The Delivery by Loulou Harris

You are about to begin reading your first Blake's Seven novel, entitled Between life and death. Sit back, relax. Put aside those papers from the office or the laboratory, or from school. Your colleagues will have to put up with your being perhaps slightly unprepared for that early morning breakfast meeting, or your experiments will just have to take care of themselves, or your professor will have to grant you yet another indulgence. For it is time you thought of yourself and your own literary needs. Forget the fact that you haven't read a 'real' book in months and that your bookshelf groans from the weight of as yet unread books bought by you with all those terrific book tokens that people repeatedly give you on special occasions because they know you to be a bookworm. Those books will doubtless edify you and enable you to engage in the intelligent conversation in which you are well known to be proficient. But not today!

On the contrary, it is true that the pages which you now hold in your hand, bound merely in a makeshift ring binder will almost certainly not further you on the journey towards literary enlightenment. Reader; your literary tastes are as yet unknown and exactly what might constitute the contents of your groaning bookshelves, is unclear. Nevertheless, it is late and you are tired; too tired for Joyce or Kafka or Flaubert or even Calvino. You sent for this book and it has now arrived and therefore, be damned before you give up this forthcoming hour of peace which you have so scrupulously set aside for this very occasion! So, turn off the television, the radio too and tell the others in your house and the dogs and cats, not to disturb you. For you hope now to enter into the reverie that only a really good book can produce and finally, after all this time of speculation, discover what thousands of other fellow Blake's Seven fans have enjoyed for so long.

This volume distinguished itself from most of the other books in your possession in that its retrieval was accomplished without so much as leaving the desk at which you sit, day after day. You simply took an address, a password and punched these into the appropriate bit of software on your computer (Macintosh or PC; who can tell to which of these firmly drawn camps you belong?) and watched as the pages of the first electronically published Blake's Seven fiction unfolded before your eyes. You tried to read the material whilst sitting at your terminal but found that in spite of yourself, you longed for the tangible experience of reading; the grasping of paper between the fingers. Reading is something which is best enjoyed in a variety of positions, each different position implying years of human tradition, be it studying, writing, leisure. For you to be able to adopt a range of these positions, it is absolutely necessary that you can hold those pages in your hand! So, you switched on your printer and, selecting the print option, downloaded the stories of your choice.

But the novel! You first heard about it when you received your first "Liberation" newsletter only months ago. That in itself was a most exciting day, even moreso than the day when you first realised that you were not, after all, alone in your admiration for the somewhat low budget, much criticized BBC science fiction series. Years ago, ou had heard Terry Wogan, purveyor of gentle and somewhat endearing Irish blarney, discuss plotlines and characters on his early morning radio breakfast show. You had also seen other people's letters (as well as your own carefully crafted affair) read out on the viewer's discussion programme "Points of View" but it had never really occurred to you that other people shared your deep fascination with this, in many ways unremarkable dramatic production. Until you finally wrote to the television company asking for a signed photograph of your favourite actor from the programme and received in return not only the now much treasured photograph but also a sheet of orange-coloured paper on which were crudely typed a list of postal addresses. One of which carried the additional caption of "World's largest Blake's Seven fan club".

Eagerly, you wrote a letter to the person listed as the contact for this society and waited what seems like weeks for a reply. In reality it was more like one week only but the anticipation had been so great that your patience had frayed and you had begun to relinquish any hope of receiving any reply. It had actually seemed to you that if the person to whom you had written did actually exist, he would share your unbridled enthusiasm for the television drama and understand that since the recent cessation of its broadcasting, you would be desparate to have some equivalent replacement of it in your life. He would, you reasoned, not allow a moment's hesitation to interfere with his rapid reply and thus your wish to become connected to the community of other lovers of the fiction would be dealt with swiftly. Well, sadly this wasn't the case and your heart had already learned not to leap upon hearing, as you munched on marmalade toast and sipped coffee, the soft thud of the morning letters on your doormat.

But in time, the long awaited letter had arrived, containing an application form which you had hurriedly filled out and returned, enclosing the requested fee. More waiting time. (You had learned more patience now and did not fret so much with the passing of the days.) Then finally, your first "Liberation" newsletter, and a membership card! The newsletter amounted to a glossy black and white cover containing four, count them, four large, high quality photographs depicting scenes from some dimly remembered episodes as well as one of your favourite character, and forty-eight pages of black-on-white typed letters, fiction, essays, interviews and merchandise listings all concerned with your long held object of enchantment - "Blake's Seven". You had dropped all other matters at once and fallen into your most comfortable sofa then and there, ignoring the bring of the telephone and had read your new acquisition from cover to cover in one long and gloriously self-indulgent hour. That is how it is to be now. You became involved, well, its not so simple as you might have thought and it doesn't end with the arrival of your first newsletter. Rather, there begins your initiation to a new world, the existence of which you had never even dreamed.

Setting into a freshly drawn and hot, deep bath (since this isn't a preciously bound commercial book, no harm can come to it in the bath; you do not take the risk of finishing with a hugely inflated book, should your pages slip into the water!). You read the cover page. Unlike a commercially bought book, there are no journalistic quotations, no summary of the plot on the back cover. Really, no clue from the outside of the book- in this case, merely one slip of paper, to tell what lies within. Inside, like any book, there are credits. Thanks to so-and-so for this favour, a mention to whatsit for that. Comradely exchanges between the in-crowd, of which you know nothing. Then the chapter headings. They seem strangely disjointed and tell you little of what you might expect from this story. Still, you have gathered from what you have gleaned from mentions of this book (or 'zine' as you ought now to call it), that the principal plot concerns the events which occurred after the battle with the Andromedans and the circumstances which followed, but this time from the point of view of Blake. Casually, you settle back to read your crisp newly printed pages.