K8

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A special, crammed, what-did-I-do-with-that-kitchen-sink issue!!

K8, an APAzine for Pieces of Eight by A. Vincent Clarke of 16, Wendover Way, Welling, Kent, DA16 2BN 'You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float on his back – you've got something'. Hartley – 1001 LOGICAL LAWS (Hamlyn '81)

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DID YOU KNOW THAT......?

I must confess that along with numerous other weaknessess I have a Thing about books of odd facts. This is partly a hold-over from juvenile days, when the reading of sf, even those horrid lovely pulp magazines, showed that there were a lot more things in heaven and earth than my family ever dreamed of, but even today you can show me a book entitled ODDITIES or FACTS AND FALLACIES or THE NATURAL HISTORY OF NONSENSE and my fingers twitch.

The latest opus, via the Public Library, was a thin, 'that'll do for a Christmas present'-type book entitled DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT! by Graham & Sylvia Nown (Ward Lock), and it's destroyed even more fond illusions than usual. The paragraphs in the book are headed by a 'fact', the wordage beneath gives it the hotfoot. Thus:

COFFEE IS A PICK-ME-UP Coffee, more accurately, is a put-you-down. Coffee contains caffeine, a stimulant which provides a brief burst of energy, but leaves the body more tired than before. Its effectiveness as a hangover cure is therefore somewhat doubtful.

and another which makes one ponder:

FRESH FRUIT IS BETTER FOR YOU THAN TINNED FRUIT Fresh fruit may taste nicer than tinned fruit, but surprisingly it has less nutritional value. Tinned fruit is picked at its peak and sealed almost immediately, etc.

Which doesn't take account of all that sugary syrup in the tin, but is also (ho ho) food for thought. But possibly the most eyebrow-raising bit in the book is the following, which ought to interest Jenny and her dinosaur-loving kids:

DINOSAURS WERE MONSTERS Very true – if you have been brought up on a diet of B-movies. The real story is that many dinosaurs were quite tiny, not dissimilar in fact to plucked chickens. Studies of fossilised dinosaur bones indicate that these particular specimens, when fully grown, measured just 76cm (2½ft) from nose to tail. They could run at a top speed of 35mph (56kph), and left the average caveman standing.

Well, yes, my trusty dictionary says that dinosaurs ranged from 2ft. to 80ft., and I guess that the the smaller types would have to be fast moving to avoid being stepped on by something that out-weighed a couple of elephants (OK, I'm being frivolous, but Desmond's THE HOT BLOODED DINOSAURS makes a point of the body structure indicating speed in some dinosaurs – your normal reptilian metabolic rate indicates slowness), but I don't dig those cavemen.

"What was dat ting dat just went past, Og?"

"Dat ting dat looked like a plucked chicken, Wug? One of 'em danged dinosaurs, I guess. Nigh knocked over da baby."

Nope – it just doesn't ring true.

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WHO'S THERE? (Line 1, Act 1, Scene 1, Hamlet)

I think it's about time that I girded my loins (whatever that means – sounds like using a truss), flexed a few muscles and did something Memorable. Or Significant. I want to go down in fan history as the fan who......ummmm.

Supposing I......no, not yet.

Look, perhaps it's best to start small. I expect Samson started by pushing over a few garden gate-posts or even small churches before having a crack at the Temple. Hercules may possibly have followed a horse with a small shovel and bucket prior to tackling the Augean stables. So – how about starting a mini-Crusade about Convention Badges? I did a bit about this in Dave Wood's XYSTER a few years ago which had all the impact of an expanded polystyrene brick falling on the Moon, and I only return to the subject because I'm obsessed by it. Take the badge on the right. (fig.1). It was recently issued to me for NovaCon. A fine badge, ignoring the fact that whoever wrote it had no idea that the letter at the end of my given name is not 'c' but 'c', thus making the name 'Vin-cent', bestowed upon me by James (Sector General) White in the style of DEMOLISHED MAN in the early '50s. I suppose the writer, he, she or it, assumed I was Slavonic. (I sometimes get the awful feeling that I'm re-living an early Van Vogt story, finding myself dealing with creatures of a history-less culture). But to get back to the badge. Fifty percent is given over to the fact that it tells you and any observer that you're at NOVACON 20. This is not self-evident? I mean, do you get Con goers walking up to each other and asking what Con they're at? Well, no, better strike that – some people sleep-walking to a Con breakfast wouldn't know whether it was Saturday or Sunday. But I'd say, on the whole, that most folk do know where they are. Even those watching programme items.

