Houston, Houston, do you read?
The other weekend – Easter 2026 – I went with a friend to the UK national Easter Science Fiction Convention. This was held at the Hilton Metropole Hotel on the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) campus just outside Birmingham. The hotel was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, which was something of a coincidence, as I realised that I’ve been going to science fiction conventions for fifty years myself. (My first Eastercon wasn’t until two years later – Skycon, at Heathrow – but an anniversary is worth marking in any event.)
I’ve written before about the culture of science fiction fandom and its conventions. This was the first Eastercon I’ve attended all four days of for some years; perusal of t’Internet tells me that my last full Eastercon was in 2019, also at Heathrow. So I was struck by quite a few things, such as how, out of an attendance of 900-plus people, I only knew around ten (and not all of those to speak to). Panel participants seemed to have little knowledge of our science-fictional hinterland; it was strange to hear people I used to know referred to as historical figures. Perhaps that’s just me getting old.
And when it did become acceptable at an sf convention to refer to the genre as “sci-fi”? When I was first diving into the genre, “sf” was the accepted term, and “sci-fi” was reserved for the description of truly bad science fiction. Now, “sci-fi” appears to be accepted usage, partly through it sounding related to “wifi” but also through some sort of reverse cross-fertilisation from film and television, as if the written form of the genre has only recently come into being.
A big feature of the convention was the fact that there was an animé convention co-located (the Metropole being big enough to accommodate two conventions at the same time). The Dealers’ Room and Art Show, as well as the bars, were common spaces. Many animé fans engage in cosplay; and the visual conventions of Japanese animé do look slightly strange for those unfamiliar with them. Nonetheless, we commented that we could remember a time when it was the sf fans who were considered the weird ones. The feeling was mutual: apparently, there were comments from the animé con that “that’s how we’ll look when we get old”. My friend commented that this was perhaps the way to rejuvenate sf fandom; by draining all these young animé fans of their vital bodily fluids…
(And truth to tell, it wasn’t entirely safe to allocate any individual to one convention or the other based on their appearance or clothing. A noticeable number of the Eastercon attendees decided that this convention was a safe space for them to dress entirely as they pleased. Equally, the animé fans probably felt comfortable in a place where even those obviously not involved in cosplay just accepted such a thing as normal behaviour. Or, as Zaphod Beeblebrox said in Douglas Adams’ The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “I get weirder things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”)
Bamford standing to his right.
And then there were things missing. For a weekend where the Artemis II mission was on the way back from circumnavigating the Moon for the first time in more than fifty years, there was no recognition of this on the programme. And then there were the authors. Or lack of them.
Yes, there were a number of authors present beyond R.J. Barker and Karen Lord (official Guests of Honour). At various times, I glimpsed Adrian Tchaikovsky, Allen Stroud, Gareth Powell, Aliette de Bodard, Charlie Stross, Juliet McKenna, David Wake and Emily Tesh. I’ve since been told that Peter Hamilton and Al Reynolds were there at least part of the time, though as the convention organisers provided no membership lists, it wasn’t possible to know in advance who one could be looking out for. Paul McAuley was down as a participant on programme items (though on the Saturday only). But others were missing: a quick perusal of my library gave me more than twenty UK-based sf authors who might reasonably be expected to turn up at the Eastercon of their own accord, including names like Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, Ian McDonald, Adrian Roberts and Tade Thompson to name but a few. These are all writers who have been at earlier Eastercons; they would be easily able to offset attendance against tax; perhaps they didn’t have books ready to see print in the next couple of months and so their publishers aren’t actively promoting them right now, but surely they aren’t all in complete thrall to their publishers for controlling their movements? Certainly when I was getting into fandom, part of the attraction was that big name authors would turn up at the Eastercon because it was the Eastercon, a part of their community that they needed to go to. And not just UK-based authors, either; occasionally, US-based authors would make the trip over for the Eastercon at their own expense. Perhaps it fitted in with wider plans; but the thing was, they made the effort because it was a part of being in the science fiction community, which transcended mere national boundaries. Or is there not that same sense of community these days?
There was also an issue over books. Not that there was a shortage of books in the Dealers’ Room: I’m pleased to report that the hard copy book is alive and well, to judge by what I came home with: a posthumous book of essays by Christopher Priest, a collection of stories by Ken MacLeod and an other commemorating the late Eric Brown; another set of short stories by Gustavo Bondoni, an Argentinian writer widely published in the USA but little-known over here; Allen Stroud’s Fractal Sequence; and a sumptuous volume of the Finnish national legend, the Kalevala. But all these came from small press publishers; the “mainstream” publishers were nowhere to be seen. No representation from Harper Voyager, Tor, Gollancz or Orbit. And no-one was selling either new books from such publishers, or for that matter, second-hand books.
The small press publishers are doing us proud: NewCon Press, Flametree Press, Guardbridge and Briardene Books, to name but four, are producing titles from a range of writers that are front and centre in the mainstream of science fiction; but they rely for sales on readers knowing about them, seeking them out and ordering books directly from them. For the most part, they do not have market penetration into the book trade, though I’m well aware of the sort of problems that could present in terms of the discounts they would be expected to offer and the sheer legwork of getting their titles into what few High Street bookshops there are nowadays. Surely they cannot be expected to keep the flag flying for new sf being published all on their own?
