Does everyone know about David Langford's zine Ansible and its accompanying blog at www.ansible.co.uk? I've had a link to it down below for a while, but haven't mentioned it directly yet. It's easier for me to just send you all to it so you can look for yourselves instead of trying to describe it. It's basically just a newsletter (and maybe a gossip sheet) of goings-on in the sf world, but it is somehow compulsively readable. Even entries that I don't understand at all I will still sit here and read. I guess I'm not the only one (even if I am a Johnny-come-lately to it) since it is a fact that Langford has won a huge pile of Hugo awards for his work on this thing. But here's the really amazing thing: Ansible has been going on since 1979. But here's the totally wild bugfuck CRAZY thing: you can go to the site and READ those issues from all the way back then because they have been transcribed from their hard-copy-only world of the pre-computer days so that they can be archived on the web. For example, you can look at Ansible#1 from August 1979 and learn that:
"SF Book Club supremo Paul Begg informs me that David & Charles are planning a follow-up to that super collection Aries 1 (not to be missed by Langford completists). The new collection will not be called Aries 2 (which is OK by me), will be paying twice the money (yes, yes, go on Paul) and will not be featuring writers who appeared in Aries 1. Hate, hate, hate. Another rumour from D&C is that the SFBC will be folding next year, perhaps in an attempt to make sure they don't print Bob Tucker's The Lincoln Hunters for a third time. Several people, including Greg Pickersgill, insist that SFBC lost its charm when they stopped numbering their books; D&C remain impervious to such criticism. Better death than dishonour, and so on. It may be that D&C will not survive the Langford book on flying saucers, due next month."
If you don't yet know about Ansible, then go to the site and check it out, and also look up Langford on Wikipedia. That's where I grabbed the accompanying picture which is of Langford at Worldcon 2005 with two Hugos.
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