking folk – said to be George R.R. Martin’s birthday party – we found Chris Priest, who recoiled slightly and asked of the world at large, “I travelled 3000 miles to meet this man?” Wriggling further into the roomful of sardine impersonators, I recognized Alex Eisenstein: before getting too close I cautiously enquired whether he’d seen my Foundation review of his wife.

“No, no, what did you say about her?”

“Nice things,” I assured him, relaxing slightly. “Mind you, if I see Charles L. Grant I’m going to hide under the table...”

“Quick – behind you!”

Spinning round in alarm, I narrowly escaped being crushed beneath hugely named George R.R. Martin and hugely bodied Gardner Dozois, who paused to induct me into the Hugo Losers’ Club. How sad that within 24 hours of this act of kindness, George would again be summarily ejected from the club. Twice.

Hazel expressed a wish to wrestle in private with the continuing malignancy of her small rubbery sea creature: I trailed along as escort. In the crowded lift, packed with gregarious folk who playfully brandished their swords, Hazel turned and took a sudden, absorbed interest in the wall. “What’s the matter?” I whispered. “Are you going to be sick?” Little muffled noises were the only reply. After several floors of entrances and exits (during which the sword-wielders were gradually replaced by equally hilarious gun-pointers) she emerged ashen-faced from her shell. “That was Harlan Ellison.”

This explained a lot. Hazel has never forgiven HE for being so ungracious about the quid pro quo that night he tweaked her nose. But the small and loud one has his virtues, for he’d listened with fascination to Paul Kincaid’s lurid account of the Jacqueline Lichtenberg Appreciation Society, and allowed that it was “doing a good job”.

Returning after a little while (still absent-mindedly clutching the now-famous pole, which gave added confidence in the darker streets), I stumbled through endless degenerate scenes. Imagine a con report by Peter Nicholls out of Dante... with Joyce implausibly cast in the role of Virgil. It started in the placid Limbo of a Clarion party, where pretentious young authors were summarily irrigated by Damon Knight’s squirt gun. Knight looked awesomely patriarchal with his endless grey hair and beard, like a major prophet who’d taken advantage of the early-retirement scheme; having instructed me that a TAFF delegate was much more enviable than a Worldcon GoH, he confided an unlikely number of Stories About Harlan – indicating that in my report I was to attribute the cleaner ones to Kate Wilhelm. Luckily for fandom, I’d never learnt shorthand and those anecdotes are safe in Limbo... Kate Wilhelm herself was also present, looking like a favourite aunt but possessed of a mean touch with the squirt-gun. She won my heart by stating – after being fearsomely warned against my uncouth foreign mumbles – that she could understand me perfectly. Good for her. I couldn’t... A lovely (it says here) lady called Jan Miele grabbed the Langford notebook and inscribed ethnic phrases suitable for adding local colour to my account of Noreascon, while her agent hovered fearfully behind and muttered “10%! 10%!” I hope the local colour wasn’t meant too personally: ain’t got sense to pound sand into a rat hole... suck sour owl shit!... anybody’d do that’d eat shit, run rabbits and bark at the moon... mind like a steel trap rusted shut. H’mmm.

I clamoured for fiercer pleasures, and Joyce led me off through infernal circles of stolen metaphor. Hugest of all was the circle of the Coke-drinkers, cursed for their folly with unending flatulence. Daemonic figures capered along the corridors, shrieking “Chicago’s won the 82 bid but it’s DNQ for now!!!”

“This has been willed where what is willed must be,” Joyce may or may not have said.

A door with a Davis Publications card beckoned, and for a moment I imagined a beery oasis funded by the limitless profits of IASFM. Small hope. This was the circle where those who have sold their souls to George Scithers must suffer the eternal tedium of his voice. The room was darkened and beerless, with GS enthroned in one corner; pressing themselves against the far wall yet helpless to flee, the damned ones writhed at his cruel pontifications on “the... publishing... policy... of... Isaac... Asimov’s... Science... Fic... tion...”

Joyce inveigled me into the next room, occupied by a furtive meeting of the Cult, that apa whose membership is limited for no apparent reason to 13. Here was the hell of ultimate elitism, its members doomed to eternal wrangling over the Cult’s abysmal code of regulations; before my brain seized up altogether I crept away.

It was only a few floors down to the miserable Circle of the Exhibitionists, where fugitives from the earlier Masquerade struggled ineptly to enjoy themselves whilst still entangled in exotic costumes. Everywhere you looked there were flocks of Princess Leias, heaped in white drifts like the output of a faulty xerox and straining to follow conversation through their hairy earmuffs. Sandra Miesel was in a particularly bad way, having converted herself into a slightly kinky fire elemental by such expedients as gold fishnet stockings insufficiently adapted to be worn on the arms. Diabolically I enticed her webbed fingers with a copy of Twll-Ddu; she could barely hold it, and claimed (despite the suggestions of interested onlookers) that she had nowhere to put it. Debauched fans like Joni Stopa and Alyson Abramowitz offered their voluptuous kisses if only they too might have copies of Twll-Ddu: negotiations were scarcely under way when in a flash of lightning Joyce reappeared to save me from myself, or possibly from Alyson. (Joyce had this unflagging crusade to protect poor helpless Britons from people she suspected to be boring... but I think the various hatchets may have been buried now.)

“This has been willed,” she may or may not have explained, “where what is willed must be.”

We made our way down, through further circles of sometimes even drunken partying, with pauses for the occasional Astral Initiation. By now my throat was afire with the gobs of flaming magma which one Texan party pressed upon innocents, in the delusive guise of chili. (Devilish good, mind you.) An oddly-cloaked black fan burst out at us suddenly and fell over, wailing “Oh God, take me home!” Plainly he was feeling excessively damned, and I tried connecting him to my bottle of Bell’s whisky. Instantly revitalized, he sat up (revealing the name Newton Ewell on his badge) and talked for forty minutes about black fandom and the decay of US fannishness into cretinousness and film animation and The War of the Worlds and... Impressed by this further proof of our Harry’s godlike potency, I said goodbye with what grace I could manage from the floor as Joyce dragged me away by one leg. Further down yet: and here were Eli Cohen and Jane Hawkins, toiling along in (as Joseph would say) sisyphean manner with an enormous crate of cans.

“Where’s the party?” Joyce and I asked eagerly. “Where’re you taking the beer?”

“This isn’t beer, it’s 7-Up.”

We made an excuse and left. Yes, definitely this was hell.... On the ground floor there were numberless fans scattered hither and thither, inert, as though frozen in that final circle of ice: it looked like the end of Hamlet, as produced by Cecil B. DeMille. And at the heart of it all should have been the Evil One himself, yea, even Peter Nicholls, clutching and nibbling (lollipop-fashion) the body of some specially irredeemable fannish personage. At the heart of it all, as it turned out, we found Jim Barker. He proceeded to deal appropriately with the body of Joyce. I left them to it, remarking “8.6 even from the Russian judge!” as I hefted the Astral Pole and moved away.

“I’ve got a lot of con scandal I was going to tell you,” came Jim’s bitter but muffled voice. “And now I won’t.”

This may explain why – just like everyone else – I’ve failed to record the real dirt about Saturday night at Noreascon. Even the swarms of friends-for-life I made that night have faded from memory like the BSFA mailings of yesteryear. All the same, it was hellish good fun.

The Day of the Jackpot

8 December 1981

This is ridiculous, you know. It’s more than fifteen months since Sunday at Noreascon; most of the relevant brain cells have died or gone into hiding. Could this Boston trip have been real? Today I woke up to a white world, the first unexpected snowfall of the English winter, and a note from early-rising Hazel saying I DON’T BELIEVE IT EITHER. There seems no way to connect with a notebook page whose first entries are about the buzzing heat in Boston and the fact that flies kept landing on my toes. Still... do we not have cosmic minds?

Sunday 31 August 1980

“Flies keep landing on my toes,” I said, and wriggled those bits of toe that stuck out of my sandals. Hazel looked away, preferring even a Boston drugstore’s display of electric vibrators (“super satisfaction for all parts of the body”) to the sight of the toes she had promised to love and cherish. She has this theory that they are oversized and malformed; but Boston’s flies seemed happy enough with their steaming bulk. We moved down the street, by now so almost accustomed to the USA that a radio warning of imminent 96° temperatures provoked no more than mild screams. Not even pausing to worry about a slot-machine advertising US STAMPS IN SANITARY FOLDERS (perhaps the 13¢ worth of folder is needed to keep the flies from the gum), we penetrated the Noreascon hotel and allowed our British reserve and likewise our brains to be eroded by the Aussiecon bidding film Antifan Strikes Back. The image of someone reeling from a Macdonalds in the grip of Alien’s face-hugger is not one to be forgotten, even after fifteen months of trying.

That Sunday morning at Noreascon was quiet. “Too quiet... I don’t like it,” I said to Hazel with characteristic originality.

“Ahh... the drums... the flies,” she responded, causing me to flash a quick glance at my toes. All clear. The flies were resting in preparation for a later assault – and so was fandom, with the appalling pyrotechnics of the Hugo ceremony approaching at a remorseless rate of sixty seconds per minute. In the relative calm I met the celebrated fan Ed Meskys: he murmured something to me, and I nodded encouragingly to him. Nobody had told him I was deaf. Nobody had told me he was blind. He murmured something else as I waved goodbye, and another fannish meeting of minds was over.

More people drifted through the foyers. I admired – at as close range as I could manage – a badge on the bosom of a moderately ravishing young lady who travelled under the name Starr Fyre: the badge read I AM NOT A MAN! I AM A FREE NUMBER! This view was blocked by the sudden appearance of Mike Glyer, who towered high over me and to some considerable way to either side of me. I’d been reading his convention newsletter Lobster Tales, specifically an item about the two tons of ice imported to chill Coke and (occasionally) other things on Saturday night; it was the work of mere minutes to assemble a lightning quip contrasting this with approximately eleven tons of beer consumed at the far smaller 1979 British Worldcon, but before I’d adjusted the semicolons Mike was far away and working on the next newsletter but three. Instead we found Joyce Scrivner, who does not tower high over me but has talents in other directions: “Linda Bushyager went to this party once,” she told me, “a party where John Norman was, because she wanted to look at his wife’s back. And do you know, all the other women were in low-cut evening dress but John Norman’s wife was wearing this outfit with a high collar and long sleeves....”

From these flagellatory thoughts it was a natural step to the agonies of the Astral Leauge Initiation. Joyce had begun to enjoy watching people submit themselves to the ritual pole rather as spaghetti submits to a fork; she hurried me downstairs to put Carey Handfield to the question. Carey was manning the fannish tables which lay on the naked face of the Lower Exhibit hall like some lonely Foreign Legion outpost amid the encircling Sahara. Tears filled his eyes at the sight of human features after so long in isolation; he announced his readiness to pit himself against any mere pole provided he was told what to do... and perhaps, for the benefit of readers as yet unenlightened by missionaries of the all-potent Astral Leauge, I should pause to explain the task required of neophytes (the technical term is “suckers”).

Take a five-foot broom-pole. Take several drinks. Stand. Hold the pole horizontally before you, in both hands – hands a couple of feet apart, palms up, fingers curled round pole. The hands may optionally slide along the pole, but the grip must not alter throughout the ceremony. Lower the still-horizontal pole and step first with one foot and then with the other over the section of pole between your hands. The pole is now behind you: maintaining the grip, bring it back over your head until you are again holding it horizontally before you (though with uncomfortably twisted wrists, as you will find). This was the easy part. Now raise your right leg – “left” and “right” may be exchanged throughout the following if desired – and manoeuvre the right foot around the right-hand side of your right arm and back over the pole towards you. You should now feel less than comfortable. It only remains to duck your head under the pole and – still without releasing your deathlike grip on it – continue the motion so that your torso follows your head, and your whole right leg follows your right foot, through the hoop defined by arms and pole. In the penultimate position you find yourself standing shakily with the still-gripped pole passing between your legs. A backwards step with the left leg over the pole returns you to square one in a glow of triumph, fulfilment and Astral Mastery. Have another drink and spend four days in traction.

The most elementary Visualization of the Cosmic All reveals that the sticking-place of all this comes in the antepenultimate motion, as pole and right knee jam firmly against one another and further progress seems unwise, not to say impossible. Carey showed the relentless driving force that had made him chairman of the Australia in 83 Worldcon Bid (Failed), and crashed through the preliminaries with contemptuous ease. Then, screwing his courage to the sticking-place, he stuck. Great veins bulged out all over him, and from his spine came a noise as of distant Rice Krispies.

“Let me give you a push,” said Joyce with solicitous giggles, approaching the puce and straining form while your narrator stealthily moved backwards. “It just needs a push here –”

The effect was rather as though she’d taken a flying kick at a trembler fuse. Carey’s fingers gave way; the pent-up energy of his pose lashed out in a multigravity thrust which brought the pole close to escape velocity. It failed to escape, Joyce having accurately blocked the launch window with her stomach; before you could say “Action and reaction are equal and opposite, and act on different bodies,” she had sat down with a thoughtful expression.

“You didn’t actually pass the test, Carey,” I managed to say above the mingled groans.

By this time Hazel had broken into groans of her own: “Heat,” she said feebly, and “Smoke,” and “People.” Again we went separate ways, she searching for cool and quiet in our hotel and I for free booze in the SFWA suite. Some fans never realized that Hazel was at that worldcon; typically she’d be lying down in our room while I lay with equal aplomb on the floor of some convenient party.

During my pre-floor period in the SFWA room I struggled to collect huge names to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing trip report; once again I had to make do with Barry Malzberg.

“Hello, Barry Malzberg,” I said brightly to the moaning figure of my hero.

“Ohhhhhh,” he told me, looking up with the air of a Spanish Inquisition client deciding that after all he had preferred the thumbscrews to the rack.

“I was reading your first novel last month and –”

“Oh God! No! Not my first one! No! No!”

“Er... Screen?”

“Ohhh. No, that was my ninth. I can just about... live with that one.” He slumped in his chair, apparently comparing the joys of chatting to me with those of the rack. I slipped away before he could reach an unflattering verdict.

Alexis Gilliland sat at a table looking distinguished and drawing a cartoon every 35 seconds. Next to him, Dolly Gilliland managed not to blench when reminded that Avedon had invited the Langfords to stay in Washington for as long as they liked and to enjoy the full hospitality of the Gilliland home. Nearly famous author Connie Willis explained how the notoriety of her exclusion from the John W. Campbell “new writer” award was doing her career no end of good. “I published this one story ten years ago and I’m sure they disqualified me because it was so bad, I mean it was really awful, it makes me shudder just to think of it...” F&SF person Anne Jordan scattered free copies of the October issue, cover story by Britain’s own Ian Watson....

“I know Ian Watson,” I said ingratiatingly. “I even touched him once.”

Anne J. was unmoved; again I reminded myself that editors and publishers have often met several authors and become disenchanted.

“Editors are just people who cannot write,” she told the unsurprised room.

Onward, to a talk by Taral on fan art: but foolishly I still carried the fatal pole, and everything was delayed while Moshe Feder failed, twice. Taral himself then mastered the pole by a series of incredible writhings, while all present shaded their eyes against flashes of fluorescent red underpants from beneath that apple-green kilt.

“I have rubber limbs,” he said, proudly unknotting himself. Avedon had gone pale, and repeated that she was only limber and lissom at certain phases of the moon, and couldn’t possibly attempt this contortion before five in the morning.

I even remember some of Taral’s slides, for the usual self-centred reasons. Up went an Alicia Austin drawing (circa 1967), and I muttered “Bloody hell, it’s a Beardsley pastiche.” Up went a drawing from Salome (circa 1894), and Taral dropped the name of Aubrey Beardsley on uncomprehending fannish heads, and I committed flagrant acts of autobackpatting for hours after.

