Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
End of August, 1987. Brighton, on the south coast of England. The World Science Fiction
Convention. Entitled ConSpiracy. This seemed like a neat name for an SF Con until it
came time for two of the Guests of Honour, the Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris, to
apply for visas to leave what was then the Soviet Union and travel to the UK to attend the
Con; its breezy, just-for-a-laugh title did not play well with the humourless pre-modern-
ists, non-ironicists of the KGB or whoever was in charge of issuing visas, because they
did not get the joke and did not issue the Strugatskys with visas either. Doris Lessing was
another GoH and gamely stood in for the Non-Flying Strugatsky Brothers on some of the
programme items they should have featured in. Given that Alfred Bester had also proved
unable to attend, the Con was having a jinxed time with its GoHs (Bester, author of at
least one of the greatest SF novels ever written, had an even better excuse for not turning
up, having recently died. Willed his estate to his bartender. Class).
But a fine Con all the same, with thousands of SF fans from all over the world enjoy-
ing a long sunny weekend; enjoying it mostly in the bars or at panel items in windowless
function rooms, certainly, but enjoying it all the same. It was only about my second or
third Convention and I was having a great time. Toby was my paperback editor at the
time, in charge of the crowded and bustling satrapy that was Futura, part of Emperor
'Bobbing' Bob Maxwell's vast imperial domain.
Toby had a party in his suite, a fairly palatial set of rooms on the fourth floor of the
Metropole Hotel, facing the beach and the sea. Not that it was really a party to Toby,
not technically. It was just 'a drink for a few friends, dear boy/dear girl'. After about six
hours, when the few friends numbered in the treble figures and the bar in the sitting room
had been restocked three or four times - and I mean a bar, here, not a minibar; each refill
required a porter with one of those vertically stacked hand-barrows, fully loaded - Toby
almost admitted that it was really a party, but then insisted that - a few freeloaders he
didn't recognise apart - this was still just a drink for a few friends. The few drinks con-
tinued. I think it's probably the best party I've ever been to.
Dawn. Most people had gone. Maybe a dozen were left, amongst them myself and
Rog Peyton and Dave Holmes of Andromeda, Birmingham's main SF bookshop. The
three of us were standing on the balcony of Toby's bedroom, talking about whatever,
when my attention was drawn by a nearby balcony; that of Toby's sitting room. More
specifically, my attention was drawn by the relatively short distance between the balcony
we were standing on and the balcony of Toby's sitting room.
'Dave, hold this, would you?' I handed Dave Holmes my glass.
Now. Especially while I lived in London, I used to enjoy the very much non-Olympic
sport of Drunken Urban Climbing. For a while I assumed I'd invented this recreation, but
on reflection I'm sure I wasn't the first to partake of its heady, dangerous mysteries, fore-
most amongst which, of course, is how anybody can ever get so drunk without actually
