Random Thought - The Misery of the Hustler, and the Joy of Being a Fan

Or, we live in two worlds, and trying to cross the streams is asking for nothing but trouble.

This post is inspired, in large part, by a well-justified Twitter rant Seanan McGuire went on about a month ago. The first tweet in the thread can be found here for anyone who wants to go read it in its entirety. The short version is that Seanan and a group of her professional colleagues were at San Diego Comic Con having a conversation in a public space and a random dude jumped in to try to pitch his own work and did so in a fairly sexist and tone deaf manner. The part of the rant I want to focus on is this one:

Mr. Hustle promptly went into his pitch. And the reason I say that this was PUA techniques, and not a lack of social awareness, is that he knew it was a pitch. He called it a pitch, called it a hustle, said several times "this is why I came to con."

Seanan's story kind of dovetails with another that I recently observed, this time from Hillary Monahan concerning someone who moved in her writer circles. The first tweet in that thread can be found here. The short version of this story is that an aspiring author spent their time networking to "move up" the ladder of writerly contacts, discarding "lower tier" authors when they had been able to move "up" to more successful authors and then began name-dropping in order to get published, apparently wildly exaggerating the extent of their relationship. The specific part of Hillary's thread to focus upon is this:

If knowing people is a boost, pissing people off with power and influence . . . does a lot more to your career than that boost.

If you want to befriend authors, you should.

If you want to scale us while you scramble up a ladder, fuck you.

Once again, the focus is upon trying to cultivate relationships, not for the purpose of cultivating relationships, but for the sole, and seemingly exclusive, purpose of career advancement. The issue isn't forming a network of professional contacts, the issue is pretending that you are socializing with people for the purpose of cynically using them for career advancement.

I even have my own story in this vein: A couple of years ago I was at Gen Con and ended up playing a game of Cards Against Humanity in the hall of the convention center with a large group that included the redhead, most of the members of Five Year Mission, their spouses, and a couple of other people. It was late in the evening - late enough that the halls of the Indianapolis Convention Center were mostly deserted. While we were playing, a random dude walked up to the group and proceeded to try to pitch us on the game he and his buddies were trying to Kickstart. First he proceeded to denigrate the game we were playing, and then he spent a half an hour droning on about how great the card game he and his friends were producing was despite the fact that we were pointedly ignoring him after about the first five minutes of his pitch.

The reason I want to focus on these stories is that this sort of behavior seems to be all too common, despite the fact that it is unlikely to ever work and will probably result in an exasperated pro and an unhappy fan. Now, I'm not going to tell anyone else how to be a fan, but going to a convention with the goal of cold pitching your brilliant idea (or manuscript, or screenplay, or whatever) to a random famous person you recognize at the event is simply a recipe for disappointment. In short, the people who do this, who go to a convention (or a writer's group, or a reading, or any number of other similar spaces) with the notion that they will "hustle" themselves into the publishing industry are probably not having as much fun as the people who just show up to be fans and are probably deluding themselves as to their likelihood of success to boot.

The root of the problem in all of the examples is treating what is intended to be a social interaction as a commercial one. I am reminded of Dan Ariely pointing out in his book Predictably Irrational that humans don't live in one society, we effectively live in two. One society is the commercial world, in which we engage in professional transactions with others, trading labor for money, and then money for goods and services. When you go to a supermarket and buy food, or hire a tow truck to come get your car when it breaks down, you're participating in the commercial world. You pay them, and you get stuff in return. But humans also live in a social world of family and friends, and you interact with them very differently. If your car was to break down, and you asked a friend to come and help you fix it, you wouldn't tell them afterward "hey, to thank you, here is $50 for your time". You wouldn't go to your mother-in-law's house and leave her a cash tip for making a particularly good dinner. You might offer to take your friend out to dinner, or send your mother-in-law a thank you note, but you wouldn't pay them with cash. And if you did try to pay them with cash, they would probably be at least confused, and probably offended¹.

When someone shows up at a convention or a writer's group or some similar event with the intention of locating a conveniently placed famous person (or potential customer) and trying to pitch their idea to them, they are trying to cram a commercial exchange into what pretty much everyone else expects will be a social one. This is why this sort of behavior is so very off-putting, why this sort of approach almost never works, and why approaching such venues with the intention of simply engaging in a social exchange results in a much better experience for everyone. When I think of the many guys (and almost all of them seem to be guys) who do this, I am struck by how much frustration they are causing themselves. They are taking what should be an enjoyable experience - attending a convention and meeting the creative people who make so much of what they profess to enjoy - and transforming it into a series of disappointments. They miss out on the joy of being a fan, and in some cases, on the human experience of having pleasant and friendly social interactions with other people. Their mercenary intentions have eliminated their ability to see the dual world they live in, and left them with only the cold comfort of existing solely within the commercial world.

In the end, this post is about expressing just how freeing it is to simply be a fan. I don't have stories to pitch, or books to sell, or a brand to promote - I don't even have ads or any other monetizing mechanism on this blog². There is simply something glorious about being able to go to a convention with no ulterior motive of any kind. To bring this back to the first example in the post, I have met Seanan McGuire: She signed a couple of books for me and we talked about some of her other books. I got to hear her recount her story about the guy with the lizard in his leg and her story about the boa constrictor (at least I think it was a boa constrictor) that bit her arm. I got to hear her exchange stories about frogs and reptiles with Ursula Vernon. I also ended up having lunch in a group that included Ursula Vernon. I could do all of this without trying to figure out how I was going to launch myself at either McGuire or Vernon in order to pitch a comic book script.

If you multiply that experience by a couple hundred, you can get a sense of how many experiences I have had as a result of simply being a fan with no further expectations. Over my years of attending conventions, I have made many friends who are authors, editors, and even publishers. I have wound up having lunches or dinners with them, playing board games with them, or just sitting in a hotel bar and having long conversations with them. Several of the people I have made friends with keep in touch so they can be apprised of the adventures of the littlest starship captain, a few have even sent her gifts. If I had attempted to go to conventions in order to hustle some business instead of cultivating these friendships, there is a tiny chance I might have been able to get a story or something published somewhere, but I would have missed out on so many truly enjoyable interactions as a result. Even if all that had resulted from my fannish attendance at things like conventions and book readings had been sitting in the audience and listening, then the result would have been more rewarding than selling a couple of stories.

Just being a fan is freeing. Just being a fan is fun. Just being a fan is rewarding. Just being a fan is joyous.

¹ This sort of mixing of the social and commercial is problematic in the other direction as well. Think back to those times when a salesperson tried to behave like they were your friend in order to make a sale and how off-putting that felt. This is also why people tend to react negatively to friends trying to sell Amway or Primerica products to them - these kinds of businesses advise their members to treat their circle of family and friends as a market for the company's products, essentially advising people to use their social circle as a source of commercial contacts.

² On occasion, someone gets mad about something I've written and loudly proclaims that I must have "just written it for the clicks", or they declare that I have just lost them as a reader, and my response is to suppress a laugh. I don't make any money off this blog, and I have no plans to change that. I don't really care how many clicks a post gets or how many readers I have. Anyone who wants to stalk away mad is welcome to and it won't bother me a bit.

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Biased Opinion - Stopping Harassment After the Fact Just Isn't Good Enough

On Saturday, August 19^th, 2016, the redhead and I were at MidAmeriCon II and heading towards a panel titled The Shipping Forecast set to be moderated by Keith Yatsuhashi and featuring Jaylee James and Alyssa Wong. The topic of the panel was the appeal of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic settings for shippers. We had decided to attend this panel specifically because Wong was on it, and we wanted to see the Campbell finalist speak in person. We figured that this was the perfect panel to highlight the skills of someone with her talent for creepy and unsettling fiction.

Alyssa Wong wasn't at the panel.

At the start of the scheduled hour, Yatsuhashi announced that Wong would not be able to attend for personal reasons, and that the trio of scheduled panelists was reduced to a duo. They tried to do their best, but without the third voice the panel got off to an unsteady start, and the redhead and I ended up leaving early, disappointed.

It was only later that we learned what had happened. It seems that two writers of a column called Exploding Spaceship for the online magazine Bull Spec had harassed Wong at WisCon leading to a "no contact" order being issued to them. They turned up at MidAmeriCon and started up more or less where they had left off, continuing to harass Wong and targeting Brooke Bolander as well after she tried to intervene on Alyssa's behalf. Wong, with Fran Wilde's assistance, filed an incident report Saturday morning. To their credit, the MidAmeriCon staff worked quickly and the two people who had harassed Wong were ejected from the convention in relatively short order. In her account of the event, Wong praised the MidAmeriCon staff on this score, but to a certain extent, the damage had already been done because the only thing that they could do at that point amounted to efforts at remediation and amelioration.

Responding to incidents of harassment is important, and it seems that conventions overall are getting better at doing so, but this only deals with one side of the problem. Conventions need to get better at preventing harassment - by identifying repeat harassers and dealing with them accordingly. In their statement announcing the suspension of the two columnists who harassed Wong at WisCon and MidAmeriCon, Bull Spec revealed that their inquiries had uncovered yet another harassment incident that the pair had been involved in at ConCarolinas. That makes three incidents that we know of. Who knows how many more took place that we don't know about. Someone might say that that is three incidents too many, but that's a standard that would be impossible to meet. However, three incidents is probably at least one, and possibly two, too many to be acceptable in terms of conventions acting responsibly to prevent harassment.