To fortify myself for the horrors of the Hugo ceremony, I accompanied Taral (and Victoria Vayne, and Marc Schirmeister) to a nearby Chinese Spaghetti House renowned for such delights as Ravioli Won Ton. Not much fortification was achieved, since the other 5751 convention members – Sunday afternoon’s count – were also trying to eat before Hugo time. Over the next hour the queue ahead of us dwindled to 5730 or so; the two cartoonists had covered all the available paper with doodles of great clinical interest (a drawing of a famine is very like the drawing of a muchness) and our hopes of sweet and sour lasagna had demolished the third law of thermodynamics as they plunged below absolute zero. Eyes averted from the delicious plates of tagliatelle Szechuan on other tables, ears popped against the muffled click of spaghetti-swathed chopsticks, the fannish party shuffled out into the night.

On the street, the meeting was called to order. The British Delegate observed that the Hugo ceremony was starting in mere seconds, and that although he did not doubt it to be a load of cobblers he nevertheless felt it his duty to attend one item on the main programme. He had his credibility to think of, he added unconvincingly. The Chairman (Taral) expressed his opinion of the Hugos, adding that he would swap the whole lot for a decent meal. The British Delegate proposed a compromise solution making use of natural resources such as the high-speed pizza shop visible nearby. The Lady Member from Toronto then took the floor and described in some detail all the frightful things which would happen to her delicate metabolism should she even set foot inside the junk-food emporium alluded to. The motion was put that the meeting should disperse in an orderly fashion, and the British Delegate found himself standing alone outside the pizza place.

The impression left by the few confused minutes I spent inside was of Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” (not featured in the Taral Slide Show) with monstrous pizzas substituting for the squalid gin bottles. No plates. No cutlery. Bloated for a dollar, ulcerated for two dollars. Still chewing carbonized crusts and wiping greasy fingers on my handkerchief, I sprinted down the aisle of the Hynes auditorium to enjoy the wondrous ceremony for which I had sacrificed so much.

There I sat down – and suddenly, almost before I knew what was happening, nothing happened. Things continued not to happen for some while; there was time to gaze around at the ranks on ranks of sweaty bodies filling the vast hall and threatening to bring the almost-as-vast balconies crashing down. Close by was the British contingent: Jim Barker representing Bob Shaw, Malcolm Edwards and Chris Atkinson representing Peter “Encyclopaedia” Nicholls, and Chris Priest representing Chris Priest. We agreed to be unstinting in our applause for all the British items nominated, no matter what deafening silences filled the rest of the hall.

From the distance comes the sound of a two-note fanfare, and from close at hand the sound of a grotty pizza rumbling in the aching void of D. Langford. Huge cheers as toastmaster Robert Silverberg bounds into view. Further fanfares. I strain to hear Silverberg’s brief introduction to the ceremony, which goes on for forty-eight minutes. (While I strain to hear, Gordon Dickson strains to see: he only has his reading glasses and is employing Jim Barker as seeing-eye fan.) Silverberg quips meriting a brief and appreciative smile, or groan, are met with colossal torrents of applause which shake the building. Harlan Ellison leaps for no apparent reason onto the stage. Even vaster cheers! Silverberg makes his Ellison circumcision joke: Boston trembles at the ovation, and far across America the San Andreas Fault slips a few more inches. Howls of feedback from the PA system. Each mention of a famous name provokes yet huger cheering. There is even a mighty burst of applause at the announcement that George Pal is dead.

At last, after what seems like forty-eight minutes, the presentations begin. Gleaming Hugos stand neatly lined up on the table... but their time is not yet. Convention chairman Leslie Turek receives bound copies of all the Noreascon literature. George O. Smith receives the black spot in the form of the First Fandom Award, uttering loud cries of “It’s about time!” An ill-looking Lou Tabakow collects the Big Heart Award... all this in far more time than it takes to tell, since the routine is for a celebrity to pace portentously onstage, and be applauded, and be introduced by Silverberg, and be applauded some more, and to make a little speech before pulling the winning name in slow motion from its envelope. Naturally all the nominees’ names must be read out too when it comes to the Hugos, but these preliminary awards are apparently not the sort which have nominees.

“The Pat Terry Award for Humour in Science Fiction...” (What the devil is the Pat Terry Award for Humour in Science Fiction?) “...goes to The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy!” Chris Priest, as Ranking British Name, is urged forward to accept the thing, and there is a chill silence while the billions of SFWA members he has alienated memorize his face. What next? “The Gandalf Award,” Silverberg reads, not struggling too hard to conceal his distaste, “is under the, ah, aegis of Lin Carter...” There is no Lin Carter. Silence swells to fill the fall, broken only by what sounds like giggling from the British contingent. On, hastily, to the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer... “Barry Longyear!” Chris’s knuckles whiten; a low moan comes from Malcolm; your reporter emits a faint noise which he later claims to have been an after-effect of the pizza.

At last, the Hugos. Good old Alexis Gilliland picks up the fanartist award, and reads out the slips from Chinese fortune cookies which (he asserts) infallibly predicted his success. Good old Bob Shaw wins as fanwriter; failed nominee Langford murmurs “The weed of fanwriting bears bitter fruit,” and stifles his cries of rage and envy as Jim grabs the trophy. Suddenly, as if by magic, the Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy Award appears and its winner is named as Ray Bradbury. The British bloc fancies the uncharitable theory that when the reasonably Grand masters are exhausted, this award will by design go to Not-so-Grand masters such as its founder, Lin Carter.

Locus wins as best professional fanzine, Michael Whelan as professional artist, Alien as best convention banquet. Tension mounts in a certain quarter of the audience. Best nonfiction is indeed the Peter Nicholls Encyclopaedia of SF. Huge cheers from the British contingent; pause while Malcolm delivers the longest speech of acceptance so far, dwelling lovingly and interminably on the revised editions which this accolade may make possible. Best editor: George Scithers of Asimov’s Skiffy Mag. Hoots and groans from the British contingent. The short story Hugo is presented by Harlan Ellison, who is swift to observe that “The short story, as we all know, is the single most difficult category of writing.” George R.R. Martin wins with “The Way of Cross and Dragon”, and again a few minutes later with his novelette “Sandkings”.

Chris smiles bravely as his own novelette “Palely Loitering” bites the dust, and mutters something which sounds remarkably like “Better than losing to bloody John Varley.”

Really huge names are making the presentations now, guest of honour Kate Wilhelm handing over the novelette Hugo and other guest of honour Damon Knight following with the Hugo for novella (which goes to Barry Longyear’s “Enemy Mine” amid indescribable noises from the Brits). Now the top award, for best novel. Who swings more weight than Wilhelm and Knight at the con where they’re joint guests of honour? Ah, of course, they’ll present the novel Hugo jointly. But no! Amid the hugest cheers of the evening, risking sunburn from a holocaust of popping flashbulbs, wittily pinching the bottoms of any (female) attendants who stray too close, on comes jolly Isaac Asimov to do the honours. Somewhere in the audience a TAFF delegate who considers Disch’s On Wings of Song to be the only decent book nominated is saying to himself, “I won’t scream. Even if it goes to Titan I will – not – scream...”

“The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke,” cries Asimov, and I scream. Cities are laid waste and aircraft hurled from their courses by the gale of cheering – which, however, subsides with remarkable speed as the vast audience becomes a mob hell-bent for the exits.

Back in the outside world, the surging crowd and the past tense, I restrained myself from taking part in Moshe’s “Claude Degler Memorial Scavenger Hunt”. Somehow my sense of wonder reeled at the thought of locating a badge advertising an old Worldcon bid (losing bids scored extra), a box of lime jello (made-up jello scored extra), a ten of clubs with a naked lady/man on the back, a Necronomicon (not in English)... The most interesting item had been removed from the list after consideration of local conspiracy and kidnapping laws: no longer could you score points by producing a mundane.

The night disintegrated into parties. Almost instantly Rochelle Reynolds (now Dorey) received a mark of favour in the form of an intimately applied Harry Bell cartoon; “I’m never going to wash that elbow again,” she declared. Harry was telling me this when Harlan Ellison himself approached us and made a ritual blessing – “Stop fouling up the goddam hallway, you fucking Limeys.” He went by. “I shall never wash that eardrum again,” I said with fervour.

Roz Kaveney fancied going to the Hugo Losers’ Party many hotels distant, and that way we went: “Jerry Pournelle’s future history broke my thirty feet of bookshelves,” she confided unconvincingly on the way, and also asked to be urgently warned should she be in danger of meeting Sandra Miesel – some little matter of her Foundation review of a Miesel book on Poul Anderson....

The party was being thrown by Jim Baen of Ace, and I furtively slipped him a copy of my own jeu d’esprit on military technology and killing people, with the suggestion that it would fit just perfectly into the Ace list.

“Oh yes,” he said, taking the hardback and throwing it into a drawer. “I’ve looked at it before. Felt it was a bit negative about warfare.”

“Of course it’s bloody negative about warfare!” I failed to say. Instead I expressed pious hopes that imminent Baen replacement Susan Allison would like the book, and madly went on to relate the description of her someone had given me earlier. “Tall and blonde and smells of money,” I heard my mouth say as I stood aghast.

“Hey Susan...”

Susan Allison appeared. She barely seemed to come up to my waist. “Tall and blonde and smells of money,” said J. Baen’s voice from an infinite distance.

“Reeeeally?” She sniffed herself cautiously.

“Mmmmf,” I replied as I fell backwards into illimitable black space. Well... at least she was blonde.

Some inward urge, I know not what, led me to abandon that party relatively soon. I left Roz teaching young skiffy writers to play charades, little knowing that mere hours later she would contrive to lock herself out on a hotel fire escape – to be rescued only after long and piteous calls for help.

The British party, held in a wide corridor near that fifth-floor swimming pool, was loud, boozy, depraved and just like home. Bottles of imported Heineken lager were regarded with indifference by Brits and with seeming awe by the natives; masterminds Greg Pickersgill and Linda Karrh (now Pickersgill) offered variety in the form of a ready-mixed “brandy Alexander” which Greg had decided he would rather like to live on for the rest of his life. It tasted like coffee-and-chocolate milk shake pepped up with the hard stuff; Graham England was deeply suspicious of it, and issued H.M. Government warnings about its fearful potency whenever I accepted a sip. Certainly it was effective enough to make me demonstrate the Astral Test anew: millions of US fans attempted it, but mastery was vouchsafed to a pitiful few. Returning to my beer-bottle after a brisk round of failed initiations, I found that kindly hands had dropped a cigarette end into it. Some victim of the pole had been revenged at last.

By 3.15 am the British party consisted mainly of Joyce Scrivner. I tottered away in search of further fun but instead found the SFWA suite, now guarded by a magical talisman bearing the cruel runes MEMBERS AND GUESTS ONLY. Brushing this contemptuously aside, I discovered the place to be full of fans: Malcolm Edwards, Chris Atkinson, Avedon Carol. We sat on the floor mumbling at one another for an unconscionable time about cosmic subjects like the Astral Leauge and Jacqueline Lichtenberg and the art of drawing with felt pens on the sleeping form of Joseph Nicholas. Bored by now with the pole, I hid it in a cupboard for the SFWA to find.

Avedon exerted her wiles to discover what my fanzine title Twll-Ddu meant. I explained that twll was Welsh for hole, and ddu was Welsh for black –

“Black hole? Do you mean to say the name of your fanzine just means black hole?”

“Ah,” I said, “But a name as unpronounceable as that is surely worthwhile no matter how mundanes translate it; and moreover, don’t you realize that this is a Welsh pun, echoing the phrase twll d’un, which literally means ‘the hole of a person’; knowing what you do of the Welsh people, you will grasp that the reference is not to the navel or nostril. Hence Twll d’un bob saes, ‘all the English are arseholes’ (saes being the Welsh version of Scots sassenach), a specially popular Welsh platitude. Being totally inept at languages I’m fascinated by snippets like that; by the information that the French have exactly the same idiom as twll d’un (only, of course, in French); by the news that ‘black hole’ can’t be translated literally into Russian because in that language the two words together have, again, a below-the-belt application (female this time); by the fact that owing to the exigencies of Welsh gender-matching Twll-Ddu is in fact ungrammatical – one of the d’s shouldn’t be there, I don’t know which – putting me in the quintessentially fannish quandry of having a typo for a title.”

Anyone who believes that I actually managed to say all this (without the benefit of later rewriting and embellishment) has probably not been around fandom very long.

The mumbling continued, and continued, until well after five in the morning: one of those pleasant times you can’t write up because you never wrote it down. Alas, thanks to some obscure conservation law, this ended with the low point of all the convention. Susan Wood was at the party, looking unwell and much the worse for wear; she went briefly berserk and flung a bottle at Terry Carr in the room next to where we were talking. That’s all. The revelry ended instantly; Terry was removed and stitched up; I was swept from the room in the general tide of eviction – forgetting I was a SFWA member with a Right To Be There – and went back to my hotel. I mention all this because I dislike the hushed silence which (especially since Susan’s tragic death later that year) tended to add an undue weight of whispered speculation to an unfortunate incident which was over in seconds.

It was nearly half-past six that morning when I stumbled into our room, swapped grunts with Hazel and remembered to phone England with the Hugo results. Just for once, Chris Morgan’s Birmingham SF Group Newsletter was going to scoop my Ansible. For a long while I was troubled with an alien voice which intoned “Wrong number”: eventually it dawned on me (even as it dawned outside) that the voice wanted my room number. That settled, I contacted Chris and told him all; he cheered and groaned in the right places; and that should have been the end of the only transatlantic phone call I’d ever dialled. Its cost was missing from the hotel bill, though: long afterwards I learnt that the mysterious Voice had failed to take down my room number after all.

I know this because next day the Bell Telephone Company called Chris, and sternly told him that he’d received a call from the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Breaking down under their ruthless lack of questioning, he admitted this misdemeanour.

“We don’t know the room number of the caller and we’d like either the name or number for our records.”

Chris thought rapidly as if trained in Null-A. The transatlantic truth was revealed to him. “Yes,” he said earnestly. “The caller was a Mr. Gernsback. G-E-R-N-S-B-A-C-K. His first name is Hugo....”

I hope the Bell Telephone Company doesn’t read fanzines.

Running Down

Monday 1 September 1980

Unwearied by his trip to Boston, undaunted by the impact of 7000 Americans (often all in the same lift), undismayed by his third failure to win a fan Hugo, unshattered by subsequent frivolity, sorrow-drownings and snubs, our hero leaps lithely and with sparkling eyes from his untroubled sleep, ready to scintillate as never before on this final day of Noreascon. Only one disturbing thought troubles the limpid clarity of his mind, the realization that this chapter’s opening paragraph is all a pack of lies....

“Ohhh,” I moaned as I studied breakfast. Breakfast, I had austerely decided, would be a mere sip of orange juice: but this was America, land of plenty, and something over a pint of glistening and vitamin-crammed gunge had arrived. (Little did I know that scant days later, Harry Bell would expound to an unbelieving Dan Steffan the details of Bell’s Health Principle, whereby you sink much orange juice at breakfast time, have a good puke, and thus cleanse out your system to face the rigours of the day. I myself lack the dedication for this regime.) The orange juice rippled its vitamins derisively at me. Some fiend had frosted my eyeballs overnight, and strange ringings filed my ears.

“Listen,” said Hazel with her head on one side. “The Muzak here is exactly the same as it is at home.” “Ohhh,” I commented.

My personal and entirely unoriginal theory is that the fannish metabolism alters when you reach a big convention. Con conditioning takes over; an unspecified selection of glands start trickling overtime; the need for sleep mysteriously dwindles; fatigue poisons are discreetly stowed away, to be either purged by Bell’s Health Principle or spewed into your bloodstream in a single loathsome cataract when the biological alarm-clock sounds “Con Over”. Thus my Eastercon Monday reflexes had gone sproing or possibly even spung, converting me at the twitch of a gland into a fully paid-up member of the walking dead. And because this was America, Land of Plenty, there was still a day’s conventioning to go.

“I’ll finish your orange juice if you like,” said Hazel.

