WHACK!

That’s the way to do it!

Well done, science fiction and fantasy community.

The first is an old photo album dating from not long after WWII when my parents had first met. It includes a couple of pictures of my mother at work in a local power station, where she was employed as a chemist. Girl scientists FTW!

The other is a bit of family tree, from which I note that in 1699 an ancestor of mine married a Miss Prudence Blackmore. Of course I know nothing about this lady, so I only speculate. And it is true that “moor” is an old English word for a peat bog. In Devon we have Dartmoor and Exmoor, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a Blackmoor too. But Black Moor has other connotations too, as anyone who has seen Othello should know. So it is just possible that I might have a bit of African ancestry, which would be very cool indeed.

Before that, though, some people needed tickets. Our friend Natalie had come all of the way from Rome for the event. She was by no means the only long-distance traveler. Later that evening I met a group of people who had traveled up from Spain. Yes, Neil is that popular. But we were in Toppings to collect Natalie’s ticket. Marjorie said she heard someone mentioning that all of the chaos was because they had a big name American writer doing an event. Oh dear.

I had a long train journey today and am 2/3 of the way through Ocean as a result. It is a very British book. Indeed, as Neil will doubtless be explaining time and time again on this tour, he wrote the book for Amanda as a way of explaining where he came from. It is not autobiographical, but it is set in the area where Neil grew up, is a suffused with Britishness, and the narrator is very like the young Neil. I’ll save the rest for the review, but it is a great book this far.

What I want to do here is talk a bit about what a Neil Gaiman signing looks like from the inside, because I did get to spend little bit of time with Neil, and anyway I have seen these things before.

I’m sure that there are people who expect that Neil was driven from London to Bath in a Rolls Royce, stopping off for a nice meal at one of the city’s top restaurants before the event, and getting pampered by his personal beautician before going on stage. Nothing could be further from the truth.

At lunchtime Neil was in the offices of The Guardian doing an online chat, which meant a great deal of fast thinking and typing. After that the put him to work helping edit the Guardian Books section. By the time he got away, the London traffic was so heavy they he despaired to making it to Bath, so he and his publicity crew dashed to Paddington and jumped on a train, making the one they really needed to get with a minute to spare, according to his tweet.

Meanwhile my friends and I were queuing. We arrived at around 5:30pm. The doors were not due to open for a couple of hours. We were not the first in the queue. A couple of girls from London had been there since 4:30pm, and they were not first either.

I presume that Neil grabbed something to eat on the train. By the time I caught up with him, around 7:45pm, he was just finishing off signing a huge pile of books. Several hundred of them. He got five minutes with me and few other personal friends whom I didn’t know, and then he had to do an audio interview. That, by the way, included a scoop about Neverwhere, which I won’t repeat as I don’t know when the interview will air and it would be bad manners to steal their thunder, but it is coming. The event was due to start at 8:00pm. As I left to go back to my seat, Neil was grabbing a few minutes with the guy from the Telegraph who was due to be interviewing him on stage.

Neil’s good at interviews. He’s done enough of them, after all. I tweeted a few choice sound bites. My favorite, and the one that seemed to get the most re-tweets, was his response to a question about his favorite mythology. He said he was very fond of the Norse gods – mostly because they were doomed.

There were questions about current projects as well. The script for the American Gods TV series is slowly working its way through various levels of management at HBO. It is not a certainty yet, but with every hurdle passed it gets more so. The question about a Good Omens movie was met with the firm no comment, which suggests that things are actually happening.

Then it was time for the signing. Just how do you manage an audience of over 1,000 people, almost all of whom are keen to meet their idol? Not easily, I can assure you.

Toppings had got some things right. They had told people, very firmly, that no one could have more than 3 books signed, which is fair. They also said that Neil would only sign Ocean, which seemed rather mercenary, but did mean that most people only had one book. They also had the queue fairly well organized. With a hard cover you want the book open at the page that will be signed, and that position marked with the cover flap. You give each person a post-it on which they write who they want the book dedicated to, and that has to go on the flap, not where the author is going to sign. They sound small things, but they help speed people through the line.

What Neil was mainly concerned about was people having to stand for hours. Priority should be given to people with young children, pregnant women, and people with mobility issues. The signing was on the stage, up some steep steps. There was a young man on crutches who had been ahead of me in the queue, whom I immediately went to reassure. The venue security brought a lady in wheelchair through, and I also brought forward my friend Pat, who has issues with her knees and is also an old friend of Neil’s. Neil came down off the stage to sign for all of them while the signing table was being set up. But everyone else was queuing in the aisles and it was impossible to get around and check for kids and pregnant women until later in the evening.

