The return of the Gillespie... two years later

I haven't been here for two years, mainly because of a lack of time to go blogging. However, recently I've retasted blogging on my LiveJournal site, but again feel the need to post long articles from the glorious past. I don't have the knowledge of HTML to set up a regular Web site, but would like to be able to point people to a series of articles that I've written over the years. Some of them can be found in issues of Scratch Pad at http://efanzines.com/ in PDF format. For some reason, however, people don't often discover this material when it's in PDF format, although my fanzines are a lot better looking than my blogs.

Thoughts of this kind were prompted by the kind folks of the Australian SF Foundation, who at ConVergence 2, the national Australian SF convention held in Melbourne 8-11 June, gave me the A. Bertram Chandler Award for Lifetime Achievement in Australian SF. The Foundation kept this a complete surprise from me, luring me into town by asking me to present the Ditmar Award for Best Fanzine during the awards ceremony. Probably a lot of people in the audience were also surprised, having not heard of me or heard mere whispers of my existence. The citation for the award mentions publishing SF Commentary since 1969, and The Metaphysical Review in 1984, and with Carey Handfield and Rob Gerrand, being part of Norstrilia Press, one of the two major Australian small presses of the 1970s. What I've mainly done is write stuff in fanzines -- probably about a million words, and many of the best of those words were written from 1968 to 1977. It's about time I placed some of those articles somewhere, despite the enormous amount of time it takes to OCR articles that first appeared in fanzines.

My other motive in returning to blogging is try to do more to publicise the life and work of George Turner. When George died in 1997, almost exactly ten years ago, he made me his literary executor and heir. Which means that, for the rest of my life, I have to be George Turner. Unfortunately, all his books have fallen out of print, excepta few I still have in boxes and am willing to sell to anybody interested (including his literary biography In the Heart or in the Head, his short story collection Pursuit of Miracles, and his book about the 1979 Monash Writers Workshop, The View from the Edge). There must be a way to post his early, non-SF novels, for instance, but again it's a long job OCRing old books. For the moment, I'm trying to get George's best novel, The Sea and Summer (Drowning Towers in the US edition) back into print, and I have a lot of OCRing to go.

Not much has happened during the last two years, except a general lack of income (as prices have really started to go up, my income from freelance editing and indexing has steadily declined), the death of my mother in March this year, and turning sixty. I feel as if I am running out of time. I want to publish lots of issues of SF Commentary, Steam Engine Time and The Metaphysical Review, but don't have the money for printing and postage. Hence I will probably cut everybody from the mailing list except those who have actually paid for printed copies, and point everybody else towards efanzines.com, hosted by the genial and brilliant Bill Burns.

As John Bangsund used to say, that's a lot of hope going on. Obviously I would prefer to keep publishing real fanzines on real paper, but one needs lots of money to do that. Still, issues that are mainly Web-based are among good company if they appear on efanzines.com.

WRITERS' WORKSHOPS: ROBERT HOGE INTERVIEWS BRUCE GILLESPIE

[Robert Hoge, who interviewed me from Queensland via email, gave the impression that this was to be a feature article in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, the busy little Australian SF magazine. Instead, my impeccable thoughts and deathless prose were reduced to one quotation of three lines within a quite different article! So enjoy the following interview: I’m certainly not going to reprint Hoge’s treatment of it.]

How did you become involved in the 1975 Le Guin Workshop?

In Australia we knew about the Clarion writers’ workshop method through reading the Clarion anthologies published by Robin Scott Wilson (founder of the method) during the early seventies. Lee Harding had conducted a small workshop as part of the 1973 national Easter convention, held in Melbourne, and I have a vague memory that George Turner conducted a one-day workshop in Adelaide in 1974.

But we -- that is, the organising committee of the 1975 World Convention, Aussiecon I, held in Melbourne -- went ahead with a week-long workshop because Ursula Le Guin asked for it. At the end of 1974, because of pressing personal reasons she wanted to withdraw from being our Pro Guest of Honour at Aussiecon. She would only stay on and make the journey from Portland to Melbourne, she said, if she could teach a Clarion-style writers’ workshop in the week
before Aussiecon. We agreed.

Who would organise the workshop? Other members of the Aussiecon committee pointed at me, although I had no experience of organising such an event. Carey Handfield offered to help. We scouted several locations, and in January 1975 found the beautiful Booth Lodge, a Church of
England retreat in the Dandenong Ranges.

We had to choose the students who would take part in the Workshop. Most of our advertising was done through writers’ groups such as the Fellowship of Australian Writers and the Australian Society of Authors. As a result, we knew almost none of the people who applied. I sent the applicants’ stories to Ursula Le Guin, who chose the participants. One of the applicant stories, Philippa Maddern’s ‘The Ins and Outs of the Hadhya City State’ was so good that it has
became an Australian SF classic.

We also had to raise a fair bit of money so that the participants could afford to attend. John Bangsund used his connections with the Literature Board of the Australia Council to obtain a large grant that enabled the Aussiecon committee to keep student fees down.

Finally, we had to set up a viable photocopying operation (using the massive old thermal photocopiers of the time), so that every participant could read everybody else’s submissions, then read all the stories during the week of the workshop. Most of this organisation was done by David Grigg, Robin Johnson, Don Ashby, Ken Ford and members of the Magic Pudding Club (Melbourne’s slanshack of the time). Somehow all the participants got to Melbourne, then
to Booth Lodge, just in time to welcome Ursula, who had just stepped off the plane.

From an organisational point of view, what was the biggest surprise for you that came out of the 1975 Le Guin workshop?
What was the most enjoyable aspect? And the least?

I was a hopeless organiser in 1975. Many kind souls took over from me and did the organising. This was the least enjoyable aspect of the workshop, especially as the same people were supposed to be organising the last stages of Aussiecon itself. The most enjoyable aspect was meeting Ursula Le Guin, and becoming one of the writing students instead of merely remaining an onlooker.

Surprises? Everything was surprising. It remains possibly the most exciting week of my life, because not only could I see my own writing improving, but I could also see astonishing improvements in the work of all the other participants. People worked at a lunatic pace: staying up to one or two in the morning to finish their stories, getting up at 8 for breakfast, workshopping the stories all morning, then settling down to the next story (or next revision of the previous story) after lunch. We became a group mind, each encouraging the other, with every triumph of every person giving extra energy to everybody else.

In The Altered I you talk about Le Guin in part by saying: ‘That she trusted us to trust each other to trust ourselves.’ Would you expand a bit on this please? Were you saying that at the end of the day, the participants in the workshop are as much if not more important to the experience than the tutor, or something else?

What is the essence of the Clarion writers’ workshop method? A circle of writers in a large room. A few hours before, we have received copies of the stories or versions written the day before by all the other participants. We discuss each story in turn. The person whose story is being
discussed cannot reply until every other person has made his or her comment. This could become a ghastly experience. I’ve been told that some writers in residence at some American Clarion workshops have chosen to make these sessions into confrontations that have left some students psychologically scarred for life. Not so when Ursula Le Guin is in the room. A spirit of enthusiastic joy suffuses the room.

Other students’ comments might not be always perceptive, but many are very helpful. When everybody else has had their say, Ursula says two or three sentences; nothing more. And we pass onto the next story. The student whose story has just been discussed goes away at the end of the session, works most of the night, and comes back with a story that neither that person nor the rest of us could have expected.

Magic is here, and it is created by every person present.

