Mr Theaker's Quarterly Fiction Goes to FantasyCon

I spent the weekend with my very dear friend Mrs Theaker's Quarterly Fiction at my third FantasyCon, and it was generally fab. We were both on the organising committee, but with volunteers like Jenny Barber, Pat Barber and Debbie Bennett doing the things we might have done, we had very little to do at times except enjoy ourselves. Our most onerous duty over the weekend was to arrange the name badges in alphabetical order.

On the Friday night we took part in the FantasyCon quiz, and while an attachment containing the answers may have swished through my inbox at one point, I promise it was never opened. Since I don't think I contributed a single correct answer, it's an easy claim to believe!

I was however inordinately proud of being able to half-answer the question, "What is the name of the main character in William Shatner's TekWar?" From the depths I dredged up the name Jake, but couldn't quite remember the surname. With the help of a clue, I guessed at Jake Trousers, but it was in fact Jake Cardigan. And I was wearing a cardigan, so I was really kicking myself over that one...

I can't remember what we did next, but it probably involved either food or drink, and then we returned to the main hall to see Joel Lane, Simon Bestwick, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Lisa Tuttle, Stephen Volk and Allen Ashley discussing how their fiction approaches or engages real world issues.

On Saturday morning I think we spent some time on the registration desk, which turns out to be the perfect place to talk to new people. They have a reason to come up and chat, but also the perfect excuse to leave when it's time to move on: no one wants to spend the whole convention talking to the convention staff!

At some point in the day I met Douglas Thompson, a frequent contributor to BFS magazines and TQF, and I also had an interesting chat with Allen Ashley, another Eibonvale author.

Saturday evening was the banquet, and as a committee member I was fortunate enough to share a table with Garry Kilworth, Lisa Tuttle and Bryan Talbot, who were charming company, and not at all put out to be seated with the help. I very much enjoyed the food this year, and going to collect it from a buffet in such celebrated company was great fun.

The banquet was followed by the awards, and at this point I have video footage to share, because I announced the first prize of the night.

There I am, announcing the winner of the BFS Short Story Competition 2010. I did a much better job this year, though I should really apologise to Robin for failing to sell his jokes! Lesson learned: next time (if there is one, after this shoddy performance): learn the lines and look at the audience. Plus: wear paper bag over head! And drink less wine!

I was also the administrator of the British Fantasy Awards themselves this year (although Guy Adams organised the brilliant ceremony), and so watching them be announced was a weirdly emotional experience. In a silly, wine-filled way, it felt as if the awards were my personal gift, bestowed upon these lovely writers, artists, publishers and film-makers at my personal lordly whim. To be even more silly about it, it felt as if I had in some way been the conduit through which all the love in that room had travelled on its way to the award recipents.

David Howe, award in hand

But I wasn't the only one with a tear or two. The British Fantasy Awards mean a great deal to the recipients, and David Howe of Telos, who has been a long-term friend of the British Fantasy Society and FantasyCon, was utterly overwhelmed to receive the Best Small Press Award.

Another rather lovely moment for me was watching Robert Shearman joke about keeping the award for Doctor Who, but knowing that he would later get an award of his own.

The full list of winners was as follows:

• Best Novel: the August Derleth Fantasy Award: ONE, Conrad Williams (Virgin Horror)
• Best Novella: THE LANGUAGE OF DYING, Sarah Pinborough (PS Publishing)
• Best Short Fiction: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU WAKE UP IN THE NIGHT, Michael Marshall Smith (Nightjar)
• Best Anthology: THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR 20, edited by Stephen Jones (Constable and Robinson)
• Best Collection: LOVE SONGS FOR THE SHY AND CYNICAL, Robert Shearman (Big Finish)
• The PS Publishing Best Small Press Award: TELOS PUBLISHING, David Howe
• Best Comic/Graphic Novel: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER?, Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert (DC Comics/Titan Books)
• Best Artist: VINCENT CHONG, for work including covers for The Witnesses Are Gone (PS Publishing) and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 (Constable & Robinson)
• Best Non-Fiction: ANSIBLE, David Langford
• Best Magazine/Periodical: MURKY DEPTHS, edited and published by Terry Martin
• Best Television: DOCTOR WHO, head writer: Russell T Davies (BBC Wales)
• Best Film: LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, directed by Tomas Alfredson (EFTI)
• Best Newcomer – the Sydney J. Bounds Award: KARI SPERRING for LIVING WITH GHOSTS (DAW)
• The British Fantasy Society Special Award: the Karl Edward Wagner Award: ROBERT HOLDSTOCK