At least there is little sign of hard copy books dying out any time soon. I feel that there is something of a backlash against digital and other non-physical formats. Once you own a copy of a book, it is yours in perpetuity; no corporate dispute over rights can delete it from your shelf, the way it can with e-book readers or online platforms. Amazon has just this week announced that older Kindles will no longer be supported, which has come as a surprise to those who thought that the Kindle platform was, through its simplicity, future-proof. It is certainly my impression that, faced with the threat of e-publishing, book and magazine publishers generally upped their game considerably and made their products nicer things to handle and possess. Compare newsstand magazines now with what they looked like twenty years ago: far improved print and paper quality and design. The same goes for books. The traditional ‘A’-format paperback has died out, replaced by the larger ‘B’-format, often with superior paper stock and nicer covers. Again, the small presses were possibly at the forefront of this; the publishers I mentioned earlier all produce books which are a pleasure to hold, and the Flametree Press Kalevala I brought back with me is part of a series of books on classic myths and legends they have produced in glorious hardback editions.
There is another elephant in the room, and that is the whole status of reading. There are signs that the advance of hand-held devices is causing a decline in the number of people who are reading for pleasure. Increasing numbers of people seek entertainment via the medium of short-form videos through platforms like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. Neil Postman’s Amusing ourselves to death, though written in 1985 and concentrating on the growth of cable television in the USA, still seems very relevant and Postman’s arguments read across to our digital age all too well.
I certainly can’t speak directly to this. I was thrown off Facebook a few months ago for undefined reasons (probably a technical error in the downstream messaging pipeline, but as Facebook never tell you exactly which post has offended, it’s impossible to tell); and in the few months that have passed since then, I can’t say that I miss it. But perhaps, as a life-long reader and someone who has made books part of their personal and professional life since the age of around fourteen – as a reader, writer, custodian and promoter – I was always going to say that. I am seeing a lot of debate on the one social media platform I still have access to (LinkedIn) about writing and AI. I suspect that my own writing might get flagged by an AI as itself being AI-generated. This would be something of a joke, seeing as I’m fairly certain that this blog has been scraped by AIs – without my permission or agreement – to teach those AIs how to write like a human being. Any suggestion that this post has been generated by an AI would, to me, be an insult. In an earlier age, such an insult would have required that “I Demand Satisfaction upon the Field of Combat”. I might still make such a demand; my weapon of choice would be a 16-pound sledgehammer, and I would pit a manuscript of mine against anyone else’s AI on those terms any day. A manuscript would most probably emerge from such a trial by combat a bit bruised; I doubt that the racks in a server farm would.
There is another issue with reading, and that is that it is seen as an activity defined in terms of gender. Reading fiction is now seen as a female activity; men, if they read at all, are assumed to read non-fiction. (Military history seems to be the sub-genre of choice here.) And publishers follow the trend, instead of trying to undo it. What few outlets there are for popular books – larger supermarkets and remainder bookshops – display a sea of pastel-shaded covers which look like the epitome of “womens’ fiction”. My local library, which has been run by volunteers for the past ten years following the Cameron-era “Age of Austerity” has asked people to stop donating non-fiction books to them, as “there is no demand for them”. They see themselves as purveyors of light fiction to predominantly middle-class women. This seems as if it is turning the clock back to the subscription libraries of the nineteenth century.
I’m not decrying fiction written by women, especially in my chosen genre. Writers like C.L. Moore, C.J. Cherryh, Ursula le Guin and (of course) Mary Shelley (amongst many others) are central to the history of the genre, and my own collection contains works by many female authors. I counted at least sixty different women writers of fiction on my shelves, and I’m certain I missed some, let alone the writers of non-fiction. The title of this post, indeed, is from a female writer – Alice Sheldon, who wrote her science fiction under the pen-name James Tiptree Jnr. for reasons far too complex to go into here, and certainly not just to get published in a patriarchal publishing milieu. Her 1976 novella Houston, Houston, Do You Read? won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. But men need to read fiction too, for the good of their well-being as well as for the polishing of their writing skills, and the pandering of publishers to a perceived reader demographic is doing no-one any favours. They read reports that men don’t read novels, so they don’t commission novels by men. And they don’t package novels to appeal equally to readers of either gender.
This is doing men a disservice. I learnt to write by reading widely. I read plenty of non-fiction in my youth; but amongst the (predominantly male) authors of that non-fiction were plenty of authors who had themselves read widely, and who I now recognise brought the fruits of that reading into their own writing, whether it was a work of military history, or books on railways, canals or aviation. I now recognise some of the techniques that these writers of non-fiction used from novels I have read over the past fifty or more years. True, there have been plenty of writers of non-fiction with a tin ear for language; but fortunately, it was those with a better turn of phrase who stuck in my memory and in turn influenced my writing. I have since recommended reading widely to anyone who has asked me how to improve their own work. I’d like to think that they’ve listened.
The rest of you – go out and read a book.
(I have no connection with any of the publishers mentioned in this post other than as a satisfied customer, and all the books mentioned were purchased by me out of my own pocket.)
A Dream of Islands
When the British author Christopher Priest died last year (an event I marked with a post), I started a catch-up read of those of his novels I hadn’t up to then seen. Due to the mysteries of my To Be Read pile, a strange juxtaposition emerged. After reading books set in Priest’s ‘Dream Archipelago’, I read Artemis Cooper’s biography of the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor (or PLF). At the age of 18, PLF dropped out of school and determined to walk across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (as he insisted on calling it for the rest of his life). This was in 1933; his account of his “great trudge” is recorded in his later books A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road. Over the following decades, he spent a lot of time in Greece, eventually settling there, and wrote about his travels. During the war, he achieved notoriety through fighting with the partisans on Crete, which culminated in his kidnapping a German general and spiriting him away to Cairo in a speedboat. This was the subject of the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight.