As someone who was at the centre of organising Australia’s first real live-in SF workshop, what advice would you be giving the organisers of Clarion South? If there was one crucial thing they must get right, what would it be? Is there anything you’d change about the 1975 workshop if you could go back and redo it?

After attending the 1975 workshop, I would have said that, apart from choosing the right teacher or teachers and picking the participants carefully, physical surroundings
are the most important aspect of a successful workshop. Someone has described the usual six-week Clarion-style workshop as ‘boot camp for writers’. If so, nobody wants to be worrying about uncomfortable beds, heat or cold, or badly cooked meals. The cost must include such amenities. Booth Lodge had idyllic physical surroundings (the hills of the Dandenongs, cutting us off from the rest of the world), comfortable rooms, adequate heating and superb meals.

However, the 1979 workshop in Sydney, at which Terry Carr and George Turner were the writers in residence, undercuts my argument. The facilities were awful, the rooms were ferociously hot, and almost every physical aspect was judged a failure. Yet the 1979 workshop has proved the most successful of the three in turning out writers who have continued to publish in the eighties and nineties (Sussex, Frahm, Buckrich, Blackford, and several others). The participants felt that they had their backs to the wall; physical discomfort is perhaps a better training for the writer’s life than the comforts of Booth Lodge in 1975.

I can’t offer much advice to the organisers of Clarion South except to take on board everything they’ve heard or read about six-week-style workshops. Such workshops cannot sustain the level of intense activity that people remember from the 1970s Australian workshops. Nobody can stay on a high plain of excitement for six weeks without expiring. There must be time and facilities for leisure activity at weekends. The style of each writer in residence must be different from the person teaching the week before or week after.

What is your opinion of residential writing workshops in general? How successful can they be and what sort of people benefit most from them?

The organisers of Clarion workshops in America and Britain can point to the large numbers of graduates who have become successful writers. In Australia, we can point to some successes, but most of them from the 1979 workshop. Most of the brightest stars of the 1975 and 1977
workshops became successful in other fields -- Pip Maddern in academic history, David Grigg in IT, Rob Gerrand in public relations, etc.

The problem with writers’ workshops is that they come to an end. That extraordinary buzz generated by a community of like-minded people, the buzz that causes lots of literary caterpillars to turn into high-flying butterflies, must end. Writers go back to lonely desks. Many of them turn back into caterpillars. They keep in touch with each other, but ordinary existence robs them of writing time. With any luck, today’s writers’ workshops place much more emphasis
on the practicalities of the writer’s life than they once did.

My guess is that writers who were always going to be a success gain most from the workshops. They can speed up the learning process immensely, gain connections in the publishing world, learn about what sells, work out their own literary priorities. As for the rest of us, the also-rans -- we tend to remember the workshop itself as a highlight of our lives. I’ve long since given up writing fiction, although I still write a large amount of non-fiction.

How did the 1975 and 1977 Writers’ Workshops lead to the
publication of The Altered I and A View from the Edge?

No event takes place in a vacuum. In 1975 and 1977, our collective confidence that we could hold such workshops sprang from our collective confidence in all aspects of Australian SF activity. In 1975, Carey Handfield, Rob Gerrand and I began Norstrilia Press, a small press that continued until 1985. Lee Harding edited the best stories from the 1975 workshop, as well as telling the story of the participants. Ursula Le Guin contibuted a story. The Altered I appeared in 1976, and was republished in America by Berkeley Books. After the 1977 workshop, held at Monash
University, with Christopher Priest, Vonda McIntyre and George Turner as writers in residence, George put together A View from the Edge.

Would you like to see Clarion South produce its own equivalent
of The Altered I and The View from the Edge?

Why not? Today, there are plenty of small presses capable of producing a good-looking volume. You would have the advantage of deciding to do a book before the workshop, not after it. A major publisher might pitch in. If your writers in residence are willing to contribute new stories to such a volume, you might be able to sell overseas rights, as we did for The Altered I.

Is the Australian SF community big enough on its own to support an annual six-week workshop catering for 17 or 18 writers? Are there enough writers to make it viable as an ongoing concern?

Any doubt about this proposition would be banished by attending any of the recent national SF conventions in Australia. Not only do we now have several writers earning a good living from fiction (which was not the case in 1975), but we have vast numbers of wannabe writers who have great potential but perhaps don’t yet know how to forge a career. The only restriction on numbers could be cost per student -- the organisers of Clarion South will have to become expert money-raisers as well as solving the other details of running a six-week workshop.

If successful, what would the establishment of an annual residential writing workshop mean to Australian speculative fiction?

That depends on the publishers. In 1975 and 1977, the only regular publishers of Australian SF were our two small presses, Norstrilia Press and Cory & Collins, and a few overseas publishers, such as Berkeley and Gollancz, who were on the lookout for good Australian novels. Today we have several major publishers earning a great deal from local authors, plus quite a few overseas markets, such as Tor, buying novels from Australian authors. Writers now can see a career path before them, which was not the case in the 1970s.

To what extent did the Australian SF community get behind the 1975 and 1977 workshops? Was that important to its success? How important is it for the organisers of Clarion South to try to involve the wider SF community as much as possible?

As I’ve tried to show, the 1975 and 1977 workshops were at the centre of SF writing activity at that time. Apart from anything else, Ursula Le Guin dazzled us with her wit and wisdom. Two years later, Chris Priest and Vonda McIntyre stayed on for Monoclave, the convention held out at Monash University on the Australia Day weekend, January 1977. This set the pattern for inviting overseas guests of honour to local conventions. In 1979, Terry Carr was an exciting writer to have around, and George Turner’s overseas career in publishing SF was beginning. Heady days indeed.

But what was just as important was the backing of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the three workshops. I suspect such funds are no longer available. Therefore the involvement of the whole SF community will be important, both for alerting promising new writers to the possibilities of the writers’ workshop method, and in raising money to hold Clarion South.

Clarion South has announced the first half of its lineup for 2004 -- Terry Dowling, Lucy Sussex and Jack Dann. Given the organisers are hoping to run Clarion South annually, who would be on your wish list (national and international) as tutors?

My wish list would have little to do with the authors I most enjoy reading. They must be good teachers. Find out the people who have proven most successful at workshops, both here and overseas. Remember that such a person has to be a substitute parent for a week, often dealing with trivial matters and conflicts as well as the major task of inspiring writers. You don’t need too many overseas people, except perhaps an overseas agent or publisher’s editor. Terry, Lucy
and Jack have all taught workshops, and quite a few other well-known writers have been writing teachers - Alison Goodman is an obvious candidate. Philippa Maddern has not published much fiction for awhile, but would be a superb teacher (and she attended both the 1975 and 1977 workshops), whereas other working writers might not relish the role of teacher. Clarion South should also consider non-SF writers who have been successful writers and workshop
teachers, such as Garry Disher, Thea Astley, and Liam Davison.

- Bruce Gillespie, 22 November 2002 (Two Clarion Souths have been held successfully in Brisbane since this interview was conducted, and a third is planned for Melbourne within the next two years.)

1975: THE YEAR OF AUSSIECON I

It was all John Bangsund’s fault. Everything in those days was. From 1966 to 1969, John Bangsund was editor of Australian Science Fiction Review (ASFR), the magazine that created Australian fandom and SF activity as we know it today.

