Walt Willis (1919–1999)
Auteur de The improbable Irish
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de Walt Willis
Warhoon 28 7 exemplaires
Archaic Egypt 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Willis, Walt
- Nom légal
- Willis, Walter Alexander
- Autres noms
- Bryan, Walter (pseudonym)
- Date de naissance
- 1919
- Date de décès
- 1999
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- Northern Ireland
UK - Lieux de résidence
- Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
- Professions
- civil servant
- Prix et distinctions
- Hugo (Outstanding Actifan, 1958)
Hugo Nominee (Fan Writer, Retro-Hugo, [1951], 2001)
Hugo Nominee (Fan Writer, Retro-Hugo, [1954], 2004)
Membres
Critiques
Warhoon 28 is a fanzine - an amateur magazine produced by science fiction fans - but any idea you may have about the merits of such an exercise should be shelved immediately. The only thing that is 'amateur' about it is the amount of sheer love that has been poured into the pages. For this issue, produced by New York fan Richard Bergeron in 1978, was a special issue produced as a tribute to Belfast fan Walter (Walt) Willis, generally considered to have made fan writing what it eventually became at its peak. And to do full justice to Willis' writing took 650 pages, which was produced in a limited, hardback edition.
So what was it that caused such devotion to possibly one of the most ephemeral forms of literature? And why bother anyway?
First, a few words on the origins of fanzines. When Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories in 1929, he quickly got an enthusiastic readership, scattered across the whole USA. But these fans were very few, sometimes only one or two in a whole city. So Gernsback started publishing the full addresses of those who wrote to him, so that readers in the same city could get in touch with each other. Quickly, fan clubs sprang up as the few fans in a city got together (for whilst it was indeed "a fine and lonely thing to be a fan", like any persecuted minority early fans felt the need to stick together. And persecuted they often were, for reading "that crazy spaceship stuff"). And when there is a natural progression, from reading books, to talking about books, to writing about books and finally to actually writing books, fans were going to want to exercise their writing muscles. They did this in fanzines, duplicated newsletters of a few pages, posted out to other fans across the country, and sometimes even the world, whose addresses you had. And sometimes, some of these fanzines crossed the Atlantic...
There were fans in Britain, of course, though there were even fewer of them. British fandom had been just getting established in the late 1930s when war intervened; many fans went to the colours, and weren't in a position to write detailed letters of comment or receive fanzines through the post whilst on active service. Some of them never returned. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, science fiction fans in Britain were just getting re-established. And whilst fans were few and far between in England, they were even rarer in Northern Ireland.
But Walt Willis was one such. He'd contacted fellow fan James White by writing to him when White had a letter published in one of the few British professional magazines of fantastic literature, Walter Gillings' Fantasy. Willis had also seen some of the fanzines of the day, and Madeline, his wife, had declared that "Surely you can do better than that?". Willis' account of how he and White published their first fanzine, Slant, says a lot about everyday life in Belfast in 1948 - acquiring a very second-hand and simple printing press, becoming acquainted with movable type, securing supplies of printer's ink, and the painstaking process of setting and then printing off a magazine, one page at a time.
But what was in this fanzine? Willis wrote most of it himself, about his own thoughts on the things he was reading, the fanzines he was seeing, and his own list of magazines he'd like to collect and which he had to offer as swaps. Along the way, he painted a picture of the Belfast of the day; reading his writing now is a step back in time in a way that Willis could never have imagined.
Through his fanzines, Slant and later Hyphen, Willis changed the nature of fan writing, putting the emphasis not so much on the "serious and constructive" discussion of science fiction, but more on what fans did, both in pursuit of their interest and in their everyday lives. Being located in Belfast, Willis was in a way as distant from other fans in England as from the far greater number of fans in North America, and this led to his becoming well-known on both sides of the Atlantic. His column, The harp that once or twice (named for a quotation from James Joyce's Ulysses), ran in a number of fanzines, starting with Lee Hoffman's Quandry in 1951.
