a worldcon report
Aug. 14th, 2009 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sergebroomAt last.
My worldcon report, or what I did from Thursday, August 6, until Monday, August 10.
In a nutshell, I had a great time. I didn’t go to that many panels, for various reasons, one of which is that I felt morally obligated to pay worldcons back for all their hard work by doing some volunteering.
But let’s begin at the beginning.
Thursday:
I left from Québec City early, to avoid the morning’s traffic. Less than 3 hours later, I was at the Garry Trudeau Int’l Airport to take my rental car back to the Enterprise concession. I was a bit annoyed to find that, even though I had signed up for the option of not having to bring the car back with a full tank, that didn’t show up in their records. They made up for it by charging me for a half-tank of gas. The next annoyance was when I took the shuttle back to the city. I had asked which one would take me to the Delta Centre-Ville Hotel, but my destination turned out to be the sort-of Greyhound bus station about 2 miles away. Luckily it was sunny.
Not long after I had checked in at the hotel, Doug Faunt, my roommate, showed up so I didn’t have to wait any further. I went down to the lobby, since that was the only place where the wifi access was free. They eventually waived the rom access’s charge for all con goers by Saturday morning. I don’t know if that was to make up for the party-shutdown fiasco. Anyway, I posted a bunch of entries on my blog and checked my mail then, after taking my brick-heavy laptop back to the room, I walked a few blocks over to the con and got my membership and the affiliated goodies. It was a bit after 12pm, I think. I kept running into buddies & buddettes from Making Light. While we were sitting around with Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a discussion of fannish fashion happened. I mentioned that, due to the way I dress at cons, people sometimes give me the Glance. You know, someone walks by, but furtively looks at your badge. In my case, that’s probably because they think I’m a Pro.
At about 4pm, I left the con, because of a party that a Québec paperback publisher was giving in the Old Port. One fourth of the way into that lengthy walk, it started raining, and yours truly was umbrella-less. By the time I got to the party, I was soaked, but there was no way I’d turn back and miss the event: it’d be the only chance I’d have to meet Norbert Spehner, original editor of Solaris, back in 1974, and whose publication basically crystallized francophone fandom into existence, with its first con being held in 1979. Nobert and I had not met in decades, and the next day he’d be leaving for a long fishing trip. Norbert isn’t involved in SF much, but we had a fun conversation about western movies and compared notes about our favorite directors. I mentioned to him that there is one Anthony Mann movie that’s seldom shown, but which he should look into - The Tall Target, about a man called Kennedy trying to foil an assassination attempt against Abe Lincoln. The party went on for a few hours. Still, I wasn’t able to see my friend Elisabeth Vonarburg much at that party (or at the rest of the con) because her being a worldcon GoH meant commitments elsewhere.
By the time the party was over, the rain had stopped. I went back to the hotel, put on fresh clothes, then returned to the worldcon by 9pm. That was when Paul Krugman and Charles Stross were going to have their talk on stage. The place was packed. I again met TexAnne, saw that Xeger was already there so I introduced them to each other. (They had exchanged posts on Making Light but never met.) TexAnne was dismayed when lights were dimmed as the Talk began because it made it hard for her to see the black wool she was knitting something out of. I never heard her go ouch during the talk’s first hour so I guess her night vision is better than she expected. I had to leave before the Talk was over, due to a birthday party for Elisabeth. I think I turned in not long after that.
Friday:
I went to some panels. There was a Q&A session where Neil Gaiman confessed that, when he discovered the TV version of The Addams Family, Morticia immediately supplanted Bewitched’s Samantha as the object of his youthful love.
Paul Krugman had a solo panel where he talked about how he became an economist. He really wanted to be a psychohistorian, but that wasn’t an option. He also talked about Health Care’s reform. If I remember correctly, he compared the proposals to Rube Goldberg contraptions. BUT. He also suggested that anything that gets implemented would be a foot in the door, and gave the example of Massachusetts's system: it had problems, but it made people realize that something like it wasn't such a bad idea so, instead of throwing the whole thing away, they decided to try and fix it.
That day, I developed a scientific hypothesis.
As mentioned earlier, on Thursday I kept running into some of the same people in spite of the size of the con center. True, it wasn’t anywhere near as big as Denver’s, but still it wasn’t tiny. On Friday though, the rate of metaphorical collisions dropped drastically and I asked myself why that would be. I reminded nyself that this was the con’s 2nd day, and its first full day. There was now more stuff going on and people had figured out where they wanted to be, and had stopped wandering around the corridor like lost souls. Of course, the moment I formulated that hypothesis, TexAnne and I ran into each other again and again and again. Mind you, I’m not complaining. Far from it. We went to the dealer’s room, where I pointed out some French F/SF books that might interest her. There were many small presses, but few used-book dealers, and none of them carried Paul Di Filippo’s Steampunk Trilogy. Drat. I did get Serliss’s 1898’s Edison’s War of the Worlds.