Or was it Andy Porter’s fault? These days he calls himself Andrew Porter, and for a long time edited SF Chronicle. In those days, he was Andy Porter, editor of Algol, one of America’s most interesting fanzines. In a letter to John Bangsund in the late sixties, he just happened to mention the idea of ‘Australia in 75’. A world convention in Australia? Ever? As soon as 1975?

John mentioned the idea in ASFR. John Foyster heard the call, and at the 1970 Eastercon in Melbourne established a committee to bid for a world convention in 1975. We would have to bid against an American city, and possibly against a European city as well. Could we do it?
Beginning in early 1970, Australian fans began editing and publishing as many as a hundred fanzines per year. In those days, the fanzine was the only form of communication between fans throughout the world.

John Litchen, Paul Stevens, and many others put together the Anti-fan film. Sent to America, it travelled from one convention to another, and became our main bidding tool.

In Australia, we had to get used to running large hotel-based conventions. In 1973, about twenty of us travelled to Torcon II (the World Convention held that year in Toronto), and won the bid.

The penny dropped; jaws fell through the floor. Now we had to run this circus! Was it possible? John Foyster handed on the committee chair to John Bangsund, who handed it to Robin Johnson. Robin, not known until then as a convention organiser, suddenly became an organising genius.

One great difficulty. Our Pro Guest of Honour, Ursula Le Guin, had great difficulty arranging to attend the convention in August 1975 and accompany her family to England in the same month. She wasn’t coming. Robin rang her in Portland, Oregon, and I and others sent her letters. She consented to attend, provided we held, in the week before Aussiecon, a writers workshop in the style of the Clarion workshops. We put in an application to the Literature Board for enabling funds. We gained that support.

Who would run the workshop? I was doing nothing on the committee at the time, so Robin pointed at me, although usually I can’t organise my way out of a paper bag. 1974 had been a depressing year for me, and I had nearly dropped out of fandom. The fact that anybody put any faith in me gave me much-needed energy. I placed advertisements for workshop candidates. The ads that worked best were those placed in the news sheets of the Australian Society of Authors and the Victorian Society of Editors. I had heard of almost none of the candidates, each of whom had to send in a qualifying story. I sent the stories to Ursula Le Guin, who picked the final list of attendees. One entrant story in particular was astonishing: ‘The Ins and Outs of the Hadhya City State’, by Philippa C. Maddern, a writer none of us had met. Some years later, after it had been published in The Altered I, the story was voted the most popular Australian SF Short Story Ever in a poll conducted by Van Ikin for Science Fiction.

January 1975 saw Carey Handfield and me trundling around the Dandenong Ranges, near Melbourne, looking for a workshop site. The site had to be secluded and comfortable. Nothing seemed promising until we found Booth Lodge tucked away in the hills, an attractive combination of Federation-style main guest house and modern dormitories. All the facilities were modern, the beds looked comfortable, and all meals would be provided. It was expensive, but the Literature Board grant would pay for a large percentage of the fees for those writers who wanted to attend.

While we were travelling around the hills, I might have mentioned, as I often did to anybody who would listen, the difficulty of raising money to keep publishing SF Commentary. Carey said: ‘Why don’t we start a small publishing company? The profits can keep SF Commentary going.’ Which is how Norstrilia Press began. We wrote to Genevieve Linebarger, the widow of Paul Linebarger (Cordwainer Smith), and gained permission to use the name ‘Norstrilia’. I put together, as Norstrilia Press’s first title, all the material I had published in SF Commentary about Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd featured an introduction by Roger Zelazny, a cover by Irene Pagram, and articles and letters by people such as Stanislaw Lem, George Turner, and Phil Dick himself. It did not take long to prepare the manuscript. What we needed was a printer we could afford, and the money to pay the printer’s bill.

When Carey Handfield first met David Grigg at Eltham High School, before they both became SF fans, David said that he wanted to be a writer. Carey said, ‘Can I be your manager?’ During the 1970s, Carey extended his web of power, and became the de facto manager of Melbourne and Sydney fandom. Within a few months, a dozen or so fans discovered they had lent their spare cash to Norstrilia Press to publish its first book. Believe it or not, eventually they received back their invested capital.

Early in his career Carey discovered the essence of management was to pay the cheapest price for the greatest amount of work. He found a bloke named John Counsel, who was setting up a printery in Traralgon, a Victorian country town several hundred kilometres from Melbourne. John Counsel quoted an unbelievably low price for printing the Aussiecon I Souvenir Book and Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd. The latter was already ready for typesetting, so we handed that to Counsel. The last bits of the Souvenir Book, as you’d expect, were finished only weeks before the convention. When the copies of the Souvenir Book arrived, half of them were misbound, and had to be sent back. But Electric Shepherd did arrive on the eve of the convention. Norstrilia Press was in business.

John Counsel happened to mention a great interest in science fiction. Carey told him about SF Commentary. Counsel offered to typeset and print the first offset issue of SF Commentary. It all seemed unbelievable, but I could hardly turn down the offer. At the same time as I was editing Electric Shepherd I was editing the Wilson (Bob) Tucker issue of SFC. Tucker, one of the greatest SF fans of all time (and one of my favourite SF writers) was coming to Aussiecon thanks to fans throughout the world who had contributed to the Tucker Bag, the fund that transported him from Illinois to Australia and back. I hoped to place the first copy of the Tucker Issue in his hand when he arrived. (It covers his entire career, fan and pro, and a new edition appeared in 2004.)

Copies of Electric Shepherd arrived. The day before Aussiecon, the Souvenir Books arrived. The Tucker Issue of SFC never arrived. Excuses, excuses, from Counsel for months afterward, then absolute silence. Nearly a year later, I gave up on the promised issue, typed the stencils, and duplicated and posted out that issue. I never could work out why Counsel promised to publish a magazine for which he didn’t have the time or funds.

Back in a wider, panic-stricken world, the organisation of Aussiecon increasingly centred around the Magic Pudding Club, Melbourne’s most famous slanshack (a slanshack being a collection of indigent SF fans attempting to live in each others’ pockets), in Drummond Street, Carlton. Robin Johnson lived there, then found himself increasingly moved in upon by such people as Don Ashby, his brother Derrick, Ken Ford, and various girlfriends. It was a three-year-long party, which exhausted the inhabitants and entertained all those Melbourne fans who visited. I lived one block away.

Robin Johnson needed help. Don Ashby loved helping people (and probably still does, although these days he lives a long way from Carlton). Derrick and Ken could always be roped in to help. So could the many visitors. At some stage, Don proposed that Aussiecon should be videotaped. It was (and the tapes still exist), but the preparation for this exercise took much of the energy that perhaps should have been invested in other matters.

I needed help. I had no idea how to organise the physical details of a writers’ workshop. Worse, I fell in love two weeks before Aussiecon. I was a stricken, helpless man, useful to nobody. David Grigg, Don, and Robin rallied around, hired the photocopier, and made the multiple copies of all the entry stories for the first day of the workshop. David and others ferried the giant photocopier from Drummond Street up the hills to Booth Lodge. Robin arranged a restaurant night so that all the Workshop people could get to know each other a little on the night before they were to travel to the hills. I met Randal Flynn for the first time (that’s a lead-in for the story of my 1976, which I won’t tell here).

Booth Lodge was wreathed in mist when we arrived, but we already felt that the Workshop camaraderie had warmed us. We dumped our gear. We gathered in the main room of Booth Lodge and began reading each others’ stories. Into this concentrated silence arrived Ursula Le Guin.

