Hard Hat Fanzine #1 This Fanzine is under construction. We Apologise for any inconvenience. Architect: Chuq Von Rospach Construction Financing by: Fictional Reality, uLtd. Our Motto: Getting in your way today to bring someone else a better tomorrow Hard Hat Fanzine #1 is an occasional supplement of OtherRealms, and is Copyright 1987 by Chuq Von Rospach Reproduction is permitted only for non-commercial purposes. Hard Hat Fanzine #1 is available from Chuq Von Rospach, 35111-F Newark Blvd. Suite 255, Newark, CA 94560. A trip report, of sorts. A commentary, with expository and just a hint of righteous indignation. The subject is Britain, Brighton, and the 1987 Worldcon. The theme is the top of Nelson's head. Now, if that makes absolutely no sense at all to you, well, you must not have travelled to Britain for the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention, held the end of August in Brighton, England. With any luck, by the time I'm through, it will. I'm fortunate that I have both legs and the use of my eyes. The layout of the convention was, shall we say, suboptimal. As an attempt in giving you an idea how the convention was put together, let's take a quick tour of the facilities. We start, logically enough, at the registration desk, placed in the Brighton Convention Centre. Now, we go up a flight of stairs and we're at the main arena, used for the massive events (opening & closing ceremonies, Hugo awards, costume contest and the rock concert) and Hewison Hall, about 700 seats and the primary programming room. So much for the convention centre. All of the other programming is elsewhere. Down the stairs, out the doors and we walk a block down to the Metropole, the main hotel for the convention. In through the revolving door, through the lobby to the back, and you're at Winter Gardens, about 400 seats and the second track of programming. Above the Winter Gardens are stairs. Up the stairs, past the builders putting up the sheetrock, and turn right, and you find -- stairs, going down. Down a flight of stairs, past the fan programming room where the folks are wallpapering, and you're at the fan room. Beyond the fan room is the real fan programming room -- they aren't wallpapering it, fortunately, but it also held maybe 150 people. The fan room, unlike most cons I've seen, was huge. Larger than many dealer rooms I've seen in fact. Lots of tables, lots of chairs, lots of couches. This looks encouraging, right? One thing I forgot to mention was the lobby of the Metropole. It was a nice, long, high traffic, narrow hallway. Practically speaking it was impossible to hold a decent conversation in the lobby. Most of the folks who normally hang out in the lobby hung out in the Fan Room. Then there's the Con Suite. Or, rather, the lack of one. Mos of the folks who normally hang out there moved to the Fan Room. Finally, the bar. Yes, they moved a full bar into the Fan Room. A nice thought, at one level. Sit with your friends and have a drink. But if you wanted something in the Fan Room, even water, you paid for it. Most of the folks who hang out in the bar moved into the Fan Room. The loud music. The lack of sound absorbing material. The Fan Room, which looked very large when empty, was loud, was crowded, was a mass of humanity. Many abandoned it to the masses and took their conversations elsewhere -- normal conversation at less than a roar being an exercise in futility. The hot place to sit and talk with folks wasn't in any of the normal places, but up in the Bid Gallery that overlooked the Dealers Room. Anyway, back to the tour. Back up the steps. Wave at the man that tried to hit you with the sheetrock, smile and duck. Now, we go up a flight of stairs, and you're at the Dealer's room. The dealers room. Cavernous. Lots of books. The dealers room was a lot different than American cons -- by far the biggest difference of a foreign con. European's still read. In an American con, you have to search under the T-shirts and movie posters and movie stills to find the books. At Conspiracy, the book reigned supreme. There is some hope in the world. Up another flight of stairs. The art show to the right, the Third Programme (about 200 seats) up front, and to the left the bid room, where all the fun is. The film programme was in another hotel completely, the Bedford, only a short two block walk away. I'd tell you more about that, but I never got there. The SFWA suite was down there as well, but I was told that I didn't miss much except a small, dimly lit, overcrowded, smoky broom closets. If it sounds like I'm being nasty to the facilities, well, I AM being nasty to the facilities. The nicest thing about the Conspiracy facilities was that it chose to not rain much during the con. If, for instance, you wanted to go from the main programme to the third programme for the next panel, you (and a thousand of your close friends) got to walk down a flight of stairs, out through the revolving doors (one person at a time, don't kill the person in front of you), walk the block to the Metropole, in through