The random adjacency of these two writers’ books on my bedside table struck a chord with me. I began to see all sorts of connections between their writings and themes. Whilst Chris Priest never cited PLF as an influence, he was such a major figure in travel writing and popular journalism through the post-war period that I could not help but see connections between PLF’s work and Chris Priest’s, especially the Dream Archipelago stories.
The result was an article for Bruce Gillespie’s fanzine SF Commentary, and it has now appeared. Issue 122 may be read online or downloaded from eFanzines.com. The article is called A Dream of Islands, a title suggested by another of Chris Priest’s novels (not set in the Archipelago).
Postscript: Someone has pointed out that the text originally made reference to PLF “fighting with artisans” on Crete. In typo veritas? I was tempted to leave it uncorrected, partly out of a sense of fun but also to see who was reading closely, but my inner proofreader wouldn’t let me.
My unexpected journey
Last week didn’t turn out at all as planned.
As someone with Type 2 diabetes, I get an annual health check, and part of this is a routine check on my blood pressure. Except that I suffer from what is known as “White Coat Syndrome”, which is where your blood pressure goes up when you encounter medical situations. This is apparently A Real Thing, because it afflicts medical professionals as well as lay people. I fall in between these two categories, as for some five years I worked on industrial injuries benefits, obtaining medical notes, commissioning X-rays, audiometric tests and consultants’ reports, working as an orderly in a medical appeals tribunal suite, and indeed preparing the State submissions for those tribunals. So I am fairly comfortable with medical matters; but yes, I, too, get White Coast Syndrome.
So after my last check-up, I was sent home with a blood pressure monitor to do a week’s monitoring. This is something I’ve done pretty regularly for quite some years. But this time, something was different. The machine threw up some quite anomalous readings. Pulse rates would veer wildly from one minute to the next, or the machine would declare itself unable to read my blood pressure as it was ‘out of range’ – too high or too low for the machine to register. Yet, moments before, it was returning a quite normal (well, normal for me) reading. And I felt completely normal – no unusual symptoms.
I returned the machine and the readings at the end of the week, and was not entirely surprised to be called back into the surgery to have an ECG taken. This was duly done; a few days later, my GP texted me to say that the ECG had come back “normal”. But what I didn’t know was that the GP’s surgery also referred me to the local hospital for more extensive monitoring. So a week or so later, out of the blue I get an appointment letter to go in to have a 72-hour heart monitor fitted. I checked back with my GP, who sent me back a message to the effect that “we always refer to the hospital when we see anomalous readings”, which I suppose is reasonable – better safe than sorry. But it would have been nice to have been forewarned.
(Funnily enough, the hospital refer to this as a “72-hour cardiac tape”, even though the recording device is a little solid-state data recorder slightly smaller than an old-style clamshell mobile phone. Odd how technological advances often take second place to familiarity, like the pictograms for ‘telephone’ or ‘camera’; look at either of these and you’ll see they refer back to a level of technology we’ve left behind.)
When the hospital reviewed the results of that monitoring, they rang me up the following night and asked me to go in the next day. They mentioned the fitting of a pacemaker, which surprised me because this was the first indication that I’d had from anyone that there was a problem. At that stage, I had not had any conversations with an actual doctor.
So I went into the hospital the next morning, expecting to have an out-patient consultation. Instead, I was admitted as an in-patient, with installation of a pacemaker to follow within a few days – at least, that was the implication. My 72-hour trace had shown that my heart rate had dropped as low as 35 bpm at one point on one night. As I had presented myself to a cardiac triage unit, there was a constant stream of patients who were assessed as needing more urgent attention than me, so it was late afternoon before I got to see a doctor. That doctor confirmed that I needed a pacemaker, and presented me with the necessary consent forms to sign. But this was hardly a conversation; rather, the doctor simply told me that the heart trace had shown a need, and so I would be admitted. I was given a bay in the triage unit, connected to a heart monitor, and left to my own devices.
The next day, I was put on a cardiac ward and kept under observation, all the while still connected to a monitor, A surgeon came to talk to me and he gave a good explanation of how anomalous traces like mine could happen. By this stage, I was beginning to feel more accepting of the diagnosis, though I felt perfectly well in myself. The conversation with the surgeon wasn’t any sort of two-way street, however, except on practical matters such as timing and the matter of driving. Because I did have a problem. Due to the way pacemakers are installed, anyone receiving one is automatically banned from driving for a month. The motions of manoeuvering a car puts sufficient strain on the coronary artery where the pacemaker wire is installed for there to be a serious risk of the pacemaker coming away and damaging the artery. The driving ban would be an inconvenience for me, but my more immediate problem was that because I had driven to the hospital expecting an out-patient appointment, my car was still in the hospital car park, and I would be unable to drive it home.
I needed some help, but I live on my own, and all my friends live at some distance. Plus I couldn’t get online because of poor signal availability to top up my phone or even make a call. And I wasn’t quite certain where I was going to end up, so I had to wait until I was settled onto a ward before I could send out calls for help. It was the morning of the third day before I could set this sequence of events in motion.
