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[Editor's Note: This material originally appeared in FOSFAX, Issue #162, October 1992. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.]
Copyright 1996 Taras Wolansky
Magicon, Worldcon 1992, was held September 3rd through 7th at the Orange County Convention Center and the Peabody Hotel in Orlando, Florida. The Guests of Honor included: author Jack Vance, artist Vincent di Fate, and eofan Walt Willis. The Toastmaster was Spider Robinson.
Perhaps inspired by Noreascon III's "ConCourse", Magicon featured a large area for fannish exhibits, in the same hall as, and in front of the dealers room and art show. Con chairman Joe Siclari referred to it as "the fannish theme park". Apart from exhibits of Hugo statuettes, program books, masquerade costumes, and other convention memorabilia, there was a ten-hole miniature golf course, each hole built by a different SF club. You played using wooden mallets and small wiffle balls.
The first panel worthy of note was "Where has all the optimism gone?", early Thursday afternoon, with author Hal Clement, publisher Mark Zeising, and editors Ginjer Buchanan and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden. At the open, Buchanan remarked that she had been a martyr to hay fever and hoped the trip to Florida would cure it; from the audience a native Floridian immediately branded her an "optimist"!
Like today's, Golden Age SF was also "downbeat" quite often, said Nielsen-Hayden, reminding us of H.P. Lovecraft; Robert Heinlein's "Goldfish Bowl" ("Creation took eight days."); as well as many works by Poul Anderson. Yet always the universe was knowable, he said, even when this knowledge did us no good.
From the floor, George W. Price put his finger on the failure of Marxism, which killed the dream of human perfectibility for many people. They now realize they will have to accept people as the "mean sons of bitches" they are. At this moment in history, I added, when the nuclear missiles that had been aimed at us are being junked even as we speak, pessimism seems absurd. But others in the audience expressed pessimism about politics in particular. Nielsen-Hayden noted that the center of publishing is grim, downbeat, pessimistic New York -- while motion pictures are made in vapid, empty-headed Los Angeles. He also speculated SF's ability to imagine the wonders of the future saps the will to create them.
From the floor, Martin Harry Greenberg reminded us that the theme of (arguably) the very first SF story, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, was: "which shall prevail, mankind or its creation."
The official opening ceremonies began 3:30, a half hour late. The conception, to tell the history of SF through slides on three screens, was excellent but it outran the execution. The two side screens were empty most of the time or out of synch with the main program; for a time the right screen displayed the shadow of a man's torso, obstinately placed where it blocked the entire image. The main screen was mostly OK; except that the image was partly washed out by a spotlight on the "wizard" who acted as Chorus to the proceedings.
Spider Robinson introduced the show, speaking of the "three Ghosts of Honor": Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Isaac Asimov. The aforementioned "wizard" appeared, dressed in silver robes. He asked the definition of SF -- and over the PA system was given all of them. We heard what Jules Verne said about H.G. Wells, and what Wells said about Verne. Motion picture SF was not neglected. The emotionless and murderous computer from 2001, "HAL", made an auditory appearance; and the role of the movie, Blade Runner, in inspiring the literary subgenre known as "cyberpunk" was noted.
Spider Robinson returned for the conclusion. "I'd like to thank you all for coming -- or however you're reacting!" Tongue firmly in cheek, he thanked Hugo Gernsback one more time, for establishing word rates for SF still in use today.
Early Thursday evening, artist Joe Bergeron, editor Beth Meacham, reviewer Peter Heck, and academic Milton T. Wolf met to praise "The Writing of Jack Vance". Wolf, though a professor at the University of Nevada, said he does not read literary criticism of Jack Vance. As a personal friend, his "point of view on this will be unscholarly."
Wolf told us how he had gotten the notoriously reticent Vance to do one (1) panel at this convention. He gave Vance an ultimatum, to the effect that if Vance didn't do one panel with him, he (Wolf) wouldn't attend the convention at all! In return, Vance required that the panel not have anything to do with sex. (In the past, Wolf has done panels on virtual reality sex.) Meacham said she loves Vance's work so much, she has a hard time reading his manuscripts critically, as she must to edit them for publication. Just to see the typos, she has to read them twice. She spoke in particular of his visual imagery, his "strong appeal to all the senses".
Wolf said Vance had been doing his writing on a computer for ten years now. Prior to that he had written them longhand, using pens of several different colors, depending on the nature of each scene. In response to audience interest in seeing those manuscripts, Wolf said they were at Boston University.
There were quite a number of European fans in the audience. One young man said he read Vance in German translation, so that the use of English the panelists had praised so much came through not at all. For him, the chief attraction was Vance's creation of unique and imaginative societies. Another member of the audience reported that on-line discussions had concluded the German translations are bad, while the Dutch are good. Vance is especially popular in Holland.