Of course, we have to have some means of identifying the badge – we all know criminal type fans who'd keep their badges from one Con to the next, so that they could free-load but preserve innocent fannish faces when walking past Con officials. But is this what an identification badge is for?

I'm probably old-fashioned, but in my bumbling way I thought an identification badge was to help identify the wearer. And if there's one thing I hate in a dimly-lit Convention hall/bar/room, it's to screw up my eyes and peer at someone's chest in an endeavour to find out who it is who greets me with all the bonhomie of an old friend I haven't seen for 'x' years. I can't be alone in suffering from this. And it would be nice to be able to identify the writer of some fan article you'd read by an unknown and to congratulate him/her on it. There's an awful lot of egoboo going to waste here, I reckon. I put forward the proposal that we get a badge that really identifies the wearer at a range of 10 feet (3 metres), and doesn't treat you as an after-thought. Of course, you'd have the name of the Con on it too, just for Security's sake. I present above (fig.2) what I would have liked to have worn. If I were a frequent Con-goer I'd probably take along a lot of sticky-backed labels to each Con and do my own modification on the spot and start the revolution. As it is, I put the idea forward (again) and hope that you either Do Something or tell me why it's a bad idea.

A reprint of this page is going to some Con holders. Who's going to be sensible first?

COMMENTS ON THE NOV. '90 MAILING:

THE CAPTAIN'S TABLE – Official – Ian Bambro Nothing much to say about this except Huzzah (I think that's the right spelling?) for Our Bold Cap'n, striding the poop deck again and no doubt as I write compiling a log of the great NovaCon APA meeting, Recruiting Drive and Knees Up. OK, we'll continue collecting crew by personal recommendation – there are certainly some types around that I wouldn't feel comfortable with as companions – and wash out any collective effort, but keep it hanging behind the door in case the membership drops to – say – 13?

* * * * *

MARAUDER 11 – Ken Cheslin – Yes, I can see the point about kid's mis-spellings leading to some of your own. As the years roll by I realise that my own spelling relies heavily even if subconciously on remembering seeing the word before, preferably in print. Is this the common experience – that you look at a word and say "That looks wrong" and if necessary check it with a dictionary? As I just did with 'necessary'!

I do have a spell-checker, a Locospell job which is 160k large (that's about 70,000 words I think), but it can only be used on my simple Amstrad after a complicated piece of disc-swapping with which I'm normally too impatient, even for PoE.

The current requirement of two sides every three months seems ridiculously small, especially if you remember that there are members willing to help out by actually reproducing the stuff. And that's not a bad idea, having a sample mailing passed around other APAs, tho' in my experience it's a lot of trouble keeping something like that in circulation.

That's a really marvellous cat on p.3. And yes, I remember crudsheets – still produce 'em and have stacks, because they're always useful for putting through a duplicator again to mop up any surplus ink. Rarely thrown away unless they're solid black each side. As a small hoax Mal Ashworth once sent Walt Willis a collection of crud sheets, purporting to be the first issue of a new fanzine. He sent me a sort of copy later, and it's a weird and wonderful item, not only having twice-duplicated text, upside-down pages, fingermarks, hand-prints and the rest, but even one or two 'tie-shape' silhouettes, as if someone had caught their tie in the duper. (Of course, that dates it – wearing a tie while duplicating!)

Re. fans in the Services. A lot of old-timers are now dead, so you wouldn't get too much response, but as I remember it very few went into the Navy, the rest were split about 65/35 RAF and Army. I wonder what it is about the Navy? Chuck?

