David Langford

Archive of older entries
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1 May 2025 Here we go again with Ansible 454.

11 April 2025 At last, our nerve-jangling front garden building works are coming to an end! New walls, new parking space, new gatepost, new bankruptcy. There are even trees again – a beech sapling rescued from the former wilderness, a bay that outgrew its huge pot round the back, and NO CEDAR THIS TIME.

5 April 2025 And a happy Last Day of the UK Tax Year to all our readers. Things have been a bit fraught at Ansible HQ, with three weeks to date of extensive and noisy demolition and construction work in the front garden – beginning with the laborious taking-down of a 125-foot cedar condemned as dangerously liable to drop branches at random on passing cars and pedestrians. Jittery displacement activity in the form of decluttering efforts has led to various discoveries, mostly too boring to mention. One small surprise was finding carbon copies of my reader's reports on the early Discworld novels Sourcery and Wyrd Sisters (digital text lost in the Great Floppy Disk Disaster of the late 1980s), which have now joined Equal Rites and Mort in the ebook below.

1 April 2025 Guaranteed no April Foolery in today's Ansible 453. This is also publication day for the second ebook edition of the TAFF Trip Report Anthology, a showcase of unfinished or abandoned reports since 1963 – first released in 2017 and now updated.

28 February 2025 Here we go again with the March issue of Ansible. Also two more free ebooks published in aid of the fan funds: Watto's Wisdom by Ian Watson, a very substantial collection of his writing for fanzines and convention publications (also available as a trade paperback with all proceeds to TAFF), and The Incomplete GUFF Chronicles, collecting the published parts of unfinished trip reports by winners of that fund. • Later: Rob Hansen's THEN Again: A UK Fanhistory Reader 1930-1979 (2019) was also released this month as a trade paperback, again with all proceeds to TAFF.

26 February 2025 A derelict shop near us has re-opened as UNIQUE BEAUTY HOUSE and put a brochure through our letter box. Items for GENTLEMEN include CHEEKS WAX, FOREHEAD, NOSE WAX and EAR WAX (the last a commodity in which I thought I was self-sufficient), all costing £3 or £5 more if served HOT. It may be very wrong of the Langfords to react to such solemn affairs with persistent giggling.

31 January 2025 It would seem to be time for Ansible 451, officially dated February.

2 January 2025 Accompanied by slightly belated Happy New Year sentiments, here is the slightly belated Ansible 450. New Year's Day was largely spent doing all the Ansible Editions royalty statements and sending them out with payments (the largest being to the TransAtlantic Fan Fund for six months of TAFF-benefit paperback sales).

24 December 2024 Merry Christmas, everyone! One of our SF Encyclopedia contributors wondered whether I’d be so “diligent (or daft)” as to update the SFE website – a traditional Monday chore – only two days before Christmas. Well, yes; and again with a small correction today. During 2024 the SFE has grown by some 288,000 words, with 467 new entries added and ever so many updates to existing ones, contributed by various hands and all or almost all end-edited by me. Perhaps “daft” is something of an understatement. 2024 also saw twelve issues of Ansible, each running to something over 3,000 words. There were nineteen additions to the TAFF free ebook library, most of them admittedly being past TAFF and GUFF trip reports where all I had to do was get hold of an existing PDF and beg for permission; but five are newly compiled and formatted ebooks, three of which also have paperback editions. Whew. I also published a few more paperbacks based on or expanded from older ebooks at the TAFF site, and have three further Ansible Editions projects on the back burner. These include Watto’s Wisdom, collecting famous author Ian Watson’s writings for fanzines and conventions (currently being proofread), and a first ever paperback of the 1985 Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf by Algis Budrys. For many years Benchmarks had seemed not worth the trouble because there were plenty of second-hand hardbacks around, but these are getting increasingly expensive. Alas, this project has long been stalled by the glacial process of arranging reprint permission, not for the Budrys review columns but for a very short introduction by Frederik Pohl which I’m increasingly tempted to drop altogether. You will hear more of this. • Happy surprises of 2024: a FAAn Award win for Rob Hansen’s Beyond Fandom: Fans, Culture & Politics in the 20th Century (Ansible Editions, 2023) as Best Special Publication; my own unexpected entry into the First Fandom Hall of Fame; and the discovery that the West Berkshire Museum in Newbury has an exhibition celebrating 75 years of the Atomic Weapons (Research) Establishment, which reportedly includes a copy of my nuclear farce The Leaky Establishment....

29 November 2024 Christmas starts earlier every year, so here’s another early release: Ansible 449 officially dated December 2024. As is Motorway Dreams below, a memorial collection of writing by the late John Nielsen-Hall.

1 November 2024 Unsurprisingly, it’s time for the November issue: Ansible 448. As mentioned therein, there are several additions to the TAFF Free Library – Steve Stiles’s 1968 TAFF trip report (published 2007) and no fewer than ten reports by winners of the Get Up-and-over Fan Fund which operates between Europe and Oceania, changing its name on southbound trips to the Going Under Fan Fund. See the latest additions here.

1 October 2024 Today, the autumnal release of Ansible 447 for October 2024. I’ve also put together an ebook of my old reference-book essays about sf, fantasy and horror, titled Work for Hire. The 2017 TAFF ebook The Frank Arnold Papers (edited by Rob Hansen) has been expanded by about a third with more recently discovered Arnold material, and now has its first paperback edition. Other work in progress includes a collection of fanzine writing by John Nielsen-Hall, who sadly died in September.

30 August 2024 In the great and perverse tradition of avoiding weekend publication, we precipitately present Ansible 446 for September 2024. • Minutes before this issue went to press, Steve Davies – who had kindly transported the First Fandom Hall of Fame plaque from Glasgow – delivered it to Ansible HQ. Many thanks! Behold:

[From Ansible 446] I’m very grateful to Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer for representing me at the First Fandom awards and reading my traditionally inadequate acceptance: ‘I must admit I’m utterly gobsmacked. With hardly more than fifty years of fan activity under my belt, I never expected to gatecrash the hallowed portals of First Fandom. It’s like being invited to join the Mary Shelley writers’ workshop, or even the Cosmic Circle! Maybe next I’ll track down the legendary Second Fandom that Hugo Gernsback set up at the other end of the galaxy to guard his thousand-year plan and ensure that what we read is forever called “scientifiction”. Seriously: thank you very much indeed.’

9 August 2024 Just released: Glasgow 2024 Fan Funds Auction Catalogue and Silent Auction Catalogue. If you’re not at Worldcon and want to bid, contact someone who’s there! (Virtual members can use the Discord server to bid in the silent auction – see catalogue.)

8 August 2024 I was hugely surprised – not today but when notified some while in advance – to be enrolled into the First Fandom Hall of Fame during the Glasgow Worldcon opening ceremonies. Likewise my old friends Mary and Bill Burns among the living, and Peter Weston in the posthumous list that this year also includes Alfred Bester, Mike Glicksohn and Mike Resnick. As Walt Willis would say in moments of high emotion: “Cor chase my Aunt Fanny round the psionics laboratory.” I wan’t actually there owing to misgivings about public transport, acoustic-hell megavenues and Covid, but many thanks to the First Fandom Foundation, to Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer for accepting on my behalf, and to an audience that kindly cheered.