A Slip of the Keyboard (22 page)

Noreascon Four: WorldCon programme book, 2004

Well, well, well …

My first WorldCon was in 1965. It was in London, of course. Only Americans and very rich people (the terms were considered
interchangeable) flew the wide Atlantic in those days. Brian Aldiss was the GoH, and Arthur C. Clarke spoke at the banquet, illustrating his uplifting talk by flourishing a nail from the
Mayflower
and a piece of the heat shield of, I think,
Friendship 7
.

Over breakfast, James Blish complained to me about the lack of waffles. I was so proud! The author of the
Cities in Flight
trilogy had chosen
me
in whom to confide his displeasure at the narrow choice of British breakfast products!

There were giants in the world in those days or, at least, people who were very considerably taller than me.

But that was later.

I think it all started with a Superman comic that another kid gave to me when I was on holiday. I must have been nine. By the end of the holiday I was wearing my red towel tied round my neck
all the time
. For what it’s worth, I always preferred Batman. Most local kids did. If you ate up your broccoli and drank your milk you could theoretically be Batman when you grew up, whereas in order to be Superman you had to be born on another planet. My friend Nibbsy, who was a Superman fan, reckoned you could be a
kind
of Superman if
this
planet blew up and your dad had the foresight to build a space rocket for you ahead of time. He thought I was in with a chance because my dad could weld. I feared his theory was unsound.

There were fights at school over the question of whether or not Batman could fly. Those of us who said he couldn’t were in the minority and, therefore, got beaten up by the thick kids. But, hahaha, it wasn’t us who broke limbs by jumping out of their bedroom windows. Shouting “Batmaaagh!” on the way down didn’t work, did it …

But the undercurrents were stirring. Gotham City had altogether too many carnival floats and too many dumb plots even for a nine-year-old. At about this time, Brooke Bond Tea started bringing out
collectable cards in every packet of tea—more particularly, a series called Out Into Space.

I have them here, now, as I type. Never mind Proust and his biscuit,
my
ticket to the past is card nine, “Planets and Their Moons.”

The colours are garish, the paintings are not great, but my family drank tea until their eyeballs floated just so I could get ’em all. Memorize the back of every card and you’d know more than most people today know about the night sky. Admittedly, some of what you’d know would be wrong: Mars was shown with canals. But they got me hooked on space, which is a great addiction because there’s lots of it and it’s obtainable free. And that was great, because they’d just decided to start the Space Age.

My parents, as they do, bought me a telescope. It was the kind of ’scope kind parents, as they were, buy without the benefit of reading a book on telescopes. Jupiter was a wobbly ball of rainbows but I learned my way around the moon.

I was going to be an astronomer, because when you were an astronomer you didn’t have to be in bed by ten.

But it turned out not to matter if you were in bed by ten, because I’d found these stories about Space …

I’m glad to say I did it right. I found a
proper
SF bookshop. Of course, a
proper SF
bookshop, one where the owner is a fan and whose customers are so well known to him that sometimes they help out behind the counter, is handily situated between a tattoo parlour and a porno bookstore.

My source of supply was
inside
the porn store. Its main line of business, conducted by a dear old lady who sat knitting in between dealing with customers, was porn.
*
¹
Yet for some reason, possibly to
add some weight to the claim to be a bookshop, half the floor space of the tiny place was occupied by cardboard boxes full of secondhand British and American SF magazines, quite often in mint condition.

Where did they come from? I never found out. All I know is, they filled up as fast as I emptied them. I never saw any other SF fans in there. There were occasionally some men in raincoats staring at the material on the upper shelves in a Zen-like trance when I came in, but they never took any notice of the kid scrabbling through the boxes below. The owner, who took quite a shine to me as possibly her one customer not yet interested in the upper shelves (and sometimes made me a cup of tea) just said gnomically that “people drop them in.”

Astounding
,
Analog
,
Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Galaxy
,
New Worlds
,
Science Fantasy
 … untold riches, they sleeted down on me at sixpence each. They weren’t the old lady’s main stock in trade and she didn’t know anything about SF, so about three times a week I came out with my school bag bulging. I still found time to do my homework.