The awards over, and successfully concealing my disappointment at not winning the award for Best Magazine, I decided for some reason to get stupidly drunk, and I'm sure I failed to impress people I met that night with any of my usual wit. Among those suffering my ridiculousness were Steve Upham of Screaming Dreams, David Tallerman, and Johnny Mains, who probably didn't appreciate me celebrating the late start to his Pan Book of Horror Stories event with a high five for being angry. Did I really do that? I choose to believe not.

On Sunday morning I suffered a remarkably polite little hangover that left me ready to face breakfast and my third Annual General Meeting of the British Fantasy Society.

In 2008, as the newbie on the committee, I had sat quietly and listened to people row – really row – about the mysterious and mischievous type who had put exactly the same proposal to the AGM two years running but wouldn't own up to it. It turned out to have been a mistake – the proposal had been accidentally copied across from the previous year's agenda…

In 2009 I had run out of water too soon and found myself unable to speak with any confidence, so this time I was well prepared with multiple drinks.

I expected this year's AGM to be more stressful, as for the first (and probably only) time I was running it as chair. But I had prepared fairly well, with nice paragraphs prepared on each of my duties, and we had an overstuffed agenda that left little time for anything but moving on to the next item. It helped also to know that whatever happened, I was stepping down and it would be the new chair's job to fix it! On my way to the lift I actually found myself whistling!

It all went very well, and even a controversial proposal I expected to fail – to allow the BFS to offer ebook only memberships at a reduced rate, should the committee decide it was ready to offer them – went through, possibly because everyone knew that in a matter of minutes I would no longer be in a position to put such mad schemes into practice. And so the burden of leadership was lifted from my head, and transferred to that of the aforementioned Mr David Howe.

The last event we attended in full was the FantasyCon raffle, raising money (£390, in the end) for the Never Again charities. No longer the unwanted stepchild, hosted by debonair FantasyCon chair Guy Adams with his usual wit and showmanship, the raffle this year brought everyone back together to close out the convention in an astonishing shower of prizes, and some of them fell on me, to the discontent of those who had earlier heard me say at the AGM that I was unlikely to buy many more paper books...

Here are the freebies I brought home this year...

• The Best of Best New Horror, ed. Stephen Jones, picking out the best from the long-running and BFA-hoovering anthology
• Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts
• Zombie Apocalypse, created by Stephen Jones, a World War Z type book by many hands that's sure to be a huge hit.
• The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions, by Robert Rankin
• The Gabble and Other Stories, by Neal Asher
• New Writings in the Fantastic, edited by John Grant
• The Poison Throne, Celine Kiernan
• The Judging Eye, R. Scott Bakker
• Bartimaeus: The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud
• Shenanigans, Noel K. Hannan
• Blind Swimmers: an Anthology of Eibonvale Press Writers (raffle prize)
• Nightmare Touch, Lafcadio Hearn (raffle prize)
• The Dragons of Ordinary Farm, Tad Williams and Deborah Beale
• Best New Horror 21, edited by Stephen Jones

My work on Dark Horizons gets a mention on pp. 52–53 of that last book, one article being described as "fascinating", so that was nice.

I also won House of Canted Steps by Gary Fry in the raffle, but one of my fellow committee members looked at it with such covetousness that I just had to hand it over. He'd earned it ten times over – but fingers crossed that it comes through for review, because I really was looking forward to it myself.

Believe it or not, I even bought two old-fashioned paper books, though one was with someone else's money:

• Never Again, edited by Allyson Bird and Joel Lane. Because I want to trick people into thinking I'm a good person.
• Selected Stories, by Fritz Leiber. The lovely Caroline Callaghan of Pantechnicon insisted upon buying me a treat for helping to get their last issue out, and to be honest I didn't resist much because I love treats.

