  I don't know how many of you realize
it, but when Judy [Blish] was masterminding this evening we're having together she
assigned different tasks to different people, and she told me I was to speak about
beer. I'm wondering why I was chosen for this particular job. It may have been
because a couple of years ago at a convention I was seen standing holding a pint of
beer. But I'd like to hasten to add that this was beer which didn't belong to me.
I was minding it for somebody else. It in fact belonged to Harry Harrison, who had
just nipped upstairs to write a novel.Actually the subject isn't
inappropriate for Jim, as we all know. When I first met him I expected him to be a
very grimmy-faced, serious type person on all levels. I noticed Armageddon cropped
up a lot in his work. And I, presuming to advise such a man, actually said to him,
"Jim, don't worry about Armageddon. It's not the end of the world!"In fact, there's a long and honorable
connection between SF writers and beer. Well, fairly honorable. In fact, thinking
back on it, it's downright disgraceful in places, but then...Bradbury, of course, introduced beer
to Mars in his books -- well, beer cans. He complained a lot about earthmen strewing
the desert with beer cans, which spoiled the look of the ancient fragile temples.
And in science fiction fandom in the `50s, I seem to remember, there was actually a
project to build a pile of beer cans which would extend to the moon.Talking about Jim, he liked beer, and
he brought bottles of beer along with him to conventions, carefully chosen. But it
says a lot for his cosmopolitan tastes that he even learned to like English pub beer.
And this is quite a feat for an American who's used, all his life, to the chilled,
fizzy drink which is served up in American bars and given the name of beer. The
gulf between that kind of beer and ours is summed up in a three-cornered conversation
Jim and I were having with another fan. This chap was a keen member of CAMRA, the
Campaign for Real Ale. He was describing a beer he had got in a pub which he was
recommending, and he said it was "a bit sour, lukewarm, flat as a pancake --
perfect!" And Jim knew enough to agree with him because he had, in fact, learned to
appreciate our kind of beer. He understood, too, that a dedicated boozer isn't put
off a drink just because it doesn't taste very nice. Sometimes we have to force
ourselves. Quite often when my wife thinks I'm out enjoying myself, I'm going
through hell!I've got one final beer story about
Jim, and it goes back to the time two years ago when four SF writers were
commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain to do a week-long tour of the
Northeast, giving talks. One or two nights in the week a friend named Mark and I
put away quite a lot of beer and other drinks, and, strangely enough, the organizers
of that otherwise very good week had made the ghastly error of putting it into a
temperance hotel. The lady who ran it was a rather puritanical type, and Mark and I
arrived home one morning about two o'clock. We had forgotten our keys. I remember
very well that last walk up to the hotel, because we kept bumping against each other
at every step. It was strange, this synchronous bumping into each other which went
on the whole way along that street -- we couldn't help it.We got to the hotel, and it was one
of these places made up of what had formerly been a row of private houses all joined
together, and all the entrances sealed up tight except the one which was supposed to
be at the hotel. Mark and I hadn't our keys, but we tried all the other doors
anyway, which hadn't been opened for years, because we didn't want to face the lady
who owned the hotel. Finally we had to knock on the door, and she came out in her
nightgown and told us off very, very severely. She said that was the third time
that week that it had happened, and she wasn't going to put up with people who drank
a lot behaving like that on her premises.The next day -- that was toward the
end of the week -- Jim was arriving. I was talking to the owner of the hotel out in
the lobby, and she had decided to go on with part *two* of the telling-off. She
really got on about it, how she didn't like boozers at this temperance hotel.And then, just at that moment, Jim
came into the hall. He was so tired, he had traveled up from London. He was wearing
his black suit, and a black turtleneck shirt, and a fur hat pulled down, and he
looked remarkably ascetic.The landlady looked at him and said,
"Is this Mr. Blish?" And I said, "Yes, that's Mr. Blish." And she said, "Is he a
minister?" And I said, "No, but he has written books that dealt largely with
religion."Her eyes lit up with this, and she
dashed across the lobby and said, "Mr. Blish, come with me and I'll get you your
key." And he went to back away, and put his hands across her and said, "Can you
get a drink round here anywhere?"And she knew there and then
that he was one of us! - - - - - - - - - -
Some of our readers had anecdotes to share about their memories or meetings with Bob
Shaw. The collected comments we received became almost a virtual wake for him. One
of them, from Tom Jackson, recalled Bob's talent for comic understatement: "[At the
1986 Hugo Awards ceremony, where he was toastmaster,] Shaw [told a story about his
career as a technical writer, where he was called on to] explain that aircraft with
twin engines are supposed to be able to keep flying when one of the engines didn't
work, but his company's aircraft didn't do that. When one of the engines quit, the
plane 'dropped like a stone'. Of course, Shaw wasn't allowed to write that; instead,
he wrote, 'the plane had a negative rate of ascent'."It unfortunately turned out that the
passing of Bob Shaw was only the beginning of a series of deaths in fandom. Soon,
most of the rest of Irish fandom would follow, as well as many other well-known
older fans. Mimosa 20, which was published
in May 1997, had an "Anthropology and Archeology" theme, starting with Rich's "A
Brief Lesson in Kitchen Table Anthropology" Opening Comments, where he likened moving
downward through a long-ignored stack of stuff on your kitchen table is like
traveling backward through time! The covers for the issue were by Kurt Erichsen,
which depicted, in their own way, a kind of futuristic anthropology scene.The featured article in the issue was
a tribute to fan artist William Rotsler -- we'd asked several other fan artists to
'collaborate' with Rotsler by completing some 'set-up' Rotsler cartoons (the same
cartoons were provided to each artist), and also asked them to write something
interesting about Rotsler that we could publish with their art. Here's some of the
results:Title illustration by Diana Harlan Stein Mimosa 20 covers by Kurt Erichsen |
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