Which is the perfect time to discuss Vance's one panel appearance, late Friday morning. The program book gave the title of the panel as "Aliens, Robots, and Modified Humans" but, as moderator Milton Wolf put it, this was actually the "Jack Vance Conspiracy Panel"; i.e. the conspiracy to get Jack Vance to talk about his work. (At NASFiC in Austin in 1985, the last time I saw Vance, he was reluctant to talk about any subject other than jazz.) The other two panelists, there for the official topic, were JoAnne Pransky and Mel Seesholz.
Vance's use of language, especially the construction of evocative names for cities and planets and people, came under discussion. Vance said he had picked up a smattering of Spanish, French, and German in his travels; he gave amusing examples of the few words the traveler really needs to know. He had also studied Japanese in college, but has forgotten all of it. He has continued reading in linguistics; his classic novel, The Languages of Pao, was inspired by Edward Sapir's theory that language structures the way a society thinks.
In response to a question from the floor, relating to the official topic, Vance said he has made little use of robots in his stories (or of other high-tech devices). As far as writing fiction goes, he said, he doesn't like robots; they're too powerful. Though JoAnne Pransky reminded him of the "Meks" in "The Last Castle": primitive aliens that had been made into something like robots.
Among influences on his work, Vance cited P.G. Wodehouse, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Saki. (The Wodehouse connection helps explain the society of Cadwal, in Araminta Station and Ecce and Old Earth.) He named two books about "Cugel the Clever", The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga, as personal favorites among his own works.
Pastiches of Vance's work had been unfavorably dismissed at the Thursday panel; today Vance was asked about them. He praised Michael Shea's The Quest for Simbilis, though he said Shea had tried too hard to imitate his style. Vance was asked about his background. He said that after a comfortable early life, he had grown up relatively poor during the Depression, living on his grandfather's farm; there were hints of intra-family skulduggery. He went on being poor until he got a job as a rigger (crane operator) at the Kaiser shipyards, on the eve of World War II. When war broke out, he joined the merchant marine rather than be drafted. It was in the relative comfort -- and considerable danger -- of berths on oil tankers that he wrote his classic tale, The Dying Earth.
Vance's eyesight, which had always given him trouble, took a turn for the worse three years ago, when an unsuccessful glaucoma operation left him nearly blind. (At this convention, he was invariably on the arm of his wife, Norma, or his son, John Jr.) He can still write because he has special word processing software that blows up letters until they fill the screen. His wife does the final copy edit.
The food was lousy but the company was fine at the Keynote Luncheon, early Friday afternoon. Spider Robinson introduced Apollo and Shuttle astronaut John Young who, reflecting on the occasion, noted that fifty years ago he was reading H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Young took as his theme the American space program, as it was, as it (optimistically) will be. When the five-and-a-half billion population of the Earth doubles and triples in the next century, we will need what we find in space. He showed slides from his Apollo 16 mission to the Moon; though he warned us that photographs don't do justice to the reality as seen by the human eye, especially the colors. (Once again, the slides were too dim.) "Delightful" was the word Young used to describe the experience of the Moon's low gravity. Someday, he predicted, we will build four and five story buildings on the Moon -- with no stairs! On the other hand, driving a wheeled vehicle on the Moon is like driving on ice.
What is space exploration good for? He put the number of spinoffs at 33,000 including the steering handle that handicapped people now use to drive. Too, the heavily cratered far side of the Moon is a warning: the Earth is playing Russian roulette with "Earth-crossing" asteroids every day. We need a capability to detect and deflect them, lest one end our civilization. He also pointed out that the Moon is particularly useful for its harsh environment. What we learn about surviving on the Moon will teach us how to survive almost anywhere in the solar system.
Friday afternoon saw "Alternate [sic] History Stories", with a sterling panel consisting of: Michael F. Flynn, Harry Turtledove, George Alec Effinger, Bruce Sterling, and S.M. Stirling. The panelists first introduced themselves (though few panels I have seen needed less introduction) and spoke about their connections to the subgenre of alternative history. Bruce Sterling reminded us of his and William Gibson's The Difference Engine and "Mozart in Mirrorshades"; somewhat dismissively he described the attractions of alternative history to the lazy writer: "collage effects ... ready-built stuff ... easy exoticism".
S.M. Stirling, who said he was also known as Steve, or as "that bastard", or as "that fascist bastard", referred us to his Marching Through Georgia and sequels.
Moderator Turtledove got the discussion started by asking the panelists how to tell good alternative history stories from bad. "I wrote them?" quipped Stirling. (Laughter.) Turtledove: "Into which category does that make them fall?" (More laughter.)
Flynn and Bruce Sterling warned writers not to use alternative history as an excuse to run wild. S.M. Stirling gave the example of a story in which Columbus meets Aztecs with helicopters.
Bruce Sterling described the attitude of some writers as, "I suffered for my research. Now it's your turn." Delving too deeply in historical minutiae merely means you leave your readers behind. Turtledove noted that editor Shawna McCarthy had once bounced one of his stories because she couldn't tell where the real history left off and the fiction began. Referring to Turtledove's background in Byzantine history, Sterling characterized alternative history as SF escaping from the future, to Byzantium. Only if you like the idea of having parts of your body chopped off for minor offenses, retorted Turtledove.