Although I once tried teaching for two years, I’ve rarely had the opportunity to watch a great teacher in action. Ursula Le Guin is a great teacher. She said very little. After each person’s story had been workshopped by everybody else, she would make a few comments. Nothing much, but she summed up precisely what everybody else was thinking. She set assignments. We had to finish each assignment by the next morning. At 9 a.m., we began workshopping the stories written overnight. Suddenly people were working to two or three in the morning, then waking, fully refreshed, for the next day’s tussle. After lunch, we began writing again (and photocopying, ever photocopying, the results). The energy built. People who had little faith in their own work suddenly wrote brilliantly. Brilliant writers, such as Philippa Maddern and her sister Marian, write better and better. Nobody disturbed us. The mist closed in, although we did go for a walk in the forest together one afternoon. At the end of the week, we vowed to stay in touch forever, and some of us did.

Why do I remember this as the best week of my life? Because for the first and last time in my life I felt I was part of a group mind. Better, the others saw clearly that I was not a very good organiser, so they organised the event for themselves. They let me get on and write stories, although I had not intended to write a thing. In later years, I rarely had the confidence to keep writing fiction.

After the week of the workshop, I must admit that Aussiecon was both a blur and a bit of a disappointment. My new girlfriend and I moved into together to the Southern Cross Hotel for the week, and tried to get used to each other while taking part in the convention. This is not the way to guarantee a long-term relationship. There were lots of writers and fans I met, and many I didn’t. It was wonderful meeting Bob Tucker, although I didn’t have his special issue of SFC to give him. Ursula Le Guin’s Guest of Honour speech was so inspiring that it is still reprinted from time to time. I even got to sit down and talk to Susan Wood, one of the two Fan Guests of Honour. (She and Mike Glicksohn were together when we asked them to be our guests, but had parted by the time of Aussiecon; this didn’t spoil the convention, since both were excellent guests). Susan and I had been corresponding for years, and did so until her death in 1979 at the age of 32, but we only ever had two times when we could sit down at a convention and talk to each other, and one of those times was at Aussiecon I.

The great benefit of Aussiecon turned out to be the people who attended for the first time, then stayed to become famous as Australia’s leading fans. Marc Ortlieb is a name I can pluck from the air, but ask many of the more energetic older fans at any national convention, and often you’ll find that Aussiecon I was their first convention. In turn, those newcomers became the people who put on Aussiecon II (1985), and some were still around for Aussiecon III in 1999. When you consider that the whole circus began with a casual exchange of letters between John Bangsund and Andy Porter in the late sixties, that’s not too bad a legacy.

Sorry for not getting back to you

I had thought of closing down the blog altogether, because of a certain lack of enthusiasm. I've started another blog on LiveJournal, simply because it's much easier to keep in touch with other bloggers on LiveJournal than it is here. I'm at http://LiveJournal.com/users/brucegillespie

However, some people have started to look for longer articles here, so I will go through my files for the Best of Bruce Gillespie and post the pieces, instead of mucking around trying to build a Web site.

Meanwhile, of course, you can get the published best pieces of mine, edited by Irwin Hirsh, in The Incompleat Bruce Gillespie, $10 from 5 Howard Street, Greensborough VIC 3088, Australia. It's 40 pages, 35,000 words, in A4 format, with a colour cover, and photographs and a Ditmar cover. It includes my pieces on Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun, Melbourne trains, Roy Orbison, Melbourne fandom as it was influenced by Roger Weddall during the seventies and eighties -- lots of things. Basically, it's stuff that people said they liked at the time, and Irwin likes as well.

Not a lot has happened since I posted last, but I have finished the Trip Report on my American trip in February and March (paid for by science fiction fans -- it still all feels like a bit of a dream). I've nearly finished the second draft as well. 32,000 words of it. Plus lots of photos. It will be available from the address above at $10 (send cash, not cheques or money orders), or for free if you contributed $25 or more to the original BBB (Bring Bruce Bayside) Fund.

RESURRECTION DAZE 23 May 2005

I haven’t posted to this blog for some weeks. I’m supposed to post often, but I don’t like doing anything I’m supposed to do. But a resurrection seems in order, rather than taking the option of closing down the blog.

In a blog I’m supposed to post diary entries, but I’m not sure I want to post diary entries to people I don’t know. Or maybe, of the few people reading this stuff, all of you are people I know. How would I find out? And how would I find your blog? And how would the people I want to read my stuff find this blog? Much remains a mystery about this blogging world.

Some nice people have sent replies. I would prefer to send you a real paper fanzine, but I can’t afford to post any. If you want to read and download electronic versions of my fanzines, go to efanzines.com, the website hosted by that kindly genius Bill Burns. The site includes the last four issues of SF Commentary, all four issues of Steam Engine Time, and 57 issues of Scratch Pad, which includes most of my writing since 1991. They are all in .PDF format, which can be read with Adobe Acrobat Reader. There must be well over 400,000 words of my writing there.

Money, or the lack of it, has been much on my mind in recent weeks. The very nice people of science fiction fandom, especially that section of it called ‘fanzine fandom’, paid for my luxury trip to the West Coast of the USA from 17 February to 13 March. The Bring Bruce Bayside Fund was huge fun, but during that period, and the two weeks beforehand, and the three weeks after, I didn’t actually earn any money as a freelancer. After I returned, I did a large editing job, but haven’t been paid for that yet. I’ve done other smaller jobs, and a huge index for which I am being underpaid, but none of these cheques has surfaced yet. And now, again, I have no Paying Work, which is why I have time to write this blog. Meanwhile, my annual superannuation payment bill wafted through the mail, plus my annual income tax bill, plus other bills, and I now owe my wife Elaine about $5000. (We do like to keep our accounts separate, but she has been paying all the expenses for the house move, so she doesn’t have much money either. The last thing she needs are my debts as well.)

So here’s a shameless advertisement for myself. I edit books, in Word 97 for Windows or .rtf, on screen. I don’t edit maths and science books, which is why I’m short of work. (One of my once-generous clients is doing only two humanities textbooks at the moment; all the rest are maths/science textbooks.) I would love the chance to edit fiction, but have been offered very few opportunities during my career. I can prepare a pretty good index (I haven’t had any complaints so far), and I would love the chance to review books or write other journalism for real folding cash. (Lots of people want book reviews, but very few people offer payment.) If you are in Australia, ring me on (03) 9436 7786.

Take away the problem of money and things are burbling along okay — except that Elaine still needs to have a minor but painful problem investigated, and she doesn’t feel as well as she might. The weather has been bright and wonderful, which means Victoria is back in its usual state of drought. (This makes eleven years in a row by my reckoning, except for the huge downpour last February.) But it is very nice walking around beautiful suburban Greensborough in late-May sunshine.

At the moment I have lots of time for writing fanzine stuff. Yes. But my main obligation is to write my Trip Report, and that’s not easy. First, I’m afraid that I might fail to thank some of the umpteen people who did so much to make the trip a success. Second, it’s quite difficult to state exactly how I was feeling at a particular time in late February or early March, and what was so exactly wonderful about a particular event. It’s much easier to tell tales against myself as I bumbled around America, so I’ll tell many such stories.

