Column 76, PCW Plus 100, January 1995
CENTENARY BLUES
It's strange to look back over 100 thrill-packed editions of 8000 Plus, as it was called from its launch issue in October 1986 to the 63rd in December 1991. Being an ancient guru with a long white beard whose column began in that first issue, I've been exploring my files....
My original brief was, roughly: `Talk about being a writer. Talk about writing on the PCW computer. Make some jokes. And never say an unkind word about that great and good man Alan Sugar, founder of the feast.' Well, three out of four isn't too bad.
October 1986. I dutifully flew the PCW flag. `I was slumming in an IBM PC magazine, where I found the fascinating news that Amstrad PCW systems have met with a "lukewarm response". To translate this you need to know the subtle linguistic codes used by IBM enthusiasts. If you buy an IBM PC, that's a ringing declaration of total commitment. If you buy something else, it's a lukewarm response.'
December 1986. The column's first prediction: `Will Alan Sugar sandbag his existing users -- as he's done before, in other ways for other computers -- by abandoning 3" drives altogether? [...] Is the Pope a Scientologist?' The same month recorded a rival magazine's BASIC tutorial. `Consider the following very simple program: 20 FRED = 30 ... When RUN, all this program does is to make the variable FRED equal to 37.' Suddenly I realized BASIC was subtler than I'd thought.
January 1987. Another safe prediction. `I have a dark suspicion that IBM versions of LocoScript are being bolted together for those who plan to swap machines and would prefer a familiar program to a more powerful one.'
April 1987. By now I was a small PCW software company. `We will not soon forget the man who twice rang us in a towering rage because our package hadn't reached his desk within two days, and ditto the replacement we apologetically rushed to him. Later, his secretary returned the extra copies of the software and we were interested to find on each a RECEIVED date-stamp showing that it had arrived the day after despatch. He had been in too much of an angrily urgent hurry to bother checking his in-tray.'
October 1987. `Hello, we want free copies of all your software,' said the phone call. `No,' we subtly riposted. `But we're Amstrad!' The obvious reply: `Alan Sugar can afford to pay retail price for a disc if he wants one.' The crushing retort: `Alan Sugar didn't get where he is by paying for software, sunshine....'
January 1988. Book publishers were still technologically backward. AUTHOR: `I can send it to you on any standard disc, 3", 3.5" or 5.25", or if you've got an electronic mail link we can....' THRUSTING, GO-AHEAD PUBLISHER: `Oh God, just post me a manuscript.'
April 1988. Virus scares grew, but not on our turf. `Don't panic yet. It's the users of other computers who are learning that when you sleep with a strange disc, you sleep with all its old mates.'
October 1988. More classic truth from a lesser PCW magazine. `One of the constant grumbles in the pages of the German computer magazines is that they have to put up with programs, manuals and adventures all written in English. It's a problem which, thank goodness, we on this side of the Channel don't have to face up to.' All too true....
March 1989. Style checkers were in the news -- software that says tut-tut at long words and sentences. Thus my example of program-attested readability: `I have been. Trying to. Improve my style and. Make it. Easier. For you punters to read. Is this any. Better?'
April 1989. Aunt Davinia's advice column from an 1889 magazine about typewriters (Remington Plus) offered pearls of wisdom. `The key you seek is the very wide one which you will find lies closest to you as you operate the mechanism. Contrary to your somewhat petulant implication, we consider the manufacturers to have labelled this clearly and correctly with a picture of a space.'
September 1989. Naked pedantry showed its ugly face, with a whole page on proper punctuation. `There's no grammatical rule against slapping exclamation marks on every sentence you think is dramatic, clever or witty! However, this is the literary equivalent of laughing loudly at your own jokes while digging violently at the listener's ribs!!!'