Which reminds me that I'm at present in touch with Frank Parnell, who is not a fan as we normally use the term but a reader & collector from wa-a-ay back; he put his immense knowledge of fantasy and weird to some use in the mid-'80s when he compiled a detailed index of magazines in those genres, 600 pages long, called MONTHLY TERRORS. Frank was in the Army during the War, and had a career that would be thought extravagant if it were undertaken by some comic-book hero. He sailed in convoy to the Middle East in Dec. '40 attacked by U-boats and a pocket battleship, on to Malta, where attacked by dive-bombers, later saw action in France, etc. etc. It's hard to realise when you hear of this sort of thing that only about 10% of servicemen actually saw 'action' during the War – 90% of us were 'back-up'.

But to get back to your piece, I don't know what it's like these days, but what I missed even in the RAF was, as you infer, the sheer curiosity about things outside one's immediate environment that seems to be possessed by fans. Things are getting a wee bit better all round – the spread of quiz shows and Trivial Pursuit may be a factor – but when you hear someone, as I did the other day, ask viewers "What is the name of the circle of prehistoric stones in Wiltshire?" .....brrrr.

Re. unimpressive crud PBs – did you get a copy of TURKEY SHOOT at NovaCon? They review the hack and the horrible in sf, much as the Medved brothers amused themselves (and us) with 'Turkeys' in the film world. It can get monotonous and a bit cruel if carried to excess but they appear to be holding themselves in check. There's a certain element of young-fan snobbery – Old is Bad – but on the whole it's impressive.

(Comments 2)

K7 – self – I mentioned Dave Langford in passing in my piece on the size of airmail envelopes, so thought it only courteous to give him a copy. With FTL speed a packet arrived at 16WWW – 50 airmail envelopes of the correct size made by Wiggins Teape and called 'Indus'. Dave said he'd picked them up cheaply and suggested office stationers were the people who'd stock similar types. He also enclosed a CLOUD CHAMBER, his own APAzine from '82, in which he revealed himself an Authority on Michael Innes stories ("The first dozen Innes detective stories are by far the best of the forty-odd, I think, full of outrageous and bizarre ideas....") and showed himself to be a definitive role model, up there in the Pantheon of Good Fans.

Other notes; I've just renewed my borrowed Washing Machine Manual again – Life is just too interesting to muck about with boring old washing machines at present – and I've kept a promise to have a Page 3 picture in this issue. This has necessitated putting 'K's on coloured paper in future – too much 'see-through' with white, and apologies to those who found the Metzger car creeping inwards from the bacover of No.7. Nothing as I write on the Tyneside front.

L29.1 – Chuck Connor – The observation on the colour of jellyfish back differing strangely from the ocean floor is typical of the remark I've made elsewhere about fans having a sense of curiosity. I notice that you don't say anything (well, that I've noticed) about any effect that weird hours of daylight and night are having on you.

L29.3 – Ditto ditto – I had this 24th. October, nicely postmarked MARITIME MAIL 23rd Oct., just too late to include giving it a mention last time.

I was asking at the local Tesco's for Austrian Smoked Cheese suppositories (as recommended by our Falklands social affairs correspondent) but all I got were funny looks, so I don't know the shape, even now. But I do know what a fender is, and I suppose Yokohama ones just have little slit eyes. I've thought for years that cars should have something like this, (fenders, not eyes) but I suppose it would spoil their aerodynamics. I've also thought for years that cars should have their numbers printed on back and sides in as large letters & numbers as possible so they'd be easier to identify at a distance, but this seems to be another idle dream. Still, come the revolution....

At last, the distinction between ships and boats – ships carry boats! Truly, all knowledge is contained in fanzines.

HARD TIMES 4 – Paul Michael Cray – The identification letters such as PLMC@ etc have always intrigue me – they're springing up all over. Leaving out the 'Janet' in yours at the end which may have some esoteric significance, and leaving out the full stops/periods, we're left with 19 symbols, 18 of which can have 26 variations. As there are only roughly 4,000,000,000 people on this planet, I'm forced to the conclusion that this is some manifestation of an inter-galactic network waiting to take us over. Or is there a simpler explanation?

Do you really think the quality of type in a fanzine makes all that much difference? Come around here (maybe I can get a PoE get-together going when Ian visits some day) and I'll open the vaults and show you HYPHEN, one of the most prestigious fanzines of all time, which was certainly inferior to HARD TIMES in reproduction. What was that remark you made re. TWIN PEAKS regarding style over substance?

