mewsings
murrayewing.co.uk
This year, for the first time ever, the World Horror Convention comes to the UK. In two weeks’ time, in fact. Also for the first time ever, I am going to the World Horror Convention. One of these events, obviously, is more momentous than the other. Anyway, I thought I’d prepare by writing my next few blog posts on Me & Horror — why I at first didn’t read it, why I started reading it, and why I still sometimes do read it. But before that, a blog post on SF. On one particular SF convention in fact.
Like this year’s WHC2010 (not to be confused with the World Hovercraft Championships 2010, which jostles for top billing on a Google search), Conspiracy ‘87 was held in Brighton. Unless Games Day ‘86 counts as a convention (I’m not sure on that point), Conspiracy ‘87 was the first con I went to. It is also, up to now, the only con I’ve been to, meaning there’s been a gap of 23 years between going to my first con and going to my second. This isn’t at all a measure of how I felt about Conspiracy ‘87, because I enjoyed it very much. It’s more a measure of the fact that I’ve never really got round to going to another one till now. (The only reason I went to Conspiracy was because Garen wanted to go, so I went along — for which I’m extremely grateful.)
So, here’s me outside the main conference centre in Brighton, wearing my Fantasy Archives t-shirt, with a just-visible Hannes Bok illustration (for Lovecraft’s story Pickman’s Model), which I must have bought at the con dealer’s room:
That dealer’s room was massive, to my eyes anyway, and like nothing I’d seen before in terms of sheer range of SF & fantasy books. I recall seeing the cover of some comic I’d never heard of, called Watchmen, on a dealer’s table, and hearing that this comic was beginning to generate something of a buzz at the time. I bought (and got signed) Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry & Wild Romance, and also bought Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove’s Trillion Year Spree. I must have bought more than that, but those are the only two I remember. Both important books for me, as they led to me reading a lot of other books mentioned between their covers. I’ve re-read both several times.
My main memory of the con itself is of masses of people milling about, and huge halls filled with people listening to SF authors. I don’t remember anyone really being in costume, though I do remember a fully-functioning radio-controlled K9 someone had brought along. I don’t have many photographs, as I’m not great at taking photos. Here’s one from a talk panel on the launch of the Tales from the Forbidden Planet anthology. The chap with the mic is Ramsey Campbell; not sure about the lady next to him, but after her there’s Iain Banks (or I suppose that should be Iain M Banks), then Tanith Lee, then I think it’s Roz Kaveney (the editor of TFTFP), and Harry Harrison on the end:
I also remember Terry Pratchett, at a panel on “SF clichés”, where someone stood up and complained about SF stories where people have normal Earth names, till it was pointed out that there’s no reason why Earth people shouldn’t still be called Mark, Paul and David and so on in a couple of thousand years’ time, as we’ve had those names for at least that length of time ourselves. Then there was an interview with William Gibson, where someone with, I think, a French accent, asked me, pointing at the stage, “Excuse me, zis is William Jibson?”
But the main panel I remember, and the main reason I’ll always be grateful for Garen getting me to go to Conspiracy ‘87 was one called “So You Wanna Be A Writer” (or something similar). The only author I remember being on the panel was Robert Silverberg, and the only advice I remember him giving was “There’s two sorts of wannabe writers. Those who say, ‘I wannabe a writer’, and those who sit down and actually do it.” That made me realise I had to sit down and actually do it, and it remains the best bit of advice I’ve ever heard with regards to writing.
My only regret about Conspiracy ‘87 was not going to the Hawkwind concert, where they did a reprise of their Chronicle of the Black Sword show. Ah well. I’ve seen them a couple of times, since. I also recall my first experience of that post-con gap you get in the days afterwards, where you feel as though ordinary life is lacking something important in contrast to those few intense days of being surrounded by like-minded souls. I plugged that gap, of course, by buying books by the authors I’d seen, or (in the case of Alfred Bester, who was either too ill to come to the con or had just died, but was a Guest of Honour) almost seen. Many of them remain favourites to this day: Mythago Wood, The Demolished Man, Tiger! Tiger! (aka The Stars My Destination).
Mmm, must go to another SF con sometime.
In the words of Futurama’s dithery Professor Farnsworth, “Good news, everyone!” — apparently, I am incredible. At least, I am according to this rather fatuous report, 
I haven’t always been like this. I used to be un-incredible, at least most of the time. (Except as a kid. All kids demand re-reading of the books they like. They’re not stupid.) I can’t actually pinpoint when my incredible, perhaps even mythical, status kicked in, but aside from re-reading favourite 
The main objection to re-reading a book is that there’s no point because you know what’s going to happen. But, to me, knowing what’s going to happen not only doesn’t matter, it actually makes it better. Exposed to stories as much as we are, we’ve all developed enough of a “story sense” to second-guess where a story is going anyway, and the real pleasure of a twist-in-the-tale is not so much the twist itself, as how skilfully it’s handled. My two most recent re-reads are both minor books by favourite authors — Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami, and The Violet Apple by David Lindsay. The first time I read Sputnik Sweetheart was when I’d just discovered Murakami. At the time, I’d only read his massive (genuinely tome-like) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and in comparison found the slim Sputnik Sweetheart a bit disappointing, though with a strikingly weird bit in the middle (where a young woman gets stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel for the night and has an experience that turns her hair completely white), mainly because I wasn’t sure how to understand the end. Re-reading it, knowing how it ended, everything fell into place and made sense, and I had time to relax and understand other things about the book, like how each of the three main characters faces the same sort of strange crisis, but one evades it, one falls before it, and one — maybe — triumphs. With The Violet Apple, I found that knowing what was going to happen at the end only made the build-up much more poignant and emotionally powerful. (That’s how tragedy always works. Macbeth’s downfall was only a surprise for Macbeth himself.)
To end off, a not-necessarily-complete list of books I’ve read four times or more (with no explanations or apologies — though, to intensify my weirdness, I’ll say that at least two in this list are books I’ve re-read straightaway after reading them for the first time): Moving Zen by C W Nicol, The Belgariad by David Eddings, A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, The Outsider by Colin Wilson, The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, The Influence by Ramsey Campbell, The Drowned World by J G Ballard, V for Vendetta by Alan Moore & David Lloyd… Not to mention the countless short stories I’ve re-read many more times than four or five. Short stories are, after all, so much more re-readable. But simply reading short stories nowadays is enough to commit you to a very dark and dingy corner of the asylum reserved for book-readers. Catch you re-reading the things, and they throw away the key. Before you eat it, or do yourself an injury with it or something.
As much as I enjoyed the last two books I read (and reviewed), Ramsey Campbell’s latest novel is the best thing I’ve read in some time. I first got into Campbell’s fiction at about the age of sixteen when a friend convinced me to give Stephen King a go (it was pretty much the first horror I’d read — apart from a disastrous attempt at Dennis Wheatley I must go into some time — and I chose Salem’s Lot because a glimpse of the Nosferatu-inspired vampire on the trailer for the TV series still came back and gave me the creeps whenever I was alone in the house). Having read one King novel, I went back to the bookshop where I’d bought it and, wondering what England had to offer in a similar vein, picked Ramsey Campbell, judging, from a quick comparison of shelf-inchery, that he must be our nearest equivalent. (This was a secondhand bookshop, so its selection may have been misleading. But thank God it was.) I can’t remember which of his I read first (The Hungry Moon, perhaps), but it must have done the trick, because I quickly became hooked. Not only was Campbell capable of writing a real page turner like King (I remember being almost unable to put down Obsession, Incarnate and The Influence, which remains one of my favourite reads), but he was — and still is — one of the most consistently artistic writers I’ve read. I hope that doesn’t sound like faint praise, because it’s one of the highest compliments I could pay: Campbell constantly challenges himself as a writer, stretching his boundaries while retaining a consistent level of readability & quality. You know what you’re getting with a Ramsey Campbell novel, and one of the things you’re getting is the unexpected, the new, the surprising. You also get a testing of the boundaries of language, of the very basis of the craft of writing. His latest, The Grin of the Dark, is one of his most interesting works of fiction to read on the level of style alone. I’d say I haven’t enjoyed a book so much since this Christmas, when I re-read his House on Nazareth Hill (which overtook The Influence as my favourite Campbell novel, both for the brilliantly naturalistic dialogue of its teen protagonist, and the fact it so purely crystallises so much of Campbell’s recurrent theme of the potentially damaging relation between parent and child) — but I don’t want to appear to be simply obsequious, so I’d better say that the last Campbell novel I read before that was The Darkest Part of the Woods, which disappointed me with the lack of definition or focus in its central horror, and which made me wonder if it was worth reading any of his subsequent books. As a result, I passed onThe Overnight and Secret Stories; but reading The Grin of the Dark — which I had to do simply because of its premise — has convinced me I was wrong to give up on him, and that not only should I snap up the books I missed, but maybe I’d better give The Darkest Part of the Woods another go.