I have to write the whole thing (well over 5000 words so far, and I’m still only in Seattle during the first week of the trip) before I can start whittling it down to a reasonable length. Thanks to Chaz Boston Baden’s website, I have downloaded lots of photos of people I met at Corflu (although I still can’t get anybody to send me a photo of Alan Rosenthal and Janice Murray, mine hosts in Seattle, together). I took some rather awful photos, but Bill Burns and Peter Weston sent me some great shots, and Marci Malinowycz was able to find the photo of her at Gualala, a photo that also shows Art Widner’s wonderful car, whose surface is a genuine Australian Aboriginal painting. The temptation is to scrap my narrative altogether, and just run the photos.

If I didn’t have the Trip Report to do, I could write stuff for ANZAPA (Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association) and Acnestis (the British apa for SF fans who still read books). At this precise moment I don’t need to save my memberships, but I like to put something in each mailing. I’m currently the Official Bloody Editor (OBE) of ANZAPA, so if you want to get into paper fanzine publishing, get in touch with me (gandc@mira.net) or send money ($12 from within Australia, and equivalent of A$58 from overseas) plus your first six-page contribution to:

Bruce Gillespie
5 Howard Street
Greensborough VIC 3088
Australia

There are vacancies in ANZAPA, but none in Acnestis.

And if I were content not to contribute to either apa right now, I would try to produce the next issue of SF Commentary, or (with co-editor Jan Stinson) the next issue of Steam Engine Time, or even the next issue of The Metaphysical Review, which hasn’t appeared since 1998. For SFC and TMR, I have a bulging bag of goodies, plus many contributions sent electronically. I can’t escape from writing the Trip Report, but producing my major magazines (the reason why people thought of paying for my trip in the first place) does seem rather more urgent.

But if I produced issues of those magazines, I would still have no money to print or post paper versions of them. I really am skint at the moment. I could put up electronic versions on efanzines.com, but lots of my most faithful readers do not have computers, do not have access to the Internet, or do not have enough grunt in their computers to download .PDF files. So I don’t know what to do, but it would be a help to have the next issues all sitting there edited and designed.

Apart from all that, I have been reading some good books (especially novels such as Gwyneth Jones’s Life and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Miracle Fair, a book of poems by Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Symborska), watching a few DVDs (best include Collateral and The Final Cut), and even listening to some music (I finally got around to listening to Robert Plant’s Dreamland from a few years ago — so nice I played it twice — and a collection of Carl Perkins’ very early recordings for Sun Records). And socialising with various groups of Melbourne fans. And sitting down and having Flicker the large black cat sit on me.

I’ve written (for money!) a few book reviews for a new magazine — I’ll tell you about the magazine when the first issue appears.

And, with Merv Binns, Dick Jenssen, Bill Wright, Alan Stewart, and Lee Harding, I was made a Lifetime Member of the Melbourne SF Club a few weeks ago. Actually, I was given this honour in October 2003, but the ceremony finally took place on 19 April. Jack Dann presided, and masterfully restrained himself from roasting the lot of us. Paul Stevens (who has disappeared from fandom) was also recognised as a LM of the MSFC, as was George Turner (who died in 1997) and Race Mathews (who did much to start the club in the early 1950s), who could not be there on the night. Thanks, Alison and Sue Ann and others involved in organising the ceremony and accompanying supper. I will try to get along to MSFC meetings more often, but won’t promise anything.

Okay, enough — I’ve just demonstrated why my diary entries are enough to render you paralytic with boredom in front of your computer. I’ve got lots of old book reviews sitting here, and articles from the period when I wrote great stuff (before 1977), so I’ll gradually OCR or retype them for you, and put them on this site.

Meanwhile, do yourself a favour and look at efanzines.com. Or google my name and find all the stuff of mine that is littered all over the Internet.

Bruce Gillespie, 23 May 2005.

THE ROAD DON'T GO ON FOREVER

Last night I was listening to one of the great CDs of the last twenty years, Joe Ely's Love and Danger. Lots of bravado; lots of drums-and-guitar led testosterone. The highlight of the CD is Ely's version of Robert Earl Keen's 'The Road Goes On Forever'. Lots of people have done versions of the song: 'The road goes on forever,/And the party never ends'. The title is ironic, of course, as it tells the story of a small-time crook who ends up on the gallows at the end of the song and his girlfriend gets away with the cash.

But the bravado, not to mention the lead guitar, are wonderful. For a few seconds you think, like a youthful Joe Ely, that the road might go on forever. Today he's re-formed his old band The Flatlanders, and sings mellow songs along with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock.

The road stopped abruptly for two old friends over the last two weeks. I've already written about John Brosnan. This morning came the news, from Dave Locke (himself nearly knocked out by heart problems a couple of months ago) and Mike Resnick, that Bill Bowers is no longer with us.

It's hard to part with people who mean so much to us. Bill Bowers was already a leading fanzine editor when I began publishing SF Commentary in 1969. He sent me the last issue of Double:Bill (edited with Bill Mallardi) and the still famous Double:Bill Symposium, which skilfully edited multiple quotations from a whole raft of SF writers about their chosen craft.

Double:Bill ended, and Outworlds began in 1970. There have been other Bowers fanzines in the last 35 years, but Outworlds has stood out as a continuing major achievement, with its large issues, impressive art folios, and scads of good articles. Early issues were slim, however. They were a major influence on what I was doing. I don't know if Bill invented the technique of cut-and-paste, skilfully putting letters of comment alongside articles along pieces of art alongside reviews so that the whole issue was a continuing pattern. I tried something similar in SFC from No. 11 to No. 17, and eventually found my own style with No. 20. In Australia, both Leigh Edmonds and the Larrikin people (Irwin Hirsh and Perry Middlemiss) tried similar editing techniques. But nobody was ever as accomplished at it as Bill, because nobody worked quite as hard at attempting to produce the Perfect Fanzine.

I met Bill Bowers only during the week of Torcon 2, in late August 1973, and on the day he and Joan left for home, after staying at Mike Glicksohn's place. Bill and Mike, seemingly dissimilar, were great friends and rivals during those years. Both were more skilful at producing fanzines than I was. Both were wonderful company on that day after Torcon, when Bill and I actually got to talk about what obsessed us both -- producing the Perfect Fanzine. Then Bill and Joan left, and I never saw him again, except on DVD. In the 1980s, Bill produced an Outworlds as taped production at Corflu, and that has recently been available on DVD. It was good to catch up with him again.

Since then we've been in constant letter and email contact, but I would never have realised how ill he was if it had not been for our mutual friend, Mark Linneman. Mark lived in Melbourne during the 1980s. When he returned to America, he kept in touch with the Cincinnati crowd, especially Bill Bowers. He told a horrifying tale of Bill suffering from acute osteoporosis, getting smaller by the year, and from increasing emphysema, although he kept smoking. In print, Bill was still as cavalier as ever. On the Internet, he told us of some his later troubles (including the very dispiriting second marriage, which ruined him financially). But still, without Mark Linneman as a link, I would have been a lot more surprised by Bill's death than I have been.

Bill Bowers was older than me, but not much older. He's part of my fanzine generation. Is the party finally ending? Time to get another drink and make sure nobody's turned out lights yet.

JOHN BROSNAN 1947–2005

There they are: John Brosnan’s dates. The man was the same age as I am when he died. Well, nearly. He would have been 58 in October. I was 58 in February.

What has prevented me — thus far — being finished off by what killed John: acute pancreatitis, according to the coroner, presumably related to both diabetes and alcohol consumption?

