Best. Trip. Ever.
Author: John Coxon
Date: 2020-10-22T17:53:00+00:00

Dedicated to the memory of Randy Byers and all the fans who continue as fond memories and wistful smiles

Contents

2 Contents

3 Toronto I

6 Toronto II

11 Toronto III

16 Toronto IV

20 Seattle I

25 Seattle II

32 The Man With Two Fezzes

38 South Lake Tahoe

46 Renovation: the 69th Worldcon

64 San Francisco Bay Area

70 The End

71 Randy Byers: The Biggest Little City in the Worldcon

74 España Sheriff: Renovation 2011

80 James Bacon: What is That Kid Doing?

82 Warren Buff: Encounters with John Coxon

85 Claire Brialey: Chris Garcia’s Warm-Up Act

86 Lloyd Penney: A Trip to the Reno Worldcon

88 España Sheriff: The Last Word

90 Credits

Toronto I

I’ve arrived at Catherine and Colin’s place and I’m sitting in their guest room, watching my toothbrush charge up (the light on the front is flickering wildly, confused by the Canadian electricity).

The trip from England to Canada went well. The plane journey from Heathrow to St. John’s took around about six hours, and was on a fairly small plane (six seats to a row). I made friends with the chap sitting next to me, who actually worked in Heathrow airport and has made the trip from London to St. John’s more times than there are years of my life; his wife and he have family over there, and so they were visiting for the summer before he went back to jolly old Blighty. I watched several episodes of Stargate Universe on my iPod before attempting (and failing) to use the in-flight entertainment system; I later had to seek out a copy of The King’s Speech and watch the last half, since I managed to permanently stop it from playing.

St. John’s is in Newfoundland, and the descent of the plane into the airport showed some fantastic scenery below us. I hadn’t realised this, but St. John’s is 3.5 hours behind London (which is the centre of the universe when it comes to time), so I had my first experience of a fractional timezone. Unfortunately it turned out to be less exciting than I’d hoped, but perhaps more confusing: I changed my watch to Toronto time on the plane, and so all the clocks completely bemused me before I realised what was going on. Clearly I should have paid more attention in Geography. The actual arrival at St. John’s was a lot more relaxed than arriving at a big airport, and the queue to enter Canada was short and moved quickly, which makes a nice change from some other places I’ve visited.

In the airport itself I grabbed a burger and my first Mountain Dew of the trip (hurrah!1) before rechecking my suitcase, going back through security, and settling down in the departure lounge. Free wifi made it easy to pass the time (are you listening, Heathrow? Get on that!2), and I was exposed to the local news which seemed to be mostly about a woman who might or might not want Quebec not to be part of Canada any more. I noticed that the flight crew on the flight from London were waiting at the same gate as me for the plane to Toronto, so I knew I’d be getting good service when we did eventually board; as it turned out, they recognised me on the plane and chatted with me about my plans for the trip.

I met Catherine and Colin at the airport and we made our way back to theirs, before settling down to have a beer and some food. We had tamales, which are a little bit like a cross between a muffin and a corn on the cob (but different), as well as an exceptionally tasty chorizo/tomato/coriander soup Catherine made. There was a bewildering selection of fruits (peaches, plums and other delicacies) on a tea towel in the living room, and so we all snacked on heavenly spheres whilst hanging out and surfing the web.

I could tell that I was going to have a lot of food I’d never even heard of before; Catherine and Colin are both very into edible and drinkable things (Colin’s beer supply had provided me with alcoholic refreshment already: start TAFF as you mean to continue!) and I’m enthusiastic to broaden my horizons and try new things. It was time to get this TAFF trip on the road.

The first morning of the trip was great. In the post-coffee period (I believe they call it “breakfast”) we ate Montreal bagels, with cream cheese and smoked mackerel and barbecued salmon. It was rather excellent, and I also got to play with some of the musical instruments lying around the dining room. There was a kalimba (from Kenya) and a thundertube (which is the device depicted below). They also have some old hard drive platters (which can be struck to create different tones) and a chimta (which is basically a very large pair of cooking tongs with tiny cymbals lining the sides). There is so much to do in their living room and dining room that I’m almost surprised they ever leave their house.

