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[Editor's Note: This material originally appeared in FOSFAX 197, November 1999. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.]
Copyright 1998 Taras Wolansky
Aussiecon Three, the 57th Worldcon, was held September 2nd through the 6th, 1999, at the Melbourne (Australia) Convention Center and the nearby Centra Hotel. Guests of Honor: Australian SF writer, George Turner, who did not live to see the convention that honored him; Gregory Benford, American physicist and hard SF writer; Australian fan editor Bruce Gillespie; and American television producer J. Michael Straczynski as "Special Guest", the same role he played at last year's Worldcon in Baltimore. There was no artist guest of honor; which may have been more significant than I immediately realized.
The convention center is about a block away from a large casino center, something still very unusual in the States. Melbourne better known for its gorgeous 19th-century architecture, including a mind-boggling old train station, several blocks long, just down the road from the convention center. Evidently well-timed economic doldrums preserved a lot of buildings long enough for their beauty to be recognized and preserved. However, Melbourne's most distinctive architectural feature is the electric eye-operated, sliding glass door; even my slightly seedy hotel had a pair. (Handicapped access legislation?)
The people on the streets of Melbourne look subtly different from the people you'd see in an American city; in fact, they look--English. This relative uniformity of physiognomy only makes the, shall we say, original countenances of many SF fans even more conspicuous by contrast. My impression is, your average Aussie does not look wholly with favor on SF fans, who tend to be out of step with Australia's cult of the macho man, or the "ocker", in local parlance. As I took my hotel's "lift" in the wee hours one morning, two gentlemen of that approximate description informed me of the unfairness of U.S. policy relating, in some fashion, to lambs; possibly to the importation of lambs or lamb products into the U.S. If I'd had my wits about me at that hour, I would have shrugged, "Hey, Clinton is for sale, by anybody, not just the Chinese. We tried to get rid of the dishonest bastard but failed."
Australians eat different candies than we do, like musk-flavored lifesavers and "fruit pastilles" (ugh); drive different cars, like the Ford Barina; and prefer different comic books, like The Phantom (judging from newsstand displays). They use different political terminology: a politician castigated a rival party saying that instead of "the fairies at the bottom of the garden", they were "a children's day care center". (Not even Australians I asked could explain that one.) And I am still puzzling over a sign I saw on a small shop front: "HEN'S NIGHT AFLOAT/Agency for Lady Killers".
I asked an Aussie fan about the Barbie-sized soap tablet -- "bar" is too strong a word -- my hotel expected me to wash with. It's a temperate climate, he responded weakly. Well, anyway, it's the first time in my life, staying at a hotel, I had to buy my own soap!
On the plus side of the ledger -- and this is almost a violation of natural law -- the sandwiches at the convention center were both cheap and good; though Australian notions about lettuce involve unfamiliar dark and twiggy leaves. This was something of a pattern. When I had crocodile at the Jarrah Restaurant -- a tourist trap that bills itself as the only Australian cuisine in Melbourne -- the meat was O.K., but it was planted in a inedible swamp of dark and slimy vegetation. The kangaroo dish was better.
Panels on sex in SF may not teach one much about sex in SF; but they're usually good for a few laughs, and so there I was, early Thursday afternoon, for "SF and Sexuality". The panelists were American SF writers Robert Silverberg and Joe Haldeman, and Aussie Stephen Dedman. Haldeman nominated Silverberg to be moderator due, he said, to his expertise in the subject!
The night before his first appearance at Aussiecon I in 1975, Silverberg told us, he had a curious nightmare about coming to the dais and telling an "utterly scabrous, vile, and endless" joke about a female wombat that horrified his Australian audience. He didn't actually know any such obscene wombat joke; but the next day he told his audience the story of this odd dream. And for the rest of the weekend, Australians would come up to him and whisper, "You can tell me the wombat joke!"
On the subject of sex in SF, Haldeman commented on Australian author Greg Egan's novella, "Oceanic" (which, the local favorite, won a Hugo Award two days later). Sometimes an SF author comes up with "neat stuff" he can't resist putting into a story, even though it really serves no function there. For example, when the almost-humans of "Oceanic" have sex, the phallus detaches from one partner and attaches to the other: interesting idea, but it has "no substantial effect" on the story, which is about the conflict between religious faith and scientific revelation. (I noticed the same thing when I read the story; I suspect it is actually a piece of a planned or forthcoming novel.)
