The material in ttba is copyright © 1990 the contributors (Simon Arrowsmith, John Burnham, Jonathan Coxhead, Kim Foster, Bernard Leak, Simon Pick, Gareth Rees and Huw Walters). The material in this file may be freely copied for private enjoyment or research but may not be republished (e.g., in printed or CDROM versions), distributed in modified form, incorporated into other works, or quoted out of context without the express written permission of the copyright holder(s).
Kim Foster writes:
"From the very beginning he refused pigeonholing, and we had to deliver missives to his room. `A Rescue on Mars' (1990) glows with the speculative dash, the borderjumping effrontery, the natural taleteller's voice, that supercharge his work even now, several stories later."His stories became more and more dangerous, skewing back and forth across the field and over the fence, violating one definition of sf after another, reworking the form entirely (as in `The Vampire's Prey' (1990), a daring attempt to resolve the struggle between author and subject, taste and cliché), or making mock obeisance to the kinds of sf he could never write with a straight face (as in `The Saviour of the World' (1990) - what other modern author could attempt to tackle the Dan Dare myth in such an insistent, humanitarian fashion?).
"He is a Protean writer, an exploder of the boundaries of the genre, a confronter, a pessimist whose gaiety is sustaining, a bustling solitudinous writer who never hesitates to speak to us person to person."
The identity of the editor of the next ttba is unclear, but you should send your pieces to me or to any other member of the committee.
Your crew are the biggest bunch of wierdos this side of Maximegalon but for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day what do you expect?
First of all there is me: John the shipboard computer, who is using the personality tape(s) of a long dead psychopathic leader of a strange group. It is rumoured that this truly wonderful person was know as John Burnham.
Next we have the obligatory small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, from it's drunken mumblings we have decided it is called Mork Saton and has the undoubted honour of being a sekretry.
Then we have Arthur (call me Simon Pick) Dent. This creature is from a long dead planet called mud or something... His purpose in life is to turn every cheque he touches into rubber; apparently on his home planet this duty was called `being treasurer'. Hmmm...
Of course, how can we forgot Tim Morley, the paranoid librarian? Library the size of a planet and nowhere to house it. Life, don't talk to him about life.
Then there is Zaphod Meredith; inventor of the Bloody Meredith, rumoured to be more powerful than a PanGalactic Gargleblaster. When not indulging in these he is believed to accept money for your passage on this great starship powered by odd drive (a drive which outweirds the universe and so convinces it that you should get where you want to go as quickly as possible, preferably in no time at all) and writing messages to people. These are believed to be called `missives'!
And last (and probably least) we have Gareth Rees (which after years of research he believed would be inconspicuous on Earth (wrong!)). He is an editor of the hoopiest magazine in the western spiral arm of the Milky Way. The title is in large and famously friendly letters on the front cover; it is ttba!
Don't forget now: Share and Enjoy!!
Seriously, folks I hope you enjoy (or even get...) this copy of ttba. A couple of things: I'd really like to thank all of last years committee: Huw, Jackie, Trish, Chris, Simon and Neil, you did a great job which should be recognised.
If a story called `The NatSci Elves' appears in this (or any future copy of) ttba, I would like to stress the main character is not based on anyone at all, honest guv.
Ho hum, work beckons and I must go; but before I do, remember it's be nice to chairbeings year, so if you see me, buy me a drink or something...
David Brin (February 10th) is a very popular author of hard sf with ecological concerns. The `Uplift' cycle of books (so far he's written Sundiver, Startide Rising (the Hugo and Nebula awardwinner) and The Uplift War, with more promised) tells the story of Earth's turbulent emergence into Galactic civilisation - and the discovery that intelligent species have not evolved but have been `uplifted' using genetic engineering from animals by another alien race who were themselves uplifted, and soon. Protointelligent species (i.e. candidates for uplift) are extremely rare, and so Earth is both tremendously lucky to have so many (we see the uplift of dolphins and chimps during the trilogy, with suggestions that dogs and the rest of the great apes may follow) and tremendously evil to have killed so many potential species (a rewriting of history takes place to conceal the extinction of the whales). Earth, his most recent novel, is concerned with ecological catastrophe. Other novels are The Postman, a postholocaust story and The Practice Effect, a comedy, and there are short stories in The River of Time.
Robert Silverberg (February 24th) is one of sf's most
prolific authors, and there are three noticeable periods in his
writing. In the 50s, he wrote a vast amount of pulp, some of which is
quite readable. In the 60s he wrote a number f serious and thoughtful
sf novels, which I think are his best work. They include
Thorns, Nightwings, A Time of
Changes, Tower of Glass, Dying Inside
and To Live Again, which are all well worth reading.
After this period of intense creative output he stopped writing for
some years before returning, changed and in tune with the 80s.
Recently his novels have been larger, more masmarket, but still,
though to a lesser extent, have the marvellous landscapes and
thoughtfulness that made the earlier books so good. The best of these
are Lord Valentine's Castle, Gilgamesh the
King, Tom O'Bedlam, Star of Gypsies
and To the Land of the Living.
SF on television (March 10th) is a huge subject which
I am unable to do justice to in this small space.
Central pillars of his writing are the subjective roots of what is
taken to be objective reality, the endless petty toil of human life
within and against a world of neutral things, and a profound desire
for a transcendent resolution of a world which Dick defines very
largely in religious, but not cultic, terms.
Dick emerged only partially intact from the pursuit of Spiritual
Fulfilment by Controlled Substances which overtook large sections of
California in the sixties. He denied that he himself took anything
more potent than dope, and even then when it was still legal, but his
word is not necessarily reliable. Certainly he knew from medication
received during his paranoid schizophrenic episodes a great deal about
the effects of mind- and moodaltering drugs. He has kept a
reputation as a `druggy' author, but his attitude ranges from bitter
mistrust (e.g., The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch -
what a title!) to an immense, barelycontrolled wrath in A
Scanner Darkly.
The relationship between one's inner world and perceptions of reality,
expanding into human relationships and eventually into definitions of
spiritual values, is sometimes rebuilt by other means. In Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the religion Mercerism is
built around the use of an electrical apparatus. Ubik, a
book much easier to enjoy than to explain, actually makes its
eponymous realitycontroller shift wildly and elastically in
perceived form and operation from one chapter to the next. The fact
that all the characters are dead only partially accounts for this.
Perhaps the greatest of his books, one of my alltime favourite
novels, is A Scanner Darkly; a triumph of darkness and
disintegration stippled with inky twinkles of black humour. The
narrator, an undercover narcotics agent in a nearfuture United
States threated by widespread use of heavy drugs, is driven by a
haggard obsessional dedication to wiping out `Substance D'. To this
dedication he sacrifices more and more of himself, until the final
chapter shows him, broken, stupefied and amnesiac, joining the labour
force that harvests Substance D from the fields. At first, I stupidly
misread the book as wholly without hope, before assorted CUSFS members
put me right. Such hope as there is remains only for the elimination
of Substance D: none at all for himself. This book appears as a last
island of control and understanding as the darkness closed in on Dick:
his most desperate and most convincing effort to recover something
from the threat of mental collapse which hung over him, without merely
denying it. A Scanner Darkly is terrible in its bitter
antireligious message: the world is not darkened by sin, with
the possibility of forgiveness, but destroyed by error, which nothing
can undo. I do not have to think this true in order to admire the
profound courage with which Dick meets his own dark gods.
