NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/alt/peeves/12621

Text File | 1992-07-29 | 16.6 KB | 303 lines

Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Path: sparky!uunet!scorn!scolex!charless
From: [e-mail] (charles stross)
Subject: The SF convention from Hell^h^h^hastings
Organization: The Somewhat Contagious Operation, Inc.
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 07:58:17 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Summary: There IS a fate worse than death; it's reserved for sf fans ...
Sender: [e-mail] (Account for Usenet System)
Lines: 291


[[ I tried posting this via demon on Monday. Lo, the demon service --
which normally posts within a few hours -- seems not to be working.
I've waited a couple of days and checked news at two sites; if you
get to read this twice it's just Murphy's Law in action ... ]]

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You'll have to excuse me if I'm a bit incoherent. I've just had
one of the weirdest weekends in living memory. Not to mention the
most peevesome.

I blame R.K. This person -- a shock-haired transsexual giant deisel
dyke with serious publishing connections -- is almost certainly
responsible for everything. When infamous sf author Dave Langford
couldn't make George Hay's tiny convention in Hastings, George
asked R.K. who he could get to speak at short notice; and she
pointed the finger of doom at _me_. Don't ask me why. I suspect
the thought of delivering me up to George Hay simply tickled her
funny-bone. Through long experience, she knew what was likely to
happen. I didn't; hence this mega-peevesome peeve.

(Digression the first: Dave Langford pulled out because his
brother was getting married that Saturday at short notice.
Dave's a wily old bird and probably knew exactly what was going
to happen to anything that George Hay was responsible for
organizing. I wonder how much arm-twisting he had to do to get
the sick note? Damn.)

Anyway, I should have been more careful. I already knew enough
about George to have misgivings, but I guess I'm an optimist
and I somehow contrived to ignore my better judgement. George is
the _ne_ plus_ultra_ of the english eccentric. He's in his late
sixties, and with his bald spot, beak of a nose, and fly-away
hair he resembles an amiable but half-starved vulture wearing a
hearing aid. He bills himself as a futures consultant, writes
incredibly convoluted academic papers about the semiotic
consequences of the Wellsian weltanschauung, and has a touching
-- some would say, evangelical -- faith in the ability of Science
Fiction to Save the World. He also founded the SF Foundation, the
only academic instution studying SF in the UK, so I suppose he's
worth listening to. Sometimes. If you want but can't find some
good blotter acid ...

George had somehow managed to get South East Arts to finance what
he described as the first sf convention to be held in Hastings
since 1066. It was going to be held in a lecture theatre in the
public library, and was limited to sixty people because of fire
regulations. This was the first bad sign. No sf convention worthy
of the name has ever been successful with less than a hundred
members (except for the Carcons, which are periodically hosted by
Dave Hodges, eagle-handler and gunsmith-manque, in a popemobile
travelling the wrong way around the M25 motorway at midnight).
The second bad sign was that George was offering to _pay_ me.
Being a sucker for money and a chance to open my mouth in public,
I accepted. More fool me. I should have asked _why_ he was
offering the money...

I set off for the event after work on Friday. Rather than going
all the way through to Hastings, I stopped off half-way. This was
a good start to the week-end. I was just in time to discover that
the couple I was staying with, who are two of my best friends and
who I haven't seen for far too long, are splitting up messily
after about seven years together. I managed to arrive at the
moment when _he_ was expecting his new girl-friend to drop round
for the night and _she_ was pissed off and lonely and wanting to
talk to someone, and even the lodger (another famous sf writer whose
name I will refrain from dropping) had done a runner for the hills
in order to get away from the bad vibes running through the house.
I spent most of the evening and half the night hiking along a canal
tow-path in London catching up on old times with her, and gradually
getting more and more depressed. Long-term relationships are a real
bitch to behold when they begin to crumble, and I hate seeing two
good friends go head-to-head self-destructively for no very good
reason. There was a lot to catch up on, and I didn't exactly get
a good night's sleep. Consequently, I arrived in Hastings
bleary-eyed and train-lagged, to be confronted, not by an
opportunity to relax, but by what can only be described as The SF
Convention From Hell.

The micro-convention was held in a lecture theatre on the second
floor of the town library. The room was air-conditioned, but for
most of the event the air conditioning was turned off because it
interfered with George's hearing aid. When it was turned on it
proceeded to pump liquid nitrogen through the ceiling ducts, to
the accompaniment of a noise not unlike an F-4 Phantom on
afterburners going over in nap-of-earth. We alternatively
sweltered and shivered through what must have been one of the
hottest days of the year, despite the presence of a beach less
than a hundred metres from the room in which we were incarcerated.