In the aftermath of this incident, I have seen numerous posts on blogs and social media discussing it, and the comments have been full of people, mostly women, saying some variant of "this is why I don't go to conventions". Allowing serial harassers to attend conventions is driving a not inconsequential number of people away. The question people running conventions have to ask themselves is simply this: Are we going to provide an environment that is welcoming to people with a track record of harassing others at other conventions, or are we going to provide an environment that is welcoming to the people who are currently staying away from their event because they fear that they will be the target of harassment. Right now, most conventions seem to have taken a somewhat confused stance, becoming better at responding to harassment, but appearing to do almost nothing to prevent it.

Conventions need to be better at stopping harassment before it starts. To be blunt, conventions need to deny entry to potential attendees with a track record of misbehavior. I expect that there will be significant push back on this point, in large part due to the fact that it runs counter to Geek Social Fallacy #1 of "Ostracizers Are Evil" as outlined by Michael Suileabhain-Wilson in 2003. On a certain level, I understand the reaction: No one wants to be the person who tells someone else that they are barred from coming to the party. On another level, however, I am convinced that this sort of preemptive banning is probably necessary: Ignoring these sorts of issues is one of the things that is driving people away from conventions. As Suileabhain-Wilson wrote, "nearly every geek social group of significant size has at least one member that 80% of the members hate, and the remaining 20% merely tolerate". Apply those figures to convention attendees, and then consider how many of the "80%" are simply staying away and it becomes clear that the cost of doing nothing is something that conventions really can't afford to ignore. When one considers that the individuals who would be excluded are those who have demonstrated a propensity to violate the rules of the convention in the past, the need for preemptive action becomes even more readily apparent.

Setting aside the reluctance of people to actually pull the trigger and exclude known bad actors from conventions, the primary practical impediment to doing so is the lack of public information about such bad behavior. When it came to light that the people who harassed Wong at MidAmeriCon II were the same people who had harassed her at WisCon, some excused the MidAmeriCon II staff's lack of proactive action upon the fact that they probably didn't know about the incident at WisCon. The sad truth is that this is very plausible. After all, as far as I can tell, until Bull Spec revealed that their investigations had uncovered an additional instance of harassment traced to the same perpetrators at ConCarolinas, it appears that most people didn't know about that either. The problem is that conventions seem to be very bad at communicating with one another. There is some communication between conventions, but it is informal, winding through back-channels and passed by word of mouth. If someone running one convention doesn't know someone at another, they may never find out about issues that have cropped up, and even if they do, it will probably be related as an anecdote that is likely to be garbled in some way in the telling.

As things stand now, it is entirely possible for someone to go to a convention, harass someone, get kicked out, and the next month go to a second convention, harass someone again, and get kicked out again. That same person could probably go to a third convention the next month, harass someone yet again, and then get kicked out yet again. And on and on, repeating the pattern every month or two, and no one at any of the conventions would know what had happened before the serial harasser caused a problem at their event. And then they could possibly do it all over the next year, starting with the original convention, because not only do conventions not talk to one another about problem attendees, some seem to not even talk internally.

Right now, there is no real way to document patterns of bad behavior on the part of convention attendees. Conventions simply must get better at documenting and sharing information about instances of harassment. There needs to be some way to keep track of who has been ejected from a convention, and for what reason. Other conventions have to be able to look at these records and decide whether to issue a badge to individuals with a propensity to cause trouble. Conventions must be willing to preemptively ban serial harassers and bad actors. Had ConCarolinas documented the harassment that took place at their event and made it available to other conventions, and WisCon documented the harassment that took place at their event and made that available to other conventions, then this pair would not have been able to fly under the radar the way they did and turn up at MidAmeriCon II without anyone there being aware of their history. Had such a system already been in place, the people who harassed Alyssa Wong at MidAmeriCon II might not have even been there to harass her in the first place.

I don't know what the perfect solution is here, but I do know that conventions can do better. Scratch that - I know that conventions have to do better, because when it comes right down to it, not taking action to head off harassment means siding with the harassers and throwing their victims over the side. If conventions are serious about making themselves a welcoming place, then they need to start working together to identify harassers and stop them before they get through the door.

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Event - MidAmeriCon II, August 17th -21st, 2016: Saturday and Sunday

There are some people who say that Worldcon is too small, and that the convention should work to increase its attendance to five figures worth of attendees. My experience with Worldcon is that it is plenty big already. For every event that the redhead and I attended, there were usually a dozen others that we did not, and this doesn't even consider the other options we had, such as wandering through the dealer hall, playing games in the gaming area, or admiring the many "parks" that had been set up. There was so much to see and do that we didn't even notice there was an Iron Throne or a display of examples of past Hugo statues in the main convention hall until Sunday.

Not only was there a wide variety of events to choose from, all of the events the redhead and I went to were well attended, in some cases, they were filled to capacity or beyond. The lines at the signing sessions were quite long for all the authors one would expect long lines for, and even for lesser known authors there was often a fair amount of traffic. The Hugo Award ceremony was held in a large theater that was filled with attendees. When someone says that Worldcon "should" be larger, I have to wonder what they mean by that. Does Worldcon need to replicate Dragon*Con, or San Diego Comic Con, or some other large media convention in terms of attendance? There doesn't seem to be a need for that to happen, especially given that giant conventions like Dragon*Con and Gen Con already exist. What does Worldcon have to gain from trying to emulate them (and probably being a poor substitute) instead of being what it already is and delivering what it is already good at delivering?

I have been to Dragon*Con. I like Dragon*Con. I will probably go to Dragon*Con again at some point in the future. But I also like Worldcon, and I don't want or need the two conventions to supply the same experience. There is room in the world for different kinds of conventions, especially since some people want the giant media experience that Dragon*Con and the various Comic Cons provide, and others want the more relaxed experience of smaller, local literary conventions, and still others prefer the conventions that fit in between those two extremes. And for every person who loves a particular type of convention, there is probably another person who has no interest in it, but loves a different type. When people who are agitated about the way Worldcon is run say that it needs to change, to expand, to cater to a different audience, they never really seem to have a reason why. They always seem to put forward the notion that Worldcon should be different as if it were self-evident that it should, and that is a proposition that I think is dubious at best.

Saturday: This was another late start for the redhead and I, mostly because of how late we had stayed at the Tor.com party the night before. At least in our experience, we have to decide if we want to attend convention events in the morning or parties in the evening, because doing both is a schedule that is simply too exhausting for us to keep up with.

The day also got off to a somewhat disappointing start. The first panel of the day that we intended to go to (actually the only real panel that we intended to attend) was The Shipping Forecast moderated by Keith Yatsuhashi, with Jaylee James and Alyssa Wong scheduled to be panelists. When we arrived, we were informed that Alyssa would not be joining the panel. As I figured out later, the reason for her absence appears to have been the result of the harassment she had been subjected to the evening before, and she was still in her hotel room filing her report with the MidAmeriCon response team. But we didn't know that on Saturday morning, all we knew is that the author we had most wanted to see at the panel wasn't there. I suspect we were not the only people who had decided to go to this panel to see Alyssa speak, and came away sad that she was not there. On the list of reasons why harassment is something conventions should be concerned about, this is well down the list, but it is not inconsequential: The ripple effects that follow-on after a harassment incident affect more than just those directly involved - they can, and often do, affect the entire convention. The problems of harassment and disruption are issues that I want to talk about, but I'm going to leave them for a blog post of their own, as I believe that they deserve a comprehensive treatment.

Friday had been a day dominated by magazine reading panels. In contrast, Saturday was a day of attending signing sessions. The first one the redhead and I went to featured David Brin and Greg Bear, who both signed books for us. While we were standing in line, David Gerrold ran over from a nearby booth where he was signing material to say "I guess this is where you come to Brin and Bear it". He then quickly ran away followed by a chorus of groans. I suspect that if people in the group had had popcorn on hand, we would have thrown it at him as he retreated. Both Walter H. Hunt and Fran Wilde were also part of this signing session, but as both of the authors have signed literally every work of theirs we own, all we could do is tell Hunt how much we liked Elements of Mind, and tell Fran how much we were looking forward to the release of her new novel Cloudbound.

The next signing session we attended featured Mary Robinette Kowal and Jo Walton. The redhead and I now have a complete set of the Glamourist Histories series, all signed by Ms. Kowal, and a copy of What Makes This Book So Great signed by Walton. Also at the signing session were astronauts Stan Love and Jeanette Epps, a fact that pretty much turned everyone present into star-struck twelve year old children. Some of the authors expressed an interest in abandoning their own signing sessions so they could go and have a fangasm over the two astronauts. Sarah Pinsker, who was signing at the table right next to Love and Epps, took a hilarious selfie with the astronaut table in the background. We ended up with signed pictures from both of them, and the redhead got to take a picture with each astronaut. All good things must come to an end, and before long the astronauts had retired to be replaced by the next collection of authors. We got books signed by John Scalzi and Ferrett Steinmetz, both of whom were exceptionally funny to talk to. We also got to speak with Sarah Beth Durst, who is scheduled to be the Guest of Honor at our "home" convention of CapClave in October.