Afterwards she steered me in the general direction of the Sheraton, where Noreascon was still so implausibly happening: past the DONT WALK signs which made me long for small, luminous and self-adhesive apostrophes, through the maze of glass corridors which confusingly linked the ground floors of all the buildings near the Sheraton, around and into various Americans. Had I been less numb-brained I might well have hauled out that Isherwood quote: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” It seemed to cover the situation. But then, if I’d been in a condition to disinter that line I’d have gone on to pass critical remarks on my lens (thick and murky, with little flaws in it that kept moving about), exposure meter (needle wrapped hard around the peg) and aperture (damn this funny foreign food).

At the hotel we met people like Malcolm Edwards and Avedon Carol, not that there are people like them, who ascribed their unnatural gaiety and sparkle to having avoided the deleterious practice of going to bed. I tried to sneer at them, but they appeared not to notice. Oh well. It was time for the Monday morning routine of recording-not-thinking, the time when you hear the exotic, quintessentially fannish and memorable things which have happened over the weekend to every single convention member but yourself. Avedon had succeeded either in encompassing the rite of the Astral Pole or in bribing Malcolm and Chris to say she had, all this at some ghastly hour about dawn. A “Galactic Mercenary”, apprehended while forcing the swimming pool doors after hours for skinny-dipping purposes, had done wonders for hotel relations by breaking a security man’s arm. Other soi-disant fans had improved the shining hour by hurling rocks from windows on the twenty-somethingth floor. The committee was struggling to keep such facts dark, and had already suppressed two Alexis Gilliland cartoons intended for Mike Glyer’s daily newsletter Lobster Tales. One concerned Kate Wilhelm (aliens in UFO: We took the GoH in the middle of her speech – and got a standing ovation! Fans are strange.): her speech had allegedly followed the anti-science party line and was later described by Mike Glyer as “bumper-sticker clichés”. The suppression of the other was still less explicable, the caption merely being, approximately, Tell Harlan Ellison stories – the crowd is going to sleep! Committees are strange.... Martin Hoare was saying, to anyone who would listen, “Katy told me to enjoy myself and sample US women – so I’ve (word garbled in transmission) a different one every night.” Bob Shaw had been not wholly enthralled when rung out of bed at 3am to hear about his fanwriter Hugo. (“Hello... Bob?” “Nnnnggg?” “Bob, you’ve won the Hugo!” “Urrrrr.” “Well, congrats and goodbye!” “Gaaaaah.”) Peter Nicholls, on the other hand, was said to have waited up all night, pacing restlessly, spraying nibbled fingernail fragments like machine-gun fire, endlessly rereading the Encyclopaedia to convince himself of its worth. And Jackie Lichtenberg...

The Jacqueline Lichtenberg Appreciation Society’s spies had been exchanging data all weekend, many going badgeless and incognito in order not to excite the envy of disadvantaged American Jackiefans (or Jakkies). Malcolm had sent Rachel Holmen of Locus fame to have his review copy of Unto Zeor, Forever autographed by Jackie herself, and later recited the inscription at unexpected moments (“...hope you will enjoy reading and rereading this wonderful book many, many times for the remainder of your natural existence... Live long and prosper”), not to mention misquoting particularly scintillant lines (“Before him, the track narrowed out of sight in both directions”). Roz Kaveney had fearlessly penetrated a meeting of Lichtenberg / Lorrah / Bradley fandom, to discover these authors outspokenly admiring one another’s work before a packed audience of eight devotees. Jean Lorrah, we learnt, was a professor of English literature at a midwestern university and had achieved tenure by writing on, and with, Jackie Lichtenberg. This shows the ineffable superiority of America’s educational system. Where in effete Oxford or limp-wristed Cambridge would you find a Regius Professor of R. L. Fanthorpe?... But here was JLAS pioneer Chris Priest with a new, evangelistic gleam in his eye. “I’m not a Jackie fan any more,” he said. “I’m a Marion Zimmer Bradley fan now. And I’m a Barry B. Bongyear fan. He’s important.”

This JLAS gossip reminded me of the approaching Dave Langford Appreciation Society meeting. Noreascon, you see, had provided two semi-formal ways to chat with SF luminaries. Really famous authors with fan clubs were granted “Special Interest Group Meetings”, the only living authors qualifying for this accolade apparently being the Lichtenberg/Lorrah/Bradley trinity. Lesser talents were permitted to fill in a printed notice saying what subjects they (as omniscient authors) cared to talk about, whereupon an ad-hoc discussion group would happen if there was sufficient interest. Drunkenly I had put my name down as willing to discourse on TAFF, UK fandom and the JLAS (I crossed that last bit out in a fit of cowardice, mind you); now I drifted round to the relevant part of the gigantic registrations complex, eager to see what massive audience had been lured. Well, yes, you guessed it. Practised apologies washed over me: “Don’t think we publicized this scheme enough... scheduled too early in the day... too late in the convention... rival attractions... noticeboard badly sited maybe...” Brooding on the rather, er, round number of people wishing to hear of TAFF and UK fandom, I decided firmly that real fans simply didn’t study noticeboards devoted to professional egotripping. The DLAS was an idea whose time had not yet come.

Perceiving that I had all the joie de vivre of a slug overdosed with Valium, more and yet more people were hideously hearty at me. Mark Digre announced that “As a legal point, Massachusetts is not a state, it’s a commonwealth.” I wrote this down in the hope that it might make sense later on. Rochelle was handing out peaches she’d bought at a dollar a hundredweight or some such typical US price; glumly we reminded her that all this would have to stop when she moved to Britain, where peaches are sold individually at Sotheby’s. Through grim jaws she cried “I’ll give up anything, except some things!” A passing Carey Handfield added the last straw to my bag – a stack of Australia in ’83 flyers weighing rather more than our air luggage allowance. “Hand ’em out in Britain!” he shouted over his shoulder as he made a quick escape.

“It’s people like that that made me resign from the A in 83 committee,” confided Keith Curtis. “Carey is so pushy.”

I groped for analogies. “The Peter Weston of Aussie fandom?”

“Exactly,” said Keith, a huge smile spreading over his face. The vast mass of propaganda was eventually dumped on Terry Hughes – a victim as always of his own niceness – who sent it on by post.

All around us the convention was slowly running down, a table cleared here, a notice-board stripped there, displays going one by one into eclipse, a gradual thinning out of the “real” fans. “Change and decay in all around I see,” your hero said to Hazel, wondering whether the faint aroma of dissolution had anything to do with the clean clothes he’d forgotten to put on that morning. Hazel, perceptive as ever, guided me to the fast-food counter, where for the last time I made the not very taxing decision between Beer and Large Beer.

This necessary fuel was for another snappily titled panel: “Time-Binding V: In Which Jophan Discovers Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll; Fandom in the 70s and Beyond.” One gathered that someone hadn’t been too clear about the difference between the 70s and the 60s. Another bare room off the Lower Exhibit hall, another audience outnumbered if not by the panelists then by the words in the panel title, another set of idiosyncratic introductions (Linda Bushyager, for example, getting an immense build-up not as a fan but as a celebrated sf novelist). The first thing that happened was that the panel junked the 70s in favour of predicting the 80s: “...electronic computerized fanzines... packaged convention kits with a videotape of Harlan, 400 empty beer cans and a plastic clip-on hangover – you stay awake for 48 hours and then open the package.” The second exciting incident, for me, was too much like an extended metaphor to be true: my battery ran down. The one in my hearing aid, that is; for fifty minutes I confined myself to wise noddings at Mike Glyer’s or Bruce Pelz’s profoundly argued inaudibilities. Eventually our very own Greg Pickersgill rose up from the audience and shouted his way through this stupor, demanding that future Worldcon attendance be limited by such means as denying facilities to nerds, “special interest groups”, non-trufans... “Why should we let these cretins swamp our conventions?”

Answer: the Worldcon is now a juggernaut which no-one can stop, least of all “us”. Those who follow the tradition of fanzine fandom are nicely treated and given their own programme track to play with, bread and circuses at a safe distance from the real programmes; the controls are in the hands of ever more ambitious sci-fi groups devoted to bigger and better conventions. Though there are exceptions, the most obvious being the fannish-fan power structure of Seacon ’79, today’s worldcons tend to consider traditional fandom as another tiresome and marginal “special interest group” incomprehensible to the committee and requiring a skilled interpreter: Noreascon seemingly drafted Moshe Feder for just this purpose. (The Denver committee, I see, had never even heard of that obscure yet Hugo-nominated fannish fan Walt Willis. No, I don’t expect every con-fan to know Walt – but why didn’t their equivalent of Moshe say “Aha...”?) Barring a financial crash or the dying away of the sci-fi (as opposed to sf) boom, we can extrapolate US con-running fandom as an expanding Irresistible Force hell-bent on collision with the Immovable Object represented by the last and largest convention facilities in the USA.

Which is what I would doubtless have said at that panel had my hearing aid been working. It mightn’t have merited Greg’s subsequent, cheering comment as I changed the batteries afterwards: “You were the only one there who knew anything about fandom in the 70s and you didn’t bloody say anything.”

Hazel guided the walking corpse away from the shambles of the panel. “It’s all so unreal,” she was saying. “We only hear all those concentrated American accents on TV... they’re associated with unreality. I can’t believe in these people.”

So, for a bracing shot of home-grown speech, we nipped into one of Noreascon’s perpetual film theatres and once again watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. On every side Americans were laughing themselves into meltdown and having to be scooped up with asbestos shovels. “It makes you proud to be British,” said Hazel.

That was our last Noreascon programme item. The rest of the afternoon was passed in such dissipations as lying down in the Copley Plaza hotel staring vacantly at the ceiling; having numerous showers in a vain attempt at post-convention decontamination; poking through the mounds of books and fanzines that had appeared everywhere in our room. (“Funny, I don’t remember buying that –”) Slightly revitalized, we ventured through the warm dusk in search of food: and found Boylston, the eatery-packed street running by the con hotel, jumping with activity. Medium-sized crowds, street musicians and even singers bawling their high notes into passing ears, shop windows ablaze, sense of numerous people having a good time: gad, how un-English. Even the bookshops were open, displaying such priceless treasures from far Cathay as the first novels of Messrs Holdstock and Stephenson, in British editions yet.... Hazel had been fascinated by my Hogarthesque account of Sunday’s sleazy pizza place: we found it, boldly ordered a large one with trimmings, and selected the finest Imitation Grape Soda the automated cellar could provide.

The meal arrived and the gourmets sat aghast. “We’ll never get through this,” Hazel predicted. “Shall I measure it?” She measured it. Fifteen inches across, one-third of an inch thick. “Pi R squared,” I mumbled, “no, pizza R squared... good grief. We are about to eat fifty-nine cubic inches of best junk food, not counting the trimmings.”

We started the epic struggle. Formica table-tops all around were littered with past failures, pizzas whose invaders had landed boldly and ravaged far inland with fire and the sword before ultimately failing to conquer the central massif. This was the American Way of Life. In the end we awarded ourselves a victory on points, and made our greenish exit.

Hazel fancied some more sleep, while I was all for a final sip at the dregs of Noreascon... but when I arrived the con had been chopped off short. All flyers and free literature had been swept from the foyer; no signs or placards remained; little demolition groups were closing down the film theatres; rare and occasional fans scurried along the corridors as though aware that a frightful fiend did close behind them tread.

Long search disclosed a Bushyager party of the dead-dog persuasion, high up one of the Sheraton towers and jam-packed with silent fans. The room was afflicted with a dismal periodic Sssshhhh! whenever an entrance or exit was made. Stu Shiffman beamed at me silently. AnneLaurie Logan mentioned in an undertone that Taral had “been snotty to too many people”. Not to be outdone, Alyson Abramowitz complained inaudibly about Rob Jackson’s standoffishness when they last met. Moshe pressed a microphone to my lips and in a whisper asked if he might tape the true pronunciation of Twll-Ddu.

“Twll-Ddu,” I said with all the clarity I could muster.

“Ssssssshhhhhh!” said everyone, but it was too late. The forces of final disruption had got their fix on this party now. The door burst open. Framed in the opening stood a convention security man, as unmistakable an agent of fascist repression as an Imperial Storm Trooper, hung about with bleepers and walkie-talkie equipment. Only the Mace spray was missing. It was Martin Hoare.

“Hello,” I said wonderingly.

“Could you please keep the noise down in here,” he barked. “Hotel security is getting very uptight and they’re now threatening to throw out anyone found without a Sheraton room key.” Grimly he surveyed the trembling fans, and stalked out. Martin appeared to be in his element.

(Later I quizzed him about this transformation. “Well, I was working for C&C, Communications and Coordination, but the Security lot didn’t seem to be doing their job properly so we took over and did that for them. I really got them organized, just like the way I ran Albacon... stopped fights... patrolled stairwells and fire escapes... made sure the hotel security people didn’t get uptight...”

(“But,” I said. “But on Monday night they were uptight, nasty word, and threatening to throw out anyone found without a Sheraton room key.”

(“Oh, we exaggerated to make sure we kept the parties under control.”)

Not knowing at the time that the eviction threat was but a paper tiger, I grovellingly begged for an escort to the incredibly secret TAFF/DUFF party which was next on my agenda: Ken Fletcher and Linda Lounsbury of DUFF fame obliged. It turned out that we had to evict ourselves, the event being back in the dread Copley Plaza, where Keith Curtis had assembled more Heineken than I’d seen together in one place at Noreascon: two dozen cans, say. Everyone was compulsorily permitted to inspect the Jack Chalker book which Harlan Ellison had inscribed for DUFF auction. From memory: “Jack Chalker is probably the finest writer in the USA – of titles. But the books are no good. Chalker wrote ‘Dance Band on the Titanic’; brilliant title, I had to read the story, and it’s shit!” No doubt. (The book, I hear, later picked up a second inscription, from its author, on the subject of runt has-beens.)

The party went on as parties do, without the elegiac feel of a convention closing down, since that mood had been exhausted during the day. My magical aura of incapability returned to me. Ken tried to explain the astral significance of the apa-name Vootie. I took some ineffectual notes of the Curtis Dicta; “Jerry Pournelle is even worse than they say, he goes round bursting into other people’s conversations and dominating them...” (Why couldn’t I think of any huge names to drop, I wondered.) “It takes a fine mind to know just how far to bend a banana.” (Now what was the context of that one?) “Charlie Brown is creepy... he puts the wind up me.” (It doesn’t say here whether he meant Peanuts or Locus, but one can guess.) “Hey, Dave, I shadowed you back from the Sheraton after the Saturday night, and you were sort of lurching about and bouncing off things...”

“I’m not writing that down,” I said with dignity, and abandoned my notebook for the night. Presently I made my final excuses and left, aiming very carefully for the doorway. I did not bounce off it, though the jamb took a bit of a beating. Noreascon had had some good moments, I hazily decided, but there was a certain relief in knowing that, at last, it was all over.

Is There Life After Worldcon?

Tuesday 2 September 1980

Perhaps realizing that my TAFF instalments would later tend to start at breakfast time with the inevitability of Ivy Compton-Burnett novels, I didn’t eat anything that Tuesday morning: so the notebook insists. Perhaps it was because the Copley Plaza Hotel threatened hearty eaters like myself with a MASS MEALS TAX sign, perhaps Hazel stood between me and the menu’s inviting breakfast choice of Bloody Mary, Tequila Sunrise or Screwdriver. Quite possibly we had no appetite after staggering from the hotel lift, whose array of 21 blazing spotlights left you with no aim in life but to rush out and plunge into a snowdrift. Outside the Boston thermometers read 95°, and we toyed with the notion of rushing back to plunge into the lift.

Hazel and I returned briefly to the Sheraton-Boston: from a hundred yards away you could feel it was no longer a con hotel, and no fans were in evidence. As with a visit to one’s old school, college or maximum security research establishment, the closed doors were all the more oppressive because yesterday we’d had the run of the rooms beyond. What exciting things might not be happening today, in those hidden halls and Gormenghastly passages? I almost suffered a pang of remorse at not having visited the computer gaming or filksinging rooms while I had the chance: the pang, however, was swallowed in a healthy surge of gratitude for the narrow escape.