the single revolving door, through the lobby, up the stairs, avoid the nice workmen with the sheetrock (yes, this is a running joke, but I'll kill it in a while. promise), up another two flights of stairs, and collapse on the floor, since all of the seats are taken. This in 10 minutes. Thank Ghod I have both feet and can walk. While there were elevators in various places, handicap access was haphazard and incomplete. The sidewalks are a wheelchair torture chamber. There are only four steps from the sidewalk to the Metropole door, unless you want to use the luggage entrance and can convince the hotel to let you. The entire Fan Room and Fan Program were not accessible, unless you know some friendly, strong people. The Brighton convention facilities are primitive compared to American hotels, and were woefully inadequate for a convention of this size. I can see that it might be reasonable for a smaller group of people, but there is no way Brighton can handle more than 2,500 people. Maybe, if we're friends, 3,000. Brighton is not, regardless of what the British say, a Worldcon class facility, and it showed. If this weren't bad enough, the hotel Metropole decided that a 5,000 person convention was a great time to do some redecoration. Major areas of the hotel were being torn down, built up or painted over, including a number of the rooms contracted out to the convention, necessitating some last minute re-arrangements. The main hallway that connected the hotel to the convention areas in the hotel were being refurbished, so to get to any of the areas beyond the Winter Gardens, you got to walk past the nice men on the scaffolding putting up the sheetrock. The promised mirrored hallway (the only place the hotel and Concom were to allow posters) will look nice someday. A the time of the convention, none of the mirror had been installed. Most unfortunately, the Concom never got around to installing alternate poster hanging facilities, much to the dismay of some folks. The hotel was a fascinating entity all to itself. Hotel management seemed to forget that it (1) had a convention in the place, and (2) had contracted for same. At various times, everyone without a Metropole room key were refused entrance to the hotel (and, as a consequence, the programming going on inside). The hotel closed places down, harassed guests (in at least one case, a group of six people sitting and talking in a hallway, and hotel security declared them to be a party. They were told if they hadn't disbursed in 30 minutes, the Brighton police would come and physically disburse them). Room parties weren't only discouraged, they were actively searched out and destroyed. The only hotel at all tolerant of con parties seemed to be the Grand. Unfortunately, most of the attendees were either in the Metropole or spread throughout the metropolis. Finding parties was complicated by a Con Committee that never got around to putting up many notice boards (there was one at the registration desk, where you never went, and one in the Fan Room that you had trouble getting to and that was covered with layers of material. In at least one case, a message left for me on the Fan Room board disappeared -- probably, it's my guess, because someone else felt they needed the thumbtack more). I could go on about the facilities, but I think you get the point. A con facility with room for (maybe) 3,000 people, spread out over a space of four flights of stairs and three buildings (with three blocks of walking between them). An actively hostile hotel management, who's main purpose in life seemed to be to make life miserable for the con goers (and the Concom as well). A seething mass of humanity poring from the pores of the buildings at every step, moving lemming-like from panel to panel in hopes of finding a seat. Settling, perhaps, for a breath of fresh air. The con was in trouble before it started. So how was it? Conspiracy was my first Worldcon, and also my first trip beyond the edges of North America. Maybe I went in with unrealistic expectations, but I came away from Conspiracy disappointed. Even excluding the many problems, glitches, and hassles I ran into, Conspiracy had a major problem. It was Just Another Con. Bigger than the other conventions I've been to, true, but that isn't necessarily an advantage. The programming was uninspired. Three tracks, plus an irregular series of fan panels. I was worried when the heavily hyped opening ceremonies went off with a whimper, as the super wonderful laser effects consisted of a single laser, aimed at the audience (who in their right mind would aim coherent light INTO someone's eyes? I don't care if it is 'safe,' I don't care what safeguards were taken, this is STUPID. S-T-U-P-I-D), doing things I saw done in a high school lab years ago. If this was a spectacular laser display, I missed something. The actual opening ceremonies consisted of Brian Aldiss marching all of the GoH's on the stage, having them wave at the audience, and marching them back off. No speeches, except for the official welcome from the