The big event of the day was the Hugo Award ceremony, which started at eight in the evening, but for which we got in line shortly after six. At Worldcon, even waiting in line is frequently enjoyable, as you are always surrounded by people who have just as much of a passion for science fiction as you do. As part of a conversation, I brought up the line "[t]he sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel", and everyone knew exactly what I was referencing. Our conversation wandered across a variety of topics, but mostly centered on time travel scenarios and how we would (or would not) successfully cope with technological limitations if we were sent back to relive our teen years knowing what we know now. There are very few places that you can have that sort of conversation with a random group of strangers in a line, but Worldcon is one of them.

Once we got into the Pat Cadigan Theatre, things settled down as everyone took their seats. Many of the attendees had dressed up, and the redhead and I were no exception - she had made herself a very attractive dress decorated with text from The Hobbit, and had made me a matching kilt, also adorned with Tolkien's prose. Among the men, I believe that Scott Edelman stole the show with a fantastic suit covered in stars (although John Hertz in a tux and tails complete with a top hat gave him a good run for his money on that front), while Lynn Thomas and Alyssa Wong appeared to be competing for the Hugo Award for Best Dress. Pat Cadigan served as Toastmaster, assisted by Jan Siegel, and they hosted a magnificent ceremony. Through the night, Cadigan and Siegel were funny, especially when joined on stage by Ellen Datlow and Robert Silverberg, but most importantly, they kept the ceremony moving at an energetic pace. The Hugo Awards have a lot of categories, and it would be easy for them to bog down (and I have watched previous ceremonies in which they dragged at times), but Cadigan, Siegel, and the other presenters kept things moving and the entire show just flew by in what seemed to be no time at all.

As anyone who follows this blog probably knows already, I have thoughts on the Hugo Awards themselves, and how the voting turned out this year. I intend to talk about those topics more fully in a later blog post, but for now I will say that I am mostly pleased with the results. Worthy works won, and, with a few exceptions, things that deserved to finish behind "No Award" did so. The speeches by the winners were all excellent, but the true highlight of the night was when Andy Weir won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer - not his winning (he wasn't my first choice, but he was my second), but rather who accepted the award for him. Weir didn't come to the ceremony due to his reluctance to use air travel, so instead he had the astronauts in attendance accept the awards on his behalf, and Stan Love accepted the Campbell for him. For those who do not know, the Campbell Award comes with a tiara, and Love happily knelt to receive the shiny headgear from presented Elizabeth Bear and proudly wore it as he delivered Weir's acceptance speech. To Stan Love - you are the best of sports, and the most securely manly of men.

Every other speech was fantastic, from Hao Jingfang accepting the award for Best Novelette with a halting but delightful speech about how she was uncertain she wanted to win because she had been really looking forward to going to George R.R. Martin's annual Hugo Loser's Party, to Best Semiprozine editor Lynne Thomas opening her speech with "Well, shit" followed by fellow editor Michael Damien Thomas opening his with "Love is real!" Neil Gaiman provided the most direct speech of the night, thanking the voters for his win, but rebuking both the Sad and Rabid Puppies in no uncertain terms. Both Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin supplied acceptance speeches that emphasized the need for, and the enriching nature of, diverse voices in the genre fiction field. The best, and most powerful speech of the night goes to another editor from Uncanny Magazine, Michi Trota, who pointed out that creating diversity is not merely opening the doors and expecting people to walk in, but also requires seeking out and encouraging new voices from the community of those who have previously been marginalized.

As quickly as the ceremony had begun, it was over. After the Hugo winners had come back to the stage for the traditional group photo, the redhead and I headed back to the con suite area for a snack and a drink and to get hold of copies of the post-Hugo statistics. We sat down with a couple of friends, and then slowly accumulated what seemed like most of the members of the Washington Science Fiction Association as we went through the rankings and the longlist of nominees, identifying who had been pushed off the ballot by slate voting, and figuring out what the ballot in some of the categories might have looked like absent the unethical actions of the Puppies. As I noted before regarding the experience of standing in line before the Hugo Award ceremony, there are few places where one can have an extended conversation about matters of mostly nerdy interest - in this case, a conversation about the nominating and voting stats for a genre fiction award - and have everyone within earshot as a fully on board participant. Worldcon is one of those places, and that is one of the things that makes it such an almost magical event.

Sunday: Sunday was the last day of the convention, and was also a shortened day, with the last scheduled event starting at four in the afternoon. There is always something melancholic about packing up and checking out of one's hotel room on the final day of a convention, but there is also some relief. Conventions are a lot of fun, but they are also exhausting.

We weren't quite ready to head home yet, so we made our way to the magazine group reading for the Hugo-Award winning Uncanny Magazine moderated by Lynne M. Thomas and featuring Scott Lynch, Alyssa Wong, Max Gladstone, and Elizabeth Bear. Lynch opened up the panel by passing out the name cards, deciding that he would like to be Gladstone for the day. Bear elected to be Alyssa Wong, and Wong decided to be Bear, because, as she said "Elizabeth Bear is awesome". That left Gladstone to be Scott Lynch, leading him to quip how great it was to have Lynch's long flowing hair. This bit of silliness completed, the four authors began their readings, quickly proving why Uncanny had won the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award the night before. I know I sound like a broken record, but I cannot recommend these types of multi-author reading panels enough.

Our next panel was Sense8 moderated by Kate Elliott, with panelists Meg Frank, Sunil Patel, and Mark Oshiro, focused, as one might expect, upon the Netflix television program. This panel was the very first one that the redhead and I had put on our schedule when we were first mapping it out, and it did not disappoint. Elliott led an energetic discussion about the series, what made it so very good, what it got right, and also what it got wrong - although the general consensus was that the show hit just the right tone much more often than it suffered a misstep. Every panelist was excellent, but the commentary provided by Oshiro concerning the storylines revolving around Leto was outstanding, as was Patel's commentary relating to Kala's story set in India. This was one of the best panels I have ever attended, which really should not be surprising given the high quality of both the panel and the subject matter.

The final convention-related event the redhead and I attended was Can Hard Science Fiction Be Too Hard? a panel with Geoffrey Landis and Ann Leckie. Even though it was late in the day on the last day of the convention, both Leckie and Landis were in top form, ranging across a wide variety of science fiction topics and works - commenting on works by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Hal Clement, and also contrasting hard science fiction with other modes of science fiction such as space opera. After the panel, we got a chance to talk to Leckie for a bit, and she was just as warm and personable as one would expect a person who wrote a space opera series in which tea was a major plot element. We also met a woman who had cosplayed as several characters from Leckie's Imperial Radch series over the course of the weekend, having taken on the appearance of Tisarwat, Breq, and Anaander Mianaai. I am always impressed by the dedication and creativity of skilled cosplayers, and this woman was no exception.

After our final panel, the redhead and I met up with a friend of ours from the local area to go out to eat at Jack's Stack, as it is probably a criminal offense to spend any time in Kansas City without having a barbecue meal. And then we drove away from Worldcon, taking with us some books, some autographs, a lot of pictures, and a collection of wonderful memories.

MidAmeriCon II, August 17^th - 21^st, 2016: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday

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Event - MidAmeriCon II, August 17th - 21st, 2016: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday

Last week the seventy-fourth Worldcon, titled MidAmeriCon II, was held in Kansas City, Missouri. The redhead and I were among the many thousands of attendees this year, and at least as far as we are concerned, it was a terrific convention.

Wednesday: We arrived late in the day on the first day of the convention after driving eight hours to get to Kansas City. After checking in to our hotel, we took the Main Street streetcar to the convention center for the first time. I will take this opportunity to heap praise onto Kansas City for their excellent streetcar service, which was easy to use and got us where we needed to go in a most efficient manner.

After a short walk from the streetcar, we reached the convention center and found the registration desk shortly before it closed, claiming our badges. The redhead also got her first badge ribbon as the volunteer working the desk had a "Team Mystic" ribbon to give her. From there it was a escalator ride to the enormous main hall of the convention where the "consuite", dealer hall, and artists' alley could be found as well as the various "parks" that had been set up, and the "party rooms" were located. Con ops and the area for author signings were also located in this room, as were the gaming area and the cosplay repair station. Everything was separated by temporary dividers, which worked well, but did block some of the food vendors along the walls - a fact that we did not discover until Saturday, and then only by accident.

We took this opportunity to tour the dealer hall, as we didn't know if our schedule would permit us to do so later. We found the Studio Foglio booth where we acquired volumes twelve and thirteen of the Girl Genius series, and had them both signed by Phil and Kaja Foglio. From there we headed to Larry Smith's book store and acquired a number of books we had been looking forward to, including Time Siege by Wes Chu, League of Dragons by Naomi Novik, The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin, and The Royal Succession by Maurice Druon. We would have also picked up Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal, but Larry didn't have the book, just as he had not had it at either Balticon or InConJunction. He had all of the other books in Kowal's Glamourist Histories series, but not that one for some reason, at least not at the start of the convention. All turned out well eventually, by Thursday Larry had received a mailed shipment of books that included Glamour in Glass, and in a stroke of luck, Mary was there when the redhead went to buy a copy and got it signed on the spot.

After leaving the main hall, we ran across Fran Wilde, Sarah Pinsker, Scott Edelman, and a few others, giving us an opportunity to catch up with them. After a short conversation, we headed over to the local supermarket Cosentino's to stock up on supplies for the rest of the week. We usually do this at most conventions, stocking up on snacks, drinks, and food for the convention and carrying the supplies in an insulated backpack we bring just for this purpose. We were able to get most of what we needed, but we discovered something we didn't previously know about Cosentino's: Their pre-prepared food is very attractive, but for the most part is mediocre at best.

