a full-bouquet day: lucy, babylon 5, and (yes) more crab.
The quote of the day:
And all that was left for me to do was to throw up.
Young Lucy, Wonder Travel Agent, called me first thing in the morning and asked if Ceej, David, Darin, and I would like to have breakfast with her and her friend Jim. We said sure and traipsed over to Burke's Deli, renowned amongst convention goers as the place than ran out of food.
They had no crab, which killed 4 out of the 6 breakfast orders for the morning.
The waitress said to me, "Isn't that coffee good? I love the coffee. Of course, I can only have one cup of the regular and then the doctor says I have to switch to decaf, and you know how horrible that tastes. But this coffee's good."
Actually, it wasn't, though it was hot, wet, and appeared to contain caffeine. I drank it anyway.
The service, despite the added kick of her morning coffee, was lackadaisical and provided almost as an after-thought. Evidntly this is simply how things are done in this city, and as far as I'm concerned is just another black mark in the Baltimore column, where there are so many already.
"You're not coming back here, huh?" Darin asked me.
"Oh sure," I said. "Once I'm dead, I can't very well stop you from bringing me here."
There were no panels we wanted to see at the convention, so Darin and I headed down to the Art Show with Lucy. The Art Show is where artists show off their various creations, and they range from the incredibly good (Michael Whelan, special guest at the convention, had a giant presentation at the art show with only a few pieces available) to the intensely bad (pictures of elves that resembled those pictures of big-eyed children so popular in the 60s, done by _______ Keene).
Lucy, if she could find it, would buy any picture that showed Captain Kirk with a cat on his shoulder astride a unicorn, because that would be a Fan Art Three-fer.
"Would you take Fox Mulder?" Ceej asked.
"Where?" Lucy said.
The Art Show is also an auction: if a piece is available for sale, a minimum bid is given and then anyone who wants the piece may write down his or her name, bidder number, and a bid. Very few of the pieces had bids on them. Lucy wasn't sure if the works were too highly priced or too low of quality, but perhaps 1 out of 20 of the available works were bid for.
The big Babylon 5 presentation was at 1 pm. Shown were the "Welcome to the Third Age" music video, a trailer for a new B5 movie River of Souls, Act One of River of Souls, a long blooper reel for Season 5 (including some scenes that haven't been aired yet), and then a compilation blooper reel for Seasons 1 through 5.
The funniest bit, I thought, was the fake commercial Londo and G'Kar did. Londo holds a giant book on his lap and says, "Looking for that special Christmas gift? Look no further than The Book of G'Kar, available at Narns and Noble."
Another group featuring Ceej went to lunch at Phillips' Crab House. I had the Premium Crab Cake Sandwich, made from jumbo lump. The place was too noisy and the service incredibly slow.
After lunch I thought I might go back to the hotel room and lay down, but then I decided to go to one more panel with Darin: Mining Mesopotamia, which sounded esoteric enough. How do modern SF&F authors use ancient Mesopotamian civilization and Gilgamesh in their work? Panelist Robert Silverberg didn't show up, and another of the panelists knew nothing about Mesopotamia but was an expert on Ancient Persia and Zoroastrianism.
This panelist made the assertion that Celtic/Arthurian mythology is so popular because of racism: everybody wants to be blonde and red-haired and white-skinned. I leaned over to Darin and asked, "Then why isn't German mythology more popular?"
When the panelist made the same assertion again, Darin piped up with, "Then how does that explain the popularity of Egyptian mythology?"
Both of us dozed off in this panel, which was probably a sign we should have gone back to the hotel room instead of listen to this nonsense. Harry Turtledove was interesting though, and now I might go check out his latest novel, Between the Two Rivers.
Afterward I decided I was going back to the hotel room to get mail and rest for a bit before the evening continued. Darin decided to see what was shaking at the Omni Hotel. We agreed to meet at the Kirk Poland contest room at 7:30pm--the program had said this contest was very popular and those interested should show up early.
I arrived at the Omni at 7 and wandered around a bit, looking for Darin. Couldn't find him. Popped into the showing of Shadowlands--hey, it mentions CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia, why do you think it was being shown at a science-fiction convention?--but felt myself getting sleepier and sleepier. If I hadn't just seen the movie, I might have stayed, but I decided to go looking for Darin again. This time I found him and we went to the Kirk Poland contest room.
Ceej told us about the Kirk Poland contest, named for a character in a novel about fandom written in the early 70s. Ceej, I'm sure, knows all the relevant data points about who and what and when. The important bit is that Kirk Poland is shorthand for "extremely bad SF writer," much like Bulwer-Lytton is in general for prose.
What the contest is: the moderator for the panel of 5 reads a selection of exceptionally bad prose that comes from a published book and stops mid-sentence. Then the 5 panelists read possible completions for the passage--1 of which is correct, and 5 of which were written by the panelists. The audience then votes on which is the real completion of the passage. (Except in the final round, where only the last sentence of the passage is common, and the last sentence this contest is the Quote of the Day today. This sentence was so popular that several panelists used it in their completions for the first few rounds.)
The audience never wins. There's one guy--Gary somebody--whose completions are realer than real: his completions always win.
The moderator for this Kirk Poland contest was Craig Shaw Gardner, a humorous SF writer. His completions for the passages were so funny that at several points I had tears streaming down my cheeks. Everyone knew immediately whose work those quotations were, but some audience members voted for them anyhow.
What was definitely eye-opening about this contest is that one of the passages was from Robert Silverberg's second novel and one was from John Shirley--whoo hoo! there's hope for anyone as a writer, if this is where Silverberg and Shirley started out.
After Kirk Poland we traipsed over en masse to the Marriott, where Clarionites of all stripes, hues, subgenres, and years were gathering. Ceej worried for a long time that no one was going to come, and then suddenly the place was packed with Clarionites and other convention-goers. Ceej disappeared into a huddle somewhere, and that was the last we saw of her.
I had my first and only beer of the convention in the bar as we chatted with several of the people we'd met through some of these massive food gathering expeditions we'd been on.
It turned out that the waitress was keeping one tab for the entire "table", which was actually about 6 tables that had been moved together, plus other various tables people circulated to and from. We ended up giving our money to one guy who said he'd be in charge of it--I have no idea what happened after we left. I knew somebody was going to get stuck with that bill, that's for sure, and I didn't want to be anywhere around when it came time to figure it out.
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com