Egan makes frequent use of sexual themes in his SF. Dedman recalled the "asexuals" in Egan's novel, Distress. These are people who have not only given up all external genitalia, but even the brain structures related to sexuality. (I read this interesting but ultimately disappointing novel on the plane to Australia. Again, the sexual theme has little to do with the plot -- which has to do with the worst kind of air-head utopian anarchism.) Dedman also reminded us of Egan's story in which an advance in biomedicine threatens to make sure no more children are born with a homosexual orientation. (At least, it threatens the homosexual protagonist's subculture.) Dedman described it as preventing the passing on of the genes for homosexuality; an ironical audience member remarked, "I thought that passing on the genes for homosexuality would be rather tricky to begin with!"
Silverberg named Philip Jose Farmer's 1952 novella, "The Lovers", "essentially the story of a man and a bug -- a very, very beautiful bug", as the first real use of sex in pulp-era SF; the effects of orgasm on the alien lover are essential to the science fiction content of the story. Not surprisingly, Farmer had a hard time finding a magazine to publish the story. Dedman wondered if Silverberg (who began publishing stories only two years later) ever ran into censorship himself. Only in Playboy Magazine, said Silverberg, and not about sex. He was asked to make an alcoholic character into a drug addict: liquor ads are a mainstay of the magazine, he was reminded! (Later, Haldeman would recall that his story about a Vietnam War military morgue, "Graves", was rejected as "too gross for Playboy". They objected to the maggots, he said.)
Sex can be a problem in an SF story, said Silverberg, because it's a problem when "any aspect of character begins to overwhelm the speculative content." There has to be a balance; or you have to make the sex part of the speculative content. "And so you end up with a kind of ... urge to make the sex weird," said Haldeman. In The Forever War, Haldeman surrounded the heterosexual protagonist with gays, at one point, to isolate him. The only problem he ever had about that, however, was when a play based on the book was performed in Chicago, with a cast made up mostly of gay actors; the gay press was very hostile. They didn't get that the story wasn't about homosexuality, but about being alone.
Which reminded Silverberg of something he encountered, cruising the Internet one day: a discussion of whether he, Robert Silverberg, was gay! (He is not.) Tracing it back, he found it started with a facetious comment someone made to the effect that, if sympathetic handling of homosexual characters makes an author gay, then you might just as well say Robert Silverberg is gay, on the basis of his novel, The Book of Skulls.
Silverberg was bemused by a reference Dedman made to "my hermaphrodite friends". "We have an idiomatic difference here, or perhaps Australia is farther down under than I thought!" Dedman clarified that he really did mean, not bisexual friends, of whom he has many, but actual hermaphrodite friends, of whom he has very few. Or, perhaps, one: "He's also a fantasy writer." Silverberg: "I would hope so!" (Much laughter.)
Will the sexual liberation train derail, asked Dedman. (Haldeman: "How do you put stuff back into Pandora's box." Very carefully, Silverberg could not resist replying.) Most stories assume it will not. The easy sex of the seventies has already gone away, said Silverberg, because of "a terminal venereal disease" but also as a matter of style.
Someone brought up Silverberg's 1971 novel, The World Inside. The Science Fiction Book Club reprinted it and applied a sexual content warning in the club flyers and catalogues. "They're still writing it and the book is still selling wonderfully well ..."
On the subject of sex in seventies SF, someone asked about the "gratuitous sex" in Robert Heinlein's later work, like Time Enough for Love. "I think he was catching up", making up for lost time, said Dedman. Silverberg agreed, Heinlein was finally "set loose to write as he pleased, and he didn't have the technical equipment to do it, because he was a gentleman of an earlier era -- as Joe has now become, for example!" (Much laughter.)
At the time, many people disapproved of the new sexual freedom in SF. When the first installment of The Forever War was published in Analog in 1972, said Haldeman, it was bowdlerized with four-letter euphemisms like "hump" and "crap") -- but many readers canceled their subscriptions even so.
From the floor, Hugo-nominated fan writer Evelyn Leeper asked about the similar cautions which accompany some stories in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Do they inform the author when they decide to do this? In Dedman's experience, at least in one case the answer was: No!
