Ansible Editions: Home Page (original) (raw)

Ansible Editions publishes books and ebooks about science fiction and SF fandom: history, humour, criticism, polemic, essays, travelogues and even some fiction, as listed on this site. Many more ebooks are downloadable from the TransAtlantic Fan Fund site – free of charge, though donations to TAFF are encouraged. Some of these are also available in paperback.

• October 2024 – The Frank Arnold Papers (2017 ebook), edited by Rob Hansen with an introduction by Michael Moorcock, has now been expanded by about one-third with previously undiscovered material (mostly published genre reviews and essays), and is for the first time available as a trade paperback. All proceeds to TAFF.
• July 2024 – yet another new TAFF-benefit paperback: British SF Conventions Volume 2: 1952-1957 edited by Rob Hansen.
• May 2024 – two more TAFF-benefit paperbacks: the newly released New Worlds Profiles compiled by David Langford and (formerly available only as an ebook and now greatly expanded) Challenging Moskowitz: 1930s Fandom Revisited edited by Rob Hansen.
• February 2024 – two newly added TAFF-benefit paperbacks formerly available only as ebooks are A Vince Clarke Treasury by A. Vincent Clarke and Fandom Harvest II by Terry Carr.
• December 2023 – the list of TAFF benefit paperbacks which started life as ebooks continues to grow, with the latest additions being Rob Hansen’s fanhistorical compilation Beyond Fandom: Fans, Culture & Politics in the 20th Century and Graham Charnock’s anthology of UK SF convention reports Running Amok in the Fun Factory.
• September 2023 – David Langford’s All Good Things: The Last SFX Visions, released here as an AE ebook in June, now has a trade paperback edition as well.
• August 2023 – officially released on 1 August is Rob Hansen’s latest fanhistorical compilation 1965: The Second UK Worldcon in both trade paperback and ebook formats. This is a companion volume to last year’s 1957: The First UK Worldcon, also available as both paperback and ebook. Both books are parts of an overarching sequence that opens with British SF Conventions Volume 1: 1937-1951 (2023).
• June 2023 – Two new AE paperbacks are released this month: The Amazing Editorials and The Fantastic Editorials, collecting all Ted White’s editorials and book reviews for the magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic while he was editor from 1969 to 1979. Both volumes have newly written introductions, respectively by SF magazine historian Mike Ashley and by Ted White himself. Ebooks are also available, with an introductory discount if both are bought together. All proceeds go to TAFF. • Another June release is the expanded Ansible Editions ebook of David Langford’s All Good Things: The Last SFX Visions, completing the trilogy of his SFX magazine column collections.
• August 2022 – Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years by Peter Nicholls is at last available, both as a very substantial trade paperback and in the usual ebook formats. Later: It has been well reviewed.
• July 2022 – Another TransAtlantic Fan Fund “Little Free Library” ebook now reissued as a trade paperback: True Rat: The Beast of Leroy Kettle, collecting the full run of Leroy Kettle’s scurrilously funny 1970s fanzine plus other contemporary Kettle articles and spoofs.
• June 2022 – A slow year while we worked on a very big project indeed, the collected essays and reviews of SF Encyclopedia founder Peter Nicholls, which has been in proofreading limbo for what seems like months. Meanwhile, the indefatigable Rob Hansen has completed another exercise in fan history, 1957: The First UK Worldcon, now available as a free download. As with Bixelstrasse there’s also a trade paperback edition.
• January 2022 – Further free ebooks at the TAFF site include Bixelstrasse: The SF Fan Community of 1940s Los Angeles, compiled and with commentary by Rob Hansen. Here is the full list with the latest additions shown first. Later: by popular request there is now a trade paperback edition of Bixelstrasse.
• October 2021 – There’s been a long silence owing to frantic work on the SF Encyclopedia, whose publisher (since 2011) Hachette/Orion/Gollancz had announced earlier in the year that they wouldn’t renew the contract in October 2021. On 6 October the SFE domain sf-encyclopedia.com switched to a replacement site using the same server as Ansible Editions. Officially, the publishers of what is now the fourth edition of the SFE are SFE Ltd (our holding company) and Ansible Editions.
