Phil Friel – Page 18

Doctor Who Returns to UK Television

[T]his coming Saturday, 30th March, at 6.15pm, sees the return of Doctor Who to UK television screens, as we finally get to see the first episode of the second half of Series 7, The Bells of Saint John. I\’m really looking forward to the start of this sequence of new stories, as is, I\’m sure, every other Doctor Who fan on the planet.

As far as I\’m concerned, Matt Smith has been a huge success as the 11th Doctor. His zany, eccentric portrayal combines the best elements of previous Doctors, but is influenced mostly by my favourite Doctor of all, Tom Baker, which has to be A Very Good Thing (at least in my book). Even in the Doctor Who stories which are… let\’s say… not exactly the best, Smith puts in a performance that is rarely less than excellent, and, by sheer acting ability alone, often elevates the quality of those episodes beyond that of the mediocre scripts.

I\’m also looking forward to seeing how he works with his new companion, Clara Oswin Oswald (played by Jenna-Louise Coleman). We\’ve already seen her a couple of times before, firstly in last season\’s Asylum of the Daleks, and then in the last Christmas Special, The Snowmen. She\’s already died twice, but keeps coming back, which bodes well for some intriguing story and character development in coming stories. From what we\’ve seen so far, Jenna-Louise Coleman is an excellent young actress, and Clara Oswald should more than ably fill the shoes of The Ponds as the Doctor\’s new companion.

But most of all, and I\’m sure many Doctor Who fans will empathize with me here, I\’m looking forward to the monsters. Yes, the monsters! What adversaries, both old and new, will the Doctor be facing this year? I\’ve caught the trailer on TV a few times over the past week, and I\’m pretty excited about it. The Cybermen are back, looking better than ever. But what excites me the most is that we\’ll at last be getting to see the Ice Warriors, the very first time they\’ve appeared in the new series.

The Ice Warriors have always been one of my favourite classic Doctor Who monsters, right up there with the Daleks, Cybermen, Autons, Silurians, Sea Devils and Zygons, and it\’s long, long past time that they made an appearance in the new series. They look absolutely amazing, at least from the brief glimpse that we got of them in the trailer. I don\’t know which episode of the new season the Ice Warriors will appear in, but I can\’t wait to see them. Hopefully Moffat and co. will do them proud with an excellent story.

Roll on Saturday evening, 6.15pm!

A Quiet Night In – A Few Good Movies

[I]\’ve been sitting in tonight for a change, having a nice, quiet Friday night viewing session, which certainly makes a change from a night out on the town, or visiting relatives, which is more like my usual Friday night.

At the moment I\’m watching a real gem of a late-night film on television, Gremlins, one of the true classic movies of the 1980s, and still one of the funniest films ever. I\’ve seen it at least twenty times, if not more, and I\’m still sitting here, cackling like an idiot. Just watching the scene right now with the gremlins in the cinema, watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the little terrors all singing along to \”Hi-ho, hi-ho, it\’s off to work we go.\” Hilarious!

Earlier this evening, I also watched a couple of very nice DVDs, starting off with Jaws, one of the real classic Steven Spielberg movies. Even with the dodgy-looking (by today\’s standards) shark, it\’s still a very scary film, and that atmospheric, frightening music each time the shark was about to make an appearance still sends chills up my spine.

Next up was James Cameron\’s fantastic Aliens, still one of the best bug-hunt sci-fi films ever. As sequels go, this one is a rarity, just as good as the classic Ridley Scott original, despite being a completely different type of movie. Most sequels very rarely live up to the original film.

Three old classic films, and still three of the best. Why the hell can\’t Hollywood make movies like this any more? All in all, a very nice night\’s viewing. I\’m going to bed a happy man tonight.

The cinema\’s just gone BOOM!! blowing up all the gremlins except for Stripe. He\’s a bad little mutha******.

When I Was Young – Christmas 1975

[I] think it\’s fair to say that spoiling children is not a good thing, as spoiled kids have absolutely no appreciation for anything that they\’re given. It seems that the more you spend on them, the LESS they appreciate it.