And after a glass of wine with the committee to celebrate the successful end of the event – pictured below – it was time to return home, and we caught our train on time, and we got home on time, and overall it felt like the entire weekend had been a very lucky one. Everything that could have gone wrong, didn't. And of course part of the reason for that is the hard work of the hotel staff. In particular I'd like to thank Mary Morris of the Britannia Hotel, who put up with some very poor paperwork from me at first as we found our feet on registrations.

The FantasyCon committee. Photograph by David Riley (see davidandrewriley.blogspot.com).

The best part of the event? Reading the blogs, forum posts and tweets where people said what a good time they had. Here are just a few:

• David Riley (who I hope won't mind me borrowing the above photo from his blog): http://davidandrewriley.blogspot.com/2010/09/fantasycon-2010_19.html
• Jenny Barber: http://bradanpress.blogspot.com/2010/09/fcon-2010-aftermath.html
• Adrian Faulkner: http://www.adrianfaulkner.com/content/node/53
• The RCMB: http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/4060.html?1284984179
• The SFX blog: http://www.sfx.co.uk/2010/09/20/blog-fantasycon-2010/
• Louise Morgan: http://loummorgan.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/fantasycon-2010
• Sam Stone: http://sam-stone.blogspot.com/2010/09/fantasycon-2010-and-bfs-awards.html
• Simon Bestwick: http://simon-bestwick.blogspot.com/2010/09/back-from-fantasycon.html
• Mark West: http://markwestwriter.blogspot.com/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/#search?q=fantasycon

It broke my heart to see on Twitter that a couple of people had a bad time. If I'm ever involved again, I guarantee we'll set up a "bad time" emergency hotline and whenever necessary send Guy Adams around to entertain you with his cheeky ways.

The 2011 convention will be in Brighton: www.fantasycon2011.org.

Dark Horizons #57

The new issue of Dark Horizons should be on its way out to members of the British Fantasy Society fairly soon. I'm very pleased with this one…

It features fiction:

• Colonies, Jim Steel
• Moonlight on the Northern Seas, Malcolm Laughton
• The Other Side of Silence, Stephen Bacon
• The Apocalypse Has Been Good to Us, Charlotte Bond
• Resistance: a Love Story, Zachary Jernigan

And articles:

• Mark Charan Newton, interviewed by Louise Morgan
• The Sign of the Unicorn’s Head: the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, Mike Barrett
• Aliette de Bodard, interviewed by Jenny Barber
• Catastrophia: Allen Ashley, interviewed by Stephen Theaker

And poetry:

• TWTMC, Allen Ashley
• Pretty Little Things, and Blood Pearls, J.R. Salling
• Folded in Darkness, Graylin Fox
• Circe Poisoning the Sea, Sarah Doyle
• The Giftshop Off the Multiverse, Ian Hunter
• Younger Gods, Roy Gray
• Witnessing’s End, Alessio Zanelli
• Addendum, Rick Coonrod

And more illustrations than ever before, from:

• Martin Hanford (who provides the stunning cover)
• John Shanks
• Inna Hansen
• Alf Klosterman
• David Bezzina
• and Les Edwards (whose cover artwork for Catastrophia is included).

It's Christmas, your birthday and the time you found a ten pound note on the street, all wrapped up in one hundred and twelve pages…

Conan Doyle night tomorrow!

I'm having a very literary fortnight. Last night was the twin launch of Michael Wyndham Thomas's Port Winston Mulberry (designed by Littlejohn and Bray) and Roz Goddard's The Sopranos Sonnets (Nine Arches Press) at the extremely impressive Priory Rooms in Birmingham.

On Saturday night (July 17) we'll be launching our own new book, The Conan Doyle Weirdbook, as part of Oxfam Books and Music Moseley's Conan Doyle Weirdnight. It's at the Prince of Wales pub, Alcester Road, Moseley Village, Birmingham, starting at 7.30pm. More details here. The price of admission, don't forget, is a book donation!

The Weirdbook will be exclusively available from Oxfam Books and Music Moseley for a period, before being made more widely available. The wonderful cover art is by John Shanks.

And then the Saturday after next (July 31) we have the British Fantasy Society open afternoon in London: 1pm until 5pm at the The George, 213 Strand, London, WC2R 1AP, featuring Angry Robot's Lauren Beukes. More details here.

