Monthly Archives: August 2012

Chicon 7 Issues Code of Conduct

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All Worldcons have a collection of policies about photography and recording, insufficient funds transactions, sales on the premises, wearing membership badges, not carrying realistic weapons, and adhering to the hotel’s rules. Chicon 7 does, too – plus a major addition it has made in the aftermath of the Readercon controversy, a policy titiled “Respect for Others.”

Respect for Others

All Chicon 7 events should be a space where everyone feels welcomed and comfortable.

Discrimination (based on, but not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical / mental disability) is not tolerated. Harassment of any kind is not tolerated. If someone tells you “no” or asks you to leave them alone, your business with them is done.

If you feel that you are being discriminated against or harassed, or if you notice someone behaving inappropriately (such as violating hotel or convention policies), we respectfully suggest the following:

If you feel comfortable doing so, point out the inappropriate behavior to the person(s) involved. Often this will solve the problem immediately.

If you do not feel comfortable talking with the person(s) involved or if talking to them does not resolve the issue, please report the situation immediately to any Chicon 7 event coordinator (i.e., Board Members, Convention Committee Members, or Operations Staff). Try to provide a name, badge name / number and / or physical description of the person(s) involved. Note that we need to know about any incidents during the event in order to take action.

Other conventions have been developing anti-harassment policies over the past few years. For Worldcons, this is new territory. The words “harass” and “harassment” do not even appear on the websites of the past several Worldcons. 

What I like about Chicon 7’s policy is its clear language and pragmatism. I also feel it has a sense of sense of immediacy and engagement that is far superior to passivity of the Anthrocon policy so widely commended in recent online discussions – which really doesn’t commit Anthrocon to do anything unless a court has already issued a restraining order (!).

The awkward part is how Chicon 7 has amalgamated all of its policies into a Code of Conduct that read collectively like the “thirty-one crash landings,” a resemblance heightened by the multiple warnings that violations “may result in revocation of membership privileges.”

Repeatedly brandishing the hammer overshadows the array of responses listed within the Code of Conduct itself:

Failure to adhere to any of the above policies may result in possible consequences that include but are not limited to:

Talking with all parties involved and attempting to mediate a solution
Issuing verbal warnings
Revoking memberships and requesting that the person(s) leave the event
Involving hotel or facility staff or security
Contacting local law enforcement
Banning of attendance and membership to future Chicon 7 events, including any post-Chicon 7 events.

Admittedly, the hammer-waving may help Chicon 7 achieve its purpose of assuring members that harassment is not tolerated. The full range of issues covered by the Code of Conduct calls for a flexible range of responses, but people fresh from reading Elizabeth Bear and Catherynne M. Valente are likely to be skeptical about mediation or verbal warnings and more interested in hearing about the hammer.

Cathy Ball, James Brazzell Passings Revealed

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A couple who were once regulars at Midwestern events like OKCon, Conestoga, Soonercon and ConQuesT have passed away within a few months of one another.

Cathy Ball-Brazzell, 59, died July 5 from cancer and other complications. She was a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and founder of the Dorsal Fin Society writers group in Norman, OK where she also ran a bookstore for several years.

Ball had several stories published. Mike Resnick bought her satirical “Love’s Purient Interest” for Shaggy B.E.M. Stories (1988). Algis Budrys published “Body Bag” (1993), “Going Gentle” (1993) and “Greenhouse” (1994) in Tomorrow Speculative Fiction.

Ball married James Brazzell in 2004. Brazzell passed away in December 2011 at the age of 58. The cause was not reported.

The Norman Transcript ran a full-length obituary.

[Via Roger Tener and Chronicles of the Dawn Patrol.]

Snapshots 89 Mike Ditka

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The Chicago Bears’ Mike Ditka wore uniform number 89, a handy bit of trivia for anyone heading to the Worldcon. Meatime, here are 10 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Chicon 7, the 2012 Worldcon, is just around the corner. Worldcon – A Beginner’s Guide by GoH Mike Resnick is the kind of highly-detailed scouting report that will let you hit the ground running.

I need hardly add that veteran fans will want to look over Mike’s article, too. I’ve noticed veteran fans always show up for “So This Is Your First Worldcon?” panels to make sure their favorite item isn’t overlooked, though Mike is so thorough it’s hard to imagine anything he’s missed.

