David Langford

15 March 2023 An old Langford story, "Serpent Eggs", is reprinted in this UK Milford Writers' Conference benefit volume. Eclectic Dreams: A Milford Anthology, edited by Pete Sutton and Liz Williams, will be launched at Eastercon; alas, I won't be there. Here is an early review.

1 March 2023 What better way to celebrate St David's Day than a piping hot Ansible 428 with leeks and mint sauce? Also, yet more new ebooks at the TAFF site: click here for the full list with the latest additions shown first.

1 February 2023 The time has come for Ansible 427, the February 2023 issue. This announces several more new ebooks at the TAFF site: click here for the full list with the latest additions shown first.

3 January 2023 Happy New Year to all, and here's the January Ansible.

25 December 2022 The delicacy pictured below is a real product. No wonder the festive board is groaning.

1 December 2022 Season's greetings, for whatever value of "season" you celebrate (or not), and here for what it's worth is the December issue of Ansible. Once upon a time I sometimes had the energy for a special Christmas extra or a bonus Cloud Chamber, but not this year, alas.

11 November 2022 I am thrilled that Michael Dirda's latest Washington Post Book World review column gives Peter Nicholls's Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years the lead spot, closely followed by John Clute's new collection Sticking to the End.

9 November 2022 Like so many who are watching Twitter's current meltdown, I've cautiously set up an alternative social media thingy at Mastodon. If nothing else, I'll be posting the traditional announcements of new issues of Ansible and new book publications on that platform (as well as everywhere else) until further notice.

8 November 2022 This morning I remembered the opening of R.A. Lafferty's "secret masters of the world" story “About a Secret Crocodile” (1970), which seems strangely relevant today: There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone but the details are not known. There are some who believe that it would be better if one of those seven men were a financier.

1 November 2022 Too exhausted today for anything but a bare-bones announcement of the latest newsletter: Ansible 424.

18 October 2022 You may think the defining characteristics of ansible.uk are "boring" and "not updated often enough", but I'm now getting emails telling me it's won an award as "one of the safest websites for users in 2022!" The prize, rather than a few spare millions from Bill Gates or whoever, is the privilege of giving the awarding outfit a free banner ad (with link) on my home page. There's glory for you.

30 September 2022 A day early but no one really cares: the October issue is Ansible 423. And yes, a couple more TAFF benefit paperbacks have appeared, converted from the still-available free ebooks: The Complete Cheap Truth and The Complete Patchin Review. Click here to see the whole list.

1 September 2022 What can I say but ... Ansible 422?

7 August 2022 Peter Nicholls's Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years is the latest trade paperback/ebook release from Ansible Editions, compiled (with help) and edited by myself:

1 August 2022 This month's Ansible 421 mentions the return of King Kong to Birmingham after 50 years, and the statue's appearance on the front cover of Speculation 31:

1 July 2022 Time for another issue: Ansible 420 is here. In recent weeks I've been obsessively fiddling with various websites – the multifarious ansible.uk family, the unofficial TAFF site, and even the frequently forgotten Thog site – in hope of making things a bit neater. Never mind if you can't see any difference; getting rid of some of the more horrible "why did I ever do THAT?" background colours and menu structures was strangely cheering for me.

19 June 2022 "Skrapbook", a cut-and-paste article I put together for The Skeptic (UK cousin of The Skeptical Inquirer) back in 2005, recently appeared on the magazine website. I didn't like to link to it until some OCR garblings had been fixed – no, pi is not abbreviated as p and is not even approximately 31 over 7 – but the editor has now done the decent thing.

10 June 2022 I've been trying on and off for years to discourage use of my first ever email address ending @cix.compulink.co.uk and its variant form @cix.co.uk. Today I gave up and cancelled the nearly 30-year-old CIX account: those addresses will now bounce. You can still reach me through the contact form, and I'll reply with the now preferred address. Unless of course you try to sell me SEO services or hot Russian sex with wealthy Nigerian princes. [Months later: although I am definitely no longer a CIX subscriber, mail to the unwanted addresses is still relentlessly forwarded. Death will not release you.]