Indefatigable tourists, we bore up under the blazing sun and went to see the sights of the Working-Men’s Co-operative Bank, a name less redolent of Boston than of Bingley. Moving from strength to strength, we joined the long queue of sightseers in the nearby State Street bank, there to speculate on the enigmatic sign FOOD STAMPS SOLD HERE. Still unsated, Britain’s vibrant representatives toured several more historic banks before reaching the First National, in the gigantic Hancock building whose mirror surface was last seen failing to reflect the Langford features in chapter 2. Here at length we found cashiers who didn’t swoon with horror when confronted with the sterling travellers’ cheques a falsely smiling Barclays Bank had assured us would be considered more desirable than cash itself, anywhere within the orbit of Pluto. Gentle reader, be warned. America is different. But then, so is Britain: the kindly cashier at the First National suffered near-terminal sensawonder when confronted by my driving licence and its expiry date of 2023.

Back in the Copley Plaza foyer, the now almost solvent Langfords met fragments of fandom. Harry Bell and Jim Barker, smiling hugely from their last night’s loathsome dissipations and waving dubious grey cans of “generic BEER”, were about to flee to Washington. Martin Hoare was smiling even more hugely and telling anyone who would listen about the total and ruthless efficiency which had engulfed Noreascon’s communications and security once he joined up on Monday. “And Katie told me to enjoy myself,” he added embarrassingly in whatever is the opposite of sotto voce, “so I (itemization deleted – Ed).” Rochelle Reynolds looked happy but exhausted from fending off the attention of Jim and Paul Kincaid – not yet having revealed her occult longings for (absent) future spouse Alan Dorey. Even Greg Pickersgill was smiling as he muttered things about “futility” and “shabby travesty of a con” and “bloody Americans”, fondly watched by his American wife-to-be. Greg and Linda were enchanted by a cab-driver they’d ridden with. “He asked us, what’s the SF con.... He’d heard some guy on the radio called Harl something, Harlan. God, he said, he’d never heard anything like it. ‘The guy must think the whole world’s his. I bet he’s short.’” Collapse of all present.

Collapse, too, of the Copley lifts. None were operating, and the word was that someone was trapped inside, perhaps raising future generations in a sealed environment. With no more effort than required to saunter up Snowdon, we visited the top floor for our voluminous (and now stuffed with volumes) luggage; with no more effort than required to cripple two once adequate bodies, we descended one storey and fell over. What happened then was like Ian Watson novels where the power of imagination evokes a new reality: before our desperate eyes an unsuspected lift door came into being and opened. Out stepped a phantasm whose proud bearing marked him as a secret master of vertical people movement. “This is the only one working,” he intoned. “You go down in it quick.” All unsuspecting, we went.

It was small, without the spotlights and plush amenities (up to though not including nine-hole golf courses) of the real lifts; you worked it with a handle. Bringing my Space Invaders experience to bear, I mastered the joystick and zeroed in within mere feet of the ground-floor level, we opened the door and with difficulty climbed down, into the eye of a teacup-sized storm.

“You got a licence?” shrieked somebody in overalls who appeared to think the whole world was his. (Yes. He was short.) “You got a licence? You know what you did? You broke the law, you got to have a licence for that elevator.”

“The chap upstairs told us...”

“He never. You stole that guy’s elevator!”

The tirade went on, our short friend explaining at great length how people could break legs climbing into the inexpertly docked lift, how you got to have a licence, and how the other guy was stranded upstairs now forever. Suggestions that he (a) remedy the hideous danger of the foot-high step into the lift, or (b) go and rescue his marooned pal, were brushed aside: here, it became plain, was someone who’d been attracted to his job by the opportunities for shouting. Little did I know that this misanthrope would take on a shimmering significance as the only person to be rude to us in all our trip. At least, the only American. Greg we have always with us.

The little knot of Britfandom in the Plaza foyer unravelled as we made our final escape and were taken firmly in hand by chunky Selina Lovett, an old-time fan. This description will undoubtedly annoy her, but on her UK visit in the early 70s she gained the unfortunate distinction of being the first American fan Martin and I had ever met. Now NESFA, New England’s answer to the BSFA, seems fonder of serious constructiveness, rules debates, committee elections, convention-running and universal domination than of traditional arts like the fanzine: as a result Selina was one of only two Langford contacts in the area. The other was Alyson Abramowitz, and a strange chill seemed to descend on the gathering when I mentioned Alyson’s invitation to visit, as though one had spoken of layout or correction fluid in the home of Keith Walker....

Into a vast car with Selina and her father, chiefly distinguished at first glance by his truncheon-sized cigar. Time to abandon the fan’s-eye view of Boston (schematic diagram of hotels, restaurants, liquor stores, vague and empirical drunkard’s-walk routes between) and play tourist at last. This was when I learnt with delight that the Hancock building was sinking imperceptibly but inexorably into the filled land beneath: “formerly the tallest building in New England.” Something the size of a writing-desk in repellent pink granite, still being cemented to the street, proved to be a monument to the lore-and-profits chap Khalil Gibran. Public buildings loomed over wide streets, thick with fake-Roman inscriptions until you expected signs reading HAMBVRGERS. Martin convulsed over a delicatessen named Lox, Stock and Bagel; he recited British prices of everything to an appalled Mr. Lovett, whose cries of amazement and loathing were terrible to behold. Hazel’s alarm grew as she noticed that every third building appeared to be a fallout shelter. There were kaleidoscope flashes of traffic, bridges, traffic, a glimpse of the sea, more traffic, fifty incredibly famous tourist sights which I forget; then we were crawling down what looked to be the prestigious warehouse district, a long drab row on either side, and was in fact the utterly famous Fish Pier.

Lovecraft-like it waited for us there: unnameable, unspeakable, unsignposted, indistinguishable from the surrounding warehouses, diffusing a miasma of eldritch horror and seafood... the “No Name” restaurant, self-effacing in the manner of our Barbican Centre (the only London building to lack an outside) and unattainable without native guides. Inside, an awesome sight, Martin was observed to drink Coke. This was the closest available approximation to beer; I fancied a nice bottle of chilled white wine, and got 7-Up. The restaurant was plain and looked like the inside of a warehouse, which it doubtless had been. Mr. Lovett, having charmed Hazel with what she thought to be an East Coast American Jewish accent of great and classical purity, cast a practised eye over the menu and recommended everything. The colossal portions of seafood were said to be the best in many a parsec, but lifetime avoidance of small rubbery sea creatures had left me with no standards for comparison. Strongest memory is of the clam roll, another Lovecraftian touch, innocuous to the eye but strangely evocative in scent and taste. One thought of fishy ports like Innsmouth at low tide, of far-off dying things in stagnant estuaries, of weirdly distorted spaces separating one from the nearest toilet.

I still don’t know whether I really like seafood.

There followed some confused transitions during which I noted that the town of Quincy was pronounced quinsy as in dog-strangling (see your local dictionary), that the NO SOLICITING sign outside the Lovett’s apartment block in Randolph did not mean either of the things which first came to my horrid mind, and that Martin had travelled 3000 miles to photograph the Concord branch of Woolworths. Mr. Lovett having retired to bask in the family air-conditioning, it was Selina alone who introduced us to the teeming historical joys of New England. At first glance this seems to be an area which like Crete in the Saki story produces far more history than can be consumed locally. Closer inspection reveals that it’s always the same bit of history, the rising against the cursed British, as commemorated in the numerous places where the first shot of the War of Independence was fired.

Concord, where the first shot of the War of Independence was fired, had by 1980 settled down somewhat: our survey indicated that local industry was divided between real estate, tourist shoppes and burying people. The town was toylike and hyper-landscaped, and some miracle of Yankee know-how kept its grass though not its visitors crisp and fresh in the baking heat. “Ice cream,” said Selina in seductive tones, and I moved towards a further confrontation with stark reality.

For years your historian has been fascinated by one aspect of Larry Niven’s work. An artist of great restraint and subtlety (I was told after daring to say Ringworld Engineers was dull), he hoards his powers of sensual description for certain paragraphs of shattering intensity. Not sex scenes, not epic battles, not the universe-wracking collision of black holes: the moment when Larry Niven pulls out all the stops is in his description of a hot fudge sundae. In the last seconds before the end of civilization as we know it, Niven characters nip out for one final hot fudge sundae. When the Lucifer’s Hammer comet is falling to smash the world, the only metaphor Niven feels will do justice to its awe-inspiring might is that of a hot fudge sundae.

For fear of repetition I won’t mention what we ordered in that Concord ice-cream parlour. The result was sticky-sweet and lukewarm, and apparently had not been made right. Another fond illusion shattered. “You took them there?” spluttered Mr. Lovett later. “You’re crazy! You must have left your brains back at the hotel!” Selina apologized; Hazel and I staggered about with tongues like flypaper; Martin thought the concoction was very nice.

Concord Bridge, where the first shot of the War of Independence was fired, is a particularly wondrous tourist spot, as instantly revealed when we’d walked up the long leafy path to get there. Had we really come 3000 miles to exchange words like Hello with Marsha and Eddie Jones, Colin and Joan Langeveld, and Peter Mabey? “They came three thousand miles and died,” I warned them with some fervour, “To keep the past upon its throne. Unheard beyond the ocean tide, Their English mother made her moan.” All this was written upon a little brass plate dated 1775 but looking newer.

“Tacky,” said Selina, not referring to the hot fudge sundae.

A sign pointed the way to THE OLD MANSE: HOME OF EMERSON AND HAWTHORNE. What a fascinating household it must have been. The man who said Isaac Asimov’s mind has a foolish consistency, and the man who didn’t. Suspecting that both Emerson and Hawthorne would be out that day, we proceeded no further. I poked about hopefully in the brilliant-green woodland for poison ivy, while the Joneses and entourage fled the scene.

Lexington, where the first shot of the War of Independence was fired, left no impression upon the memory except as a singularly inappropriate setting for Selina’s query, “Do you find everything here more spacious?” (“Yes,” said Martin. “Agoraphobic is the word,” said Hazel. “Your pizzas wouldn’t go through our doorways,” I clarified.) We marvelled at the spacious land whose houses were all white and made of wood, defying such forces of British nature as wet rot, dry rot, death-watch, lyctus powder-post beetle, weevils and our favourite little friend Anobium punctatum or common furniture beetle, with all of which the British contingent had had intimate and embarrassing acquaintance.

Boston and Cambridge, where the first shot of the War of Independence was by some oversight not fired, were overrun by our party that evening. Unerringly Martin’s sixth sense led us through the Harvard Square district to something called the Oxford Ale House. In its olde-worlde cellar they served Bass at liquid nitrogen temperature in fiddly eight-ounce glasses which once again didn’t fit the image of a wider and more spacious land. “What you mean is, everything here is more specious,” I suggested to Selina as the merest sip of beer converted my mouth to a cryonics chamber. We had to warm the glasses in our hands for long minutes, as though they contained a rare old frozen brandy. Perspiring Hazel found this soothing, while Selina’s giggles couldn’t be controlled.

“The difference between British and American fandom is mostly that you two British fans are sots,” Hazel deduced inexcusably and correctly. Martin and I made our excuses and promised to do more sightseeing.

It was pleasant soaking up the university ambience of Harvard Square, parts of which were nostalgically like Oxford if you could imagine dank Oxford with a heatwave and a plague of 120-decibel crickets. More than once I had a perfect and eerie illusion of standing in Christ Church meadow, or of threading my way through Trinity or Magdalen College. No doubt by daylight it wouldn’t be so easy to ignore the buildings’ strong American accent. The illusion of Oxford was shattered when we found a series of bookshops still open and thriving late in the evening: I draw a discreet veil over the scenes of pillage which ensued. Several vast parcels were furtively conveyed to Selina’s car, which may have been a mistake, since a tyre immediately exploded. Martin and I had many exciting adventures amid the strange and bizarre places where foreigners choose to hide their car jacks and free air taps: consoled only by quantities of Fosters from another miraculously open shop, we rode home in fear and trembling on a spare tyre whose condition would instantly have caused a British magistrate to assume the black cap.

In Randolph, Mr. Lovett admitted, the first shot of the War of Independence was not fired but might well have been. He went on to reveal local scandal about the Boston Tea Party, the participants in which were (he said) all as tired and over-emotional as newts. I choked back the reflection that after Hazel’s experience with a moribund teabag’s death throes in lukewarm milk-and-water, one could see why they hurled the rotten tea into the harbour: this cannot be a new observation and was probably first made by Paul Revere.

The Lovetts senior, good people, forced quantities of food into us, reeling at Martin’s cultural comparisons. “Corn costs a dollar a cob back home,” he would say casually, and watch them boggle as they contemplated the pantechnicon load of corn-on-the-cob Selina had picked up for $1.75. Still eager to sample new goods, new drinks, and generally to boldly go, we tried another item of US exotica: root beer. It tasted medical – specifically, like that transparent red brand of toothpaste. “Noooo...” said Selina disbelievingly as in turn the Brits delivered this judgement; then, assailed by doubt, she took a sip herself. A wondering light came into her eyes. “Hey... it does.” If this truly is a constituent of the famous Spayed Gerbil, that drink’s cult status is even less explicable.

With a day of recuperation behind us and our minds partly de-blown, it was possible to think again about Noreascon. “Whoever did the lighting for the Hugo ceremony and the masquerade ought to be shot,” said Martin omnisciently. “Never in twenty years as a stage lighting expert have I seen anyone use primary green, red and blue for illuminating spots.*” Mr. Hoare, who at that time was 28, went on to explain how he’d had to teach the professional lighting man at Seacon ’79 how to focus his own lanterns....

* George Flynn comments: “Chip Hitchcock, who was responsible for the lighting at the Hugo ceremony and the masquerade, has asked me to convey the view that Mr. Hoare doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“A touch of amateurism,” I suggested. “Humanizes the whole thing. I couldn’t care less about the bloody lighting, anyway. It was some of the fans that worried me, the loons with their ultra-realistic simulated machine guns and suchlike.”

“Dave,” said Martin. “Some of those weren’t simulated.”

“Argh,” the Langfords profoundly commented, in unison.

Selina, a jackbooted Noreascon committee member, said “Don’t quote me, but –” and launched into a monologue about unbelievable atrocities committed by “fans” over the past few days. We listened, fascinated and horrified at the tale of mayhem, only occasionally interjecting “Bloody hell!” or “Never!” or “With a melon?”

Here we saw for the first time the Secret Celebrity Guide, a programme-book supplement hastily produced (though never actually distributed) to appease Ben Bova. Reportedly, after thinking himself too huge a celebrity to bother providing a mini-biography for the main programme book, he’d been deeply piqued at his consequent omission: hasty appeasement, and the supplement, followed....

Another convention viewpoint was waiting for us on the table. “‘Pardon me,’ said the Hobbit as he stopped the well-dressed matron on her way down the stairs, ‘but is this the way to Middle Earth?’ Whereupon the woman calmly looked around her and replied ‘I don’t know, but this is the Sheraton-Boston Hotel.’” So began the Boston Evening Globe’s carefully balanced coverage of this literary event. Quotations came as usual from hand-picked cretins: “a woman who would only identify herself as ‘Pixie, as in Dungeons and Dragons’.” Reporters had worked long and hard to locate the wrong end of every stick (and thank God they never learnt of the Astral Pole): Bruce Pelz’s rather jolly fannish Tarot pack, variously painted by 85 different SF/fan artists, was ingeniously covered in the line “Battlestar Galactica playing cards were selling for a mere $15 a deck.” Suspicions that the Boston Evening Globe was pulling fandom’s leg began to grow when we reached a bit concerning the archetypal fan who “described the convention in a word: ‘Wow!’” If only it had been “Goshwowohboyohboyohboy!”