All the while Flynn had been making horrible puns, which I blush to record here. After one particularly outrageous utterance, Turtledove said, "You should be ostracized for that!" Effinger: "You hold him, I'll ostracize him!"
Turtledove and S.M. Stirling introduced their remarkable theory explaining the fall of the Soviet Union. Since 1840 every American President elected in a year evenly divisible by twenty has not survived his term in office. That Reagan did, proves we are now living in a low-probability time track!
Flynn noted that statistician Colin Renfrew's economic model of nations had persistently shown the USSR breaking up; to the perplexity of Renfrew, who thought he must be doing something wrong. Effinger said he thought the breakup was a bad thing, and we should stop gloating. "I'm still gloating, I gloat every day!" gloated Bruce Sterling.
Saturday afternoon I saw two panels with Tim Lane, back to back. I was too active a participant in the first, on H. Beam Piper, to have taken many notes. Some of the discussion of the Roland Green/John F. Carr sequels to Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen would have been familiar to FOSFAx readers anyway. One interesting question raised was the ethics of, essentially, making pets of intelligent beings, in Little Fuzzy.
The second panel, on "Trade and Economics", also featured Wall Street maven Susan Shwartz, author Jane Fancher and, arriving late, C.J. Cherryh. The smart SF or fantasy writer ought to be interested in economics, said Shwartz, for both the general culture of a society and its military are impacted by economics; not to mention its importance to alternative history. Several members of the audience brought up the notion that computers -- artificial intelligences -- would actually be doing all the stock trading in the future. Some people seemed to think every trader (with the same hardware) would then be equally competent, but Lane reminded them the computer would be only as good as the program running in it. (This is a distinction laymen often fail to understand.) Human judgment would be involved only in the selection and application of the right AI program, others suggested. On the other hand, Fancher thought AIs would not be able to understand the fads and crazes that influence the market. Hardware is outrunning software; improvement in computer performance will level off for a while.
Back in 1985 at my first convention, NASFic in Austin, I watched John Shirley lead Bruce Sterling on a walkout from a cyberpunk panel, because he (Shirley) had not been permitted to select the panelists. I've never seen anything of comparable oafishness at any SF convention I've attended since that time -- but this panel on anarchy and SF, late Saturday afternoon, came close. (The full title, with which the panelists were rather unhappy, was "Under the Cover of Darkness: Anarchy in SF -- Does It Always Mean Destruction?")
The perpetrators were: filker Leslie Fish, who asked, What's the difference between an anarchist and a libertarian. Answer: about twenty thousand a year. (My impression was she is at the other end of that 20K.) Joel "J. Neil" Rosenberg, the perplexed recipient of a nomination for the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Award for his novel, D'Shai, which he said has no characters named Neil in it. Limited-government libertarian Brad "Neil" Linaweaver, author of Moon of Ice. And as a buffer between Rosenberg and Linaweaver, self-styled "Zen fascist" John Maddox Roberts. Rosenberg and Linaweaver began mixing it up early on. "Thoreau ate at his mom's every day," Rosenberg charged (perhaps in the spirit of those Japanese soldiers who sought to enrage the Americans by yelling, "Babe Ruth sucks!"). Linaweaver saw no hypocrisy in that. Yes, there was, retorted Rosenberg; Thoreau's book gave the false impression of life in "solitude". Fish was smoking as she sat on the panel, but very considerately used a machine to suck up the fumes. Nonetheless an audience member complained. "This is anarchy. If you don't like it, shoot her," sneered Rosenberg. The discussion bogged down on definitions, on disagreements over State-like organizations like the PLO and the Mafia. Fish put forward the standard definition of the State: an organization which holds a monopoly of force in a particular territory. Rosenberg refused to accept this definition, but just as adamantly refused to offer one of his own. Then what's anarchy, asked an exasperated Linaweaver. "The absence of a State," I said sarcastically. And to my surprise, Rosenberg picked up on this: "The absence of a State, whatever that is," he said smugly.
About half way through, the panel was more or less forcibly pulled back to the topic of "Anarchy in SF", as a young couple rose to leave, unless the panel got back on track.
Somebody asked Fish for examples of working anarchies. She named two, the island of Tortuga in the 17th century, ruled (if that's the word) by a council of pirates; and Nestor Makhno's army in Ukraine during the Russian Revolution. Somebody else in the audience offered the more common example, Ireland before the Norman conquest.
Rosenberg said he and Mike McGarry are writing a novel, in which all the Earth's libertarians are dumped on an alien planet, and the history of the planet followed for the next 150 years. He described it as a "thought experiment" -- but then couldn't resist telling us how it comes out: feudalism. Joel, if you've predetermined the conclusion (I remarked), it's not an "experiment"! One might also question the the wisdom of someone who knows so little about a subject writing a book about it. (Rosenberg was uncomprehending, even contemptuous of the distinction between the anarchist and the limited government libertarian. Most if not all of the Founding Fathers were "libertarians" in the latter sense.)
