David Langford (1) (1953–)

This book is a compilation of Dave Langford's convention reports, pulled together from various sources - mainly fanzines - between 1976 and 2014. I saw quite a few of the earlier reports at the time of publication - I got quite a few fanzines in those days - so it is good to have them collected together. The more recent ones were mainly new to me, and I have to say that I had a few laughter-related incidents whilst reading them.

At the same time, the early reports are nearly fifty years old, show more and reflect the times they were written in, both for content and subject matter. Dave comments that the accepted "classic" format for a convention report starts with details of how the writer travelled to the convention, sometimes at greater length and detail than the convention report itself. After all, Walt Willis' account of his first trip to the USA for the 1953 Worldcon started with a lengthy piece talking about the much more difficult part of his trip, getting from Belfast to Cork and then on to Queenstown for the tender that would take him to join his ocean liner for the transatlantic crossing, cheap air travel not being a thing then. It is in itself a valuable picture of days gone by. So here we have an account of Dave's 1963 Ford Anglia and some of the characteristics it "boasted", most of which would get it taken off the road today. In other reports, there are names dropped of fans and writers no longer with us.

I get namechecked twice in this book; once for a comment I'd made which I'd forgotten, and once for a drink-related incident which I'd rather forget.

I've always felt that Dave Langford is one of our finest comic writers, and this book simply confirms it. show less

This is the fairly definitive collection of all of Dave Langford's serious short fiction up to 2004. It covers science fiction, fantasy and horror - though the horror is a particularly British type where the horrors are all of our own making. I was particularly struck by a 1994 story 'Serpent Eggs', wherein a UFO investigator follows up a story which takes him to a hippie commune on a remote Scottish island, and gets his comeuppance through his own lack of scientific knowledge. The writing show more in this story felt particularly dreich, as the Scots say, and the scene setting was particularly effective.

There are four outright fantasy stories in the collection; some have commented that they felt them to be so-so (although Dave Langford's 'so-so' would be the highest quality of many other writers in the genre), but I was well engaged with each of them, perhaps because I read very little heroic fantasy.

The best in the book is left to last; four of Dave's stories of 'basilisks', fractal images specifically designed to short-circuit the brains of anyone who looks at them. The last, from which the collection takes its name, shows the life-changing effects of taking any new thing to its ultimate conclusion, and is as good a piece of 'out-there' thinking as you could wish for. It won the Hugo Award for best short story in 2001. show less

Dave Langford's only hard-sf novel to date is a tour de force of theoretical physics with the nastiest matter transmitter you will ever come across.

Matter transmitters in this universe have been proved possible; but not practicable. Their use affects nearby suns, making them go nova unless the MT gate is restricted in size - to 1.9 centimetres. Not very useful; but when a lost human colony is detected using MT technology, something has to be done.

The military of the time have (by and large) show more perfected the technology of regenerating damaged and destroyed bodies and alleviating many of the simpler forms of death. A desperate plan is hatched to a) send a sophisticated robot through a 'mini-gate' to build first a spaceship and then two regeneration tanks, then b) send a soldier and a psychic communications specialist through the gate to undertake a mission to persuade whoever is using MT at the other end to stop. And there is, of course, a Plan B...

The regeneration tanks are necessary because the only way to get a human being through a 1.9 centimetre aperture is to reduce them to a spinal column and as much cerebral cortex as can be spared...

The reality of getting to the colony and then making contact with the colonists takes up about half the book; the other half tells what happens then, the political manouevering, and the revelation of Earth's final solution. Strange to relate, it has a diameter of about 1.9 centimetres...

The UK Arrow paperback has some unintentionally hilarious cover art, showing a spacesuited figure apparently doing ballet exercises with a giant glowing Malteser. Apparently, the artist had no idea how to show a mini black hole.... show less

This book brings together all of David Langford's sf parodies and pastiches. The first part was published in 1988 as The Dragonhiker's Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune's Edge, Odyssey Two and is long out of print. I commented in a review of that book that the parodies it contains tended a little towards undergraduate humour, but they were early work. The pastiches in the second half are - for the most part - rather more polished and substantial. The Spear of the Sun (first published in show more the British sf magazine Interzone) is not just a G.K. Chesterton pastiche, but indeed is a clever meta-fiction, set within an alternate universe where Chesterton wrote science fiction and popularised the genre in the UK before Hugo Gernsback could get a look in. Out of space, out of time is an interesting piece of Lovecraftiana. If looks could kill came from the shared-world anthology Temps (properly, the second volume, Eurotemps). There are also some E.E. 'Doc' Smith pastiches which are nearer to the earlier parodies, one of which - the resoundingly-titled Sex Pirates of the Blood Asteroid - dates from 1979, earlier than most of the entries in the second part. The whole is well worth acquiring. show less