5 June 2022 Further excitement in the wake of the 1 June publications below: since the trade paperback of Bixelstrasse: The SF Fan Community of 1940s Los Angeles has sold quite a cheering number of copies (all proceeds to TAFF), Rob Hansen and I have agreed that there will sooner or later be a similar Ansible Editions paperback of 1957: The First UK Worldcon, to be sold on the same basis. Proof copies are now awaited. • There's been a minor upheaval at the little-known site davidlangford.co.uk, long used for announcements (with masthead artwork) of new issues of Ansible. This was a WordPress blog bundled as a freebie with my web hosting package, which grew increasingly cranky and senile over the years – for example demanding that for mysterious security reasons I must delete unused WordPress visual "themes" which the software had installed without being asked to and which it faithfully reinstalled whenever I deleted them. The last straw came this month when trying to create a new post failed with a PHP error (presumably WordPress was too busy reinstalling unwanted themes to update itself to comply with the latest PHP rules). I deleted the blog and substituted a little script that automagically provides Ansible links and artwork for any year; that is, pretty much what the site used to show, minus WordPress clutter and now going all the way back to Ansible 1 in 1979. Thus I waste my days....

1 June 2022 As well as the expected Ansible 419, here's yet another fanhistorical ebook treatise edited by Rob Hansen, 1957: The First UK Worldcon.

5 May 2022 Technobabble alert: I finally found time to investigate the tiresome "fuzzy logic" URL matching at the Ansible site. If someone tries to get to the nonexistent issue 500 (which if it ever happens will be a500.html), I want the server to show the 404 error page – not silently redirect to its best guess of a50.html. This was particularly tiresome when smartarse readers (a) entered the easily predictable URL of the not-yet-posted next issue in hope of a sneak preview; (b) got redirected to some weird guess at what they might have mistyped, as it might be 148 for 418; (c) when the real issue appeared, still saw the guesstimate instead because it was helpfully cached in their web browser; (d) emailed me to complain that the perfectly good home-page link to the new issue didn't work. Anyway ... it turns out that my web hosting service likes to set the default server option "MultiViews" (producing this behaviour) with no visible way to turn it off; which can however be done with an extra line in the .htaccess file. At last!

29 April 2022 A little early rather than (owing to the weekend and UK bank holiday) late, it's time for Ansible 418. Or Ansible 406, as its masthead said until embarrassingly late in the day: I'd copied the May 2021 header and updated the year only....

13 April 2022 For a variety of reasons I won't be at the coming UK Eastercon, Reclamation. Even before lockdown I had found myself enjoying conventions less and less owing to ever-worsening hearing (added to which, both my NHS hearing aids have died during the long closure of the local audiology service centre), while with Covid infections rising yet again I still don't care to mingle with crowds. Best wishes to all Eastercon attendees: I've laid in ample supplies of vintage Co-Op cider and from time to time will raise a glass. Meanwhile, there's Ansible newsgathering and SF Encyclopedia maintenance to keep me occupied, and Rob Hansen has started work on another monumental fanhistorical ebook....

1 April 2022 No April Fool gags, just Ansible 417 and another fanhistorical ebook, The Incompleat Burbee Volume 2 (the latter much expanded from the 1996 version).

1 March 2022 Echoing the February message with slight variations: here are Ansible 416 and another fanhistorical ebook, The Harrison Saga.

1 February 2022 Today: Ansible 415 and another fanhistorical ebook, The Incompleat Burbee (1958) by Charles Burbee

3 January 2022 At last, after much ringing out of the old and ringing in of the new, here's Ansible 414.

1 January 2022 Another year, but not (just yet) another Ansible. Here is the latest ebook addition to the Little Free Library at the TAFF site: Ah! Sweet Laney! The Writings of a Great Big Man by Francis Towner Laney.