Later I almost gave myself a heart attack. TexAnne and I had been sitting to chat at some table near the artshow so I took my backpack off, and hanged it to the back of my chair. Thirty minutes after we got up and went our separate ways, I noticed that I wasn’t carrying my backpack. I rushed back very fast. The backpack was still hanging to that chair, but someone had simply pushed the chair away. Not only was my passport still in its pocket, but so was my money and my memory stick.
Phew!
By supper time, I went over to the room of Kathryn from Sunnyvale at the Delta Centre-Ville to help with her Making Light party. My contribution consisted mostly of slicing lemons and grapefruits, but not my fingers, with her ceramic knife. The party started on time, with just a few people trickling in at first, but it got more crowded fairly quickly. It was my chance to finally meet many more ML people, including Skwid, Xopher, Kayjayoh, Marna Nightingale and Nicole Leboeuf-Little. People were quite amused by Joel Polowin’s giant stuffed squid, and by Kathryn’s dinosaurs doing the sodomy thing. Things were in full swing when we were told that the hotel was shutting the party down because it wasn’t on the party floor. Mind you, those idiots had given that room to Kathryn knowing that she needed it for a party, and after they had repeatedly changed the room she could use (which is why I had to pepper the voodoo board with pins to tell specific people where they reallyreallyreally should go for the celebrations). To say that this was upsetting was an understatement. The hotel ‘graciously’ said we could use one of their basement’s conference rooms, and we did that eventually, but by then most attendees had scattered. Brad, Kathryn’s Significant Other, did manage to round some people up and we had a good time. By 4am, we called it a night. I was bummed that I wasn’t able to say goodbye to Abi, who was attending online from Holland, because the laptop being carried from one person to the other decided to have its battery run out just then. Paula Lieberman posted a comment on ML to tell Abi what had happened. So off to bed we went. Of course I woke up 3 hours later. And began my 3rd day at the con.
Saturday:
After dragging myself to the Van Houtte concession for some breakfast and caffeine, I wandered around. I attended some panels. Little bumping into familiar people occurred although I finally managed to connect with my friend Susan de Guardiola. Most of the day revolved around my being involved in Lisa Ashton’s masquerade presentation “Twilight of the Gods”. Susan had recommended me to Lisa as being reliable, which is how I wound up being the ninja who carried the antelope-headed Egyptian god on stage. My actual costuming contributions (demonstrating how to make a ninja hood out of a t-shirt, and showing one of the group’s young ladies how to tie a tie) were humble ones, but it was all fun. Everything worked, nobody missed a cue and no Egyptian god’s head rolled off the stage and into the audience. The judges’s deliberations took longer than the actual masquerade, but that’s ok. While that was going on, Bugs Bunny cartoons were shown on the masquerade’s screen. Lisa won an award. We took her stuff back to her hotel, had an wrapup party with Susan and with Sandy & Pierre Pettinger, costumers whose own presentation was inspired by Charlie Brown’s Halloween Special, with Pierre playing the part of the Great Pumpkin’s patch.
Another day that ended with yours truly going to sleep much later than he is used to, but not regretting one minute of it.
Sunday:
That day was my good-deed day, wherein I volunteered to help the con. I had thought it'd mean running around the place so I decided against lugging my laptop with me and against bringing any reading material besides Asimov's latest issue, which I was almost done with. Of course I wound up being assigned gatekeeper duty at the ASFA suite. Only one person showed up to enjoy the food during those 4 hours. Oh well. I took a sort-of nap.
After that, I met a bunch of friends from my francophone-fandom days then we each went our separate ways. I managed to get Susan de Guardiola and TexAnne to finally meet. After that, I went back to my hotel to put on my steampunk scientist’s outfit because I was going to be an usher at the Hugo Ceremonies. That meant making sure that only pros sat in the front-center area. When the whole thing started, there were enough free seats left in that section that Susan and I were able to sit there. After the Awards were over, Susan did a tour of duty at the Hugo-loser party. Bill Higgins and I had a nice long chat about all kinds of things, including his contribution to the adventures of Agatha Heterodyne. He also recommended proto-steampunk novel Queen Victoria’s Bomb, published in 1968. We were still at it when Susan came out of the Hugo-loser party so the three of us wandered over to the con suite, where we got our memberships for 2011’s worldcon in Reno. I received many compliments about my outfit, and some people even took photos. I wish I had thought of having one taken of Bill and I. I met writer Michelle Sagara-West, whom I knew from when I lived in Toronto in the mid-1980s. I managed to make her run away in horror, reducing her to a gibbering remnant of humanity, simply by explaining my wife's absence from the con with two dreaded words – writing deadlines.
