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[Editor's Note: This material originally appeared in FOSFAX, Issue #153, date 1991. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.]
Copyright 1991 Taras Wolansky
ConDiego, The 1990 North American Science Fiction Convention, was held at the Omin Hotal, I mean, Omni Hotel, and the Convention and Performing Arts Center in San Diego. Guests of Honor were Samuel Delany (pro) and Ben Yalow (fan). As is typical of a NASFic, ConDiego had to scratch for its guests: many people who attended Worldcon just a few weeks earlier are reluctant to go to another con.
On the other hand, NASFics are usually well-run; and ConDiego was not. The typographically laughable program book, with its ConDigeos and Omin Hotals, was one early sign. Another was the "Opening Ceremony". Before a small audience, the chairman of the convention said a few words of greeting, reluctantly answered a few questions, and ran off. That was it for "Opening Ceremonies".
Even so, several program items were of interest, one way or another.
A panel that was supposed to be about "Anthropology in SF", Friday morning, was my first encounter with the inquiring mind of Julian May, who was the sole panelist to show up. May spent a good deal of time discussing her recent, collaborative fantasy novel, Black Trillium. Having recently heard Vonda McIntyre complain about the "camps without camp chores ... animals that never have to be fed" of so much medievalistic fantasy, I asked if the three questing princesses of Black Trillium traveled through the wilderness with a pack train. No, she replied. In the "archetypal" quest, the quester must knock about all by her lonesome. It soon developed that the book was the standard stuff, so written not out of incompetence, which we might pity, but on purpose.
"Heinlein is dead in more than one sense, if you look at the underpinnings of his stuff." (I won't try to guess what she meant by this.)
"Living with Another Author" -- three writing couples offered anecdotes and survival tips: Frederik Pohl and Elizabeth Ann Hull, Harry and Laura Turtledove, Raymond E. Feist and Kathy Starbuck.
Hull explained that when she met Fred Pohl marriage was not in her plans; but "at this point it's easier being married than not being married, and though we got married in 1984 we still feel that way." Pohl said they collaborated very rarely: you get in enough trouble just being married. However, Hull remembered some attempts at collaboration Pohl had forgotten. All the panelists agreed spouses had better not collaborate on fiction; but (Hull added) nonfiction was OK.
Just how far apart a husband and wife should keep their careers is a difficult question. Hull spoke of her astonishment when she learned Gene Wolfe's wife doesn't read his work. Feist worried that his success was negatively affecting his wife's career (which is a very diplomatic thing for a best-selling husband of a non-selling wife to say). Some publishers are reluctant to carry a husband and a wife.
"Horror and Dark Fantasy: How they differ, or do they?" for once featured a discussion precisely of the stated topic. Raymond E. Feist suggested dark fantasy differs in that it is less gruesome than horror. Karen Joy Fowler remarked that, until seeing the panel topic, she had thought dark fantasy was simply a tonier name for horror; Feist agreed that at most they are two sides of one coin. However, James Van Hise pointed out that horror need not be fantasy at all.
Feist painted a portrait of the horror writer as "sadist", treating his characters like "rats in a maze", putting walls in front of them every time they think they've made it through. The essence of horror is hopelessness, he felt. This set off Fowler's view that horror is "for fun": the reader and the writer have an implicit agreement not to take it seriously.
"Psi/Parapsychology", Friday evening, was my second encounter with the inquiring mind of Julian May, who thinks hypnotic "regression" is bunk, but believes everything else. On the issue of psychics who are revealed to be frauds: it's tragic, she said, when people with real psychic powers are forced by circumstance to become charlatans!
The moderator was engineer/SF writer Arlan Andrews, who attacked arch-debunker James Randi and said that "the Skeptical Inquirer is worse than the National Inquirer." (Biologist and skeptic Judith Lazar completed the panel.) Andrews claimed to have unequivocal proof of the existence of psi powers, but refused to reveal it. And refused again after the panel was over, when I asked him privately.
From the floor it was suggested there are two good reasons to disbelieve in the existence of psychic powers: Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
I wish I had a transcript of Samuel R. Delany's GoH address, "The Life of/and Writing" delivered Friday night. Part of his talk concerned what he called "political cliches": e.g., "blacks are shiftless"; "women are bad drivers". It's their frequency of use and role in an oppressive system that makes them offensive.
This is why I wish I had a transcript of his talk: because this part of it sounded like elegant nonsense. A cliche, more often than not, is true; in fact, "truism" is a synonym for "cliche". A cliche is objectionable because it is old hat, not because it is false. I cannot believe this is what he intended to say.
Postscript: the latest issue of NYRSF gives me the transcript I wished for. My recollection was accurate: Delany says nothing at all about truth or falsity. Evidently the statement, "women are bad drivers", is sexist and therefore "censurable" even if it is true!
It seems simple enough to make up statements, that are not cliches, about blacks and women and homosexuals that Delany (who is two of the above) would consider racist or sexist or anti-gay.