Spoiled, ungrateful kids really piss me off. You know the sort I\’m talking about, spoiled brats throwing a tantrum, hurling a £300 games console back at their parents because it isn\’t what they wanted for Christmas. \”I want an X-Box! You got the wrong one! Wahhh!\” (I have actually seen this happening). If any kid of mine ever threw a tantrum like that, they would find themselves playing with Lego and not a £300 games console. Those kids need a good, swift kick up the arse, if you ask me. And the parents need an even swifter, harder boot to the rear end for making their kids turn out like that in the first place.

Modern society has become so materialistic that it sickens me. It\’s all about (for both kids and adults) how many nice, shiny, expensive new things you can acquire. I get so angry when I see how much more is spent on Christmas presents these days compared to when we were kids, and the complete lack of gratitude on the part of most of those kids receiving those expensive presents. Speaking as an Old Phart, I can state with some authority that back \”in our day\” we got a heckuva lot less, but we appreciated it a lot more. Which brings me to Christmas 1975, and one of the best Christmas presents I ever received.

I came from a very poor family (I could give you a \”We were so poor that… \” story, but you get the picture). My Dad had to to raise five kids on his own, after he and my Mum split up. He gave up his job to look after us, and, as a typical working-class man in the early-1970s, he was very ill-equipped to do so. Indeed, he almost gave up on many occasions, but he loved us, so he hung in there against all the odds, refusing to leave us hanging high and dry, where many other men would\’ve given up altogether.

The worst part of all this was that our lives were a constant struggle against poverty. Life on the dole in Northern Ireland at the start of the 1970\’s was no laughing matter, especially if you had to raise a family on it. Maybe it wasn\’t exactly Bangladesh, but it was as near as a so-called advanced western society came to it. We managed to eat, just about, and very poorly. Meat only two or three times a week at most (I got real sick of chips \’n\’ beans), and chicken only very rarely, on special occasions (like Christmas and New Year). Buying clothes for the kids and paying the bills and debtors was a major problem. What we would take for granted today as the everyday little luxuries in life were totally out of the question for us back then.

And, most of all, Dad dreaded Christmas, with a passion that even I could only imagine, for all my strong dislike of the Festive Season. Christmas meant extra spending on food and presents. But how could you spend extra when you didn\’t have it in the first place? Trying to feed the kids and buy a few cheap presents to give at least an impression that it was Christmas was a recurring nightmare for my father. And this went on every year for at least a decade (until we were old enough to work and contribute to the household ourselves). He\’d buy a few little toys and confectionery items for the younger kids, but I was older, and toys didn\’t do much for me. He knew I liked books, but wasn\’t too sure what kind of books. So he\’d usually pick up something on space or prehistoric animals, which he knew I had a thing for, and that generally kept me quiet.

Then one year he struck gold. I remember it well. Christmas Eve, 1975. He landed back late with the Christmas presents, and handed them out to us. Nobody in our family believed in Santa, aside from the two youngest, who were very young and already in bed. I was fourteen years old, and the other two brothers were twelve and eleven, so we were too old to believe in Santa. We knew Dad was the Man with the presents, and we were waiting like hawks when he came in the door.

The younger brothers got their usual ration of toys and sweets, which kept them very happy indeed. Then he handed me my present, obviously a book of some kind, large format and hardback. I ripped off the wrapping paper eagerly, expecting another book on dinosaurs, or spaceships, or Doctor Who. But I was in for a real surprise. It was an Annual, and not just any old Annual. It was the Avengers Annual 1975. I\’d already been a crazy superhero fan for several years by that stage, and collected all three Marvel UK weekly comics, the (Mighty World of Marvel, Spider-Man Comics Weekly, and The Avengers), even if it meant walking the four miles home from school every day in order to save my bus money for them (no such thing as pocket money for poor kids like us in those days). But I\’d never been able to afford the expense of any of the Marvel Annuals, which, at nearly £1, almost twenty times the price of the average Marvel weekly, were well outside my budget at that time.