Marjorie says she has seen signings in the Forum where they asked people to remain seated and called people forward by row. That would have been much better, I thought. You could have made an announcement asking for kids, pregnant women and people with mobility issues to come forward first. Everyone else could sit in comfort until their time came.

I got my books signed fairly quickly as I had been right down the front — a benefit of all that queuing early to get in. I asked Sam Eades, Neil’s chief PR lady, if I could help, and she asked me to stick around and be available. I spent about an hour there, mostly helping lubricate the queue by doing things like taking care the presents people brought for Neil, and making sure that books were open to the right page and post-its placed appropriately. Around 11:20pm I had to rush off to catch the last train home. As far as I could make out from Twitter, Neil did not finish signing until gone 1:00am. He always stays to sign for everyone, no matter how long it takes.

One good thing about hanging around the signing table is that you get to hear how positive the experience is most of the time. All those people coming up and telling Neil how his writing has changed their lives, or inspired them to become writers. The amazing things that people bring. There was an oil painting of the Angel Islington, a girl with lines from Neverwhere tattooed on her torso, a primary school teacher who had brought examples of work his kids had done after reading Coraline in class, and so on. It was a very rainbow crowd too. Neil’s fans always seem to be people I would like to hang around with, and I can’t say that for everyone I’ve met at conventions and signings.

Neil has a very long signing tour ahead of him, but do catch him if you can. Unless he falls over sick, I’m sure he’ll be doing his utmost to make every fan he meets feel special, as he always does.

Finally, I’d like to note how embarrassing the Newsnight interview with Neil turned out. It wasn’t enough for them to state at the beginning that his writing transcends genre, they had to wheel on Harvey Weinstein on to reinforce the point. The guy doing the interview was positively cringeworthy, and if there was any interesting content in the interview (which is pretty much a given with Neil) then it got edited out. To reinforce the fact that this was a “fantasy” writer being interviewed, they showed the clip from Stardust where Michelle Pfeiffer takes her clothes off (“fantasy”, get it?). And there was the unseemly haste with which Neil was cut off when it seemed like he was about to be critical of the way his recent Doctor Who episode was edited. The interviewer was so panicked all he could think of doing was asking a question about sex. It really was a mess. Even John Mullan’s sneering would have been preferable. If the Newsnight team are that uncomfortable interviewing an SF&F writer, why on Earth did they have him on in the first place?

I should note here that I am an ex-SFWA member. I joined as soon as I thought I was eligible, because I think SFWA is a useful organization and the more eligible people who join the better. I quickly found out, however, that SFWA regarded its Associate and Affiliate members as a source of cash and little else, so I walked away. When John Scalzi and friends took over I figured that I should re-join as things would get better, but I was told that you can’t simply re-activate your membership. You have to apply again from scratch. Because having been accepted as a member in the past is not sufficient proof that you qualify now. So I walked away again, and am unlikely to join until I can do so as a full member.

Having said all that, I still believe that SFWA is a good thing, and the more good people who are eligible to join who play an active role the better. I agree with Tempest that we want a SFWA that is the best it can be.

I’d also like to agree with Lavie Tidhar and call for a more international SFWA. However, I understand the practical problems on the road to that goal. SFWA is not (whatever some people might claim) an organization for American writers; it is an organization for writers who do business in America. It has that restriction because the legal framework in which writers do business in the USA is different from that that obtains in the UK, different again from that in Australia, and so on. To become truly international, SFWA would have to develop skills in the business environments of every country, and that is a major undertaking.

Before SFWA can even start to tackle that sort of project, however, it needs to put its own house in order. That too will be hard, at least in part because, like so much in our community, it is dependent on the work of volunteers. It is also plagued by culture wars. Some of those people who have been members for years and remember it being a club for white boys are having difficulty coming to terms with a world in which women, people of color, QUILTBAG folk and so on expect to be members in equal standing.

Long term, however, SFWA has to be a professional organization. It can’t be that if its newsletter gives a platform for two people to do a bad impression of Statler and Waldorf, abusing everyone else in the community (some of you may remember that I had my own run-in with Resnick & Malzberg a couple of years ago). And it can’t be that if it is continually finding itself in the news, not for fulfilling its stated purpose, but for providing a platform whose views would be politically conservative in the 19th Century, let alone the 21st. The past couple of weeks have provided more bad press for science fiction than I can remember in a long time, because time and again I have seen articles in mainstream media outlets explaining how the genre is a bastion of sexist old men. After today that will be amended to sexist and racist old men.

