Being Volume 12 of the Brightononicom

A couple of weeks back, wearing my Spring Heeled Jack hat, I attended the British Fantasy Society’s annual wingding, or FantasyCon as they will call it.

As they define fantasy to include weird fiction I saw it as a chance to put in a bit of networking and get an idea of what’s what in the genre these days.

So what did I discover?  Of this I shall sing:

1/

Obvious point, but does need to made for those of us whose idea of ‘fantasy’ is that it’s solely made up of those interminable multi-volume sagas involving magical artifacts and epic quests and heroes who introduce themselves as so and so’s son assuming an interest in their genealogy which most of us simply do not share, is that it’s a cheerfully open genre happy to embrace just about anything it likes.  There was none of that ‘Oh I never read [insert whatever/whoever here]’ that so bedevils a lot of book talk.

2/

I don’t know if this is usual as I’ve never been to one of these things before, but it is an odd experience to find yourself reading a book in a bar and looking up to see the author sitting three foot away from you.*  Or even more a challenge to etiquette, to realise one is sitting opposite an author whose name you recognise and whose work you are aware of  but have never actually read.  What, if anything, can you say?  Nothing in my case.

*’Ash’ and James Herbert if you were wondering

3/

Fantasy authors are engagingly shy about that unhappy business known as networking.  I thought I’d missed a trick by only having the logo, a mildly sinister quote and the web address on the cards I scattered about cheerfully, but apparently not.

4/

Mark Gattiss disliked the new iDalek design and argued against it.  He was therefore particularly irritated that it was introduced in a story written by him.  

He also uses the neologism Poliakoffian to describe very, very slow moving drama.

5/

The members of the panel discussing the member’s vote on ‘Best Ghost Story’ all admire MR James but really wish the membership would stop voting “Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come to You, My Lad” in every single bloody year.

.

Any many other things besides, but you'll have to wait for the next volume to find out what manner of things they may be.

Now There's a Weird Thing

Back when I used to be in charge of a charity second hand bookshop, a fun game was to infuriate those volunteers who were science fiction fans by firmly putting George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in the general fiction section. ‘But they’re science fiction,’ they would wail. I would then gently point out that they were also highly respected literary works and therefore could not be science fiction for science fiction cannot, by its nature, be respected literarily.*

*not 100% sure if that’s an actual word, but microsoft word spellcheck isn’t complaining though it is complaining about ‘spellcheck’. It also rather presumptively put a capital ‘M’ to microsoft (and has just done so again) without so much as a by-your-leave.

SF authors have been complaining about this for years and look hungrily at crime fiction which has acquired a patina of respectability over the last few decades. But then, detective stories never had the true pariah status that SF had. It was acceptable to admit to a liking to them while maintaining an intellectual front, in much the same way as high-minded people occasionally admit to a liking for soap operas, though at all times making it clear that said liking is an amusing eccentricity akin to always wearing something purple.

An exception to this rule was John Wyndham, here in the UK anyway. His ‘cosy catastrophe’ books were acceptable though the 1970s Penguin editions that I own have this gloriously Oxbridgian put down in the ‘about the author’ section: ‘…[Wyndham] decided to try a modified form of what is unhappily known as “science fiction”…’ which brilliantly dismisses both the genre and its readers in one elegant swoop. The BBC 1950s Quatermass serials by Nigel Kneale also fell into this camp.

I myself was an avid SF reader for a couple of years as a teenager and as science fiction is like malaria and LSD in that it never entirely leaves your system, I still occasionally read some.  And I do so with the distinctive feeling that I am doing something mildly embarrassing.  Proper readers do not read such nonsense.

Yet, over the last ten to fifteen years, this has been slowly changing and SF, along with its cousin Fantasy, has been creeping into the light of day. No idea why, though I suspect the emergence of comedians such as Bill Bailey and Simon Pegg, with their open love of Star Wars, Doctor Who and Star Trek, has a lot to do with it. As indeed has the successful re-launch of said Doctor Who. There is naturally still a lot of crap SF out there, but Sturgeon’s Law does apply.* There is also the appearance on the scene of China Miéville, the critic’s darling.

*’90% of science of fiction is crap, but then 90% of any everything is crap’, derived from an article by Theodore Sturgeon, a Golden Age SF author

I think this is great, of course. As those who have waded through previous blogs may have noted, I am all for people reading what they like to read rather than what they feel they should read and although science fiction is not entirely my thing, it is akin to it.