November 1990. `Fifty issues of 8000 Plus, and I've appeared in them all....' This is more or less where we came in. Alas, I couldn't be in every issue from 51 to 100, but have mercilessly repeated all the above jokes and denunciations as often as I could -- with asides on Adventure, indexing, rejection slips, padding, lawsuits, chain letters, e-mail, prediction, padding, recessions, research, programming, padding and of course padding. Meanwhile, champers all round and roll on issue 200.
Column 77, PCW Plus 102, March 1995
PARTY TIME
Gosh, that immense gala party for the 100th issue of PCW Plus was an incredible event and for some reason I still haven't quite recovered. The sight of all the past editors snaking down Westgate Street in an impromptu conga line will not lightly be forgotten by the people of Bath -- but that came towards the end of the day. The following is what the fabulous Dave's Disk Doctor Service Ltd later managed to extract from my few remaining hungover brain cells....
Champagne flowed freely in all directions. A 100th birthday cake exquisitely baked in the shape of Alan Sugar was ceremonially cut by editor Dave Green (the cake's strawberry jam filling was perhaps not in the best of taste), and thanks to the miracles of videotape the bearded founder of our favourite company delighted everyone at the celebration with his hearty recorded message of greeting: "Buy more computers, you bastards."
Meanwhile net-surfing production editor Rebecca Lack had put the party on-line to Internet, and the congratulations of world notables crowded her PCW display ... all the way from clinton@whitehouse.gov to HM Customs & Excise (terminator@vat.uk) trying to track down an overdue VAT return from someone called Langford. Alas, Boris Yeltsin could only send an international telegram complaining that he couldn't afford a net connection, or for that matter a PCW.
Future's publisher Simon Stansfield presented each of the editors and contributors with a lovingly hand-crafted copy of PCW Plus in solid gold ... and then it was time for a traditional game of Hunt the Missing Address Mark under all the tables and carpets of the party room. Other mirthful party games followed, including that old favourite "Outguess the Spelling Checker" -- who would have imagined that you could blow out a PCW's RAM chips by trying to spell-check our previous editor Mary Lojkine? By this time I was feeling extremely cheerful, and when I recounted my own spell-check favourites ("And for my name it suggested LANDLORD, ha ha ha!!!") the room fell silent in respectful acknowledgement of my famous wit.
It was wonderful to meet all the other former editors who formerly had just been names: I hadn't realized the astonishing extent of erudite Rob Ainsley's repertoire of off-colour jokes about Mallard Basic and Z80 assembly language, or that Steve Patient could perform such a hilarious impersonation of a malfunctioning PCW 9512 daisywheel printer, or indeed that Sophie Lankenau had that interesting tattoo. Nor had I expected such a splendid Charades performance from the absent Ben Taylor and Sharon Bradley, as they acted out the whole of that celebrated and much-reprinted CHECK3.BAS listing in Basic. "Sounds like ... sounds like ... could it possibly be IF UPPER(ASK$)="Y" THEN PRT%=1?" How we all roared.
Howard Fisher of Locomotive Software was present amid the merry throng, relating anecdotes of how customers who'd encountered slight learning difficulties with LocoScript had amusingly mailed him scorpions, anthrax bacilli, venom-encrusted boomerangs and, on one droll occasion, a small tactical nuclear weapon.
Some more serious discussion took place as well -- the technical highlight being a virtuoso demonstration of how to widen a PCW's three-inch drive to 3.5" using only a broken bottle, a fishknife and three cocktail sticks. "Don't try this at home," warned the staff writer who performed this much-admired operation: "It was only to make it more exciting that I worked blindfolded and with the mains power turned on."
Next there was a moving special presentation to an ancient and white-bearded columnist who dated back to the antediluvian era of the magazine's first issue ... myself, in fact. The presentation consisted of -- beautifully etched on a slab of lead crystal -- the 34 paragraphs which owing to a typesetting software problem had been omitted from my piece in issue 52 (January 1991), thus giving everyone the impression that I had written it during a severe attack of delirium tremens. Tears came to my eyes as I accepted this memento from our kindly editor, and fell over.