The ferocity of Dick's attempt to save not merely his sanity but his
integrity from what threatened him produces some strangely warped
judgements. He portrays drug users as largely hapless victims of
their own ignorant folly, but suppliers as agents of
quasiSatanic evil, mysteries of iniquity which are best
exorcised rather than explored. The narrator, giving a
publicrelations talk about his work to a gathering of citizens,
breaks with his prepared speech and with department policy to declare
his opposition. Asked what can be done to help his work, he replies
"Kill the pushers". Granted that he speaks in character, and that
Dick presumably does not share his bitter contempt for the audience,
this is a flicker of doubt at the limit of vision, rather than a
challenge. Within the closed orbit of paranoia, moral adequacy
demands this ruthlessness.
For a great writer, he's managed to generate an indecent number of bad
books. Valis I rank as his worst; the central character
is too obviously signalled as a selfportrait, although the book
is not simply an autobiography, and attempts to generate respect for a
Gnostic delusional system housed in a partial schizoid personality of
his own. I feel that Gnostic ideas rot the brain, and
Valis certainly doesn't persuade me otherwise. The
attempt to empathise with the narrator victim is strangled by Dick's
selfprotective determination to take such notions seriously,
even while admitting that they are hopelessly false. Something of the
same obstruction gets between me and several novels by Ian Watson, so
this may well be my problem rather than his.
There is no clear line between Dick's major works and his potboilers.
Different readers will set the limits of readability in different
places. I feel that only dedicated completists should be happy to
devour The Zap Gun, but others disagree. He needed to
eat, and practically nothing he wrote is without at least some rocks
of invention and wit sinking slowly from sight into the swamp.
At his best, he grapples with his own fears for himself, his fear of
death and insanity, and his fear of false escapes into delusion,
isolation and impotence. The dominant tone of these struggles is of
unrelenting hardness; he who struggles to the end may (just possibly)
be saved. He is weakest when he allows himself packaged escapes, like
the Gnostic fantasies of Valis, even though he attempts
some critical distance. The struggle appears in the wrestling match
(perhaps inevitably reminiscent of Milton) between a sympathy,
perceived as debilitating, with human weakness, and a transcendent
hardness. If A Scanner Darkly is his bravest book,
perhaps Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (packaged
these days with Bladerunner writ large across its cover,
and a picture of Harrison Ford) is the most disciplined of his
attempts at a less costive kind of courage. The strange synthetic
religion of Mercerism lurks inside this book; one of Dick's most
enigmatic and troubling notions. The question `Are androids human?'
has been asked often enough, and often enough in the form `Do androids
have souls?', but only Dick manages to rescue the question from the
customary shunting of tokens in a matrix of glutinous religious
sentiment. The film isn't much help here; read the book.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said seduced me by its
title; the first book by Dick I read. On recollection, I note with
surprise that I haven't reread it since, and as usual I've
forgotten the protagonist's name. Being rather young - perhaps
fourteen - and not yet assimilated into the PhilDickian
worldview, I paid rather more attention to the plot (which
doesn't make all that much sense, really) than now seems warranted,
but even the faded memories of half my lifetime ago seem to justify me
in admiring it retrospectively. It can be read as a gimmick inverted
amnesia story, in which the central character retains his memory but
everything connected with it seems to have vanished. As usual,
however, Dick is patrolling the boundaries of self, identity and
reality, in a way which has subsequently been absorbed into the
literary mainstream (sf got there first, tell your friends).
The policeman of the title is a rare sf instance of a topos found more
generally in the roman policier, the policeman as pillar of
competent decency. Dick's obliquity appears here at its best. Who
else would use a policeman's love of English lutemusic as more
than incidental character decoration? There is very little the
policeman can do, professionally speaking, for the viewpoint
character. He stands, nevertheless, at the margins of his own
society, looking outwards from what he values in it into the
surrounding darkness, taming it and making it intelligible. There he
finds the viewpoint character, adrift and terrified, and offers him a
cool, confident, professional hand.
Perhaps most famous of all is The Man in the High
Castle. Set in an alternative United States largely carved up
between a victorious Germany and a victorious Japan after the second
world war, it is a strange and subtle book about the relationship
between art and life, and the roots of hope and courage in
imagination. I am disturbed by its adumbrations of a liberating power
in unreason, even in the irrational, but that's not necessarily a bad
thing. Comparisons with Brazil suggest themselves,
though the film is altogether darker and the liberation more private
and desperate than in the book.
I could go on ad taedium about Dick's lesser novels - I
haven't done justice to Ubik, and an inner voice reminds
me that I haven't even mentioned Galactic
PotHealer. I'm not even going to try to cover his
innumerable short stories. These are mostly lighter in tone than the
novels, but this gives freer play to his lunatic sense of humour,
without which any image of his writing is horribly distorted. Being a
gloomy person myself, I've paid too much attention here to Dick's
sense of cosmic threat, but his expansive wit is one of the ways in
which his sanity fought it out with his fears, and one of the most
refreshing to his readers. It never quite deserted him.
Yes, I'm putting Dick down at #1 in the Hall of Fame. Tradition dies
hard.
But you can't let them drown themselves in your secret soul. They're
alien, this is why, and they'll change you too and make you alien and
rip off your crust to drink the red liquid running fire beneath. This
is why I hunt vampires, so they don't get me. They're multiplying on
all sides, swarming out with every breath they take onto you and me,
onto ordinary people they make like themselves, but going too fast so
I have to kill them or in time as the clock ticks, as the sun burns,
as the earth dries up there'll be none but the vampires and me, and
then they'll get me. Mr. Jenkinson tells me it's a straight
evolutionary fight for survival, and I can help us, my race, not the
aliens, win through as millions of time travels on, as the big clock
ticks as the earth dries up, and but I'm new to the game. I didn't
know you could fight the vampires and only killed the first
two days ago.
I met Amelia at pottery nightschool classes. I think it is good
to have a hobby and so I went to pottery nightschool classes to
learn a new craft to broaden my outlook on life and enhance my
conversational abilities. I am an interesting person with a wide
variety of interests. I didn't know she was a vampire at first, or
no, I probably did know but I didn't want to tell myself because she
was so pretty when she laughed at me, but that shows you their
cleverness and how easily they trap and how much you have to be on
your guard so that they don't trap you. This is true. Amelia had
laughing eyes that were like broad black V's upside down when she
laughed, and she laughed a lot at almost anything; they were big,
black and brown like oil floating on water when she was concentrating
on something. She had a ripe white face with big lips that were
always amused, taking their cue from the eyes, and when you saw the
summer sun through the desiccated outermost wisps of her blonde head
of hair you lost yourself in an aching moment. Somewhere I am still
static in that one moment on the common when I saw the sun through her
hair and she was smiling at me, but I couldn't see this when I first
met her because we were in the pottery room at the college in the late
evening when we were at our first pottery nightschool classes.
I met her when I dropped clay all over her red tartan shirt which she
was wearing with the sleeves partially rolled ip and which was loose
and baggy on her; I remember lots about her, which I think is alright
because she can't suck my blood now. She didn't mind about the
accident and laughed at me. I liked this. Noone laughs at me
openly, they do it when they think I'm not looking and pretend to be
nice to me afterwards but really when they're being nice to me I know
they're looking at each other across the table and setting me up to be
laughed at some more which is why they're pretending to be nice to me
because it's all a trap. Even the ones who aren't vampires do this
and laugh at me. But she was laughing at me openly because she was
going to like me - I could see when I looked at her that she was going
to like me because she liked everyone - and I wanted to be liked and
she was honest. So we got talking and I said hello.