New Horizons #5 / Prism 2010, issue 2

If you're not already a member of the British Fantasy Society, I'm afraid you've almost certainly left it too late to get your hands on either of these: a last minute upswing in membership left the print orders looking a bit pessimistic!

Prism (right) features the editor's report on the World Horror Convention, along with dozens of reviews, an interview with Shaun Jeffrey, columns by John L. Probert, Ramsey Campbell and Mark Morris, and without a doubt the finest, most lovingly crafted Chairman's Chat the British Fantasy Society has ever seen. Edited by David A. Riley. Cover art by Howard Molloy.

New Horizons issue five, edited by former Elastic Press supremo Andrew Hook, features stories by Craig Hallam, Frank Roger, Terry Grimwood, Mark Finnemore, Allen Ashley and Douglas Thompson, and a series of bite-sized interviews by Andrew with literary luminaries at the World Horror Convention 2010, including Neil Gaiman, Ian Watson and Paul Cornell. The fantastic cover art (see left) is by George Cotronis.

Nominated for the British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine!

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction has somehow sneaked on to the shortlist for the British Fantasy Awards. Since I'm currently the administrator of those awards it's a little embarrassing, so a pox on everyone who voted for us!

I'm won't pretend there aren't magazines out there who might have been expected to earn the slot ahead of us. For example the longlist featured brilliant publications like Weird Tales, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Clarkesworld Magazine, Dodgem Logic, Estronomicon and Fantasy Magazine.

So there's a bit of luck in it, and perhaps a bit of gratitude for the work I've done for the BFS, but I'll take it! We did publish some marvellous material last year. The other nominees are Black Static, Cemetery Dance, Interzone, Midnight Street and Murky Depths. Postscripts won the 2009 award, but competed this year as an anthology instead, so it's wide open. Good luck to everyone! Especially us!

Dark Horizons #56

Dark Horizons #56 was recently sent out to members of the British Fantasy Society.

This 128pp bumper issue featured stories by Val Gryphin, Ian Hunter, Jim Steel, Niall Boyce, Philip Meckley, Rafe McGregor, Ralph Robert Moore, Patrick Whitaker and Andrew Knighton, interviews with Brian Stableford and Simon Bestwick, and poetry by Charles Christian, Jan Edwards and Peter Coleborn, Diana Lewis, Allen Ashley and Ian Hunter, and illustrations by Inna Hansen, Mark Pexton and Howard Watts, who was responsible for the cover.

The guest editorial, on gender bias in fantasy and the BFS in particular, came from Jenny Barber, while Mike Barrett provided sundry observations on Arkham House.

The Age of Chaos: the Multiverse of Michael Moorcock, by Jeff Gardiner – reviewed

This is a well-written overview of Michael Moorcock’s complete works, published by the British Fantasy Society with an introduction by Moorcock himself. Moorcock has written hundreds of books, so covering them all in under 120pp is obviously going to leave some underserved. Although the chapters on Moorcock’s early and later periods are detailed and fascinating, the heroic fantasy for which he’s still best known gets extremely short shrift (quite oddly, given the publisher), being crammed into one nine-page chapter. There’s little room for anything more than brief summaries of Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum and the rest. The complete chapter given over to Gloriana, in contrast, seems extremely generous.

Nevertheless, this is an ideal book for anyone looking to get a quick critical grasp on Moorcock. The lack of footnotes may limit its academic usefulness, but a useful reading list is provided. The discussion of Behold the Man contains a couple of odd comments (apparently “Moorcock does not deny the truth of the crucifixion”) but is still very illuminating.

It was a perfect book for me: in my twenties I read everything I could that Moorcock had published up till then; now a new pile of his books has accumulated and I find myself a little daunted. Reading The Age of Chaos has left me primed to have a crack at the pile; recurring themes, characters and in-jokes have been dislodged from my memories and reactivated.

On the other hand, will that help me enjoy Moorcock’s new books? It’s the critic’s job to trace the connections between an author’s various works, to identify the themes and preoccupations, and Gardiner does an excellent job of that. But these books are already awfully interconnected; they lock together like chainmail. By stressing the connections this book gives an impression of sameiness and repetition.