No sooner did I manage to contact people and get assistance closing in on me from various points of the compass, than I finally got to talk to a cardiologist. He had actually reviewed my heart trace, but he also had access to my notes. These revealed the fact that at no time in the previous two nights had my heart rate dropped below a safe level (alarms would have started sounding on the monitors I was connected to). He started asking me diagnostic questions, such as what symptoms I had had. He was a bit surprised when I said “None”. I added that I had had some brief dizzy spells over a year ago but nothing either recent or frequent. (At the time, I put those down to low blood sugar.)
He asked me some more questions about possible symptoms – do I wake up in the morning gasping for breath, for example (“No”) – and listened to my heart. He then said that he wasn’t convinced that a pacemaker was the right solution for me right now. And then he added “Do you snore?”
Further questioning saw me ticking most of the boxes for sleep apnoea. And so I was discharged, with a plan to call me in for further examination for sleep apnoea (which can lead to cardiac arrhythmia). If that doesn’t solve the problem, then we can revisit the question of a pacemaker. (Which would be done as an out-patient.)
But for now, I’m home again. I think I’ve been a victim of a mechanistic diagnostic process – a sort of ‘diagnosis by flowchart’ – that pushed me down a particular treatment route simply because the numbers suggested a particular course of treatment, but without any opportunity for me to have a conversation and give my side of the story. One of the things I said to the cardiologist was “I wish I’d had this conversation three days ago” (to be fair, he did say “GPs aren’t specialists”, though I do feel that if I’ve heard of a condition like sleep apnoea, I’d assume my GP would have too).
The specialist has also reviewed and revised my medication regime, as he found one of my regular blood pressure medications had reduced my potassium levels; and a potassium imbalance is one possible cause of cardiac arrhythmia. We’ll see how that goes.
I’m a bit concerned at how easily I found myself on a pathway to having a pacemaker installed, with decisions taken purely on the basis of the numbers. This is the new NHS, with streamlined processes for getting patient outcomes quickly without having to wait too long for appointments or decisions. And if this is the way of things now, how long before the NHS embraces the Brave New World of Artificial Intelligence? This is exactly the sort of decision I can see an AI algorithm taking without human intervention or challenge. And it may not actually be the right decision; but “the computer says so.”
But full marks to Glenfield Hospital, Leicester and their staff for making a fraught situation tolerable, and showing kindness and helpfulness to all their patients.
At its best, the NHS in action is an awesome sight. I was reminded of the scene in the classic film Forbidden Planet, where the Walter Pigeon character welcomes the starship captain to his home, and says “I… find myself beset by an army of fellow creatures, all inflexibly bent upon being of service to me!”
The concept of “service” as an end in itself seems alien to some of our politicians and commentators: perhaps this shows that it is their vision that is lacking.
Lorraine Hobson (1949-2025)
My dear sister Lorraine passed away on 6th January following a long illness. She leaves behind her husband Rick, and daughters Suki and Chloë.
Dancing in the streets
We took ourselves off earlier this week to Abbots Bromley. Nearly every year since 1226, the Staffordshire village of Abbots Bromley has held this dance. It originally marked the village’s Bethelmy Fair, celebrating St. Bartholomew’s Day on 24th August, though with the changes made to the Julian calendar in 1752 the date moved to the beginning of September. The first recorded mention of the dance is in Piot’s 1686 Natural History of Staffordshire; it seems that the dance was discontinued during the Commonwealth era when dancing and music were forbidden. The date is fixed as “the Monday following the first Sunday after the 4th of September” – so that’s perfectly clear, then.
A team of twelve dancers start from the parish church (where the horns are usually stored) in the morning and process around the village and neighbouring farms and hostelries, taking refreshment along the way. They finish in the evening back at the church.
The twelve dancers comprise six dancers carrying the horns (actually reindeer antlers); Maid Marian; the Hobby Horse; the Fool; two boys (one with a bow and arrow and another beating time on a triangle of near-industrial sonority) and a musician. Those familiar with that classic film The Wicker Man will recognise the roles of the dancers, though proceedings end with a church service rather than the ritual immolation of an over-inquisitive police sergeant. (It has to be said that in the film, Sergeant Howie ends up committing so many instances of misconduct in public office – performing house searches without a search warrant, breaking and entering, assaulting a member of the public, and generally overstepping his powers – that getting burned in a Wicker Man would probably be preferable to the roasting his Super would give him if he’d returned to the mainland. But I digress.)
Two village families, the Bentleys and the Fowells, have the charge of the dance and its management. In our modern corporate age, there is a refreshing lack of formality; drivers are warned that there may be delays in driving through the village, and the dance happens pretty much where it wants to, although there is a route, starting at the village church, out to the neighbouring village of Admaston, then up to Blithfield Hall; then, looping round to the north to visit an outlying farm, the dancers start back into the village, with increasingly frequent stops for refreshment at the village’s four pubs. (A fifth pub became an Indian restaurant some time ago, but the dancers still stop there, too, though they don’t stop for a curry.) Eventually, they work their way back to the church, where the horns are returned to their places and the evening ends with a church service.