I am very occasionally asked just what kind of fiction I write and I find it slightly hard to answer. To date there’s not been a spaceship in sight so I can’t say SF. Fantastical things almost invariably occur (talking animals, chatty corpses, tetchy Arthurian knights and pre-christian survivals to name a few) but if I say Fantasy then just about everyone thinks Lord of the Rings and I really don’t write that kind of thing. I could say Ghost Stories but I don’t always write about ghosts and they are rather integral to the whole ghost story package. Horror Fiction always makes me think of James Herbert and those interminable NEL paperbacks about giant flesh-eating crabs or slugs or whatever that swarmed around newsagents in the 1970s and that’s not my bag either. Speculative Fiction is a phrase I dislike, it lives next door to the phrase ‘graphic novel’ which is a graduate’s mealy-mouthed excuse for reading comic books. No, I shall go back to the early 20^th century and re-claim the adjective that I think best suits my jottings: I write Weird Fiction.

All of which is a highly roundabout way of mentioning a website that I am involved with and which has just launched. Called Spring Heeled Jack it will, I trust, become a home to some weird fiction. You can find here and I hope you enjoy it:

www.springheeledjack.org.uk

PS

It is my avowed intention to one day write a story in which the title of this piece makes up the opening words as spoken by one character to his or her companion, while pointing past them.

Reading Maketh Something I've Read

So, Michael Gove thinks children should read 50 books a year. Seems a lot to me, that’s one a week with a fortnight off at Christmas presumably, but what do I know? Reactions were as to be expected. Some people boasting that fifty was not nearly enough, one on-line commentator threatening violence if any of the fifty were Harry Potter or Twilight books, which seemed hard, and most agreeing that quality not quantity was the issue. I have to say, I’m not so sure.

Reading is many things. At its basis, it’s a way of sharing information with others. It’s a form of pleasure for some. For others it is a kind of moral duty and there are some for whom it is a way to parade their superiority to others. Each, save the last, seems valid. But it is the idea that there are books that should be read (and by serious and worrying implication, books that should not be read) that I find truly troublesome. I know I failed that test badly as a child by spending a year obsessively reading Enid Blyton (the Famous 5 and the Adventure stories to be precise) which confession casts me into the outer darkness as far as some are concerned. In the pre-video/i-player days I read novelisations of my favourite television series, Dr Who and Space: 1999 in particular. As a teenager, or Young Adult as they are now designated by the publishing industry, it was Alistair MacLean and science fiction. Then as an older Young Adult (if that makes sense) I discovered Penguin Modern Classics and dismayed my friends and family by always having one in my pocket, green spine to the fore so that it could be seen, identified and admired. And of all of them, I cannot think of a single book that I have ever regretted reading and that, surely is the important thing. The act of reading is neutral and to attempt to indoctrinate children into thinking otherwise is as dubious as not allowing them to read at all.

Anyway, must dash, got a DVD I want to watch.

And here's something else you might not know...

There was a recent news report that some doctors are campaigning for the introduction of plastic glasses only in pubs. This is to reduce the number of injuries caused by glassing apparently. Now I have never glassed anyone and have no immediate plans to do so, but it so happens that I do know, in theory anyway, how to break the bottom off a beer bottle so that it can be used as an improvised weapon just as they used to do in films but no longer seem to. It seems that just smashing the thing against the nearest hard surface will cause the bottle to shatter completely in your hand and as you are clutching it tightly this causes nastiness to your palm. Now I’m not going to tell you how to it, I’m not Frederick Forsythe, but I merely use it as an example of the odd bits of information I’ve picked up over the years. I know the correct lights that a ship should show while sailing at night and used to be able to tie a bowline knot one-handedly. I know, thanks to a couple of medical students, the most painful thing you can do to a man and owing to my intense conviction that it would come up as a jackpot question in a pub quiz, the registration number of the car that Patrick McGoohan is driving in the opening credits of The Prisoner. On matters of pronunciation I know, thanks to one of my brothers, how to pronounce the name of the Norse god Odin correctly and thanks to George Bernard Shaw that the words ghoti and fish can be pronounced the same way. I know the fates of the six wives of Henry VIII and at a push I can remember the accomplishments that were required before you could join the men of Finn Mac Cool, legendary hero of Old Ireland. I freely admit that some of this knowledge may be of limited use.

For there is a hierarchy in knowledge. Knowing the names of all the actors who have played Dr Who is an accomplishment that is, on the whole, held in a degree of contempt. Knowing the names of all the players who scored winning goals in a football team’s championship wins is at worst seen as being a bit keen. Being able to name all the books in the Apocrypha makes you a theologian and understanding the ramifications of the salic law makes you a mediaevalist. My father knew how to manumit a slave which, along with a few other details, made him a barrister.

Well I think that knowledge should be equal. Let us put aside these old prejudices and admit to being proud that you know the names of everyone who performed at Woodstock or all the lyrics to Bony M’s Rasputin or the solution to every Sherlock Holmes mystery. Let's call an end to this apartheid style segregation of useless knowledge and three cheers for mnemonics.

Oh, and if you want to know which host of which tea-time quiz show also played James Bond, give me a shout.