Saturday evening was time for the centerpiece of any Worldcon, the Hugo Awards ceremony. MC Spider Robinson, in top hat and tails, opened the session with Carlinesque wisecracks about the stupidities of modern life and technology.
Andre Norton presented the Gryphon Award, for unpublished fantasy by a woman, to Eleanora Sabin. (With women holding a mere four of the six Hugo novel nominations, the need for a women-only award is obvious!) Forry Ackerman presented the Big Heart Award to Samantha Jeude of the handicap-access organization, "Electric Eggs". This can't be a dream, she remarked; she still has her clothes on! (That remark can be interpreted in more than one way.) As a child, she recalled, she had overheard doctors tell her parents she would never survive to the age of thirty.
Following the First Fandom awards, a fifteen minute slide show remembered the forty-nine previous Worldcons: program book covers, schedules (too small to read), cartoons (too small to read), portraits of a few of the Guests of Honor, covers of Hugo-winning novels. There was no voice-over or captioning; you had to know what you were seeing, to know what you were seeing. As the show reached the 1960s, I hoped the producers would graciously bend a rule and spotlight GoH Jack Vance's Hugo-winning novellas, "The Dragon Masters" and "The Last Castle"; but alas.
Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog, presented the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer to Ted Chiang (accepted by Eileen Gunn); boasting all the while of Analog's role in discovering new writers. (Well, what else does Analog have to boast about.)
With all the minor awards done, we were now ready for the main event. Spider Robinson displayed this year's Hugo rocket, gorgeously gold-plated and containing a piece of the gantry from Cape Canaveral's Pad 26. Fan artist Phil Tortorici, who designed and hand-painted the base of the statuette, took a bow.
The Hugo Awards did not run entirely smooth. In fact, they are likely to go down in fannish legend. As in the opening ceremonies, the slides shown did not always agree with what Spider Robinson was saying. When slides of the fan artist nominees' work were shown, he didn't realize what they were; the winner was Brad Foster. Then Robinson introduced the nominees for best fanzine. Oops! Best fan writer, he meant to say. The inevitable winner, England's Dave Langford, had sent a little acceptance speech which predicted his reaction on being called with the news: "You bastard, I was fast asleep!" The most egregious example was the fanzine Hugo, which was presented to George "Lan" Laskowski for Lan's Lantern even as the slide read, "Mimosa, Dick and Nicki Lynch". The show continued, with the usual Hugo for Locus (semi-prozine). Oddly enough, we saw slides of the artists themselves, and not of their work, as the professional artist nominees were read. Dressed in a white suit, Michael Whelan said, "I feel like a thief [for being singled out as the "best" of so talented a group] ... nonetheless I'll accept it". I had thought a sentimental editor Hugo would go to the retiring Ed Ferman of F&SF, but Gardner Dozois of Asimov's won again.
Then the shocking announcement. The slide had been right all along: the fanzine Hugo winner was Mimosa! A flabbergasted Dick Lynch was brought to the stage, where he announced his wife, Nicki, was "temporarily indisposed". And just in case anyone in the huge audience might have mistaken his meaning, he then proposed that someone be sent to call her from the ladies room. Let's all adjourn to the ladies room, urged Robinson gleefully.
Van Ling of James Cameron's production company accepted Cameron's Hugo for Terminator 2. The Let's-Give-Michael-Whelan-Another-Award award was given to Michael Whelan, for his cover to Joan Vinge's The Summer Queen. Whelan spoke of his enthusiasm for the literature he illustrates. Then Dick and Nicki Lynch finally made their joint appearance: "Thanks, guys!" The nonfiction Hugo went to the "existence challenged" (Robinson's phrase) Charles Addams for The World of Charles Addams. (Comment overheard: "At least it wasn't the cookbook!") Then the fiction Hugos were presented. Geoffrey Landis won for his short story, "A Walk in the Sun", an exemplary Analog story, except that Landis had wisely sent it to Asimov's, or it would not have won. Janet Jeppson Asimov accepted a sentimental Hugo for Isaac Asimov's so-so novelette, "Gold". Nancy Kress added a Hugo to her Nebula for the novella, "Beggars in Spain". (Yay!)
Finally, the big award went to Lois McMaster Bujold for her "favorite book", Barrayar. Bujold is a good little writer but, to put it tactfully, if I wanted to introduce a sophisticated reader to SF, I would not give him one of her books. Well, at least it wasn't Anne McCaffrey, "the Barbara Cartland of SF" (Darrell Schweitzer; the typical McCaffrey fan would treat that as a compliment).