One of the horns has been carbon-dated to around 1065, though that is not to say that all six sets are the same age. They have also been identified as being of Scandinavian origin, which suggests a role for Viking traders. But this, like so many other things connected with the dance, can only be speculated upon until more research has been done. The costumes, though, are modern in origin. Originally, dancers wore their everyday clothes (although one dance performed during World War I is known as the “Khaki Horn Dance” as the men of the village taking part were in the Army. Sadly, on their return to France, two of them were killed in action within days.) The costumes now worn are based on a set designed and made by the daughters of the vicar for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, though those in use now were supplied following an appeal in 1997.
Although the origin of the dance is known, what we see today has far older roots. Neolithic cave paintings have been found depicting figures with antler headdresses. Dances like these would originally be intended to bless the hunt; perform a ritual depicting a successful hunt before setting out, and your chances of success will hopefully be increased. Other possible reasons for the dance might be the beating of the parish bounds, or possibly even the collecting of the annual rents due to the lord of the manor.
The village has an active research group who maintain an exhibition of photographs in the church that explore the history of the dance. (The information in this post comes mainly from an excellent leaflet prepared by the parish council – for more, see www.abbotsbromley.com.)
The atmosphere of the village was rather like a small festival. Strangers were made to feel welcome and there were opportunities to join in for those who wanted it. Morris sides from the surrounding area were invited to entertain those who wanted to stay around the village centre whilst the dancers made their final circuit to the south-east end of the village and back.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that the Horn Dance itself is “Morris dancing” – it is much older than that tradition, and resisted efforts by those Edwardian stalwarts of preserving the folk tradition, Cecil Sharp and the English Folk Dance and Song Society, to codify or gentrify it. The music that accompanies the Horn Dance is an odd mix of dance tunes from all round these islands and some popular tunes of years gone by, such as The Isle of Capri and others. There is a certain irreverence to the dancers, and they strike a balance between maintaining an ancient tradition and at the same time, not taking themselves too seriously. Long may it continue!
I have been faithful to thee, science fiction*
The other weekend, I (sort of) attended the World Science Fiction Convention, held in Glasgow. Regular readers will recollect that I last went to – and wrote about – a World Convention in 2019, in Dublin (Fantastic Voyage)**. This time, for a number of reasons I was unable to make the trip to Glasgow, but was able to attend virtually. Since the Covid pandemic, science fiction conventions in particular have embraced the future and streamed many of their sessions across the Internet. This caters for those of us unable to attend for reasons of old age or poverty, or indeed, those still nervous about attending large gatherings in person because of the risk of infectious diseases. (Science fiction conventions in particular have a reputation for ‘convention crud’, an ill-defined low-grade viral infection that a number of people experience in the days following a convention, usually put down to the gathering in one place of a few hundred – or thousand, in the case of a Worldcon – people from different places with different variants of whatever infections are common in their home locations and that they have immunity to but people from the other side of the country, or the globe, don’t. There were also some thirty or so confirmed cases of Covid itself at the Glasgow convention, which out of some six thousand physical attendees is probably not too bad.)
The Glasgow Worldcon got comparatively little attention from the mainstream media this time around, though George R.R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame) caused a bit of a stir before the convention by not following the organisers’ arrangements for registering interest in advance in participating in, or indeed leading, programme items, and then complaining that he was being “excluded”. Certainly here in the UK, this was a five days’ wonder, especially as the organiser’s response (best summed up, with a sardonic Glaswegian accent if you can manage it, as “No-one’s too important to fill in a form”) caused the whole thing to fade from view before the convention opened.
Otherwise, mainstream media coverage was fairly muted; I don’t watch much tv news and don’t take any newspapers, but I did see that Sky News ran a short piece on the opening day and the BBC News website ran an equally short story on the closing day. Neither of these seemed to badly lapse into cliché (“Sci-fi fans beam into Glasgow” is about the standard of journalism usually expected), and indeed, BBC Radio 4’s arts programme Front Row interviewed this year’s Hugo Award winner for best novel, Emily Tesh (Some Desperate Glory) on the Tuesday night in a wholly acceptable way, with a BBC anchor who showed signs of not only understanding the genre and discussing it in an adult way, but also of actually having read some of the central works of the genre from the last twenty years or so.
BBC Radio 4 also has an influential and long-running magazine programme, Women’s Hour, which has been looking over the past few months, on and off, at genre fiction and how women relate to it. So on the Wednesday they got around to science fiction and fantasy, and of course I listened. I was perhaps hoping that some of the authors and fans who had been at the Worldcon might be interviewed, or at least have pre-recorded segments played back. Instead, I began to wonder if I had myself slipped into some sort of alternate universe – one where the preceding weekend, the World Science Fiction Convention had not been held in Glasgow; one where all six Hugo awards for written science fiction or fantasy had not gone to women writers; one where half of the guests of honour were not women; one where many of the panel and lecture participants were not women; and one where more than half the senior organising committee – including the convention Chair – were not women.
Neither of the two guests – Moira Buffini and Larissa Lai – seemed to be aware of either the convention, nor of the long-standing role of women in science fiction. The show’s anchor showed no sign of having done any research whatsoever, talking about the genre as being seen as “a boy’s thing”. Yes, the roots of science fiction were predominantly male, but women have now been visibly active in the field for more than half a century; more, if you count writers who concealed their identities behind androgynous bylines, such as Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore or Andre Norton. Moira Buffini is, apparently, a writer of screenplays who has produced a novel of “climate fiction” (or, shudder, “cli-fi”) in the belief that she is being ground-breaking; Larissa Lai was shortlisted in 2002 for the Otherwise Award (previously the Tiptree Award), a literary award for works exploring gender and administered from within the science fiction/fantasy community. Lai does not, however, identify as a science fiction writer. What qualified either of these writers to speak with any sort of authority about science fiction escaped me.