The only shadow on the day's merry proceedings was that, as kindly Bath paramedics assisted me aboard a Great Western Shuttle express train and medically advised me not to come back, I realized that I'd somehow forgotten what had actually happened and would have to make it all up. Just like a tabloid journalist, really....
Column 78, PCW Plus 104, May 1995
MYSTERIES IN THE MAIL
One hazard of writing professionally is that strange people read your words, and may write back. Thus when I once wrote about military technology I was accused of being a wicked Commie, for suggesting problems with `Star Wars' laser defences (then the flavour of the month in America). When I mocked predictions of Armageddon, a concerned believer sent me his definitive proof that Christ would return and the Universe reach its sell-by date on 26 June 1987. (I haven't heard from him since.) And some satirical comments about UFOs brought the bitter response that I was in the pay of the international C.I.A. conspiracy and receiving wads of money to help Cover Things Up. If only I were.
Strangest of all is the correspondent known as Rachel Oliver. Her career (she is probably not a `she', but let it pass) began with idiosyncratic letters to my pal Brian Stableford, author of such fine sf novels as The Empire Of Fear. Presently the curse spread to another author of repute, Colin Greenland, and then to me ... and I was not the last.
The letters of Rachel Oliver (alias Siobahn [sic] Munster, Amanda Haertel, Sylvie, Susan Illegible, C.Judd, Penelope Garrard, Siobahn O'Connor, Kate McGowan, Jane Smyth, etc) usually claim to be from a pre-teenager suffering from leukaemia or another dread disease, writing from nonexistent addresses, who has a precocious grasp of scientific jargon and invariably suggests sf plot ideas. These are often traceable to articles in New Scientist -- and famous science journalist John Gribbin reports by e-mail that he too receives letters from this versatile girl, sent c/o New Scientist!
Brian was amused by young Rachel's cheerful inconsistency: `Me again,' a familiar-looking letter might begin, though signed with a name she'd never used before. Colin and I felt more churlish: it seemed a slight insult, expecting us to swallow all those false names when every letter had the same handwriting, or recognizable tatty typescript. We guessed that `Rachel' must read Interzone (Britain's sole professional sf magazine): we all wrote for it, and our addresses had appeared in its classified-ads columns as we tried to flog off our remainders....
During 1994, the frolic grew darker. The BBC received an ill-typed letter, drivelling about the cosmos in a familiar style -- signed `Colin Greenland', with his return address. Channel Four TV wrote to me rejecting an embarrassingly poorly presented sf proposal called Hitler's Dimension, supposedly by David Langford. The BBC did the same with a further submission `from' a new player in the game: Stephen Baxter, another Interzone author whose address `Rachel' didn't know ... so she'd given Interzone's instead.
Was `Rachel' a very, very stupid admirer who thought this impersonation would help our careers, or was she maliciously trying to damage reputations by sending out badly-presented rubbish under authors' names? Something had to be done.
What outsiders may not realize is that sf authors and critics mostly know each other. Information was pooled. Electronic mail hummed over the Net. Turning a blind eye to the Data Protection Act, sf convention organizers and magazine editors searched their databases for clues in the general area from which `Rachel' sent her letters (York, Malton, Norton-in-Derwent). Brian, we began to realize, had never been impersonated because `Rachel' knew that among the zillions of fake addresses on her letters, one of the earliest ones sent to Brian was genuine. After I'd spent a long afternoon with postcode and phone directories, we had a name, an address and even a phone number. I tried the number. It rang, but I didn't wait for an answer.
What would you do next? There were several wicked temptations, such as setting my Internet software to dial that number at 3am daily and make screeching fax noises at whoever picked up the phone. But I virtuously refrained. Colin's lawyer friend suggested, inevitably, that we should give money to lawyers -- get a solicitor to write a terrifying letter. Economically, we wrote our own letters: Brian's was tactful and mine slightly stroppy. Months of silence followed. We wait nervously for developments. Did we do the right thing? Should we have called in the police? Jitter, jitter.