Noon Sunday saw a sizzling panel on "Mercenaries in SF: Eclipse of the Citizen Soldier", with authors Jerry Pournelle, Joel Rosenberg, and S.M. Stirling; DoD intelligence analyist Robert W. Glaub; academic Brad Lyau (who said little). Publisher Jim Baen joined them later. My impression is there were a lot of people in the audience with a military background. Stirling joked about the "deep cultural roots" of the trend described by the panel's title; i.e., Jerry Pournelle and David Drake. In SF, four writers equal a trend!
Pournelle said there was no military SF published during the 1960s. He singlehandedly revived the genre, he said, especially with his series, "The Mercenary". When he described a corrupt society breaking down, and loyalty to a subculture replacing loyalty to the society as a whole, reviewers tended to assume he liked what he was describing. Similarly, when in his Codominium universe he portrayed the logical outcome of the (US-USSR) "convergence thesis", Thomas M. Disch and others thought he was in favor of it. For all the writing he has done about professional soldiers, Pournelle actually prefers the Swiss system, in which every citizen is a soldier and weapon ownership is required. He recounted how the Danes had been embarrassed in 1940 by a very thorough gun registration system which the Nazis used to confiscate all of their guns. So, immediately after the war, the Danish government permitted huge stockpiles of captured German weapons to disappear into the population.
Unfortunately, Pournelle continued, in rejecting the citizen soldier, SF is merely imitating the real world, which also appears to be rejecting the citizen soldier. Later he added: historically, democracies without citizen armies have not survived.
The trouble with a professional army, said Stirling, is that it may be a bigger threat to the State that employs it than external enemies are. For example, Rome never conquered Germany because it feared to concentrate that many men in one theater. He quoted the French Legionary slogan, "The Legion is our fatherland."
(Around this time, Jim Baen came in. He twitted Pournelle over his one-time Leftist sympathies. Pournelle: "I was a Communist, Jim. I was not any lukewarm liberal [like Baen in his youth].")
The great advantage of having a Foreign Legion, said Rosenberg, is that it is expendable. A government can use it and not worry about public reaction to casualties. (He may have been thinking about our prematurely concluded adventure in the Persian Gulf.) Stirling noted there are a lot of East Europeans in the Legion today.
On the subject of what professional soldiers are loyal to, Pournelle noted that to this day British soldiers swear an oath, not to Parliament, but to the Queen. Would they accept an order from the Queen to shoot Parliament, asked Baen. Pournelle: "Hell, yes!"
When President Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of his command in Korea, Pournelle continued, the troops would have followed MacArthur to Washington. He developed a scenario in which MacArthur's troops surround the Capitol and Congress swiftly impeaches the unpopular Truman. This provoked a lot of disagreement, particularly from a military guy in the audience, who felt Pournelle was casting aspersions on the loyalty of the U.S. military. Well, anyway, I would have followed MacArthur, said Pournelle, and my soldiers would have followed me. (Pournelle was an officer in Korea, wounded in action.)
Big wars need citizen armies, said Stirling. In 1914 the British had, man for man, the best soldiers in the world. In the early days of the war they saved the Allied cause from defeat; and in the process they died. On the other hand, a small professional army is just the thing for fighting "colonial" wars. Or Arabs, added Pournelle.
The distinction between a professional army and a mercenary army was raised. From the floor a British soldier told the panel that his buddies in the Persian Gulf felt like mercenaries, in the pay of the Arabs and Japanese. Glaub said it is possible to have your cake and eat it, too. Today's U.S. military combines professional combat troops with citizen soldiers in support.
When military technology is easy to learn, suggested a member of the audience, we have citizen armies; when it is hard, we have professionals. Pournelle felt it is possible to have a competent citizen army, but the price is high: universal service.
On another subject, Pournelle praised Reagan for having the wisdom to get out of Beirut, after those 300 Marines were killed. He worries Bush will get bogged down in Yugoslavia.
Early Sunday afternoon, Jack Williamson, Robert Silverberg, and Ray Aldridge, representing three generations of fantasists, discussed "The Far Future: Where Fantasy Meets SF".
Silverberg recalled the enormous impression Williamson's far future tale, "The Stone from the Green Star", had made on him when he encountered it as a boy. He loves it in memory, he said, but would never reread it. Williamson said he had recently looked at the story, and "there's nothing there". It was the reader who created the magic himself.
Reflecting the title of the panel, Silverberg praised the far-future novel for its "wonderful irresponsibility". We're "beyond the realm of rationality when we're beyond the 800th millenium." He attacked the generic fantasy trilogy for not having that "irresponsibility"; for being all too predictable, a "worthless experience for the reader and the writer", with its "Merlin, now called Gandalf, now called something else."
How does a writer depict the world of the far future? Silverberg recalled Jack Vance's classic fantasy, The Dying Earth. Vance solved the problem of showing the reader the strange world of 1,000,000 A.D. by making it look a bit like the strange world of Baghdad in the 11th century. The "basic human verities ... passions" remain the same, said Aldridge, though he noted depictions of the far future are often horrific. Silverberg cited Austrian author Franz Werfel's 1946 novel, The Star of the Unborn, as an example of a future so strange as to horrify.