One of the discussion panels at the Worldcon was about what happens when “literary” writers try their hands at science fiction or fantasy. What usually happens is that they think they are being original and ground-breaking, but through ignorance of the field they usually only manage to produce works that have glaring errors of logic, world-building or ideas. As one of the panellists said, such a writer might say to themselves “I’ll write a book about AI, because artificial intelligence is a hot topic right now. But what if the AI developed feelings??” (Cue general laughter from the audience.) Often, if interviewed about their latest work, such writers will say “My latest book may be about climate change / AI / returning to the Moon but it isn’t science fiction – instead, it’s about what might happen if we carry on like this / how technological change impacts ordinary lives!” And the majority of science fiction readers will shout loudly at their radios, tvs or devices, crying “That’s what science fiction IS!!!”
Science fiction is now a generally accepted mode of story telling in the wider media field. Films and tv shows are more and more likely to fall under the category of “science fiction”, especially if your definition of the genre is broader than just robots and spaceships. (Though just restricting it to those two plot elements will still probably result in a list of recent blockbuster successes that seems inordinately long.) Yet the literary world still prefers to ghettoise the genre. I recollect talking to the late Iain M. Banks about an open letter he – in concert with a number of others – signed to the Booker Prize organisers decrying the absence of genre titles from most literary award shortlists. That would have been in 2010 or 2011. The opposite holds good: the Arthur C. Clarke Award this year has gone to Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension, longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of two other literary awards; it is unashamedly science fiction, concerning the discovery of alien life in a deep sub-ocean trench. In an earlier year, the same Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, on the strength of its magical realist device of making the eponymous route for slaves escaping the American South into an actual railroad, with trains, conductors and stations. But the Booker list never includes anything that was originally marketed as “science fiction” or “fantasy”, and the literary establishment would sneer at any attempt by a genre author to promote their work as any sort of “literature”. Terry Pratchett once famously commented that his knighthood, awarded for “services to literature”, must have been referring to his failure to write any. He was laughing all the way to the bank, of course, but wider recognition would have been the cherry on the cake. Again, many in the literary establishment think that Pratchett’s readership was and is adolescent boys when the truth is very different.
Again, one of the funniest things I ever saw was one year at the Hay Festival, when famed comics writer Neil Gaiman was interviewed by Stephen Fry. The amusement came from watching it gradually dawn on Mr. Fry that the thousand or more people in the audience were not there to see him. Perhaps I’m worrying too much about this reverse cultural cringe; but it would be nice to see credit given where credit’s due.
*(The title of this post is adapted from a 1961 fanzine article by author Bob Shaw; another talented writer who achieved fame amongst science fiction fans for both his fiction and his fan writing, but remains sadly little-known in the “mainstream”.)
**(Also published in Bruce Gillespie’s SF Commentary 104, which is available online.)
A window into the past
(This post is cross-posted from my book review blog, Deep Waters Reading. I’ve re-posted it here because the book it reviews, John Henry Woolley’s Toton Engineman, captures something of a big part of my father’s story; and so, by extension, my own. The book is now out of print, but copies are still fairly widely available through online sales platforms.)
My late father worked on British Railways for nearly twenty years. He worked as a signal linesman at the Toton freight marshalling yard, outside Nottingham, rising to become Chief Signalling Linesman before being head-hunted into the signalling drawing office in nearby Derby in 1959. One of my abiding memories is being got up one Sunday morning when I was about six years old, and being taken, first by bus and then by train, from where we lived in Derbyshire to the almost mystical junction station of Trent, which served no settlement and where trains could arrive from, and depart in, almost any direction, seemingly unrelated to where the train was supposed to be going.
From there, we walked across the line, along paths only used by railwaymen, until we came to the Down side of Toton Yard. We went to the yard control tower, where Dad met up with his old deputy; and whilst they set to and had a good chinwag about old times, I was taken up to the operating floor and was shown the control room. And I was sat with one of the old hands and inducted into running the yard. Wagons, either singly or in groups, would be pushed up one side of the hump and then roll down the other. The shunters would chalk on each wagon or group (“cut”) of wagons the siding number they were supposed to go into. The hump controller would transmit that by telepriinter to the control room; and the yard controller would set the route accordingly for the cut of wagons to go into. When a train had been made up, a brake van would be sent down to be attached to the back of the train, and a cardboard collar would be put over the point switch to show that no more wagons should be sent into that siding.
Toton Yard was at one time the biggest marshalling yard in Europe, almost two miles long, with 36 sidings in the Up yard (towards London) and 35 in the Down yard (for trains from London). It handled coal traffic from 1856 to the end of the 1960s, when coal traffic from the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfield ceased being sent to Brent and Cricklewood to be burnt in the furnaces and fireplaces of London. The modernisation of the railways and of power generation meant instead that coal now went direct from colliery to power station in bulk. In its day, Toton was a showpiece facility; indeed, that was how my father was headhunted, as he had taken over showing a party of dignitaries around and answering technical questions on the signalling systems. The signalling inspector in charge of the party was impressed and asked him “Why haven’t I ever seen your name on a promotion application?” Within a week, he was being interviewed for a place in the drawing office. This was the way the old railway worked, and it meant that people ended up in management positions who knew the job from the ground up.