Once upon a time we fans would complain that newspaper coverage of the exhibitionistic few at conventions was Unfair. We knew that. We were the silent majority, the comfortably dressed element, the ones with sensitive fannish faces. Some day our cause would prevail, as at Yorcon 1979, where the first shot of the War of Independence was fired and the committee wangled trufandom’s viewpoint into the local press. (“The Trekkies... they’re our Irish joke.”) But the balance has shifted in America and is shifting here, by a process of positive feedback: each time a reporter focuses on the gaudy, eye-catching minority, protofans out there are reinforced in their view that the essence of fandom is waving lasers and dressing funny. They plunge in themselves, equipped with pointed ears and four-foot broadswords to help them blend in. The costumed minority becomes that much less of a minority, leaps that much more obviously to the reporter’s sensation-seeking eye....

(Angela Carter professed disappointment in fannish garb at Channelcon 1982. She’d read the papers. She sincerely expected a hotel full of pointed ears.)

I went to bed wondering if the ever-increasing wave of costumed silliness mightn’t have some positive aspect. Once upon a time, when SF was despised, fans had more sense of community: the chosen few who could see past the garish pulp covers to whatever shreds of literary worth lay within. Now SF is all too respectable, and anyone can play; perhaps this very popularity has erected a new ring of defence about “true” fans. Perhaps only the chosen few see past the garish tinsel g-strings to achieve cosmic oneness with other unkeen on the pointy-eared and beweaponed idiocy which screens “our” fandom from the public eye.

There’s an elitist viewpoint for you, eh? Everyone ought to be in some elite or another. You too can be insufferable. Try new spray-on Hubris™. It’s fun. For example:

The Langfords had taken over Selina’s bedroom in the vast reshuffle which shoehorned three extra bodies into the not overly huge Lovett apartment. Hazel kept nudging me in a definitely elitist way, pointing to the vast fan which patiently shoved hot air across the room and back again. “Look at the trademark,” she said. I looked blearily. “KelAire?”

“Isn’t that remarkable!”

“It is?”

“The name of my favourite Tuareg tribe,” she said smugly.

“I can’t take you anywhere,” I muttered, and went to sleep.

Yes! We Have Parakeet Diapers!

Wednesday-Thursday 3-4 September 1980

So bits of New England kept popping up before us like stage-sets hastily constructed to fool the solipsist in that skiffy story “They”. Selina’s apartment, where Hazel found a travel book whose revelations about the Tamachek (Tuareg) alphabet set her gloating a gloat which if done in the street would have frightened the horses. Quincy, Mass., where Martin lusted after a Snoopy telephone (“I want one for the office”), Hazel studied the US system of social security (“Not as efficient as ours”) and in a fit of silliness I bought an Olde Englysshe typeball. (Possibly discovering my origins, the shopman remarked “Cheerio, old chap”; possibly uttering a hideous insult, I answered, “Pip-pip, old fruit.”) An immense shopping mall lightyears from civilization, where a traditional “English pub” beckoned us with its real plastic wooden panelling and promise of almost real beer; no sooner had we succumbed to its allure than we were bounced for Martin’s hideous crime of wearing a T-shirt. Bloody hell, they don’t do that at the Ritz, as I told the barman but to no avail.

“Plimoth Plantation” was a reconstruction of an early New England settlement, enclosed by a stockade from which hand-made iron brads ostentatiously protruded. We pretended not to notice the modern steel screws actually holding the thing together. Inside, flies were present in authentic numbers; the local populace, actors hamming it up in archaic dress, had huge fun treating sightseers as village idiots.

“Did you come on the great ship Gloriana this last week?”

“Er, actually it was the great ship DC-10.”

“Nay, we know nothing of that,” and significant exchanges of glances, tapping of foreheads.

Martin, being Martin, enquired about local taverns, sparking a terrific simulated argument wherein a mob-capped lady (with whom Hazel tended to side) excoriated the twin evils of men and booze, while pigs grunted and chickens pecked their way between the dingy wooden buildings. A sort of low-tech Disneyland.

Thinking back to all those other wood-frame houses, Hazel tactfully said: “Your architecture hasn’t changed much since the seventeenth century, has it?” I was musing that such a reconstruction might never receive a Langford visit if it were 3000 miles closer to home. One goes abroad to see history. For all I know there are similar enclaves in Reading, folk with job titles like brockingman or fuggler, wielding with trained fingers their immemorial tools of weevilling-iron and scrotum-tongs, and pretending huge annoyance at the recent invasion of 1066.

Yes! We Have Parakeet Diapers said a never-explained shop window on the Plymouth seafront, while with the air of connoisseurs we rolled cinnamon-flavoured saltwater taffy around our mouths and wondered whether the sign NO BAREFEET ON STATE PIER merely interdicted a little-known Indian tribe. I looked at Plymouth Rock, which as the only pebble on the beach with a roof over it was manifestly the landmark to which any pilgrim ship would steer. In other respects it strongly resembled a rock and unlike the Brighton variant does not have the name going all the way through. Hazel probed the mysteries of why saltwater taffy failed to taste of salt water, and Martin recovered enough from the stark realization that in New England his name is a monosyllable (“Matn”) to despatch semi-cheerful postcards saying “Weather hot, women warm, beer cold,” only the former items having won his approval.

At the “Discount Center” in a town called Clancy we gritted our teeth and got down to the bread-and-butter of holiday duties, purchasing a musical toothbrush to annoy my little brother and an ethnic wooden aardvark to alarm Peter Roberts (only it was diverted to other friends – tough luck, Peter), not to mention a stout suitcase marked down to $5, made necessary by the huge piles of books already acquired. Thus fortified, we sought even huger piles in Boston’s bookshops, Selina being gratifyingly startled when the sole SF novel on a table of grubby paperbacks just happened to be the one Brian Stableford had dedicated to the Langfords in exchange for bed and board. (He dropped in to visit, for about a year....) Our city tour took in a joke shop stocking a hundred varieties of cigarette paper (if it had been open we’d have bought some Grape Flavour Reefer Wrappers for, again, Peter Roberts), the handkerchief-sized Granary Burial Ground containing the remnants of B. Franklin, P. Revere et al, the Boston Market galleries which recalled that part of Oxford known as Little Trendy Street – oh, the horror of tables whose glass tops were held up by the arms and legs of supine chimps rendered either in fibreglass or beaten copper, as you pleased.... I added choice specimens to my collection of signs, PLEASE ASK HOSTESS TO BE SEATED (would she obey?) and, on the side of a van, ALL PURPOSE TOMATOES.

In New England, as you see, it was the small differences that caught my eye. Washington and New York were far more obviously alien: Massachusetts kept seducing us with its familiarity – Chinatown in Boston is no different from the London version off Leicester Square – until suddenly we’d put a foot through the stage-set, slip on an all-purpose tomato, confront the enigma of parakeet diapers and realize again that this, for us, was a Phil Dick reality that didn’t quite fit.

That we’d entered an alternate universe grew irrefutable on Thursday night. At the bedside was a heap of magazines; unearthing a 1979 Starlog Yearbook I read with growing unease that “In 1978 the TAFF winner was British fan and cartoonist Terry Jeeves.” Now wait a minute....

Friday 5 September 1980

Waving from the “Route 128” station platform, Martin and Selina shrank out of sight, eventually, as Amtrak rushed us southward with all the mad haste of Remembrance of Things Past. The goal was Washington, where we planned to accept with all graciousness Avedon Carol’s kind invitation to stay as long as we liked with Alexis and Dolly Gilliland. “Hi, I can’t hear you,” Dolly had told me reassuringly over the phone, so we knew it would be all right.

I sat, and sat, dipping into the Panshin’s SF in Dimension (revised edition, each page better than the next), thoughts churning in even slower motion than the train, something like this –

Can this journey really be going to take nine hours?

Is this Panshin evasiveness about The Number of the Beast meant to be ironic?

Will we ever finish all these suitcase-sized tuna-fish sandwiches Selina’s father made us?

Why not just say it’s a rotten book instead of poncing around with metaphysics?

What is this abiding horror of bare feet which permeates New England?

Can I really be sitting opposite a pair of hamburger-eating nuns?

“Because of The Number of the Beast, SF-to-come will be non-linear. It will be imaginary and know it.”

Gorblimey.

How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two, one to change the bulb and one to not-change the bulb. Fine, fine, but how can anyone stomach a whole book of these formula gags? In Boston it was a bestseller – maybe because anyone can do it.

(How many fans does it take to report a 6000-person convention? One to do bizarre things, and 5999 to write conflicting reports.)

Night, so soon?

Oh, a tunnel: doesn’t New York look curiously unimpressive from underneath?

Can we really be only half-way?

Can I not force myself to eat one last tuna-fish sandwich?

Do the Panshins not appreciate that by using a worthless book as the fulcrum of their poxy “transcendence” argument they are lending it an undeserved importance?

Might this not be Washington? (No.)

Will the Bushyagers forgive me for not stopping off in Philadelphia?

Will my mouth ever cease to taste of tuna-fish sandwich?

How many Panshins does it take to transcend a lightbulb?

Have I bought too many books?

Have I not rather bought too few?

Are these inane reflections not reminiscent of Edward Lear’s Corsican diary?

“Should there not be innumerable moufflons?”

... thus and thus, into a semi-coma; until, far later than any reasonable person could have imagined it, Washington happened.

Dolly Gilliland seized upon us with terrifying competence and threaded the vast echoing halls of Washington station, in which small-town shacks like Buckingham Palace might have been mislaid without effort. After half an hour’s portage through deserted vaults we saw ahead a glimmer of evening light and another of Alexis, who instantly assumed the persona of all-knowing tourist guide, beginning with a sort of indoor Colosseum which functioned – though not just then – as a slide-show of Washington’s wonders.

“When they’ve built the Nixon Monument,” he drawled in tones impossible to disbelieve, “they’ll be showing the Watergate story here. The musical.”

We spiralled through sultry Washington in the Gilliland car, heads twisting right – left – right – left as Dolly and Alexis took turns to point out cosmically important landmarks, every third building another branch of the famous Smithsonian chain. Einstein’s bronze statue with his three famous formulae engraved there (and in my confusion I could only remember two), the ponderous and marble Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the White House, all looking unbelievably like their pictures, and what was this subdued mutter by my side? “All this monumental stuff reminds me of those newsreels of 1930s Berlin,” said Hazel unforgivably.

There came a growing sense of crescendo as we approached the most famous edifice of all, which in later days we’d be proudly shown from every conceivable angle and then a few more. In blank nonrecognition we stared across the Potomac River at that unimposing frontage, or backage.

“That,” said Alexis reverently, “is Watergate.”

Both of us sat with a wild surmise, almost ashamed that we had no hats to doff, until the golden moment was past.

The sprawling Gilliland house, with huge party/meeting rooms and only intermittent space for actual living, might have been bought entirely for the convenience of the Washington SF Association. Indeed, as I learnt with mild bogglement, it was. “We wanted somewhere with privacy and big bedrooms, but we saw this one and said ‘WSFA!’”

I saw how full it was that very night, and deduced: “WSFA!” But not only WSFA; the thronging members were bemused by an influx of Brits, and even of Terry Hughes, drawn by who knows what dread incantations from the Falls Church vault where from year to year he lies entombed in uncollated Motas. That party polarized, most of WSFA doing the things WSFA does in the largest basement room, while to Alexis’s mingled pride and alarm the British and their cronies settled like a swarm of locusts upon his stocks of home brew in the adjacent cellar. Caring nothing for mere comfort, these sots perched themselves on crates of bottles, producing arcane indentations on their buttocks which Paul Kincaid tried to interest Hazel in as a new knitting pattern.

Jim Barker was still brimming over with JLAS news – “Roz Kaveney managed to stand the Noreascon meeting of the Jakkies for a whole seven minutes before she got driven away by its awfulness, and you may think that’s not much, but Rochelle Reynolds only clocked up thirty seconds!” He made an expansive gesture with a can of Alexis’s imported Theakston’s Old Peculier – seemingly a dilute form of the deadly Yorkshire brew, specially for foreigners – and tipped quantities of it upon the groin of Avedon Carol. Menacingly she told him of how when Susan Wood was introduced to someone called Platt (“Don’t mention Platt near Ted White!” cried Jack Chalker from somewhere) she knelt down with amazing grace and sank her teeth into his finger, and he tipped beer on her, and she pitched an ashtray at him....

No ashtray was to hand, but Jim got his comeuppance when Avedon introduced us round WSFA and certain cultured members asked, “What’s Scotland?” Similarly, parts of DC fandom stared at me saying “What’s TAFF?” and one Pat Kelly, after long concentration on Hazel’s arcane English accent, was moved to ask: “What part of Australia do you come from?”

“They’re all cretins anyway,” Avedon said, or words to that effect, and plunged madly on with her introductions. “Here’s Dave, he’s a deaf gossip columnist!”

“Jerry Pournelle is deaf, which is why he shouts,” confided Jack Chalker, looming at me in a way which made me hope he hadn’t read my reviews of Jack Chalker books. Luckily the connection “British... shouting...” led him off at a peaceful tangent: “It’s ironic Peter Weston should have shouted at me about SFWA things at Seacon – I’m usually the one who has to shout at the idiots in SFWA.” The light in his eye may or may not have indicated a wistful longing to give up shouting at people, and instead to transform them into grotesque and degraded shapes, as done with relish in every Chalker novel I’d read.

Harry Bell (“British fans love to vomit. You Americans just don’t know how to have a good time.”), Jim, Dan Steffan, Steve Stiles and Alexis were indulging in sinister smoffery, promoting a Cartoonists’ Popular Front to push Grant Canfield for TAFF in 1983. “What we have to do first is degafiate him,” I thought I overheard.

Most of the evening, as with so many fannish evenings, was a pleasurable blur which (now that I’ve lost count of how often I was shown Alexis’s Hugo and FAAn Awards, for example) might as well be concealed under the interlineation begged at the time by

Ted White – by special request of Ted White.

I don’t know why either, but he dictated it Himself, and made me write it down and promise to use it somewhere real soon now. Five years... that’s not too many.

We nearly even met the fabulous Martin Morse Wooster, only he was away at a sneak preview of Flash Gordon, no doubt making notes for his History of Fandom.

Avedon was currying favour for her own TAFF campaign by tempting Hazel with Armenian fanzines, and by sitting on the right knee of J. Barker. “My heart belongs to another,” she hastily qualified. “And my body belongs to someone else entirely.”

“Oh God! It’s you!” said Newton Ewell, entering and gazing on the classic Langford features with well-simulated horror. He mumbled a mumble about how I’d rescued him from a death worse than fate at Noreascon, something I myself could barely remember because it all happened long ago in Chapter 3.

But forces too appalling even to think about were converging on me. Suddenly Avedon had leapt forward to dominate the WSFA hordes, instructing them that they were all desperate to see and attempt the fabulous initiation of the Astral Leauge. Alexis and Dolly produced, with sinister smiles, a fair facsimile of the ritual pole. In an epidemic of malicious cowardice, fans in the know hastily pleaded excessive drunkenness, sobriety, obesity, arthritis, alopecia, anything. I felt the fierce light that beats upon a scaffold as under the pitiless gaze of WSFA, the pitiless giggles of my former friends and the proddings of Avedon, I found my mouth again saying, “First you hold it like this, then you put your foot through here, and –”

As I wove myself into a double reverse Gordian knot, there came an anonymous voice. “I heard the British were kinky, and now I know why.” To my Welsh ears this was wounding, wounding.

From an improvised wheelchair I later saw the Astral Feat performed by remarkably few eager initiates, two in fact, one of whom was Charles Gilliland (son of the famous...). Charles, as Avedon noted, is young enough for it not to hurt – even D. West complains of being outperformed by his kids, you know.

Human sacrifice being the traditional culmination of any barbaric gathering, WSFA avoided anticlimax by starting to drift away. When the Brits were finally peeled from the home-brew fridge, it was found to be (as Alexis noted with mingled alarm and pride) empty.