His reputation grew to the extent that he became the first recipient of funds raised by North American fans to bring him to the 1952 World Convention, held that year in Chicago. This became the genesis of TAFF - the Transatlantic Fan Fund - which from 1954 to date has sent fans from the UK to the USA and (in alternate years) vice versa. Later funds were created to establish similar fan exchanges between Australia and the UK, and Australia and the USA. Willis wrote up a report of his trip with lots of accounts of meetings with American fans of the day, some of whom would become quite well-known in years to come, even outside the science fiction community, such as Robert Bloch (the author of the story that became Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho), Harlan Ellison, Forrey Ackerman (whose remarkable collection of film memorabilia became internationally famous) and Ray Bradbury. And again, Walt Willis provided us with a fascinating coincidental picture of the world in 1952.
Willis' trip report set the standards by which all others have since been judged. For example, his report started with an account of how he actually got to Chicago. To begin with, it took him two days to get from Belfast to Cobh in the Republic, from where he would pick up an ocean liner - that still being the cheapest way to cross the Atlantic in those days. He travelled aboard a Greek liner, the Neptunia; and we are shown a vanished world, where international travel relied on a range of different sorts of vessels and for every posh Cunarder, there were perhaps twenty or thirty far less glamourous ships plying an everyday trade.
Once in the USA, it became part of the tradition that visiting fans would be shown around the country by home fans, with the objective that local fan clubs could get to meet this ambassador from a distant land. Willis wrote up this trip in considerable detail, in a series of articles later collected as The Harp Stateside. He was to visit the USA again in 1962.
During this time, Irish Fandom became one of the centres of fan activity in the British Isles. Walt detailed some of this in his ongoing Harp columns. But nothing lasts forever. In his Day Job, Willis had risen to considerable heights in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, serving as a direct Ministerial aide in the first devolved Stormont government created to try to quell political turmoil in the wake of the Troubles. But by the early 1970s, those troubles had almost completely dismembered Irish Fandom (admittedly, the least of the impacts sectarian violence was to have); Willis was devoting almost all his time and energy to his job, at the same time (as a senior civil servant) being targeted by paramilitaries because of that very job; James White was equally tied down by paramilitary activity; whilst Bob Shaw had relocated himself and his family to Barrow in Furness, having taken a job with Vickers to escape the turmoil.
Almost the last item collected in Warhoon 28 is a piece Willis wrote for Rob Jackson's Maya 11 in 1976, The Revenant, recounting Willis' first visit to a convention in over ten years (Mancon 76, in Manchester that year). I saw this on first publication, as I was just getting involved with fandom at that time, and indeed taking part in the production and distribution of Maya as part of the Newcastle fan group, the Gannets. I later saw this special issue of Warhoon advertised; at the time, it meant little to me, as I was then new to fandom. Little did I suspect that nearly 40 years later, a copy would come to me. 2019, the centenary of Willis' birth, was also the year the World Science Fiction Convention came to Dublin, and the organisers had secured the last stocks of Warhoon 28, primarily because of the Irish connection. Irish fandom has had a renaissance in recent years, with active fan groups and regular conventions in both Belfast and Dublin.
So what do you get when you open a copy of Warhoon 28? 650 pages of typewritten and duplicated text, interspersed with occasional illustrations by diverse hands. Although the original material has been transcribed, there are occasional typographical errors, but it's unclear whether these are faithful reproductions of the original text or are new errors introduced in the transcription process. But never mind. Just as the medieval monks used to insert errors into their illuminations to show the fallibility of the human hand, so these typos just add to the atmosphere. Paper stock is mainly a heavy blue duplicating paper, but the print run has been kept in such conditions so as to make this feel like a book printed yesterday, not in 1978.
I doubt many readers will ever have the chance to see a copy of Warhoon 28; it's something that will only appeal to a limited number of people. But it is an important document; the number of writers Willis encountered and described in these pages, from both sides of the Atlantic, reads like a Who's Who of fantastic literature, and includes some names who to us are simply names on a page, or in a list of genre classics of some past Golden Age. Willis brings this era to light; and if the humour - especially in the convention reports - seems a little quaint to us now, well perhaps that's an indication of how much the past is a different country. But we have Walt Willis to guide us through one odd corner of that country, with writing that belies its amateur status; and for that we must be grateful.… (plus d'informations)
So what was it that caused such devotion to possibly one of the most ephemeral forms of literature? And why bother anyway?