(2) One of the best features on the Chicon 7 website is the digital collection of Past Chicon Program Books — from Chicon 1 (1940), TASFiC (1952), Chicon 3 (1962), Chicon IV (1982), Chicon V (1991), and Chicon 2000 (2000), as well as the history of Chicago fandom 6 in 60 published at Chicon 2000.

(3) Fans going to Chicon 7 should also look over Neil’s Native Guide Chicago Edition, a compendium of restaurants and resources convenient to the Hyatt Regency compiled by Neil Rest.

(4) I was intrigued to find L. Timmel Duchamp’s “Panel Deportment and Demeanor” on the SFWA Blog.

Speaking to the subject of the panel is, after all, what they as panelists are there to do. But it’s not really just that simple, is it. Panelists are there to engage in a collective communication– with fellow panelists, and with the audience (even when the audience isn’t speaking).

Always leave a little oxygen for the next panelist.

(5) The late Washington Post columnist William Raspberry evidently had a skill that has become even rarer in the age of the internet:

 “He was viewed as a truth-teller,” lawyer, civil rights advocate and political adviser Vernon E. Jordan Jr. said in an interview. “I am sure that I disagreed with him on a number of things. He had a way of telling you to go to hell and making you look forward to the trip.”

(6) Science Fiction Land could have been Aurora, Colorado’s biggest tourist trap, if its backers weren’t crooks:

Science Fiction Land was the brainchild of a Hollywood stuntman named Jerry Schafer, who showed up in Aurora in 1979 with a plan for an amusement park three times the size of Disneyland. It was to feature a 38-story Ferris wheel, a holographic zoo, a 1,000-lane bowling alley attended by robots, security guards equipped with jetpacks, and the “Pavilions of Joy,” made up of fourteen Las Vegas-style dinner theaters. The park, Schafer said, would also serve as the set of a $50 million sci-fi flick called Lord of Light, which was to be the most expensive movie ever.

It never happened, of course.

(7) Buried nuclear waste will remain radioactive far longer than any warning sign could last, so how do we prevent future generations from accidentally digging it up?

The solution to that problem may lie in a $30,000 hard disk, made of an indestructible combination of sapphire and platinum that claims to be durable enough to last for up to one million years. It was designed by a diverse team of scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, artists, archivists and linguists who worked to build something that would last, but could also be understood by people thousands of years from now.

This hard disk is different from the type of external hard drive that you would save your documents and music on, and not just because of how long it lasts and expensive it is. Unlike a digital hard drive that codes data in a series of zeroes and ones, this hard drive is build to contain tiny images that is read like a microscope, sort of like futuristic microfilm.

Plan B is to breed cockroaches that give traffic directions, since we know they’ll outlive us all.

(8) John Scalzi always seems to know how to handle his business, like the way he cautioned people not to go overboard praising his comments on the Readercon controversy  —

I’m happy to be getting credit for being a good guy, and I really do try to be a good guy. But, you know. I have shown my ass on the Internets (and elsewhere) before, and I probably will again; hopefully unintentionally and then I will then hopefully quickly apologize, but even so. I just want it out there that I’m aware that I’m a fallible person, will almost certainly experience fallibation in the future (“fallibation”: not a real word) and that makes me like everyone else.

I’m watching to see if “fallibation” enjoys the same popularity as his other invented word, “nerdgassing,” did a few years ago.

(9) “This Troll Should Have Stuck at Home” on Not Always Right begins:

(There is a large anime convention at our hotel. During these conventions, many guests dress up as their favorite characters. Some even go all-out and will wear body paint or mascot suits, carry fake weapons, etc. Even during these conventions, non-convention goers stay in the hotel. I am working the front desk and am approached by a very angry guest.)

Me: “How may I help you today?”

Guest: “Kick these d***ed freaks out of this hotel! They’re disturbing my children!”

Surprisingly, it was not Nick Mamatas.

(10) What a lovely new hobby for nosy neighbors: the personal surveillance drone. Won’t it be ever so delightful when everybody owns one?

After years of selling its wares to the military, these companies are desperately trying to depict the next generation of domestic drones as friendly, more like “Robby the Robot” than HAL, the computer antagonist of Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey novels and the films based on them.

But you can’t blame people for getting the wrong idea if online ads pitching drones to law enforcement are anything to go by.

One comes from Aerovironment, a California-based company preparing to sell smaller drones to police. In the video, cops pull the small unmanned plane out of their cruiser’s trunk, quickly assemble it and use it to monitor the movements of an armed suspect.