And here was my father handing to me the Avengers Annual 1975! He might as well have been giving me the Crown Jewels. I threw my arms around him and gave him a big hug. He was very taken aback by this, as he wasn\’t one to display much overt affection in public (Real Men didn\’t do that kind of thing back then), although we all knew that he loved us. But he was obviously surprised and delighted that I was so happy with the present. He\’d taken a chance on it, thinking that I might like it, being a fan of superhero comics. But the degree of joy I\’d shown was completely unexpected. He shook his head in bewilderment, smiling, as I rushed off to find a quiet spot to read my new found treasure.

You wouldn\’t even have known I was in the room, as I sat in that corner, reading the annual over and over again for hours on end. I was captivated by the gaudy front cover, with Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, and the Vision smashing through a wall. And the even better back cover with all the Avengers together in one pin-up. There were more pin-ups inside. And the stories! Wow! The first one was a great Steve Englehart/Don Heck strip featuring The Mighty Avengers and The Uncanny X-Men at the mercy of Magneto.

The second strip was part two of the same story, with the three remaining Avengers, plus Daredevil, and the Black Widow, all taking on the power of Magneto and his mind-slaves (namely all the other Avengers plus the X-Men). In another strip, the Avengers took on the Lion-God, my least-favourite of the stories in the annual, but still interesting. But the greatest eye-opener for me was a classic Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Captain America and Bucky strip, set during World War II. I loved that one! I\’d never seen any stories in a Golden Age setting before, and I found it completely fascinating.

Overall, this was a fantastic gift from my father, and out of all the Christmas presents I have ever received, that Avengers Annual from 1975 has always meant the most to me. And the cost of that amazing present? A cool ninety pence. That\’s right, not even one lousy English pound. Sometimes the value of something, no matter how cheap, goes way beyond anything monetary. Which is a big reason why I get so riled these days by spoiled kids and their lack of gratitude for the vastly more expensive things they get, and the stupidity of their dumb parents for splashing out so much money on the ungrateful little brats.

I still have it, that 1975 Avengers Annual, and all the other annuals that my father made sure to buy me for the next few Christmases after that. I wouldn\’t part with any of them, not for any amount of money, even though they\’re aren\’t really worth a lot in money terms. They mean too much to me, carry too many fond memories for me of my late father, and all those Christmases from long ago, when we struggled just to survive the Festive Season, when we were lucky to get fed, let alone receive presents.

That cheap little present still means more to me than anything I\’ve gotten for Christmas in all the years since then. There are some things that money simply can\’t buy!

Reading History: The Invention That Changed the World by Robert Buderi

[I]\’ve always been fascinated by history, and in my other (non-SF geek) life I\’m actually an historian by profession (I used to be a history teacher, believe it or not). So, for a change, I\’m going to recommend not an SF book, but this really fascinating $\"BuderiPic-2\"$ technological history book that I picked up a few years ago, and which has been sitting in my \”to read\” pile for donkeys ages now. The book is The Invention That Changed the World, written by acclaimed author Robert Buderi. I\’ve at last finally gotten around to digging it out for a proper read, and it\’s long past time that I did.

One of the main things that attracted me to this book is the fact that it not only covers World War II (one of my favourite historical periods), but also does so from a perspective that I rarely see in history books. I have to admit that I\’m finding it both unusual and refreshing to read a WWII history from a different, technological perspective, rather than a social or military one, which is what you see in the vast majority of history books.

World War II and the post-war period has always been one of my favourite historical eras, and I\’ve also always had a fascination for science and technology from any era, past or present. Any book which mixes technology with history has a great chance of being a winner with me. And this one does it in style. So it wouldn\’t be too far wide of the mark to say that I\’m enjoying The Invention That Changed the World, and I\’m enjoying it a lot.

The importance and implications of the development of radar and the part it played in the Allied victory during the war simply cannot be stressed enough. It was absolutely pivotal in the victory of the RAF over the Luftwaffe in 1940, and, in the later stages of the war, the non-stop Allied aerial bombing campaign that helped bring Germany to its knees would not have been nearly as effective but for radar, which allowed bombing flights to be continued in all types of weather, day and night.