En route to bed, Hazel and I paused twice to gape: firstly at the Gillilands’ brand new $7000 Chinese-dragon-pattern carpet, which had actually been exposed to the fringes of the WSFA rout in an act of confidence unthinkable among fans used to Harry Bell or Greg Pickersgill; and secondly, for a long while, at an alien visitation outside the front door. The thick, buzzing night was like warm soup with flies in it, the porch lamp spilled just enough light to where It clung on the wall, and we’d never seen a praying mantis before. Improbably green, implausibly huge, it turned stiffly this way and that with all the unrealism of an SF special effect. We gaped.

“About four inches long,” said Newton, who knew about these things. “Small. They go up to six inches or more in these parts.” Hazel and I were on the whole thankful that we’d started in a small way. An endless flow of mantis lore came fluently from the Ewell lips, until we reluctantly accepted that the beast wasn’t going to seize dramatically on passing flies, discharge laser beams, or cut a swathe of devastation across Tokyo. The mere fact that this SF monstrosity wasn’t safely confined in a zoo sent us to bed, at last, with sense of wonder exuding from every pore.

Saturday-Sunday 6-7 September 1980

Again we were wafted off to be tourists, hurtling past notable places where Alexis worked or used to work, such as the Pentagon – a week’s experience of American cars not saving me from the instinctive cringe each time my reflexes shrieked things about driving on the wrong side of the road.

With the aid of Terry Hughes we infested parts of the Smithsonian, where notices by each lift-door advised SAVE ENERGY / WALK UP ONE / WALK DOWN TWO, surely a rather energy-intensive algorithm for going down one floor. Almost the first exhibit was a rotten log pretending to be an ecological community: you touched the button and vile insects and fungi grew all over the wood. “The fannish community,” Alexis explained. “The rotten log is SF and on it are all these strange growths....”

An exhibit of Iranian textile painting offered us a genuine cloth crudsheet; Hazel bewailed a lack of her favourite Tuaregs in a display of African tribes; homesickness touched my heart when nobody made a Rob Holdstock joke over the reconstruction of Homo erectus; Terry took thought for foreigners as a slide show of the Ice Age impended and he cheerfully said, “You folk should appreciate all these pieces of ice and snow.”

Hazel was pondering the comparative fewness of actual exhibits – “Can you imagine the British Museum wasting all this space?” – when we reached the first, baffling displays of “Dynamics of Evolution”. I stared at a heap of 36 identical shrews evocatively labelled SHREWS, and eight stuffed SOOTY TERNS lying forlornly on their backs, and 221 GROUND BEETLES, none showing signs of evolving: apparently they embodied the diversity of animal life. We passed on to the heavily guarded Hope diamond, which I was afraid Hazel might covet, but she thought the setting vulgar and preferred sapphires anyway, an international incident thus being avoided until we got to the sapphires. I goggled at the even better guarded Moon rocks, speculating on the chance of one day purchasing a lump from the 300+ kilos of unexamined (thanks, I gather, to Senator Proxmire’s merry men) samples, perhaps to replace the pumice stone in our bathroom....

Emerging much later, we passed further monumental things, knocking our heads three times against the car’s floor at sight of the IRS building. Hordes of fans converged on “Dino’s Steak House”, where I fancied the third biggest steak on offer, only to have Hazel complain “That’s three times what I give you at home!”

“Well, this is America,” I said feebly.

“Not so much a question of what Dave likes as of what Hazel lets him like,” murmured a slanderous P. Kincaid, who may yet suffer for that.

All this was the preliminary to semi-drunken revels in Avedon’s – actually Avedon’s parents’ – basement, a large room boasting a bar (bring your own drink), real bar stools, a pinball machine and other attributes enabling nostalgia-smitten Harry to pretend this was a pub really. He, Jim, Terry, Paul, various Gillilands and I took turns to lose miserably to Avedon at pinball, intimidated more than we chose to admit by the notice on the machine boasting a record score of 1,251,250 by The Fabulous Avedon Carol.

Upstairs Hazel, who collects strange alphabets and interesting peoples, was collecting the Armenian alphabet and Avedon’s parents, who seemed happy to ignore the noises of destruction from their basement and did not confuse us much by being called Gary and Queenie Avedikian. “The Corpse and the Queen,” their daughter translated. From time to time I nipped up to swap hearing-aid gossip and practice shouting with Mr. A, who wears twice as many aids as me. He at once demanded that Hazel come out and be received into the local Armenian church; or that was how it reached my ears.

“Can you trust her alone with that man,” said Avedon earnestly, but already Hazel had gone, carolling “I’m enjoying myself at last!” It seemed a long while before she returned, making little noises of ecstasy and clutching a T-shirt blazoned with the Armenian alphabet. I had to dissuade her from trying to take the whole family home with us: she compromised by insisting on nominating Avedon for TAFF. Oh, the corruption that goes on behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, Jim had discovered that you could run two-player games on the pinball machine. His face split in an enormous grin, and those who knew Jim cast up their eyes in resignation and dread. “He’s going to say it,” I whispered as Charles Gilliland bagged the Player-1 position...

“I’ll be the new Number Two!” said the famous producer of The Captive.

It was after ten o’clock when Dolly, returning from watching what Avedon swore was the Miss America Pageant on TV, brought Mrs. A’s offer of coffee all round. A hollow groan from Harry, who’d just been getting into the mood – “The pubs don’t close for an hour yet.” I thought I saw teetotal Avedon making mental notes about us; later she merely remarked that if there had been any witty repartee she didn’t remember it. Er, quite.

Next morning Hazel continued to enjoy herself. Having gleaned that there was a genuine authentic mosque in the vicinity, she demanded to see it. Dutifully we took off our shoes in the porch; a resentful acolyte issued Dolly and Hazel with shawls to cover their infidel hair. (“Argh!” said Hazel afterwards. “I carried my respectable long dress all this way and didn’t think to wear it there...”) The interior was huge, bare, brightly-tiled and impressive, with exotic carpets and almost no furniture bar a few chairs where women and children respectfully sat while men practised freestyle kneeling and banging of heads against the floor, as though in the throes of unheard disco music. Another and fiercer acolyte urged us to chairs when coordinated prayers and chants began. Allah akbar! Hazel was in raptures, Alexis impassive as always; Dolly kept saying through her teeth such enthusiastic things as, “We’ll give you just five more minutes.”

Eventually dragged outside by the combined efforts of three strong fans, Hazel was heard to say dreamily, “I could have stayed in there forever.”

“It just seemed that way,” came a chorus of three voices.

Next stop was another of Hazel’s shrines, the National Geographic headquarters, which looked just as I’d always imagined a National Geographic headquarters should look. A temple more to my liking was Moonstone Bookcellars, the only underground specialist detective/SF bookshop in Washington: proprietor Phil Grossman was a fan himself, and lavishly handed out bookmarks, document cases and shopping bags bearing the Moonstone name and logo. “This is why people like to go round with the Gillilands,” said Dolly smugly as we staggered under the weight of free gifts. Overwhelmed by this and by having filled out my Edward Gorey collection, I promised a free plug in the relevant section of TAFF report, and this has been it.

Eventually, alas, I was dragged outside by the combined efforts of three strong fans, and forced to read the Gettysburg Address from the inner marble wall of the Lincoln Memorial. Dolly’s enthusiasm almost made me feel barbarous and provincial for never having memorized the thing at school – or Magna Carta either, for that matter. The actual memorial is a sort of vault enclosing a whopping statue, very much huger and in slightly better taste than what one of G.K. Chesterton’s characters calls “our partly joyous institution of the Albert Memorial.” We perhaps lack a sense of history, and don’t even employ armed security guards to prevent kids approaching our memorials on impious roller-skates.

A long pool stretches away from Lincoln, like the one before the Taj Mahal, with an expanse of green park on either side: kites were flying here and there, and Dolly reminisced about once having to haul hers in because its string might have brought down the Presidential helicopter. Ah, America, land of opportunities unknown near Downing Street.

There was time for a final sightsee at the Torpedo Factory Art Centre, formerly a (surprise!) torpedo factory, where in dozens of little workshops an array of creative talent was converting raw materials of paint, metal, glass or enamel into money. Lulled into false security by the informal surroundings, one was suddenly blackjacked by the prices; a few more dragons, a few more unicorns, and it might have been the supply centre for those Noreascon dealers. Hazel and I scattered admiration this way and that, consulted our dwindling stock of travellers’ cheques, and escaped empty-handed.

Being also empty-stomached, we were lured to the Hsain Foong Chinese restaurant by the promise of a first encounter with that great Sino-American delicacy, fortune cookies. The preliminaries included food and table talk; I misread “Hunan” as “Human” beef, leading to a series of gags about long cow. Dolly revealed that she was born in Reading, Pa., and Alexis that “Marx is to political theory what Khalil Gibran is to philosophy.” Then came the great moment: Hazel’s cookie told her, “You never miss the water till the well runs dry,” and she became quite upset – “It’s not true! When you’ve read as many books on the Sahara as I have....” Mine contained the sententious comment “It’s nice to be important but it’s important to be nice.” “That,” said Alexis with his usual tact, “means don’t drag people into bookstores.”

Later, when the rest had gone to bed, he treated me to a lecture on his version of “the oriental mode of production”, whereby capitalist societies bog down in regulations and controls, thus achieving stasis rather than going bang in the revolution demanded by Marxist orthodoxy. For some reason my thoughts touched on the BSFA, and then moved on to contemplate Worldcon organization.

“This is a bit sercon,” I seem to recall saying, out of my depth. Obligingly Alexis switched to telling me about his SF novels. “Somtow Sucharitkul is good at the high-flown stylistic stuff, poetic descriptions... I’m not, I’m good at plot and dialogue. What are you good at? What are you writing?”

Little did he know that this was a question to make me cringe, my first SF novel deadline being at the end of that year and the draft being woefully incomplete, not to say nonexistent. A day or two in New York, a flight home, and the bloody thing would have to be written. A bony, spectral hand seemed to clutch me by the goolies.

“Um,” I said slowly and painfully. “I’ve written a title, The Space Eater, and, er...”

“Have another beer,” said kind Alexis, letting me off the hook before I could blurt out the horrid truth – that the unwritten work already had the Panshin seal of disapproval owing to its not being Transcendental, so that naturally, I thought, nobody would ever buy it. (I was not as sensible then as I am now.)

With a sense of many missed opportunities in our too-rapid visit, we left the strange and alien American capital next morning, via a train called The Crescent whose air-conditioning turned our breath to white smoke and the smoke to tinkling crystals. To wander off to the toilet was to risk the fate of Captain Oates. Icebergs formed and bumped about in our veins as we trundled through the red-hot day, in what could only be Amtrak’s Arctic acclimatization chamber, towards the frozen northern parallels of New York.

I Was a Worm in the Big Apple

Monday 8 September 1980, continued

Andy Porter, a reassuringly bearlike figure, helped us out of Penn Central Station more or less by the scruffs of our necks. Though travel-worn we’d greeted him effusively: “Gug,” said Hazel. “Nng,” I agreed. Sensing that dynamism was at a low ebb, Andy got us to his apartment by heroic efforts involving cattle-goads, firemen’s lifts and subway tokens used in a manner not convenient to describe. “....,” I remember saying gratefully as at last I sank to the floor in Pineapple Street, Brooklyn.

The Porter apartment was a deeply fannish venue, with vast toppling heaps of Algol/Starship (anyone remember that?) and SF Chronicle everywhere; ramparts of mint review books which Andy generously offered to sell us (I have never equalled the chutzpah of his insistence that publishers send two copies of everything, one for the reviewer and one to sell to visitors); typewriters and ansaphones and a pan-galactic card index which late one night I was graciously permitted to update with a hundred-odd new cards for new Starship subscribers.... But behind the gay exterior lurked the hidden terrors of New York. Why was half the kitchen-cupboard space sealed up and inaccessible? We never got round to asking. Why did Andy return ashen-faced and tight-lipped from an innocuous trip downstairs? “I saw a roach in the trash,” he gritted through clenched nostrils, and secured fourteen bolts and three locks on the apartment door, frenziedly spraying door-edges, floors, walls, food and guests with an aerosol labelled something like Zyklon-B.

We’d hit upon one of the great preoccupations of New York (pronounced “Nyork”) life. With the nervous interest of hay-fever sufferers in pollen counts, fannish apartment-dwellers swap notes on the cockroach count. Even subway cars were full of ads from something called a Black Flag Roach Motel: “Roaches check in – but they don’t check out!” Or if I got the bilingual bits right, “Las cucarachas entran – per no pueden salir!” My planned witticisms on the Roach Motel were pre-empted by despicable Leroy Kettle (only a year later), so out of spite I now steal his version: “A superficially attractive little cardboard construction into which the vile monsters march with remorseless stupidity until they die gurgling in vast quantities of their own secretions. It’s incredible how many countries seem to have their own version of the BSFA.” Thank you, Leroy.

When Andy had calmed down from his attempted acts of genocide in self-defence, we found it was still early afternoon and strolled out to see the sights. Dr Johnson used to quip about the finest sight a Scotsman ever sees being the high road leading to England; similarly, the sights of Brooklyn are all down by the East River and consist of Manhattan Island. We duly gaped at the edited highlights which were actually visible of the Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Libertarianism, World Trade Centre (or Center), Empire State and Chrysler buildings, and as Hazel was swift to observe it was all just like the photographs. Amazing, astounding, analog! Descriptions of sightseeing are liable to be a bore without the special angle which converts them to insightseeing, and by then I was clean out of insights. Conversely, although the secret of trip reporting lies in knowing what to leave out, the second law of thermodynamics has been nibbling at my memories to leave the far more challenging problem of finding something to leave in. The remaining evidence for the prosecution consists of a mere nine Fortran cards pencilled with the faded Langford minuscules which made Hazel accuse me of writing microfiche.... I wonder how Proust did it without Fortran cards?

It was bloody hot. (Pause to omit joke about Muriel Spark’s Hothouse by the East River.) Even hardened NY city cops, laden with what appeared to be about 30% of the arms race, could be seen staggeringly pathetically to lap at drinking fountains. “Your accent is so thick,” Andy told me bafflingly, but perhaps he was referring to the air, which pressed around us like tepid gumbo. Dimly through the glop we encountered Sarah Prince, Sue-Rae Rosenfeld, Lise Eisenberg (large) and Moshe Feder (small). “Peter Roberts,” said Moshe earnestly, “wanted to go up the Empire State building because it was more traditional than the World Trade Centre even if the WTC is higher.” Passively agreeing, I found I’d booked Hazel and self for a trip next day up the Empire State.

Through fading evening heat, Moshe led us to stock up at the nearest bagel dispensary carrying his rare Seal of Approval (as withheld from everywhere in Boston). The alien comestibles were vaguely doughnutoid, coming in a variety of creeds and colours: ordinary, dark, fruity, onion, worcester sauce plus chocolate-chip, etc. I failed to collapse in hysterics at someone’s quip about onion bagels as a secret password to Harry Harrison. Evidently my overloaded sense of wonder had finally sputtered out.

But not for long. Trance persisted through the subway journey (where points for style and cool were awarded to a vast black chap seen air-conditioning himself with a battery-powered fan)... but the Staten Island ferry, even more trad than the Empire State, overwhelmed my blasé sleepwalker’s pose in sheer bogglement. Out over the water, all Manhattan was glowing like a clutch of neon-lit Chris Foss paintings. Noises like Goshwowboyoboy emanated from slack-jawed Langford, and little oohs and ahs from formerly jaded Hazel. Flocking to the rail like Gadarene swine, the rest of the tourist passengers snapped photos of the lurid spectacle – overcoming the problem of the dark by using flashguns at half-mile range. Even those aggressively dull WTC towers had become cubist Christmas trees, outglittering everything else in view: “Japs still working,” Andy clarified. “There are two rush hours in New York, five o’clock and again at seven when the Japs go home.”