However, it’s not unlikely this new hobby will inspire all kinds of aerial hacking.

[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus, Dave Doering, Neil Rest and John King Tarpinian.]

Ken MacLeod’s New Gig

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Ken MacLeod

Ken McLeod has been appointed Writer in Residence at Edinburgh Napier University.

A three-time winner of the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award, the British sf writer has thirteen published novels that range from hard sf space operas like The Star Fraction (1995) to his dystopian novel, Intrusion (2012).

MacLeod’s work also has attracted scholarly attention in works like The Science Fiction Foundation’s The True Knowledge Of Ken MacLeod, edited by Andrew M. Butler and Farah Mendlesohn.

Former literary agent Sam Kelly – who runs the MA course alongside acclaimed screenwriter and author David Bishop – said MacLeod’s appointment was a “perfect fit.”

The course embraces genre writing, especially science fiction, fantasy, horror and crime writing – and was the first in Britain to offer a specialist module in writing for graphic fiction.

“Ken has tackled many of the biggest ethical and political dilemmas of our age, through artistically ambitious speculative fiction,” she said. “His work closely reflects our commitment to intellectual radicalism and genre writing. The role of the writer-in-residence is to challenge and inspire the teachers as well as the students and it’s a great privilege to be able to house our chosen influences on campus.”

Edinburgh Napier created the year-long writer in residence role in 2010. MacLeod will spend an average of two days a week at the university mentoring students.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Harry Harrison (1925-2012)

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Harry Harrison passed away August 15 at the age of 87. Born and raised in the U.S., he lived in several other countries, including Ireland for many years, before dying in England. The SFWA Grand Master (2009), inductee of the SF Hall of Fame (2004), and past Worldcon guest of honor (1990) was also co-founder of World SF and part of the famed Hydra Club.

After I discovered sf in the 1960s and set about reading everything in the library, I became a fan of Harrison’s fiction both in its own right and as a dialog with his contemporary writers. While that was unmistakable in outright satires like Bill, The Galactic Hero, a send-up of Heinlein, Dickson and Asimov, it was also true of his straight fiction, like Deathworld (a 1961 Hugo nominee serialized in Astounding) or his series of matter-transmitter stories.

I soon learned through fanzines that most sf writers feel they are part of a literary conversation, however, fanzines also allowed me to witness the combative side of Harrison’s personality, the need to define himself by opposition to perceived wrongdoing, even if it might be hard for anybody else to see the difference. For example, readers found plenty of action in novels like Deathworld, but Harrison saw his violence as quite different from the warfare in other genre works:

You know they’re adventure stories without being like Baen books which have nothing but war stories in the U.S. – it’s violence – it’s just dirty! It’s pornography of violence I think. I can’t stand it. There’s too much of the heads rolling and guns bursting you know. It’s not my stick.

Harrison was an unabashed liberal and in these highly-polarized times his virtual father-son relationship with editor John W. Campbell is almost unfathomable given their irreconcilable political views. Yet it was Harrison who edited John W. Campbell: Collected Editorials from Analog, two volumes of The Astounding-Analog Reader, and The John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology. He told an interviewer in 1997 —

I was the very opposite of him politically in every way but he never dictated, It was easy to sell him a series, hard to sell him a short story. If he didn’t like a short story, he threw it out. But a serial, novel length thing, he knew what it was going to be like from the very beginning. And if he did not like it, he didn’t put it in. But he would allow you the freedom to do whatever you want. He might argue with you, but he wouldn’t correct you….

I worked with him, in a sense collaborated with him. When I gave him an outline for Deathworld, my first novel, he wrote me a five page letter of  [pause] not telling me what to do but expatiating on my ideas. You didn’t have to follow him. He never told you to, “do this.” In a sense, all my novels, the first five or six, are a sort of collaboration with John….

There was a lot of give and take. Poul Anderson once said that having lunch with John Campbell was like throwing man-hole covers at each other, you know KLANG, CRASH, BANG.

The movie Soylent Green (1973) was based on Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966), elevating it as his most recognizable work. Considering Harrison’s stated dislike for Stanley R. Greenberg’s script, it’s either ironic or unfair that Soylent Green was also the only item of Harrison’s career to win a major award, a 1974 Nebula.

Harrison got his start in the professional sf field not as a writer but as an artist for EC Comics. Then for several years he was the main writer of the Flash Gordon newspaper comic strip.