I think that this blurb from the back cover sums it up nicely:

\’The Invention That Changed the World is a technological thriller better than Tom Clancy\’s best. It will introduce you to wonderful characters you will never forget. The atomic bomb was a sideshow in World War II compared to radar – and finally Robert Buderi tells the amazing story of radar\’s invention in the heat of war and its equally amazing elaboration across the years.\’
RICHARD RHODES

\’Nuff said. I can\’t recommend this book highly enough. Go out and get it from your local bookshop or library, right now. You won\’t regret it.

Some Nice Night Music – Silk Degrees by Boz Scaggs

Two of the greatest feel-good, easy listening albums of all time are Fleetwood Mac\’s Rumours and Boz Scaggs\’ Silk Degrees, both of
$\"Silk$ which came out within a year or two of each other in the mid-1970\’s, an era which was a fertile period for such music.

Silk Degrees (1976) has proven to be the most enduring of all the albums produced by Scaggs, a highly talented and versatile, but hugely (and sadly) underrated guitarist and musician, who had previously worked with the Steve Miller Band. Scaggs had jumped ship from that band when he decided to go it alone, and made the switch from r\’n\’b to producing his own strand of smooth, silky jazz-funk, a genre which was enjoying some considerable commercial success at that time. He set up stall with a bunch of excellent session musicians (most of whom were to go on to later form the acclaimed band Toto), a combination which was to prove, along with his own undeniable talent, the main motivating force behind the polished, classy quality of his albums.

Scaggs had produced a number of albums before Silk Degrees, but this was the one which skyrocketed him to the top of the \”absolutely must listen to\” musical charts. There are so many good tracks on this album, which produced no less than three chart-topping singles – the sublime What Can I Say?, the sultry Lowdown, and the catchy floor-filler Lido Shuffle. But I rate the equally catchy It\’s Over and Georgia just as highly as the three singles, two tracks so good that they should also have been singles themselves. The album also provided a couple of excellent ballads, Harbor Lights and We\’re All Alone, the second of which which was later to be a massive hit cover single for Rita Coolidge.

I originally bought Silk Degrees on vinyl way back in the early 1980\’s, and more recently also bought the remastered 2010 CD edition, which contains several bonus tracks, including live versions of What Can I Say?, Jump Street and It\’s Over, all of which are also excellent, and show just what a force Scaggs and his group must have been on tour.

I can listen to this amazing album over and over and over again, and I never get fed up with it. If you are a fan of soulful, silky-smooth jazz-funk, and you\’ve never heard Silk Degrees, you are missing one of the true classics of the genre. Do yourself a huge favour, go out and buy this great album, pour yourself a cool drink, and just sit back and let the music flow over you.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

A Quiet Night In – The City of Lost Children (1994)

On my old, long-gone SFreaders.com blog, I used to do short reviews of films and television programs that I\’d just watched. I\’d note down a few on-the-spot points and comments during the film, and put together a short review – just several paragraphs summarizing the comments and impressions I\’d jotted down – while the film was still fresh in my mind, either that same night or the day after. I\’d then post this mini-review to my blog under the heading of \”A Quiet Night In: (Title of Film)\”.

$\"Cover$

Well, I think it\’s long past time that I started reprising \”A Quiet Night In\” again for this blog. I had a nice, quiet night in tonight, and had a great time watching the DVD of a rather strange, yet enjoyable film, The City of Lost Children (1994). This is a fascinating and entertaining French surrealist fantasy from Belgian film-makers Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, the two guys who produced the classic and equally surreal Delicatessan back in 1991, as well as the more mainstream hit movies Alien: Resurrection and Amelie.

The City of Lost Children is a strange, whimsical, dark adult fairytale. Set in a bizarre, twilight, retro steampunk, dystopian cityscape, the story begins with a weird gang who kidnap young kids from a local harbour town, and take them by boat to an offshore oil-rig. This is the futuristic base of evil scientist, Krank, who is afflicted by accelerated ageing, apparently caused because he has lost the ability to dream. Krank believes that he can reverse the ageing process if he can start dreaming again, so he tries to do this by stealing the dreams of the kidnapped children, but all he gets are nightmares, because the kids are terrified of him.