Haldeman told the story of how his (non-SF) Vietnam War novel, War Year, because a 1st Amendment cause celebre in, of all places, Sitka, Alaska, for using a common term of endearment which I shall render phonetically, as "mofo". For Silverberg, the freedom to include four-letter words is a mixed blessing: "I regret, in a way, that the lightning and thunder that those words could create has been lost. ... When I walk down the sunny streets of California and I see six-year-old girls mouthing words that would have had D.H. Lawrence put in jail, I think, maybe we've sacrificed some of the magic and power of these incantations. ... As a writer, I miss the fact that you could 'blow up' a whole page by using all these words."
Thursday afternoon, it was time for another round of the eternal conflict between "Fans and Writers". The fans were represented by moderator Perianne Lurie and Go Under Fan Fund delegate Paul Kincaid; the pros -- every one of them once or currently active in fandom -- by Ace Books editor Ginjer Buchanan, and authors Terry Pratchett (who tended to monopolize the discussion) and Gregory Benford.
Pratchett, who attended his first science fiction convention at the age of thirteen, apologized for his slightly late arrival: "I allowed fans to buy me a drink!" In fact, he has found fandom to be a huge time waster for him as a professional writer. For example, there are two or three Internet sites dedicated to his work, but he has had to stop reading them. ("On the net, dyslexia is a badge of couth," he later remarked caustically.) On his visit to Australia, Pratchett continued, he has written twice as much as he would have at home. At home, half his time is dedicated to the business of being a writer, including ministering to fans, a tiny fraction of readers. (He estimated that he has 5,000 "fans", but 300,000 "readers".)
Benford published a fanzine when he was 14 years old, "and never looked back". He still considers himself a member of fandom; for example, he is still contributing pages an amateur press association. Fandom is a huge asset to SF, he said. Other literary genres -- mysteries, Westerns -- have "hollow little copies of fandom". On the downside, there are those "late-night phone calls, the hate mail on the Internet, the occasional car bomb"! (Laughter.) But even so, fandom "will ensure [SF's] survival ... as publishing withers" over the next few decades.
The Internet has changed everything, lamented Pratchett. "Fandom is, in many respects, a kind of socially acceptable copyright infringement." For example, a Russian fan translated two of his novels into Russian and posted them on the net -- and couldn't understand why Pratchett was not grateful for this attention! As for fan fiction, based upon copyrighted characters and settings, "sooner or later we'll have to confront this stuff." He doesn't dare even look at it, lest he be accused of stealing somebody's story idea. For the same reason, Buchanan said, Babylon 5 producer J. Michael Straczynski would have someone erase all story ideas from a B5 discussion site so he could read it! (Later, Benford said he had received in the mail two screenplays based upon his novels, which he dared not read.)
All of which suggests there is little of the fan left in Pratchett the pro -- but "I'm still fan-shaped!" "You're not 'fan' at all," Benford scoffed. (Laughter.) Of course, as he later admitted, Benford has a day job at U.C. Irvine and thus is not dependent on his copyrights for his livelihood. (Then again, it occurs to me now, Pratchett must have made millions of pounds off his writing. How much of that could fan activity be costing him: a fraction of a percent?)
From the floor, Pratchett was asked if there was a positive side to fandom, in his view. Recently, he admitted, he turned to fandom when he needed an Arabic translation of the phrase "the place where the sun does not shine". Benford: "I thought they had a whole culture devoted to that!" (Laughter.) Also, some fans do respect an author's rights, said Pratchett, as in, "Can I name my cat after one of your characters?"
Since Pratchett's success, an audience member pointed out, there have been a great many comic fantasies published: "Terry and the pirates," Benford wisecracked. But Pratchett was sympathetic to his imitators. "When I started out, it was 'the new Douglas Adams' ... I only stopped being 'the new Douglas Adams' just by surviving ... by becoming 'the old Terry Pratchett'."
Early Friday afternoon the title, "The 'Science' in SF", seemed to be followed by an implied question mark. The moderator was Brad Lyau, whose academic work is in the history of science and the history of ideas.
Richard Harland, who writes science fantasy, staked out a middle ground. There are "different levels" or kinds of science fiction writing. In some kinds of SF, the laws of science should be strictly observed; in some kinds, other things are important. We are subtle readers, he said. We know what kind we are reading. Perianne Lurie, a public health physician and SF fan, who has taken courses in the history and philosophy of science, concurred. A story by Terry Bisson, for example, can get away with frivolous and pseudoscientific explanations which, by another writer, would have her throwing the book across the room.
