PCW Today "Langford" #7
Me, Ansible, and Thog


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Well, I have to admit it: my little software company Ansible Information is in its twilight years as far as the Amstrad PCW is concerned. Orders for AnsibleIndex, the famous LocoScript indexing software, are now rare and joyful things. Each time, it takes me longer and longer to remember how Ansible's home-made invoicing software works, and spiders have spun their webs over our last immemorial stack of 3" disks....

All this is something of a relief, since I've been ever so busy writing and occasionally editing -- that other perennial subject of my old PCW Plus columns. Twenty years since I escaped the radioactive hell of being a weapons physicist at Aldermaston, I'm still a footloose freelance and struggling with some success not to end up in the gutter asking passers-by if they can spare a few Terry Pratchett paperbacks. Instead, I get paid for providing feedback on first drafts of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels ... but that's another story.

Even the main hobby of what I laughingly call my spare time consists of writing and editing. This is the scurrilous science fiction newsletter Ansible, which is still the only non-North American SF fanzine ever to win the Hugo award, SF's equivalent of the Oscar -- four times now. It's available free by e-mail and on the web, incidentally: see the links at www.ansible.co.uk. Strangely enough for a free publication, Ansible has opened doors leading me to sums of actual money.

Example: years ago the editor of Britain's longest-established SF fiction magazine Interzone decided he'd like a news and gossip page to provide variety amid all those worthy stories. I gave him an Ansible at a publishing party and he instantly commissioned a monthly column based on it. As I write, I've just sent in the 100th instalment. [This was written in September 2000.]

Example: in 1995, by waving around all the vaguely prestigious Hugo awards resulting from my SF fanzine hobby (I also have fourteen as `best fan writer', a peculiar category covering SF journalism, humour and gossip), I persuaded the newly founded magazine SFX to take on a regular Langford column. Nowadays SFX claims to be the world's best-selling SF magazine, which may even be true; and I'm working hard to persuade them that this is all because, at the time of writing, I've produced 70 columns without missing an issue.

Example: occasionally I scatter a few copies of Ansible in the SF sections of local Reading bookshops. This year someone passed it on to Waterstone's head office, and the editor of their planned on-line SF newsletter got in touch about reprinting some of the material for real money. We eventually settled on a version of the Ansible department called Thog's Masterclass ... which was also the subject of my column in the very last PCW Plus. The one the rotten sods at Future Publishing never sent me a complimentary copy of. Sniff.

What, asks the alert and keen-eyed reader, is Thog's Masterclass? Well, Ansible has long had a tradition of publishing awful or accidentally funny sentences from SF and fantasy -- the more famous the author, the better. Meanwhile my pal John Grant had invented the huge and thick-witted barbarian Thog the Mighty for various of his fantasy novels. Somehow Thog's name attached itself to Ansible's `Ghastly Lines from Genre Fiction' department. The rest is history.

Thog's selections cover a wide range of fictional strangeness. Sometimes you suspect the author isn't entirely sure what he meant: `They were both roughly the same age, in their very early fifties, though a hundred years earlier they would have appeared much younger.' (D.F.Jones, Colossus, 1966) Often fictional characters' eyes do unexpected things: `They all felt Michael's adrenaline kick in and watched his eyes bounce off his legal pad ...' (Rock Brynner, The Doomsday Report, 1998) Certain authors have a flair for the utterly wrong simile: `A silence descended like steel doors slamming down around the room.' (James P.Hogan, Voyage from Yesteryear, 1982)

Sheer overwriting offers treats like carnivorous weather: `Rain came as a wet drizzle that clings to your face like a hungry leech fighting to hang on, only to slip down over the scars and dive into the abyss of excrement and refuse at your feet.' (Bradley Snow, Andy, 1990) Metaphors often fall awkwardly over one another: `Only Lily could tell there was more to it, because whatever was haunting the back of his eyes made a trail of uneasy paw prints up her own spine.' (Charles de Lint, Someplace to be Flying, 1998) And it's so important to retain a sense of direction when piloting spacecraft: `Captain Vandermeer, if you will please initiate a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn of the Washington, we'll begin the long journey home.' (Anne McCaffrey, The Tower and the Hive, 1999) There is more, all too much more.

Needless to say, I'm planning (with John Grant) to compile an entire book of Thog's Masterclass. The time is ripe, because electronic and print-on-demand publishing is making it easier for marginal or special-interest books to appear. One such publisher, Wildside Press, has already signed up my long out-of-print novel Earthdoom and its unpublished companion Guts (both, coincidentally, collaborations with John Grant), plus a huge collection of the `Critical Mass' SF review columns I wrote in the 80s. I wonder if they'd like a book of all my PCW Plus contributions?


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