First, a few words on the origins of fanzines. When Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories in 1929, he quickly got an enthusiastic readership, scattered across the whole USA. But these fans were very few, sometimes only one or two in a whole city. So Gernsback started publishing the full addresses of those who wrote to him, so that readers in the same city could get in touch with each other. Quickly, fan clubs sprang up as the few fans in a city got together (for whilst it was indeed "a fine and lonely thing to be a fan", like any persecuted minority early fans felt the need to stick together. And persecuted they often were, for reading "that crazy spaceship stuff"). And when there is a natural progression, from reading books, to talking about books, to writing about books and finally to actually writing books, fans were going to want to exercise their writing muscles. They did this in fanzines, duplicated newsletters of a few pages, posted out to other fans across the country, and sometimes even the world, whose addresses you had. And sometimes, some of these fanzines crossed the Atlantic...
There were fans in Britain, of course, though there were even fewer of them. British fandom had been just getting established in the late 1930s when war intervened; many fans went to the colours, and weren't in a position to write detailed letters of comment or receive fanzines through the post whilst on active service. Some of them never returned. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, science fiction fans in Britain were just getting re-established. And whilst fans were few and far between in England, they were even rarer in Northern Ireland.
But Walt Willis was one such. He'd contacted fellow fan James White by writing to him when White had a letter published in one of the few British professional magazines of fantastic literature, Walter Gillings' Fantasy. Willis had also seen some of the fanzines of the day, and Madeline, his wife, had declared that "Surely you can do better than that?". Willis' account of how he and White published their first fanzine, Slant, says a lot about everyday life in Belfast in 1948 - acquiring a very second-hand and simple printing press, becoming acquainted with movable type, securing supplies of printer's ink, and the painstaking process of setting and then printing off a magazine, one page at a time.
But what was in this fanzine? Willis wrote most of it himself, about his own thoughts on the things he was reading, the fanzines he was seeing, and his own list of magazines he'd like to collect and which he had to offer as swaps. Along the way, he painted a picture of the Belfast of the day; reading his writing now is a step back in time in a way that Willis could never have imagined.
Through his fanzines, Slant and later Hyphen, Willis changed the nature of fan writing, putting the emphasis not so much on the "serious and constructive" discussion of science fiction, but more on what fans did, both in pursuit of their interest and in their everyday lives. Being located in Belfast, Willis was in a way as distant from other fans in England as from the far greater number of fans in North America, and this led to his becoming well-known on both sides of the Atlantic. His column, The harp that once or twice (named for a quotation from James Joyce's Ulysses), ran in a number of fanzines, starting with Lee Hoffman's Quandry in 1951.
His reputation grew to the extent that he became the first recipient of funds raised by North American fans to bring him to the 1952 World Convention, held that year in Chicago. This became the genesis of TAFF - the Transatlantic Fan Fund - which from 1954 to date has sent fans from the UK to the USA and (in alternate years) vice versa. Later funds were created to establish similar fan exchanges between Australia and the UK, and Australia and the USA. Willis wrote up a report of his trip with lots of accounts of meetings with American fans of the day, some of whom would become quite well-known in years to come, even outside the science fiction community, such as Robert Bloch (the author of the story that became Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho), Harlan Ellison, Forrey Ackerman (whose remarkable collection of film memorabilia became internationally famous) and Ray Bradbury. And again, Walt Willis provided us with a fascinating coincidental picture of the world in 1952.
Willis' trip report set the standards by which all others have since been judged. For example, his report started with an account of how he actually got to Chicago. To begin with, it took him two days to get from Belfast to Cobh in the Republic, from where he would pick up an ocean liner - that still being the cheapest way to cross the Atlantic in those days. He travelled aboard a Greek liner, the Neptunia; and we are shown a vanished world, where international travel relied on a range of different sorts of vessels and for every posh Cunarder, there were perhaps twenty or thirty far less glamourous ships plying an everyday trade.
Once in the USA, it became part of the tradition that visiting fans would be shown around the country by home fans, with the objective that local fan clubs could get to meet this ambassador from a distant land. Willis wrote up this trip in considerable detail, in a series of articles later collected as The Harp Stateside. He was to visit the USA again in 1962.