Gregory Benford guessed he represents the "more extreme view". "If you write a sonnet that has seventeen lines and does not rhyme, you have not written a bad sonnet; you have not written a sonnet at all."
Then again, Benford did write an introduction to a new university press edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' science fantasy of Pellucidar, At the Earth's Core. (The occasion of the publication, he explained wryly, was that the book had recently fallen into the public domain.) He complimented it for what he described as a decent try at establishing plausibility in "a dream landscape", the inhabited inner surface of a hollow Earth. Actually, according to Newton's laws, there would be no gravity on the inside of a spherical shell. (Later, Benford was intrigued by a suggestion from the floor, that the sun of Burroughs' Pellucidar has a negative mass, and simulates the effects of gravity through repulsion, not attraction.)
"Rigor is ... a matter of taste," he said, repeating his familiar motto of the hard SF writer: "I'd rather have tennis played with the net up."
Benford has used hard SF, even scientifically inaccurate hard SF, to teach courses on "science through science fiction". He used Larry Niven's classic "Neutron Star" to teach about tides, even though Niven's solution to the story problem doesn't work once you plug in the numbers. This is the only story he knows "in which the proper response to a hard science fiction problem is to curl up in the fetal position!" And then there is the Jerome Bixby story about tiny, ultra-dense moons orbiting Mars at such a low altitude that they have bored neat holes in mountains: "even arts majors can see there's a problem here." (Much laughter.)
Prof. Lyau recalled Golden Age editor John W. Campbell's line, that "science fiction is the hors d'oeuvres and science is the main course." "What's the dessert?" somebody asked, to general amusement.
From the floor, Benford was asked what SF writers he considers as "playing with the net up", as far as scientific rigor is concerned. Benford commended the "whole new generation of miraculously appearing U.K. hard SF writers", like Paul McAuley and Steve Baxter and Charles Sheffield, plus Australian Greg Egan. He recommended David Hartwell's recent anthology of hard SF, The Ascent of Wonder. All together, Benford thought there were about 20 or 30 hard SF writers active. Lurie: "And they're all men?" Obligingly, Benford added the names of Nancy Kress, C.J. Cherryh, physicist Catherine Asaro, and James Tiptree (Alice B. Sheldon).
On the flip side, Benford criticized the fantasy novels that he has read. "Obviously, the authors never really sat a horse for a long time, or picked up anything really heavy, or plowed a field". (I think Benford was a farm boy.) The world of most fantasy novels is a "world powered by muscle; yet it really has the feeling of being written by somebody in the suburbs with a four wheel drive." (Laughter.) Then again, Benford hesitated to take responsibility for the results of encouraging such people to go out and get a lot of unaccustomed exercise! (More laughter.)
An audience member asserted that the Society for Creative Anachronism was founded by sword-and-sorcery authors who wanted to know what warfare with sword and shield was really like. Some hard-SF authors, like Poul Anderson, have also joined, someone added. Benford agreed cheerfully, "A lot of hard SF writers have the desire to hit those people with swords!"
Noon Saturday, we were invited to spend "An Hour With Robert Silverberg", in a question-and-answer format. Silverberg said he was happy to be back in his "ancestral homeland"; for, he averred, the Hebrews were an ancient, pre-aboriginal Australian tribe, according to certain lost books of Genesis.
Asked about his novelizations of Isaac Asimov short stories like "Nightfall", Silverberg said Asimov "was rather miffed about the fact that a story he wrote when he was twenty-one remained his most famous story for the rest of his life!"
Asked if his enthusiasm for his writing as great as it was in the past, Silverberg responded, "Twenty years ago I was 44; that's about the peak of a writer's particular powers. ... What remains is the craft, and the accumulated wisdom"; but not the same "vitality or intensity".
Yet his work seems more optimistic today? The 1970s in the U.S. were particularly chaotic, Silverberg explained; also the 1970s in his personal life. "Part of it is just internal chemistry on a level not accessible to the writer, who really doesn't want to know where the stories come from." Too, the marketplace plays a role: asked if his novel about a telepath losing his powers could be published today by a new author, Silverberg replied, "I don't think Dying Inside [1977] could be published today by me." But he quickly amended that. The book could be published, but "would not do very well."
