Alan Dorey
Alan Dorey, a major figure in British sf fandom since the late Seventies, died July 24. The cause was not announced.
Dorey was one of eight co-editors who started Interzone magazine in 1982, along with John Clute, Malcolm Edwards, Colin Greenland, Graham James, Roz Kaveney, Simon Ounsley and David Pringle. (Dorey left Interzone after issue 10.)
He first became active in fandom while attending Leeds University in the late Seventies. He co-founded the Surrey Limpwrists (a local club near his hometown), worked on the Eastercon committee, and was elected Chairman of the BSFA, all in 1979. He continued as BSFA chair until 1985. During that span he also wrote a lot of columns and reviews for BSFA’s fanzines Matrix and Vector.
His own fanzines included Black Hole for the Leeds University sf club, Gross Encounters, and Sirius (with Mike Dickinson).
His fanpublishing resume did not include the first issue of Another Bloody Fanzine (1979), although he and Joseph Nicholas shared the masthead. As Rob Hansen explains in his British fanhistory, THEN:
For some months, Alan Dorey and Joseph Nicholas had been telling everyone of their intention to puiblish a fan zine of that name that would be devoted to killer fanzine reviews to end all killer fanzine reviews, so when ABF 0 dropped onto their doormats most assumed it was the much awaited thunderbolt….
The hoax penned by David Langford and Kevin Smith caused at least as much of an uproar as had been promised by the real editors, and when Nicholas and Dorey did in fact put out an issue by that title in late 1979 it was almost anticlimactic.
Dorey’s fanac tailed off in the 1990s but in 2012 he revived Gross Encounters where he explained:
The late 1990s saw my activity increasingly head towards the back burner, taking its place amongst a host of other projects that sat there gently simmering away. I can’t quite place my finger on the exact moment, but sometime between 1998 and the fuss over the new millennium, the shilling in the meter must have run out and the burner flickered no more.
By then his real passion was his radio show. Dorey’s first experience in radio came decades ago at BBC Radio Manchester. He wrote book reviews and discussed them on air with the show’s host, Briony Barton. Since 2006 he had been a presenter and DJ at Forest FM, where his show was called “Music Box.” Dorey described it this way –
The show runs to a loose format which can be summed up as “old, New, Borrowed, Blues” . It’s a simple formula, but it works and it ensures that there’s always plenty of new music as well as older sounds and a mix of genres. There’s a handy little phrase in putting a show together—”hammocking”: this is the process of bookending segments with more familiar music so that casual listeners aren’t put off with too much new and unfamiliar music.
Today many listeners have left messages on his Facebook page praising his openness to new music and support for local artists.
Dorey is survived by his wife, Rochelle, and their children.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter and Steven H Silver for the story.]