Thursday: Our convention really got going on Thursday, with a panel on the Best (Mega)Bits of Gaming featuring Randy Henderson, Symantha Reagor, Andrea Stewart, Brianna Wu, and Carrie Patel moderated by Vivian Trask. We had mostly gone to the panel to see Brianna and Carrie, but the entire discussion was excellent, touching on a wide variety of issues related to video game development and design. On a side note, this panel was scheduled in the earliest time slot of the day, which was a quite reasonable 10 A.M. Whoever made the decision to have programming for this Worldcon start at 10 A.M. (as opposed to many conventions where 8 A.M. is the norm), I send my thanks to you. As a bonus, Brianna's husband Frank Wu was in attendance at the panel, and we were able to meet him as well. He thought my Five Year Mission t-shirt was interesting, so I pointed him to the band's website where I hope he enjoys the music they produce.

After our panel we ran across Mary Robinette Kowal, who was in costume for her roving book launch party for Ghost Talkers. We gave her the pass phrase from the blog post in which she had announced the roving book launch party, and she gave us a coded telegram. And thus our participation in the game of cracking Mary's various coded messages began, although it turned out that this was an inauspicious beginning, as there was no real way to crack the code in the telegram. It turned out that the code in the telegram was a book code keyed, naturally enough, to Ghost Talkers. Unfortunately, Ghost Talkers was pretty much impossible to acquire at the convention, as none of the book dealers had a copy available, which made the code impossible to crack. After we had beaten our heads against the code for the better part of a day, we ran into Mary again, and she gave us a postcard as a replacement code to puzzle out, and the rest of the challenges went quite smoothly. There were common Caesar codes, a keyed Caesar code, a pigpen cipher, and a columnar transposition cipher. We spent the better part of two days working them out and then tracking Mary down to give her the coded pass phrase to get the prizes of tea, chocolate, rum, and a pencil, and finally the final code. The final prize was to be delivered at the Tor.com party on Friday evening, but I'll talk about that when I write about Friday's events.

Going back to the subject of musical acts, at noon, we attended Paul & Storm's concert. As usual, the duo were excellent, providing geeky comedy and music that included numbers such as Opening Band, Irish Drinking Song, Write Like the Wind (George R.R. Martin), Nun Fight, and Westerosi Pie. They closed their concert with a rousing (and lengthy) rendition of The Captain's Wife's Lament. If you have not attended a Paul & Storm concert, it is worth it to go just for that song alone, although one should be warned that they take a song that runs for about two minutes and twenty seconds in the studio recording and make it last for eight, ten, twelve, twenty, or even more minutes. As a consolation, the live version of the song incorporates substantial audience participation, which is what makes the song so long and so much fun.

Our next event was the Grand Master Chat featuring Larry Niven, Connie Willis, Joe Haldeman, James Gunn, and Robert Silverberg. This is the sort of panel that it is almost impossible to find anywhere but Worldcon, because this assemblage of talent doesn't show up anywhere else very often. The panel was mostly an undirected conversation, in part because one would be hard-pressed to find someone who could moderate this group, and in part because there wasn't any real need to direct it. For the most part, this panel was a little bit like sitting in a room where some very old friends were having a conversation about whatever they thought was interesting. Everyone on the panel was excellent, but Willis and Silverberg stood out even in this group.

Our next panel was titled SF as Protest Literature with Bradford Lyau, Mark Oshiro, Jo Walton, Ann Leckie, and moderated by Alex Jablokow. Once again, this was a brilliant panel with intelligent and knowledgeable panelists providing insightful and interesting commentary. From there we went to Your Character Ate What? a game show style panel hosted by Fran Wilde and featuring Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch, Maz Gladstone, Esther Friesner, and John Chu. The format for the game show was fairly simple: Two audience members were selected as contestants; they then picked a member of the panel as their spokesperson for each question. Fran would ask a question and ask the selected panelists to answer it, at which point the contestants would have to decide if their chosen panelist's answer was right or wrong. The twist is that the questions almost always involve food, and are almost always incredibly weird. The real fun is watching authors who clearly have not read the book that the question is based upon try to bluff their way through their answer, or, as seemed to frequently be the case for Scott Lynch, when they simply make no pretense at getting the correct answer. This panel was great fun, and was one of the highlights of the convention. If you are ever at a convention where Fran is hosting this game show, I highly recommend attending.

The redhead and I then headed back to the main hall to cast our votes for site selection, which was an extremely well-organized process. Our return to the main hall also allowed us to stop by the various fan tables, including those organized by the various bids to host Worldcon and NASFiC. This allowed us to obtain a number of badge ribbons, both for the bids themselves - I got ribbons for New Orleans in 2018, Dublin in 2019, New Zealand in 2020, and San Jose in 2018 - and silly ones such as a ribbon stating "Adult Supervision Is Recommended", and a pair of Chuck Tingle influenced ribbons: One said "I Am Chuck Tingle", and the other "No Devilman Plots". The redhead got one that said "Ladys Get Hard". On that note, I should point out that anyone who thinks that Tingle's placement as a Hugo finalist embarrassed the Worldcon community is simply deluded. There were so many Chuck Tingle themed badge ribbons that if one didn't know better, they might have thought he was one of the guests of honor. There was even a matching set of ribbons that said "I am secretly Chuck Tingle" and "I am not secretly Chuck Tingle", which many people wore together, making them a kind of Schrödinger's Tingle. Far from being upset by the nomination, most people seemed to embrace the silly nature of it, and had great fun at the convention as a result.

Friday: Friday was supposed to start off with the panel It's Not Torture If It's the Good Guys, but the combination of Wednesday's drive and Thursday's packed schedule meant that the redhead and I didn't get ourselves together early enough to attend. One thing that almost always happens at a convention is that your planned schedule will be disrupted and you won't be able to do one of the things you had hoped to be able to do. Whether it is because you overslept, or because getting lunch took longer than you thought, or simply because the event you wanted to attend was so overcrowded that you couldn't get in, something is almost certain to go wrong somewhere, and it is unlikely to be a unique event. You just have to be prepared for this sort of thing to happen, and roll with it.

The first panel we actually made it to wasn't really a panel at all, it was the Magazine Group Reading for Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, moderated by C.C. Finlay and featuring readings by David Gerrold, Cat Rambo, Sarah Pinsker, William Ledbetter, and Esther Friesner. This was the first of several magazine reading panels that the redhead and I had scheduled at the convention, and I cannot recommend this type of panel enough. There is no better way to get exposure to the work of a lot of writers than to go to a group reading panel, especially one that is themed in some way. The authors on this panel had all been published in Fantasy & Science Fiction at some point, and most read a section from one of their stories that had appeared in the magazine. Each of the authors gave a terrific reading, but both Gerrold and Friesner were notable for the humor that infused their readings.

Next we attended the Magazine Group Reading panel for Analog: Science Fiction and Fact moderated by Trevor Quachri and featuring Alec Nevala-Lee, Stanley Schmidt, Rosemary Claire Smith, and James van Pelt. Of all the group readings the redhead and I attended at Worldcon, this one was the least interesting overall. I'm not sure if it was because the readers delivered their material in a dull manner, or if the stories themselves were weak. I have found the stories in Analog, when taken as a group, to be the blandest and most pedestrian of the stories found in the major speculative fiction magazines, although I usually attribute this to the fact that the magazine emphasizes technical details more than the others, sometimes at the expense of storytelling, and that may have been what happened on this panel. On the plus side, there were two stories featuring dinosaurs. I will also say that while I have often been critical of Quachri's time at the helm of the magazine, the answers he gave to the audience questions were informative and insightful.

From the Analog reading, we moved directly to the Magazine Group Reading for Asimov's Science Fiction moderated by Sheila Williams and featuring readings by James Patrick Kelly, Mary Robinette Kowal, Steve Rasnic Tem, Connie Willis, and Robert Reed. As with the other readings, all of the authors were in top form, and all gave excellent readings, especially Willis and Kowal. One of the interesting things to see at these panels is the interaction between the editors and the authors, and one particularly funny exchange ended up with James Patrick Kelly crawling away into the audience in shame.

Friday was the day that David Truesdale hijacked a panel on The State of Short Fiction, an incident that led to his expulsion from the convention. I may write about that in some other post, but to satisfy my curiosity I went back and figured out where the redhead and I were when this happened: We were in line to get books signed by Robert Silverberg. Over the course of the convention, the redhead and I asked several authors to sign books for us, and every single one of them was gracious and generous, whether we were asking after a panel, or while in the dealer hall, or at an official signing session. Silverberg was no exception. One of the wonderful things about the science fiction community is that an author with as long and accomplished a career as Silverberg will still sit and talk with fans almost at the drop of a hat. In many cases, I have the impression that were it not for the requirements of scheduling, many authors would spend all of their time at Worldcon simply sitting around and talking with attendees.