Brighton mayor. The con is half an hour old, and already fizzling. I won't go into a lot of details, since they're bound to be a lot more boring than sitting through the panels was in person. There were some highlights (the Magical Sex panel, with Quinn Yarbro, Guy Kay and Suzy McKee Charnas for one) some definite lowlights (the SF Mastermind contest, a continuing series of silly trivia games) and some very tired programming schticks (this was, for instance, the third time I've seen Quinn do the "Vampire in SF" panel this year, and we're both getting rather tired of it -- Concom folks note, this one can happily be retired for a few years, okay?). Anything with Gene Wolfe, Robert Silverberg, or Peter Nicholls on it was worth catching, even if the panel ended up having nothing to do with the topic. With a few exceptions, there wasn't anything particularly wrong with the programming, there just wasn't anything very special about it. The annual regional con out here on the West Coast, Baycon, does a better programming job than Conspiracy did, and they don't have nearly the number of pros and other Interesting People To Listen To to work with. They could have done a lot more, and I was disappointed. As I said once before, Conspiracy was Just Another Con, and it didn't have to be. As far as other features, I skipped the films, as usual. I was a little disappointed in the art show -- it was better than most art shows I've seen, but there was still only one piece I even considered bidding on. It was very spacious and well lit, except for one dark corner. One major gripe for me was the Fearful Symmetry exhibit, an collection of invited artists. The art was good, but the only documentation on it was in a printed guide, available for a nominal sum at the counter behind you. Nominal sums. I've mentioned the Fan Room, with the pay-your-way bar. The concept giving away anything seemed to be foreign to Conspiracy. At most American cons, you can at least get a soft drink in the Con Suite. Munchies. Conversation food. Not here. You got used to dropping a few coins here, a few coins there. You really had no choice. If you wanted to know what was going on at Fearful Symmetries, you bought the guide. This bothered me, and a lot of other people, too.It seemed that the Conspiracy group put a nominal sum on just about anything they could; things that in most American con's would have been included in the membership. Worse, a number of items were subsidized by New Era, Bridge Publication's English sister. On the front cover of the pocket guide was the Mission Earth logo. Inside: a number of full page advertisements for various Bridge publications, the Writer's of the Future had a large corner of the Bid Gallery, a program panel on how important the Writers of the Future is, they supported the costume show and were allowed to name an award after themselves, and they supported the Hugo ceremony and were allowed to have A.J. Budrys open the ceremony with a commercial. Somewhere along here we passed the line between support for the convention and crass commercialism. I don't blame Bridge/New Era for this, but the con for allowing and soliciting it. The huckster room, as I said, was wonderful. Books. endless rooms and rooms of books. the only thing that kept me sane was the realization that I was going to have to carry those things back through customs. As it was, Laurie and I found some truly amazing (and cheap) books in the used stacks, such as a first edition Brave New World, or a signed first edition Dying Inside by Silverberg (one of my personal all-time favorites, and a very important and powerful work). One disturbing thing I saw was in the new book stands. I was hoping to track down a few British authors I'd either seen limited material from or hadn't heard of before. While there were a few, the vast majority of the works shown at the con were British editions of American works and American authors. It almost looked to me like the American press has inundated Britain and shoved the local talent out -- if you can't succeed across the ocean, there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for you at home. I hit two other main events, the Costume Show and the Hugos. The Costume show was fairly small, and generally pretty good -- significantly fewer clunkers than I've seen elsewhere. The only real problem was the distance from the stage: unless you paid (there's that word again) for the Masquerade Ball, you were up in the bleachers that lined the arena. It could have been worse, though -- if you DID pay for the Ball, you got a table on the main floor and couldn't see anything, because they didn't use a raised stage for the contest. The Concom admitted at the gripe session that it was an experiment that didn't work (they were trying to make life easier for contestants, at the expense of everyone else), but I wish someone had thought of it ahead of time. The Hugos had the same problem -- if you weren't party of the ceremony or a gopher, you were in the bleachers again, even though half of the main