Not everything changes, it was noted from the floor; a medieval peasant brought forward 1000 years would find the Pope still in Rome, for example. After the panel, Silverberg had a good laugh when I reminded him of Jack Vance's "Demon Princes" series in which, as a bit of background information, we learn that people in the 35th century go on pilgrimages to see the Sacred Shin of Kalzibah in the Earth's religious center, Edmonton.
Sunday afternoon, Jerry Pournelle asked an overcrowded room, "If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can't We Put a Man on the Moon?" He opened his talk by apologizing for his "artilleryman's ear", a selective deafness earned in Korea which often leaves him talking too loud; and by humorously bullying the audience: "You don't get any books signed until you've heard me out." Pournelle explained why the billion-dollar tether experiment on a recent flight had failed. Regulations demanded that a small bolt in the unwinding mechanism be replaced with a larger bolt, even though the mechanism had never been tested with the larger bolt.
He gave a brief overview of the American space program. John F. Kennedy needed something to distract the public from the Bay of Pigs disaster -- but he was also a visionary. Lyndon Johnson's eye, as always, was on the pork barrel; the price of his political support was the reindustrialization of the South. (Somebody bumped against the light switch in the crowded room and the lights briefly went out. "Did NASA pay you to do that?" cracked Pournelle.) Otherwise Apollo could have been much simpler. And having created an army of 28,000 with nothing to do, NASA then dreamed up the space shuttle to give them all something to do. The SR-71 Blackbird had 48 people in support of every flight; NASA has 22,000 people supporting the four shuttles, at a cost of one billion dollars a flight. It should be four or five million, said Pournelle. The Citizens Advisory Board on Space Policy, which Pournelle chairs, determined to design a spacecraft as easy to support and maintain as an airliner. They came up with a "saveable rocket" called the Delta Clipper, a wingless, blunt cone weighing forty to fifty thousand pounds empty and half a million full. It could take off from any airport in the U.S. -- a space port in every Congressional district! -- and would land on its thrusters. Ten years before something similar had been suggested, but then the needed microcomputers had not been available.
Pournelle, rocket builder Max Hunter, and Gen. Daniel O. Graham (of "High Frontier" fame) talked to the Vice President in the White House for an hour. Quayle referred the proposal to NASA, which of course told him it couldn't be done. (NASA bears the same relationship to space flight, that the FDA does to pharmaceutical development, I later reflected; i.e., they try to stop as much of it as they can.) Fortunately Pournelle was able to learn what had happened, and answered NASA's objections, which were based on old work. Quayle could have accepted NASA's finding, Pournelle said, but instead to his great credit he stuck his neck out and sent the issue to an impartial panel. The result: McDonnell-Douglas is building a one-third size prototype which will be tested in suborbital flights.
Sunday evening, the Masquerade opened with the usual announcement forbidding flash photography. !!FLASH!! Immediately spotlights pin the offender, who is grabbed and carried from the hall. The Masters of Ceremony, Richard and Wolf Foss, introduced Ann Howland, who announced the death the day before of Fritz Leiber.
I'll describe a few of the more memorable entries. But first, two general observations. The stage was not high enough; there was a great deal of head craning and swaying as people in the large audience struggled to see, occasionally rising to their feet. Filking had invaded the masquerade to a greater extent than I had ever seen before, with varied results. A great many items were humorous. "Portions of this masquerade need to be subtitled for the humor-impaired," said the M.C.
"For Relief of Periodic Distress": a bottle of Midol chases a bunch of rambunctious elements from the Periodic Table off the stage. "Costumer's Nightmare": a complicated medievalistic tableau literally falls apart on stage. "After the Ball": several ladies fight over a handsome prince; meanwhile he exits with the dumpy maid. "Bad Ballet": a pas de deux by the girl hippo and guy croc from Walt Disney's "Dance of the Hours". In a more serious vein, "Heroes": a little boy opens two "Dorsai" books by Gordon Dickson to reveal Amanda and Michael, as the narrator eloquently tells of their importance to him. "St. Alia of the Knife": a costume becomes a gorgeous stained glass window.
The next day, in a nearby restaurant, I happened to talk to some of the people who worked the masquerade behind the scenes. Some of the entries had to be rushed to the stage unexpectedly, as the MCs announced them out of the proper order. (This explains some of the odd delays I'd seen.) Running Glasgow's three-man sea serpent, Nessie, up two flights of stairs in the dark was fondly remembered.
Early Monday afternoon, Jim Baen gave a little talk, mostly for the benefit of the aspiring writer. One may look forward to perhaps 20 to 25 thousand, or even as few as 18 thousand copies shipped of a first or second novel. The industry average is 50% returns, though Baen was proud to say his company averages 30%. In spite of everything, he said most Baen authors are making a living, after a few books.