The audience was even smaller than expected. Besides the little
old ladies in tennis shoes, who looked as if they came to
everything that went on in the library on general principles,
there were about two general-issue die-hard fans and a couple of
local literati, who were mainly there because of the frequent
adjournments to the real ale pub round the corner. Some of the
talks and panels were tolerable, but others ... well. At one
stage I asked Molly, George's blue-rinsed girlfriend; ``aren't
George's talks a little, uh, academic in content? More like a
symposium than an sf convention?'' To which she smiled and nodded
encouragingly; ``that's _just_ what George wanted!''

Now, there is a certain unspoken law that governs the creation of
panels, talks and other sundry justifications for any sf con,
that says, ``thou shalt not bore the pants off the audience.''
George, for reasons best known to himself, had decided that this
was quite obviously air-headed nonsense dreamed up by people who
were insufficiently Serious-Minded, and that he knew best. David
Gemmel, Kim Newman, and myself were featured as participants; we
were supposedly there to pontificate entertainingly and draw in
the punters. At any normal con, this is what we would have done,
and a good time would have been had by all, especially considering
that we would have relocated the con to the nearest pub. Instead,
we were (for some reason) scheduled to speak for about an hour
each. Meanwhile, George took advantage of his captive audience and
rambled on interminably about everything under the sun for half a
day at a time. He enlivened this by periodically delivering a new
and hitherto unknown permutation of what I eventually deduced to
be his stock harangue about how science fiction was going to save
the world. Then he would adjust his spectacles, causing his
hearing aid to go flying across the room, and launch into another
random diversionary lecture about something like the significance
of gastric processes in the work of H. G. Wells. Those of us who
were being payed to be there had no alternative but to sit
through all this. Little did we realise that there was worse to
follow.

(Diversion the second: Dave Langford's speech. Dave is one of the
great humourists in British SF, arguably superior to Terry
Pratchett (save in respect of his bank balance). ``I'm now going
to read Dave Langford's speech,'' announced George, causing
everyone to sit up; ``it's called `Fun with senseless violence'.''
George bent over and rummaged in his brief-case for a minute.
Then: ``I'm sorry, I appear to have lost the speech, so
I'll read one of my papers instead. This one's called,
``digestion and neurolinguistic programming in the metaphysics of
H. G. Wells ...'' )

When he finally ran out of breath, George demonstrated another of
those dreadful foibles for which he is justifiably notorious.
Most eccentrics are fairly harmless, and will ramble on into the
small hours until they run out of breath and begin to repeat
themselves, or fall over as a consequence of imbibing too much
Scrumpy Jack in the bar. But George is no single-shot eccentric;
he bears the same relation to the average annoying street lunatic
that an SS-18 Satan missile bears to a musket. George attracts
lunatics like a magnet; he has a strange, dreadful charisma that
pulls them in from all around the world. The average sf
convention has one or two lunatics, but most of the people there
are harmless (if not socially conventional) people like real ale
drinkers/filkers/readers/trekkies, and so forth. George's
convention, with only thirty people present, had more lunatics
than the average worldcon. And they were all scheduled to speak!

First, there was the gentleman with the hyperspherical geodesic
dome made out of tooth-picks. Buckminster Fuller would have
appreciated him, I'm sure. He had a great flowing leonine head of
silver hair and a beard to match; he was the very picture of a
Greek philosopher. He might even have _been_ a Greek philosopher.
Unfortunately he didn't sound like one. He pontificated in
cryptic grunts, waving a stack of print-outs that contained his
distillation of the wisdom of the late Gerard K. O'Neil in
respect of subterranean electromagnetic rapid transport systems;
this, we were led to believe, was vastly important, if a man was
to travel from Land's End to Dounreay in under twenty minutes.
Vastly important. And of course it was _essential_ that a man was
to be able to travel from Land's end to Dounreay (or at least
John o'Groats) in under twenty minutes. Harrumph! We must Write
Letters. Harrumph. At once.

He was followed, or possibly preceeded (I was suffering from mild
catalepsy at this point) by a distinguished looking American
university professor; she spoke with a fanatical gleam in her eye
for over two hours about the structural significance and
ontological meaning of _Little,Big_ by John Crowley. Occasionally
she teetered dangerously close to the brink of post-modernism,
and at other times she drifted abeam of the shoals of political
correctness, but in general she succeeded in delivering a
flawless gem of an academic conference paper to an audience of
half-drunk fans, bored hack writers and little old ladies in
tennis shoes. The only thing that struck me as odd about this was
the way she quoted _me_ three times. I had earlier waffled for
half an hour about new thingies in something or other; quite
possibly there was something about either science fiction writers
or real ale in it, or maybe even both, but my mind is a blank.
Certainly I can't remember ever expressing the scintilating
pearls of wisdom that she attributed to me, but that's academia
for you. Maybe she thought I was someone important.