Circus strongman One (played by Ron Perlman) and little orphan girl Miette, search for One\’s little brother, who was kidnapped by the gang at the start of the film. A series of crazy adventures and dangerous encounters with all sorts of weird characters lead to the final psychedelic climax and rescue of the children from the doomed oil rig.

The plot isn\’t exactly logical or based in reality (it is absurdist surrealism, after all), but it\’s great fun, full of crazy technology, imagery, schemes and ideas, and truly grotesque characters. There\’s not just one but TWO mad scientists; we\’ve also got Krank\’s six henchmen, who just happen to be clones (all played by Dominique Pinon) created by the other mad scientist (also played by Pinon); a giant brain floating in an aquarium; evil Siamese twin sisters (the Octopus) who control, Fagin-like, a small gang of runaway children, using them to steal money, jewellry and other valuable items; the weird gang (who kidnap the children), all of whom happen to be totally blind and who can only see with the aid of cybernetic eyes; and trained fleas and rats. Nobody could ever accuse these characters of not being memorable!

It seems that Jeunet and Caro have their own little group of favourite actors that they like to call upon whenever they make new films, and there are a few of these familiar faces in this film. Ron Perlman also starred in Alien: Resurrection, and Dominique Pinon and Jean-Claude Dreyfus were both major characters in Delicatessan several years before.

Dominique Pinon has starred in at least four Jeunet and Caro films that I know of – Alien: Resurrection, Amelie, Delicatessan and The City of Lost Children (as well as other cinematic classics like Betty Blue) – although he is mainly familiar to mainstream audiences because of the first two films.

I\’m a huge fan of \”foreign\” (non-English) films at the best of times, and this is a good one. But I\’d offer a bit of advice – watch the original preferred 2002 French-language DVD release with subtitles, and avoid like the plague the awful English dubbed later releases. The original DVD version is far superior.

Anyone who is tired of the endless, vacuous, formulaic Hollywood action flicks, or if they just enjoy off-beat, surreal fantasies such as Terry Gilliam\’s Brazil, could do a lot worse than try out The City of Lost Children. I certainly enjoyed it immensely.

The City of Lost Children (1994)

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SF Labels and Categories – Useful, or a Waste of Space?

SF fans just love to categorize and pidgeon-hole their fiction, to label it so that it fits neatly into certain little boxes with other fiction of exactly the same kind. I\’m referring primarily to all those little categories, sub-categories, sub-sub-categories, and so on, that we invent to identify and promote the various kinds of SF&F that we read.

We\’ve got Hard SF, Soft/Social SF, Space Opera, New Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Military SF, Alternate History, Parallel/Alternate Universe SF, Time Travel/Temporal Paradox SF, Superhuman SF, Utopian/Dystopian SF, Apocalyptic SF, Alien Invasion SF, Space Westerns, Anthropological SF, Comic SF, Feminist SF, Scientific Romances, Slipstream, Science Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy, Magical Realism, Epic Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Mainstream/High Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Heroic Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, Superhero Fantasy, Comic Fantasy, Paranormal Fantasy… the list of sub-genres, and sub-sub genres goes on and on and on endlessly, and there are new ones popping up all the time.

Let\’s take the Hard SF sub-genre, for example, which is based on a worldview projected ahead from theories of real, existing science (usually physics, or one of the other hard sciences), creating a future reality that may be possible, with none of the unrealistic, fantastic elements seen in other types of SF. I think that the classic definition of Hard SF was that the writer was allowed ONE element as a \”maguffin\”, a plot device that doesn\’t have to be extrapolated from real science (something like a time machine, or FTL, both of which are, some would say, actually as much fantasy as fairies, elves or vampires, with absolutely no basis in real science), but the rest has to be true extrapolation from currently understood science.