I think the best way out of your problem (food left in oven while you work late at QMW) is to get a cheap microwave oven; they're lots cheaper than word-processors.

I like your style, Paul – clear and unadorned with the sort of fripperies and brackets that I indulge in. And always something on which to comment. Re. the fact that people have pleasure from reading fanzines even if they don't LoC is one of the great problems in fandom; those that do produce must surely feel sometimes that they're shouting into a desert. I suppose the attitude to cultivate is that of a TV performer, who'll sweat (metaphorically) before 10m. people and get possibly a hundred letters back – an infinitesimal return in egoboo for the effort. But the TV performer gets an ever-swelling bank balance; the poor old fan sees it diminish in most cases.

FRAGMENTS – Mike Gould – Impressive. Firstly, congratulations on the marriage. And I suppose lastly as well – it should overide all other considerations.

The poll tax will be modified if you believe everything that the candidates for Tory party leader are promising as I write, notwithstanding the fact that none of them had the guts to stand up and tell Maggie it was unworkable before she left office. I think some form of personal income tax as advocated by the Social Democrats is the only fair way of proceeding. Unfortunately, the whole thing has been bogged down in politics; an alleged five years to construct a scheme which is leaking in every seam.... I'd like to see something on the lines of a national referendum; if national political parties can afford to swamp us with election literature every four/five years they should certainly be able to devise a scheme which would tell us the essence of each party's proposal and get a vote taken which would fix the thing for, say, 20 years, no matter which political party ran the country. This would then shift the onus of decision on to the people themselves.

In the para. re. comics, I don't know what "Alan More's V for Vendetta" is, so don't know to what you're referring, but I suppose my chief objection to comics, apart from the fact that they discourage literacy (why bother to learn the words when you can look at the pictures?) is that, like films and TV, the physical effects of violence are too glossed over. Knocking a guy across the room (and sometimes out of the window) is not possible without the knocker suffering also.

I very much appreciate the account, but don't understand the point, about feeding a cat a whole pill – surely it's possible to crush it up and mix it with a sardine or whatever? I think "He came in to a telling off" may give the wrong psychological signals; a young child may be able to link cause and effect and we know of dogs who look – er – 'hang-dog', but does a cat's mind work that way? Feline psychology, anyone?

'A Travelling Show' is good atmospheric stuff, tho' I'd hardly classify it as a story. Where did the 'wellies' come from? I thought that he was expecting to cross a bridge.

The DIY piece reminded me in every sentence of my own struggles. Re shelves, did you know that in a recess it's possible to stand a series of small uprights on the skirting boards (if you have them) and then keep them in place by inserting horizontal shelves? My main shelves either side of a fireplace haven't a screw in them. You have to put in middle-of-the-shelf upright supports, of course, especially if, like mine, the shelves are overloaded.

That's a good point about the waitresses dresses in the Jersey travelogue, and I very much like 'waspfully'.

OASIS OF LOVE etc. – Darroll Pardoe – Well, your heart's in the right place in the interesting piece on charity, but if I were in the unfortunate position of begging I think I'd rather have cold money than a warm thought. But we enter very deep waters. What you're asking for is a re-examination and where needed revision of the whole prevailing philosophical ethos. I think, as you presumably do, that if we all loved one another in a simple communistic state then all our worries would be over. I believe that this was roughly the hippie position of the mid-'60s. You'd have to overturn the whole caboodle – the feelings of every religious person (Jews & Arabs, fundamentalists, Moslems, etc.), every nationalist political tenet (Northern Ireland, Cambodia, S. Africa, etc) etc., to achieve it. I'd be interested to hear what went wrong with the hippie movement – I was rather busy while all that was going on.

Re. memories. Yes, memories can fade into a pleasant blur, and admittedly if you start digging around written sources you find some distortions and even downright lies. But in all human activities you build on past achievements; we learn from the dead past, as well as being entertained by it. If you were holding a Convention, would you go ahead, as the Tyneside mob tried to do, with an elaborate programme run by three people? In the fanzine field would you only distribute your ish to those names currently appearing in that month's fanzines? Of course not; you'd be guided by knowledge of the past. "Had a good long natter about the last 20 years in fandom", eh?

TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY – Maureen Porter – Mythology. I presume in the past myths were constructed by itinerant story-tellers who travelled from place to place, embroidering and elaborating and refining their stories until the latter received the accolade of being written down. There was a solid (if you'll pardon the term) basis of oral tradition and the things could have happened. William Tell and Robin Hood and King Arthur and the rest could have existed. In 20th. century Britain there's a strata of the population that believes in soap-opera – look at the wreaths received when someone-or-other in CORONATION STREET snuffed it – because the nearer to real life it is the more believable it is. But no one, not even the most ardent Trekkie, believes in sf on TV or in books, so I'd think that an essential ingredient – believeability – is missing. On the other hand, it's possible to believe that a little Dutch boy stuck a finger in a hole in a dyke, even tho' the incident has been traced back to a children's book.

I'll give you for free an exception to this – a fantasy story that became a myth in the 20th. century, tho' it took place in the hectic atmosphere of the first World War, with some elements of religion which is always myth-based.

I have the first PB edition of Arthur Machen's THE BOWMEN (Simpkin Marshall 1915); a shorter version of the main story in the book, 'Soldier's Rest', was printed in the Evening News some 10 months previously. Simply, both versions told of angelic appearances to British troops – the 'Angel of Mons'. To his amazement, Machen found that the stories were being taken seriously. The Occult Review got in on the act, asking if the story had any foundation in fact. Machen replied it had none, but A month or two later, I received several requests from editors of parish magazines to reprint the story. I – or rather my editor – readily gave permission, and then after another month or two the conductor ((sic)) of one of these magazines wrote saying (that) issue had been sold out...would I allow them to reprint it as a pamphlet, and would I write a short preface giving the exact authorities for the story? I replied I could not give authorities, since I had none, the tale being pure invention. The priest wrote again, suggesting – to my amazement – that the main 'facts' of "The Bowman" must be true, that my share in the matter must surely have been confined to the elaboration and decoration of a veridical history....."

Machen adds a postscript, quoting a late extract from Occult Review in which a lady says of battlefield visions "Everybody has seen them who has fought through from Mons to Ypres; they all agree on them individually, and have no doubt at all as to the final issue of their interference"

Presumably she means they inspired soldiers. Some kind soul has affixed in THE BOWMEN a cutting from the Daily Mail, August 24th., 1915, in which a soldier swears in an affidavit that he saw the Angel at Mons, with an additional note from a JP, saying the soldier was a "very sound, intelligent man".

Alas, there's also a cutting from the Hickey column in the Daily Express, 28th. December 1939, when we were in another war, outlining the story and adding that "Ten days later the same JP announced with regret that he had found out that this soldier had, in fact, been in England throughout the battle of Mons."

Gee, all that without mentioning flying saucers.

Response: I think you'd have had a better response to your article if you'd have found out beforehand how many PoEers had read 'Stig of the Dump'. I shall now go and study Crispin.

Responsibility: I wouldn't have minded taking on the awesome responsibility of navigating PoE through the reefs, but I'm a new lad in the crew, still swabbing the deck.

THE ARACHNO FILE 3 – John Rickett – This is such a competently crafted and watertight 'zine (as well as being withal, funny) that it's hard not to go overboard about it. So – bits and pieces. Yes, tanks arrived in Saudi camouflaged – six weeks after they'd been drafted. Must have been long-drying paint. * The sorbet reminds me of a very funny piece (PUNCH?) where after feverishly following a recipe for that evening's meal the amateur cook reads "Leave to marinate overnight" * I took a video of RUNAWAY as I was doing something else at the time, but all I can read through a sleet of special effects sparks was that special effects were by – would you believe Special Effects Unlimited?*

'The Muse Strikes' (nice title) reminds me of that sf author (was it Fred Pohl?) who said that it was absolutely vital to start your fingers doing something at the keyboard, even if it was the saga of the quick brown fox. Although it's not strictly relevant, I'm remembering John W. Campbell Jnr.'s anecdote in OF WORLDS BEYOND (Fantasy Press '47) – "When (L. Ron) Hubbard has to rewrite a passage, he will start a couple of pages earlier and gather momentum, so to speak, so that when he hits the revision he's rolling at his usual high-speed pace". This was about Ron's earlier (readable) stuff, of course.