I asked if Jack Vance had been an influence on his writing, especially of the Majipoor books. "Vance is a writer that I much admire," replied Silverberg, and once or twice he had tried his hand at imitating Vance's "rather baroque style". "The Majipoor books have a Vancean genesis" in that they were inspired by Vance's 1952 novel, Big Planet, about a human-inhabited world with an 80,000 mile circumference (but a low density and therefore a reasonable surface gravity). Even as his protagonists encounter a dizzying variety of cultures, Vance shows the reader only a tiny fraction of this enormous world. (Just 1,000 miles, I believe; Silverberg pointed out that by today's standards, the book would be a novella.) Why not, thought Silverberg, create a huge world -- and show all of it. (Vance returned to Big Planet for another "fractional" look with his 1975 novel, Showboat World.)
Somebody brought up media adaptations. Mel Gibson is interested in a movie version of Silverberg's 1969 novel, The Man in the Maze. The experience has taught Silverberg something about what goes into a good Hollywood movie. The screen adaptation, "perfectly in keeping with the spirit of my book", wraps a good action-adventure story around the original concepts. "I would have done a linear adaptation of my novel, scene by scene".
Amanda and the Alien is a TV-movie adaptation of a Silverberg short story that actually came to fruition. Silverberg had met the director twenty years earlier when, aged seventeen, he announced he was going to be a director, so he could do adaptations of Silverberg novels! Silverberg makes an appearance, near the end of Amanda, as a TV panelist contacted by aliens. He had no lines -- if he did, the director explained, he would have to be paid -- but he did get a back rub from televangelist Jim Bakker's one-time main squeeze, Jessica Hahn.
Silverberg remarked that as a young man in his early twenties he read just about all the SF that was currently being published, which amounted to just a few monthly magazines. Today, he can't even find the time to read Locus Magazine's lengthy bibliography of what's being published. "Do I really need to read the new, masterpiece on the subject of the alternate history of Venus when I haven't read War and Peace? ... I still think science fiction is a wonderful thing; I'm just bored with reading it. But I hope you aren't!" (Laughter.)
Will you write any more non-fiction? Answer: It's too much hard work. "I'm tired of explaining things to people. I'd rather just embellish reality with fiction." But you write a monthly essay for Asimov's SF Magazine? "That's not non-fiction; that's fun!"
Silverberg was asked about converting from a typewriter to a computer. Even before word processing he was already doing "seven drafts of each page", because he could see so many alternatives: "each story, each sentence, each word". "Had the word processor not been invented, I'm sure I would have taken up some other profession by 1985."
Early Saturday afternoon, Gregory Benford gave his Guest of Honor speech. When Benford was first asked to be Guest of Honor at Aussiecon III, introducer Perry Middlemiss said, he immediately accepted, asking only if he was going to be there as Fan Guest of Honor, or Pro Guest of Honor! (Benford published his first fanzine in the 1950s.) Or, perhaps, Science Guest of Honor, Benford added, because that was the hat he was wearing today.
What he would give us, he said, was a "transmogrified" version of a lecture he gave ten days earlier at the University of Sydney, on "Deep Time: Communicating Across the Millennia". "The whole essence, you might say, of the science fictional perspective is to bring into the foreground what is, for almost everyone else in the culture, background; that is, where we are and when we are. And how much stretches both backward in time and forward in time."
In the entertaining lecture that followed, Benford defined Deep Time as about 1,000 years, or longer than your civilization -- "the continuity of your culture" -- can be expected to last. Benford has served on a Federal government panel examining the subject, which is of more practical relevance than you might think.
The first problem of Deep Time communication is how to tell our descendants, 10,000 years from now, not to mess with our radioactive waste depositories, buried in salt 200 feet below the surface of the desert. This is difficult because the odds are good they will share no common language with us, and may not know what radioactivity is.
Benford annoyed his fellow panelists by reminding them that there may be "mining moles" in the future, which drill sideways. Thus, you'll need warning signs subsurface as well as on the surface.