However, in practice, most Hard SF novels contain more than one non-Hard SF element, and the category seems to have been slightly \”watered down\” in recent years, to allow a few \”maguffins\” in each story, rather than only one, just as long as the overall science and extrapolation in the story is \”real\”. There also seems to be a widening trend towards expansion within the modern Hard SF sub-genre itself, a trend which promotes including everything from ultra-hard, to generic SF, with a few Hard SF elements in among the non-hard stuff. There\’s even a relatively new sub-genre within Hard SF known as New Space Opera, which fuses the best elements of Hard SF and Space Opera, two sub-genres so far apart on the SF spectrum (pretty much at opposite ends, actually) that classic Hard SF and Space Opera fans of days gone by would never have believed that they could ever mix.

If we were to truly apply the \”only one maguffin allowed\” rule of classic Hard SF rigidly, many of the great SF stories of the past fifty years or more would really have to be re-classified as generic SF, or some other sub-genre, rather than Hard SF. Even the mighty 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the benchmarks of classic Hard SF cinema, has at least TWO non-Hard SF elements (if not more) – alien visitation in the past by near-godlike beings, who manipulated and altered the man-apes to enable them to survive and evolve into modern humans (more Erich von Daniken than Hard SF), and a stargate to allow FTL travel (pure fantasy according to current scientific theory).

As far as I\’m concerned, labels and categories are merely guidelines, useful pointers so that fans of certain sub-types of SF can search out and find the shades of SF that they are most attracted to, from among the huge spectrum of assorted sub-genres. SF fans should never lose sight of the fact that the Real Deal is the story itself, and how good it is. The labelling is only to help them find and classify it, and is quite unimportant outside of that purpose.

But sometimes we can get a little bit too caught up with labels, and unfortunately there are some really obsessive fans out there, a small percentage of the Faithful Adherents in each sub-genre, who tend to go way, way overboard in their compulsion to keep their little corners of the SF meta-genre pure and untainted by anything from \”outside\”, anything that doesn\’t fit their limited and restricted worldview. A symptom of this is their extreme obsession with labels and categories, and excluding anything from those categories that they believe doesn\’t belong, even on the flimsiest of rationalizations.

I\’ll give an example. I was witness to an online discussion a few months ago (can\’t recall exactly where) about SF author Peter Watts and his excellent novel Blindsight. Now Watts is usually categorized as a Hard SF author, and a good one, too. And Blindsight is a pretty good Hard SF novel. But a few so-called fans were slating it for daring to commit a \”cardinal sin\” – there were vampires in the story. And vampires are Horror, not SF (never mind Hard SF), right? You can\’t possibly have vampires in a Hard SF story, right?

This is all totally ignoring the fact that Watts had given his vampires a \”scientific rationale\” for existing. Sure, not exactly Hard SF, but they certainly weren\’t the fantastical, supernatural vampires of horror legend, either. But you\’d have thought that Watts had murdered someone, the way these obsessive fans were having a go at him about it. One second they were praising him for writing such an enjoyable novel, and next they were tearing into him for having the temerity to have vampires in a Hard SF novel.

I found myself rolling my eyes in disgust and disbelief at these sad, anal-retentive idiots. I mean come on, Get a Freakin\’ Life. WHO CARES? It\’s a great novel, and that\’s all that matters. And in defense of Blindsight, if we were to consider the vampires as the single, permissible, non-\”hard\” extrapolated item or plot device, then the rest of the novel could definitely be considered true Hard SF. I certainly consider it Hard SF. Even by the classic Hard SF definition, it still fits the label.

But, to be honest, at the end of the day, I really couldn\’t give a hoot what label is stuck on Blindsight or any other book, just as long as the book is good. I don\’t really care if Blindsight is labelled as pure, undiluted Hard SF or not, or merely \”mostly\” Hard SF, or even \”Hard SF/Horror\”. I really, really don\’t give a damn. I just prefer to enjoy it for what it really is, a cracking good read.