• June 2021 – Another free ebook at the TAFF site: Faan Fiction 1930-2020: an exploration, compiled and with commentary by Rob Hansen, historian of fandom. The focus is on fan (or faan) fiction in the old SF fanzine sense of stories woven around real-life fans and fandom. Also free is an early fanzine example of fan fiction in the modern sense of writing new adventures for established fictional characters: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger vies with others from pre-1940s SF in The Road to Fame by D.R. Smith.
• February 2021 – Another pleasant surprise. The Locus Recommended Reading List for 2020 includes Beyond the Outposts: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy 1955-1996 by Algis Budrys in the nonfiction category.
• January 2021 – The BSFA Awards longlists have been released, and we are delighted that the nonfiction category includes two AE publications: Beachcombing and Other Oddments by David Langford, and Christopher Priest’s introduction to The Jonbar Point: Essays from SF Horizons by Brian Aldiss. • Another cheering review of Beyond the Outposts: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy 1955-1996 by Algis Budrys, by Russell Letson in the September Locus, can now be read online. • Christopher Priest has released an ebook of The Magic, his long essay on the complex relationship between the film The Prestige and the original novel. This ebook was prepared by (faint noises of trumpet-blowing) Ansible Editions.
• December 2020 – Beachcombing and Other Oddments by David Langford, comprising fanzine articles, convention talks and other previously uncollected strangeness. Here are some early reviews.
• November 2020 – we nervously present the first ever ebook edition of the spectacularly tasteless horror spoof Guts: A Comedy of Manners by David Langford and John Grant. The blurb quotes by noted horror authors on the linked book page are all genuine, the first three written specially for Guts and the last appropriated without permission.
• September 2020 – The Jonbar Point: Essays from SF Horizons by Brian Aldiss brings together two major essays, never before collected, from the Aldiss/Harrison critical magazine SF Horizons (1964-1965), with a new introduction by Christopher Priest.
• August 2020 – Ansible Editions is proud to announce the first release anywhere in the world of John Sladek’s last completed novel, the offbeat mystery story Puff Love.
• 24 May 2020 – A cheering review, by Paul Di Filippo in Locus, of Beyond the Outposts: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy 1955-1996 by Algis Budrys.
• May 2020 – After what seems to have been an awful lot of unnecessary work, we have restored the links to Lulu.com POD book order pages for our various paper editions, as listed here. Changes over which we have no control include the vanishing of the useful “Preview” option at Lulu which showed selected pages within each book.
• 26 April 2020 – Initial sales of Beyond the Outposts: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy 1955-1996 by Algis Budrys were encouraging, but now our POD publisher Lulu.com has thrown a spanner into the works with a site redesign that has not only broken every single link from ae.ansible.uk to Lulu.com book sales pages but (at least for the time being) made all our POD books unavailable with the solitary exception of Beyond the Outposts, which has a new Lulu sales page here.
• March 2020 – Our April release is a new and huge compilation of critical writing by Algis Budrys, titled Beyond the Outposts: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy 1955-1996 (see link). This author’s collected “Books” columns from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction were published by Ansible Editions in three volumes (still available) back in 2012-2013.
• 1 February 2020 – Yet another free ebook edited by Rob Hansen, this one very large and long in the making. Homefront: Fandom in the UK 1939-1945 brings together a great many first-hand accounts showing how UK fandom maintained its lines of communication during World War Two despite everything that Hitler and the British armed services could throw at them.