Then, in one of the U.K. mags, there was a mention of the British Science Fiction Association.

Contact. And that led to the cons, and to that general encouragement to write that is part of the atmosphere. I wrote. I wrote rubbish, mostly, but some of it was okay, and I took notice of those guys on the panels who said: “If you want to be a writer, get another job.” That was newspaper journalism and, for a trainee, a wonderful opportunity to work every god-given hour; the guys should have said: “Get another job but not one which takes over your whole life.” And there were girls. The other job and, indeed, the girls took over.

The 1965 WorldCon was my last convention for twenty-one years. I’d been formally in fandom for a mere three years, not
counting the apprenticeship in the little shop, and didn’t find my way back until I’d written four novels. It’s nice to be home.

Last time I went past, the shop had totally vanished under the concrete forecourt of a car dealership.

Either that or, the day I left for the last time, the little lady, her work done, pulled the lever under the desk and the whole place just folded up and slipped away.…

Vector
,
21 September 1963

TERRY PRATCHETT (Beaconsfield)

The article “SF in Schools” in No. 20 [
Vector
] interested me mainly because

a) I’m a schoolboy, and

b) I’m very interested in SF.

First of all, I think Ron Bennett’s pupils are dead lucky in having a Master who is interested in Science Fiction. All we get at my school are the same old dreary titles “My Pets” or “A Day at a Railway Station.” However charming they are the first time round, they begin to pall after five or six laps. (I exaggerate only slightly, I assure you.)

Of course, the cry goes up: “Not everyone is interested in Science (ugh!) Fiction.” So what? “A Day at a Railway Station” isn’t everyone’s cup of tea either. Besides, most of the blokes in my form copy the stories out of various magazines; it might interest them to crib out of
New Worlds
, etc., or
Science Fantasy
.

[Editor’s reply: The two composition titles you mention are easily adaptable to SF themes, surely. “My pets”—a Little Fuzzy and a small thoat (I had a banth once but they banned it). “A Day at a Railway Station”—digging among the ancient ruins in some future time when teleportation is universal. AM]

Waterstones’
Books Quarterly
,
12, 2004

My granny had one bookshelf. I recall it contained a large book which was a great help to her in times of trouble and confusion, and it was the only one I ever saw her open: it was called
The Crossword Puzzle Solver’s Dictionary
.

But the shelf also contained G. K. Chesterton’s
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
, a book that distils the heart and soul of fantasy—which, I have to say, has little to do with wizards and everything to do with … well, everything. When you’re a kid you fill your local landscape with perils and terrors (there was a barn a few miles from us where, I knew for a fact, giants lived). Chesterton knew why, and could achieve in a sentence what some philosophers can’t manage in a book. He taught one lesson that I took to heart: there’s nothing so strange as the “normal.”

I came to reading late but hungry and so read adult and children’s books together, without distinguishing very much between them.
The Wind in the Willows
was the book that dragged me in; I’ve still got my original cheap copy somewhere, in a plastic folder because the spine evaporated years ago. Next time you read it, pay
attention to what size the animals are. It changes throughout the book and yet it doesn’t matter.

By sheer luck I also picked up
Mistress Masham’s Repose
, by T. H. White, and loved it because it was a children’s book that made absolutely no concessions to children. It was also a work of fiction in which another work of fiction (
Gulliver’s Travels
) was real; that Chinese box of an idea is wonderful to discover when you’re eleven. In fact I’d developed a taste for works that show us reality from a different perspective, and that led me to slink down towards the science fiction shelves.

Every literary novelist apparently knows that science fiction is “all about” robots and spaceships and other planets. Oh, there’s plenty of that stuff as topdressing, but at its best science fiction is about us and our Faustian bargain with our big brains, which dragged us out of the trees but may yet drag us into the volcano. The best science-fiction book ever is only erratically in print, and it is
The Evolution Man
by the late Roy Lewis. Look in vain for robots. In fact, look in vain for
Homo sapiens
, probably, since the cast is a family of Pleistocene humanoids.