But you know because she was really a vampire it was all done to trap
me, it was only a film on her surface. Yet she seemed nice. So only
the vampires show that they really like me, and they want to kill me.
People don't mean it when they say they like people, they're only
lying and everyone's the same. They don't like me so I protect myself
from them, I'm clever at defending my liquid soul. And it's the same
for everyone else or else everyone'd like me because I am an
interesting person with a wide variety of interests but some people
are purely vindictive and they poison all the others against me who
laugh at me behind my back.
We talked a lot and I walked home with her. Next day after work
finished in the library I went to call on her and talk with her
because she liked me. She was pleased to see me and by daylight I
could see her skin, which had a slight sheen of grease and was
imperfect. When I talked to her I only pretended to be talking and
really I looked at her skin. I wanted to run my fingertips down her
cheeks, but I drank lots of water instead to keep my mind off it. She
didn't mind what she talked to me about and we talked about anything,
and when she had finished choosing the subject to talk about I talked
to her about pottery and went into great detail to keep her interested
and to show that I knew a lot and wasn't your average shallow guy who
just poses with cars or drinks beer and shouts, but can really care a
lot about something and take an interest. I know a lot although I
didn't get good exam results when I was at school. But she seemed
tired so I went home. But I called again soon.
I didn't want to press her. I did like to call on her and offer to
help her and sometimes I went shopping with her, and then we would
walk across the common. She was indulgent, but this was just her
vampire tricks of course. I know that now: she was trapping me. But
everything was going well and I began to think that, you know, I was
making headway because all women want to be courted really and once
they let you hang around, you know, it's a sign that they're waiting
for more from you and they're really keen, but you have to do things
properly and so I didn't press her for more because I knew it would
come soon enough and we were just being romantic - or that's how it
would have been if she wasn't a vampire, and I could have asked her to
go out with me anytime but it didn't mean anything really do I never
did. In a sudden emergency she'd have clung to me soon enough, you
bet, and I was waiting for one. Or a party.
But the odd thing was that there was no party, she never made any
effort to introduce me to her friends, which I don't understand. I
knew she had some friends because I sometimes saw her with them, but I
never went up to her when she was with them because women who don't
know me look at me strangely although I try to be nice to them and
because they're usually nastyminded they'd have tried to put her
off me. I know. And I know what most women are like really; modern
girls have no interest in decency and hobbies, it is with them that
vampires breed most, and they have much in common. Sometimes women
make themselves into vampires without another one doing it
for them, and they do it to trap us. But I only saw her with other
people at the pottery classes. But all the people at the pottery
classes were also nastyminded and cruel swines anyway - with
what I know now I bet half of them were vampires - and just not
charitable to other human beings, although I could never make her see
this and she talked and joked with them anyway just as if she was
quite as good friends with them as she was with me. This was wrong.
I tried to make her see that they were not nice people, which I knew
because they were cruel to me for no reason at all, really none, and
that what they said were lies. But she behaved to them as she behaved
to me: she was probably trying to keep our special friendship secret
and didn't want to spoil it. And I know nothing would have spoiled it
if Bob hadn't come along.
I hate Bob, he was no gentleman - I'm sure - and you've got to be a
real swine to attract ladies, nice guys don't stand a chance any more,
not like in the past. He was a maths teacher who only moved here two
years ago. And I've lived here all my life. All my life! But if
you're a real swine to women they don't take account of anything else.
I started finding Bob round there when I called. Later I even found
him cooking for her, or sometimes she wasn't in and when I asked she
said she'd been at Bob's or out with Bob. And he always pretended to
be polite but I could tell he didn't likeseeing e round there much,
and when he was there neither did she so he must have been telling her
things about me behind my back. And they'd giggle together and insult
each other and laugh and he'd do really stupid things like putting the
teatowel down her back or showering her with water, and I've
never treated her like that but she never behaved to him as she ought
to have done and thrown him out which just shows that women like to be
treated rough. And when he was doing these things she'd ignore me. I
tried to indicate our special relationship to him, and that we were
just waiting for the right moment because she was shy and there was no
need for it yet, and I did this by nodding and winking at meaningful
moments, but he never noticed the hints which showed me how blind he
is. And I really began to doubt myself that things were as they used
to be with me and her beacuse she was spending so much time with Bob.
He must have said some really unpleasant things about me. I don't
know if he fabricated them himself or if he copied them off all the
others who like to spoil things for me; for all I know they're all in
touch. But I don't think that this is the case; I just believe that
people are like that and like to spoil things for others. I'm not
like that, which is one of the reasons they pick on me.
So one day I decided to force her to a conclusion, because I hate Bob
and when things were settled I could have told her not to see him
again. I won't make a lot out of this; I just felt that the time was
right. Something had to be done soon and it's up to the man. It's
just what we've got to do - that's how it is and when you're a man you
know that. So I got a single rose - I'm graceful at love - and
decided to present it to her and ask if we could go on a date. That's
all, just like that: I'd just ask her straight out, I thought, just
the proper way to do it. No more, no less. No hesitation. My
savoirfaire would click things into place as smooth as computer
chess. That's the play. I knew it all and would go straight forward,
believe me I would, and if things went wrong it's not my fault, is it?
I'd planned everything through: it was a white rose, to match her
(although her freckles meant that she wasn't very like a white rose,
but it's the poetry that matters), and it was white because I'd been
speaking to Mr. Jenkinson and he'd caused me to have suspicions
already. The rose was white as purity, for a test. I'd put on my
best clothes and the hat she likes and when I'd finally decided on it
it went to see her.
Bob was there.
I could tell this wasn't a good start towards the moment, but I
continued anyway in the face of Bob's unenthusiasm. Straight out.
"Amelia," I said, "might we speak alone, please. I have something
very important to say to you." Amelia said nothing, but turned to Bob
and I couldn't see the expression on her face. It must have meant
something: Bob glanced at me briefly, said "I'll be in the kitchen,"
and left. When Amelia turned back to me her face was conspicuously
solemn. "What is it, Horace?"
So I stuck out my rose, which was not yet in full bloom - I had
planned it would bloom with our love. "This is for you, Amelia." She
took it, right up to her face so that her eyes were on it instead of
me - she didn't want to look at me, which I thought might be shyness,
or a deep passion; I could tell she was bridling hard on something.
"It's... it's very nice, Horace." She turned away from my eyes and
her mouth struggled on its own. There was something wrong; my brain
could see it but my eyes couldn't. Her Vshaped eyes were wide
and tight. Suddenly I became hot and couldn't think: "I
thought..."
She interrupted me: "I think you'd better go now."
"Go! What about Bob?"
"What about Bob?" Her hand was over her mouth.
"I can't leave you here with him! You can't trust men like that.
They only want one thing. I think he's been around young girls too
long at his school, that's what it is. Young girls do things which I
know mature women like you are too wise for, they've got bad eyes when
they look at me, I mean at anyone." She was laughing at me! She was
laughing at me! - incomprehensible. It wasn't the nice laughter of
before, but comic ridicule; at me! She couldn't hide it! Why? I
could see her trying to trap it behind hand and rose but her shoulders
were going up and down with vibration, and then she began to shake her
head - not in denial as if I'd accused her of laughter, but simply
with the force of her wicked glee. "You'd really better go," she
choked out, and then made such an internal effort she began to
cough.