• 25 December 2019 – The legendary fan writer Walt Willis’s centenary year is nearly over (he was born in October 1919). As a Christmas treat today, there are two more free ebooks of his work at the TAFF site: The Willis Papers (1961), showcasing his first 11 years of fanzine writing, and Beyond the Enchanted Duplicator (1991) with James White, sequel to The Enchanted Duplicator (1954). This link shows all the available ebooks in reverse order of release, with the latest appearing first. Further new titles have been released since the October post below. • In preparation for 2020 as a slim paperback is The Jonbar Point: Essays from SF Horizons by Brian Aldiss, comprising two major critical studies from the mid-1960s which have never been collected, together with a new introduction by Christopher Priest.
• October 2019 – There have been several more additions to the free ebooks page since June. Click on any link for details: The Astral Leauge Dossier, The Complete Cheap Truth, The Complete Patchin Review, Hyphen 37, The Meadows of Fantasy, THEN Again: A UK Fanhistory Reader 1930-1979 and Tyne Capsule.
• June 2019 – Fandom Harvest II is a new collection of Terry Carr’s fanzine writing, much longer than and not to be confused with the 1986 Fandom Harvest which it complements: there is no overlap in content. Another title for the free ebooks page at the TAFF site.
• May 2019 – New Maps: More Uncollected John Sladek (see below) is now also available as an ebook in the usual formats. • Meanwhile the latest addition to the free ebooks page at the TAFF site is Terry Carr’s 1986 collection of fanzine writing, Fandom Harvest.
• April 2019 – New Maps: More Uncollected John Sladek (click on the title for details) is now available from Lulu.com as a POD trade paperback. • Another item for the free ebooks page at the TAFF site: Francis T. Laney’s once hugely controversial memoir and polemic Ah! Sweet Idiocy!.
• January/February 2019 – Newly added to the free ebooks page at the TAFF site are the late D. West’s two major collections of fanzine writing, Fanzines in Theory and Practice (1984, also available as a vast PDF image scan of the first edition – but the ebook versions fix the typos!) and Deliverance (1995).
• December 2018 – Three recent additions to the free ebooks page at the TAFF site: The Dirty Movie Book by John Brosnan and Leroy Kettle in November; The Complete Checkpoint edited by Peter Roberts and others, also in November; and in December, David Langford’s Don’t Try This At Home: Selected Convention Reports.
• May 2018 – A March release at the free ebooks page was somehow not flagged here. Debbie Cross’s Down the Badger Hole: R. Lionel Fanthorpe: The Badger Years collects much memorable prose from Lionel Fanthorpe’s legendary stint at Badger Books. It has been considerably expanded from the original 1995 paperback. Here’s an appreciative review at Black Gate.
• February 2018 – This month’s offering at the free ebooks page is You Only Live Once, the best humorous fanwriting of John Brosnan, compiled and edited by Kim Huett.
• January 2018 – Yet another item of fanhistorical import at the free ebooks page is True Rat: The Beast of Leroy Kettle, collecting the funniest fanzine writing of this poll-topping humorist, compiled and edited by Rob Hansen. (Early adopters should note that one belatedly remembered article wasn’t in the 1 January launch version but was furtively added on 10 January.) • Another change at Ansible Editions is that we’ve invested in a security certificate for all the ansible.uk sites. No visible change, except that the URLs now begin with HTTPS rather than HTTP and most browsers will show a little padlock on the address bar to indicate a secure connection.
• Christmas 2017 – A small treat for those who bought the Langford ebook Short Shrift: A Big Book of Little Reviews 1976-2017. This has now been expanded with a few more 2017 articles, boosting the word count from 262,000 to 264,500. Contents list and all indexes updated to match. You can download the Improved Version using the same login details as before.
• December 2017 – Another two additions to the free ebooks page at taff.org.uk. The Frank Arnold Papers collects thirty nonfiction pieces – most not previously published – by Frank, long-time stalwart of the London First Thursday meetings from the 1940s until his death in 1987. This is edited by Rob Hansen, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock and afterword by Dave Rowe. The Complete Skyrack brings together the entire run of Ron Bennett’s 1960s UK fannish newsletter Skyrack, together with hoax issues devised by Ron to torment individual readers and parody issues devised by other fans to torment Ron. All human life is there.