Yes, that was another aspect of the wonderful world of freelance writing! Don't all rush to give up the day job, now.
Column 79, PCW Plus 106, July 1995
URBAN FOLKLORE
You keep hearing these infernally plausible modern myths, like the tale of the woman whose cat got into the washing machine -- and so she dried it off in the microwave. Hordes of such anecdotes, sometimes called Dead Granny stories after one of the most famous ones, are in circulation. Almost always, they `actually happened' to a FOAF (friend of a friend) of the person telling the tale....
But I'm growing bored with traditional urban myths. Country yokels already have their own new, modern beliefs: `Crops do wither and leaves do fade, When EC intervention cheque be delayed.' I call on readers to experiment by spreading these fresh myths and superstitions, and seeing how far they travel. This may entail long, arduous hours gossiping in pubs, but think of the pride we'll enjoy if one of the following snippets gets into a magazine report on New British Folklore or yet another of Jan Howard Brunvand's books about urban mythology....
• One for hard disk users. James Thurber's mother believed that electricity leaked from empty light-sockets. Similarly, data from a PCW's hard disk can escape from floppy drive slots. (Especially when you've raised the hard disk's internal pressure by filling it nearly full.) Safeguard your novel-in-progress by taping up the disk slot or slots when not in use!
• Computer screen flicker can be reduced by magnetizing the power lead. Repeatedly draw a strong magnet along the last foot of the wire for half an hour every Sunday morning. For best results, align your PCW facing magnetic north. (There are hi-fi fanatics who claim to get better sound quality by tying knots in the cables, so this sounds extremely plausible.)
• One of the `bullet' characters in LocoScript 3 is useful when printed near the top right-hand corner of your tax return. Position it correctly and you will receive Windfall Bonus tax coding (all allowances multiplied by 14) when the form is processed by the Inland Revenue computers. Tax returns issued to MPs, senior civil servants and members of the House of Lords are preprinted with this mark.
• Satanic messages may be detected in the PCW Plus editorials by reading them backwards as a coded acrostic. In recent issues, fundamentalist researchers have uncovered the diabolical, subliminal commands `SUBSCRIBE', `BE A DEVIL, BUY TWO COPIES' and `WOULDN'T A LIFE SUBSCRIPTION BE NICE?'.
• A PCW-based astrology program reports that no matter what your sun sign, when walking up the western side of Tottenham Court Road in London it is deeply unlucky not to cross to the opposite pavement before passing the Scientology shop.
• Postmen leave coded rubber bands on doorsteps as a contemporary version of traditional tramps' marks. For example, an arrangement of five rubber bands signifies: `Householder has good hearing -- put the "could not deliver, ha ha" card through the letterbox VERY QUIETLY.' As a writer, I think I've deciphered a further pattern as meaning: `Occupant received another rejection slip, poor sad fool.'
• Despite contrary claims, there is a computer virus going the rounds of PCWs. Known as `Titter', it infests spelling checkers and then their users, causing uncontrollable tittering at extremely unfunny discoveries: `Titter titter titter, when I typed in "committees" the spell-checker suggested "comatose"! Laugh, I thought I'd die. And "Ansible Information" came out as "Unusable Information"....' In extreme cases, sufferers write whole articles full of this material in our national press before kindly men in white coats administer the Prozac.
• Last year a certain hard-working author, though slightly muzzy and hungover, was trying to gobble a snack lunch, revise a book with an urgent deadline (much rapid changing of PCW disks), and deal with phone calls -- all at the same time. When the rush was over he had an eerie, spectral sense that something was wrong: had he somehow put a disk in twice without taking one out? Everything seemed fine, though, and he forgot about that odd feeling until weeks later the PCW disk drive began to buzz. A fly crawled out, and then others. The repairman had to don a surgical mask before he could face removing what remained of a very elderly quarter-round of accidentally inserted corned beef sandwich squashed up at the far end of the disk drive....