THE STRUTHIAN PERSPECTIVE – Theo Ross – That's a nice piece of sustained atmospheric humour that you start with on Rule Four; wish I could write like that. Oh yes, I agree that science hasn't resolved everything and it's still the Theory of Relativity and stuff, but the classes and parameters of phenomena are fairly well defined; you can tinker about with divisions of elementary particles and stars but you won't find the scientist staggering back from his telescope exclaiming "I've seen an elf"! I'm not a hard-core sf reader only, though – besides Pratchett I like Dunsany, Cabell, De Camp, Eisenstein's SORCERER'S SON and...and...I'd be interested to hear about Sally the Dog, to counterbalance the superfluity of felinophiles we seem to have in fandom.

THE RETURN OF THE CULTURE VULTURE – Peter-Fred Thompson – You have a too down-beat view of your achievement – a report (of sorts) on the World Con; there have been very few accounts of it that I've read so far. I'm a real home-body personally, so although you wouldn't get me actually partaking in tours to furrin parts, I appreciate all the incidental detail you give. And fret about the detail you don't give. To take one of several instances, why were you and Christina "determined to do some cycling whilst in Holland"? (Incidentally, I did one circuit of the block on a back-pedal-brake bike about 40 years back and the experience, the sense of helplessness, has remained etched in my memory – I commend your fortitude). Tell us, if you'd had and were able to see bigger name badges at the Con, would it have made a difference? The Yugoslavian Pavel I mentioned a couple of 'K's back who was also at the World Con practically fell in love with Holland – and he has visited other countries down Yugoslavia way. Cleanness, courtesy. etc. – he was full of praise.

COMMUNICADO 3 – Ian Bambro – Titles have been a source of interest to me for years, of course; in my position you naturally pick up THROUGH THE SUN IN AN AIRSHIP or VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS or WHEN YVONNE WAS DICTATOR, all outstanding titles in their own right as well as murmuring "grab me" to the searcher for sf. But as you say, there are many with a certain intrinsic charm, irrespective of the story within. As a child I used to hesitate in the Public Library every time I saw one particular book with two titles on the spine: I BOUGHT A MOUNTAIN & UNCERTAIN STAR; there was a rhythm there that was difficult to overlook. THE PLUMED SERPENT, THE EGG & I, COLD COMFORT FARM, THE MOON OF MUCH GLADNESS, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN...hell, I have a 430-page book here full of pocket book titles I can pick from, including such gems as NAKED ON ROLLER SKATES and HOW TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS FROM APES. If I ever need space fillers.....

Glad you liked the London piece, and though I flinched as anyone would at the aspects of dirt and noise and traffic and air-pollution and the rest, I felt a certain ridiculous and unwarranted sense of pride at being able to 'show it off'. That's a very canny comment about the similarity to parents sharing their children's wonder, tho' the weirdest thing that I remember about that was renewing acquaintance with fairy stories.

Jobs. Yes, white-collar gets the nod amongst sf fans, particularly computer staff, tho' I've known a few others in the past, including three regular soldiers and a couple of truck-drivers, all active fans. I suppose the furthest from the median that I knew was a simple Wiltshire farmhand, who like the great McGonagall thought he was a poet and produced excruciatingly bad verse. At the other end of the scale were a US senator, a practising psychiatrist and – would you believe a lawyer, Ian? Good stuff.

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Nov. 27th. I'd w/p'd all the above, and was just thinking that today I'd finish , get some coloured duplicating paper, and maybe run the pages off after electrostencilling, when DON-o-SAUR 60 came in the morning mail. Unexpectedly, it reprinted the trip report from K6 when Don Thompson, DON-o-SAUR editor visited. Since returning to the US, Don's found he has an inoperable cancer. Average patient's life expectancy 9 months. Don's one of the nicest people you could hope to meet. He sets a most dignified and praise-worthy example of the way to exit. AVC