"I see." The crust of my face was aheat with my liquid soul! She
hated me! Did she want blood? I still could maintain my dignity
before an alien world, she'd see. "I thought I'd found something
special, Amelia. I thought you weren't like all the other vicious
ones. I see your mother didn't bring you up as well as some people's
- " It was making matters worse. "I'll leave now. But I want you to
know it's for good. You've got to understand that: once you reject
Horace Mape, there's no second try, you can't play your women games on
me like those schoolgirls which Bob's with. Oh, it's all Bob,
isn't it? Just because a man's got a beard..." Speech was
unappetising. I just stood there and watched her - now letting it all
gush out without any effort to hide her opinion of my suit. I turned
for the door. She wouldn't see me again, I'm on my way out (she's got
no sense of gratitude), but as I left I heard her calling for Bob,
"Bob!" with the voice of someone who's got something to tell quick.
So I stood outside by the appletree in the front garden. She didn't
come and call me back in, she didn't come and apologise, it just got
darker. When the streetlights came on I left, watching the orange
light on my shoes as I walked.
When I went to see her the next day, she composed her features the
moment I saw her, so I knew she was trying not to laugh. How had I
ever thought her different from the other viscious people? Bob wasn't
there, and she asked me in. She started apologising the moment we sat
down. "I'm sorry, Horace, but you caught me by surprise, I had no
idea..." She dragged another secret smile off her face. "But it's
really very sweet."
"Do you like white roses?" I asked guardedly. This was a loaded
question: I hoped she didn't see through my subterfuge. "Yes," she
answered, "They're charming really, no really."
It was time for my question: "Was the rose the reason? Was it just
because it was a white rose? Wouldn't you have preferred
red?" And I sat back with an air of knowing confidence I
knew she could only respect.
Something seemed to have amused her again. "Well I suppose red is the
colour of love -" She choked on the last word and sniggered away from
me.
"That's all I wanted to know, Amelia, all I wanted to know!"
And without another word I saw myself out of the house, because I knew
the, you see, what she was: her incarnadine lusts had revealed her at
the end. It had been a combat all the way! and I had been fooled,
doped up so that you can hardly blame me for any of it. I was the one
she tried to trap! I was the one who had narrowly got away, the truth
revealed by my hardheaded ploy. And she would pay for the trap. But
I can hardly be blamed if she was a vampire, after all. This was her
slyness, her danger; this was the revelation of her lusts, her vile
alien liquid skill. She was a demon, a pollution, a terror, a terror,
a terror.
So I took no chances. I waited two nights until she left her home
after dark then jumped her with chloroform. I stuffed the body into a
hired car and drove out to the common. We waited, she kept in a
stupor, since I did not want to be trapped in the car with this
monster, this female, conscious. What were my defences against her
rapacity? It wasn't my fault if anything happened in that car - I am
not responsible for her constant sly suggestion, her hunting call. It
operated even in her doze, it was a power clutched round my soul - she
was asking for it, don't you see, and if it was not on her terms then
this is only right and fair, the revenge of the prey on the hunter.
I was in any case quick as at midnight I had to do what had been
suggested. I dragged her to the common and poured round us a great
pentagram of petrol from my petrol can - I knew the satanic forces
with which I contended. This woman was a vampire, my foe, and would
seize any opportunity I let slip, so I was prepared, so I took the
stake and hammer quickly and coldly. It was a duty, but not to be
relished.
It was not what I had expected. I positioned the stake below her left
breast, just pushing slightly so that I made no puncture but had
forced down to a comfortable resistance. I raised the carpenter's
mallet above my head. I waited a second. Then pound! I smashed down
into her chest and it was as if I had cracked a walnut to reveal the
sea, there was bursting from her the force of her evil liquid soul,
showering up with more pressure that I had conceived, drenching my
hand and face and purity, pouring, pouring, a river of red. No,
believe me, I found no relish in this rush, this revelation of her
true core, this finding her in an intimacy greater than you can ever
know; I drowned in her privacy, and there was more and more of it,
more than I could have thought possible in such a small frame, though
after the initial burst it was just a drenching flood of her warmth.
A powerful vampire she, to have drained all this from so many! I had
not finished: one strike had not nailed her to the ground. I pounded
again to feel in my arms the smack as I penetrated through her back
and then it was no more of a business than knocking a nail into
wood.
It was done and I paused. You must comprehend that there was no joy
in me for this justice when I say that on a sudden spasm I rubbed my
hands, my arms in the blood; it was a job, a necessity, a revenge on
all the creeping tribe of vampires who usurp this world, who walk the
corners and the walls hunting me, I have to escape, it's a human
instinct. It's a tough job to hunt, and there are some who have got
to do it, but if I drowned my crust in her hidden liquid it wasn't for
the relish, it's not a mark of enjoyment, it's the duty of the hunter,
his mark, his propriety. You have to get the rituals right with
vampires or they return.
So I left my staked specimen there. I did not need to light the
petrol; it was there as a potential ward, and that sufficed. Who
would discover Amelia? A dogwalking oldster or partying kids?
They needn't worry: the world could be sure they were safe from her
now.
But I was careful as I walked back to town (I did not want to dirty
the car, for whose cleaning I might have to pay) because if people saw
me bloody they might not understand.
Mr. Jenkinson understood. He told me not to worry, that he should see
that noone found me for the moment, because there was much else
for me to do and many such vampires for me to stake. Didn't I
remember that the pottery class were likely suspects, the way that
they had laughed at me and that they were friendly with her. He
laughed a lot when I suggested a rest for myself from the hunt, and
reminded me that it was really a war. He has very long incisor teeth,
which you see when he laughs. When I questioned these, he told me
they were a result of eating much steak when he was younger (which
also contributed to his height and strength). He told me I should eat
more steak, and even undertook to supply the meat. He told me that
cooking often spoiled the flavour and the virtue in the meat. He told
me I had done very well in hunting vampires, and would learn much as I
slaughtered more; and then when I've killed several he'll show me his
little secret. He's said that I'll find it very surprising.
Me.
Much of your recent fiction has been a comprehensive
workingout of the vampire motif. Is this an attempt to carry a
cliché to its ultimate conclusion?
Yes indeed. I see the vampire motif, essentially, as a comment on the
role of the artist in society, a paradigm simile for a social function
that feeds off the environment in which it is nurtured but returns
nothing. Yet it is very necessary for the artist to exist, as a means
of limiting the spread in our diseased society of crime and murder.
If we artists did not have outlets for our nervous, apocalyptic
talents we'd be out there on the Yorkshire moors slashing schoolgirls
to bits with the best of them. Why do you think I wear my big leather
coat? It keeps the carvingknives rustfree in heavy
rain.
Many people have suggested that your work is primarily
autobiographical in nature. Do you have any plans for a
fullblown autobiography?
No, I feel that primarily anything I have to say about myself is
already an integral part of my work - a man can only draw on the
truths kept dark within his soul, after all - and it is to there that
one must go if one seeks to quarry my character; alternatively you can
buy me a drink and I'll tell you about myself in nauseating detail.
But this lack of autobiography is partially as a result of a deal with
my publishers, so that they can bring out a series of critical studies
taking its place after my death to capitalise on any ambiguities I may
have left behind me.