But maybe it’s just me, an impression I was left with after reading far too many of them all at once a long time ago, an impression revived by this book, but not derived from it.

After all, reading Gardiner’s description of The City in the Autumn Stars, I didn’t recognise a thing: my overwhelming memory is of thinking, right, there’s Tanelorn, there’s Jerry, there’s Von Bek, and so on. Gardiner’s account has tempted me to re-read it: it’s entirely possible that I read it as a fan, looking for the things that fans look out for, rather than paying attention to everything that was new.

Still, I’m probably not alone in thinking Moorcock’s books would benefit from being pushed apart a little bit. When I first read most of them they were short, easily digestible books. Then some began to be collected in omnibuses. And then they were all gathered together into a fourteen-volume series of gigantic paperbacks. While I appreciated the value for money, it felt as if they were being drawn closer and closer together, like the stars at the end of the universe.

The Knight of the Swords, The King of the Swords, The Sword and the Stallion and The Hollow Lands were all winners of BFAs for best novel, but now they are permanently reduced to chunks of larger volumes. Even an important literary novel of ordinary length like A Cure for Cancer is only available as part of an omnibus, which is utter madness. (Shouldn’t it be a Penguin Modern Classic by now?) These books could really do with being treated as individuals again, given some room to develop separate identities. Maybe if ebooks take off and economies of scale stop being so all-important, that will happen.

The Age of Chaos: the Multiverse of Michael Moorcock, by Jeff Gardiner. BFS Publications, pb, 120pp (2002).

A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults, ed. Lavie Tidhar – reviewed

I was hoping this anthology would take a more formal approach, so I was a tiny bit disappointed with it as a whole. Nevertheless, many of the individual stories are interesting. The stories fall into two main camps, with some having a foot in both: adult stories written in the style of children’s books, and grown-up stories about Dick and Jane themselves.

I’d never heard of Dick and Jane before, but they’re the American equivalent of Peter and Jane (making them a slightly odd choice of subject for a publication only available to members of the British Fantasy Society); a foreword to put the stories in context would have been useful.

Writing a vocabulary-controlled book for children is a particular kind of exercise – the early books in the Peter and Jane series, for example, only introduce one or two new words per page. In this book none of the writers try to write with a controlled, cumulative vocabulary. The linguistic references to the original texts tend to be just to the easily parodied surface elements – e.g. see Jane run – rather than trying to emulate their structures, and working within them, which might have been more subversive. It’s a bit like producing a book of adult nursery rhymes that don’t rhyme or scan. It’s not wrong, just not quite as interesting as it might have been. Admittedly, a more formal approach might have led to much duller stories!

A lot too has been lost by printing it like a normal, adult book, in a small font with ordinary typesetting, with ordinary (if slightly inconsistent) punctuation. It works for the adult stories of Dick and Jane, but it would have added much to the power of the pseudo-children’s stories if they had appeared in a format reproducing that of a children’s book – i.e. a large font, just a few lines per page, no quote marks around dialogue (in the very simple stories), etc. Obviously all those extra pages would have added a lot to the cost of printing, but it’s nice to imagine this as a thicker book, with the artwork (by John Keates, which is very good indeed) used for fake covers in between the stories, taking us through an imaginary reading scheme.

One of my favourite stories from the collection was “Somewhere in the Street” by Ed Clayton. The strange, controlled dialogue of characters like Peter and Jane makes them sound half-crazy even in real children’s books, so it’s not a leap to imagine them as fully psychotic, something Clayton does very well. For an example of such dialogue from the real Peter and Jane, see the chilling scene on pages 24 to 27 of Key Words 2a: “Here are Peter and Jane. Peter has some water. Here you are, Jane, he says. Here you are, Jane, says Peter. Here you are. This is for you. Here is some water for you.” The picture shows Peter pouring water over Jane’s head while she screams…

I enjoyed all the stories individually, but two others I liked in particular were “The Hushes” by Conrad Williams, which was very well written if a bit tangential to the anthology, and “We Go Down to the Woods Today” by Marion Arnott, which reads much like a Ladybird book written by Stephen King.

A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults, ed. Lavie Tidhar, BFS, pb, 52pp.