From: charless@sco.COM (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
Summary: There IS a fate worse than death; it's reserved for sf fans ...


[[ 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 charless@scol.sco.com ..... UNIX oriented text mangler
WARNING: The opinions voiced in the preceding electronic document are the
product of a warped mind. Take two before meals.