Your death is already arranged then?
Certainly. It's in my contract that I'm to die at 32, after I've
written myself out, but just soon enough to convince people that I
still had a major work inside me which - due to the tragedy that dogs
the beautiful people on this earth - went unfinished on my death.
They plan to clean up by getting a hack to produce a set of unrelated
notes and market it as the pinnacle of my achievement which my
untimely end cut short, and reap in further shekels by getting several
respected modern novelists to finish it for me, as they imagine I
would have wished it. In some respects my story `A Dissolution on the
Shores of Entropy' is a prefiguring of this. The manner of my
rock'n'roll style youth hero's death is as yet still under
negotiation, but I believe (it's all in the hands of my agent) that
the latest word says I will be poisoned by an elephant - whose trunk I
happened to have had in my mouth at the time - breathing poison gas
into me after itself finishing a chicken vindaloo which was heavily
infected with salmonella. The publishers feel that the slightly
unusual nature of this death will keep punters intrigued.
Do you think all fiction is about experience?
I have already answered this question to some extent by revealing the
breadth of autobiography in my work, but certainly in particular my
fiction has drawn on my experiences as a male prostitute in Bengal.
The shocking nature of these experiences would then go some way to
explaining the heavy torment of existential angst which impregnates
most of your work?
By no means! While it is true that being a male prostitute is not
always fun and games, many of my happiest memories come from my time
in Indri Khan's Super Sin Den and Bingo Cellar, where I was employed,
and most of the men were rather charming and vulnerable once I had got
their trousers off. No, the heavy torment of existential angst which
impregnates most of my work comes rather from my desire to pose a
lot.
Some of your early stories acknowledged the influence of other
writers - Edgar Rice Burroughs, E E `Doc' Smith, Michael Moorcock. Do
you feel that your more recent stories are also offering variants to,
or adding upon, classic ideas of other authors?
This is an unfair comment: my work is more original than perhaps you
give it credit for, although to be fair I do take inspiration from
where it comes. My forthcoming novel, The Tiger, the Wizardess
and the Sideboard I feel has drawn much on Stephen Donaldson's
Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and I'm only too afraid
that people will recognise that I have borrowed certain elements from
Donaldson's hero - the central character of my novel being a charming
prepubescent girl evacuated from London to a big old house
during the war - by making her an anguished leper with absolutely no
sense of prose style.
After that, what further works can we expect from you?
At the moment, my plans are nebulous as morning mist, but - as shapes
loom darkly out on foggy mornings to startle the unwary traveller -
several projects are promising to force themselves upon an eager
world. Particular ones I might mention are the stories `The Impotent
Vampire', `The Spacedrive of the Cigarshaped Starship',
`Starship Sextroopers', `Wishunfulfillment', `The Man who
Couldn't Work Miracles', `The Glandless Hero', `The Horrible Murderer
Who Never Had Much Luck With Women'. As I say, much of my work is
autobiographical.
Assuming that you manage to avoid destroying the world with your
words, where do you see yourself going from here?
Bognor Regis.
Simon Pick, stardreamer, gazer on the Cosmic Wastes,
apocalyptic fictioneer, prose rebel, thankyou.
Thank you. While you're here, do you want to buy a set of
encyclopaedias?
No.
Day went, night came to promise rest. It never delivered; in a world
where pizza could have no existence, John's brain was stuck in his
hell.
And then stopped in horror.
All eight questions were on the effects of heat tempering on the
thermal shockresistance of glass.
Anyway, tonight I was by myself. It was a strange job - two different
contracts from different people - but there was a pleasant irony to it
all that lightened my soul. I sat through the first half wishing that
I had brought someone along. It was so lonely in that little box, and
the show was abysmal. I understood the necessity for both jobs. I
watched the writer carefully. He didn't seem the slightest bit
embarrassed, unlike one famous playwright who was discovered to be the
loudest of those booing a certain performance of one of his own. The
cast didn't really deserve it - they were very good, and making the
best they could from an appalling script and some stunningly
unoriginal music. Indeed, the whole production was the best it could
have been, given the material they had to work with.
I digress. I am not a critic. Edward Harris is. His is the column
that new shows live and die by in this beautifully corrupt city, and
many a worthy production has been forced to close early because he
happened to be in a bad mood when he saw it. I was watching him too,
and followed him to the bar. He stood apart somewhat, looking around,
obviously waiting for someone. The writer stumbled into the bar,
hauling a large briefcase with him, and crossed to Harris. I watched
as the two talked, and took my pictures. Then the writer left, and a
few minutes later Harris also went, staggering with the case. I
closed my camera up. I don't know why Harris makes these exchanges
look so amateurish. I've seen him do it so many times, and no doubt
he's arranged a few while I wasn't looking. I don't know who asked me
to take the photographs either. They paid well, and I don't question
anybody over a simple matter like that. Their motive remains
unexplained, too. If they were trying to get a hook into the writer,
it won't do them much good. Pleasantly ironic, as I said before. If
they were after Harris, I salute them; but the establishment doesn't
like that sort of thing. Make no mistake, Harris is establishment,
and you can't safely do that sort of thing to him unless you are
absolutely untraceable. I survive by working for both sides.
The second half was better, but only just. I picked Harris out from
the audience, and he seemed to be asleep. His review had already been
written. In fact, some people found the improvement sufficient to
provoke a respectable ovation, which was what I was hoping for,
although I disagreed with them. The management's decision to call me
in was, in my opinion, totally justified. The show was a clear loser,
and they needed either publicity or an insurable way of closing.
A modern blowpipe can be collapsed into very small segments, and
it's a beautiful weapon. I was thinking such dire things at the
writer by the end that I almost missed him. I live near
theatreland, it's convenient for work, you see, and walked home
in the clearing rain.
The moon drowns in the city lights that clamour at my window. Life is
wonderful.
The host was a greyhaired urbanity in a loud jumper. "Welcome,
Mr. Sims," he said as he gestured for the Werewolf to sit down. "I
understand you are, I believe, a werewolf."
"Yes, indeed," Sims replied, smiling. There were snorted giggles from
the audience.
"Now," said the host, "doubtless some people find this hard to believe
so what you've agreed to do is change for us in the studio here. And
for you at home I should emphasise that this show is going out live,
this is not done by camera trickery." Once more to the Werewolf: "Do
you find that many people don't believe you when you tell them?"
The Werewolf was fast becoming hairy. "Well, Bob, it's not something
you come across every day so I can understand people being
incredulous. But I find that after I've shown them they have to
believe their own eyes, you know." He waved a hand to accompany this
statement: the fingers had clubbed together to form a paw. Now talons
began to extend from it.
"But I should emphasize," said the host, "that we are in no danger
here. You are a complete vegetarian, aren't you, Mr Sims?"
"You can really get your teeth into a raw potato, you know? But
seriously, I find it galling never being taken seriously. People have
to watch the transformation or they just think I'm wearing a hairy
rubber mask. I'd like to just come out into the open, let people know
what being a werewolf is all about." He seemed to be having some
difficulty speaking now, and his voice came raw and clotted. "Also I
plan to give up vegetarianism. I'm always laughed at when I mention
that." His face was covered with coarse wires.
"So I understand what you're doing here today is that you have some
big demonstration planned as a new career move for yourself and to
encourage other people to take up werewolfing. Would you like to tell
us what it is, Mr. Sims?"