Monday:
I flew back to Reality.
My worldcon report, or what I did from Thursday, August 6, until Monday, August 10.
In a nutshell, I had a great time. I didn’t go to that many panels, for various reasons, one of which is that I felt morally obligated to pay worldcons back for all their hard work by doing some volunteering.
But let’s begin at the beginning.
Thursday:
I left from Québec City early, to avoid the morning’s traffic. Less than 3 hours later, I was at the Garry Trudeau Int’l Airport to take my rental car back to the Enterprise concession. I was a bit annoyed to find that, even though I had signed up for the option of not having to bring the car back with a full tank, that didn’t show up in their records. They made up for it by charging me for a half-tank of gas. The next annoyance was when I took the shuttle back to the city. I had asked which one would take me to the Delta Centre-Ville Hotel, but my destination turned out to be the sort-of Greyhound bus station about 2 miles away. Luckily it was sunny.
Not long after I had checked in at the hotel, Doug Faunt, my roommate, showed up so I didn’t have to wait any further. I went down to the lobby, since that was the only place where the wifi access was free. They eventually waived the rom access’s charge for all con goers by Saturday morning. I don’t know if that was to make up for the party-shutdown fiasco. Anyway, I posted a bunch of entries on my blog and checked my mail then, after taking my brick-heavy laptop back to the room, I walked a few blocks over to the con and got my membership and the affiliated goodies. It was a bit after 12pm, I think. I kept running into buddies & buddettes from Making Light. While we were sitting around with Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a discussion of fannish fashion happened. I mentioned that, due to the way I dress at cons, people sometimes give me the Glance. You know, someone walks by, but furtively looks at your badge. In my case, that’s probably because they think I’m a Pro.
At about 4pm, I left the con, because of a party that a Québec paperback publisher was giving in the Old Port. One fourth of the way into that lengthy walk, it started raining, and yours truly was umbrella-less. By the time I got to the party, I was soaked, but there was no way I’d turn back and miss the event: it’d be the only chance I’d have to meet Norbert Spehner, original editor of Solaris, back in 1974, and whose publication basically crystallized francophone fandom into existence, with its first con being held in 1979. Nobert and I had not met in decades, and the next day he’d be leaving for a long fishing trip. Norbert isn’t involved in SF much, but we had a fun conversation about western movies and compared notes about our favorite directors. I mentioned to him that there is one Anthony Mann movie that’s seldom shown, but which he should look into - The Tall Target, about a man called Kennedy trying to foil an assassination attempt against Abe Lincoln. The party went on for a few hours. Still, I wasn’t able to see my friend Elisabeth Vonarburg much at that party (or at the rest of the con) because her being a worldcon GoH meant commitments elsewhere.
By the time the party was over, the rain had stopped. I went back to the hotel, put on fresh clothes, then returned to the worldcon by 9pm. That was when Paul Krugman and Charles Stross were going to have their talk on stage. The place was packed. I again met TexAnne, saw that Xeger was already there so I introduced them to each other. (They had exchanged posts on Making Light but never met.) TexAnne was dismayed when lights were dimmed as the Talk began because it made it hard for her to see the black wool she was knitting something out of. I never heard her go ouch during the talk’s first hour so I guess her night vision is better than she expected. I had to leave before the Talk was over, due to a birthday party for Elisabeth. I think I turned in not long after that.
Friday:
I went to some panels. There was a Q&A session where Neil Gaiman confessed that, when he discovered the TV version of The Addams Family, Morticia immediately supplanted Bewitched’s Samantha as the object of his youthful love.
Paul Krugman had a solo panel where he talked about how he became an economist. He really wanted to be a psychohistorian, but that wasn’t an option. He also talked about Health Care’s reform. If I remember correctly, he compared the proposals to Rube Goldberg contraptions. BUT. He also suggested that anything that gets implemented would be a foot in the door, and gave the example of Massachusetts's system: it had problems, but it made people realize that something like it wasn't such a bad idea so, instead of throwing the whole thing away, they decided to try and fix it.
That day, I developed a scientific hypothesis.
As mentioned earlier, on Thursday I kept running into some of the same people in spite of the size of the con center. True, it wasn’t anywhere near as big as Denver’s, but still it wasn’t tiny. On Friday though, the rate of metaphorical collisions dropped drastically and I asked myself why that would be. I reminded nyself that this was the con’s 2nd day, and its first full day. There was now more stuff going on and people had figured out where they wanted to be, and had stopped wandering around the corridor like lost souls. Of course, the moment I formulated that hypothesis, TexAnne and I ran into each other again and again and again. Mind you, I’m not complaining. Far from it. We went to the dealer’s room, where I pointed out some French F/SF books that might interest her. There were many small presses, but few used-book dealers, and none of them carried Paul Di Filippo’s Steampunk Trilogy. Drat. I did get Serliss’s 1898’s Edison’s War of the Worlds.