Somehow the question of censorship and John Norman came up. "The vile and foul-minded John Norman has not been actively blacklisted," Baen said. "I find his works moderately loathesome," he continued. "I don't want the reputation of my company associated with that. ... He should be published by a pornographer." On the other hand, Norman is an "accomplished writer" (I disagreed vehemently), and Baen would publish him if his ideas were different. "I publish what I like," said Baen. He looks for protagonists which the target audience will either identify with or wish to emulate. Curiously, he seemed to advise fantasy writers not to try to be too original. As he put it, twenty years ago writers knew about the Aztecs and tried writing about them, but the books failed with the audience.
I asked him about Roger MacBride Allen's dazzling Orphans of Creation. Had this very atypical Baen Book failed to find its audience, because it was neither a fantasy nor military SF? (A later Allen book concerning political intrigue was packaged to look like military SF.) But Baen denied his company's reputation, if any, could affect a book this way; and anyway, the book had not done badly. He has a point, in that most readers do not pay attention to publishers.
Many publishers complain the stores do not keep books on the shelves long enough. Baen offered the heretical notion that books do not turn over fast enough. The good books are sold; what's left are the bad ones. The worst 30% dominates the racks, he said.
On another subject, Baen suggested just a little of the credit for the Evil Empire's fall has to go to Jerry Pournelle, for using his Citizens Advisory Board to promote strategic defense within the Reagan Administration. When Reagan said the intent was "to kill missiles instead of little girls", he was borrowing a line by Baen from the Board's report.
The longest Closing Ceremonies I have ever encountered began late Monday afternoony. Con chairman Joe Siclari introduced the major guests (except Vance, who was not present) and his department heads. The "gripe session" he had just attended, said Siclari, had more praise than gripes. (This was indeed a well-run convention.) Then the con committee sprang a surprise on its chairman.
"Sit down, you swarthy Italian devil, and let me speak," said Vincent DiFate. "In spite of all his deficiencies as a human being," DiFate presented Siclari with a plaque and, because a con chair may not be awarded a Hugo, a "Mickey" instead; that is, a Mickey Mouse doll to stand on the plaque. A long time was taken collecting all sorts of convention junk for a time capsule to be unsealed at the 100th world SF convention in 2042: books, souvenirs, bid materials, a miniature golf mallet, Ben Yalow's bow tie, a Hugo Award. A carton of Scotch was handed in; instead of a bottle it was filled with memorabilia from British conventions. (Fifty years from now, said Siclari, somebody's going to be very disappointed!) Siclari was given a pith helmet to replace his hat, seized for the time capsule. His very gavel was snatched from his hand, and he banged the convention to a close with one of the wooden mallets.
Which was not the end of the ceremony, as he passed it to next year's Worldcon chairman. The ConFrancisco committe marched in, waving flags, and we watched a slide show about San Francisco. Fortune cookies were distributed. Mine read: "You will have a memorable hedonistic experience at ConFrancisco."
The art show was overflowing with good stuff.
Once again Omar Rayyan, an artist I have praised many times before, provided things to surprise and delight, including "The 1642 Invasion of the Beanie Penguins from Outer Space", and a Botticelli "Venus Rising Over Mars", accompanied by cherubs in space helments.
Joe Bergeron's "Tsais Calls on Mazirian" was notable for its striking color and design. Based on an episode from Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, it shows the beautiful Tsais silhouetted in the window of a castle as Mazirian engages in wizardry below.
Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" has been depicted many times, but never the way Jim Burns did it here. The stories on the man's back and left shoulder look just about ready to come to life. Burns also had a nice wraparound cover for Jack Vance's "Durdane Trilogy".
Steve Crisp's "Trullion: Alastor 2262" was another work based on a Vance book. A huge moon looms over a swamp with strange trees; what the Starship Enterprise is doing there, I have no idea.
A shaman is the subject of Diana Harlan Stein's "Go Ahead and Laugh -- But the System Hasn't Crashed Since He Started Working Here". Only it's a shaman who wears electronic accouterments, as he dances before a "computer" (i.e., an old-fashioned tape drive). Stein, a talented amateur, wisely averted his face as, judging from her other work displayed here, this is the one area where she still needs a little improvement.
British artist Mark Harrison displayed two splendid panels. I may not have recognized the name, but I remembered his work, for all that I'd only seen it miniaturized for paperback. "Walkabout Woman" (for the novel by Michaela Rossner) shows an abo woman overlooking a vast landscape of red rock, as a flying, translucent snake hovers in the air before her. In "Demon Drums" (novel by Carol Severance), on the other hand, it is a Polynesian woman with an elaborately tattooed back who stands amid the palms of a South Sea island. Other works were on more conventional fantasy themes, but always beautifully done.
Another cover I recognized was Barclay Shaw's surrealistic wraparound for Spectrum 3. This time, the painting as it appeared on the (trade) paperback never drew my attention, though I own the book. For example, I never noticed that the green continent seen through the clouds of a blue Earth globe is in the shape of a human embryo.