Mr. Sims was completely transformed now. He had got scattered
applause when his snout had popped out of his face and he sat forward
in his chair to receive it. His paws gripped the armrests. He was
breathing heavily.
"You're sure this programme's going out live, Bob?"
"Yes. Why do you ask?"
the colour of the sky is not stable.
nothingness
we feed on the stars. we bathe in life
when all the pieces were used, he read his improvised, randomised book
from start to finish.
it made a coherent narrative.
Clarkson, face mottled in sudden rage, glares upwards. his unbending
arm like a lever swings viciously up to point vertically. he
screams:
- No, this was not the plan. You knew, you knew all the time.
- We are not gods, mouths the voice behind his shoulder. but no words
are spoken.
no
The play was written in 1666. However, its age has been largely
concealed in a new translation by Tony Harrison, a poet and the author
of the controversial poem `v.' (Don't confuse this with either `V'
(for Victory), V (by Thomas Pynchon) nor `V for
Vendetta'.) `v.', as you may remember, aroused the anger of people
like Mary Whitehouse when it was read on Channel 4 a couple of years
ago, on account of the unusually high incidence of the word `fuck.'
His translation of `The Misanthrope' is deliberately made to be very
much of its time, mentioning brand names of mineral water and fast
cars to put across the lifestyle of the chic Parisian group that make
up the characters. (The posters very wittily described it as "The
Misanthreaupe by Molière and Tony Harrison."
Clearly, someone associated with this play is going to go on to a
successful career in advertising, which they thoroughly deserve.)
The part played by Simon Pick, who is celebrated by this issue of
ttba, is at first sight a minor one: however, all is not
as it seems.
It is the story of a man, Alceste, who believes himself to be seeking
honesty in all things. To this end, he is willing to hurt people's
feelings, as long as he feels it is for the cause of the truth.
Alceste is the eponymous misanthrope for this reason.
He is in love, and he loves jealously, despite having a constant lover
in Celimène. He takes his crusade for truth and honesty to
such lengths that his jealousy prevents him from realising that she is
true to him all along. Instead he stridently wishes that there were
such a thing as true love in the world of distrust in which he finds
himself.
Indeed, practically the only way in which the play shows its age is by
the alacrity with which the Alceste jumps to conclusions about
Celimène's relationships with her male friends - it doesn't
quite ring true for a modern urbane socialite in the way that it would
have in an age when the sexes were more segregated, and marriage
normally preceded sex.
Although the main action of the play concerns Alceste's search for
truth and honesty in a world of hypocrisy, selfserving and
economy with the truth (not unlike Fleet Street or the House of
Commons), the play's success in convincing an audience to believe in
his terminal insecurity must rest with the portrayal of those of whom
he is jealous.
Alceste and Celimène have have two friends who are an obvious
couple from the start (although this seems not to have been intended
by the author or the translator); so they are not really in the
running for this rôle.
Then there are the two Counts who form a double act - "the tall one"
and "the short one," of course - as they thrust and parry with barbed
verbal spears in their attempts to impress Celimène with their
intelligence and wit. They are not fully convincing as potential
lovers either, as they are present mostly for comic effect. In any
case, they never seem to believe in their own possible success, so it
is hard for the audience to do so.
This leaves Oronte, as portrayed by Simon Pick, as the main rival with
Alceste for Celimène's affection. The rôle is played for
laughs in the first scene in which he appears, and as Pick takes the
part of a local media magnate and gesticulating versifier of bad
verse, he certainly gets enough of them. His wildly flailing limbs
drive home his sincerity in the enormous respect he feels for Alceste.
But as his heroworship turns to bitterness, his presence becomes
more keenly felt, and his desire for Celimène becomes more
obvious and eventually reaches a climax as he and Alceste vie with
each other in front of her.
This shows a side of Pick for which he is not usually noted: a
formidable sexual charisma, which is used in the slow building of this
sexual tension. It is all the more impressive because for most of the
play he is not physically present on the stage.
In the end, it is Celimène's uncompromising stand for her own
vision of the truth that brings about the natural ending of the play,
and it becomes less clear to whom the description `misanthrope' really
applies.
All in all, a suitably melodramatic part for Pick's talents,
reminiscent of John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons: but
it would be good to see him in a more understated rôle in the
future.
David Pringle has restricted himself to fantasy written after 1945,
and the list he produces is therefore very predictable: there simply
hasn't been enough great fantasy writing in this period for it to be
possible to make a very surprising choice. Thus we have The
Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast, The Dying
Earth, The Once and Future King,
Stormbringer, A Wizard of Earthsea,
Black Easter, The Last Unicorn,
Mythago Wood, Aegypt and so on. You could
have compiled this list from the CUSFS Hall of Fame or from the Nebula
or the World Fantasy Awards.
What justifies this book, I wonder? In the two or three pages devoted
to each choice, Pringle has no room to say anything new or
enlightening. Do we really need plot summaries of Glory
Road, The Shining and so on?
This book is at its best when considering the more unfamiliar works:
Pincher Martin by William Golding, Gog by
Andrew Sinclair, Ariosto by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro,
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin; but this is probably due
to their unfamiliarity than any critical insight on the author's
part.
Asimov's reminiscences of Horace Gold, John Campbell, Stanley Weinbaum
and others are well done, and his essays on the history of sf are
readable and informative, but when it comes to criticism he has
nothing to offer. He judges 1984 on its failure to
predict the realities of the mid80s and criticises The
Lathe of Heaven on grounds of petty internal inconsistencies
while failing to appreciate the metaphorical and psychological content
of the stories (or even acknowledge that it might exist at all).
Asimov is a literalist and a pedant consistently in pursuit of plot
and scientific accuracy at the expense of writing.
Meanwhile, in a very small room at the heart of the remote Tibetan
lamasery, the Mark V computer was humming happily to itself with a
firm belief in its purpose in life; it knew 8,999,999,999,997 Names of
God.
On his way to the refectory, worried by the anonymous lack of noise
from the printer, the lama went in and glanced at the computer screen.
A bewildered monk,. sitting amid piles of surplus printouts and floppy
disks, was studying the manual assiduously. "Tell me," he said, "what
does `out of memory' mean?"
Followers of the new (BBCinspired) wave of thinking which
believes that "nine billion" actually means "nine thousand million" -
who object to the above can go put their heads in a bucket of water.
I am a traditionalist and still believe in the notion of imperial
measurements. So there.
No time for a more extensive Nelson's Column this issue, but I am
already considering the subject matter for the next. So until next
time, goodnight out there, whatever you are.
My computer screen's still flickering brightly in the darkened room,
and there's a page I didn't fill, and there may be two or three
stories I didn't use. But I am done with editing for now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night, the magic of
makebelieve: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness
from my sight I got from looking at the manuscript I fetched this
morning from my pigeonhole and read while thinking of last
night's news. It blurred; I let it fall. But I was well upon my way
to sleep before it fell.
And I could tell what form my dreaming was about to take: magnified
words appear and disappear, and worlds of fairytale more real
than this one, more bright and clear. My arms not only keep the ache,
my fingers feel the texture of the keys, and I still hear, (as if from
a distance), the taptaptap of story after story typing
in.
For I have had too much of editing: I am overtired of the great
harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand thousand stories to
read, cherish in hand, and polish to perfection. For all that did not
meet the standards (however small) went surely to the slushpile as of
no worth.