The Statue of Liberty was floodlit too. It didn’t seem right: how can they let something with that mythic power (in SF, anyway) just be there, year in, year out? Surely it should be rationed, unveiled on rare and ceremonial occasions.... While thinking about large mythic figures, I unguardedly told Andy my theory that he resembles two British authors, a touch of each: Mike Scott Rohan and Andrew Stephenson. The latter name rang unexpected bells. “Oh, him, He’s the guy who goes around with a bottle of whisky in his hand, inseparable – I’ve got pictures to prove it.” Pause to worry: this sounded more like me.

The ferry droned on remorselessly and I finished waking up, to find that the party consisted only of myself, Hazel, Andy and Lise: Moshe, poor devil, had retired to review his advance copy of Tolkien’s Unpublishable Tales. We fell on the defenceless bagels, which were triffic with cream cheese but more dubious with lox. I’d always thought the latter was a liquefied gas you kept in bottles, not part-liquefied fish you put in bagels... like gas it escapes at the slightest opportunity, and the analogy might be taken further but not here.

A vast free light-show of planes and copters erupted over the Manhattan skyline, yet another 50s SF vision: even the illuminated cranes at the docks were Fossiferous laser cannon aimed into the sky. I tried to curb the sensawonder before Andy started to remind me of Gort or Mighty Joe Young. In a searing illustration of the proverb “better to travel hopefully than to arrive,” there turned out to be nothing whatever do on on Staten Island except catch the ferry straight back... and venture on foot into the untamed interior. (Hazel complained of an untamed interior, but this was merely the lox.)

Up close, the Manhattan streets shed their technicolor glamour. Down-and-outs slept in heaps by the ferry terminal like the aftermath of Saturday at Noreascon, diffusing a pong of urine. Hazel claimed to overhear an Illicit Transaction in the street, and Andy informed us that 42,088 bullets had been made from a statue of George III previously erected in this vicinity by grateful Nyorkers. Nineteenth-century edifices burst into gormenghastly outbreaks of gothic furbelows and classical pillars, hundreds of feet from the ground. At Trinity Church, alarmingly vast and black, we learnt that savage New York sanctions against Iran involved noonday bell-ringing. Liberty Tower (“Being Restored As A Residential Co-Operative Gothic Skyscraper”), Federal Reserve Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank.... Andy seemed especially keen on banks, perhaps owing to his semi-pro ambitions, and explained deadpan that a certain panel in the Chase Manhattan plaza contained a plunger which would destroy the whole massive erection. He even pointed out the panel, which opened at his touch, and...

Everything went a bit surreal at this point, and I don’t wholly trust my hallucinations of a fifteen-inch illuminated clock buried in the pavement (sc. sidewalk), the ornate mosque ceilings of the Woolworth Building, a panel boasting 5,600 branches of Woollies in ten countries, and our brief collapse on the steps of City Hall. By 10pm it was cool enough to sleep, a bracing 76°F, and we caught the subway to Pineapple Street.

There were three sofas in the Porter residence. One was nobly proportioned but deep-frozen by the main air-conditioning fan: the prognosis included cramp, hypothermia, chilblains, frostbite and death. The others were each four feet long. Hazel contrived to curl up, giggling and yawning at the same time (versatile woman) – while I tried to balance left-over bits of my own six-three (chiefly my feet) on painstakingly constructed piles of old Algols. Since that night, I’ve had enormous difficulty in remembering that it was Macbeth and not the Porter who murdered sleep.

Tuesday 9 September 1980

Suffice it to say that old copies of Algol are slippery. A further scientific discovery was that bagels, left overnight, assume the texture of structural concrete. We left Andy gnawing them in preference to the only alternative (his review copies), and with insane confidence headed for the subway. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, was to meet Moshe at the Museum of Natural History. Forensic analysis has utterly failed to reconstruct the route we took: the Tube in London has no pangs to compare with seeing your chosen station flash by and deducing you are on a blasted “uptown express” which is determined to take you somewhere like Poughkeepsie. As on a golf course, the inept neophyte gets a lot more value and mileage for the money.... Moshe was frankly disbelieving when told of how we had to search the museum from within to locate the special, convenient, direct-from-subway entrance where he awaited us.

Hazel pronounced this museum better than the Smithsonian for your actual density of exhibits, and had a great time. Amid the bumf on a Zulu-ritual exhibit I found the cheering phrase “libations of beer alone can absolve the people’s sins”, a point for US con-fandom to ponder. Vondänikenesque exhibits included “spaceman” masks and the kinky regalia of the Ibo Society of Ghosts, a whole-body knitted garment oddly foreshadowing Damart Thermawear. Nothing foreshadowed Gary Farber, who appeared as if by magic, simultaneously with our discovery of a full-size blue whale in tasteful fibreglass. Moshe carefully explained that the whale wasn’t a real one, but neglected to confirm the status of Mr Farber.

Soon we hit the streets again, enthused by Gary’s recommendation of the Big Apple: “The only place where I’ve found a kosher Chinese pizza house.” The world-renowned Feder city tour began with the offer of a peep at the Dakota building where Richard Bergeron lurked, “as seen in Time After Time and Rosemary’s Baby.” The reclusive one was still in New York (and still in possession of his marbles) then. John Lennon was still alive. I was still under thirty....

In Central Park, a man picked a small, full glass from the ground with his teeth, drinking it without spilling a drop. (Can D. West do this?) I was momentarily dubious about the park’s internal nomenclature – Horse Dropping Walk, Gayrights Path – but Moshe was impossible to disbelieve. He knew all. For each NY building he could (and did) recite name, date, nature and purpose, all major renovations/redecorations, and principal childhood illnesses of the architect. My notes luckily failed to keep up. Hazel scorned his effort to tempt her with glittery shops like Tiffany’s; there was nothing for it but a bus to the Empire State Building, where new horror struck.

“You’ve got to have 60¢ ready,” Moshe had said. I obeyed slavishly, $1.20 in hand to cover self plus Hazel (I did O-level maths, I’ll have to know). The surly driver looked at my huge plutocratic dollar bill as though it were a badly forged rouble: “No bills,” he barked. I groped frantically for change while a queue of 5,271,009 people formed magically behind me and grew restive, and of course I dropped dimes all over the floor, and smashed my head clangorously into a metal rail provided specially for people who tried to pick up change.... Thus I sulked with a headache for the ensuing ride past millions of famous shops, Gucci, Cartier, Saks, etc., while in an undertone Moshe revealed the number of bricks used to construct each one, also the current owners’ inside leg measurements.

The Empire State experience starts unpromisingly, with a walk downstairs for your $2.25 ticket. Moshe resumed our education in the lift and seemed mildly irritated when a girl asked hopefully if he was an official guide. From the 80th floor he pointed out obscure landmarks: the Coney Island Parachute Drop near the horizon this way, the giant Unisphere globe from the 1964-5 World’s Fair far off that way, and “The stadium is, er, that stadium-shaped thing.” We were on a high windy perch, railed-in and much overpopulated, with an utterly unconvincing scale model of the city wavering in heat-haze far below. Yellow Cabs crawled like infant beetles. Alarmingly, the next lift to the 102nd floor had an altimeter rather than the usual indicator.... 1250 feet. I felt exceptionally traditional and touristy – also, not quite real. The very top chamber is a small, hot, blue-painted steel room like the interior of a bomb. THE TOP OF THE BIG APPLE, said untruthful signs: the view from tiny, cloudy windows was even less convincing. Being up there is a state of mind.

A final touch of wonderment, which somehow gave perspective to the hugeness, came as we left and Gary asked the info-desk where he could find the toilet. “There isn’t one,” they said. Outside, we gazed awestruck up 102 floors and marvelled at the inhabitants’ self-control. (I’d already had suspicions of the little gobs and splutters of pseudo-rain that kept hitting us in the streets, but allowed myself to be persuaded that these were merely the excretions of high-up air conditioners.)

Moshe was quite distinctly miffed when again taken for an official guide, ths time in the vast Barnes & Noble bookshop. (Apparently he’s tired of having his leg pulled in this area, and awaits each new TAFF report with mounting dread. Oops.) Meanwhile I acquired a stack of books which almost ruptured several things including my credit card, and Hazel chased a cockroach. It was small and elusive, and she followed it intently from shelf to shelf. Gary and Moshe leapt back in alarm, projecting “We’re not with this person” vibes at innocent passers-by. A sidelong whisper from Moshe: “Why’s she trying to catch it?” With irrefutable logic I explained: “She’s never seen one before.” Stark disbelief from Moshe: ‘But you were at Stu’s!’ I gleaned the impression that our night chez Shiffman without the scuttle of tiny feet was an event which shattered legends, a portent on the same order as blue moons, flying pigs, and correct punctuation in the writings of Alan Dorey. Eventually Hazel desisted, consoled by a loyal husband with the thought that her quarry was too small and she’d have had to throw it back anyway.

A great deal of complicated walking revealed flaws in the rectilinear idealism of New York’s street plan: Einstein might approve of the curved space in which West 4th Street intersects West 11th Street, but Euclid would have a fit. Eventually we found ourselves studying the illuminated Empire State building from a distance quite far enough to account for the meeting of parallel lines, and Gary chilled my bones with the casual remark, “You realize we’ve walked all the way from there?” Instantly I realized my feet were raw pulpy masses exuding a substance resembling bolognese sauce, and we collapsed into an alleged Indian restaurant. It must have been very exclusive and special: I’d never before seen Indian menu entries like “Yummy Potatoburgers” or “Punjab Dinner for One/Two – From the Land of Zesty Punjabis”. Despite all ordering different things, we received teensy identical portions of Generic Brown Curry, except for Moshe, who got nothing at all. Scurrilous conversation saved the meal: “Harry Andruschak used to be fandom’s biggest fugghead – went round propositioning all the women, then decided he was bisexual and propositioned all the men,” etc. Moshe, eyes narrowed, complained that it was harder to understand Langford now than at Noreascon. Hazel explained with lightning tact: “He always talks slower when he’s drunk.”

The day was running down. We had an awesome glimpse of the apartment block containing Charles Platt... a fun visit to an ice cream shop where I discovered the Irish Whiskey flavoured version and ever-didactic Moshe instructed me in the subtleties of how to eat it... Bill Rotsler walking by the same shop as we left, ice-creams that pass in the night... a “Head Shop” devoted to the paraphernalia of naughty substances, with everyone lurking cravenly outside as I bought a nice present for Peter Roberts, banana flavoured cigarette wrappers (“pure cannabis paper, finest rolling paper in the world”)....

The almost godlike Mr Porter welcomed the returned travellers with a half pint of near-beer: Britfans will realize my state when I mention tears of gratitude at being offered Harp lager. “You could get several Gary Farbers on to that,” assured Andy Procrustes as he shoehorned me again between the arms of the four-foot couch. “Vernon Brown and Pat Baxter only used one between them when they stayed here....” No doubt. And so to “sleep”, brooding on why my memories of the day, far from being a richly coherent sociological and intellectual exposition replete with moral instruction for the young, instead resembled a smashed kaleidoscope.

Last Day: Wednesday 10 September 1980

After all-night protrusion, my legs had the sturdiness of asparagus. I soon gave up trying to clean sweaty footprints from the valuable copies of Algol. The bagels, speculatively placed in the fridge, now aspired to being neutronium. I could feel my sentences getting shorter, more fragmented, as our flight time neared... even if it wasn’t until 22:15 that evening. Andy tried to soothe us with the antiquities and oak panelling of the nearby Long Island Historical Society. Local-interest material in the Society bookshop included the undeniably local title Last Exit to Brooklyn, as well as a history of Coney Island titled Sodom by the Sea. The memory of our promise to Lunch With Moshe produced a resurgence of deathly pallor – due not to fear that he’d tell us the unexpurgated history of luncheons, but to the prospect of another lone subway journey.

Andy scribbled us a freehand map, full of HERE BE TYGERS and EDGE OF WORLD – GO BACK. “Made your wills?” he asked solicitously. With false confidence we stalked out and demonstrated our sense of direction by not getting lost in the elevator to Pineapple Street. At this point we paused, wondering which way to go, until Andy shouted from the fire escape, pointed, and threw down a fluttering, forgotten subway map. Delusions of self-confidence were abandoned.

This time we beat Moshe to the rendezvous point, and admired slums and an immense, revolutionary wall-painting for several minutes before being quick-marched to the Yonah Schimmel Knishery, where Moshe’s cultural shame at Boston’s “small red egg-shaped knishes” was at last wiped out by giving us the Real Thing. We smacked our lips vigorously despite total failure to remember how the false knish had tasted in Boston. (Later – no memory in UK of how the real knish tasted in New York. I blame Heraclitus.) Next came the even realler thing, the Crown Kosher Deli: “Don’t embarrass me by asking for milk!” hissed Moshe. As a generous concession I drank beer, while Hazel declined Dr Brown’s Celery Pop.

Onward to the Waldorf-Astoria, Times Square, notorious 42nd street with porn films showing on either side, and more, and more: if ace guide Moshe had pointed out the Taj Mahal I’d have mechanically written Taj Mahal in my notes. The afternoon slipped by, with Hazel and I developing a tendency to scream at the sight or mention of aircraft, air, birds, flies, even geometrical or astral planes. Our touching farewell scene on a subway platform was marred by persistent strangers, lured by Moshe’s air of authority into asking route directions. The train squatted, humming, unmoving, for subjective hours, us inside and Moshe on the platform, swapping uneasy grins, farewell noises used up. Eventually the graffiti-encrusted train grumbled off into the tunnel, Hazel declared Moshe to be Really Nice, and I wondered idly about the evening’s low passenger density. Andy explained all at the other end: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, “three million people staying home instead of crowding the subways.”

We packed suitcases, meditating on last things. The gloating radio promised hurricanes over the Atlantic. Hazel twitched a lot. A grey procession to the last subway journey... more goodbyes, eulogies to mighty Porter hospitality, assurances that sweaty TAFF footprints had doubled the value of all those Algols. Some while later, our special JFK Express train emerged from the catacombs, bits of New York glowing behind it in a dull red sunset like furnace heat.

JFK Departure. Hazel trembling. In eschatological mood I blew our last dollars on drinks. Hazel confessed enjoyment of: mosque, museums, National Geographic HQ, “people one at a time”. Not crowds. Not Noreascon. In macho silence I blankly failed to come up with any likes or dislikes whatever. Stern notices warned of hideous penalties for carrying bombs or drugs, also for joking about carrying same. Were there infinite levels of metapenalties for joking about joking about joking about...? Wisely I didn’t research this, but Wrong Thoughts were detected anyway as the Langford shoulder-bag provoked gadgetry to irate beeps. My shaver plus loose change formed a convincing infernal machine on the fluoroscope. Very Stainless Steel Rat. I thought of several brilliant jokes, bit them back for fear of being shot where I stood. Later I forgot them all.

Plane. Hazel near-catatonic. Fine cracks visible in Langford machismo. Cheering demonstration of lifejackets, oxygen masks, as we moved to the runway. Thrum thrum. Through the window, psychedelic glimpses of lit-up America tilted away and vanished. Me: “The big question now is, are our feet going to swell up?” Hazel, resigned: “Mine swelled up yesterday in New York.” Did Camus ever use this symbol of Angst?

Special arrangement between Laker and weather: dinner served in appetite-flattening turbulence, stomachs leaping through mouths on every side. The food: unidentifiable fine-grained probable-mince entombed in possible-pasta. Imagine a Wimpy or Burger King lasagne. Ate Hazel’s as well as my own, drank her wine, ordered liqueur, muttered excuses about abstinence in USA. She Who Must Be Obeyed feebly agreed: that foreign stuff didn’t really count as drink. Queasy blank period. Somewhere underneath, it became

Thursday 11 September 1980

The small hours. Extreme turbulence. Noise of plane bouncing along a sheet-iron runway. Pneumatic drills were also implicated. Mighty hammerblows detectably ripping off wings, battering fuselage into bagel-shape. Hazel in tears. A stewardess recited soothing lies, “happens every time, dear,” while I felt useless. Even my double assault on nervousness failed to induce stupor: dulling senses with whisky and intellect with (bought specially from Andy for this purpose) a Piers Anthony novel. All was grim until the indigestible breakfast, low flight over patchwork green England, gentle touchdown, end of notes, end of trip report.