Later I almost gave myself a heart attack. TexAnne and I had been sitting to chat at some table near the artshow so I took my backpack off, and hanged it to the back of my chair. Thirty minutes after we got up and went our separate ways, I noticed that I wasn’t carrying my backpack. I rushed back very fast. The backpack was still hanging to that chair, but someone had simply pushed the chair away. Not only was my passport still in its pocket, but so was my money and my memory stick.
Phew!
By supper time, I went over to the room of Kathryn from Sunnyvale at the Delta Centre-Ville to help with her Making Light party. My contribution consisted mostly of slicing lemons and grapefruits, but not my fingers, with her ceramic knife. The party started on time, with just a few people trickling in at first, but it got more crowded fairly quickly. It was my chance to finally meet many more ML people, including Skwid, Xopher, Kayjayoh, Marna Nightingale and Nicole Leboeuf-Little. People were quite amused by Joel Polowin’s giant stuffed squid, and by Kathryn’s dinosaurs doing the sodomy thing. Things were in full swing when we were told that the hotel was shutting the party down because it wasn’t on the party floor. Mind you, those idiots had given that room to Kathryn knowing that she needed it for a party, and after they had repeatedly changed the room she could use (which is why I had to pepper the voodoo board with pins to tell specific people where they reallyreallyreally should go for the celebrations). To say that this was upsetting was an understatement. The hotel ‘graciously’ said we could use one of their basement’s conference rooms, and we did that eventually, but by then most attendees had scattered. Brad, Kathryn’s Significant Other, did manage to round some people up and we had a good time. By 4am, we called it a night. I was bummed that I wasn’t able to say goodbye to Abi, who was attending online from Holland, because the laptop being carried from one person to the other decided to have its battery run out just then. Paula Lieberman posted a comment on ML to tell Abi what had happened. So off to bed we went. Of course I woke up 3 hours later. And began my 3rd day at the con.
Saturday:
After dragging myself to the Van Houtte concession for some breakfast and caffeine, I wandered around. I attended some panels. Little bumping into familiar people occurred although I finally managed to connect with my friend Susan de Guardiola. Most of the day revolved around my being involved in Lisa Ashton’s masquerade presentation “Twilight of the Gods”. Susan had recommended me to Lisa as being reliable, which is how I wound up being the ninja who carried the antelope-headed Egyptian god on stage. My actual costuming contributions (demonstrating how to make a ninja hood out of a t-shirt, and showing one of the group’s young ladies how to tie a tie) were humble ones, but it was all fun. Everything worked, nobody missed a cue and no Egyptian god’s head rolled off the stage and into the audience. The judges’s deliberations took longer than the actual masquerade, but that’s ok. While that was going on, Bugs Bunny cartoons were shown on the masquerade’s screen. Lisa won an award. We took her stuff back to her hotel, had an wrapup party with Susan and with Sandy & Pierre Pettinger, costumers whose own presentation was inspired by Charlie Brown’s Halloween Special, with Pierre playing the part of the Great Pumpkin’s patch.
Another day that ended with yours truly going to sleep much later than he is used to, but not regretting one minute of it.
Sunday:
That day was my good-deed day, wherein I volunteered to help the con. I had thought it'd mean running around the place so I decided against lugging my laptop with me and against bringing any reading material besides Asimov's latest issue, which I was almost done with. Of course I wound up being assigned gatekeeper duty at the ASFA suite. Only one person showed up to enjoy the food during those 4 hours. Oh well. I took a sort-of nap.
After that, I met a bunch of friends from my francophone-fandom days then we each went our separate ways. I managed to get Susan de Guardiola and TexAnne to finally meet. After that, I went back to my hotel to put on my steampunk scientist’s outfit because I was going to be an usher at the Hugo Ceremonies. That meant making sure that only pros sat in the front-center area. When the whole thing started, there were enough free seats left in that section that Susan and I were able to sit there. After the Awards were over, Susan did a tour of duty at the Hugo-loser party. Bill Higgins and I had a nice long chat about all kinds of things, including his contribution to the adventures of Agatha Heterodyne. He also recommended proto-steampunk novel Queen Victoria’s Bomb, published in 1968. We were still at it when Susan came out of the Hugo-loser party so the three of us wandered over to the con suite, where we got our memberships for 2011’s worldcon in Reno. I received many compliments about my outfit, and some people even took photos. I wish I had thought of having one taken of Bill and I. I met writer Michelle Sagara-West, whom I knew from when I lived in Toronto in the mid-1980s. I managed to make her run away in horror, reducing her to a gibbering remnant of humanity, simply by explaining my wife's absence from the con with two dreaded words – writing deadlines.
Monday:
I flew back to Reality.
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