Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (2 page)

Travel Diary

Author’s Preface to Introduction to Travel Diary

To anticipate the critics, yes, I
am
aware that it’s self-indulgent to print one of my trip reports in this collection, especially as many, if not most, of the readers will probably find it quite dull. However, since this may well be the only opportunity that will come up during my lifetime to get one of my trip reports into print, I figured that I’d allow myself to be self-indulgent for once, and take it. After all, there’s still plenty of fiction here as well, so I hope that the readers will feel as if they’re getting their money’s worth, even with a certain number of pages devoted to the trip report rather than to stories.

If there are any publishers out there who are feeling suicidal enough to consider a collection of trip reports, as George R.R. Martin suggests, I have about 100,000-words worth of this piffle in my files.

Gardner Dozois

Introduction to Travel Diary

In his novel
Glory Road,
Robert A. Heinlein wrote that the typical American male is convinced that he is a great warrior, a great statesman, and a great lover, and is usually wrong on all three counts.

There seems to be a similar delusion in SF fandom, where every fan and his sister are convinced that they can write a great trip report. All they need to do is go on a trip, keep a diary, and write it all up when they return home, regaling the world with a detailed account of every place they went, every sight they saw, every meal they ate, and how much fun they had (or not). In the old days, you could find these fannish trip reports in fanzines and APAs. Nowadays they have proliferated all through cyberspace, initially on bulletin boards like GEnie and Prodigy, more recently on listservs, home pages, and newsgroups. No one goes anywhere any more without producing a trip report afterwards (except for the vast majority of TAFF and DUFF winners, that is).

Unfortunately, the experience of reading the majority of these outpourings is much akin to the experience of watching your Uncle Walter’s slides of his visit to the Grand Canyon, complete with pictures of the gas stations where he stopped along the way, and the inevitable shot of Aunt Hilda straddling the continental divide.

The sad truth is that the majority of trip reports are not worth the paper they are printed on, even when they’re posted on the Internet. When confronted with one, I often find myself skimming rather than reading, looking to see if I was mentioned anywhere. I rather suspect that’s the way most fans read trip reports. We’re all looking for our own names . . . because we have given up on the prospects of stumbling on an amusing anecdote, a poignant observation, an insight into a distant land or culture. Instead we learn what the writer had for dinner on Tuesday.

Thankfully, Gardner Dozois does not write
that
kind of trip report. Oh, he tells us what he had for dinner on Tuesday too . . . but he never fails to serve up amusing anecdotes and poignant observations along with the neeps. Gardner writes far and away the best trip reports in fandom, as far as I’m concerned, and I am still hoping that one day some enterprising small press will realize that and collect them all together in a book. Of course, the Great Gargoo has some unfair advantages. He has always been a hell of a fine writer, for one thing. He knows how to bring a scene vividly to life, and he takes care to show us his trips where others only tell us about them. He is also the best editor in the field, as the Hugo voters keep insisting year after year after year after year. And every good editor knows not only what to put in his trip reports, but more importantly what to leave out (mainly the dull stuff).

Gardner’s accounts of his travels remind me of the work of the top best travel writers. He can describe the sights and smells of a foreign land as vividly as Paul Theroux, and he make his own adventures as funny as P.J. O’Rourke. If
Asimov’s
ever goes out of business, Gardner should make a second career as a correspondent for one of the big travel magazines before settling down on that hot air vent he’d reserved for his golden years. But don’t take my word for it, read Gargy’s account of his travels in Scotland in 1995, before and after the Glasgow worldcon. It’s one of his best, I think.

