A BBC documentary on the 1979 Brighton Worldcon, from the Time out of Mind series.
Fandom
LonCon3: Hugo Awards
So it was fun being at my very first Hugo Awards evening and great to see so many people who I wanted to win, actually win (and where they didn’t, people I liked just as much did). Especially since none of the wingnut brigade did. The detailed breakdown of the votes (PDF) only confirmed this.
Awards I got right: the Campbell, Fan Artist, Fan Writer, Fanzine, Best Related Work, Best novel. Of the other awards, the only one I was really disappointed in was the Best Fancast award, as that just seemed to trade on familiarity rather than quality; personally I saw SF Signal Podcast as the worst of the nominees.
But apart from that it was a brilliant night, with the people winning firmly part of the future of science fiction, rather than the dead past dragging us down.
LonCon: Captain Marvel
I’ve always had a fondness for Ms Marvel/Carol Danvers, one of those also ran characters you encounter as a kid and feel kindly towards. She was of course a distaff spinoff of Marvel’s first Captain Marvel character, from the same time as Spider-Woman and She-Hulk, created to defend a trademark. Her first series was so-so, though Chris Claremont did his best to make something from it, in its later issues linking it indirectly to his X-Men and Iron Fist series, to little avail. She also had a brief stint in the Avengers, leading to the infamous mindrape in issue 200, later resolved by Claremont in Avengers Annual 10. After that she’s taken to the X-Men as a supporting character, Claremont always loyal to his characters…
Her costume during most of her run was godawful, as you can see from the first picture, a bad knockoff of Mar-vell’s one with added skin. Why the exposed stomach and legs? God knows. Over time they at least closed up the stomach gap, but it remained a dull costume. When Dave Cockrum came aboard for a few issues late in her run, the first thing he did was change it for a much better one, though as you can see there was still the focus on t&a, but at least Cockrum was a good enough artist to use a mirror rather than have her be one of those broken spine girls to show off both. I always liked this costume, even if, yes, it was designed to tittilate. It’s such a seventies Cockrum design what with the mid riff shawl and all that. Cockrum would be back to design Carol’s next costume, Binary in Uncanny X-Men #164
That’s how things stood for Ms Marvel for a while, until she got brought back in the late nineties as part of Busiek’s Avengers and took the name Warbird, then inevitably went back to her old codename and costume. Busiek also gave her alcoholism, which I hated at the time, yet again crippling what could’ve been the strongest person on the team; Ms Marvel just couldn’t get a break. That is until she got a new, longer lasting series as sort of a Marvel counterpart to Wonder Woman or Power Girl in the early noughties, Bendis nostalgia driven New Avengers series finally accomplishing something worthwhile. Not long ago she got yet another relaunch as the new Captain Marvel, severely pissing off Monica Rambeau once again. With that came a new, more respectable costume that I never liked until I saw it on a Ms Marvel cosplayer at LonCon. For once there’s a superhero costume that actually looks better in real life than in the comics. Suddenly the various elements came together in a way they didn’t on the page and looked good. A good cosplayer can of course make any costume work, no matter how ridiculous, but many female costumes do look a bit …uncomfortable? This didn’t.
LonCon3: finding and talking to people
Well, LonCon3, the 72nd WorldCon is well and truly over, the last dregs of it drunk Tuesday morning, when I spent a couple of hours before I had to get my train helping out with the cleanup. It had been a long weekend of drinking of the firehose of fandom, so much stuff and especially people to see that whatever you were doing, there were always two to five more interesting things to do. I had an absolute blast.
What remains now is the inevitable summing up and recounting. If you’re not all that interested in science fiction and fandom, you may want to skip the rest of the week here or so…
This was my first Worldcon as well as my first convention in a decade, the last having been the 2004 Discworld con. I can’t say it wasn’t a bit scary getting back after so long, at what promised to be a huge con (the largest Worldcon ever!). Cons can be cliquey and lonely if you’re going to them on your own, when everbody else seems to have come with friends and is having fun with them.
What I also found coming back to my friends from alt.fan.pratchett for example is that it’s harder to talk to people you haven’t seen in some years than it is when you’ve met regularly. Our lifes have moved out of synch, people have gotten older, established relationships, had kids and such. It can all be a bit awkward.
But I worried for nothing. What I should’ve realised is that because of its size, most people would be strangers to each other and that there always would be people willing to talk to you if you were open to it. I had a lovely long conversation with a woman in the fan village on Sunday, for whom it was also her first Worldcon and she’d gotten a membership as a birthday gift. There were similar conversations with other fans, especially during the parties at night, when alcohol and general cheer made it easier to talk.
Apart from meeting new and interesting people what I was also looking for was meeting old friends and online acquintances; I’d made a list of people I was on the lookout for, but with on average some 6,000 attendees present each day, it was hard to find them. And then when I did, there wasn’t always time to chat long, either because I was going to a panel or doing some voluntering or because they were. So e.g. on Thursday I was playing hall monitor for the fan village when Deidre Saoirse Moen walked past (not to mention Robert Silverberg) and a little bit later I ran into Nicholas Whyte at the press stand when I was running an errand. At least I got to say hi to him…
I learned a lesson through this: when you run into people, say hi, because you never know when you’ll see them again at the con. I managed to have several quick conversations with various sf bloggers that way, as well as got several people coming up to me who knew me from various online haunts, including several who knew me from back in the day in the rec.arts.sf.* groups. I also got to talk to some of my favourite authors after panels, or like Paul McAuley, browsing in the dealers’ room. Also met Kev Mcveigh that way browsing through the same stack of DAW paperbacks and who kindly gave up a Doris Piserchia novel I had my eye on. Many others though I never met; never got a chance to talk to Elise Mathesen frex, though we tweeted at each other from the same panel…
One meeting happened entirely by chance late at night on the very last day of the con, as some Polish bloke asked me to take a picture of him and his two friends and then the friends turned out to be Gay and Joe Haldeman, who were some of the nicest people you could hope to meet.
So yeah, seize the day, talk to people whose badge names you recognise.
Should the WFA use Butler instead of Lovecraft?
I understand the impulse behind this petition, but I don’t understand the need to replace H. P. Lovecraft with Octavia Butler:
Octavia Butler contributed a rich, nuanced, complex body of work during her lifetime. Her novels, essays and short stories changed the entire genre of speculative fiction by complicating our notions of power, race and gender. Her characters were vivid and deeply human and her prose was sharp. She wrote masterfully across the imaginative genres, from science fiction to historical fantasy to horror.
While HP Lovecraft, whose head the current award is modeled after, did leave a lasting mark on speculative fiction, he was also an avowed racist and a terrible wordsmith. Many writers have spoken out about their discomfort with winning an award that lauds someone with such hideous opinions, most notably Nnedi Okorafor. It’s time to stop co-signing his bigotry and move sci-fi/fantasy out of the past.
What strikes me here, as it did Nick Mamatas, who spent some time refuting it, is the gratitious dig at Lovecraft’s writing, which is irrelevant to the purpose of the petition. That Lovecraft was a racist and that his racism was often integral to his stories should be enough; his writing qualities do not enter into it.
It also strikes me as odd to propose Octavia Butler as a replacement. She was a science fiction writer, not a fantasy writer. Just because she’s about the only deceased, prominent black science fiction or fantasy writer people actually know doesn’t make her suitable as figurehead for this particular award. It’s not as if science fiction has no awards named after horrible racists that could do with a bit of a cleanup, frex both the Campbell awards, named after an editior whose racism shaped science fiction far more and for far longer than Lovecraft’s ever did.