A Brief History of Swill

It all began as a surreal, last minute, idle prank.

The Catalyst:

I was attending York University in Toronto. My old high school friend, Lester Rainsford, as also at York. Another friend of ours from high school, Andrew Hoyt, was studying at the University of Ottawa. In early October of 1980, I pitched the idea to Lester that we should all attend Maplecon III in Ottawa. I was going to the convention anyway -- some other friends and I were entering the masquerade as droogs from A Clockwork Orange -- and I thought that Lester and Andrew might enjoy attending the convention. Both were science fiction readers, but had never attended a convention nor had any interest in fandom.

When Lester found out that this was going to be a science fiction and comic book convention, he initially had cold feet about attending. Then, he had the idea that we should distribute a boycott flyer at the convention. It told him that that would be pointless, since anybody who would read the flyer would already be attending the convention. His reply was, "Exactly."

So a couple of days before the convention, Lester with my help bashed out the boycott flyer on my aging manual typewriter. The flyer was offensive, outrageously politically incorrect by present standards, with intentional poor grammar, typos, misspellings, and strikeouts. We printed 500 copies and headed off to Ottawa.

At the convention, Andrew and Lester quickly became bored. They found the panels to be dull or stupid, the dealers room to be overpriced and a waste of time, and the art show to be laughable. By Saturday morning they were pretending to be sociology graduate students from the University of Toronto gathering initial research on deviant subcultures -- comic book fandom being highly deviant and science fiction fandom simply deviant. Then Andrew noticed that the boycott flyer was creating a stir.

Initially, we were putting out the flyers in piles of twenty. These disappeared quickly, so we started putting them out in piles of ten. These vanished even faster. Andrew and Lester noticed that everytime some of the boycott flyers were set out, a someone wearing a special coloured badge -- I forget the colour, but it was the colour that indicated that the person was part of the convention committee -- would spirit away the entire pile. And so began a game of cat and mouse.

We started putting out flyers in piles of five, then one. The convention committee eventually stationed somebody to watch the table. Tape was borrowed from the front desk and the flyers were put up in several places on the convention floor and in some of the panel rooms. Now there was some poor sod patrolling the entire convention floor searching for our boycott flyers. At this time, I was getting ready for the masquerade judging. We split the remaining flyers between us, and I headed off to join my droogs.

Lester and Andrew amused themselves getting rid of their remaining flyers. They slipped them in, underneath other flyers, had a small pile set out on the hotel literature and tourist info table, and even had some set out at the hotel bar... When their flyers were gone, they left to go back to Andrew's residence.

After the judging -- the droogs won first prize for best group costume -- I distributed the rest of my flyers at various room parties. The last batch I slipped in on the flyer table before I retired to my hotel room.

Lester and Andrew returned to the convention early Sunday afternoon and we all went to the train station where Lester and I caught the train back to Toronto. Aside of the fun with the boycott flyer, the convention had been a bust for both Lester and Andrew and I don't think that they have attended any since then.

The Reaction:

Back in Toronto, things were the same as usual until I attended the next monthly fan gathering. Here I heard that the local powers that be -- the Big Name Fans of Toronto -- were looking for who was responsible for the boycott flyer. It appeared that the Ottawa fan organisation that hosted Maplecon was very upset about the flyer and that they held OSFiC responsible. Of course, I found this to be hilarious.

· First that anybody would believe that OSFiC actually wrote the flyer

· Second that anybody would be stupid enough to believe that OSFiC would write the flyer and sign their name to it

I mentioned this to Lester and he suggested that we do something to really annoy the Big Name Fans. And so the germ of Swill was born. Christmas break came and went. When we got back Lester, Andrew, and I began work on the magazine that would become Swill.

The Products:

In February of 1981 the first issue of Swill appeared. I no longer have any copies of the magazine, so I will have to go on recollection alone. It contained an Editorial by myself, columns by Lester and Andrew, some filler, and a reprint of the boycott flyer. I called the publishing company VileFen Press and the magazine had a punk look to it. I think I had 200 copies made and charged one dollar -- or whatever I could get -- for the magazine. At the February fan gathering I brought some copies that I handed out for free.

Well, the proverbial faecal matter struck the fan. All of the Big Name Fans in Toronto were very very angry with me. Of course, in true fannish fashion, nobody said anything directly to me. So, whatever I heard was second or third hand at best. Not that that really mattered. The details were unimportant; the general consensus was that people were angry and disapproved.

Swill was intended as a one-shot, single-issue magazine. However, with the response it received, Lester and I decided that more issues should be produced. Another York student, using the name Stephano, joined as our cartoonist and we set out to produce a second issue. This time, I enlisted the facilities of a friend in Guelph to print the magazine rather than use a printing company. The mimeograph was cheaper and gave Swill that grunge look that so befitted it.

In all, six or seven issues of Swill were published. Of those issues the first four were the best, in particular issues two and three. At the time of issue four was published two things happened that changed Swill and led to its decline.

· I moved to Vancouver

· Stephano began to publish his own version of Swill called BeSwill.

While I was getting settled in Vancouver, Swill ceased to be published.

In Ontario, BeSwill was being published, but BeSwill was... I don't know how to describe it, just weird, a side branch of Swill that was in essence a separate species.

In the late summer of '81 I began to publish Swill again, but it was not the same as the original four issues. I don't remember how many issues I published from Vancouver, two or three, but as the year drew to a close so did Swill. No longer living in Ontario, I had any real desire to try and tick off Toronto fandom. I was getting more and more involved in the anti-arms race peace movement and the anarchist community to spend time on Swill. The drive and the desire had faded. As of February 1982, Swill was no more.

Aftermath:

In 1984 I published three issues of a magazine called Daughter of Swill, Mother of Scum. This magazine had some of the same spirit that was in Swill, but it was also quite different. Each issue was an essay on a single topic; one on fandom and fascism, one on the science fiction of winnable nuclear war, and one on the lack of alien aliens in science fiction. These were distributed to a select group of friends. Of these three issues, the one on science fiction aliens was the best. Again, no known copies of this magazine survive -- and it is probably for the best.

In 1991, I wrote the magazine Scum. It had a series of essays in it on various topics about the genre and one on fandom. Some reprints of old Swill columns, such as Lester Rainsford's rant against Libertarian Party science fiction, "A Gram of Brains, is Worth a Pound of Shit" as well as some material that had been written for Swill by Hoyt and Rainsford, but never published. I wrote Scum, but I never published it. It and all the Swill related things went into a box in the basement. And there it rested until a basement flood some years later reduced it and several other items to garbage.

In 2001, Swill Online was published.

And that is the history of Swill.

Swill @ 30 -- thirtieth anniversary site

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