David Langford

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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. 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.

1 August 2024 The last issue before the Glasgow Worldcon – Ansible 445 dated August 2024.

1 July 2024 Time for Ansible 444, the July issue. Also yet another ebook and simultaneous paperback release in aid of TAFF: British SF Conventions Volume 2: 1952-1957 compiled by Rob Hansen.

31 May 2024 Avoiding weekend publication as usual, here is Ansible 443 dated June 2024.

1 May 2024 Mayday! Mayday! Help is urgently needed but all you get is Ansible 442. Also yet another ebook and simultaneous paperback release: New Worlds Profiles 1952 to 1963 edited by myself.

2 April 2024 Avoiding 1 April to show there’s absolutely no fooling, here is Ansible 441. Winning the Doc Weir Award (in absentia) at the just-finished Eastercon was a huge surprise.

15 March 2024 Since I missed First Fandom by several decades, I hadn’t expected this nominations list.

4 March 2024 Very pleased to hear that an Ansible Editions book – Rob Hansen’s Beyond Fandom: Fans, Culture & Politics in the 20th Century – has won the Best Special Publication category of this year’s Fanzine Activity Achievement Awards.

1 March 2024 Here we go again with the March issue of Ansible.

1 February 2024 Time now for the February issue: Ansible 439 with far too many death reports and Hugo scandal horrors. New TAFF-benefit paperbacks are A Vince Clarke Treasury by Vince Clarke and Fandom Harvest II by Terry Carr

24 January 2024 On Christmas Day I was asked to update the Guardian’s stock obituary for D.G. Compton (written long ago by Chris Priest, who stepped down from that particular chore) and it has appeared at last on their website. Perhaps later in the printed newspaper too; I’m told there can be a delay of as much as six weeks. Later: it was in the 27 January edition.

2 January 2024 And now it’s time for the first issue of the Newish Year: Ansible 438.

1 January 2024 Looking back ... what did I get done in 2023? Twelve issues of Ansible, and there’ll be another one tomorrow. Unceasing maintenance work on the SF Encyclopedia, where since October 2021 I’ve been the entire technical staff while still writing the occasional new entry and updating heaps of old ones. Two “Ansible Link” news columns for Interzone, and there won’t be any more because I am Old and Tired. One obituary rewrite for the Guardian, not yet published (that one was dumped on me on Christmas Day). Fifteen ebooks for the TAFF site’s Little Free Library, not counting PDFs already created by others and now added to that collection. Seven paperbacks sold for TAFF, five based on existing ebooks and two brand-new. A few reprints but no new fiction. One reissued title of my own sold for corrupt personal gain, both paperback and ebook. Too many crosswords and rereads of old favourite books.

Archive of older entries
2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017 • 2016 • 2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009 • 2008 • 2007 • 2006 • 2005 • 2004 • 2003 • 2002 • 2001