21 December 2021 Merry Solstice to everyone! Hazel is putting up decorations and I'm posting the promised link to my miserable Xmas-card substitute Cloud Chamber 165. • Of late I've been beset by pangrams. A recent Inquisitor crossword revolved around Mark Dunn's 2001 novel Ella Minnow Pea (fortunately I have a copy), whose plot requires the finding of a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet and improves on the traditional THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG by being shorter yet still comprehensible. The book's answer is the long-known but less famous PACK MY BOX WITH FIVE DOZEN LIQUOR JUGS. Just two weeks later, another Inquisitor setter required us to discover and write in a "perfect" pangram of exactly 26 letters: CWM FJORD BANK GLYPHS VEXT QUIZ. "Carvings on the side of a valley inlet annoyed an eccentric", according to the official explanation of that puzzle in last Saturday's i. Whose easier general knowledge crossword included PANGRAM as an answer which Hazel pointed out to me. "Blimey," I said, since I'm comfort-rereading Augustus de Morgan's A Budget of Paradoxes (1872, revised 1915, mostly about circle-squarers and other mathematical cranks) and had just reached the page in Volume 1 where de Morgan trades pangrams with a friend, decides it's necessary to use I for J and omit V altogether (as presumably covered by W), and comes up with I, QUARTZ PYX, WHO FLING MUCK BEDS. The fickle finger of fate, insecurely attached to the long arm of coincidence, had struck again.

1 December 2021 It's time for the last Ansible of the year (no wimpy Christmas special in these tough times, although I do have a new issue of Cloud Chamber up my sleeve): here's Ansible 413.

7 November 2021 Today I discovered something I'd have kept back for Ansible if not for the December deadline involved. The National Library of New Zealand quietly announced in July that it's giving a huge tranche of discarded books from its overseas collection to the Internet Archive, which will digitize them all and put them online. In October it was revealed equally quietly that authors who'd rather not be pirated have until 1 December to opt out. See here. I downloaded the immense spreadsheet of 428,232 titles and found only one by me. But 46 by or edited by Robert Silverberg; 24 by Michael Moorcock; several by Chris Priest; many more still-in-copyright titles. Author friends may want to check for their names. • Later, 29 November: plans for the donation, now given as 600,000 titles, have been put on hold.

3 November 2021 Covid booster shots today at the local pharmacy: Pfizer this time. Perhaps my arm felt a little bit sorer that night than after the previous AstraZenecas, but nothing alarming happened.

1 November 2021 October was mostly spent settling the SF Encyclopedia into its new web-server home, as briefly mentioned in today's Ansible 412.

1 October 2021 Shut up, Fred Hoyle, I'm publishing Ansible 411 no matter what you say!

21 September 2021 Here's a belated review of All Good Things: The Last SFX Visions. Also, Keith Freeman points out that The Leaky Establishment is cited in the comments to this recent story at The Register.

1 September 2021 What, Ansible 410 already? Where does the time go? When will the RIP list get shorter and Thog less resolutely tasteless? Answers may be submitted on a postcard, but not to me.

24 August 2021 An unexpected bookplate discovery on the front endpaper of a volume in my collection (The Story of Manon Lescaut, 1731; translated by Helen Waddell for the New York Heritage Press, 1935):

1 August 2021 An experiment: I placed a tiny classified ad for Ansible Editions in Private Eye #1550 (25 June - 8 July). No detectable blip in sales or even shows of interest, so I probably won't try this again.

30 July 2021 The traditional avoidance of weekends means an early "August" issue: Ansible 409 is out today!

1 July 2021 It's time for Ansible 408.

25 June 2021 At last I've disposed of that long run of complimentary copies of SFX magazine, after going through the whole lot and (for the sake of future bibliographers) noting all the title changes they made to my long-running column there. More than I remembered. In the collections – The SEX Column and Other Misprints, Starcombing and All Good Things: The Last SFX Visions – I naturally used my original titles, thus causing fearful confusion at the Internet SF Database.... • Do I regret not having that regular soapbox for (almost) anything I cared to write? Not really, although I could have had some fun with the true and terrible history of the online SF Encyclopedia following the Gollancz announcement that they will be pulling the plug on this noble enterprise in October 2021. Instead – in between the agonies of constructing a replacement website where the SFE show will go on – I've written about all this for the next issue of William Breiding's fanzine Portable Storage.

Archive of older entries
2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017 • 2016 • 2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009 • 2008 • 2007 • 2006 2005 • 2004 • 2003 • 2002 • 2001