This is the first of several old fan articles I’ve written over the last four years that I’m starting to archive on this website (in an effort to make it useful for something other than reading about esoteric Hitchhiker’s Guide merchandise). This was written as part of a fanzine-in-an-hour project undertaken by James Bacon and Chris Garcia at Orbital, the 2008 Eastercon held in London, England. That fanzine-in-an-hour was destined to become Journey Planet, and so this article appeared in its inaugural issue.
Published in Journey Planet #1 (ed. James Bacon, Chris Garcia & Claire Brialey); available on eFanzines.com
It is always difficult for me to say no to James Bacon. It’s even more difficult when he uses a phrase like “Chris [Garcia] and I want to do a fanzine at Orbital and we want to get some s**t hot writers on board beforehand, so can you do an article?” Combine that with the fact that every time I publish a copy of my own fanzine, Procrastinations, Chris refers to me in terms that would make Jesus blush, and you have a couple of people for whom I’d write an article on almost anything.
So, this article is about London, as that’s where Orbital is based. In fact, it’s about three specific experiences I’ve had in London that are to do with fandom, and in this instance, it makes most sense to start with the second one, and the fannish event that really introduced me to fandom out of ZZ9 (and, probably introduced me to people who weren’t paying attention even though they were in ZZ9).
That event was, in case you weren’t there, <plokta.con> π: The Dangercon. It was a very good one-day convention at which I went to two programme items and spent the other nine or ten hours in the bar – one must always start as one means to continue, we are told. Now, if you weren’t there, you might not know that it was held at the Horseshoe Inn, a rather nice pub (which has since, I gather, gone downhill) which is nearest to London Bridge tube station. And if you’ve never been to London Bridge, you might not know that they extremely carefully modelled the place on a labyrinth and so I very easily got lost.
So, there I am, I’m in London, I’m sixteen, the only other Peterborough fans likely to be attending (Max and Tobes) were otherwise occupied with something-or-other and I am totally and completely lost. And I see two people who look like fans crossing a bridge, so I catch up with them and ask, nervously, “Excuse me, but are you SF fans?”
Those two people who ‘looked like fans’ were Claire and Mark, and, as it turned out, they were fans (I was extremely pleased) and so I followed them to the convention. When we arrived, I got out some copies of Procrastinations One and I gave them one, thus putting me on the Banana Wings mailing list. I promptly gave everyone in the con ever a fanzine (people who were within ten metres of me at Contemplation may remember this sort of behaviour) and got very drunk (if you don’t believe me, I think Bug will be able to recall…) and very loud and was on the stage twice and had a very good time.
But yes, that was my first one-day con, and the first time I’d met people like Bug and Mark and Claire, who are (obviously) well-known in British fandom and also happen to be thoroughly lovely people.
So. That was my first fannish London experience. For seconds, I could talk about the London ZZ9 events I’ve been to, or describe the two Picocons I’ve attended, but instead I’m going to talk about something that happened just before the aforementioned event – a performance, in the Lyric Hammersmith, of The Wolves in the Walls, a play adapted from the book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. It was a good play, although I must confess that I personally felt that I was a little too old for it. This did not stop me buying a T-shirt (see Procrastinations One).
However, the play wasn’t really the highlight of the day for me. Four people were going to London – myself, my mother, my brother and my then girlfriend, Jessica. We had to co-ordinate with her as to which days were suitable and then we cross-referenced that with which days were good for us whilst bearing the days on which the cheap performances were available in mind. And then, after we’d decided on a day to go and see it and a time on that day which would be a good plan, Neil announced that that show would be the one he chose to do a Q&A at.
So, naturally, I was excited. I’d read, at that point, American Gods, Neverwhere and the first three or four volumes of the Sandman graphic novels and I’d thought they were all genius (well, this is partly because they are, I suppose) and so I wanted to get his opinion on the new Neverwhere comic that, at that point, was still being released, written by Mike Carey.
Anyway, so the day comes, and I watch the play and enjoy it, and then the Q&A comes. The audience is roughly 50-50 kids to SF fans, I’d have guessed, and so the variety of questions was really interesting, but I didn’t get to ask my question, so at the signing (at which I got the programme signed, having spectacularly failed to bring my copy of Neverwhere) I asked him what he thought, and he said it wasn’t the way he’d have done it but he was still pleased with the result, and I walked away very happy.
And then, fifteen minutes later, I queued up again, because I’d forgotten to get a picture taken with him. That’s how cool I am. The picture is genuinely awesome, though.
And finally, the last London event that I went to that really stands out in my mind so far wasn’t really an event. During August, I got bored. I’d had a lot of summer holiday, and I was feeling restless. Recombination had finished and so the convention season was over until Orbital for me, and the First Thursday meeting was coming up, so I expressed on my LiveJournal that I might turn up and distribute Procrastinations Four to people there. James, being ever excellent, commented saying, “Well, if I got the day off, we could go comics shopping and hit some bookstores and have a couple of drinks and stuff.”
Well, I’m not the sort of chap to turn that down, you know. So I get into London fairly quickly and James and I quickly hit around fifty bazillion comic and book stores, all of which were really awesome. We hit several stores and I wound up coming home with about ten new books, including one by Tanith Lee, since I wanted to read something she’d written before Orbital and, at the time of writing, have still completely failed to do so (uni involves work, who knew?).
James will, undoubtedly, write a short paragraph to supplement this to tell you all the book and comic stores we went to – there were many, many shops and all were excellent and I can’t remember the names of any of them. However, there were other really cool places we visited. For instance, there was the Gate bar in Notting Hill, as I recall, that had done the whole place up as a beach over summer and so we had fun sitting in the deckchair and drawing our names in the sand and having a glass of some foreign lager.
The second place we visited was a café near Kim Newman’s apartment, and (as you might have gathered by my way of referring to it) we met Kim Newman there. Now, Kim is a chap who writes reviews for SFX magazine, has written a couple of Warhammer 40,000 novels for Games Workshop and also wrote some books such as Anno Dracula and The Night Mayor, the latter of which I had read on the train that morning.
One of the main characters of The Night Mayor is an actor who is sent into a virtual world to combat a dangerous criminal who has hacked the computer of a prison and turned it into a Sin City-esque world. As it turned out, the chap who Kim had based the character on (and had named the character after) was with him at the time and so I got both of them to sign my copy. Which was, as you could probably guess, genius.
And then, after meeting him, James and I strolled down a street and saw a branch of Hotblack Desiato, which was the inspiration for the name of the dead rock star in the Douglas Adams novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I got my photograph taken outside, grinning inanely.
Eventually, after some more comic stores and a meal at a very nice Italian place, we actually went to the pub and did the First Thursday thing. This was the first pub meeting after the Japanese Worldcon and so there were plenty of fans (well, Flick…) sharing stories of Japan and showing off kimonos and the like, which was very cool, also. Eventually I went home with Max – she’ll tell you a funny story about me catching London buses, if you ask her…