And Benford annoyed them even more when he proposed what he called the "Tut strategy". Tutankhamen's tomb was not looted, Benford explained, because it got covered up by construction debris from a much bigger tomb and, fifty years later when that important Pharaoh was finally buried, nobody remembered there was a tomb under the tailings. "So I proposed that we build up the marker -- Congress said we had to have a marker -- but we make it subject to minimum bid negotiations!" One or two centuries down the road, the marker would have eroded away, and we would forget where the repository is. Unfortunately this modest proposal was rejected. (Later, Benford would hilariously retail the history of time capsules, from one buried by George Washington, to the hundreds or thousands being buried this year. Almost invariably, they are lost.)
Problem #2 is less urgent by about five orders of magnitude. How do we say "hi!" to aliens who might pick up one of our deep space probes, a billion years from now. Benford described at length the messages inscribed in a thin diamond disk affixed to the Cassini probe.
Benford spoke more briefly about a third deep time project he was involved in: to grab and freeze everything -- not just the DNA but the whole organisms -- in ecologies about to be overrun. He compared it to being in the Library of Alexandria while "Christian fanatics" are burning it down. (Or perhaps Muslim fanatics, as I have read.) Save as much as you can; you don't have time to think about what is more or less valuable.
Benford concluded his 90 minute lecture by noting that "as you try to plan on longer time scales, you will need a science-fictional imagination. And therefore, you see, you thought you were just here to have fun! But in fact, this kind of mind exercise is extremely useful and will be more so in the future. That's really one of the major things science fiction does for society; and society, as usual, is largely unaware of it. But we don't have to be!" (Rapturous applause!)
The Q&A went on for more than half an hour.
Benford had shown us slides of the various, spiky and bizarre constructions that, crowning the waste repositories, are intended to scare off our primitive descendants. An audience member commented, they look like "exotic contemporary sculptures"! Artists serving on the government panel said they looked postmodernist, Benford chuckled. "Whenever I hear the word, 'postmodernist', I reach for my revolver!"
Addressing environmentalists who think shutting down nuclear power plants is an alternative to entombment of wastes, Benford challenged them to "grow up". The waste, currently sitting in "swimming pools" prone to leakage, must go somewhere -- and most radwaste comes, not from nuclear power plants, but from hospitals!
The first time I laid eyes on Prof. James Benford, I thought Gregory Benford had shaved off his beard. However, no such confusion was possible Sunday morning, as both twins turned out to discuss their common project, "The Interstellar Precursor Probe". G. David Nordley assisted with the presentation.
The Benfords' design involves sending a very light-weight probe into interstellar space, riding on a microwave beam at one percent of the speed of light. Even at that speed, the nearest star is too distant to be a practical target. However, the recent finding that L-type stars -- dim dwarf stars -- may be within one-tenth of a light year of Earth means we're looking at a flyby mission of just ten years duration, the same order of magnitude as the outer planet flybys of recent years. If a "Nemesis" star exists -- a hypothetical nearby star that regularly slings comets in our direction -- it might be one of these unobtrusive neighbors. (And a great argument for funding the probe, I remarked to James Benford after the panel.)
I asked the Benfords what the beam would look like from the vantage point of another star; the same thought having occurred to them, they immediately knew what I was getting at. They've thought about what it would look like but, no, nobody on Earth is looking for such a signal -- yet. But after the panel I suggested the next logical step, which hadn't occurred to them: superimpose a message on the beam. James Benford liked the idea and said it could be done with no loss of energy.
Noon Sunday, the subject was "Collaborating, Or 'No, *You* Write the Monster Scene'", with publisher Ginjer Buchanan; American authors Robert Silverberg, and Jody Lynn Nye, who has collaborated with Anne McCaffrey; and Australian author Sean Williams.
"Your collaborative efforts span ... eons," Buchanan ribbed Silverberg, who agreed with equanimity. In fact, he has had four collaborators over his long career. In the 1950s, in New York, there was Randall Garrett, "an alcoholic, a night-owl, and -- a psychopathic liar ... [but] a very good science fiction writer, who couldn't make himself get any work done." Garrett would "start a story late at night and before he collapsed into a stupor ... he'd leave the manuscript, as it stood, under my door"; then Silverberg would continue; then back and forth; "and usually, in a couple of days, we would have a story." And then the two of them would carry the story downtown, to the offices of John W. Campbell of Astounding, or sometimes to the offices of one of the other magazines. Their collaboration lasted "several years and I don't know how many dozens of stories under how many dozens of different names." Silverberg continued, "But then I got married, and my wife (of that era) said, 'I don't want that man in the house!'" As Silverberg realized he didn't want that man in the house, either, the collaboration came to an end.