"Using History in SF", Saturday morning, may have told me little I didn't already know about history and SF; but it did introduce me to one of SF's more colorful characters: Icelandic opera singer, Danish TV star, American fantasy writer, big and blond-bearded Thorarin Gunnarson. He described himself as a traveler through history. Growing up in Iceland, he got electricity in his house for the first time in 1972 and television a few months later.
When his literary agent, no doubt with the opera connection in mind, suggested he try his hand at retelling the Ring of the Nibelungs, Gunnarson decided to do all of Norse mythology instead. He believes scholars have, hitherto, forced Norse mythology into the mold of Classical mythology.
In a digression on the subject of how odd real life can be (as though his life wasn't odd enough already), Gunnarson told the audience he had been shot four weeks before -- with a flintlock musket.
In the part of the discussion that actually concerned history and SF, panelists Harry Turtledove and Lisa Goldstein spoke to the issue of how characters in a historical milieu can avoid espousing attitudes that seem reprehensible to the modern reader. For Turtledove, who is working in the Civil War period, it is attitudes toward blacks. For Goldstein, whose work-in-progress is set in Elizabethan times, it is anti-Semitism. From the floor it was suggested this was really "anti-Judaism": in The Merchant of Venice the most likeable character is Shylock's daughter, a convert.
"Time Travel: Back to the Future IV", midday Saturday, opened with George Alec Effinger asserting that, while both time and faster-than-light travel are scientifically impossible, they are tools the SF writer uses to illuminate various concerns. He noted the time travel story is a recent invention; in earlier times the world seemed unchanging, so there was no reason to travel. Then again, David Ross noted, Dante's Inferno features meetings with great heroes of the past and even earlier, added Paul O. Williams, the Bible gave us prophecy.
Reacting to Effinger's statement about time and FTL travel being impossible, I brought up physicist Kip Thorne's recent work on doing both within the framework of relativity, using "worm holes". Nobody on the panel knew what I was talking about; I got the impression they thought I was a crank, retailing some crackpot theory. Nor were there any glimmerings of recognition in the audience.
The Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Awards were given out Saturday afternoon, in one of the convention center's smaller halls. (Having ascertained that no Type-A personalities were laying for me, I felt safe in attending.)
Sam Konkin presented the Prometheus to Victor Koman for Solomon's Knife, which proposes embryo transfer as a compromise solution to the abortion question. In his acceptance speech Koman said "transoption" could soon become a reality, but for doctors' fear of: fire-bombing fundamentalists, litigious liberals, and NIH bureaucrats.
Vernor Vinge inducted F. Paul Wilson's Healer into the Prometheus Hall of Fame. Jim Baen read a short thank-you note from Wilson.
The audience numbered exactly twenty, counting Koman's wife and little daughter, and me.
The room may have been too small and too warm for a panel on an enervating Sunday afternoon, but the panelists were exceptionally well qualified to discuss the subject of alternative worlds. Greg Benford began by giving the scientific basis for alternative worlds. The other panelists expressed their gratification that there was a scientific basis for alternative worlds; even if, as Harry Turtledove pointed out, the writer of alternative history is really writing about this world.
Sheila Finch, who had spent part of her childhood in London bomb shelters, found it an interesting experience to write a story for Greg Benford's anthology, Hitler Victorious. The challenge was to change history just enough to make Germany winning the war a good thing! William F. Wu:
"But making Hitler gay was going a bit--" Finch: "I didn't!" Stephen Potts:
"In an alternate world you did!"
All the panelists for "Female Warriors" were women, and most of them were warriors; at any rate I got the impression more than half were involved in the martial arts. Perhaps this was why no one demurred from the admission by one panelist that testosterone makes men stronger than women; and that a woman warrior would have to use different methods than a man if she wants to stay alive. Jennifer Roberson pointed out that cultural underestimation of women would be a positive boon to a woman warrior.
The sillier side of women warriors in fantasy was also explored. An excessively-endowed female "warrior" on a well-known book cover came in for ridicule, and the likely fate of that endowment in the first sword-fight was bandied about. A woman in the audience also noted that, in woman-warrior fantasy, it seems a sword prevents pregnancy!
The Chesleys, the Association of SF Artists' awards named after space artist Chesley Bonestell, were handed out Sunday night. Master of Ceremonies was Kelly Freas; who temporarily turned blushing award recipient when he won Best Magazine Cover, to wild applause. "This means more to me" than his many Hugo Awards, he said, because the voters are so knowledgeable. (Well, they may know art, but they also know the artists!)
Slides were shown of nominated works as they were named; unfortunately only about two of five had slides available. Jim Baen (greeted by enthusiastic applause) presented the award for best book cover to Keith Parkinson, for "Rusalka". It was Don Maitz, "for body of work", who won Artistic Excellence; and DAW Books was honored with Best Art Director.