Then there was the Occult publisher. This gentleman looked
perfectly normal. But he spoke in a drone. In very short
sentences, man. About how he had really wanted to publish the
work of this guy. So he had performed a spell. But you had to
forget about it before it would come true. So it had taken eleven
years before he got to publish this guy he admired. Wow. Like, he
had published a guy, entirely by magic. Like, it works! And now
he's going to publish him some more. Which proved something or
other. But he couldn't remember what. But he really did believe
in it, because it worked and it was real. Most people don't know
this. But it really works. Especially if you keep taking the
pills.

Well, after _that_ one I decamped to the pub. The pub was
alright; it was a real pub with real beer and real goths and
punks and foreign language students who all had apallingly even
sun tans and looked terribly young and enthusiastic. I sneered at
them over my beer, and commiserated with Kim Newman and Chris
Priest (who had dropped by for some reason). We generally moaned
about how ghastly it all was, and wondered (not for very long)
why David Gemmel had done a runner, and drank some more beer.
Then we drank even more beer, until it was time to retreat to our
respective destinations for the night. Little did we suspect
that George had saved his most lethal weapon for last.

The man who went, ``dum-diddly-dum-de-dum-dum-diddly.''

On the second and final day, after a night out on the town, I
dragged myself blearily down to the con (by way of a bookshop and
a tea-room) to listen to the talk on fractals and chaos theory. I
had no great expectations after the first day, and in this I was
not disappointed. The gentleman who George had selected to speak
was old, and stooped, slightly dea[d|f], and spoke in a thin,
reedy voice that induced in me a wholly subconscious urge to
throttle him with a convenient electric cable. He shuffled up to
the podium and stood next to an ancient super-8 projector. ``I'm
going to talk about chaos theory,'' he whistled. Then he pressed
the play button on the antidilluvian tape recorder which he waved
alarmingly over his head like some kind of talisman that would
protect him against the rage and fury of his audience.

What followed was the worst speech it is possible to imagine, or
to deliver, or even to contemplate the existence of. It was a
paradigm of such unbelievable badness that any attempt to convey
it in words much be reduced to gibbering incoherence by the
attempt to portray such insanity. This, one feels, is the kind of
speech which must have been transcribed in the _Necronomicon_ of
Abdul Alhazred, a book of which it is said two thirds of the
readers died insane and gibbering, and the other third came to
sticky ends as they frantically scribbled in a crabbed hand in
their notebooks by candelight: not the shopping list, but things
like ``Iaah, Iaah, Shub-Niggurath! He comes to steal my soul and
inner icky gibblet-things --'' You could hear the sound of skulls
being dashed against the walls and floor as the audience realised
despairingly that they were _trapped_, that for the next hour
they were going to be incarcerated in a room with this man, and
that he was going to keep on _doing_ it to them unless they
managed to commit suicide first.

What was so truly awesomely terrifying about this speech was that
its owner appeared oblivious to the effect he was having on the
audience. On all of them. It takes a lot to get through to a
little old lady in tennis shoes, but he was making progress; even
_they_ were foaming at the mouth after the first five minutes.
Half the audience were laughing at him, the other half were
trying to slash their wrists or jump out the window -- but the
gentleman with the tape recorder and cine projector carried on
regardless. The tape? That was his sound track. I'll interpolate
the special effects. ``Hello. I'm -- pant -- a bit out of breath
but I'll -- puff -- try to explain. It's all about -- gasp --
strange attractors. There are lots of strange ... thingies --
gasp -- as I shall demonstrate. Look for the synchronicity
between this recording and the -- hack, splutter -- film, which I
will shortly show. You will be watching me walking over to the --
cough -- projector and maybe rewinding the film -- pant -- and
switching it on -- gasp -- and here are some pretty fireworks.''
Cue: blurry, shaky, out-of-focus soundless under-exposed
monochrome film of fireworks bursting overhead. ``And here's a
strange attractor. Dum-de-iddly-dum-iddly-dum-dum -- gasp --
diddly-dum-de-dum-de-dum-iddly-pom-pom-iddly -- choke -- gasp --
dum-diddly-dim-de-dum-de-dum-iddly-pom-pom ...''

The true mind numbing insanity of this event was driven home home
by Chris Evans, who murmured, awe-struck, to Chris Priest;
``what's this guy _on_?'' Chris Priest shrugged; ``senile
dementia?'' ``c'mon, let's get outa here!'' Everyone who was
close enough to the door to make it inconspicuously did a runner
-- except for me. George had me pinned down before his merciless
gaze; ``and now I should like to ask Charles Stross what he
thinks the prospects are for using chaos theory to predict the
likely consequences of political or economic developments in
future --''

By which time I was so far gone that I could only respond with:
``gurgle, drool, iterated function system, yibber, Barnsley, non-
linear dynamics, eep!, waah ... ''

--
Charlie Stross aka [e-mail] ..... UNIX oriented text mangler
WARNING: The opinions voiced in the preceding electronic document are the
product of a warped mind. Take two before meals.