Our final Magazine Group Reading of the day was for Clarkesworld, moderated by Neil Clarke and featuring Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kelly Robson, Seth Dickinson, Martin Shoemaker, and Naomi Kritzer. As with the other reading panels, this one was entertaining fro start to finish, with highlights provided when Kritzer read from her Hugo-nominated (and later Hugo-winning) story Cat Pictures Please and Shoemaker read from his WSFA Small Press Award-nominated story Today I Am Paul. Aside from the readings, the best moment in the panel came when Mohanraj pointed out to Clarke that he has turned down the sequel to the story she read and he went and stood in the corner in shame.

After four magazine group readings and two signing sessions, the redhead and I made it to our first actual panel of the day titled 'It Takes a Pack to Raise a Child' Families and Friends in Steampunk, with panelists Gail Carriger, Beth Cato, Sandee Rodriguez, and Belinda McBride moderated by Heather Rose Jones. This panel was quite good on the whole, delving into what makes a character a side character as opposed to a member of an ensemble, and how to use such characters to drive a story forward. All of the panelists contributed, but the star of the hour was definitely Beth Cato, whose commentary was consistently stellar.

The final event we attended on Friday was the Girl Genius Radio Play hosted by Phil and Kaja Foglio. As they explained at the outset, this event was neither radio nor a play, but rather a collection of people standing in front of microphones reading a story in character in a manner similar to that done in the past for radio broadcast. Except there was no broadcasting done on this night. After Phil selected members of the audience to fill out parts, Kaja took to the microphone as Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius, while her son took on the role of Krosp, Emperor of All Cats, and Phil assumed the role of narrator. With the cast in place, presentations of Revenge of the Weasel Queen and Agatha's Big Date commenced, with much fanfare and cheering and audience participation. Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer, tried to be heroic, Krosp was sarcastic, Zeetha knocked heads, and Agatha saved the day. Kind of. By mistake. The Girl Genius Radio Plays, despite being neither radio nor plays, are a rollicking good time, and if you are at a convention where they are held, I highly recommend going.

After the Radio Play, we went to dinner and eventually went to the Tor.com party, and finally completed Mary Robinette Kowal's final code challenge. The prize for completing the challenge was supposed to be a story, written by Mary on the spot at the party using her portable manual typewriter. Unfortunately, she had accidentally dropped the typewriter earlier in the day, and it was not working. Mary spent nearly two hours trying to fix the machine, adjusting the tension of various screws and wires, trying to find just the magical combination that would get it working again. For much of this time, I sat next to her, having offered my Swiss Army Knife for her to use as a screwdriver and holding the miniature flashlight for her while she tinkered away. Eventually she gave up, and gave us an I.O.U. for the story, but even if she had not, this is the sort of experience that makes conventions what they are. As tense and out of sorts as Mary was for most of the time, I will never forget sitting there and doing my best to help. It wasn't how I imagined I would spend the bulk of the Tor.com party, but I wouldn't trade the time spent being Mary's assistant for anything. On a more party-like note, I did get to spend some time making the acquaintance of Naomi Kritzer, who is just as delightful in person as her stories are on the page.

MidAmeriCon II, August 17^th - 21^st, 2016: Saturday and Sunday

Events     Home

Event - Balticon 50, May 27th - 30th, 2015

Or The Tale of the Good, the Bad, and the Shoe-Cop

The Good: There was a lot that went right at Balticon 50. This was a unique event, as Balticon invited all of its previous guests of honor back to celebrate the fiftieth time this convention had been held. As a result, the lineup of guests was quite impressive for a relatively small regional convention, and a similar event is probably not going to happen outside of a Worldcon for at least a few years. The real beauty of smaller conventions is the unplanned things unconnected with any "official" events that happen spontaneously. We were able to go to dinner with Day al-Mohammed, Renee Brown, and Meriah Crawford and play Stone Age with Renee as well. I saw Natalie Luhrs, who I only get to talk to at conventions. We went to dinner on Saturday night with a group that included the authors Tom Doyle and David Walton, and so on. These sorts of things are the magical part of science fiction conventions, and pretty much make going to these events worthwhile all by themselves. As far as planned events go, the following are the highlights of the weekend from my perspective.

• All of the author guests the redhead and I interacted with were absolutely fabulous in person, most notably Connie Willis, Fran Wilde, and Kim Stanley Robinson. In the swirl of convention chaos, the presence of so many top-notch and exceptionally warm authors provided a steady rock to stabilize the convention. A terribly run convention can be saved by a strong guest of honor, and while Balticon 50 had issues, it wasn't terribly run and with both George R.R. Martin and the returning "Alumni Guests of Honor" it had the advantage of having at least a dozen guests who could have headlined the convention. There was so much star power at this convention that it is somewhat tempting to simply list them all and call it a great convention. As far as I can tell, every one of the "alumni" was extremely generous with their time and effort, patiently sitting through long signing sessions and participating in panels and readings scheduled for some of the less desirable hours that would normally be populated by faces with considerably less experience in the field (Connie Willis, for example, was saddled with two 8:00 AM events). I am consistently amazed by how accessible and friendly so many of the figures in science fiction are, and it is on this pervasive congeniality that the community is built.


• Speaking of readings, the redhead and I attended a number of very good author readings. Before Balticon, I though of Jody Lynn Nye as "that author who has written some collaborations with Robert Lynn Asprin and Anne McCaffrey". After Balticon, I will always think of her as "that author who delivers fantastic readings". Nye was brilliant both as a reader and as a panelist. I have some of her solo books (I even brought them to the convention and got her to sign them), and seeing her in person pushed them quite a bit closer to the top of my mountainous to-be-read pile. Although the event we attended featuring Steven Barnes was listed as an author reading, Barnes didn't do much reading, but instead talked about how he found balance in his life - more or less turning into an infomercial on "how to live your life according to the wisdom of Steven Barnes". This was different from the reading it had been advertised to be, but Barnes is such a passionate person that listening to him extol the virtues of almost anything would be interesting. We also attended a few multi-author readings, starting with one that featured Tom Doyle, A.L. Davroe, and David Wood. It seems that Balticon tried to put authors together who would have a diverse array of writing, as Doyle's modern secret magic story, Davroe's young adult story on the moon, and Wood's hard-boiled 1930s detective story would seem to have little in common. All three authors gave good readings, but the star was clearly Doyle who read the introduction to his forthcoming War and Craft, wherein he sang the mystical poetry duel between two Irish craft practitioners. The other group reading featured Scott Edelman, Steve Lubs, Christopher Rose, and Don Sakers. Edelman got everyone on his side right off the bat by bringing an assortment of cookies to share, and then delivered his usual excellent reading. Steve Lubs read what I believe was an as yet unpublished science fiction story about double-crossing aliens visiting the Earth, while Rose read his story that won a Baltimore Science Fiction Society-sponsored writing award, and Sakers read an excerpt from a longer work. Once again, the line-up of authors at the reading were all very different, although they were all quite entertaining.


• Although the redhead and I only attended a few panels, the ones we went to were all good - once again made so by the high quality of the program participants. Our first panel was Why Ant Man and the First Thor Movie Are Good moderated by S.L. Wideman with panelists Day al-Mohammed, Meg Nuge, and Joshua Bilmes. The panel was mostly interesting, although it quickly devolved into a referendum on the more recent super-hero oriented movies Batman vs. Superman and Captain America: Civil War, turning more into an analysis of why people don't like some movies featuring super-heroes rather than an explanation of why the movies that were supposed to be the subject of the panel were good. The next was titled Writing: Its My Job and What I Do for Fun and was moderated by Carl Cipra and featured Jean Marie Ward, Jody Lynn Nye, and Keith DeCandido. To be perfectly honest, the redhead wanted to go because she wanted to see Ward on a panel, having enjoyed her presentations at previous conventions. Ward was in fine form with her usual wit, and both Nye and DeCandido made us into new fans with their participation. The most star-studded panel we attended was Finding a Foot to Stand On, another panel moderated by Carl Cipra which had Alexandra Duncan, Charles Gannon, Fran Wilde, Larry Niven, and Connie Willis as panelists. The subject under discussion was more or less "how does an author with a non-science background write hard science fiction", and given that both Willis and Gannon have academic backgrounds in English, while Niven holds a degree in mathematics, this seemed particularly apropos. Wilde, with an undergraduate degree in English and graduate degrees in information architecture, seemed to bridge the gap. Overall, the panel was exceptional, covering the topic quite ably, and often humorously. Our last panel was a presentation by Day al-Mohammed which was titled How to Make Your SF Short Film, but actually had the topic of "odd historical pieces of technology that Day thinks are interesting", including al-Jazari's water clock, the Mysorean rockets, and the somewhat ghoulish necropants.


• The redhead and I attended part of the Baen Road Show, an almost ubiquitous event at conventions these days, where Baen promotes various upcoming titles. This road show was no exception on that front, with announcements including an upcoming title by David Weber and a discussion led by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller about the interconnected web that is their series of stories set in the Liaden universe. Having seen the presentation, I am somewhat interested in reading the series, but somewhat deterred by the fact that it is eighteen novels long (plus various other ancillary materials) and has an almost unfathomable continuity. The highlight of the event was when Larry Niven was called to the stage to talk about the ongoing Man-Kzin Wars series. Apparently, no one had bothered to tell Niven where the stairs were to get on stage. Not to be deterred by such issues, the 78 year-old clambered onto the waist high stage, and then slowly rose from the hands and knees position such a maneuver had placed him in. As he turned to the audience, one could see that his face was flushed from the effort and both the redhead and I were certain he would have a heart attack right there on stage. Fortunately, he did not, and when a con staff member ran up to point out where the stairs were, Niven simply deadpanned in response, "That will be useful information for when I want to get down".