floor was empty. The Concom justified this by saying that they wanted to reward the folks who worked with them. It's perfectly reasonable to give them preferred seating, but to the complete exclusion of everyone else? Worse, I talked to four different Gophers who were never told about the perq -- and what good is a perq that people aren't told about? Other than this, the Hugo awards went off pretty well. The author photos had some problems, primarily caused by authors who didn't bother to send the committee the requested pictures and ignoring their pleas for a last minute photo session -- the end result being muddy shots pulled at the last moment from the pages of Locus or SF Chronicle. It made the show look shoddy, unfortunately. Next time, perhaps the committee will let the authors stew in their own juices and get someone like Taral or Brad Foster do caricatures of the offending people -- the audience would love it and the authors would perhaps learn a lesson... It was a good year for the Hugos. With the exception of the Hubbard book (which ended up well below No Award in the final voting) I don't think any of the fiction works on the ballot didn't deserve to be there. The only real surprise in the winners was the Novella, with Silverbob winning for "Gilgamesh in the Outback" after 21 straight losses, beating out Lucius Shepard and "R&R" for the award. I still think that the committee made a mistake with Dark Knight, and I think the voting showed that. It placed a close second in the non-fiction category to Trillion Year Spree, but many fans voted it after No Award because it isn't non-fiction. The committee should have recognized that it didn't fit anyplace in the awards and created a one-time special award, and put it on the business agenda to find a permanent solution. They didn't, and Dark Knight suffered as a result. I hope that if the same support shows up for The Watchmen next year the committee does something about it rather than avoiding the issue. Graphic novels seem to be here to stay, and trying to shuck them off as art books is an insult to them and to the integrity of the awards. There are procedures that can be used to conform the Hugos to reality, and they should be used. Congratulations are in order for both the winners and the losers in the Hugos this year -- I can't think of a stronger set of works in recent history. Anyone could have one, and I don't think anyone really lost. The Hugo award was the highlight of the convention. The hotel was the lowlight. And the controversy (you know there had to be a controversy, didn't you?) was centered firmly in the Bid Gallery, and its name was American Imperialism meets European Snobbery. By a combination of some very smart politicking, a European Worldcon and the Conspiracy Concom's inability to get mail addressed to the United States delivered, Holland won the 1990 bid by a vote of 800+ to 500+. Both sides were unsure of the voting, and tensions ran high. Add to this a very strong undercurrent of anti-American sentiments by many of the European fans over what they called the American 'hijacking' of the Worldcon. % Item: When I mentioned to the Holland people that if Sydney won in '91 I was not likely going to both foreign cons, I was given a five minute tirade about rich, selfish Americans who were unwilling to share the Worldcon with anyone. % Item: A woman was browbeaten by the Sydney in '91 people to the point she broke down in tears. % Item: Some American authors were taken to task in panel Q&A periods. For being American. Nothing more, nothing less. % Item: a published manifesto in the Bid Gallery that told all us bloody Americans that since we're all so rich, and all the Europeans are so poor, we should be HAPPY to fly to foreign Worldcons every year because we can afford it and they can't. It is our destiny to support their cons. % Item: I overheard arguments on this topic between Americans and foreign fans constantly -- from many different countries. It all came to a head with a Fan Programme item titled "Why have the Americans hijacked the Worldcon?" (nothing quite like being innocent until proven guilty). As the 1990 bid got tighter and tensions ran higher, things got nastier until the Americans decided to pull out of the panel in disgust. The Concom spent the next couple issues of the convention newsletter trying to both apologize, explain what they REALLY meant (the title, it turns out, wasn't what they really meant, it was just what they said) and simultaneously accuse the Americans of overreacting. It may well be true that too many Worldcons are in North America, but if Brighton is the best convention facility in England (something the British will acknowledge) there is a good reason for that. There aren't many places outside of America that can handle 5,000 people, and as the Conspiracy Concom showed, not many fan organizations that can successfully entertain them. I felt that I was made unwelcome by the British fans at Conspiracy because of this attitude. I was also made very uncomfortable by the Hollanders, to