Collaborator #2 was Harlan Ellison. Early in their acquaintance, they did not collaborate, as Ellison, who had not yet begun to sell stories, and was "not only the difficult and complicated man that we all know and love, but a lousy writer." (Laughter.) Later, when both of them were established writers in their thirties living in California, Ellison more or less forced a collaboration on him: "Bob, put some science in here." Silverberg expected $150 from Galaxy for the collaboration, but Ellison got them $1200 from Cosmopolitan, a substantial sun at the time.
About ten years later, Silverberg was again visiting Ellison, who said, "Let's write another one!" Ellison banged out a page and a half beginning, which made no sense to Silverberg; who added another page and a half, which also made no sense to him. Silverberg left the few pages and forgot about it. Ten years later, Ellison: "Remember that collaboration we were working on? ... I think we ought to finish it!" Somehow they did, "by a process of his sending incoherent pages to me; me writing another scene that ... had no bearing on what went before; his tacking some more on", etc.; and somebody bought the story for a thousand dollars. Silverberg is politically to the right of Ellison, and "I did take a little sinister pleasure in building inextricably into the story my view of the more unruly left-wing demonstrators that infest San Francisco. And he was troubled by this, because he saw no way of removing that scene from the story." (Laughter.)
Collaborator #3 is Karen Haber, his wife. They edit each other's manuscripts, and bounce ideas off each other; and share credit when she writes and he plans and edits. While he is, of course, the more experienced partner, "she has made immensely useful suggestions to me, especially where I started drifting into the wilder reaches of fancy prose."
The fourth collaborator and "strangest one of all" was Isaac Asimov, indirectly and late in that writer's career. Asimov wanted to write nonfiction, but his publisher wanted some more best-selling novels. The solution was for Silverberg to rework certain classic Asimov novellas. He would do the first draft, and Asimov "would then go over it, remove anything that might seem too Silverbergian in style, and otherwise tinker with it."
"Nightfall" (1941), about a world where the stars come out once every 2000 years, was the first story to be novelized. Asimov insisted on correcting an astronomical error in the original story which no one else had ever noticed. Another was "The Ugly Little Boy", about a Neanderthal child temporarily brought forward in time. Silverberg and Asimov disagreed about the title, which Silverberg wanted to change and Asimov did not. They compromised: the American edition keeps the classic title while the British edition that came out after Asimov's death is called Child of Time. Also, Silverberg quoted something from Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus; Asimov would not allow the N-word, even used in a non-pejorative sense, in any book with his name on it. The quote appeared as by Joseph Conrad, sans title. The third, and so far last, adaptation is The Positronic Man, based on "The Bicentennial Man". By this time, Asimov was dying, and Silverberg was very uneasy about presenting him a story about dying; but as it turned out Asimov did not live long enough to see it.
Jody Lynn Nye described her long-distance (U.S.-Ireland) collaboration with Anne McCaffrey as "an arranged marriage"; the matchmaker was Nye's husband Bill Fawcett, a book "packager". Of course McCaffrey got the last word, said Nye, but she was open to new ideas. Nye described a typical exchange: "Jody, write the technical scene." "Anne, please write the diplomatic scene."
Their relationship has been very easy but McCaffrey, who fears being tormented by hopeful collaborators and fan writers, wryly told Nye she should tell people McCaffrey is very difficult to work with -- or that she is McCaffrey's daughter!
Another kind of collaboration, the "shared world", also came about by way of Nye's husband Bill, who is co-editor with David Drake of the military SF anthology series, called "The Fleet".
However, yet another attempt at collaboration is not turning out so well. The other author, whom Nye would not name, is not holding up his end of the bargain.
Buchanan asked Silverberg, why all the pseudonyms, like "Robert Randall" (Silverberg & Garrett). "Sometimes we wrote whole issues of magazines", said Silverberg. "We would have five or six stories in one magazine. You just can't have it all by Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg!" Garrett loved puns and word-play; for example, the pseudonym "Gordon Aghill" combined Garrett's real first name with a rendering of "Silverberg".
