Beachcombing: Fan Tidbits by David Langford

Release date: December 21, 2020

Subgenre: Non-fiction collection, Fanwriting

About Beachcombing:

 

Beachcombing is David Langford’s first collection of (mostly) SF fanzine-published essays, speeches and silliness since the long-ago The Silence of the Langford (1996), edited by Ben Yalow, which was a Hugo finalist for best nonfiction in 1997. Over the years this author has won 29 Hugo Awards for his work in fanzines, science fiction newsletters, short SF, and SF reference works. Beachcombing comprises over 78,000 words of vintage Langford.

The contents include the much-acclaimed convention talks “Live Thog’s Masterclass”, “The Secret History of Ansible” and “Twenty Years of Uproar” (a ramble through favourite fanzine humour); offbeat pop-science articles for Fortean Times and elsewhere, on such subjects as perpetual motion, violet-ray healing machines, St Hildegard of Bingen, and how to detect the Number of the Beast in practically any name you choose; a handful of recipes and another handful of Drabbles; several introductions to SF books; and many instalments of unreliable autobiography.

 

Excerpt:

 

From Live Thog’s Masterclass, a convention talk:

To set a suitably low tone, I’ll begin with a few of Thog’s most cherished lines from the big names of fantasy, SF and even that mainstream stuff. Sensitive authors should already have left the room. As Erich von Däniken put it in Chariots of the Gods? – “It took courage to write this book, and it will take courage to read it.” Or to quote the series blurb for the Usborne Spinechillers imprint, these are “Full length spinetingling tales – too scary to read in the dark!” Here we go....

• Brian Aldiss demonstrates his knowledge of arcane geography in Remembrance Day: “She wore large bronze earrings made in an obscure country which rattled when she laughed.”
• Poul Anderson’s story “Among Thieves” suggests a futuristic method of spring-cleaning: “He swept the antechamber with the eyes of a trapped animal.”
• Isaac Asimov mentions an unusual throat problem in Prelude to Foundation: “His mouth, for a moment, ran liquid and then it slid, almost of its own accord, down his throat.”
• J.G. Ballard presents the concept of fun-loving facial hair in Cocaine Nights: “The underwriter seemed equally amused, frisking up the ends of his moustache, eager for them to join in the fun.”
• Stephen Baxter reveals a daring combat technique in his story “The Star Beast”: “He closed with Arabs whose breath stank of spices and who fought with knives clutched in their teeth.”
• Storm Constantine’s Hermetech describes a young woman with unusual physical endowments: “He could feel the bones through her spare buttocks.”
• Robert Heinlein sensitively describes a kiss from the female viewpoint in “The Number of the Beast”: “Our teeth grated, and my nipples went spung!”
• Thomas Harris conjures up a slightly fishy image in Hannibal – “Excitement leaped like a trout in the public trousers.”
• Robert Holdstock combines horror with fruit salad in The Stalking: “His head suddenly began to peel, the flesh tearing away from the bone in ragged strips, like a pink banana.”
• Patricia McKillip diagnoses another throat condition in The Riddle-Master of Hed – “Something jumped in the back of Morgon’s throat. It was huge, broad as a farmhorse, with a deer’s delicate, triangular face.”
• Kim Stanley Robinson finds an exciting simile for a space elevator in Green Mars: “Just to the south of them, the new Socket was like a titanic concrete bunker, the new elevator cable rising out of it like an elevator cable...”
• Connie Willis describes her versatile heroine’s skills in Doomsday Book: “She had memorised the Latin masses and taught herself to embroider and milk a cow.”
• And over a hundred years ago, Robert W. Chambers in his horror classic The King in Yellow summed up how we all feel after completing the first draft: “I believe the author shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn’t he?”

Now you may be asking yourselves, is Thog’s Masterclass just a sadistic exercise in tearing defenceless prose fragments from their literary context and holding them up to the cruel light of scorn? I’d like to assure everyone that that’s completely correct.

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About David Langford:

  David Langford is a UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos and one Semiprozine Hugo for his self-produced news magazine, Ansible (which see). His one fiction Hugo is for "Different Kinds of Darkness" (January 2000 F&SF) as best short story.

Ansible | SF Encyclopedia | ISFDB