I tell this story because this book, an autobiography of John Woolley, who started as an engine cleaner at the age of 15 in 1954 and rose to become an Operations Manager before he retired in 1993, describes the Toton that my father knew. Just as my father was headhunted (as we would now say) into the drawing office, and went from starting as a labourer, through the signalling department to designing and implementing modern signalling schemes for the electrification of the West Coast main line from London Euston to Stafford, Stoke and the north, so John Woolley rose through the ranks of enginemen, from cleaner to fireman to driver, and then impressed people so much that he was invited to apply for managerial roles.
John Woolley wrote his autobiography after retirement; that retirement was short, as he passed away after four years in 1998 at the early age of 59. The book sat in manuscript form until a series of happy meetings saw it brought into print in 2013. It is written in a vernacular voice, but there is both the immediacy of experience and an eloquence in the writing. John Woolley was no scholar in his youth, but he wanted to be a driver from an early age, and when he saw that learning was required of him to achieve his aim, he set to it and achieved his objectives.
His story does not only describe what he saw and experienced; he also had understanding. He saw that the traditional route of career progression amongst enginemen was going to break; engine cleaners were the lowest of the low, being tasked not only with the dirty job of cleaning engines but also with any manual jobs around the engine sheds that needed doing. John Woolley saw that the conditions that these jobs were carried out under would deter many from staying with the job for the years necessary to secure promotion to the next stage up the ladder. Many decry the passing of the steam engine; whilst John Woolley was attracted by the romance of the crack passenger expresses he saw as a boy, he also saw that the Victorian conditions that the engines were serviced under would not attract a new generation of enginemen; and the coming technological world would require a different sort of operation and management.
He comments on the locomotive crews’ strike of 1955, which drove many freight clients away from the railways and towards road transport. My father corroborated that view, as one of his major jobs was the remodelling of the railway network around the brewery town of Burton-on-Trent following the strike, when the breweries switched wholesale to road transport. Yet, looking at the resulting world of motorways and road haulage, who is to say that the strike only sped up the process of the change to road transport, a change which would become inevitable anyway? The old steam railway was labour intensive; steam locomotives needed two footplate crew and an army of cleaners, fitters and other workers to keep them coaled and watered. They required regular maintenance; and the limits of their haulage power meant that large railway staffs were required to assemble trains, handle freight consignments, and signal trains; all of these people increased the overheads on the railway balance sheet. Change would have to come, and John Woolley saw that change coming, and he chronicled it and how it affected the engine sheds at Toton in this book.
The book gives some interesting insights into some of the detail of those transitional years, For instance, one of the labour relations issues in the early years of the transition from steam to diesel was the question of single manning. Diesel engines did not require a driver and a fireman, but the trade unions were reluctant to agree to single manning. John Woolley points out that not all drivers adjusted easily to the new technology. Having a second man in the cab probably turned out to be a necessary measure in the transition to the new traction, as in the event of problems (and problems there were), two heads could often be better than one, if only for moral support.
The book also answers something of a personal mystery. My father’s deputy was a keen model engineer, and he was building a live steam model of the then new British Railways “Britannia” class of express locomotives. One day, he came into the linesmans’ room, saying “There’s a Britannia on shed! Shall we go to look at it?” So they did. But the puzzle was this: Toton was a engine shed dedicated to heavy freight; “Britannias” were express passenger locomotives, and were neither allocated to Toton nor any other sheds in the locality, and so were not likely to visit. What was a “Brit” doing there?
John Woolley answers that question. In 1958, British Railways ran trials with “Brtannias” on continuously air-braked fast block coal trains, as they would be soon cascaded away from express passenger services with the increasing use of diesels for passenger work. Although nothing came of the plans, the trials show that “Britannias” were based at Toton for a time, making my father’s sighting of one explicable.
This book has made a lasting impression on me. I recognise the voice it speaks to me with; it is a voice I have heard from railwaymen of that era. John Woolley describes the railway I knew in my youth, because until my father left the railway in 1967, we travelled everywhere by train. And the book has been assembled expertly by Nigel Harris, a journalist with one of the UK railway magazines. It is illustrated with a selection of photographs from a number of different photographers. They are all of a uniformly high quality and accurately illustrate both the surroundings of Toton yard and shed, and the trains that Toton engines hauled.
There are minimal errors of grammar or typography. Perhaps the one thing that struck me was that regular mention is made in the text about the future role of the Toton site as the location of the East Midlands interchange station for High Speed 2, the 300 kph railway intended to connect the North and South, and to give onwards connections to the European high-speed railway network via the Channel Tunnel. Neither John Woolley nor Nigel Harris were to know that political machinations would result in the north-eastern arm of HS2 from Birmingham to Leeds being cancelled by the Conservative government of 2019-24. These railwaymen saw HS2 as a promise of the future; politicians rarely have such vision.
Although no longer in print, I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the railways of Derbyshire or Nottinghamshire, the Midland Railway and its successors, the day-to-day working of the steam engine, or indeed the history of the Erewash Valley and the East Midlands generally. It paints an affectionate, but at the same time chillingly accurate, picture of working life from the 1950s to the 1990s in one of the powerhouse industries of the British post-war economy. It celebrates the everyday working achievements of ordinary people, at the same time highlighting the pitfalls and dangers that working life held. There are some graphic accounts of accidents, some involving loss of life; and there is one story in particular of an accident avoided and a tragic aftermath.
