Worldcon: A Really Rapid Roundup

So many people are blogging about AussieCon4, and most of them are insiders with far better photos of the behind the scenes happenings and major events, far more intimate meetings with interesting people to tell about, and certainly a higher grade of gossip than me, so I’m just going to do a ramshackle rundown of a few everyday things that happened to me, amused me, or in some way caught my inconsequential attention. There will be much gratuitous name dropping as well.

1) The funny film montage shown at the opening ceremony. Cutting back and forth between Aussie films and SF classics, it gave us, among other things, Sarah Connor watching Mad Max blow up Kenny’s poo truck and the Terminator emerging from the flames, Storm Troopers shooting down Ned Kelly, hobbits hiding from the Wolf Creek psycho, David Gulpilil watching X-wings bomb Darwin, and Crocodile Dundee doing his call-that-a-knife shtick to Darth Vader. By popular demand, the montage was shown again at the closing ceremony.

2) The Write the Fight workshop was fun because we got to get up for a change and jump around and pretend to hit each other. Predictably, there were a few guys, some in berets, who were eager to impress Alan Baxter by expounding their knowledge of commando techniques for quickly killing people or by trying to grab his leg when he was demonstrating kicks, but he very deftly and graciously deflected their attempts at hogging the limelight.

3) I enjoyed any session or panel with Kim Stanley Robinson in it. The man is brilliant, funny, compassionate, optimistic about the future, ideological, and just plain lovely. He got top points from me for continually referring to Economics as a pseudoscience, and belittling it as the astrology of our times.

4) While standing in a long line waiting for the above mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson to sign my Blue Mars, I got to chat and joke with folk from Finland, the UK and Western Australia. We felt sorry for poor KSR, but not sorry enough to remove ourselves from the queue, and explored the possibility of just asking him to simply spit on the title pages of our books. It got a bit gross. I suppose you had to be there.

5) The later people arrived for a session, the closer to the front they wanted to sit, and then preferably right in the middle so that half a row of settled folk had to get up to let them past.

6) I recall suffering through a dark, bleak, very weird, Brazilian SF film and groaning with the rest of the audience at the end when it turned out to have no point whatsoever. It was like a parody of an art house movie, and yet it wasn’t. The comments from the audience made it worth the agony. It was a real bonding experience, but the memory of that film still makes me shudder.

7) I got a bag of lollies from Twelfth Planet Press when I bought a book. I love freebies and personal touches.

8) Coffee with Kaaron Warren. I signed up for my first kaffeeklatch as a tentative exercise in practicing my convention socializing skills and overcoming public shyness, thinking there would be no pressure to perform because I could hide amongst the other 8 participants. Shock, horror, I was the only participant. Amazingly, I remained calm. Fortunately, I didn’t babble. I wasn’t brilliant, but I didn’t babble. Happily, Laura E Goodin and a few other writerly folk and their friends and family joined us, so I got lean back and listen to how the other half lives (you know, how it is when your stuff gets published a lot and editors actually invite you to submit stuff) and I even occasionally butted in. The only fudge was when Kaaron kindly asked me if I was a writer and I went into my default, dismissive waffly mode. The highlight of the klatsch was when Kaaron suddenly jumped up because she had spotted Robert Silverberg , sprinted across the room for an autograph and a fangirl chat, then returned with stories of his niceness.

8) Peter M Ball signed my copy of Bleed. I tried to ever so casually mention that we shared the TOC of Moonlight Tuber #1, but my brain inexplicably latched onto Midnight Echo, so I babbled something about Midlight Mumble Mumble instead. Peter was a real gentleman and very gracious about it.


9) Have I mentioned the Build a Lego Dalek workshop? It was fun.






10) I got a big hug from Sue Bursztynski, and she shared the news that her book Wolfborn has been picked up by a publisher and will be out in December. Go Sue!

11) Coffee with Catherynne M. Valente, during which I did not mumble or babble, said a few relevant things, and scored a treasure.

12) Coffee with George R.R. Martin (I just can’t repeat that often enough) during which I also said a few coherent words. See, practice pays.

13) On the last day, I was much amused by a panel with Greg Benford, Alistair Reynolds and Charles Stross during which many science jokes were made about centrifugal forces, teleportation, FTL ships and stasis fields, and the audience laughed in all the right places. I love SF people!

There’s more, but that’s enough. I’ve got some more sleeping to do.