Among his other achievements, Harrison co-edited nine editions of the Best SF annual with Brian Aldiss, spanning 1967-1975.

A fan of SF beginning in 1938 at the age of 13, Harrison co-founded the Queens chapter of the Science Fiction League. Later, as a pro writer in New York, he was part of the Hydra Club — and may well be somewhere in the LIFE magazine group photo (1950).

He also helped found World SF, primarily organized to hold regular meetings of sf professionals all over the world to which Soviet bloc and Chinese sf writers could be invited, facilitating their ability to travel to the west.

Significant Hookup

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Yes, it’s official, they’re dating – Worldcon and Dragon*Con.

Chicon 7’s latest press release announces “a significant hookup” with Dragon*Con as part of their Labor Day weekend activities.

Four shared program items per day have been scheduled to give attendees a chance to sample the flavor of each other’s events. Dragon*Con will also show the Hugo Awards Ceremony live,  while Chicon 7 will present a previously recorded video of Dragon*Con’s parade of 3,000 costumers through downtown Atlanta.

Just one question: Was Mike Resnick the yenta?

The full press release follows the jump.

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Mark Plummer Is Not Impressed

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File 770 typically needs a couple of years to catch up with an internet meme. Not in this case. Isn’t it easy to imagine Mark Plummer wearing McKayla Maroney’s silver-medalist scowl while drafting his column about Chris Garcia for Strange Horizons? The first paragraph derides Chris’ overuse of the word awesome. The second paragraph frowns upon his addiction to exclamation points and liking for extra capital letters (remember “ChiCon”?) Not impressed, okay — but what made this worth a column?

Just before my fuel gauge hit the point-of-no-return I found Mark’s lede in the third paragraph, crash-landed on a lonely desert island beside Amelia Earhart’s Electra: Mark disagrees with some points Chris made comparing blogs with fanzines in an article for Apex Magazine, “What It Is We Miss When We Don’t Read Fanzines”.

Mark has circled the blog v. fanzine topic before in his Strange Horizons column and I am as willing to listen to his views as Chris Garcia’s. If only Mark would state them affirmatively! Then it would be easier to tell who’s talking because it’s not as if Chris and Mark are any farther apart than “Tastes great!” “Less filling!” or “It’s a breath mint!” “It’s a candy mint!” For example, Mark writes —

And that, I think, is the key thing about Chris’s article: that it tries to identify differences between fanzines and blogs when it seems to me that there are really far more points of commonality.

And —

Bloggers, though, may be more firmly embedded in the broader fandom as it’s played out here in 2012 and so when Chris says, “Many bloggers have become that ranting commentator who never actually participates in the events they react to; a claim held often against many zine writers of earlier days” I suspect that’s true of some fanzine writers of the present day too.

Now that Chris has cracked open the door, if Mark is willing to step through and analyze the issues of power and privilege among fanwriters in all media, I’m ready to be part of his audience.

Whoops Factor Three

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In the future Captain Kirk will beam up – for now, he’ll just flash.

William Shatner recently experienced a pat-down search at LAX during which a TSA agent forced the 81-year-old actor’s pants to fall down. Since he was not wearing underwear, the Captain’s Log was briefly on display to all in the vicinity.

Shatner, interviewed about his TSA situation by Craig Ferguson on The Late Late Show, said “It was awful. It was the most embarrassing thing, probably, that’s ever happened.”

[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]

Talkin’ About the 50 Ways

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So many capsule histories of fan fiction are appearing under the influence of Fifty Shades of Grey that one occasionally defies Sturgeon’s odds.

The Guardian’s Ewan Morrison presents an exceptionally coherent history of fan-fic, “In the beginning, there was fan fiction: from the four gospels to Fifty Shades”, noteworthy for its gloss of this faanish classic:

The Enchanted Duplicator by Walt Willis and Bob Shaw was a metafiction based on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but which described a world populated with sci-fi fans. It chronicles the adventures of hero Jophan in “the land of Mundane”. All of the characters in the book are renamed versions of real fans from the London SF circle of the 50s and the book was created entirely for their pleasure.

(Note: This post cried out to be named “50 Shades of Purple” — in America the word “duplicator” triggers images of volatile-smelling copies fresh from the school’s spirit duplicator. However, as anyone likely to care already knows full well, The Enchanted Duplicator is a mimeograph. The technology A.B. Dick trademarked in America as the mimeograph was often called in Britain by its generic name, stencil duplicator, otherwise shortened to duplicator.)

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]