• November 2017 – Still more titles added to the free ebooks page at taff.org.uk. Our indefatigable fan historian Rob Hansen is now editing what might be called the THEN Library of Fandom, each volume collecting the works of a different writer for SF fanzines, with a cover design echoing THEN itself. The first of these is Temple at the Bar by British SF fan and author William F. (Bill) Temple. Meanwhile Graham Charnock has compiled Running Amok in the Fun Factory, a selection of UK convention reports chosen for style and (usually esoteric) humour rather than historical significance.
• September 2017 – Rob Hansen’s THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980 has a nice review in Fortean Times (October 2017) by that magazine’s august founder Bob Rickard. • Some Ansible Editions backlist titles have recently been updated. THEN now incorporates corrections to date; a couple of minor afterthoughts have been added to the Langford/Morgan Facts & Fallacies: A Book of Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions; and the Langford Up Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002 now has author, book title and essay title indexes, bringing it into line with Short Shrift: A Big Book of Little Reviews 1976-2017. You can use your existing login/download details to acquire the latest version of any AE title already bought – hover the cursor over the relevant Download button to see when a book was last updated.
• August 2017 – As a change from the usual David Langford backlist ebook, here’s a collaboration between Langford and Chris Morgan. Facts & Fallacies: A Book of Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions, out of print since the mid-1980s, is now expanded and titivated for its first digital edition.
• June 2017 – Yet another David Langford compilation ebook, vaster than ever: Short Shrift: A Big Book of Little Reviews 1976-2017, weighing in at 262,000 words. Meanwhile, several further titles of a more fannish nature have appeared on the free ebooks page at taff.org.uk.
• May 2017 – Although another worthy winner took the BSFA Award for Best Nonfiction at Easter, Ansible Editions is delighted to announce that Rob Hansen’s THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980 won the Fanzine Activity Achievement Award in the category of Best Special Issue. Congratulations to Rob! Other work on hand includes a ebook of David Langford’s many hundreds of short reviews (plus a handful of articles and obituaries) not included in his other nonfiction collections, tentatively titled Short Shrift and still growing – 150,000 words and counting; and a new ebook edition of his and Chris Morgan’s 1981 Facts and Fallacies: A Book of Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions.
• March 2017 – Now it’s the Fanzine Activity Achievement Awards: another shortlist featuring Rob Hansen’s THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980. We hadn’t expected a professionally published (albeit small-press) book to be eligible for these most fannish of all fan awards, but the nominators thought differently.
• February 2017 – The BSFA Awards shortlist has been released, and Rob Hansen’s THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980 appears in the nonfiction category of this final ballot. To encourage voters, the printable PDF download (6 megabytes) of its first 48 pages will remain available until Easter 2017 [offer now ended]. We’re also madly reducing the price of the ebook edition from £7 to £6.
• January 2017– Ansible Editions is happy to announce that Rob Hansen is on the longlist for the nonfiction category of the BSFA Awards with his monumental tome THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980.
• December 2016 – This month’s Ansible Editions release is the first ever ebook of Yvonne Rousseau’s The Murders at Hanging Rock, a tour de force of tongue-in-cheek criticism that offers four mutually contradictory explanations (in fantasy, sf and detective-fiction terms) of what “really” happened in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, plus an essay on the suppressed final chapter of Picnic that was later published and proved eerily similar to some of Yvonne’s theories. By special request of the author this expanded edition has not been retitled The Picnic Perplex.
• November 2016 – Ansible Editions had a dealer table at Novacon 46 and there sold all the copies of THEN (both paperback and hardback) that we could haul along to the convention; Rob Hansen was on hand and let no copy escape unsigned. Also in November, the ebook edition of THEN was “upgraded” to include the lengthy index from the print editions, with each page number linking to the appropriate pagebreak positions. Furthermore, all note references in the text now link to the appropriate endnotes. If you bought the ebook but missed the upgrade announcement, you can log in to the download page with the same email and password as before to get the latest version.