The good news is that Newton was right: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The louder and more repulsive the conservatives become, the more likely it will be that people fight back. I have been very heartened, over the last couple of weeks, by the number of blog posts I have seen by women writers saying that they are not going to sit back and be treated with contempt any longer. Furthermore, after today’s latest outrage, John Scalzi has been raising money for the Carl Brandon Society, by offering to match donations up to a total of $1000. Other people have offered to add their own matching payments, or match bands above $1000. This is delightful.

With any luck we’ll get into the news for doing something good for a change.

My favorite dress was this “Wood Witch” by Zoe Dolman. It reminded me of something Terri Windling might have drawn.

The bottom of the dress has more of a seaweed air to it.

Zoe tells me that her ambition is to do costume design for people like Tim Burton, which is a very fine sort of ambition to have.

If I was going to pick a dress to wear it would be this one:

This one looks like something that the Red Queen might wear:

This was just a skirt, but again very striking.

Every House is Haunted by Ian Rogers is a debut collection of horror novels with a rave recommendation from no less than Laird Barron.

Hair Side, Flesh Side by Helen Marshall is also a debut horror collection. I remember Alisa Krasnostein enthusing about this one on Galactic Suburbia. Alisa, of course, if known for publishing the likes of Kaaron Warren and Margo Lanagan (and a Kirstyn McDermott book just launched, I believe), so her opinions on such books should be highly respected.

Stories from the Plague Years by Michael Marano also appears to be a horror collection. I see from the blurb that one of the stories, “Displacement”, was a Shirley Jackson award nominee.

The odd book out is The Book of Thomas, Volume One: Heaven by Robert Boyczuk. It is a novel, and despite the creepy cover it appears to be more grim satire than horror. Boyczuk has a Big Idea post at John Scalzi’s blog explaining his concept for the books.

Well, to be precise, they talk about The Shadow of the Torturer, which is merely the first volume in the first series of Wolfe’s magnus opus. And they only have an hour or so of podcast in which to talk. All of which means that they hardly scratch the surface of the complex edifice that Wolfe is building. This does not detract from the interest of the episode. Indeed, it is a positive delight to hear someone as smart as Karen L. discovering Wolfe for the first time (because, you know, no one can have read everything).

I note also that the next episode will be devoted to Derryl Murphy’s novel, Napier’s Bones (which Karen L. describes as “math-fi”). This is a book that I have been wanting to read for some time, but have never found the time for. I look forward to hearing what Karen and Karen make of it. Should you want to read along with them, ebook copies are available in the bookstore.

Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye by Paul Tremblay is a satirical science fiction story. I can’t explain any better than the blurb:

Farm is the mega-conglomerate food supplier for City, populated with rabidly bureaucratic superiors, and sexually deviant tour guides dressed in chicken and duck suits. City is sprawling, technocratic, and rests hundreds of feet above the coastline on the creaking shoulders of a giant wooden pier. When the narrator’s single mother, whom he left behind in City, falls out of contact, he fears the worst: his mother is homeless and subsequently to be deported under City to the Pier. On his desperate search to find his mother, he encounters ecoterrorists wearing plush animal suits, City’s all-powerful Mayor who is infatuated with magic refrigerators and outlaw campaigns, and an over-sexed priest who may or may not have ESP, but who is most certainly his deadbeat dad.

Jeff Ford and Lucius Shepard love it. What more do I need to add?

The Indigo Pheasant is an entirely different animal. It is the sequel to The Choir Boats, completing Daniel A. Rabuzzi’s Longing For Yount series. Delia Sherman describes the books as, “Dickens by way of C.S. Lewis and Jane Austen, set in a London where literature, history, science, and magic are all real.” I’ve been wanting to read these books for some time. My apologies to Daniel for not having made time to do so yet.

Canterbury 2100 is a science fiction re-imagining of the Canterbury Tales. Edited by Dirk Flinthart, it includes stories by Angela Slatter, Stephen Dedman, Kaaron Warren, Thoraiya Dyer, Trent Jamieson and Lisa L. Hannett. You might wonder how travelers in the 22nd Century would have time to tell tales, but this is England we are talking about. In the future we will apparently have nuclear-powered steam trains, but they will still be subject to horrendous delays.

One Small Step is edited by Fablecroft’s supremo, Tehani Wessley. The theme of the anthology is discoveries, and contributors include Joanne Anderton, Deborah Biancotti, Rowena Cory Daniells, Thoraiya Dyer, Lisa L. Hannett, Angela Slatter and Tansy Rayner Roberts.