One can see what will trouble this sleep of mine, whatever sleep it
is. Were he not gone, Mr. Frodo could say whether it's like his long
sleep, as I describe its coming on, or just some human sleep.
Philip K. Dick - Genuinely Mad, Genuinely
Prophetic, Any Offers?
Bernard Leak
Philip K. Dick is at once one of the best and one of the most
bizarrely overpraised writers of sf. It's a bit difficult to manage
both at once, but (particularly when his death was announced) his
fellow sf writers fell over themselves to declare him the one true
genius of the genre. On the other hand, outside the ghetto hardly
anyone noticed. After the frenzy, sf's own public mourning over a
figure made somehow into sf's own Lennon, he slipped slowly out of the
general eye. Though his individual works have lost ground in the
`best novel' category, the CUSFS Hall of Fame continues to display him
at the top of the `best author' list; a mute tribute to the respect
still felt to be due to him.The Vampire Hunter
Simon Pick
You must understand when I say that there are hundreds of vampires at
loose in society, but you don't notice them because they're shifty and
sly, and can smile and waft their way past you in the street and you
never know the difference because they're vampires and they're hunting
you and they never warn their prey before they leap on him together
and club him to the ground or just sidle up to him and smile again and
make him want to be caught - which is the worst thing of all
because it means that deep down you're like them really and
they know you and have marked you down for it. If you're cold in your
soul they know it, and their huge black eyes can spy it out down
there, although you've got to hide it from them with your clothes and
your frowns and the crust you make inside yourself to hide what you
are. The vampires don't have a crust, they have no shame, and so can
attack you direct with their force, which is why they see so much and
are so dangerous. And it's why they feed on your blood, because
they're nothing but a hot liquid themselves inside because they
haven't encrusted themselves. But they're greedy and they want your
liquid too.Simon Pick
Interviewed by Kim Foster
For some time, I've grouped together people like Keith Roberts,
Christopher Priest, yourself and one or two others, as distinctively
British writers; who, among your own generation, do you admire?The NatSci Elves: A fairy tale for dull
people
Simon Pick
Jesting John B. the fabled NatSci tossed and turned upon his bunk, the
sheets sweaty with long misuse, the cheery, cheeky features his
admirers knew so well now twisted into a knot of unselfconscious pain.
He was running with a fever dream. The dim yellow light of his sleazy
room (comics tossed trampled to the floor in casual disillusion, the
mound of stink in the corner all that remained of his once noble
washing) absorbed his murmured words and their vibrations hung in the
air, an atmosphere instinct with his torment. "Crystallography,
crystallography," his voice came, delirious. "What's the tensile
strength of concrete?"
In the bleary light of dawn the day began and Jester John was on the
treadmill. The cycle of essays turned, and his brain turned with it.
From the towering stack of example sheets on his right they came,
questions on ceramics, electromagnetism, rigid bodies (Oh! not for
weeks had he felt a rigid body!) ground through his brain and were
spat, dry as his mouth, through to the finished pile on the left.
Another and another and another crept on this inky pile from hour to
hour and all his yesterdays were scoured away in the numbing of the
tide of his soul as it beat against the rocks of contemporary physics.
The work overcame him as a drug; space and time meant nothing now, his
concentration pointed to these chores cast itself loose from reality
and let shift the world around him. Perspective, let free from the
grip of reality, beat and pulsed, the concrete walls shifted and swung
in nauseating freedom. Light solidified, day grew black, jewels fell
from the sky but were unheeded. And so it went.
Or was it? What had the drug of work done to his mind, weak and
susceptible as he was? Somewhere in the nets of delirium something
had shifted, reality had operated into itself, a world crawled into
being. As Joking Johnnie travailed still in his sleep, there was a
little stirring in the room. Tiny white faces peeped from cracks in
the wall, little arms were extended to test the air and chance of
movement. From cracks and chipped corners (Churchill, shaken by
countless years of mental activity, was in poor repair) they came,
stumbling over uneven concrete floors, dancing between the tidelines
of dust and grime, the NatSci Elves! Their little anoraks bobbed and
danced, their cycling helmets swung with gay abandon - the NatSci
Elves were abroad! Fairy forms swung from the light fittings, sprang
in multitudes from among the cupboarding, crawled out in clumps of
twos and threes from posters of Marillion and hairy Tull. In glee
they danced between the inkstains and abandoned, teartorn
example sheets; for NatSci Elves had but one function in their little
lives and they lived to fulfill that function - they completed
triposes. Pens were seized, question papers straightened,
knowledgeable imps scanned the questions. For a moment there was
silence and still; then "Away!" cried the chief elf tossed his
calculator in the air and then - O! reader - what a scurrying and a
busying was there. The NatSci Elves set to their work on papers all
across the floor, six of them to a pen to hold it upright, dozens more
sitting on the edges of the paper to hold it down, a hundred to call
hints and helpful suggestions, and there was activity all that
night.
Once more day breathed unwelcome in the room. Once more John the
Japer stretched his arms inside his smelly shirt and rubbed the sticky
from his eyes. But as he forced their lids apart to let in the light
shine in, shock jerked them apart of themselves for the first time in
many a morning. "Butter me!", he said, and buttered he was to find
that in the night his entire stock of work had been done for him! It
lay there, crisp and new on the table where the day before he'd bitten
his nails to the blood in frustration at the capacitance of an
uncharged sphere, or the elasticity of a constant volume of rope.
Stack after stack after stack of frustration was circumvented, his
future had been freed, and as he looked closer in bogglement he saw -
it was all in his handwriting. Or, at least, in his scribble. Except
for one tiny sentence, traced tiny in (he smeared it to see) red
blood, on the one unfinished question ("What are the effects of heat
tempering on the thermal shockresistance of glass?") it spelled
out "No more ink." It was right - all his pens were drained dry.
Big J B strode head high into the exams. It was done for him, this
exam, his first was in the bag, his entire syllabus memorised from
perfect worksheets, his record showered with supervisors' praises. He
sat at his desk in quiet confidence and then PARTY, secure in the
knowledge of a top gradeA degree. The papers were handed out;
he lazily reached out to discover which bit of his perfect stock of
his knowledge would he have to disgorge?The Best Seat in the House
Simon Arrowsmith
I really enjoy my work, and there are few who can say that in this day
and age. I am a freelance. Do not ask "A freelance what?" - just a
freelance. I specialise in theatre work, which I find most enjoyable,
not to mention the perks of getting to see lots of shows. I sometimes
take along a girlfriend or a boyfriend, providing they know me well
enough. But I never let anyone get too close to me. First rule of the
game, don't let anyone inside you. You lose your edge, and you gain a
chink in your armour. I've seen it happen so many times.The Werewolf's Transformation
Simon Pick
The Werewolf was appearing on a television chatshow. Werewolves are
quite rare so it was not really surprising that he should be asked to
appear. This was the first television interview he had consented to.
He watched from the wings as the previous guest took applause and
left; a man in headphones signalled him on and with a smile on his
chubby human face he bounced down the steps to more applause. For
want of anything better, the studio band played the theme tune from
Animal Magic to cover his entrance.A Dissolution on the Shores of
Entropy
Simon Pick
Artist's Forward
The `New Wave' in sf of the late 60s was a fascinating period of
reevaluation in the field - sometimes redefinition - and
of experiment with the limitations and many unexplored possibilities
offered both by the genre and by the nature of fiction in general.