Like any travel writer, he tells us about the hotels and restaurants he visits, and that alone would make the report worthwhile reading for anyone planning a similar trip. But his trip reports offer many other delights above and beyond haggis and neeps (even above and beyond his frequent mentions of me). Humor, as in his discussion of the Viking contribution to Scotland’s cultural heritage, and my encounter in the bar with the Scotsman intent on ripping my head off (much more enjoyable to read about than to experience). Some lovely character sketches of folks met along the way; my favorite is the pretentious young Oxford student that he discusses with such warmth and insight. Sadness, in the death of John Brunner. Vivid evocations of Tarbert, Glasgow, Cawdor, Dumbarton, and other lochs, castles, and steak pies encountered on the road. A clear-eyed discussion of the troubled state of SF publishing in Britain. And of course, his musings on life, time, and human mortality. When you actually travel with Gargoo, you never notice this melancholy pondering, mostly because you’re laughing too hard at his latest penis joke. But read Gardner’s sad, sweet, beautiful account of his final bus trip back to Glasgow, where he ponders the passing lights in the night and the lives that hide behind them, and you’ll begin to understand the depths of the man, and to realize that when he shoves a chip up one nostril, as he so often did in Scotland, it is only his way of grappling with a deep sense of cosmic loveliness and existential despair.

George R.R. Martin

Another Introduction to Travel Diary

Look at him, and you’d never think Gardner Dozois was a world traveler. (Of course, you’d never think he had a dozen or more Hugos stashed away either.)

I don’t look much like any more of a world traveler than Gardner does, but I’ve traversed even more of the globe than he has, and have placed about a dozen trip reports of my own in various magazines, so naturally I pounced at the opportunity to introduce Gardner’s pale imitation of my work.

Except, he said bitterly, it’s neither pale nor an imitation. It is the true, essential Dozois, than which nothing is more unique. If you first encounter him in public, you wonder why he didn’t go into a more lucrative career as a nightclub comic. If you first meet him through his very best stories, you could be forgiven for wondering why he doesn’t take an occasional antidepressant. If you meet him one on one, you quickly find that he is so deeply committed to excellence as both a writer and an editor that his passion is almost palpable.

But here, in his diary of his trip to England and Scotland in the late summer of 1995 (culminating in the Worldcon, where we each won a Hugo—but where I also lost three, while he finished the evening undefeated), you get perhaps the truest picture of Gardner Dozois that you’re likely to get in this lifetime. He notices details; you’ll rarely get better descriptions of the places he visited and the things he saw. He’s honest; when he chooses a lousy restaurant or entertainment, he doesn’t blame the travel agent—and he tells you
why
it was lousy.

Mostly, as with any good travel writer, he puts you there. I felt that I was in the Wigham restaurant when the eight French guests decided they didn’t like the food. A few pages later I sat on the lawn with Gardner and Susan, cold drink in hand, watching the stars just outside Oxford. A bit earlier I’m there with them, sharing their awe at the zoo’s display of falconry.

Gardner, you will notice, remembers every meal he ever ate and every bed he ever slept in. He’s a lot less grouchy than V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux, probably the two most famous of the current crop of travel writers, which would certainly seem to make him a better travel companion. He can keep you interested describing a relatively uneventful day in the British hinterlands, while Theroux needs corrupt islanders or Chinese militarists and Naipaul requires top-to-bottom racism to grab and hold the reader’s attention. (Think hard: would anyone read a
happy
Theroux, or a
contented
Naipaul?)

Trust me: this kind of travel diary, one that can captivate readers even when the author isn’t facing charging elephants or exploding volcanoes, is a lot harder to write than it looks. I mean, hell, he was never even arrested by the local gendarmes and I kept reading it. And wondering which of his approaches and techniques I could use to improve my own trip reports, than which there is no higher compliment, at least from me.

One final note: you cannot help but be aware of Gardner’s fascination with food and restaurants. The last time I was flown into Philadelphia to speak to the local science fiction club, Gardner invited Carol and me to dinner at his favorite restaurant and promised to show us a hot time.

He did.

Literally.

We were seated, studied our menus, and ordered appetizers—and, so help me, the goddamned restaurant burned down before they arrived. Honest.

Mike Resnick

Travel Diary

Sunday, August 6th, 1995—
Philadelphia

Packed, did last-minute stuff.

Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger come over, give us a lift to the airport, dropping us at Terminal A a bit before 5 P.M. We check our bags with British Airways, go upstairs to the coffee shop and wait for an hour or so; finally go through the security gate, visit the Duty Free shop, look at the Rube Goldberg-like kinetic sculpture in the waiting room near the gate. On to the plane, a 747, settle into our seats, Susan asleep almost at once. Long delay ensues, during which the plane taxies out to the runway and then has to come all the way back to the gate because the internal PA system (as they inform us through a bullhorn) is not working. Then, after that is fixed (sort of; you never can get the sound to work right on the audio channels for your earphones, which, since the movie they’re showing is
Tommy Boy,
is no great loss, and may even be a benefit), there is another long delay because a plane up ahead of us has run over a dog on the runway, and we must wait while they clean up its remains—what a strange death that must have been for the poor dog, death falling suddenly from the sky; I wonder if he had time to think in angry protest that he’d never seen a car coming from
that
direction before? Finally airborne. Uneventful flight during which I read and doze fitfully, although I get little sleep overall; after we’re airborne, Susan wakes up and can’t get back to sleep, so her plan to sleep all the way to London is frustrated. Nice sunrise over Europe, deep sullen red below with bars of black over it, later changing to orange that ranges up into peach and lemon. They turn on the lights at what is about 1:30 A.M. by our body clocks, and feed us a croissant for breakfast. Land about 8 A.M. local time.

Monday, August 7th—
London

Get off the plane, long walk down the corridor at Heathrow, then wait in line to show our passports. Waved through customs, then into the terminal, where we find out that we have to pick up our Heritage Passes downtown near Piccadilly Circus. Take a traditional black taxi into the city, winding through Hogarth and Earl’s Court, past Hyde Park, seeing the Horseguards go by in the middle distance, then by the top of Soho and past the British Museum to Russell Square. It’s overcast in London, but not actually raining. It strikes me during the early stages of the cab ride how many horses we see grazing in fields within only a mile or two of the airport, something that certainly would not be true within a similar distance from the Philadelphia airport, where only oil refineries and other similar examples of industrial desolation would be found; the horses don’t seem to pay much attention to the huge airplanes roaring overhead—I guess they get used to it, although what they think the planes are is, I suppose, unknowable.

Check into the Hotel Russell, but find, to our dismay, since we’re both staggering with fatigue, that our room is not available yet. Leave our two immense suitcases (which will grow ever heavier and ever more of a logistical problem as the trip progresses, particularly as mine came down the luggage carousel with its handle broken off) with the concierge, take a short dispirited walk, buy some postcards, and sit in the bar of the Russell, refamiliarizing ourselves with how bad most English coffee is, filling out postcards, and half-heartedly talking about what shows are in town. Finally get into our room about an hour later, dragging our suitcases behind us down labyrinthine corridors of a sort of faded shabby-genteel grandeur. Our room is small, and very hot, but we go to sleep immediately, and nap for about two hours.

When we awake, we grab a disappointing lunch at the Night and Day coffeeshop (a place that attracts me because its name reminds me of the Night and Day Joint in
Silverlock,
showing you that you should never allow literary resonances to guide your choice of eating establishments) in the Imperial Hotel next door, take a cab to Lower Regent Street to the British Tourist Authority Office, the cabdriver mentioning in passing that he had been born in 1968, the date of my first visit to London (God!). Looking out of the cab window, note that London has been even more taken-over by American fast-food joints than it had been during our last trip here in 1988; when I first came to London in 1968, you couldn’t have found a slice of pizza in London if someone had held a gun to your head and threatened to kill you unless you guided him to one—now, American fast-food places are
everywhere,
and it seems like every street-corner boasts a freight of Pizza Huts, Burger Kings, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Baskin-Robbins, and, especially, McDonalds; there must be hundreds of McDonalds now in London alone, and we were to encounter them almost everywhere else we went in Britain, except for the very smallest of villages. Having eaten what passed for fast-food in London in the old days, where the best you could hope to find was some moderately palatable fish-and-chips or pub grub, I can understand why the American fast-food chains have filled this particular ecological niche so explosively here—compared to the hamburger I had here in 1968 in the closest English equivalent of the time to a McDonalds, the Wimpey Bar chain, where the hamburger was charred black all the way through, like a charcoal briquette you were supposed to
eat,
and the milkshake was warm chocolate milk with no ice-cream at all in it, the food at McDonalds is a treat fit for the gods—but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable to see one of them every few hundred feet along the street; as a tourist, I want
foreignness,
something different and exotic and strange, and it’s hard to maintain the feeling that you’re really in a foreign country when the streets are filled with McDonalds and Pizza Huts. (As an unfortunate side-effect, the success of the American chains also seems to be killing off the traditional pub-grub such as Shepherd’s Pie and Bangers
&
Mash and Steak & Kidney Pie—very few pubs we went into were serving anything like that anymore, having switched over to pizza and lasagne and hamburgers in imitation of the American fast-food fare; the word “chips” may be dying out, too, as several pub menus listed “fries,” instead; it may be that the younger generations of English people, because of the popularity of McDonalds, will grow up calling them “fries” instead, which I suppose is not a great tragedy, but which
is
yet another part of their cultural heritage gone.)