• September 2016 – Early response to THEN (see August below) includes an enthusiastic “first dip” review at Amazing Stories, with more detailed coverage to follow; and an official THEN t-shirt from Alison Scott’s fanwear emporium. The ebook edition of THEN was released this month. • Meanwhile David Langford, reverting to his sadly self-promoting ways, presents the first Ansible Editions ebooks of his sf novel The Space Eater – with cover art by the great David A. Hardy – and his collection of old computer magazine columns, The Limbo Files.
• August 2016 – The first book edition of Rob Hansen’s THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980 has been in preparation for a long time. This account of UK fandom from its earliest days to 1980 (and a little beyond) is hugely revised and expanded from its original fanzine incarnation. At 454 pages and nearly 228,000 words, Then is the largest single volume Ansible Editions has ever published, and the most heavily illustrated, with hundreds of photographs and scans. It is also our first hardback – this and the usual trade paperback appeared simultaneously.
• June 2016 – Another break from the usual relentless commercialism: the free ebooks at the TransAtlantic Fan Fund site now include a curious historical document. Ansible First Series: 1979-1987 comprises the first 50 issues of the not very legendary SF/fan newsletter Ansible, a mixture of outdated news, old jokes, forgotten controversy and feature articles of varying length and relevance, all totting up to some 300,000 words.
• May 2016 – David Langford’s Starcombing (first published 2009 and now slightly expanded as an ebook) is a double sequel, continuing The SEX Column and Other Misprints with further SFX magazine columns from 2005 to 2009, and also continuing the more substantial critical retrospective of Up Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002 with essays, reviews and book introductions from 2000 to 2009.
• April 2016 – to mark the cancellation of his long-running column in SFX magazine (1995-2016), David Langford offers an ebook of the first big collection of these pieces: The SEX Column and Other Misprints, expanded from the print edition of 2005. • Please don’t forget that despite all the recent outbreaks of Langford, Ansible Editions publishes other and more important authors: see here.
• March 2016 – an expanded ebook of David Langford’s major retrospective critical collection Up Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002, first published in 2003. Here’s the contents list. Originally this was announced as an April ebook title, but Mr Langford got all excited and brought it forward.
• October 2015 – a further addition to the free ebooks page at taff.org.uk: A Vince Clarke Treasury, a very substantial collection of the late Vince Clarke’s writings about fandom as described here. Michael Moorcock writes: “Glad the Vince Clarke book’s out. I mention Vince quite a lot in The Woods of Arcady. Sequel to W[hispering] Swarm ... As I say in the book, Vince was something of a mentor to me and really helped me. Great bloke.”
• July 2015 – Is there no end to the making of many books? Still another David Langford title: Don’t Try This At Home, collecting a mass of SF convention reports old and new. Ebook only, partly to benefit the TransAtlantic Fan Fund, which receives £1 for every copy sold.
• June 2015 – Yet another David Langford title. Crosstalk: Interviews Conducted by David Langford contains, well, what it says on the tin. Newly collected and available in both trade paperback and ebook formats.
• May 2015 – A little later in the month than usual, the new release is yet another David Langford backlist title: his major retrospective story collection Different Kinds of Darkness. • As a break from the usual relentless commercialism, Ansible Editions has created some free ebooks for the TransAtlantic Fan Fund site: past TAFF reports (including of course that man Langford’s) plus other items of SF fan memorabilia.
• April 2015 – This month’s ebook offering is David Langford’s The Silence of the Langford, a Hugo-shortlisted collection of humorous and critical pieces first published by NESFA Press in 1996.
• March 2015 – This month’s ebook offering is David Langford’s The Complete Critical Assembly, a much-praised collection of classic review columns first published as a single printed volume in 2001.
• February 2015 – A new ebook! David Langford’s He Do the Time Police in Different Voices is available in ebook form at last, with some bonus material added to the full contents of the 2003 print edition.