• After two years of planning (and failing) to attend an Eye of Argon reading, the redhead and I finally made it. For those unfamiliar with the work, The Eye of Argon is more or less an homage to the pulpy barbarian stories of authors like Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter, and L. Sprague de Camp. Written by a very young Jim Theis and originally published in the Journal of the Ozark SF Society, the story is terrible in the most hilarious way, combining a mighty thewed barbarian hero, a wench with a "lithe, opaque nose", an evil prince with an adviser who gets killed twice in the story, and even more evil cultists worshiping the vile idol of Argon. The writing is terrible, riddled with grammatical errors, misspellings, words used in incomprehensible ways, and situations described that are literally physically impossible (at one point a woman is described as having her face peering up from between her bosoms). The story has since become something of a cult favorite at conventions where it is read aloud, with the challenge being to read it as written in all of its horrendous glory, convoluted syntax, oddly spelled words, and all. At this reading, members of the audience were brought to the front to read the story, with Ian Randal Strock reading along to make sure they read the text exactly as written, and stopping any reader whose internal editor unconsciously caused them to say "many faceted gem" instead of "many fauceted gem", "chasm" instead of "chasim", or "deity" instead of "diety". Enhancing the reading, Keith DeCandido, Hildy Silverman, and Mike Ventrella attempted to act along, trying to recreate the actions the text describes, although they occasionally had to simply shrug their shoulders and give up despite their valiant efforts, helpless to actually recreate what was on the page (mostly because what was described was anatomically impossible). Despite excellent work by Keith, Hildy, and Mike, and some almost improbably skilled readers (at one point DeCandido remarked that this reading had gotten further through the story than any other he had participated in), the highlight was Strock reading along and registering his approval with a nod and a smile when a reader navigated a particularly tricky passage.


• The redhead and I attended the eSpec book launch party where the publisher was officially launching their short fiction anthologies Gaslight & Grimm, The Weird Wild West, and The Side of Good/The Side of Evil, as well as the relaunch of their military science fiction anthology Dogs of War. With plenty of good food, an impressive array of authors, and a pile of good books to be had, this was an excellent event. There were a number of small presses at Balticon, many of whom clearly get a decent chunk of their business from convention sales, and eSpec, run by Danielle Ackley-McPhail and Mike McPhail, is one of my favorites (I am also a fan of Ian Randal Strock's small press Fantastic Books). With the death of the mid-list at larger publishers, it seems that small presses are taking up the slack. If one is interested in experimental work, authors on the rise (or simply authors who are more comfortable working at shorter lengths), the diverse assortment of small presses in the genre fiction world are the place to look.

The Bad: Balticon 50 had a lot of issues. Some were beyond the control of the convention staff. The following problems, however, are pretty much squarely on them.

• One glaring problem was that programming was a mess, and apparently so from the beginning of the convention. Balticon provided both a large convention book containing a schedule and a pocket guide that also had a schedule. The first problem was that these schedules were incompatible with one another, each listing events at different times - they diverged by a half an hour, which unsurprisingly served to make it difficult to figure out when an event was supposed to take place. The second problem was that many program participants had schedules that were, as Mur Lafferty described it, "temporally impossible", with many participants double-booked for two events at one time, or booked with back-to-back events separated by several hotel floors. When I attended a scheduled interview with Phil and Kaja Foglio on the tenth floor of the hotel, they were immediately whisked away to a panel that was taking place on the fifth floor. Despite many fans standing there who wanted to say hello to the Foglios and maybe get something signed or a picture (and the Foglios being apparently willing to accommodate such fans), the requirements of the schedule were such that they had to leave right away. Given that the Foglios did not have a scheduled signing session, this was somewhat disappointing. The programming issues were especially problematic when one considers the presence of so many guest of honor "alumni". Given that the convention had a magnificent pool of talent to draw from that included Steve Barnes, Peter Beagle, Michael Flynn, Phil and Kaja Foglio, Joe Haldeman, Donald Kingsbury, Sharon Lee, Steve Miller Larry Niven, Jody Lynn Nye, Nancy Springer, Allen Steele, Charles Stross, Harry Turtledove, John Varley, Jo Walton, and Connie Willis as well as their usual set of attendees such as Charles Gannon, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Fran Wilde, not to mention guest of honor George R.R. Martin, there was absolutely no need to have such tight schedules for any participant.


• The convention was held at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel, which had a number of design flaws that hampered the convention. I'm not going to hold the poor hotel design against the convention staff (except to the extent that they never should have chosen this hotel to begin with), but I will hold it against the convention staff that they used the available space quite badly. To begin with, programming was spread out over several floors, with scheduled items taking place on floors five, six, nine, ten, and eleven, and the Con suite and Green Room were on floor twelve. This meant that program participants often had to go up or down several floors to get between their (often tightly packed) events. Because the hotel had so few elevators, this often meant using the Soviet surplus stairwell to get from one event to another. Apparently no one considered that by bringing back several guest of honor "alumni", they were bringing back people who are a lot older than they had been the first time they attended Balticon, and many of them are, for want of a better word, frail. Watching a convention staff member try to get Donald Kingsbury to hurry to his next panel was almost painful. Kingsbury was a trooper about it, but the man is eighty-six and that should have been considered when his schedule was made. This could have been avoided: Most of the programming could have taken place on the fifth floor. If ConOps, the Tabletop Game room, the RPG room, the Dance Hall, and the LARP room had been moved to the sixth floor (or in the case of ConOps, to one of the ninth or tenth floor suites), that would have freed up more space on the fifth floor for programming, easing the load on the elevators and making it easier for program participants to move from scheduled event to scheduled event.


• Using the space badly extended to the locations provided for author signings. With a star-studded lineup, one would think that the convention would have thought to provide a good space for signing events. Instead, most of the signing events were crammed into the back corner of the hotel restaurant, meaning that the lines would snake through the bar area and into the hallway. This resulted in people seeking to get books singed being constantly admonished to move their line so it wasn't in the way of restaurant patrons - an issue that loomed especially large during signings that coincided with the breakfast buffet, such as the one for Niven, Willis, MacAvoy, and Turtledove. Another issue was having signing sessions that conflicted with one another - the signing session for the four authors I just mentioned took place at the same time as George R.R. Martin's first signing (which had its own issues, that I will go into next), so a fan basically had to choose between getting something signed by Niven or signed by Martin. Placing the signing sessions where they were almost seemed like an insult to the authors in question, who should have had space allocated to their event that was more commensurate with their stature. Compounding the problem, immediately behind the "main" signing area was a glass partition, behind which the convention had scheduled other signing sessions: At the same time Niven, Willis, MacAvoy, and Turtledove were signing up front, Compton Crook Award winner Fran Wilde and former Compton Crook award winners Alexandra Duncan and Kim Stanley Robinson were behind the glass partition at their signing event - and the only way to get to them was to form a line in the area where Niven, Willis, MacAvoy, and Turtledove were doing their signing. This created no small amount of congestion. This was not unique - later an "up front" signing session that included Charles Stross had John Varley, Peter Beagle, Jody Lynn Nye, and Donald Kingsbury behind the glass partition.


• George R.R. Martin breaks conventions. That can simply be taken as a given. He has hordes of fans, all of whom want autographs and pictures with him, and they will mob any event he is at unless plans are made to organize this chaos into some semblance of order. Balticon worked out a system where each attendee could get a ticket to one of his signing events, and then they would control the number of people who attended each one and limit how many things a person could get signed. This seemed like a reasonable plan, but it was (at least initially) executed very badly. The schedule said that the first signing would begin seating at 10:00 AM, and the event would start at 10:30 AM. When people began to show up at 10:00 AM, it seemed to take the convention staff by surprise, as they were unready to begin seating people. When 10:20 rolled around, a large line had formed in the central hallway, and convention staff were yelling at people to clear a passageway through the area so others could get to and from the events going on at the convention. When convention staff finally started calling for groups of ticket numbers to come forward, the woman working the seating table insisted that those in a group called up that included numbers 1 through 40 must line up in numerical order before she would process them and allow them to enter the room. A good plan can be foiled by poor execution, and although Balticon's plan had promise, the execution left a lot to be desired.


• This is a gripe that is probably minor in the grand scheme of things, but as one of the things that I look forward to at conventions is browsing the booksellers in the dealer's hall, I will bring it up anyway: For no real reason that anyone can discern, Larry Smith was given inadequate space. Smith has been attending Balticon as a dealer for many years, and in the past he has always requested, and paid for, four tables to be able to adequately display his stock. This year, he was limited to two, and one was only allocated to him at the last minute. To cope with his reduced space, he bifurcated his wares and had some in the dealer hall with a suite on the tenth floor to hold the remainder. Smith was able to work around the problem, but it was a solution he should not have had to resort to.

The Shoe-Cops: Several of the problems at Balticon stemmed from the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel itself, and can't really be blamed on convention staff. That said, the hotel had so many problems, and most notably a security staff run amok, that the redhead and I are unlikely to return to the convention as long as it is located there. This is not a sentiment that is unique to us: I have spoken with several other convention attendees who have said the same thing, and seen posts and comments online to that effect as well.