Of course it's true! It happened to a friend of a friend. Or one of his friends.
Column 80, PCW Plus 108, September 1995
GADGETS OF YESTERYEAR
Isn't there a certain bizarre charm in outdated technology? I still savour my collection of obsolescent glories like old slide rules.... Remember slide rules? Or the 1950s Astounding SF cover showing a kerchiefed space-pirate swarming through the airlock with a slide-rule sinisterly clenched between his teeth?. Ah, nostalgia: the big scientific rule with log-log scales, the miniature circular one, the telescopic helical model that squeezed out an extra decimal place of accuracy by wrapping a five-foot-long scale around a cylinder....
For those wondering what proto-yuppies used to carry before cellphones and laptops, the Langford collection has the answer: the Swiss Precision Mechanical Pocket Calculator. It's a matt-black tube like an expensive camera lens, with hordes of adjustable slides and a handle on the end. You set up figures on the slides and add them by a mere turn of the handle. Subtract by turning the other way! Multiply by turning ... yes, you're ahead of me there.
There are also some nifty facilities for shifting decimal places: as Erich von Daniken might have phrased it, it's hard to believe such things were known to the primitive, cave-dwelling craftsmen of 1966.
But my collection's place of honour goes to the Ediswan High-Voltage Healing Box, vintage 1933, enabling you to commit high-frequency healing in your own home. Its front panel is a nostalgic vista of bakelite, with exciting knobs, a socketed handle on a lead, and strange glass electrodes held by clips in the velvet-lined lid.
You simply slot your favourite electrode into the handle's socket, turn on, and press it relentlessly against the Afflicted Part. I offered this opportunity to all my friends, who diplomatically dived out of windows. The lonely experimenter thus had to test the device on himself.
Switching on produces a hellish racket from an induction coil inside, an eerie violet glow in the glass electrode and a prickle of tiny sparks where this touches the aforesaid Afflicted Part. This fizzy sensation, accompanied by a paralysing reek of ozone, must have persuaded users that jolly beneficial things were happening.
The Box comes with a catalogue of tempting accessories -- thirty-one specialist electrodes for all medical contingencies. My kit has only the bare essentials, alas: the puny Surface Electrode `for use on any part of the face, body or limbs'; the appropriately-shaped Rake, `very effective for Falling Hair, Dandruff ...'; the Metal Saturator, a chromed tube that bypasses the usual route through gas-filled glass to zap patients directly with `a very strong current which gives powerful tonic effects'; ... and, most fearsome of all, the Fulguration Electrode.
This uses the principle of electric discharge from a sharp point to generate showers of vicious little sparks which `deal with corns, warts and similar growths'. Having tested it very briefly and uttered loud opinions, I suspect that `similar growths' may include fingers.
Luxury extras begin with the Roller Electrode, ideal for use when the Surface Electrode sticks and jerks in its passage over terrifiedly sweating or carbonized flesh. The Double Eye Electrode has twin cups allowing both eyeballs to be simultaneously convulsed. And with the Ediswan Ozone Inhaler, `a mixture of pure Ozone and Pine Vapour is driven right to the back of the nose and down into the lungs'. Breathtaking!
Some specialist electrodes I'd rather not go into, or indeed vice-versa; imagine, if you will, the Nasal, Urethral, Rectal, Prostatic and Dental Cavity models plying their trade. I keep remembering an old New Scientist headline competition: ALTERNATIVE HEALER USED BARBED ELECTRIC ENDOSCOPE -- SHOCK HORROR PROBE.
The instructions say the Box will cure everything from Abscess to Warts, including Alcohol and Drug Habits (`For Cocaine users a mild current applied to arms, legs and soles of feet, until the skin is reddened'), Brain Fag, Dropsy, Female Troubles, Obesity and Stiff Neck. Cynics might wonder why the magic current, so good at making boils, goitre, piles and warts shrink away, has an entirely opposite effect when applied to Breast Development or Impotence.