The art show had much worth seeing, especially the spine-tingling sculptures. Heidi L. Snyder presented a pack of eerie, disturbing creatures with only two limbs but human faces, standing on hands and tail, with growths more like twigs than hair on their heads and running down their backs. I noted a multitude of bids. Scott F. Hill's "Graven Images" were horrid little (imitation) human skulls, adorned as though for some unspeakable ritual.
Richard Hescox's slide show had been lost by the program book, and his seven remarkable paintings were hidden all the way in the back of the art show. In "Space Vectors" a space-suited figure stands next to an array of missiles on an orbiting platform, looking down at the Earth as nuclear explosions bloom through the clouds. In "Delan the Mislaid" an elf leads a crippled and blinded gryphon/centaur down an icy mountain path.
Both the 1994 Worldcon bids were represented. I had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Nashville bid, which lost its hotel and became the Louisville bid. Unfortunately in the process it lost its main selling point, the huge Opryland hotel that could house a worldcon under one roof.
The impression I got of the Louisville bid was a couple of blocks to one hotel, a couple of blocks to another hotel, a couple of blocks to the convention center, a couple of blocks to still another hotel, and so on. By contrast, the Winnipeg in '94 bid offers three hotels immediately adjacent to the convention center, two of them linked to it by sky bridges. Events at ConDiego (see "Local Fauna", elsewhere in this report) lead me to suggest the Louisville people look into hiring armed guards for the nighttime hours. Even without sky bridges, Winnipeg at night and Louisville at night are not the same thing.
For all that only two short blocks separated the Omni Hotel and the convention center, this convention offered opportunities, unparalleled in my experience, to get to know a host city's street people. By the first night of the convention I had been accosted by three panhandlers, and actually began to keep a tally; but the onslaught slackened after that, amounting to about a half-dozen in the end.
Two o'clock one sunny afternoon I was grabbing a late lunch at the McDonald's that lay on the route between the Omni Hotel and the convention center. As I stood near one of the exits with my tray, looking for a comfortable spot, the cry rang out: "Stop him! Stop him!" As I stood frozen for a long second, a long-limbed young black man flew towards, then past me, hotly pursued by a young white woman in sweats. The next thing I knew, I was pounding after them.
Several blocks of broken-field running later, he was pulling away from her, she was pulling away from me, and I was running out of steam.
Fortunately several other people had finally joined the chase, so I slowly made my way back to the restaurant. I found my lunch strewn over half a block outside the door. Evidently I had let it fall when I started running.
I later learned that, by a happy chance, the purse-snatcher -- it was the woman's purse he had stolen -- had run into the arms of five Marines coming out of a bar. The purse was recovered, but I do not think the snatcher was brought to justice.
The restaurant manager replaced my lunch gratis, and this time the fries were fresh. Never say virtue goes unrewarded!
The pocket program was the worst I have ever seen, and not just for the typos that made it a laughingstock. ("ConDigeo" and "Omin Hotal" are just two of many.) First, look at the chrono chart, where you discover that something called "Theor bas of alt" is in the Balboa room at 3 P.M. To find out what it is and who's on it, you're supposed to look it up in the alphabetical (!) listing; where, in this and many other cases, you will NOT find it. By contrast, the Japanimation schedule, with extensive synopses by Patti Duffield, was near perfection. About which:
A tip for your next convention if you have not yet become acquainted with Japanimation. As soon as you register, go to the Jap. Room and ask if they're showing anything (especially full-length, subtitled versions) by "the guy who made Warriors of the Wind". Four of Hayao Miyazaki's films were shown here, of which I saw one, Kiki's Delivery Service, a delightful fantasy about a young witch; had previously seen two, Nausicaa/Warriors of the Wind and Laputa/Castle in the Sky, both SF; and missed one, Tonari no Totoro, nature unknown.
While we're (briefly) on the subject of things that were done well at ConDiego, I should mention the masquerade, which was of high quality and held in a real theater. The dealers' room was extremely well-stocked; too well-stocked, I gather, as far as making money was concerned.
The Regency dance took place Sunday night. The dancers' dress was, to say the least, various; ranging from the proper costume of a Regency buck (worn by a Regency, um, doe); to costumes of other periods; to ordinary fannish costume; to no costume at all: one barefoot young fellow wore a large green bath towel wrapped around his waist and nothing else.
Over a long metal trough with water spraying into it from a pipe, weirdly and incessantly squealing, in the men's room at the convention center, one man says to another: "Aren't you Gene Wolfe?"
Once again I was grumbling, to the guy signing up Louisville pre-supporters, of the silly habit of convention progress reports, not to note on the covers important contents, like Hugo ballots and hotel forms. He defended the practice: "The experienced con-goer knows the worldcon PR that appears in the spring contains the hotel form." So the purpose is to give insiders an advantage? "Oh, no, no! ... It would cost more money!" For what, ink? "It's always been done that way!"
The real reason, probably, is to force people to read the progress reports: "Look how hard we're working!" I suggest, the number of Hugo nomination ballots turned in might not be so low, if more people knew they were there. (True, not everyone is getting progress reports from six or seven different cons at the same time!)--Taras Wolansky
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