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OryCon 23, Portland OR, November 9-11, 2001. Reprinted from Fred Patten's APA-Lzine, Rabanos Radiactivos!, by permission.
One of my panels at OryCon 23 was on "How SF Conventions Have Changed", with the description, "What's different between OryCon 3 and OryCon 23?" As I thought about it, I realized that I have a hard time telling the OryCons apart. And that certainly goes for OryCon 23. It was very pleasant, just like they always are; but nothing stood out. Just a couple of days afterwards, it is already blending into the generic "OryCon memory."
Friday morning I flew to Portland on Alaska Airlines. Like my flight to ConiFur a couple of weeks earlier, I got to L.A. International Airport a couple of hours early to find that one hour early would have been plenty of time. I wish that all my flights were as smooth as this one was: it left on time, arrived about ten minutes early; my suitcase was one of the first unloaded, and I reached the pickup area for the hotel vans just as the Doubletree Columbia River's was stopping on its half-hourly round trip. I was at the hotel by 1:30, in plenty of time for my first panel at 4:00.
The con's badges this year created a lot of double-takes. Real Musgrave was the Artist Guest-of-Honor, and the badge featured one of his Pocket Dragons in color. Not the usual moss-green with a pinkish belly, but yellow with red highlights. From further away than about a foot, it was indistinguishable from Pikachu; giving the initial impression that this was a Pokemon convention! OryCon this year was having trouble with the computers at its Registration table, resulting in a long line for at-the-door memberships from the main lobby down the hall into the first sleeping wing. Like Anthrocon, the con apologized for its computer glitches, but used them to promote preregistering for next year since preregistered members' badges and packets were available for immediate pickup. It also guaranteed getting into the con.
Several years ago I used the OryCon as an example of how to keep constant track of attendance/membership since each issue of its newsletter had the latest membership total. OryCon stopped this a couple of years ago when the attendance regularly reached the hotel's maximum of 1,600. Since then, OryCon has been able to count on filling its last few memberships with at-the-door joiners; the only question is how soon after the con opens on Friday will 1,600 be reached and latecomers told to join earlier next year?
My 4:00 p.m. panel was "Is Alternate History Becoming a Publishing Sub-Genre?", a.k.a. "An exploration into the trend of alternate history novels and series." Other panelists were James Fiscus, Laura Ann Gilman (OryCon's Editor GoH, who publishes lots of Alternate History), and Writer GoH Melanie Rawn, drafted to fill in for a panelist who was not at the con. Unfortunately, she had to leave early to prepare for her 5:00 p.m. GoH presentation. Gilman pretty well carried the panel, since as an Editor for Roc Books she was the only one with any expertise in publishing it. She said that alternate histories were clearly growing in popularity, but whether they ever became a sub-genre depended upon your definition of the term. There were two kinds of alternate history; time-travel stories, where someone goes to the past and tries to change it; and stories in which history developed differently. The former is science-fiction and is clearly accepted as such by s-f fans. The latter is arguably either fantasy or speculative mainstream fiction. Readers looking for clear-cut s-f may consider it a cheat, while readers looking for genre fantasy usually consider it not fantastic enough. After Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, the plot of a man being transported to the past by being struck by lightning has been used up; and a non s-f reader is not interested in stories about going into the past by technological means. The general public is only interested in alternate history as speculative mainstream fiction if it is about some major event that everyone knows about; that is why there are so many "if the South had won the Civil War" novels outside of the s-f genre. One of the minor headaches in publishing "history developed differently" novels is coming up with packaging (a cover illustration) that will make the book look like s-f rather than a straight historical novel misshelved in the s-f section. Gilman made several other interesting observations; Fiscus and I mostly just sat back and listened to her.
My next panel was right after, conveniently in the same room: "Favorite Non-Superhero Comics," described as "Heroism without spandex." This was a little confusing; were we (John DeCamp, Tom Galloway, and David Lohkamp) supposed to name our favorite comics without superheroes (which could include the likes of Barks' Uncle Scrooge and Meyer's Sugar & Spike), or only those with heroes who did not wear costumes or have superpowers (like Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo; or Age of Bronze, Shanower's retelling of The Iliad)? We ended up pretty much just naming all the comic books that we could think of that had any literary/intellectual merit, which almost by definition were non-superhero; throwing in the few worthwhile superhero titles we liked because, "The characters may be superheroes but they're not really 'superhero comics.'"; Busiek's Astro City and Moore's Top Ten. My list included the Foglios' Girl Genius, McNeill's Finder, Lash's SupernaturalLaw, Barr's Desert Peach, Crilly's Akiko, and Medley's Castle Waiting. Several others that I would have mentioned were named first by others, like Smith's Bone, Barr's Stinz, and DC/Vertigo's Books of Magic and The Dreaming.
I spent most of Friday evening split between the "Artshow Artists' Reception", to which all program participants were invited; and the con-long "OryCon 23 Anime Room Party" organized by the NOVA club to celebrate its tenth anniversary. The Art Show was crowded and had some interesting work (Mark Ferrari's fantasy landscapes; Alan Clark's illustrations for a children's fantasy picture book), but was mostly of the "nothing I'd want to buy even if I had the money" category. The anime room party (an old-fashioned video program run by a club in a member's room, not a part of the con's program) was proud of having a subtitled bootleg video of Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, which was only released theatrically in Japan in early September and is still playing in some cities. However, the video quality was so poor that I gave up watching it after a while. It looks good enough (with an extremely topical bioterrorist plot) that I will wait until I can see a sharper copy with more legible subtitles to appreciate it properly.