Fear of anti-Semitism, on the part of editors like John W. Campbell, was also a factor. Garrett came up with "Calvin Knox", saying "There is no more Protestant name than that." Silverberg: "Make it Calvin M. Knox; the M for Moses! [Laughter.] But don't tell John." A couple of years later, though, he did tell John. By this time Silverberg had sold two dozen stories under his real name to Campbell, and even seen it highlighted on the cover; when late one night at a convention the two were sitting on a couch together, and the redoubtable editor of Astounding asked about the significance of the curious pseudonym, Calvin M. Knox. So Silverberg came clean. Miffed, Campbell responded: "Did you ever hear of a writer named Isaac Asimov!"
Sign behind the information desk, Sunday morning: "IGNORE the Pocket Program, except as a souvenir." Earlier in the convention, a notice had advised us to use it as a doorstop; later, another note said, never mind that, either! I can't say if it really was that inaccurate, as I took the con's advice and used the daily schedule sheet instead. However, it does contain one of those ridiculous alphabetical lists of program items -- which would have annoyed me if, as I said, I'd been forced to use it even once. (Alphabetical program lists are prone to error, because they are nearly impossible to proofread.)
The glossy souvenir book is pretty typical of its kind. The Guests of Honor are represented by the usual encomia. No fiction; instead we have George Turner's "The Double Standard", a brief 1967 attack on Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. I was amused by Turner's description of Dune as "a piece of painfully second-hand Talbot Mundy". The absence of an artist guest meant no portfolio of artwork; there were several droll cartoons by the late great Australian fan artist, Ian Gunn, but not as many as one might have wished. Several brief articles added up to a profile of the state of Australian SF and fandom.
There were nine numbered issues, and a Hugo Awards special, of the convention newsletter, The Monotreme. This publication seemed a bit off to me: no program changes, but a trivia quiz (also with errors, which the editors flatly stated they would not correct). Usually, there was no party list, as this is normally understood, but instead some kind of discursive paragraph which attempted to conceal the fact that there were very few parties. (Union rules? Hotel regulations? All I know is, the next time there is an Australian Worldcon bid, I will have some hard questions ready.)
"Thank you, Jerome K. Jerome, and most of all, thank you, Robert A. Heinlein; this Hugo belongs to you!"--Connie Willis, on winning the Hugo Award for her novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog. (Probably the weakest nominee, but the strongest claque.)
"I'm a time theory tart--I'll eat any theory [and use it in a story]."--Australian SF writer Alison Goodman at the interminable Saturday morning time travel symposium.
"I see eye to eye with Harlan Ellison."--height-challenged Karen Haber at Sunday afternoon's "Liar's Panel".
"I write science fiction, OK?"--J. Michael Straczynski at the closing ceremonies, after the audience reacted with audible incredulity to his description of the convention as "astonishingly smooth and well-run".
Just a few weeks after Aussiecon, I attended Albacon, a pleasant convention of a couple hundred souls in Schenectady, New York. I had the pleasure, if that's the word, of informing the Albacon people that their art show was about twice the size of the Worldcon art show this year.
My first idea on seeing the Aussiecon art show was to turn on my heel and pretend I never got to it. It was pathetically small: 24 panels, one-sided, lining the walls of a function room, plus a few tables. (More hard questions for the next Aussie bid.) True, one of the tables did offer Marilyn Pride's exquisite "Painted Stones": trompe l'oeil goblins and dragons and lizards on rounded river pebbles. But most of my time in the room I spent looking through the portfolio of Joe Mayhew, the Hugo-nominated (and greatest living) fan artist.
False advertising: At a panel entitled "Classics of the Slush Pile", one panelist had forgotten to bring any material, another had not edited anything since 1983, a third had ethical objections to ridiculing aspiring writers, even ridiculous ones. And so, instead of the humor panel promised, we got sensible and boring advice for beginning writers.
I did not expect to see many friends in Australia, so I was floored when I ran into FOSFAXians Martin Morse Wooster and Patrick McGuire, almost simultaneously. This meant that the nucleus of the annual FOSFAX dinner, unofficial edition, was all present and reporting. And so, Thursday night, joined by Erwin "Filthy Pierre" Strauss and D.C.-area fan Wendell Wagner, we repaired to the (excellent) Miyabi Japanese restaurant, and raised a glass to absent friends.--Taras Wolansky.
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