So yes, I consider labels and categories to be useful, a good thing, but they are not the be-all and end-all, and are important only as a useful way to locate, indentify and classify certain types of story. That\’s all they are for, and they are not important in themselves. And they should never be held so self-important or inflexible that they \”lock out\” any story from that genre, just because it contains a few things that don\’t fit the overall category. If the general essence of a story places it in a certain category, say Hard SF, then it doesn\’t matter if there are a few elements in it that aren\’t \”hard\”, just as long as most of them are.

In the Beginning… My Earliest Days on the Internet (Part Two)

When I first joined CompuServe UK, back in Christmas 1995, we were still in that antediluvial period when we had to pay by-the-hour for internet access, and it was a couple of years yet before Compuserve was to introduce monthly flat-rate payments (at the end of 1997), in response to an earlier similar move made by AOL. But, despite this, I quickly became an online junkie, with some pretty big quarterly phone bills to show for it. I learned very quickly (after the first phone bill, which was huge) that it would be very wise to start using an OLR (Off-Line Reader), a fantastic piece of software that automated the connection process with CompuServe, going online, downloading all my forum messages very quickly, and going offline as soon as that was done.

This helped cut my time online (and phone bills) down considerably from what they had been initially. I could now read and respond to all my forum messages offline, without running up huge bills, and all replies would be automatically uploaded and new messages downloaded the next time the OLR connected to CompuServe. I loved my OLR – actually, there were two – first I used NavCIS, then I moved on to OzWin, my favourite OLR, when NavCIS was discontinued. So much so that, even when CompuServe did away with the by-the-hour charges and introduced a monthly flat-rate of £19.99 in late 1997, I continued to use my OLR instead of the normal CompuServe online software (WinCIM), simply because it was a better piece of software, and much nicer to use.

By the end of the 1990\’s, the state of the primitive web browsers had improved to a level where I started using them occasionally to venture out into the Web. But CompuServe remained my main base of operations for several years yet. AOL, CompuServe\’s biggest rival, bought out the CIS branch of CompuServe in 1998, and CompuServe went into a slow and steady decline thereafter, with many members deserting it for other online enclaves or taking the big step of just booting up their web browsers (Mosaic and the earliest versions of Netscape were the most powerful at that time) and striking out into the web by themselves.

I hung on at CompuServe for a while yet, but, by 2002-2003, I followed the mass exodus out into the internet. By that time, I had another, cheaper ISP, which let me have browser-based internet access, and CompuServe had declined to such an extent that it was a mere shadow of its former self. I no longer saw any need to pay for two internet accounts, so I dropped CompuServe, ending an era which had encompassed my earliest, most happy days online.

Moving out into the wilds of the World Wide Web, I roamed all over the place for a couple of years like a crazy man, absorbing and downloading everything that I could. But once the novelty had worn off, I began to realize that I\’d lost something very important, very special, that strong sense of belonging, of being a member of that classic, irreplaceable CompuServe community. In all the years since then, even with the advent of Facebook and other social media, I\’ve never quite rediscovered the magical feeling that I felt during my first few years online with CompuServe, and I\’ve never come across forums as active, exciting and fun to be a member of.

Those days will always remain my happiest times online, when I was part of that huge, close-knit, vibrant CIS community. I\’ve always retained a deep affection for my first online home, and I still go back regularly to the CompuServe forums (what\’s left of them) to visit my old buddies in SFLIT. CompuServe Classic, the original service, is now gone, but CompuServe 2000 still exists, and a few of the old forums still survive, and will continue to exist as long as there are enough people still using them to make it worthwhile.

The forums are now, of course, a pathetic shadow of their former glory, and most of the thousands of forums that existed back in the good old days are long gone, disappearing as the original membership left CompuServe in droves. But a few small groups of die-hards in SFLIT, BOOKS AND WRITER\’S COMMUNITY and a handful of other forums have refused to give up, and are still fighting the good fight. So those forums continue to keep on keeping on, although the overall number of forums is now a tiny fraction of what once existed. This number continues to shrink ever further as forums fold, one-by-one, due to declining membership and post activity.