With the death of New Worlds magazine and indeed with the
apparently linked decline of the experimental principle in sf much of
this promise is lost and sf remains as hidebound and unimaginative as
it was under the worst excesses of the Heinlein era; but by listening
sufficiently to Hawkwind it is possible to recreate to some extent the
enthusiasm and challenge of past glories. The story below may perhaps
mark a renaissance in experimentalism and quality of writing and
conception in sf. While not perhaps so naive as previous
groundbreaking work has been - since it inevitably has a wider fund of
literary experience to draw on - it nevertheless shows many of the
same basic concerns. I wish to point out at this time that the story
will remain untitled until finished, and the title you see below will
have been later inserted in a space left blank for that purpose. By
this means I am able to equip the story with a title which will best
mirror whatever prove to be the story's most obvious
meaningciphers.
A Dissolution on the Shores of Entropy
1) Butyl Mercaptan
strolling down entropy strand came Garvin, a faceless
wanderer in eternity. space tore ragged storms about him as on little
earth international tensions spread violence about the globe. youths
with no future rioted through carnaby street, dressed in exotic
clothing stolen from looted shops. the police were miles away,
guarding the bunkers. Garvin dodges as a teenager attacks him,
leaping on him with tooth and claw from off a low concrete wall. his
face is drugcrazed, slavering; he wears a thick artificial fur
coat, though it is midsummer and the temperature is sweltering.
Garvin pulls a luger from inside his shirt, shoots him and moves
on.
2) Quod Erat Destructandem
surfing across the stars, oh oh oh. see the purple lights
out beyond crab nebula! a flash of breathy nothingness and you're
there -
nothing ness
0 = nothing
ness = 1, a quantity, a definition
but
0 + 1 = nothing + ness = nothingness = 0
we're drowning by the shores of time.3) Short Sharp Shock for Local Mum
Clarkson giggles as he shoots the heroin into his
veins.
4) The Thinking Man's Boadicea
Garvin reached for the paperback. it was Nova
Express by William Burroughs. seizing half the pages in each
hand, he ripped it down the spine, then ripped each half again, then
set to work with the scissors. when he had finished he had a scatter
of confetti paper, each piece its own individual size. he threw them
in the air. he spun them round and round. he put them all in a pot
and drew them out again, one by one. each piece he withdrew he pasted
down inside an album, next to one another so that he was forming new
page patterns from the random cut ups of the old.
5) Unseemly Desire for Ruminants
in one of the domed cities on the highest platform of the
highest tower Clarkson bends low over Garvin's dead body. he has
snapped Garvin's neck. he hears a susurration of sound, it washes
around and over him from all quarters. he straightens and looks down:
it is the inhabitants of the city, their eyes blank and formless as
they sigh in exultation at the deed. it is all they have of comfort
now.
6) A Dissolution on the Shores of Entropy
yes
The Misanthrope (Molière)
Jonathan Coxhead
The Misanthrope is a sophisticated drama of love and
jealousy, drawing on the author's own experiences (which married the
daughter of his own mistress, among other things: that sort of thing
doesn't seem to happen around here).Metareview: Old Talent on the
Prowl
Kim Foster
The subject of my review is to be the review found elsewhere in this
"Simon Pick Commemorative Issue" of ttba, of the
performance of Molière's The Misanthrope. This
review by Jonathan Coxhead (one of the more important and interesting
of the `Old Wave' of ttba contributors whose work appears
- alas - far too infrequently) is worthy of review as being a major
new step in the course of his development as a writer. Off the cuff,
I may say that as a piece of work, I can heartily recommend it: its
tone is assured and down to earth and Coxhead - who has evidently seen
the play - knows what he intends to say about it and makes the trip
interesting for the reader. It's not yet a masterwork, but enthusiasm
is always to be commended and it is evident that Coxhead has a great
love and appreciation for Pick and all his works. What gives the
piece added depth is that for J C it's not blind adulation all the
way. His manifest heroworship turns to bitterness, his presence
becomes more keenly felt and his desire for wet fish (manifest in the
subtext) becomes more obvious and eventually reaches a climax as he
spurts salty prose across the tender page. Coxhead has evidently been
seduced by Pick's formidable sexual charisma and has evidently
undergone a slow building of this sexual tension to the point where it
can only be released on paper, or some similar horizontal surface, in
a demonstrative outburst which is the only true release of the
exhibitionist. Eventually it is clear that the subject of review is
ultimately unimportant: in its daring exposé of hidden desires
the piece stands as a masterwork of selfrevelatory art, a deeply
concerned individual laying bare his soul to the world while
pretending to talk about something else. The review is finely crafted
and deeply felt; I urge you to read it again and again, and look
forward to more from this radical author.Modern Fantasy: the Hundred Best Novels
(David Pringle)
Gareth Rees
Books of this form seem to be proliferating at the moment; there seems
to be something fascinating about making lists, and comparing your
favourite books with the critic's choice.Asimov on Science Fiction (Isaac
Asimov)
Gareth Rees
This is a collection of short essays, book introductions and magazine
editorials written during the period 1974-1980. The contents are
typically Asimovian: chatty; wordy; pedantic; at their liveliest when
talking about Asimov himself (his favourite subject) or about writers
and editors he has known.Wizardry and Wild Romance (Michael
Moorcock)
Gareth Rees
Not only a study of epic fantasy, but also (more or less directly) of
Moorcock's considerable and varied prejudices within that field. He
approves of the Victorian, the Gothic,, the humourous, the
leftwing. He detests the Romantic, the soppy, the
rightwing, Tolkien, Dunsany, Lewis. The last two are attacked
with considerable venom (the chapter on The Lord of the
Rings is entitled "Epic Pooh").
rarely profound, but wideranging, iconoclastic and
entertainingly opinionated, Wizardry and Wild Romance
will be of most annoyance to the diehard Tolkien fan, and of
most use as reading list rather than an indepth study.The Marvellous Buck Rogers Poem
Simon Pick
Express yourself in fiery space
The blasters of the stars -
Ho!
Shearing away from the planet so green,
The lasers fire quick on the first target seen.
Simile into the camera lens,
And flex your biceps tight -
So!
The painful sweet moment, the female lead's here:
Script scheduled for silent noncombat I fear.
Nelson's Column
Huw Walters
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
That was a Drabble actually (count the words) and in fact it was
written specifically as a Drabble and not as a Nelson's Column.
Still, it was sitting on my hard disk doing nothing in particular, and
I finally decide to get some use out of it.Mindy and Mork (A lyric for TV
dreamers)
Simon Pick
Laugh, laugh, laugh
And you're going to Laugh! laugh laugh -
when you see, how sweet, how sad the run through the grass has made
me:
Nevermore,
will you ever let life, time or death come to phase us
For we'll ever live again
in the golden gratuitous haze. So
Laugh (laugh) laugh (laugh) laugh
And you're going to laugh laugh laugh
when you see, how sweet, how sad
the run through the grass has
made us.Robert Downham
"Well Mr. Smith, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that your test
results are completely normal for a man of 25. Which is, considering
that you are well past middle age and have spent a lifetime abusing
your body through smoking, drinking, overeating and general physical
neglect, quite remarkable. I'm afraid we'll have to dissect..."Endgame
Gareth Rees
With apologies to Robert Frost
[Email: Gareth.Rees@cl.cam.ac.uk]
[Up: Title to be Announced]