Lisanne Lake provided three colorful panels of toothy monsters. A Tyrannosaur's head in bright red, yellow and white with black markings tells the awful "Truth About Birds and Dinosaurs". It's a book-lover's nightmare in "A Troll of Sherwood Forest, Part 2", as huge pink bookworms burst out of a mass of collapsed bookshelves and attack a -- wizard? -- in top hat and torn denim.
It is dusk in Paul Youll's "Serpent Catch", as Neanderthals with torches lead a huge wagon pulled by two mammoths. Behind them glow the windows of a town cut into a hillside. Stephen Youll's "The Broken Land" is set at sunset, in an organic-looking city of ceramics. A woman sits on the railing of a tower, looking across the city and an intervening valley to another, spiny-towered city; as black helicopters like predatory insects approach. Judging from his display, Kelly Freas shows no sign of retiring. A Hugo rocket blasts off its base, in the cover for the "Super-Hugos" anthology (Baen), as a little Freas female in brass bikini and bubble helmet gestures with alarm; books, rayguns, propeller beanies, balloons (labeled FIAWOL and FIJAGDH) float all around.
Part of the art show was reserved for a retrospective of great (?) SF and fantasy art. The overall theme or plan of this display was not immediately evident; it didn't help that some of the works were not labeled. One very interesting juxtaposition was Michael Whelan's "John Carter of Mars", from the 1980s Ballantine edition of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series, and Rudolph Belarski's "Synthetic Men of Mars", the original 1939 Argosy cover for that work. Both show a man and woman riding a huge bird. In Whelan's version, the man is white-skinned and the woman is red, just as ERB had described. In Belarski's version, the woman is white-skinned and the man is red; perhaps in keeping with a tradition as old as ancient Egypt. A special resale area was set up for Florida art lovers creamed by the hurricane. One such was Paul Cordsmeyer, who put up a sign which read, "This Artwork Survived Ground Zero, Hurricane Andrew." Among the works he was selling was "Two Hunters" by Eric Ladd, featuring a woman in a brass breastplate and a young girl, eleven or twelve, without one. On the bid sheet, in place of a bid, someone had written, "This is an inexcusable exploitation of a girl child." Dang, those feminists won't let anybody have any fun!
A relatively small number of 3D works were displayed. "Protecting the Motherland from Hordes of Invaders" read the subtitle of Ken Grimes' pink military spacecraft model, "Dalkon Defender" ("based on the Dalkon Shield I.U.D.", the overly-helpful label explained).
Sabrina Yarema-Chyzy (and six other people) created the delightful "The Fan's Bedroom". In a box 17 inches wide (by 11 by 11), we see a brass four-poster with a crocheted comforter and a lit lamp on the nightstand, a desk with a PC; prints on the walls, miniature sculptures -- dragons, unicorns -- on bookshelves, with a phonograph and microscope; strewn everywhere, books with the real covers, photoreduced, and lettered spines; a bag of potato chips spilled on the needlepoint rug (by Vonda MacIntyre).
At first, the dealer's room seemed small for a worldcon, but that turned out to be largely an illusion. In honor of Jack Vance, the various sections were named after geographic locations in his work, like Lyonnesse and Krokinole.
When I spoke with Mrs. Vance at the second autograph session, I mentioned to her that two years before I had sent a recorded book to Mr. Vance via his publisher, Underwood-Miller, for his birthday, and had never received any acknowledgement. She had no recollection of the matter. The matter was finally resolved, in a surprising way, when I walked up to the Underwood-Miller table in the dealers room. When Chuck Miller saw my badge, he accosted me in high dudgeon: What did I mean by sending him books to be autographed by Vance! ?!?!, I replied. It turned out he never even opened the package, and did not recall the telephone conversation we'd had. The upshot is, Vance will get his birthday present two years late. (When I consider what happened to an unidentified package left on Stephen King's doorstep -- a copy of It was blown up by the bomb squad -- I don't feel too bad.)
I was amused to see for sale signed copies of "Darrell Schweitzer books -- We deny the rumor that unsigned Schweitzer books are scarcer!" Schweitzer later admitted to me that he wrote this himself.
There were two Vance autograph session, lasting nearly four hours all together. Evidently many people had the same idea I had, that this might be the only chance we'd ever have to get a Vance autograph. Nearly blind, Vance had to have someone put his finger on the part of the page he was to sign. Then he would orient his pen by touching it to that finger, which grew quite ink-stained after a while.
I hung around a bit at the second session and got the opportunity to talk with Norma Vance at some length while she waited for the autographing to finish. I gave her some pointers about what to see and what to avoid at the Disney amusement parks, where I had spent three days just before the convention. Then as the autographing wound down and just about everybody had gone, I listened to Vance talk some more about his early life and academic career. He had begun by studying mining engineering, then switched to physics; but the people around him were all "dried up" and he couldn't see himself spending his life with them.
I attended a great many good parties and dinners, among them the ones given by FOSFAX. But I'll let Tim Lane tell you about them.--Taras Wolansky
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