• One of the major problems was the structure of the hotel itself. The hotel had most of the convention space on the fifth floor with an additional amount on the sixth floor, and a few suites on the ninth, tenth, and twelfth floors, which would not have been a huge problem, except that the hotel only had one publicly accessible bank of six elevators to serve a twelve story facility that took up an entire city block. Two of these elevators were express elevators that only went between the first and fifth floor (and the parking garage), so getting to and from the convention space was a little bit easier than one might think, but the elevator area was still incredibly congested at almost all hours. Although this hotel has more rooms than the Hunt Valley location Balticon was at for the last couple of years, I'm not entirely convinced it has more public convention space, and even if it does, it is very poorly laid out. Among other things, the public areas seem to be almost designed to prevent the kind of casual socialization that makes fan run conventions so special (and the hotel security did their best to make such socialization even more unappealing than the space did). When these issues are combined with the greater expense of everything in the Baltimore Inner Harbor area - from parking to food to accommodations - the move from the Hunt Valley location to the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace seems like a step backwards.


• The Harborplace Hotel also seemed to be poorly ventilated. The main convention area on the fifth floor had a skylight and overlooked a four level mall built into the hotel, and the HVAC system of the facility didn't seem to be up to the task of keep the air in this large area adequately circulated. With the sun shining through the glass roof onto several hundred people, the convention area got quite warm, and was almost stifling at times. Someone who had their table in the atrium area of the convention space got a sunburn from sitting there all weekend. I can't imagine how unpleasant this space must be in July and August. The Harborplace Hotel seems like it was designed to be a pretty facility, and it is, but it certainly falls down when it comes to functionality.


• The biggest problem with the Harborplace Hotel was that hotel security was obnoxious and surly. I have seen reports that hotel security harassed convention goers, including the sexual harassment of female cosplayers. That would be an issue by itself, but the hotel security seem to have spent their time looking to start problems rather than trying to solve them. Security people would roam the quiet hallways, knocking on doors looking for parties to shut down - targeting rooms that were frequently occupied by sleeping guests instead of the parties they were supposedly looking for. One convention goer was accompanied by his teenage children, and left his door propped open so they could get in and out of the room when he wasn't there. Hotel security paid him a visit to harass him over leaving his own room door open. Hotel security apparently harassed and behaved aggressively towards a person who was in the middle of a panic attack. One of the panels I attended was interrupted by hotel security who informed the panelists that there had been a noise complaint. One of the panelists asked if security had contacted the convention staff to let them know (so they could do something to make sure it didn't become an issue again), and was told they had done so. This was a lie. Hotel security never bothered to contact convention staff. When people attempted to discuss the matter with hotel security, they were uninterested in working with convention staff to prevent problems from reoccurring and seemed almost gleeful at the prospect of throwing people out of the rooms they were using. I have been told that hotel security did, in fact, shut down the dance hall.
  
  
  
  Then there was the issue with shoes. Hotel security was very concerned about foot-gear, enforcing their previously unannounced policy that shoes had to be worn at all times (throwing at least one person out of the hotel for not wearing them). It would seem that once this policy was made known, this would not be an issue any more, but it turned out that hotel security was also interested in policing what kind of shoes people wore, harassing a young woman over the ballet shoes she was wearing. To most of the world, these are shoes by any definition of the word, but hotel security was using some alternate and arbitrary definition and targeted the poor girl anyway. The shoe-cop issue was hotel security at their most petty, and was such an annoyance that one attendee wrote a long poem titled Ode to the Shoe Cop and left it on one of the fan tables after it had been vacated¹. To be blunt, I don't think I have ever seen a hotel that had as many uniformed security personnel as this one did, and I have never seen hotel security behaving in a ruder manner. When they were not roaming the halls in packs looking for illusory parties to break up, they took up positions in the middle of the convention space, transforming what could have been a social space into their turf to launch harassment targeted at convention attendees. The head of hotel security was a thoroughly unpleasant man, and I suspect that the problems with hotel security stemmed from a combination of poor training for the security staff, and the fact that the head of hotel security seemed to have an axe to grind against those who came to the convention. In a job where resolving conflict would seem to be the goal, he and his staff spent their time trying to unnecessarily create conflict.

¹ I didn't copy the Ode down, but I wish I had. I know other attendees did, and if I can find a copy, I will place it here to immortalize it for all time

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Event - CapClave, October 9th - 11th, 2015

Our 2015 CapClave book haul

This past weekend, the redhead and I attended CapClave, the annual science fiction convention put on by the Washington Science Fiction Association that has the motto "Where reading is not extinct". Both the redhead and I are members of WSFA, so CapClave is essentially our "home" convention, and we look forward to attending every year. This is an account of my convention. Even in a relatively small convention like CapClave, it is impossible to cover everything about the event. There are usually three or four panels going on at once, as well as book launch parties, or other room parties, not to mention informal get-togethers at the hotel bar or nearby restaurants.

The convention focuses primarily on written science fiction, and the convention draws several authors, aspiring authors, editors, and publishers. This year's guests of honor were science fiction author Alastair Reynolds, and former editor and current publisher of Fantasy & Science Fiction Gordon van Gelder. In addition, this year had a ghost of honor in the form of the late, long-time fan Peggy Rae Sapienza.

Friday: Due to other commitments, the redhead and I didn't get to the convention until almost 5:00 PM, and we immediately headed to the registration desk where we first got our badges and then set about working as volunteers. Conventions like CapClave are run entirely on volunteer labor as dedicated fans donate their time, effort, and sometimes their money to make them happen. Our contributions thus far have been much more modest - a few hours of working at the registration desk checking people in and registering "at the door" attendees. But the size of the contribution is not as important as the fact that it is done. This is how most local science fiction conventions get put on. People show up, volunteer their time, and ask for nothing in return except a good convention.

While panels and organized events are important, a lot of the action at a convention like CapClave takes place in the informal spaces. Most of the authors and editors are there to interact with readers and with each other. Before I made it to a single panel on Friday evening, I ran into author Charles E. Gannon at the hotel bar and we ended up having an extended conversation about, among other things, our shared love of the writing of William Faulkner.

It was then time for the redhead and I to attend our first panel, titled "50 Years of Dune", which was moderated by Fran Wilde and featured Natalie Luhrs, Darrell Schweitzer, and C.S. MacCath. Fran proved to be a deft moderator, ensuring that the pace of the discussion moved quite quickly and giving each participant the opportunity to be heard. The only real problem was that it quickly became apparent that Dune, as a topic, is just too large to be adequately covered in a single hour of discussion. And that is without considering any of the subsequent novels in the series, or any of the film adaptations of the story, all of which were brought into the conversation at one point or another. Fran did finish off the hour with some amusing questions, including a "pun off" as she asked the panelists to use their favorite Dune related puns, prompting MacCath to pull out her Toto-inspired riff "I miss the rains down in Arakeen", and a couple of groaners from Schweitzer. Then Fran moved on to some rounds of "Love, Marry, Kill", matching up various characters and groups for the panelists to choose from for the game. Overall, this was an excellent panel full of interesting analysis and humor.

Lobbycon 2015 with Natalie Luhrs, C.S. MacCath, and Me.
Barely visible: Sunny Moraine, Bernie Mojzes, Fran Wilde
and Jean Marie Ward

From there we returned to the hotel bar for dinner and an ever increasing circle of conversation at "Lobbycon". Though we started with just the redhead, myself, and our friend Natalie Luhrs, the group progressively grew to include, among others, Fran Wilde, Sunny Moraine, Jean Marie Ward, Bernie Mojzes, A.C. Wise, and C.S. MacCath. Though the conversation was extensive and wide-ranging, covering a variety of topics (and sometimes no topic), this sticks out to me as the first time that someone recognized me based upon something I had written. When C.S. MacCath joined the group while we were talking about the WSFA Small Press Award nominees (of which she was one, for her story N Is for Nanomachine), and she remarked that she had read a piece where someone had claimed that the 2015 WSFA Small Press Award nominees were all better than every one of the short fiction nominees for the 2015 Hugo Awards. As she made the reference, she noticed my name badge and said "It was you! You wrote that!" I did write that, and I stand by that statement still. Plus, it is nice to know that at least someone is reading what I write. Though they aren't part of the programming, these sorts of gatherings are a large part of what is so special about small conventions like CapClave. Being able to sit around with a collection of brilliant creative people for a couple of hours is an experience that simply cannot be found in many places, and fan-run science fiction conventions are one of the few events where this is possible.

Saturday: The redhead's work schedule required her to leave me at the convention by myself for most of the day. After breakfast with Natalie Luhrs, I was faced with a surfeit of riches as there were panels on James Tiptree, Jr., Democracy IN SPACE! and the Survival of Short Form fiction. In the end, I went to the Tiptree Retrospective panel, as I love James Tiptree, Jr.'s writing. The panel was moderated by Scott Edelman and featured Jim Freund, Julia Rios, Sarah Pinsker, and David Hartwell. All five of them were clearly lovers of Tiptree's work, and provided great analysis of both her writing and the personal struggles she faced. As Hartwell worked as Tiptree's editor for a time and corresponded directly with her on several subjects, his contributions were especially insightful. One of the great things about conventions like this is the ability to participate in in-depth conversations about topics that are mostly only of interest to science fiction fans with a group of people who are as prepared to dive into it as extensively as you are. In day to day life, starting a conversation about an author like James Tiptree, Jr. will usually result in an empty look from the person you are talking to, but at a place like CapClave, it sparks an hour (or more) long discussion about her work and her life and how the two intertwined.