John Woolley saw the coming of privatisation; his views put the accepted narrative about the nationalised British Railways into perspective. Yet at the same time, he saw that change was necessary. I wholeheartedly recommend this book and anyone with an interest in its subjects should lose no opportunity to acquire a copy.
Seamless transitions
Yesterday, I watched the British political process unfold with the seamless transfer of political power from outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to incoming PM Sir Keir Starmer. I’m not usually given to expressions of patriotism – I honestly don’t think I have the patriotism gene – but thinking about some comments I’ve seen online from countries where this does not normally happen, I experienced feelings of pride in my country. This week, we held a General Election where a significant proportion of the electorate filed into a tiny booth and made a mark on a piece of paper with a stub of pencil. Those papers were put into boxes, and later that evening were taken to local halls, emptied out and the papers sorted by human beings into piles that determined who should be elected to serve as a Member of Parliament. When one party had sufficient MPs to command a majority in the House of Commons, the leader of that party was invited by the monarch to form a government.
The transfer of power from one party to another was accomplished in about an hour or so, from one leader tendering their resignation to the other taking office. Meanwhile, non-political civil servants who had been talking to all parties likely to form a government since the beginning of the year – “access talks” – were putting the final touches to dossiers which will have been presented to the new Ministers when they arrived to take up their roles. “These files”, the Permanent Secretary will tell them, “contain our proposals for how to put your manifesto commitments into practice.”
And there will have been no debates about the validity of the ballot, no results emerging from incomprehensible algorithms, and any disputes about the vote hinged on perhaps a few score ballots and were settled by recounts on the night before a result was announced. Our Victorian system of elections may be slow, and archaic; but no-one argues over the result or raises the spectre of conspiracies. It is true that there is debate over the way our representative democracy actually works, as by making the system rely on the election of local representatives does mean that there can be a mismatch between the popular vote cast and the number of seats actually won. Both main parties have benefitted from this at various times in the past; that a high-profile party leader has taken exception to that mismatch this time around should not be a surprise, though I suspect that had the positions been reversed, he would have been quite happy with the status quo.
The one thing that no-one calls for is any sort of change to the actual election process through the adoption of electronic voting machines. I was amused some months ago when hackers accessed the IT systems of the UK Electoral Commission. I suspect that they thought they were going to strike at the heart of the UK’s electoral process; but there is voter security in our pencil-and-paper system. Our system has its faults, but the ballot itself cannot be called insecure or flawed. The result is not in doubt, even if the way we got there causes debate.
Recent problems with big public sector IT systems would, I suspect, make any call to automate our electoral system fall on very deaf ears. I’ve been writing a lot lately about the Post Office Horizon scandal; I’ve also recently been thinking about computer systems in the Department of Work and Pensions, especially following revelations about the overpayment of Carers’ Allowance. In both these cases, I suspect, the root cause of so many problems must in the end come down to the way these systems were specified, designed and tested.
The IT industry has reached the point where it is quite common, especially with large systems, to out-source design and build. This has massive risks. If that process of gathering system requirements is not done thoroughly, then things are missed. Were the design teams for Horizon told that if their system went wrong, people could end up in prison? I doubt it, because we are looking here at the need for people with a holistic view of the whole business to have input at the design stage. But project or commissioning managers don’t usually take that sort of position, because management itself isn’t encouraged nowadays to think of specific businesses as having unique characteristics that exist in some abstract sense. Management isn’t encouraged to think in the abstract; the emphasis is placed either on physical attributes – production expressed in terms of units shifted – or the financial bottom line. Business has for some time been promoted as an area where morals and philosophies don’t apply.
The trouble is that matters of law and obligation start with moral rather than tangible questions. Think again of Horizon. The problem starts either with Fujitsu people not wanting to own up to their own testing or their system coding (or both) being inadequate, or with Post Office people not wanting to admit that they’d spent big money on a system that wasn’t fit for purpose. Setting the story running that this could only be down to crimes snowballed with a toxic mix of groupthink, misplaced belief in technocratic infallibility and backside covering as the PO got further and further down the rabbit hole. At some point, that story flipped over a boundary line into illegal actions within the Post Office – by whom and when remains to be teased out.
And let’s think about Carers’ Allowance. DWP benefit payments are now all generated by IT systems. Those systems will have been specified by middle-ranking officials; but would they be people with a thorough understanding of the law, the practical administration of benefits and the legal requirements for deciding on a claim? In my day, benefit decisions were legally the responsibility of someone identified as an Adjudication Officer, someone who (if necessary) could say in a court of law that they decided to make, adjust or withdraw an award of benefit according to their interpretation of the law and the relevant codes that the DWP drew up to help staff translate law into actual payments. They would most likely not have made that calculation themselves, but they would have administered a section of clerks working on claims and would have authorised payments and made regular audits of the case papers passed across their desks to monitor the quality of decisions they were being asked to put their signature to.
But now, when “the computer says no” to a claim for a state benefit or allowance, who is the Adjudication Officer? Who is responsible for whether that decision is right or wrong – let alone fair or equitable within the limits of the law? My worrying thought is that no-one is now responsible for actual day-to-day decisions that can be checked, audited or if necessary challenged. And as we are seeing with Horizon, that makes it all the harder to identify problems and drill down to their root cause, let alone put them right.
Steer for the deep waters only 