Well, nearly. UK Customs were gratifyingly nonplussed by my declaration of a suitcase and a half full of used books: no duty, no VAT, and somehow we never got round to discussing the typeball. The Gatwick-Reading train journey was plainly a time for peaceful sleep and recuperation, but was instead dominated by a middle-aged Canadian over here to research a book on pilgrimages. As a returned pilgrim I felt well briefed, but could only stare with glassy tact while he pulled out endless rare stamps I’d surely like to see, ancient first editions which I was invited to envy – “I got a first of Gray’s Elegy at home,” the researcher droned: having instinctively dozed off at this point, I don’t remember any more.

The Langford hovel proved to be unburnt and unpillaged. Leaving an immense drift of mail to be dealt with in future months, we reaffirmed the ancient values of civilization with visits to a real tandoori restaurant (wholly devoid of Zesty Punjabis) and a real-ale pub, followed by several days’ continuous sleep. This would be the place for a final summing-up, an ultimate distillation of the TAFF odyssey’s moral lessons; but really, everything my ravaged brain can recall is somewhere in the preceding 30,000 words of variegated tedium. Gooey gratitude is again extended to all who, over these immense cycles of time, caused, inspired, enlivened, or published my long-past TAFF trip and this ensuing ego trip. The only remaining points are that I’d like to go again, while Hazel would like never to go in a plane again.

We’re working on it.

Appendix 1: Yesterday’s Men

This bit might well have been called Epitaff had Walt Willis and Eric Bentcliffe not cunningly used the heading in their own reports, back in the days when Leonardo da Vinci was but a neofan. (Typical skullduggery that, stealing my title while I was still under age and unable to sue.) Certainly it felt like the final stage of something when – with the air of a deceitful swimmer inviting folks to sport with him amid the friendly ice-floes – I welcomed mighty BNF Stu Shiffman to these shores and to his even mightier responsibilities such as shouting at deaf Langford, listening to Alan Dorey, and looking at D. West. It was strangely instructive to experience the ritual of the meeting of the strange foreign fan, with roles now exchanged.

We set off in the car. The car wasn’t a big car, but then its price was not a big price, i.e. nothing. My kindly aunt and uncle in Cornwall had decided that one of their spare vehicles was senile, moribund, mere yards from massive systemic collapse, not even worth the effort of pushing round to the scrapyard. “Nobody in his right mind would touch the thing if you paid him,” they said to one another above the sound of stampeding rust. “Wait a minute, though –”

“David, would you like to have a really nice little car?” came the phone call.

And, indeed, apart from the missing lamps and the fungoid growth all over the interior and the tasteful holes in the bodywork which so resemble my own little eyes (being vacant, with red rims) and the tendencies to not start, to do kangaroo impersonations on reluctantly starting, and to moult whenever parked or in motion, it was pretty good for a 1966 Ford Anglia. Especially if you remembered to top up the radiator every two hundred yards and to wear either a warm coat (because the heater didn’t work) or no coat at all (because the interior cooling fan belonged to the same union as the heater). This car, we felt, would swiftly and almost painlessly introduce Stu to the Langford lifestyle, so typical of true fans in the UK. So I scrawled TWA flight 708 10:45 don’t forget TAFF welcome banner on a bit of paper, and shortly before 10:00am, pausing only to forget the TAFF welcome banner, we set off for Heathrow. In the car.

By thrusting the accelerator far down below the floor, meanwhile jumping up and down and shouting Vroom vroom!, I called forth the full power of the mighty internal combustion engine and carved up the M4 at a shade under 55mph. At 10:20am we fell off at the Heathrow junction, there to find an impacted mass of cars, buses and taxis stretching as far as the eye could see, tooting horns as far as the ear could hear, and emitting CO₂ and lead derivatives as far as the nostril could smell. It was like bursting into one of those thought experiments where the velocity of light is a mere two miles an hour and once in a while drops to zero: as we crawled down the Heathrow motorway spur we had the familiar Lorentzian sensation of being compressed to an infinitely thin sheet, usually between two intolerant taxis. The Anglia’s temperature gauge shifted up the scale from mild paranoia to strong hysterics; the emergency backup temperature indicator came into play, emitting its preliminary warning sign of 1000 cubic feet of superheated steam. At the roadside, slugs waved their eyestalks in derision as they effortlessly outstripped us.

Hazel made warning signs against the evil eye as at last we spied the much-dreaded Heathrow Hotel; after many adventures (second, third and fourth books of epic trilogy omitted here), Childe Langford to the Dark Tower came. In this case the fortress of ultimate evil took the questionable shape of the Terminal 3 car park, where it was revealed that our handbrake was not sufficient to hold a car, a driver and a passenger on such steep slopes as are commonly encountered on the ramps of multi-storey car parks.

Hazel had a nice walk of it.

A horde of panic-stricken Langfords finally burst into Terminal 3 a quarter of an hour late, fearful lest Stu had been sucked into the Underground never to be seen again, and found that Flight 4098 wasn’t now expected until 11:25, while its luckless passengers would not escape HM Customs’ stern questioning and probing of awkward bodily orifices until, say, 12:25. We grunted at each other breathlessly. The atmosphere was strongly tropical, plainly a pathetic attempt to give a false first impression of Britain’s climate to these foreigners. We stood there.

“I suppose Stu does look the way he did before?” I said after a long while. “Suppose he’s grown a long white beard in Customs. Suppose he’s had plastic surgery and now looks like a hunchbacked Mexican dwarf with only one leg...”

“Hush,” said the light of my life. “I’m watching these interesting people. See the Hajji over there with his beard dyed red?”

“Maybe it’s natural... maybe he has Irish ancestors.”

“Gosh, look at that smashing lady in the black veil.”

“I should at least have brought a placard to tie to the umbrella, saying TAFF or something.... Also I should have brought my umbrella to tie the placard to.”

“Mmm, isn’t that sari lovely?”

Then the trench-coated hero of TAFF made his titanic way from the Customs Hall, and there was much waving, and with blinding originality I said, “Welcome to Britain in the name of the Surrey Limpwrists!”

The rest is history. You’ll all have to wait for the Shiffman TAFF report to hear how his visit to Oxford culminated in a midnight drive back to Reading wherein the car’s electrical systems became incapable of powering the ignition and headlights at the same time. Don’t miss By Starlight Across England, soon to be remaindered at your local bookshop.... (“Terrifying” – Hazel Langford.)

Appendix 2: Vital Statistics

These are the TAFF delegates so far [i.e. to 1985] – though the first, Walt Willis, was technically pre-TAFF, the special fund which took him to America having been the inspiration for all that followed. Asterisks indicate winners who for one reason or another didn’t make the trip.

Year
• Europe to NA
• NA to Europe

1952
Walt Willis

1954
Vin¢ Clarke*

1956

Lee Hoffman
[made trip at own expense]

1957

Bob Madle

1958
Ron Bennett

1959

Don Ford

1960
Eric Bentcliffe

1961

Ron Ellik

1962
Ethel Lindsay

1963

Wally Weber

1964
Arthur Thomson

1965

Terry Carr

1966
Tom Schlück

1968

Steve Stiles

1969
Eddie Jones

1970

Elliot Shorter

1971
Mario Bosnyak

1973

Len & June Moffatt

1974
Peter Weston

1976

Roy Tackett, Bill Bowers* (tie)

1977
Peter Roberts

1979

Terry Hughes

1980
Dave Langford

1981

Stu Shiffman

1982
Kevin Smith

1983

Avedon Carol

1984
Rob Hansen

1985

Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden

The current TAFF administrators are, by fairly immemorial tradition, the most recent European and North American delegates. When the print edition appeared, that meant Rob Hansen and Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden; but much beer has gone under the bridge since then. For a complete listing that is still regularly updated, see taff.org.uk.

Appendix 3: The Call of Kho-Ad

The Call of Kho-Ad [1]
by H.P. Lovecraft and Derleth Langford [2]

What nameless, gibbous force drew me on that nightmare journey across the soul-destroying wastes of the abominable ocean? What eldritch call from the uttermost shores of space and time (not to mention the Atlantic) lured me ever closer to the leprous city of Bos-Ton in the Warm Waste... there to steep my horrified ears in the croaking and jabbering of that hateful patois shamblingly uttered by its degenerate and fishy folk?

Perhaps the horror’s first inklings emerged as my reluctant eye crawled over certain forbidden passages in the unspeakable Necronoreascon [3] progress reports, where dwelt monstrous runes having the semblance of malformed lobsters and other shapes, shapes less wholesome to the view. My brain reeled before the Necronoreascon’s blasphemous promise of unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged; formless phantasms of unimaginable gratification fleered and gibbered before my ensanguined eyes; I began at once to pack. So crazed was I with insane desire that I even trafficked with the abhorrent Trans-Arkham Fungoid Federation; and it was under the shunned aegis of TAFF that I crept at last amid the polypous perversions of Bos-Ton in the Steaming Hot Waste. And at length I gazed, not without feeling partly rugose and partly squamous, upon that scabrous conurbation’s malign inner fane – the unnameable, the unspeakable, the almost unaffordable temple of Sher-Atonh-Otel.

Ah, that I could forget the demented geometries of that cyclopean edifice [4]; the crazed distortions of its impious architecture wherein gravity itself seemed horridly suspended and water found its level in a phantasmagoric swimming-pool five stupefying floors from the unhallowed ground; insane laughter bubbling from verminous vaults and illimitable mazelike arcades choked with overweight abominations; slime-bedecked altars where worshipped the hideous, exiguous cults of Lichtenberghotep and Emzeebee and fearful Drag-Anne whose works fill all of space and time; worst of all, the shuddering degradation as in the heart of that tainted necropolis I was compelled for want of proper nutriment to gorge myself on an abhorrent plasticity of fungous loathsomeness, to choke down draught after repugnant draught of viscid ichor [5]....

As the accursed rites of immemorial foulness raged on through the charnel corridors of that unholy place, one ultimate question burned like eldritch fire in my dimming mind. Which, which of the Great Old Soggy Ones was the heart of this seething evil which whiffled and burbled like some hydrophobic shoggoth through this appalling vortex of cosmic contamination? Could it be the shambling Kho-Ad, palpitating and salivating Lord of the Interliterary Spaces and all the cinereous junk therein? [6] Perhaps Abdul al-Pelz, the Fangoh or High Priest of this gibbering congregation, whose damnable computer scrolls list all the secret names of a lore too grotesque and repellent to relate? Perhaps even Bhob-Tuckerrath, the Wrinkled Goat with a Thousand Young, who incontinently wields the power of Beamsspecialbourbon stolen from the Eldest Gods? [7]

And then, and then, on the threshold of one final, hellish room-party – in a stark blaze of insane lightning which erased my sanity forever – I saw IT and I knew! Oh God, that I might forget! A great mass of bristling, funereal hair that bulged through the doorway, and not only this, but the parting of that hair, flowing blackly to either side to reveal the pitted, protoplasmic flesh forming that eldritch, hideous horror from outer Toronto, that spawn of the blankness of primal fanac, that behatted, bebottled, amorphous monster which was the lurker at the threshold, whose mask was an accretion of cimmerian beard, the noxious GLICK-SOTHOTH who froths in primal slime and Chivas Regal forever beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time![8]

“Hello, Mike,” I said....

To be continued. [9]

With nervous apologies to the late Mike Glicksohn and the late Bruce Pelz....

Notes

1. Originally “recreated” in 1981 for the archives of an occult researcher to be revealed in a later footnote. In his notes Lovecraft himself failed to supply a title for this work, but my intense spiritual rapport with him leads me to the certainty that he would have chosen this, or one with a similar number of words.

2. My own small part in this latest of Lovecraft’s 1,346 posthumous masterpieces was confined to a little rounding and polishing of the detailed plot outline which (in folded form) was found wedging a window in a house Lovecraft may well have driven past once. The original text is reproduced here:

Idea: man visits weird city and meets something pretty horrible. Or have I done this one before? Check.

3. 1980.

4. The semicolon marked here merits special attention, being a microscopically accurate copy of one handwritten by Lovecraft himself in a private letter to his bank manager. A collector’s item.

5. Conceivably vulcanized pizza and Generic Beer from the fast food counter, but these mysteries may never be wholly fathomed.

6. As good a time as any to mention that this first appeared in Rich Coad’s Space Junk.

7. This potent name appears in one of Lovecraft’s lesser-known shopping lists, and it is inconceivable that he would not have invoked it to thicken the atmosphere of the present story.

8. One of Lovecraft’s few faults was his failure to indicate each story’s climax by a good long exciting passage in italics. When he is kind enough to collaborate posthumously with me, I am always careful to correct this lapse.

9. Or not. Somehow this whole segment was omitted when The Transatlantic Hearing Aid was finally collected, perhaps because typist after typist was found speechless, twitching and afflicted with a terrible leering rictus after striving in vain to transcribe these dread words. Bloody literary critics.

Original Appearances

Bits of this report first appeared in the following fanzines and publications, in varyingly different form depending on the editors’ creative typing and the voluminousness of my own afterthoughts. Thanks to all.

Preliminary Bit
– in the collected The Transatlantic Hearing Aid, 1985. Artwork by D. West from Cloud Chamber #4 edited by Dave Langford, March 1980.

1: Travelling Hopefully
– Twll-Ddu #19 edited by Dave Langford, April 1981. Artwork by Rob Hansen – Starfan strip from Twll-Ddu #18, August 1980 – and Jim Barker with 1980 TAFF campaign material.

2: Vaster Than Empires and More Slow
– Boonfark #5 edited by Dan Steffan, August 1981. Artwork by Dan Steffan from that issue.

3: From Pole to Pole
– Nabu #11 edited by Ian Maule, 1981 [no month given]. Artwork by D. West: 1980 TAFF campaign material from somewhere now forgotten and from Ansible #7 edited by Dave Langford, March 1980.

4: The Day of the Jackpot
– Warhoon #30 edited by Richard Bergeron, September 1982. Artwork by Alexis Gilliland, 1985.

5: Running Down
– Tappen #3 edited by Malcolm Edwards, November 1981. Artwork by Brad Foster, 1985.

6: Is There Life After Worldcon?
– The Zine That Has No Name #3 edited by Paul Skelton, November 1982. Artwork by Atom from that issue.

7: Yes! We Have Parakeet Diapers
– Mainstream #9 edited by Suzanne Tompkins and Jerry Kaufman, October 1983. Artwork by Stu Shiffman from that issue.

8: I Was a Worm in the Big Apple
– Wallbanger #9 edited by Eve Harvey, May 1984. Artwork by Rob Hansen from that issue.

Appendix 1: Yesterday’s Men
– Visitor’s Pass (a one-shot) edited by Dave Langford and Stu Shiffman, April 1981. Artwork by Taral: 1980 TAFF campaign material.

Appendix 2: Vital Statistics
– in collected edition, 1985.

Appendix 3: The Call of Kho-Ad
– Space Junk #6 edited by Rich Coad, 1981.

All segments reprinted in the booklet The Transatlantic Hearing Aid (1985) were revised for that edition, Chapter 8 very substantially (don’t ask). Appendix 3, “The Call of Kho-Ad”, was wisely not included in the collected edition but hideously reanimated for the TAFF website and now for this ebook.

Additional thanks are due to Rob Jackson, who not only designed, typeset and published the 1985 print edition but later rekeyed Chapter 1 for website publication; and to Bridget Bradshaw, who even more heroically rekeyed Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Still further thanks to Rob Jackson for preserving and (thirty years later) scanning all the original artwork from that 1985 print edition, for inclusion here.

This free ebook version of The TransAtlantic Hearing Aid is exclusive to the unofficial TAFF website at taff.org.uk. If you enjoy reading it, a donation to TAFF is a fine way to express your appreciation.

That’s all. You may go now.

The End