Later, I attended Tom Doyle's book launch party for his new novel The Left-Hand Way, which was also the book launch party for 1636: The Cardinal Virtues, Walter F. Hunt's collaboration with Eric Flint in the 1632 universe. I read The Left-Hand Way several months ago as an advance review copy, and I really liked it, and hope it does well for Doyle so that the third book in the series will be published sooner rather than later. I didn't get Hunt's 1632 universe book, but I did pick up a copy of his Victorian mesmerism novel Elements of Mind, which I hope to review in the reasonably near future. As far as I can tell, the party was a success, as everyone seemed to enjoy themselves quite a bit and Doyle even read an excerpt from the novel. I ended up sitting in the middle of a conversation between Charles E. Gannon, Lawrence M. Schoen, and Hildy Silverman, mostly about Gannon's new novel Raising Caine (which I hope to review soon) and Schoen's blog feature Eating Authors. Moments like this, when I can sit and be part of a stimulating discussion involving multiple Nebula Award nominees are why I go to conventions, and are also the moments that I would like to go back in time to tell 12-year-old me are in the future, because he wouldn't believe it.

I spent part of Saturday afternoon sitting in for Colleen Cahill at the WSFA silent auction which raises money for the SFWA Emergency Medical Fund. From there, I headed off to A panel on Non-Western Influences in Fantasy featuring Day al-Mohammed, Ann Chatham, Alex Svartsman, and Michael Swanwick. With the broadening of the fantasy field, stories that depart from the tried and true "vaguely Medieval pseudo-Europe" have become more common, and questions related to how to present such settings are looming larger in the field. The panel was quite interesting, with each author providing insightful commentary, although the working definition of "non-Western" fantasy used by some of the panelists and audience members seemed to me to include some things that I would have classified as being in the "Western" camp.

Beth Zipser, Jim Henley, Me, and Jon Zeigler

Any plans I had for the rest of the afternoon were derailed when I ran across the File 770 meetup in the hotel bar. Going in to the convention I had intended to attend this meetup, but had forgotten about it in the swirl of activity. Fortunately, Jim Henley recognized me as I was walking by and called me over. It is a curious feature of the modern world that so many of our friends are people who we have met only in electronic form, and while I had conversed with all three of the other "File 770ers" quite a bit in Mike Glyer's online forum, I had never met them in person. Going to CapClave fixed that, and we had a great time talking about books, the then impending WSFA Small Press Awards, File 770, books we were considering for Hugo nominations, Puppies, and other sundry topics. It was great to actually meet some other File 770 commenters in meatspace, and I hope that this becomes a regular event at future conventions.

Alastair Reynolds

As I noted before, CapClave is a convention focused on written genre fiction, and the centerpiece event of the weekend is Saturday night, when the mass author signing and presentation of the WSFA Small Press Award take place one right after the other. By the time these events rolled around, the redhead had returned from her exile to work, and my friend Dave, a first time attendee at CapClave, had also joined us. The mass author signing is a fantastic event, and it is exactly what it sounds like. The largest room at the convention is filled with authors ready to possibly sell some books, certainly sign some books, and spend some time talking with the people who love what they write. Almost all of the authors at the convention attend the mass author signing, and for a couple of hours CapClave essentially turns into a chaotic love-fest. I generally wait until the mass signing to start getting any books at the convention, as I prefer to get them directly from the authors, and this year was no exception. I picked up Chuck Gannon's novel Raising Caine, Alex Shvartsman's collection Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma, James Morrow's novel Galápagos Regained, C.S. MacCath's collection The Ruin of Beltany Ring, and the anthology A Is for Apocalypse. I got a second copy of Sarah Avery's novel Tales from Rugosa Coven, because I am sometimes absent-minded and forget that I already have a signed copy of a book. I was also able to spend some time talking with the authors Bud Sparhawk and Will McIntosh who, being short fiction writers, didn't have any books on hand for me to buy. I was also able to chat a bit with Gordon van Gelder, the publisher of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Neil Clarke, the editor and publisher of Clarkesworld.

Alex Shvartsman

Before long it was time for the awards portion of the evening, and everyone took to their seats for the presentation. The 2015 CapClave Chair Sam Lubell led things off by introducing a representative from the Baltimore Science Fiction Society to announce George R.R. Martin as their guest of honor for the upcoming 2016 Balticon, as well as to remind everyone that as it is the 50^th Balticon, they have invited every guest of honor from the previous forty-nine Balticons to attend, and are currently raising money to allow them to be able to afford to bring them all to the event. The Baltimore Science Fiction Society also announced the winners of their Amateur Writing Competition, but I was exceptionally remiss and did not write down the name of the winner or the names of the individuals who placed second and third.

C.S. MacCath, Neil Clarke, Paul Haggarty,
Unknown, Bernie Mojzes, and Day al-Mohammed

Sam Lubell once again took the podium, this time to present gifts to the two guests of honor: A set of planet-themed drinking glasses for Gordon van Gelder and planet-themed plates for Alastair Reynolds. Sam also presented Roger Burns, CapClave's Programming Chair, with a gift to thank him for his work putting together the programming for the convention.

After Sam completed his presentations, 2014 WSFA Small Press Award winner Alex Shvartsman took over to present the 2015 Award. CapClave is a convention oriented towards written science fiction, with a special emphasis on short fiction, and that bent is reflected in the WSFA Small Press Award, which is given to a work of fiction shorter than 17,500 words published for the first time by a "small press" in the previous full calendar year. After reading off the list of nominees, Shvartsman announced Ursula Vernon's story Jackalope Wives as the winner of the award, to much happiness, as the story seems to be quite well-regarded even among Ms. Vernon's competitors. As Ms. Vernon was unable to attend, the Small Press Award committee chair Paul Haggarty accepted on her behalf and read a short statement from the author. Afterwards, all of the nominees in attendance and the designated representatives of those who could not attend lined up for pictures, closing out the ceremony.

The redhead and I had intended to go to the Eye of Argon reading after the WSFA Small Press Award ceremony. I have been to see a reading of this terrible and almost incomprehensible story before, but the redhead has not. However, for the second year in a row we got side-tracked into playing games with our friends Day al-Mohammed and her wife Renee. This time our friend Dave joined us, as did Danielle Ackley-McPhail, and a good time was had by all, so we didn't mind missing the reading too much, although from what I have been told (and the pictures I have seen of it), the reading was quite epic and even included some attempts to act out scenes from the story.

David Sklar, Hildy Silverman,
Shahid Mahmud, and Day al-Mohammed

Sunday: The last day of a convention is always sad, because, of course, the convention is about to end. On the other hand, it is also kind of a relief, because to be perfectly honest conventions can be kind of exhausting. Our first stop was a panel titled Separating the Author from the Work moderated by Day al-Mohammed and featuring Shahid Mahmud, David Sklar, and Hildy Silverman. As the panel had two publishers on it, the panel focused heavily on when one would publish a problematic author and when one would not, but it also touched on when and how a reader would support (or not support) an author who held distasteful views or who included problematic scenes in their writing. I was mildly surprised that Neil Clarke was not on this panel, as he has published a few stories from at least one author widely viewed as problematic, but on the whole the panel was quite interesting and relatively informative.

Our next to last stop of the convention was the dealer hall to round out our purchases after our book buying spree at the mass author signing on Saturday night. We picked up several books from Larry Smith, and a few of the volumes published by the WSFA Small Press. One of the books we acquired was Fran Wilde's Updraft, and since she was there, we got her to sign the book. I also picked up paper copies of the last twenty-one issues of Clarkesworld magazine from Neil Clarke at the Wyrm Publishing booth. I just wish the magazine would let people get a paper subscription, but that is probably economically unfeasible for them. After that there was time for a round of Star Realms with Day and Renee, and then the convention was over.

After the convention, I spoke with my mother on the phone. She had traveled to New York to visit my sister for the weekend, and she was somewhat perplexed that the redhead and I had gone to CapClave rather than New York ComicCon. While the redhead and I enjoy big conventions with tens of thousands of attendees every now and then - we have been to DragonCon once, and we go to GenCon every year - there is simply no substitute for the congenial and friendly atmosphere of the smaller fan run conventions like CapClave, Balticon, Chessiecon, and the hundreds of other small conventions that take place every year. The blunt truth is that the large professionally run media conventions like New York ComicCon are simply exhausting. New York ComicCon had about 170,000 attendees this year. CapClave had about 400. To attend almost any panel at New York ComicCon, you have to wait in line, often for hours. You might be able to see stars like Chris Evans, George Takei, or Carrie Fischer, but you'll likely see them from the back of an auditorium as they speak to a couple of thousand people. Or if you want a personal interaction you'll pay for the privilege, and you will likely only be able to interact with them for a minute or two. At CapClave, on the other hand, the panels are small and interactive. I have never had to spend any appreciable time waiting in line for anything. Most of the authors who attend are more than happy to sit down and talk with you, whether after a panel, sitting in the con suite, or simply while hanging out at the hotel bar. An event like New York ComicCon is a spectacle, while CapClave, by contrast, is a conversation. There is room for both in the genre fiction world, but as for myself, I prefer the conversation.

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