SFMEDIA folded into SFLIT quite a while back, and, most recently it was the COMICS & ANIMATION forum which folded into the BOOKS AND WRITER\’S COMMUNITY. Those were two of my Top Three forums to hang out in, back in the day, when I used to check in on SFLIT, SFMEDIA and COMICS & ANIMATION daily, downloading hundreds of messages and posting regularly. So it really saddened me a lot to see those two forums disappear.

There are still some good old friends in SFLIT, and it\’s always nice to go back for a decent conversation. Some things about CompuServe will never change, even if it has gone downhill, compared to the glory days of the Nineties. But I really, really miss the sheer excitement and fun I had during my earliest days on the classic CompuServe forums. It\’s a great pity that we\’ll never see the likes of those days again.

In the Beginning… My Earliest Days on the Internet (Part One)

I\’ve been online for a long time now, almost twenty years, in fact. My love affair with the internet started when I first came online on Christmas morning, December 1995, and has continued ever since. I can now barely remember what life was like before the internet, and it\’s so much part of my daily existence nowadays that I simply couldn\’t picture how my life would be without it.

Back in those days, the internet had been up and running for a while, but the World Wide Web was still in its infancy, and only a relatively few people were brave enough to venture out into the \”wilds\” of the Web, using nothing but one of the primitive web browsers available at the time. Besides, that early on in the Web\’s existence, there weren\’t really very many good websites out there anyway. So most of the fledgling web denizens tended to hang out in the safe online enclaves provided by the large commercial online services such as AOL, CompuServe and GEnie, which dominated the internet during its first couple of decades. And it was on CompuServe, otherwise known as CIS (CompuServe Information Service) that I was to spend my first few years on the internet.

In the heyday of CompuServe and AOL, every UK household used to get AOL and CompuServe CDs regularly in the mail. They bred like rabbits! I had dozens of them lying around the house, so many that I was never short of beer mats. Early on Christmas morning, I unpacked my latest, most anticipated Christmas present, a shiny new US Robotics Sportster 28.8k modem, connected it to the computer, popped a CompuServe CD in the drive, and I was off and running. I was about to enter the online world for the very first time.

I was a huge Doctor Who, Babylon 5 and Star Trek fan at that time (I still am), so the very first thing I did after joining CompuServe was to become a member of the SFMEDIA forum, a busy, bustling community full of nice, friendly sci-fi geeks, who all just happened to love the same kind of television series and films that I did. After living my entire life in almost complete isolation from other sci-fi fans, I was now in geek heaven. I had literally thousands of like-minded geeks to converse with online every single day. I made my first posting in the Babylon 5 section of SFMEDIA at 4.55am on Christmas morning, and never looked back.

As I was also a big fan of written SF, I moved on to join the SFLIT forum a day or two later, and I liked that forum even better than SFMEDIA. Then, after a few weeks finding my feet in the two SF forums, and as I was also a comics fan, I joined the COMICS & ANIMATION forum, then the SCIENCE forum, the SPACE forum, the HISTORY forum, and quite a few others. But it was the SFMEDIA, SFLIT and COMICS & ANIMATION forums which always remained my main hang-outs, my central \”base of operations\”, so to speak. From 1995, up until about 2002, my entire online existence, both on CompuServe and elsewhere revolved around those three forums.

These were the days before everyone and their dog had their own webpage/website, when anyone who was anybody had a presence on CompuServe. Big companies like IBM, Microsoft, Lotus and Borland had their own communities there, and ran their online business from CompuServe. Many of the big SF authors and fandom figures hung out on SFLIT (Mike Resnick, Ray Feist, Catherine Asaro, David Gerrold, Jeff Carver, Gardner Dozois, Jon Stith, Dave Truesdale and many others come to mind), the likes of Joe Straczynski (yeah, JMS himself) hung out on SFMEDIA, and Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Steve Gerber and many other big comics writers and artists hung out on COMICS & ANIMATION.

Having notable media figures like this all in one place, interacting directly with fans and other members in the forums every single day, made CompuServe an absolutely incredible place to be back in the 1980\’s and 1990\’s.

To Be Continued…