Finding Elaine, more than anything else. Feeling melancholy in the 1970s, I got stuck into the juice in a big way. But when Elaine and I got together in early 1978, I had much less reason to drink in order to face life and feel jolly. (In the eighties, Elaine and I and Mark Linneman drank a great deal too much red wine, but that’s another story. That was research, part of our ongoing quest to find the most congenial restaurant in Melbourne. It was, and still is, Abla’s Lebanese restaurant in Carlton.)

Many years ago, I gave up all thoughts of becoming a writer of fiction. John Brosnan did maintain his ambition, and at times it seemed as if he would crack the big time. I thought his books were a bit too genial ever to carry him over into the big league. SF fans like their books to be solemn and glutinous. If John had discovered the Terry Pratchett approach before Pratchett did, he might have become very rich. Long ago I decided to stick with that branch of non-fiction called ‘fan writing’: you can’t make money doing it, but you don’t have to worry about making money doing it. I just wish my chosen method of earning an income, freelance book editing, had been successful instead.

But again, I found Elaine, and John never found a life’s partner. Elaine’s carried me over endless bad patches. I would not have survived anywhere near as long as John did if it hadn’t been for her.

At my worst, I’m as melancholic as John ever was, and nowhere near as funny. But because of fandom, and because of Elaine, I haven’t been allowed to retreat from the world. You could say I’ve been forced to become a social animal in spite of myself. As Brian Aldiss puts it, ‘Cheerfulness keeps breaking in.’ I don’t think it broke into John’s life often enough.

In the end, of course, it may be simply a case of different drugs for different folks. The grog got to John, and eventually the coffee will get me. So why are we all addicts of something or other?

Here are some pieces I’ve collected about John Brosnan since he died. First, an updated version of the piece I wrote on the morning I heard of John’s death:

JOHN BROSNAN: AN AUSTRALIAN TRIBUTE
by Bruce Gillespie

John Brosnan discovered fandom in 1966 through Australian Science Fiction Review (ASFR). John was one of a very small number of Western Australian fans. He met John Bangsund (editor of ASFR) during one of Bangsund’s trips to Perth. As soon as he could, John Brosnan moved to Sydney, where he became a valued part of the revived Sydney fan scene, and attended several conventions.

Without having the Contents list of the first mailing to hand, I can’t remember whether or not John was a founder member of ANZAPA (Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association). If not, he joined very early, and was a strong presence during its first year (1968–69). His ANZAPAzine was called Why Bother?

In 1970, he was part of the Big Bus Trip (1970), during which several Sydney fans, including Ron Clarke, travelled overland by bus from Australia to England. John reported in hilarious detail to ups and downs (mainly downs) of that trip, and stayed an ANZAPA member for a while after he settled in London.

John’s exploits were many, including his great fanzine Big Scab, his membership of Ratfandom in the 1970s, and his perpetual attempts to become a big-name writer. He had quite a few novels published over the years. The most recent is Mothership (Gollancz, 2004), and he had finished a sequel. He had had a few books made into films (with unintended awful results) and published several important books about SF films.

An original member (1969) of the mailing list for my magazine SF Commentary, he stayed with me at my Carlton Street flat during his only trip back to Australia (1974) and kept in touch by letter and email until recently. He took me to the Munch exhibition at Southbank in London when I visited in 1974. His letters were always funny, but the tale he told — of alcoholism he could not kick although he knew it was killing him, and constant money problems — was rather melancholy. Until his death, John survived mainly thanks to the kindness of friends (especially Leroy Kettle, Rob Holdstock, Malcolm Edwards and John Baxter) and the landlord of Ortygia House, Harrow, the famous old building that housed many fans and pros over the years.

I will miss his letters, although it’s a great pity I did not get to natter to him one last time. Thanks again to Kim Huett and Lee Harding (and, indirectly, John Baxter) for the first news of the passing of an old friend.

Bruce Gillespie


JOHN BAXTER'S TRIBUTE

has allowed me to reprint the following tribute to John. This is the not the same as his tribute submitted to the next issue of Locus. It’s probably rather different from the obituary he is hoping to place with one of the major Australian newspapers.

JOHN BROSNAN

John and I don’t go back as far as many people in the fan community. By the time he became active, I had left both fandom and Australia, and while I knew his name, we first met in person when an eager young man in black, with a Prince Valiant haircut (he hadn’t yet added the third and, later, indispensible elements of his couture, the beard and dark glasses), introduced himself to me at the National Film Theatre in London.

Being in London and moving in the same movie circles, we saw a lot of one another, often attending the same bizarre social events. I remember, when John was writing for Starburst, being present at a birthday party for its editor Alan Mackenzie at which a scantily-clad showgirl burst out of an improbable-looking canvas cake. John also distinguished the 50th wedding anniversary of Harry Harrison by getting very drunk and berating an equally pissed Kingsley Amis for refusing to give him an interview. My wife and I carried John home insensible from that event, and, over the years, from an increasingly large number of others.

You give me too much credit for the day-to-day shoring up of John’s tottering life. While I’ve done what I could over the years, Roy Kettle and Rob Holdstock in London were far more involved. As well as collaborating with John on a number of horror/sf novels — they were jointly Harry Adam Knight and Simon Ian Chilvers (HAK and SIC) of Slimer, Tendrils, The Fungus etc — Roy was John’s guardian, mentor and confidant, while John routinely moved out of his fetid Harrow flat into the Holdstocks’ more salubrious home whenever they were out of the country.

About a year ago, Roy, Rob and myself got together in London in a last-ditch attempt to save John from himself, but our efforts to, for instance, place him in an effective drying-out program or even get cleaners into his flat were met with such stubborn resistance that we gave up. He refused to admit anyone to the flat, not only as part of a general paranoia but for fear they were representatives of the tax authorities, He had nothing but scorn for detox programs, a few of which he’d tried, and found ineffective. As for AA, John was so shy that the thought of revealing his problems to strangers filled him with horror.

Over the last fifteen years, John retreated both physically and mentally from the world. He had few romantic relationships in his life, and the break-up of the last important one about that time may have precipitated his flight. Certainly it was exacerbated by his move to Harrow, a suburb so remote that few visited him there. For a time he would come into the West End to meet people like myself who were passing through, or to drink at the poky and dingy Troy Club, on the edge of Soho, but its closing, and the death (from alcohol) of the owner Helen, a close friend, cut him off from an important source of companionship.

On numerous occasions, we tried to lure him to France, if only for a holiday, but fears about his shady residency status in the UK made him unwilling to leave the country. Nor would he consider returning to Australia, where he could have relied on friends in the fan community.

He also left his long-time agent John Parker, moving to various smaller agents, or relying on friends in publishing to give him work. As part of the self-fulfilling prophecy that his life had become, he naturally gravitated to people who shared his emotional frailty and addiction to drink, so the attrition rate among his professional associates was high, An alarmingly high number had nervous or physical breakdowns, or died, while others elected to leave the business altogether. Lately, he had no agent at all, but dealt direct with old friends like ex-fan Malcolm Edwards, publishing director of Gollancz and now of Orion. Malcolm commissioned the bulk of John’s sf and fantasy work , ie, the Skylords trilogy, his comedy fantasy novels like Damned and Fancy, and the Mothership trilogy, the second book of which John had just completed at his death.