Stand in long lines at the Tourist Authority, finally get our Heritage Passes, then take a cab to the Tate Gallery. Tour the Turner exhibition there—Turner having been one of my favorites since the days I used to stand slack-jawed before the immense canvas of
Rain, Steam, and Speed
at the National Gallery, when I was a skinny, callow, teenage bumpkin, instead of a fat old callow bumpkin—then go to see the Pre-Raphaelites. Leave Susan to commune with Lizzy Siddal as Ophelia for awhile (Susan is writing a book about Elizabeth Siddal) while I explore the rest of the museum. After the inevitable visit to the gift shop, where Susan buys lots of Pre-Raphaelite stuff, we leave the Tate about 4:30, and walk slowly up the Thames Embankment toward Westminster, passing the Houses of Parliament. Notice how brown and sere the grass everywhere in London seems to be, worn almost bald in places by foot traffic, unusual since London is usually very green and lush—my first inkling of what a severe drought London has been going through; the overcast day has fooled us into thinking that the weather has been normal London weather, but in fact, as we find out as the trip progresses, many parts of southern England have not seen any rain since March. Tour Westminster Abbey. A religious service is in progress as we walk around, and, as always (I had similar reactions to similar circumstances in Notre Dame in Paris, and in several other cathedrals), I am appalled by the fact that the Church will allow crudely irreverent people with purple hair and nose-rings, young girls chewing gum and giggling nosily, and bellowing tourists in T-shirts with cameras to wander around laughing and taking photos and shouting obscene jocularities and blowing their noses on their sleeves while, a few feet away, grim-faced devout people are trying to worship. I’m not religious, and yet this strikes me as extremely tacky, and I always feel very uncomfortable when joining the milling crowd of tourists just outside the velvet ropes (because, after all, I’m part of the problem, aren’t I?), and try to be as non-intrusive on the worshippers as I can, feeling that when some poor old woman is in the process of lighting a candle for her departed husband, she really shouldn’t have to listen to someone a few feet away shrieking jokes about the incontinence of someone on their bus tour. I suppose this is old-fashioned of me. Can’t see Poet’s Corner because of the service, which several people are complaining about in loud voices, but tour the rest of the Abbey, which is full of people doing brass rubbings (for a price) and shops selling key-chains and toy tour buses. See the grave of Lloyd George, and am tempted to tell someone, “Lloyd George knew my father, Father knew Lloyd George,” but do not. Also see the grave of that Peabody who emigrated to Massachusetts, and for whom the town of Peabody (a grimly Dickensian factory town where my father used to work) and the Peabody Museum in my hometown of Salem, Massachusetts is named.