During this time, Irish Fandom became one of the centres of fan activity in the British Isles. Walt detailed some of this in his ongoing Harp columns. But nothing lasts forever. In his Day Job, Willis had risen to considerable heights in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, serving as a direct Ministerial aide in the first devolved Stormont government created to try to quell political turmoil in the wake of the Troubles. But by the early 1970s, those troubles had almost completely dismembered Irish Fandom (admittedly, the least of the impacts sectarian violence was to have); Willis was devoting almost all his time and energy to his job, at the same time (as a senior civil servant) being targeted by paramilitaries because of that very job; James White was equally tied down by paramilitary activity; whilst Bob Shaw had relocated himself and his family to Barrow in Furness, having taken a job with Vickers to escape the turmoil.
Almost the last item collected in Warhoon 28 is a piece Willis wrote for Rob Jackson's Maya 11 in 1976, The Revenant, recounting Willis' first visit to a convention in over ten years (Mancon 76, in Manchester that year). I saw this on first publication, as I was just getting involved with fandom at that time, and indeed taking part in the production and distribution of Maya as part of the Newcastle fan group, the Gannets. I later saw this special issue of Warhoon advertised; at the time, it meant little to me, as I was then new to fandom. Little did I suspect that nearly 40 years later, a copy would come to me. 2019, the centenary of Willis' birth, was also the year the World Science Fiction Convention came to Dublin, and the organisers had secured the last stocks of Warhoon 28, primarily because of the Irish connection. Irish fandom has had a renaissance in recent years, with active fan groups and regular conventions in both Belfast and Dublin.
So what do you get when you open a copy of Warhoon 28? 650 pages of typewritten and duplicated text, interspersed with occasional illustrations by diverse hands. Although the original material has been transcribed, there are occasional typographical errors, but it's unclear whether these are faithful reproductions of the original text or are new errors introduced in the transcription process. But never mind. Just as the medieval monks used to insert errors into their illuminations to show the fallibility of the human hand, so these typos just add to the atmosphere. Paper stock is mainly a heavy blue duplicating paper, but the print run has been kept in such conditions so as to make this feel like a book printed yesterday, not in 1978.
I doubt many readers will ever have the chance to see a copy of Warhoon 28; it's something that will only appeal to a limited number of people. But it is an important document; the number of writers Willis encountered and described in these pages, from both sides of the Atlantic, reads like a Who's Who of fantastic literature, and includes some names who to us are simply names on a page, or in a list of genre classics of some past Golden Age. Willis brings this era to light; and if the humour - especially in the convention reports - seems a little quaint to us now, well perhaps that's an indication of how much the past is a different country. But we have Walt Willis to guide us through one odd corner of that country, with writing that belies its amateur status; and for that we must be grateful.… (plus d'informations)
4 
RobertDay | Jan 20, 2020 |
RobertDay | Jan 20, 2020 | 
A Pilgrim's Progress for science fiction fandom (or, more specifically, for science fiction fanzines). A detailed story of a boy setting out from home to find the Enchanted Duplicator which will allow him to create the perfect fanzine, which requires him to cross the Desert of Indifference, pass the Circle of Lassitude, negotiate the Jungle of Inexperience and the Canyon of Criticism...It's fun to read, though not a patch on its sequel. And it makes me want to read the real Pilgrim's Progress, to see how much was a direct steal and how much just the same themes. Fun, not wonderful.… (plus d'informations)
Stumbled across this at Worldcon - it's available online (for free) at fanac.org (along with a _lot_ of other fanzines and similar writings). Jophan has achieved his aim...but now he's feeling restless. He wants to explore beyond Trufandom and visit Mundania again. He retraces his steps (a lot of direct references to The Enchanted Duplicator, which I hadn't read at the time), and goes to seek out a Convention. He gets a mundane job in order to be able to afford the Convention, and uses the skills he's developed as a fanzine editor to shine, and to make things better for all those around him. Then he becomes useful at conventions, and more useful in his mundane job...until his job is to travel all over, in random patterns, talking to people at different companies during the week and teaching them his way of making things better, and then spending the weekends at conventions. It's a perfect happy-ever-after story, at that idealistic level. The dreams of science-fiction fandom made real. It's a great story, if you're interested in cons and fan activity at all. The original story, The Enchanted Duplicator, is also available on fanac.org.… (plus d'informations)
Prix et récompenses
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 5
- Membres
- 31
- Popularité
- #440,253
- Évaluation
- 4.2
- Critiques
- 4
- ISBN
- 2
- Langues
- 1
???… (plus d'informations)