The grail of John’s life was TV and the movies, but his relationship with both was fraught with frustration. His one American film, Carnosaur, commissioned by Roger Corman in a deal formalised by Corman’s wife with a memo scribbled on a bar napkin at the Troy Club, was butchered, and his credit reduced to that of ‘Original Story’. Numerous contacts with London producers of varying degrees of sleaziness, in particular those involved in the production of Beyond Bedlam (1993), convinced him that life in the movie world was one long rip-off, and he cut himself off from that that as well. Undoubtedly his Golden Moment in film and TV was pitching a Doctor Who story in which the Tardis materialises in the BBC TV Centre. The Doctor, played by Tom Baker (like John, an habitue of Soho’s after-hours drinking clubs), is immediately mistaken for actor Baker, with resulting complications. The producers weren’t amused.
(14 April 2005)


JOHN BROSNAN’S FINAL LETTERS TO SF COMMENTARY (excerpts)

11 Feb 2003:

I’m still here at Ortygia House but I don’t know for how much longer. As I’ve pulled out of the income support system, it was either that or get a job, or take a six month course on computers. I don’t think my rent is being paid any longer. There’s also a ‘For Sale’ sign out the front. It’s been there for months but no one seems to be in a rush to buy the place.

I’m currently waiting for a reaction from my editor to the ms of my novel Mothership that I’ve finally completed. It’s quiet; too quiet. I’m reasonably happy with it but whether it works or not I don’t know. It’s a lightweight piece with, hopefully, a fair amount of humour (which the editor wanted) but it’s not a spoof. Hard to categorise it. I said to a friend that it fell between two stools. He said, you mean it’s between shit and shit?

Still going on periodic alcoholic binges but have managed to stay out of hospital since I last wrote to you. Actually I should be in hospital today having a blood test — my blood pressure is creeping up despite the medication — but I can’t be bothered. Famous last words?

15 February 2003:
I wouldn’t describe my current mental state as ‘chipper’. I would say I was manically depressed except I seem to miss out on the manic phases. Just continually depressed. You said that I sounded in last year’s email that I was about to take the Big Dive. I must admit that thoughts of throwing myself off the top of Ortygia House have occurred to me but, as the old joke goes, with my luck I’d probably miss the ground. Also I don’t think the building is high enough for a successful suicide attempt.

I don’t think you stayed in Flat 2 here when you visited Chris Priest in 1974. He lived in the bottom flat which is on the ground floor, or the basement if you want to be pedantic. I remember your 1974 visit. You persuaded me to accompany you to an exhibition of Munch’s work at, I think, the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank. I was, as usual, feeling pretty depressed at the time. The Munch exhibition depressed me even further but you found it positively exhilarating.

Alarming to see that photograph of my younger 1969 self in your ConVergence report. I don’t see Gary Mason in that collective of comic fans yet I’m sure he was present. I definitely remember an incident that took place in the Melbourne SF club room at that time. Gary suddenly grabbed my arm and whispered urgently, ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ Outside in the street I asked him what the problem was. His reply: ‘They’re smoking marijuana in there! The police will probably be here any minute now!’ Once again I was struck by the huge gulf that existed between Melbourne fandom and Sydney fandom.

INNER STARS: THE NOVELS OF ALAN GARNER

Previously unearthed Gillespie article

[At least I think this article remained unpublished. I wrote it while I was the assistant editor of The Secondary Teacher (the weekly magazine of the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association) in 1977. It was written for that journal, but I can’t remember if it appeared there, or was quietly spiked. It’s never appeared in a fanzine. I can’t remember whether or not it’s based on the Nova Mob talk I gave about Alan Garner in 1977. In fact, I can’t remember writing it. But when I was packing to move from Collingwood to Greensborough, it suddenly appeared there in the files.

It hasn’t dated much, since Garner hasn’t published a whole lot since 1977: just The Stone Book Quartet, Strandloper, and an occasional title that never materialises in bookshops. However, Garner has published a book of criticism since then, and my view of him might have changed greatly after 27 years. Now I’ll find out by typing the article.]

The scene: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

The time: An evening in February 1975.

The happening: A white-faced, tense man rises to give a lecture on `Inner Time’. He looks vulnerable; giving the lecture is painful for him. The audience listens intently, a bit embarrassed.
The words: `The feeling is less that I choose the myth than that the myth chooses me; less that I write than that I am written . . . I simply plot the maps of inner stars.’

The writer: Alan Garner, author of five novels, several other books, two operas and several television plays.

New label?: `Magic fiction’ writer; English novelist.

So who are children these days?

Let’s get rid of the label first. In his now-famous ICA lecture (published in Science Fiction at Large, edited by Peter Nicholls), Alan Garner does not talk about himself as a writer for children. Yet all his books have been published as `children’s books’. He has even been credited with revolutionising the genre. Labels stick, even when Alan Garner goes beyond them.
Garner’s first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, are `children’s books’ in the oldfashioned sense. The two main characters are Colin and Susan, about ten years old. They are on holiday in the English moorland (as in Enid Blyton novels). They meet a wizard, and umpteen magical creatures, and survive endless hairbreadth adventures. The images are bright, the language is simple, and there is always home to return to.

The children’s book has traditionally been a symbol for domestication. Let the children romp around a strange landscape; give them a bit of rope; but always end the book with `happily ever after’. It was all a bit of a trick. The `happily ever afters’ were to reassure parents, not to soothe children.

Even in the first two books, Garner began to change all that. Colin and Susan are hardly memorable characters, but at least they are not typical child heroes. They get swept along with the magic events, rather than control them. They have to make important decisions, but they are not always the `right’ decisions.

There is no `happy ending’ in The Moon of Gomrath. Colin and Susan think they are on the side of the goodies, but the wizartd Calledin proves to be a bit of a shyster. The forces of magic are not put back in their place. `Old Evil’ is still loose at the end of the book. Most of the loose ends are not tied up.

Children’s books changed altogether when Alan Garner published Elidor, then The Owl Service and, most recently, Red Shift. Children’s books are now dynamic, not to be touched by those who want a `safe read’. Writers such as William Mayne, Leon Garfield, Ursula Le Guin and Ivan Southall have also been part of the change. But somehow the change is most noticeable in Garner’s books.

It is not even certain that Garner’s books are any longer for children, let alone about children.

In Elidor, Garner narrowed the focus of action to a suburban house in England. Great magic events still take place, but they bring only trouble to the children in this story, and not much adventure.

The Owl Service is about `young adults’, rather than children. Alison is Roger’s half-sister, and Gwyn is a Welsh kid who is involved with them. The personal relationships are real, intense, and irritating to any reader who wants only an adventure story.

Red Shift breaks right out of the children’s category. It will be hated by many adults who control book buying for their children. Only a third of the book is actually about the young adult characters, Tom and Jan. Most of the book includes swearing, physical and verbal violence and a fair bit of talk about sex. All the old taboos have been broken. If Red Shift is a `children’s book’ (and the publishers say it is), the label is losing its meaning.

Which is all to Alan Garner’s advantage. But if they don’t fit a label, what are Alan Garner’s books?

Mything links

`The element common to all the books’, said Alan Garner during the ICA lecture, `is my present-day function within myth. The difference between that function and what are usually called "retellings" is that the retellings are stuffed trophies on the wall, whereas I have to bring them back alive.’

I’m one of those people for whom any retelling of a myth is like watching a stuffed trophy on a wall. Long lists of ancient names (as in Garner’s first two books) make me yawn.
Yet, says Garner, `the more I learn, the more I am convinced that there are no original stories. On several occasions I have "invented" an incident, and then come across it in an obscure fragment of Hebridean lore, orally collected, and privately printed, a hundred years ago.’
But it is a modern world, isn’t it? Things were quite different way back then. Even people are different now. Why bore us with old legends, Mr Garner? Where’s the originality?