Saturday started with a "free Cereal & Cartoons" breakfast like ConiFur had, though OryCon's "cartoons" were videos of British TV s-f: Max Headroom and The Prisoner. My first panel on Saturday, at 10:00 a.m., was another on Alternate History: "Futures of the Past." "What could have happened if..." Other panelists were Steven Barnes, Dan Duval, Chris McKitterick, and Mike Moscoe. This concentrated on "history developed differently" rather than attempts to change the past. The discussion revolved mostly around broad cultural differences rather than specific changes. Individual leaders and even nations might be different, but would North American culture be vastly changed if the American colonies had not become independent from Great Britain, or if Lincoln had not elected in 1860? One example discussed at some length was what if the Native Americans had not been so vulnerable to European diseases? A major reason for the settlement of America by Europeans was the devastation of the Indians by the new diseases just when they needed to defend their cultures. What if the Viking attempt to establish a colony 500 years before Columbus had resulted in the spread of European diseases then, so that by the time of serious European colonization in the 16th & 17th centuries, the Native Americans had already gone through the plagues and rebuilt their populations with disease-resistant warriors?
Barnes talked about his new novel to be published early next year, Lion's Blood, in which Socrates does not commit suicide but accepts exile from Athens and takes his philosophical teachings to Egypt, resulting in a world 2,000 years later in which America is colonized by Islamic Black nations with White slaves. (Although it was not brought up here, the cover of Lion's Blood illustrated Gilman's point at my previous panel. It shows two young men, one Black and one White, in vaguely late 19th century traveling clothes, and definitely looks like a Western or a historical novel about exploring the American frontier. It would not catch the eye of any reader looking for s-f including alternate history. This is part of a deliberate effort to market the book as mainstream/Black literature rather than as genre s-f.)
I spent an hour browsing through the Dealers' Room, then since it was a beautiful day outside the hotel, I wandered over to explore the huge Jantzen Beach shopping center that was built several years ago. I did not get any farther than the Barnes & Noble bookshop. It was no different from the Barnes & Nobles in L.A., but in L.A. I always have too much to do to spend hours browsing in bookshops. This one kept me occupied until time to get back to the con for my 2:00 p.m. panel on "How SF Conventions Have Changed", in the Fan Lounge. Other official panelists were Clifton Amsbury, Suzanne Tompkins, Art Widner, and Julie Zetterberg; and we welcomed someone from the audience whose first con had been OryCon 3. We did not stick to the Pocket Program's "What's different between OryCon 3 and OryCon 23?" description; in fact, we hardly mentioned it. With Cliff Amsbury and Art Widner on the panel, we covered the differences in cons from the 1930s to the '50s to the '70s to the present. Tompkins is a professional convention organizer, so she was particularly aware of changes in s-f con organization from the just-rent-some-hall-a-couple-of-months-before-the-con days up to the late 1950s to today's need for elaborate contracts signed a year or more ahead of time. This led to stories of some major con disasters, which we continued discussing for about a half-hour after the panel ended even though there had been a separate "Disastercon" panel the previous day.
I spent most of the rest of the afternoon in the Dealers' Room, and most of the evening until after midnight in the NOVA club's anime video room. They were also advertising SakuraCon, the "Pacific Northwest Anime Convention" in Seattle, which is holding its 5th annual con next April.
I slept late Sunday morning and did not get up much before the noon hotel checkout time. I was not particularly interested in any of the programming just then, so I did something that I have not previously done at a con: I went into the Internet Cafe to read the last couple of days' worth of Internet comic strips on "Bestiaria.com" and "The Belfry: Furry Comics Online" (www.belfry.com), instead of waiting until I got home. (I am still not computer-literate enough to know how to get my own e-mail on a computer besides my own.) My final panel was one of the con's last at 3:00 p.m.: "How 2001 Differs from 2001," with John Cramer, Dan Duval, Tom Galloway, and Wolf Read. "Well, we haven't made it to Jupiter, and we have more computers. How else does the year 2001 differ from the movie 2001?"
Cramer, who writes a regular science-fact column for Analog, dominated this panel. Unlike Saturday's panel on convention history, this one stuck rigidly to the Pocket Program summary. If a 2001 prediction was not in the movie 2001, we ignored it except in passing. The con was already packing up and being torn down by the time this panel ended. A Dead Dog Party was announced for that evening, but I took the hotel's 5:30 shuttle to the airport for my flight home.
Notes in a Bottle
John Hertz, in Vanamonde 451, took up the gauntlet Evelyn Leeper implicitly threw down when she reported Darrell Schweitzer is the only person to rhyme "Cthulhu" in a limerick. John replies:
"Hey, Abbott! I think it's Cthulhu!"
"Such blubbering never will do, Lou.
When we met Frankenstein
The box office was fine;
You knew our next would be a lulu."
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