D. West (5) (1945–2015)

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So said L.P.Hartley in The Go-Between; and D.West's magnum opus, Fanzines in Theory and Practice, is an excellent illustration of this.

D.West (1945 - 2015) was an irascible Yorkshireman, a science fiction fan, a fanzine writer and fierce critic, and a highly talented cartoonist. He wrote for a number of British fanzines from the mid-1970s onwards; this self-published manuscript (back in the days when self-publishing meant cutting stencils on a typewriter and duplicating, collating and binding the results yourself, perhaps with the help of whoever you could wheedle into coming to help on the strength of the promise of drink) collects together some of his most iconic articles from the years 1976-82.

Many of these articles were convention reports, which were of great interest to me as I was at a number of these conventions, and knew many of the people who went to the ones I didn't go to. So this was quite the nostalgia trip for me. Not only did D's (he was always known just as D.) vivid and cutting descriptions recall events long gone, but they also brought back to life a number of personalities who have been lost to us, too many of them too early. Other names dropped were to go on to fame (at least within the science fiction fan community) or fortune (in the case of Malcolm Edwards, who became one of the magnates of British publishing as a Huge Corporate Name with publishing houses such as Gollancz, Grafton, HarperCollins and Orion).

Other of D's articles were fanzine criticism. Fanzines - privately published and circulated magazines written by science fiction fans for other science fiction fans - have a long history, stretching back into the 1920s. D set out an account of their post-war development in the UK and analysed their content, audiences, and significance to those who produced them and read them. D's sort of fanzine wasn't about science fiction, it was about science fiction fans, and to appreciate the more in-groupy sort of fanzine, you had to know at least some of the personalities involved. But just because a thing is done for the love of it, that was no reason, felt D, that they shouldn't be good. Excusing poor writing on the grounds that "Well, they're only amateurs" was not permitted in D's world.

Along the way, D's analysis shows up a startling parallel with our own time. If it was going to be honest, fanzine criticism shouldn't spare anyone's feelings, D felt, and he made sure that his criticisms took no prisoners. Now, it's a recognised fact, amongst those who are familiar with both old-fashioned fandom and the Internet, that the Internet looks the way it does because the people who developed the Net into the form we see it today came from either fandom or from sub-cultures close to fandom. So websites and blogs take the place of fanzines, the standards of netiquette are very similar to their fannish equivalents, and the openness of the medium allows for all sorts of weirdness. Including trolling, if D's brand of iconoclastic reviewing and criticism is any guide.

This is probably one of the rarest items in my collection, though it will be of value to very few. But reading it will take those who knew the times and the personalities back to the 1980s, to Leeds fandom and to the heady days of our youth. We will not see the like of this again.… (meer)