We are both seriously tired by this point, and take a cab to the Gaylord Indian restaurant, recommended by my Michelin Red Guide, which, however, turns out to be closed. We wander around the neighborhood, and end up eating at an outdoor table in a Greek restaurant called Andrea’s, which pleases me because it is on Charlotte Street, which is where the spy has his offices in Len Deighton’s
The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin,
and
The Billion-Dollar Brain,
four of my favorite novels . . . and because you can see the strange edifice of the Telecom Tower from here, like an immense surreal ice-cream-cone wrapped in winking lights, which I recall nostalgically from my first trip to London, when it was known as the Post Office Tower. While we eat, we are entertained by street buskers playing “Over the Rainbow” and a selection of old Beatles songs on the guitar and accordion. Walk slowly back past Tottenham Court Road, through Bedford Square, past the back of the British Museum under the sleeping stone gaze of the lions, through Russell Square. Have dessert in a little outdoor Italian cafe in an alleyway a few blocks down, just off Southampton Row, very Left Bank and bohemian in its English way. Then back to the Russell.

Tuesday, August 8
^th
—
Greenwich Observatory & London

Up early, about 6 A.M. (much earlier than I usually rise at home, but this was to become the pattern of the trip for me). Sit and catch up with this diary while Susan sleeps. We go downstairs about 8 A.M. and have the usual Trusthouse Forte breakfast, which we had every morning on our last trip here; I have sausages, toast, croissants. Meet Walter Jon Williams and his wife Kathy Hedges in the lobby of the Russell, by prearrangement. We buy theater tickets for that night’s performance of
The Importance of Being Earnest,
then cab to the Tower of London, where we catch a boat down the Thames to Greenwich. We all tour the
Cutty Sark,
a famous sailing ship now sunk in concrete, which is adorned with a masthead of a bare-breasted woman clenching a horse’s tail in her hand (she’s supposedly a witch who was trying to catch a passing rider but missed and got only the horse’s tail, but she
does
get to go bare-breasted in public in London, proving once again that only Evil Women are permitted to have nipples . . . or show them, anyway), and which features, up on deck, a box of fake chickens, complete with a continuously playing tape-loop of chickens clucking. Seeing the sailor’s bunk-room, it strikes me once again, as it did when I was here before in 1968, how
small
the bunks are—I’d have to sleep in them almost doubled in half. There’s also a fake plastic pig, with a tape loop of it grunting, and the tour-guide, talking about the livestock they kept aboard for long cruises, is saying, “On British ships, the pig was always called Dennis.”

Have a quick lunch in a pub called The Gypsy Moth, which features an electronic Monopoly game; wonder how it works, but don’t play it. We walk up through Greenwich toward the Royal Observatory, Walter amused at the number of Mexican and even “Tex-Mex” restaurants in town; why in
Greenwich,
of all places? (We don’t see another Mexican restaurant for the entire trip, by the way). Walk into and across Greenwich Park, Susan and I stopping to rest at the foot of the very steep climb up to the Royal Observatory itself, while the hardy Walter and Kathy press on ahead. Spend a pleasant five minutes looking out across the park, which falls away from our bench in a long rolling hill, watching a man playing with a small child in a stroller by letting the stroller go racing away down the hill; looks kind of dangerous, but when the stroller gets to the bottom, the child eagerly pushes it back up the hill so that his father can send him careening down the slope in it again. Long steep climb up the hill to the Old Royal Observatory. See the Prime Meridian in Meridian Courtyard, take the obligatory tourist photos of us standing with our feet straddling the Meridian, then tour Flamsteed House. In the Octagon Room, a peak through a long telescope there gives you a look at “Pluto”—the Disney character, that is, whose likeness they have pasted over the end of the tube. Also find the “Dog Watch” idea interesting, a proposed sympathetic-magic system for telling time at sea, from before the days of precision timepieces—the idea was that at noon a knife would be plunged into a pile of magic chemicals in London, making the dogs aboard ship, who had previously been pricked with it, all howl at the same time, thus telling the sailors asea what time it was in London. Also interesting, although a bit gruesome, was a time-lapse film of a dead rat rotting. We finish first, and wait for Walter and Kathy outside, while crows squabble and fight and call harshly down through the tangled trees of the hillside. Outside the Observatory, I point out the holes in the statue there; when I was here in 1968, with a group of fans that included Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein and Steve Stiles, I remember Atom Thompson, the old British fan artist, pointing out the same holes and telling us, with his voice quivering with passion and indignation, that the damage to the statues had been caused by Luftwaffe planes strafing the Observatory during the war.