A Few Novels More

Chip Hitchcock adds several more titles to the list of stories set at sf conventions (see Barf Factor Three, Mr. Sulu):

One of Donna Andrews’s Meg Langslow books, We’ll Always Have Parrots is set entirely at a convention for a TV show with elements of Sheena, Xena. (Her studly ?fiancee? appears on ~half of the episodes, so they’re guests when the unprintable star gets murdered; the title comes from the attempt to reproduce the show’s setting in a very mundane hotel.)

I suppose Murder at the ABA doesn’t really count — even if mundanes would think publishers and authors are plenty weird enough.

And to dig really deep, the end of de Camp’s Goblin Tower is set at a wizards’ assembly that is extensively pastiched from SF conventions, even including an uncredited reference to one of Rotsler’s Rules.

(If you’re curious, Rotsler’s Rules for Masquerades is available here in a PDF file.)

6 thoughts on “A Few Novels More

  1. I don’t have either at hand, but if I recall correctly, Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn’s Fallen Angels and Niven & Pournelle’s Inferno have scenes set at cons.

  2. Gah! I should have looked up the reference; the non-Rotsler rule I was thinking of was “No costume is no costume.”

  3. Fallen Angels does have a convention take place during the book (in fact I think it’s already been mentioned here); I’m sorry to say I never read Inferno, it’s one of the holes in my reading I have to patch.

  4. P. S.: Murder at the ABA by Isaac Asimov, as the title implies, takes place at an American Booksellers Association convention, although Dr. Asimov made himself a character in the book (including a mention that he had an American Express card, which he used to pick up the check at dinner with friends); and although there’s an astricked note from Harlan Ellison in the book that he is not the basis for protagonist Darius Just, it seems fairly obvious that he is.

  5. I just read Beyond the Beyond, by Lee Goldberg. It’s about the eponymous SF series from the 60s, obviously based on Star Trek, where the deranged actor who played the captain is murdering the actors playing the leads in a revival. Part of it is set at Beyondercon.

    And has anyone yet mentioned Mack Reynolds’ first novel, The Case of the Little Green Men (1951)?

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