BucConeer, the 1998 Worldcon

Monday, 10 August 1998

I got back today from six days in Baltimore, Maryland for BucConeer, the 56th World Science Fiction Convention. I hadn't been to a Worldcon since ConFrancisco in 1993, or even to any convention at all since the 1997 Readercon (except for a token appearance at Lunacon), so I was spoiling for a good con, and BucConeer didn't disappoint.

I stayed with Chris, Lisa, and Josh in the Omni Inner Harbor hotel, which was where the filking was taking place. A nice enough place, but located three or four blocks away from the convention center and main party hotel. A lot of people were griping about how spread out this convention was. I didn't mind much; I found, to my pleasant surprise, that my feet hardly hurt at all the whole con. I must be in better shape than I thought I was. I've been making a deliberate attempt these past few months to do a lot of walking, and it's paying off.

The food was great. Wednesday night, I went out with Vicki Rosenzweig, Andy Hickmott, and Nancy Lebovitz to Obriky's, a seafood restaurant specializing in crab. We split a couple of dozen crabs between the four of us. It took a few minutes before any of us discovered the easy-open tab on the crabs's bellies, but that didn't matter -- there's something viscerally satisfying about smashing one's dinner open with a hammer.

Chris had a hectic time of it early in the con. She took a bus down to Baltimore after class Wednesdaynight, arriving around 11 PM, and then went back up to New York Thursday afternoon to take her Ethical Philosophy final, and came back down afterwards, so she practically missed the first two days of the con. Thursday was her 30th birthday, though, and she wanted to be somewhere special for it. Originally she had wanted to attend the special BucConeer crab buffet, but that turned out to require that we have bought tickets before the con, and the timing with her final wouldn't have worked out anyway. We went out to breakfast at a little greasy spoon near the hotel. Not much of a special meal, but Saturday night we went out to Obriky's again, so Chris got to enjoy whacking her dinner open.

Several times during the con I was greeted by people who recognized my name from my Usenetpostings. In some cases, these were people whose names I didn't recognize in return. This has been happening sincemy days on GEnie seven or eight years ago, but I'm still not used to it. Comes from having a distinctive name, I guess. On top of that, though, it turns out that some people find my writing memorable and enjoyable. I don't suppose I'd be writing these entries if I didn't think anyone would enjoy them, but it's nice to get some feedback every now and then. And while checking out the art show, I met Hannah Shapero, who I know from Golden APA, who told me that she had expected me to be older, thinner, and more debauched, but was pleased to see me young, plump, and lively. She's not the first person to have overestimated my age from my writing. Maybe it's my name; a lot of people probably think of "Avram" as the sort of name someone's grandfather has. Or maybe I come across as really formal in my writing.

And speaking of knowing people from the net, I ran into C.J. Silverio and David Zink at the con. I wound up not spending nearly as much time with them as I'd have liked, mostly due to odd attacks of shyness and self-consciousness on my part. Ack. They also come across as more formal in their writing than in person, which is part of why I was so shy. Come to think of it, most people I know who contribute to the Net in one form or another come across more formally there. I'll have to keep this in mind in the future. I'll also have to make sure that I deliberately schedule time with people I want to see at a con, rather than relying on chance to run across them (especially at widely-dispersed Worldcons).

I managed to get out without having bought too much stuff. I've got half a dozen new t-shirts for my wardrobe, including two expensive (US$32 each) ones that were just too gorgeous to pass up, a couple of buttons, and a copy of The Postmodern Archipelago, a reprinting of the essay of the same name by Michael Swanwick about new SF writers of the early 1980s, along with another Swanwick essay called ""In the Tradition...,'" about fantasy writers. A good guide to stuff worth reading from the past 20 years of the genres. And I finally bought myself a copy of Big Eyes, Small Mouth, an anime role-playing game that I'd been meaning to buy for several months.

I went to a few panels, but the only one I really enjoyed was "Modernism and SF," with Greg Feeley, John Kessel, James Morrow, Michael Swanwick, and David Hartwell moderating. Lots of great argument, heated-but-witty invective, and speculation. It's a juicy topic, since SF ought to have been the essential literature of the Modern age, but most SF readers (and many authors) are profoundly anti-Modernist (and even anti-Post-Modernist).

In addition to two film tracks, there was also an anime track, where I finally got to see an episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion. It looks intriguing. I'm going to have to try to get back in touch with New York anime fandom and find out where I can rent anime videos nowadays. I also watched the PBS film of Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, which I'd never seen before, and would probably have enjoyed more on the small screen where video tends to look less blurry than it does when projected onto a big screen. And there were clips shown of upcoming movies, the best of which looks to be Free Enterprise, about a pair of die-hard Star Trek fans who are trying to become Hollywood filmmakers when they meet William Shatner (played by himself), who becomes their mentor and gives them advice on their love lives while convincing them to make a musical version of Julius Caeser in which he plays all the parts.

I didn't do much filking. I generally only got to the filk rooms after I was done with the parties (which were generally excellent), and just hung around and listened for a while before going to bed. The filking at the Dead Parrot party Sunday night was an exception. Both song circles that appeared (in the same room) were boisterous and fun. I don't know why, exactly. The earlier filks had just felt, well, stale and formulaic to me, while the Dead Parrot circles seemed more lively and exciting. The presence of Mitchell and TJ Burnside-Clapp probably had something to do with it, but I was enjoying myself even before they showed up.

I don't yet know whether I'll be able to make next year's Worldcon in Australia, and I probably won't know until well into next year. I'll very likely be going to the 2000 Worldcon in Chicago, and certainly the Millennium Philcon in Philadelphia. I'm hoping Seattle wins the 2002 bid, since I've never been to Seattle and have a lot of friends there I'd like to spend some time with, but San Francisco would be OK too.