The originality is in the art of the books themselves, of course, not in the bits and pieces from which they are made, though many readers of Garner may be most interested in those bits and pieces.

Not that there is much artistic originality in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963). They fit the `one damn thing after another’ category: one adventure after another, without leaving space to think. Colin and Susan track across woods and moors, get trapped in magic-ridden houses, clamber through a particularly crazy system of underground caves, but not much is resolved.

There are some memorable images: the magic lady on the island; the flying pony that takes Susan for a ride beyond the earth; the Wild Ride; the beam of moonlight that reveals a hidden path over the hills once a year. But mainly these books form a catalogue of old legends and legendary names.

In Elidor (1965), Garner’s work begins to get interesting. The book begins with a fairly hackneyed adventure into a magic kindom — but the children this time find the entrance to the magic kingdom in a ruined church in the middle of a slum clearance in Birmingham. No more country landscapes and natural images to help along the story.

For Garner, myth is not what happens in ancient stories. It represents what happens in all periods of time. In modern England, the four treasures turn into a length of iron railing, a keystone, two splintered laths and an old, cracked cup. Buried in the garden, these objects still disburb any electrically driven machines in the vicinity. A year after the journey into Elidor, Roland looks through the keyhole in the front door — and sees an ancient eye peering back at him. The enemies of Elidor have found a magic doorway to catch up with the children. They wait in ambush — just outside the door, yet thousands of years in the past.

Still, Garner is concerned not so much with what happens to the treasures, or to Elidor, but with what happens to the children. Three of them pretend that Elidor never existed. Roland tries to solve the problem. Elidor is a sly protest against people who say, `It’s nothing to do with me!’ Garner does not quite meet the challenge set by his ideas. He settles for magical effects — a unicorn, a breathless chase — to end the story.

The Owl Service (1968) won the Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal. It’s been called the most important children’s book of the last twenty years — which, as always, is to put it in a pigeonhole. The Owl Service is one of the best English novels in any category during the last twenty years. The readers have realised this already, even if the critics haven’t.

The Owl Service is a terrifying book. No `magic kingdoms’ here. The magic is still here, but it is in the air that surrounds the characters. The magic is malevolent, inevitable and it settles down on the shoulders of the main characters like a stinking smog.

Two of the characters, Alison and Roger, are on holiday with their parents (his father, her mother) at a house in a Welsh valley. A daft Welsh gardener shuffles around the house. A sharp-tongued housekeeper reigns inside. Her son, Gwyn, forms a friendship with Roger and Alison.
A reminder of cosy British fiction for children? Of course. But nothing is cosy in this household. There are mysteries about why the English family owns the house at all. And daddy is henpecked by mummy. Gwyn has a chip on his shoulder about these visiting English upper-class slummers, and Roger treats Gwyn as a low pest. Alison wants everything to be `nice’, but all her actions increase the bitterness.

Then Things Start to Happen. The three find themselves hit by a lightning bolt of magic; they are condemned to act out an ancient Welsh legend about a wizard who built a woman from flowers, who then turned into an owl and caused the deaths of both her husband and lover. The legend begins working again when Alison finds some old plates in the attic. A pattern of owls appears on the plate. The patterns disappear, and Alison begins to make paper owls. Garner hints, but never says directly, that she is turning into a magic owl.

The transformation is only the shell of the story. The legend itself shows in the bitterness between the three characters. This scarcely disguised sexual bitterness gives the book its strength. Magic is no longer a playground for wild adventures. It’s a kind of disease that comes to life in everybody, and causes only grief.

Gwyn tries to escape responsibility for his part in the triangle. He tries to leave the valley, but local villagers force him back. Roger and Alison try to ignore what is happening to them, but it happens anyway. `There are no original stories’, says Garner. What he means is that there are no people who can escape from being what they are.

The Owl Service is very concentrated writing, each word picked precisely. The entire book is only 156 pages long. Many pages consist of only violent conversations between characters, yet the damp atmosphere of the Welsh valley sweeps out of the pages. We are part of the legend; Garner makes this idea live in the book.

Inner time: Red Shift

I suspect that nobody knew what to make of Red Shift when it was published in 1973. The reviewers didn’t. Some of them admitted that they were baffled. They said all the usual things: about Red Shift changing the face of children’s writing, which was true enough. Some other authors, such as Paul Zindel, might not have succeeded without Garner’s pioneering success.
It’s easy to see why the reviewers scratched their heads. Make a hasty first reading of the book, as I did, and it’s confusing. Red Shift flashes continually between three stories: the story of Tom and Jan (time: now); the story of Thomas and Margery (time: the English Civil War); the story of several Roman soldiers cut off from their legion and attempting to survive in occupied Britain (time: about two thousand years ago). The third story is confusing because Alan Garner gives the Romans modern names (such as Macey and Magoo).

The three stories seem to have little to do with each other — except that each happens in the same area of England (on or around a castle hill called Mow Cop), and that the same axehead turns up in each story. In story 1, the Roman soldiers survive for a few months. All die except for Macey and a Celtic girl who surived a raid on a village. In story 2, the Puritan village is captured by a group of Irish Loyalist soldiers under the command of a former citizen of the village. Everybody is killed except Thomas and Margery. In story 3, Tom and Jan are separated by distance when Jan moves to the city. They meet each month until each believes each has betrayed the other. They separate permanently (or do they?)

It’s the modern story that is puzzling. No sudden violence or real adventure. A boy discovers that his girlfriend once spent the weekend with another bloke. The girl discovers that her boyfriend has sold an old axehead that she cherished. A bit tame?

What does the book’s title mean? It’s easy to work out the scientific meaning. The red shift of the stars is the change in their colour that is observed on earth as stars rush away from each other and the earth at ever increasing speeds.

`When we look at a starry sky’, writes Alan Garner, `we see a group of configurations that seem to be equidistant from us and existing now. That is an "apparent perspective". We are looking a a complexity of times past — a sky of "it–was", all at different epochs, distances and intensities. Inner time creates similar illusions.’

`Red shift’, it seems, is something that happens inside people, and between people. Three eras of history in Red Shift, but one humanity.

There’s that axehead, for example. In Roman times, it is the means by which the group survives at all. In Roundhead times, it is a good luck charm — and a symbol of last-ditch survival. In our time, Tom and Jan find it and Tom sells it to a museum. Twentieth-century people, Garner seems to say, have forgotten their history. They’ve forgotten the importance of really important things.

In the two historical sections, exterior violence draws people together. In the modern section, nobody is threatened by sword-carrying soldiers. But, without exterior threat, the main characters fly apart from each other. They commit psychological violence instead.
I cannot do justice to the writing skill that Garner shows in Red Shift. Every line is important to everything else in the book. Much of the book is in dialogue. Not a word is wasted. At the beginning of the book, Jan has just returned from a holiday in Germany. By the end of the book, we know what happened to her there. So we read the beginning of the book again to find out how it affected them there. And so on, watching the pattern grow, word by word. Beware: read the last two pages carefully.

Each book that Alan Garner publishes, the pattern gets more complex. Garner is a `wise fool’, like the characters in The Guizer, his recent book of retold legends.

He calls himself a `boundary-rider’, finding the precent boundaries of knowledge and going beyond them. We must explain ourselves to ourselves; we can explore the inner worlds through myth and story. There are stars flaming inside our heads, and Garner can draw star-maps for
us.