Funny you don't seem to see this on sale any more....
And the moral, alas, is that all too many computer snobs out there regard the PCW as fit only to stand on the museum shelf next to that Healing Box. Well, they both still work, but one of them does seem a shade more useful!
Column 81, PCW Plus 110, November 1995
MY FANTASY LIFE
One of the slight shocks of getting into the literary business is realizing that "major" reference books are produced by ordinary human beings who frequently sneak out of the back door of their ivory tower and visit the pub....
I'd written quite a few encyclopaedia entries all by myself, some of them even accurate. But before 1992 it hadn't become a habit. I could give it up any time. Until the second edition of The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction (ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls) began to move slowly and painfully towards publication, like a goat through a python. Too many of my sf friends were involved. In a fit of utter folly I pronounced the dread phrase which I recommend others to avoid: "Hey, I'll volunteer to look through all the text on disc and see if I can spot any mistakes!"
The finished encyclopaedia ran to 1,300,000 words. Months vanished from my life.
But it was still throughly exciting, helping with the most important reference book in the sf field. (Like the slimmer first edition of 1979, the second edition won a Hugo award -- the Oscar of science fiction -- in 1994.) Hordes of my corrections went into the text, and the editors gave me a nice credit in the acknowledgements; even better, the publishers sent a free copy, not easily come by when the book costs forty-five quid. I felt a certain share of reflected glory.
Then came news of a companion volume, The Fantasy Encyclopaedia edited by John Clute and John Grant (the latter having been Technical Editor on the first book), who invited me to come aboard as a humble Contributing Editor. This was sheer madness, so naturally I said Yes at once. Even now the huge tome is being written, to a tight deadline....
Of course it would be almost impossible without computers and the net. I've been shuffling documents between PCW and IBM disks, squirting text to and fro by e-mail, and using the Internet "telnet" facility to probe the US Library of Congress Information Service and the National Library of Scotland on-line catalogue, in hope of sorting out bibliographies. (The telnet addresses are locis.loc.gov and opac.nls.uk, if you're interested.) Luckily Usenet is full of helpful people: in the rec.arts.sf newsgroups I bumped into the net personage known only as "Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew", who actually loves researching awkward bibliographic information. Praise be.
One of the great things about the sf volume was its "theme" entries, little essays on standard sf devices like ANTIGRAVITY, MATTER TRANSMISSION and TIME TRAVEL. Fantasy is not so easy to define or subdivide like this. In the jargon, there's a shortage of critical vocabulary, and the editors have been heroically striving to borrow or invent names for themes which exist out there in the mists of fantasy but have never been properly classified. One slightly tongue-in-cheek example: PLOT COUPONS are frequently encountered in unimaginative fantasy novels, the sort where the plot consists of travelling up and down the map of a generic FANTASYLAND collecting the coupons (swords, rings, grails, talismans, etc), with the characters needing the full set before they can send off to the author for the ending.
The capital letters above are because all cross-references in the encyclopaedia are indicated in small capitals. After writing a few too many entries you find yourself thinking in these cross-references about mundane things like hangovers (see ACHILLES' HEEL), the bank balance (see WRONGNESS), the bank manager's office (see DARK LORD; BAD PLACE), and the awaited cheque from the publishers (see NEVER-NEVER LAND).
Meanwhile the brain gets cluttered up with the litter of becoming an instant expert on dozens and dozens of fantasy writers whose entries need to be researched and written. In spare moments I've also been trying to perfect some database software that will check all those cross-references and make sure that they all refer to theme entries that actually exist. This program scored an early success when it reported numerous cross-references to a nonexistent entry entitled SHADOW, which obviously had to be added since so many contributors felt it necessary!
And that, dear readers, is why I'm gibbering and twitching over the keyboard with all these straws in my hair. Sanity will be restored some time in 1996 (see IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS).