David Langford

8 May 2010 A general sense of post-election gloom prevails. • Still the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (third edition) chugs slowly onward. We now have an arrangement with Locus Online whereby we send public links to entries for the recently deceased, for inclusion in online death notices. Here's our own list of these. Another list in preparation will appeal for help with corrections to the EoSF contributor credits: software checking reveals that the second edition listed contributors whose initials appear on no entry, while a few entries are signed with initials not found in the contributor list. Some are easily fixed: JP turned out to be a typo from the rekeying of the first edition as a basis for the second, and should be JB (John Brosnan). Others remain mysterious: who is JCB, who wrote a couple of entries (including SEAQUEST DSV) found only in the 1995 CD-ROM edition? Can such historic data have been totally forgotten in a mere fifteen years? Oh yes. • Adam Roberts has recovered enough from his agonizing surfeit of Robert Jordan to struggle through book eight, while Thog looks on in awe.

30 April 2010 Heigh-ho, and up she rises! – the May Ansible has sneaked pre-emptively into existence. Which, as noted therein, is merely because my printers don't open on Saturday. But I impulsively dated it 31 April or Mercer's Day, and wonder how many sf fans will get the reference rather than sending solemn corrections of the obvious typo. • Adam Roberts, alas, has faltered at book eight of the Wheel of Time, marking this non-occasion with a little Robert Jordan pastiche that's uncannily reminiscent of my old friend's reaction to proofreading book five. Could they possibly be related?

25 April 2010 When Adam Roberts undertook to review Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series in weekly instalments (one per bloated volume), and said after the first book "The whole series will be a doddle." ... I sensed that Hubris would before long get clobbered by Nemesis. Some weeks later Adam agreed (in private email) with this diagnosis, but nevertheless – older, wiser, wearier, red-eyed and intellectually ravaged – he's struggled on through books #2, #3, #4, #5, #6 and #7. Thog is grateful for tasty pickings from the last two in particular. And still there's more to come at Punkadiddle!

15 April 2010 At last, in a time of gloom, clouds of volcanic ash and an impending general election, this cheerier news story: Chiropractors' libel case dropped against Simon Singh . • Speaking of elections, Ernest Bramah's forgotten sf novel The Secret of the League (1909; 1907 as What Might Have Been) reminds us how much has changed in British politics: "In other words, it was quite legitimate for A to declare that the policy of the party to which his opponent B belonged was a policy of murder, rapine, piracy, black-mail, highway robbery, extermination and indiscriminate bloodshed ..." What, no NHS death panels?

10 April 2010 I'm overwhelmed by today's flood of birthday greetings. (Cyberspace: 5,271,009. Snailmail: 2.) Again, thanks to everyone! I am trying hard to get to grips with the fact that I am now as old, sober and responsible as Martin Hoare. • Brian Stableford asks me to publicize the selling-off of his vast book collection. • Later: deathless verse received from Brother Jon and his family!

Happy Birthday dear brother far over the sea
Roughly 5 years ahead on life's tollway it seems
   Stagger on without care
   To the number you share
With the year of my birth and a can of heinz beans.

8 April 2010 Catching up after Easter is always a chore. See Ansible for the few news updates I managed during and since Eastercon. • It is, in a weird sort of way, a relief to have dropped off the Fanwriter Hugo shortlist (or rather, to have been pushed off by feisty young bloggers like Frederik Pohl). Thanks to all who, despite my relentless lack of campaigning, put Ansible on the ballot for Semiprozine. I shall continue not to campaign. • Farewell to Guy Kewney.

2 April 2010 Today I'm off to Eastercon, but have posted some bits and pieces for non-attendees to read while I'm away, including of course the April Ansible.

1 April 2010 More royalties! The Harry Potter book is still earning money, which seems moderately incredible. No, really: I promise I wrote this note after midday....

30 March 2010 It's one of those days when I fondly raise a glass to the late George Hay and his eccentric project The Necronomicon (1978), which is still generating royalties – now solely from foreign editions – after 32 years. The latest statement reporting my modest but welcome quarter-share arrived this morning. Thanks again, George. Now I'll be able to afford a meal or two at Eastercon.

28 March 2010 Intermittent bedtime reading has recently included The High Speed Gasworks, a 1970 collection of Patrick Campbell's humorous articles (with trademark author-caricature cover by Quentin Blake) which includes a prediction of the horrors of the year 2000. A bottle of stout will cost 49/6d, while the great attraction of future Spain is that you can get wine there for only £7 12s 6d a bottle! Prediction should be made of sterner stuff. Elsewhere, though, a droll piece about contemporary aerial hijacking – written when Cuba was the invariable destination – imagines the writer's own peaceful hijackers being shoved aside by "the Suicide Squad of the Black Panthers, whose intention is to hi-jack our plane and land it on Fifth Avenue, thereby liquidating half the white population of New York." Did I say humorous?

20 March 2010 Here I am at Corflu, having just had breakfast with the great Earl Kemp. The usual suspects are present in force. Expect no updates until I'm home again. • A depressing outcome to the Peter Watts trial; which, coming so soon after Cheryl Morgan's travel nightmare, does not increase my enthusiasm for visiting the USA. Meanwhile in Britain....

17 March 2010 It took a long time to get rid of the death-rattle cough which usually follows a Langford cold – in fact it hasn't quite gone – but now the convention season is about to open, with Bill and Mary Burns staying with us prior to Corflu in Winchester (from Friday). After that, Eastercon; I'm skipping the World Horror Convention because the prospect of desperate fun on three successive weekends evokes little whimpers of dread from both my bank account and my liver. • This month's roll-out of Google Maps Street View to cover 95% of the UK led to a lot of obsessive typing of postcodes and steering down on-screen roads using an interface substantially clunkier than the original Doom game (this is known as progress). You can count the daffodils in our front garden – except there aren't any yet in 2010, so the photo must be from last March – while Hazel is highly critical of the new roof and loft conversion (as evidenced by extra windows) of the High Wycombe house where she grew up. Even my mother's place, in a cul-de-sac off an obscure side road in Gwent, shows up in relentless detail: dare I tell her that total strangers all around the world can now count the knick-knacks on her windowsills? Fortunately we have The Register to track such related phenomena as the Giant Flying Pliers of West Bromwich controversy.

3 March 2010 Yes, I still have a horrible cold. Never mind. • Of all the insanely labour-intensive sf projects on which I've worked, I am proudest of Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2002; reprinted 2003). But now – look on my works, ye mighty, and despair – it's about to become a tiny bit obsolete. I tried to assemble all the great John Sladek's uncollected fiction (and poetry), but little did I know that there was an actual unpublished Sladek typescript hidden beneath dense verbiage in John Clute's cellar. Wearing his agent's hat, Chris Priest scanned this and cleaned it up; I proofread it; Gordon Van Gelder bought it for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The May/June 2010 issue will thus contain "The Real Martian Chronicles" by John Sladek, which might be described as "Mr Pooter [of Diary of a Nobody fame] Colonizes Mars". This has been an unsolicited plug.

1 March 2010 St David's Day, and I have a horrible cold. Managed to print and mail and webbify Ansible anyway, but now I'm getting complaints from a few people who received multiple copies in email – though I sent only one copy of this month's issue to the Mailman mailing list server, and authorized only that one copy for distribution. Will try to investigate when I feel less awful. Any suggestions, clever readers?

26 February 2010 Here's a surprise: the British Library's UK Web Archive is preserving Ansible.co.uk and its subdomains for posterity. Unfortunately I've been a bit too clever for my own good: to give the illusion of regular updates even when I'm away from home and net access, there's a bit of Javascript that "vanishes" conventions etc from Ansible events listings once their dates are past. So UKWA's 2009 snapshot of Ansible has large blank areas.... I've fiddled with the script in a way which I hope will fix this little problem next time they archive the site, but meanwhile embarrassment reigns. • A good word from Neal Asher – who is "still waiting to be thogged". Thog researchers take heed. We have a volunteer!

23 February 2010 I have to admire the energy of people who post daily reams of golden verbiage to their blogs even while keeping up a steady output of novels, short stories, etc. Merely updating the various puny Ansible pages often leaves me drained and depressed; there are times when I wish I'd steered clear of perpetual time-wasters like that damned overseas convention list. In other grumpy news, SFX informed me that my regular column was persistently too long for the page design. I was naughtily writing 750 words when they could fit in only 600. This, of course, was because 750 was the figure I'd been given. No one believes it's harder to say what you want to say in 20% less space; it was sheer luxury to relax and write a thousand-worder for The New York Review of SF yesterday, but this doesn't pay the bills. Onward. • Counting blessings: a hefty payment this month from ALCS, a £25 Premium Bond win, and a few unsolicited plugs. Looking forward to Picocon, Corflu and Eastercon....

12 February 2010 A word from Dr Samuel Johnson: "A man who is asked by a writer what he thinks of his work is put to the torture, and is not obliged to speak truth ..." (Boswell's journal, 1778) • I still feel a residual thrill when a Langford piece appears in print, especially with a cover credit: today it's Murky Depths #11 with my longish review of Phil Baker's The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley.

8 February 2010 The mysterious server problems at The Book Depository UK had vanished by yesterday, and I completed my fell task of Amazon-zapping. All the thousands of hard-coded Amazon affiliate links on this site's Books Received page and past archive have been replaced by marked-up ISBNs which a little PHP script expands into links to The Book Depository UK, The Book Depository US, and anything else I care to add in future. Even Amazon, should they ever manage to redeem themselves. (Special exception: Amazon links leading to their commissioned Langford reviews were the whole point of the long-static Amazon Reviews pages, and these have been grudgingly allowed to remain. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.)

6 February 2010 The vanished Buy buttons at Amazon.com returned yesterday – except for Kindle editions [now also restored]. Maybe they felt a sense of artistic neatness in pissing on all us Macmillan/Tor authors for exactly one week, or five days from when they first pretended to "capitulate". • The only Langford book to be affected was The End of Harry Potter? It was a mild surprise to discover in January 2010 that a Kindle version existed: I had vaguely assumed that publishers should tell the author about such things, although I suppose a complimentary copy (six complimentary copies?) would be a mite impractical since I don't have a Kindle. • My latest review copies added in Books Received have links to The Book Depository and not Amazon. Amending past links will have to wait until I find time to fudge up a suitable macro, but Amazon's days on this site are numbered. • Very annoyingly, just as I'm switching affiliation, The Book Depository UK site seems to be having server problems and is almost unusably slow. Following a book link right now (10:15am GMT) gives me some 40 seconds of connecting to things like books.google.com, affiliates.bookdepository.co.uk and www.google-analytics.com, at which point the page appears in ugly basic HTML with no images or style sheet; then, on the one occasion I had the patience to time it, two and a half minutes "connecting to static.bookdepository.co.uk" before a final "Done" with the page still identically messy and unstyled. Oh dear. I hope signing up with them wasn't a bad decision. (I assume the problem isn't with my broadband connection since other sites, even demanding ones like Gmail and Facebook, seem fine.) But bookdepository.com is fine; it's just bookdepository.co.uk that's taking forever to misdisplay a page.

3 February 2010 A happy surprise: Starcombing appears under Non-Fiction in the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2009. • Three days now since Amazon's alleged capitulation – see yesterday's entry – and still no sign of restored Buy buttons for the Macmillan-imprint titles I'm monitoring, including my own. So I've grumpily signed up as an affiliate of The Book Depository and am gradually adding their links to Langford book pages (see upper right corner here). Expunging the huge backlog of Amazon links will be more work, but I'm feeling increasingly inclined to take the time as their "sod the mere authors" attitude persists. • Oddest book title of 2009: longlist released.

2 February 2010 This month's Ansible appeared yesterday, and I can relax for a moment. The Amazon vs Macmillan feud – and Amazon's subtle negotiating ploy of removing virtually all Macmillan-imprint titles from sale – has been hugely discussed in sf circles since 29 January. It's interesting that so many news outlets have been saying that Amazon blinked/caved in/capitulated when its Kindle team posted a rather petulant announcement that could be paraphrased as "we suppose we'll have to give in eventually, but we won't like it and we hate Macmillan anyway." Some capitulation! That was two days ago, and Amazon still hasn't issued an official management statement or restored its direct Buy buttons, even for supreme masterworks like the Tor edition of The End of Harry Potter? Looks like sullen intransigence to me, and not capitulation at all. I'm considering dropping the Amazon links from my Books Received list, but can't face the sheer effort just yet. For now, let me just recommend The Book Depository as an alternative online source for new titles: they offer reasonable discounts and free shipping anywhere in the world. (It is one of Amazon's small meannesses that their standard shipping charge is automatically added to Book Depository orders made through Amazon, even though TBD ships directly and without charge.)

26 January 2010 Several days of stress and upheaval since Hazel's father was rushed into hospital with a heart problem: she had to get to his house to let in the ambulance crew, and owing to Reading's morning rush hour the taxi arrived 40 minutes late, and ... let's not go on. All praise to the Royal Berkshire Hospital for quickly carrying out a life-saving procedure. The Aged P is home again now, tired but officially well, and normal life should with luck resume. • As a lifelong fan of A.P. Herbert's Misleading Cases, I was delighted (if slightly horrified) to find the famous crossword libel action moving from fantasy into reality. Whatever next?

14 January 2010 Some of my photographs from Rob Holdstock's funeral (mostly taken in the pub afterwards) can now be seen at Graham Charnock's website, in addition to his own – images selected, cropped and generally improved by Graham.

7 January 2010 As this week's snow began to fall in earnest, there was a late-night orgy of artistic creation next door. From our house we see only the rear of this monolithic figure. Today I found I'd been guilty of hideously sexist default assumptions in assuming it to be a snowman.

5 January 2010 At last: Ansible 270 and the accompanying Rob Holdstock memorial supplement are finished and published. I seem to have been working on the latter forever, with various moments of madness including one I wish I could share with Rob. At some stage I decided to add the excellent photo of him on the Order of Service booklet cover, acquired via screen capture from the PDF document. Unfortunately the cursor of my PDF viewer had strayed into the photo area and got captured too. This cursor takes the form of a tiny hand, and the tiny hand – with the sort of precision you achieve only by accident – was groping Rob's fly. As Roy Kettle rather ambiguously put it, he would have fallen off his chair at this.

1 January 2010 Happy New Year, everyone. May we (especially in science fiction circles) lose fewer friends in 2010 than in horrible old 2009. • I've been making some changes to other Langford websites. The great John D. Berry, master of typography, felt it irksome that although each issue of Ansible credits Dan Steffan for his logo (a permanent fixture in the print edition since 1991), the logo itself used to appear only on other site pages, not the individual issues (a quick and dirty decision made long ago to simplify web design). At colossal expense this defect has now been fixed in all past issues! Other "improvements" are too small and fiddly to note in detail. • Meanwhile, Ansible Information – the software arm of the Langford empire – has gone into suspended animation. This relates to a New Year resolution to abandon technical support for cobwebbed utilities that worked perfectly well up to Windows 98 or ME but which Microsoft has since clobbered with several layers of its famous Backwards Incompatibility. It's time (when I find time) for cruel triage of the catalogue into products that might still be sold, though online only; those that can be added to the free downloads; and those I don't want to think about ever again. • Work continues on the now very large Rob Holdstock memorial supplement to the January Ansible, both to be released on Monday if not earlier. There is still time to contribute.

Archive of older entries
2009 • 2008 • 2007 • 2006 • 2005 • 2004 • 2003 • 2002 • 2001

Starcombing • The Limbo Files • The SEX Column • Different Kinds of Darkness • The Leaky Establishment • The End of Harry Potter?

Site Update Log • Diary RSS Feed (Long)
Ansible Newsletter • Books Received
SFX columns • Cloud Chamber • Reviews Index
Langford Writing: Free Reads Here
Contact David Langford
PayPal: Help Fund Ansible & This Site
Photographs • Langford RAQ
Miscellany & Lists • Site Map

Langford Bibliography
BOOKS (with covers & details) • SHORT STORIES • COLUMNS & ARTICLES • FANZINES • Contributions to BOOKS | JOURNALS | FANZINES • WEB • AWARDS • BUY LANGFORD BOOKS & STORIES

Other Stuff
Ansible Information (software)
Ansible E-ditions (POD books)
SF Encyclopedia CD-ROM
Checkpoint on-line archive project
Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) updates and corrections
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) updates and corrections
The TransAtlantic Fan Fund
The Runcible Ansible (now in limbo)
Amazon Reviews (also in limbo)

About David Langford
AnthologyBuilder • Facebook • Fantastic Fiction • Fictionwise • Gollancz • Infinity Plus • ISFDB • LinkedIn • Christopher Priest • TV Tropes • [Not Twitter] • Wikipedia • Wildside Press

Visitors since July 2004. Allegedly.

Selected Weblogs
Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
BoingBoing
Hooting Yard (Frank Key)
Making Light (the Nielsen Haydens)
Punkadiddle (Adam Roberts)
The Sideshow (Avedon Carol)
Charlie Stross

Past Entries from This Page
2009 • 2008 • 2007 • 2006 • 2005 • 2004 • 2003 • 2002 • 2001

Comic Relief
Dilbert • Wondermark • xkcd

Family Links
Jon Langford on MySpace
Jon Langford: Art and Music
Jon's Paintings
[Jon] The Mekons
[Jon] Waco Brothers fan site
Cousin Susan, Dog Fancier

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