the point that I've already decided I'm not going to Holland. Maybe America has hijacked the Worldcon (I don't believe this, however). But the foreign fans have given me no reason to want to come and visit, so they can run all the Worldcons they want, but they'll do it without me. I don't need to spend thousands of dollars and travel to foreign lands to be insulted, so until I see evidence of a change in these attitudes, I'm going to Nasfic. (Unless Sydney wins in 1991. I want to go to Australia, so even if the convention is horrible I'd still enjoy the trip. Go Aussies! Also, even though one of the Sydney folks browbeat someone to tears, in general the Aussies were the friendliest and mellowest delegation there, and the head of the Sydney in 1991 bid did apologize profusely for the behaviour of their man). If the foreigners want the Worldcon, they have to earn it. Conspiracy didn't help their cause, and so far, neither has Holland. They can't badger it away from us or try to guilt trip us into giving it to them without having it backlash against them -- and I'll predict now that Sydney will probably (unfortunately) lose 1991 to Chicago, in part because most people won't want two foreign cons in a row, in part because of the negative attitudes that were pervasive at Conspiracy. To close this out, and tie it up (I still need to work the top of Nelson's head into this somewhere. Probably down the street from the Blue Saran Wrap), I should say in summary that for all my criticism, Conspiracy was not a bad convention. It wasn't a great convention by a long shot, but it could have been much worse. It's biggest problems come back to two things: the hotel problems and the size. The root for both of these has to rest with the Concom. I don't believe the Concom for Conspiracy was skilled or motivated enough to really handle a 5,000 person convention. Conspiracy, if it had been half its size, would have been a wonderful convention, but these things don't scale up well. They got caught napping by the hotel, and didn't seem to recover from that catastrophe. Their programming was simplistic, and they were understaffed and overwhelmed. They did their best, but it wasn't good enough, but I have sympathy for them as well, because it couldn't have been much fun on their end, either -- there's a good reason why I go to conventions and not run them.... If the only thing I'd done on the trip was the convention, I might be a more unhappy than I am. As it was, the convention was a disappointment, but I'm happy to say that England itself is a joy. We spent a little over a week in Brighton, and a little under a week in London, and enjoyed both cities thoroughly. Brighton is a great place to sit and unwind, full of many small, family restaurants and great food. The two days before people started piling in for Conspiracy the city almost seemed empty. During the con, many of the restaurants were busy and relatively noisy (unfortunately, in many cases the excess noise was caused by American fans showing off their lack of awareness of folks around them. When four Americans are making more noise than the rest of the room combined, you get a little embarrassed for them). London was the same. The English made us both feel very welcome, and were amazingly friendly (as long as we weren't discussing Worldcon politics, that is...). The little B&B we stayed at in Brighton (The Le Flemings hotel on Regency Square, plug plug]) went out of their way to make us family rather than boarders. American, with its insane preoccupation with fast food chains and interchangeable four-wall hotel rooms, has definitely lost something special. The only problem with London is that everything is under reconstruction. Every place we visited with the exception of the Tower had some kind of work going on -- a wing of the National Gallery closed, work being done at the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert, the Natural History museum, large parts of the Underground and the coup de grace, the Nelson column [see, I TOLD you'd I'd tie it all together]. Britain seems to be very interested in preserving its history, which is encouraging, if a little inconvenient. I will say the British do a good job of working around the construction, although it makes it hard to take decent photos when the outside of the buildings are surrounded by scaffolding, as the Nelson column in Trafalgar Square is. When you go to see this national hero, all you see is this tall blue box, with the top foot or so of the statues head sticking out of the top. What they do, by the way, is wrap the scaffolding with blue plastic to keep the weather out, since it rains in England once in a while. So all of these buildings look like they've been covered with blue Saran Wrap -- a term I didn't come up with (Lois McMaster Bujold did, so blame her) but which I'll happily steal. All I can say is this: I loved England, I loved its people, its history, and blue Saran Wrap notwithstanding, I can't wait to go back. Thanks, England, for being a fun place to visit.