• January 2015 – As of the New Year, we’re tentatively continuing to offer ebooks, but only to customers in the United Kingdom and in non-European Union countries such as Australia, Canada and the USA. Any EU orders from outside the UK will be refunded, with regret. See the December post below for more. If this blatant “discrimination” leads to any trouble with officialdom, the Ansible Editions ebook operation will simply close down altogether.
• December 2014 – Here we are in the Last Chance Saloon. Our ebook sales haven’t been stupendous, and new EU VAT regulations coming into force on 1 January 2015 seem designed (apparently through cluelessness rather than malice) to put small digital-product vendors out of business. See here for a brief summary and a mass of relevant links, of which this cartoon sums it up most concisely. The Ansible Editions ebook sales page may vanish on 31 December. Print editions will in any case remain available.
• February 2014 – At last, here are the promised ebook editions of all three of those Algis Budrys critical collections. If the revamped ebook purchase page isn’t self-explanatory, please let us know. Later: Benchmarks Revisited and Benchmarks Concluded both appear on the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2013. If you liked one or both, your vote in the Nonfiction category of the Locus Poll would be much appreciated.
• January 2014 – As noted in November (below), we still hope that some of you will nominate Algis Budrys’s Benchmarks Revisited: F&SF “Books” Columns 1983-1986 in this year’s Locus Award nonfiction and Hugo Award “related work” categories. Alas, it turns out that the two 2013 Budrys collections don’t in fact qualify for the nonfiction BSFA Award, owing to a clause in the rules that we hadn’t noticed and which is being interpreted very strictly indeed: “Whole collections comprised entirely of unrevised work that has been published elsewhere prior to 2013 are ineligible.” Apparently our extensive proofreading, correction and annotation of factual errors, and addition of introductions and indexes (after the less than easy task of tracing and digitizing all these never-before-collected columns), make no difference whatsoever to the “comprised entirely of unrevised work” status.
• November 2013 – BSFA Awards nominations for 2013 publications have opened. We’d like to remind you that the Algis Budrys collections Benchmarks Revisited: F&SF “Books” Columns 1983-1986 and Benchmarks Concluded: F&SF “Books” Columns 1987-1993 are eligible in the Nonfiction category and deserving of at least a nomination. If you agree, it’s probably better to go for Benchmarks Revisited – the stronger of the two 2013 books – to avoid splitting the Budrys vote. The same applies to nominations for the Best Related Work category of the Hugo Awards to be presented at Loncon 3, the 2014 Worldcon. David Langford would like to stress that this is not a bid to add more trophies to the groaning Langford mantelpieces: the rightful recipient would be our man’s widow, Edna Budrys, who has supported this project throughout.
• August 2013 – It’s time to try our hand at ebooks as promised. The first and at present the only offering is The Leaky Establishment by David Langford, including Terry Pratchett’s introduction to the 2001 and 2003 paperback editions. See the Ebooks page.
• August 2013 – The Zeno Agency, which represents Algis Budrys and agreed the terms on which our editions appear, has plugged the Ansible Editions Budrys Project at some length on its website.
• July 2013 – Our project to collect all Algis Budrys’s “Books” columns from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is now complete. Following last year’s Benchmarks Continued: F&SF “Books” Columns 1975-1982, volumes two and three – published simultaneously on 1 July – are titled Benchmarks Revisited: F&SF “Books” Columns 1983-1986 and Benchmarks Concluded: F&SF “Books” Columns 1987-1993. Click on the titles, or the cover images at the right, for more. We also have a tasteful PDF press release; please feel free to share this. The Frequently Asked Question is: “Will there be ebook versions?” Yes: we didn’t have time for this while preparing the printed books but are working on it now.
• April 2013 – Several appreciative reviews of Benchmarks Continued: F&SF “Books” Columns 1975-1982 have appeared. See links and excerpts here.
• November 2012 – Ansible Editions (without the former misleading hyphen) returns to publish the collected Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction book reviews of Algis Budrys in three volumes. The first, Benchmarks Continued: F&SF “Books” Columns 1975-1982, is now available.
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