Fan Envy

Jennie's post about not being a fan, but enjoying fannish things such as Eastercons, strikes a chord with me. I too come away from cons with mixed feelings. On the one hand, withdrawal symptoms from a kind of protracted ecstasy rarely experienced since I was a teenager and the world was constructed largely for my benefit, with new Howard the Duck comics and Philip K Dick novels drifting like dandelion seeds into an endless golden Saturday. On the other, a sense that I could have engaged more with people; that some diffidence on my part has kept me from having all the con-versations and encounters that I could have had.

So what has held me back? Partly, like Shaun CG, it's a sense of 'being surrounded by intelligent, often erudite, hard-working people who obviously care a lot about these subjects'. I can't improve on this description (cheers, stranger) - I have a fair bit of arcane knowledge, but compared to many Con-goers I'm just scrabbling blindly on the foothills, not much better equipped for the rarefied climate than a Dan Brown reader who thinks the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series sounds like porn, and that the adverts for X-Ray Specs are the most interesting things in comic books.

And partly it's lack of in-depth commitment to particular authors, and the general difficulty of approaching them (about which I've written before.) For instance, there's Tanith Lee a few yards away in the bar. She has written 90 books. I've read, maybe eight or nine of them; I imagine the corseted people surrounding her have not only read all 90, but own them every published edition, indeed in all imaginable editions, including volumes printed on wyvern skin with letters of pale fire. I could saunter over, say something like 'Wotcher Tanith, when Birthgrave came out in the seventies it was like a new oasis appearing in a desert: a genuinely new fantasy appearing in the barren shelves; it was so great that a young Brit was writing fresh stuff... I've read some of your books and enjoyed them... you write like a demonic angel and I'm looking forward to reading the some of your more recent stuff...' Her dustman could probably say as much, so why bother? Best leave well alone.

Having said that, I did come over all fannish whilst acquiring signatures from Joe Abercrombie. (The approach involved drinking a pint of Guinness Extra Cold in about five minutes, which acted like an icicle lobotomy, reducing me to a babbling loon for the duration of the encounter.) I wonder why? Every day at work I do much more challenging things than asking a writer to sign copies of his books - that I have just bought expressly for the purpose - at an event where such behaviour is expected and even encouraged.

So - cons - strange and addictive experiences. There is much I love about them - not least their superficial resemblance to other kinds of events, such as professional and academic conferences, but with subtly different content... It's great to be somewhere where the sentence "Now, it's time to talk about the elephant in the room - Marvel's 'Civil Wars' series" can be uttered and received in total seriousness. Where topics from the surveillance society to the enduring appeal of H P Lovecraft can be discussed with intelligence and verve - with real ale never more than a few twisting corridors away.

I wonder if anyone feels 100% a part of an SF convention (or indeed anything) - or whether we're all orbiting in degrees of outsiderhood?

Things to look forward to

Advent being a season of expectation, hauling in green sprigs and lighting flames in the darkest heart of the year, sketching out the idea that light will return, here are some things I'm looking forward to next year...

1. Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie
In his book Clubland Heroes, Richard Usborne described a delightful quandary: given (I think) a Richard Hannay adventure by John Buchan, one of Dornford Yates' Berry and Co stories, and the latest Bulldog Drummond (in a cheerful yellow Gollancz wrapper)... which to read first? In the end it has to be the Drummond. For some reason, contemplating the conclusion to Joe Abercrombie's First Law series reminds me of Usborne's anecdote. Not that the series concerns a beer-drinking, cheerfully ugly gentleman adventurer (as such) - just that my enthusiasm for these books would put them top of my reading list, even if greater literary merit could be proven for the alternatives. My fondness for these novels matches that of Usborne for Sapper's creation. I won't attempt a review - there are some good ones at Strange Horizons ("Fans of character-driven epics who are willing to take their heroes with a grain of moral ambiguity should add this novel to their "must read" list"), SF Site ("In addition to excellent characterizations and fascinating world-building, Abercrombie also writes the best fight scenes I have read in ages") and BBT ("Do want an author who tweaks the nipples of the oh-so-revered Fantasy Formula?" - there's only one answer to that.)
Not attempting a review but... personally I wouldn't use words like cynical or postmodern, and perhaps not noir. I would say it's as bracing as a friendly headbutt, that the characters and plot threads are incredibly compelling (leaving one plotline to join another one in a subsequent chapter is a wrench) and that the humour is actually funny.



2. A new Gillian Welch album
Billboard were reporting a follow up to 2003's excellent Soul Journey back in 2006 - surely she'll commit something to 'vinyl' next year? Failing that, I'm tempted by her painting:




3. Final Crisis
Periodically, the unwieldy DC Universe (the fictional nexus of all the characters, plotlines and milieu in stories published by DC) gets a makeover, in the form of a vast 'crisis', involving all of the characters and their worlds/universes in a collective story that carries out a lot of housekeeping. For instance, 1985's 'Crisis on Infinite Earths' got rid of lots of characters, plotlines, tropes and history that either didn't make sense, or didn't chime with current fashion. Contradiction, silliness and outdated concepts were elided (literally, in a surging wave of antimatter represented by the white paper of the unprinted page.) A fresh new world with relaunched characters also 'explains' why, in a story that started in 1938, the cast doesn't comprise aged pensioners. Now you don't get this sort of thing
- in real life, otherwise I'd reinvent about half of my life (the rubbish half)
- in most other forms of literature - for instance, Tolkien doesn't relaunch a new version of LOTR with more more women, no Tom Bombadil, and a language that cannot create poetry (sadly).
But in DC the crisis story has become a regular fixture, so much so that persistent crises themselves have become a piece of slightly creaky daftness on a par with Bat-Mite and Wonder Woman being secretary to the Justice Society. Perhaps this is why the next one is called Final Crisis. I have high hopes for this, mainly as it's written by Grant Morrison, a writer of some genius who I believe has the chops to re-engineer the symbolic architecture of a fictional world that is an important part of the troposphere of the real universe, with some poetry, energy and surprise.
And he'd better deliver. In the runup to Final Crisis, all kinds of crass hatchet-work is apparently happening - for instance, Big Barda gets casually killed on the floor of her kitchen... a pathetic way for one of the noblest, kick-assest female characters to go. Hopefully this kind of stuff is some kind of prelude to a rebirth that will both preserve and renew the mythical lifeblood of these tales - otherwise it will be a fecking crisis...



Anyone else looking forward to stuff next year?