After breakfasting and playing with instruments we headed into Toronto itself. On the way to the subway we saw a couple of places that appeared in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (which is, obviously3, set in Toronto) so I took some photographs. The artwork on the front of Lee’s Palace is particularly photogenic anyway, so I’d taken a photograph before I’d seen the name and made the connection; the photograph of Sonic Boom, unfortunately, isn’t so great. I was too busy being excited to notice at the time… We grabbed coffee (my first iced coffee of my trip: I love iced coffee, and North America does it so well) before we caught the subway and made our way to St. Lawrence Market. On the way we saw a bright pink cement-mixing truck which I duly took a photograph of, since I like bright pink things (cement trucks are something I can usually take or leave).

St. Lawrence Market is massive and filled with awesome things. We headed to a meat stall and Catherine bought some amazing and exotic meats I hadn’t previously tried; something that was repeated when we hit a grocer on the market later and bought awesome-sounding vegetables before I had my first experience of Canadian Bacon.

Canadian Bacon is great.

After Canadian Bacon we went to leave the market and saw a gumball machine. However, this was one with a difference: it had a wooden obstacle course down which the ball had to roll. Naturally, I took a video, which is available at youtu.be/3W1z3gi7pso, but for now you’ll just have to imagine how awesome it was. The money went to a children’s cancer charity, so I felt good for the rest of the day. Naturally, this was entirely down to my sense of charity and not down to my thrill at the awesome gumball-based obstacle course.

With shopping in hand and bacon in bellies, we walked around Toronto. I was shown several banks and the City Hall. There was a great model of Toronto in the hall, which I totally forgot to take a photograph of (silly me). There was also a brilliant piece of artwork constructed from different sizes of nails, which I did successfully manage to get a photograph of. I also found a copy of PC Gamer4. Now, the British versions of magazines are usually different to their American cousins, so I was tempted to purchase it despite the fact that it was slightly slimmer and had no cover-disc. When I noticed that it was $11 (!) I decided against the purchase.

We got the subway back to Catherine and Colin’s and chilled for a bit before heading out to a book launch at the Merril Collection. For those reading who don’t know what that is, it’s a collection of SF hosted by Toronto Public Library, and there is a reading room as well as the 50,000+ items the collection houses. It used to be called the Spaced Out Library, but they changed the name in order to avoid the obvious drugs reference – which I suppose is a bit of a shame given that it was Judith Merril’s joke.

The book launch in question was for One Soul, a graphic novel written by Ray Fawkes and published by Oni Press. The basic premise of the novel is that eighteen people’s life stories are told in parallel, and there are multiple different ways in which one can read the book. It sounded really interesting and I fully intend to read the copy Colin bought before I leave for Seattle!5

Now, it’s time for dinner. Mexican food is something we don’t get a whole lot of in the UK (almost certainly due to the simple fact that Mexico isn’t on the same continent), and so Catherine is planning on doing mostly Mexico-inspired stuff whilst I’m here. We made our way home via a Mexican grocery and a convenience store and, as I type this, I can hear the noises that indicate soup and quesadillas are being organised. The soup is the soup from yesterday and Catherine just gave me some great cheese, so I’m looking forward to eating.

I have elected to keep this “hurrah” for posterity but, as will become clear, this was no cause for celebration.

Some parts of this report have aged better than others. This is, perhaps, an example of the latter.

I had forgotten this until I saw Lee’s Palace.

I’m fascinated by the difference between what 22-year-old me found interesting enough to report on and what 29-year-old me finds interesting.

Reader, I didn’t.

Toronto II

Last night, I fully intended to write something about my day but I ended up being a little the worse for wear in the evening (alcohol doesn’t necessarily improve my writing style!) so I didn’t get the chance to do so. I can imagine this will eventually become a theme, and I suspect that journal entries every day are something to which I will eventually stop aspiring, but for now, I’m managing to write something fairly regularly! Let’s start at the beginning, by charting my adventures from Thursday.

Colin and I caught a variety of methods of public transport to the suburbs to see the Ontario Science Centre. Thursday and Friday saw much higher temperatures during the day with very little cloud to be seen in comparison to my adventures on the Wednesday, when cool air permaeated the city. Since the subway trains and the buses have air conditioning, the heat wasn’t really an issue.

The Ontario Science Centre is a science museum (in case that wasn’t obvious from the name). My very first impression was good due to an awesome thermometer they had outside the main entrance (I entirely failed to take a photograph, which was becoming a theme with me). It’s made from two beams of two different metals. The two metals both expand and contract at different rates in reaction to a change in temperature. Both beams are attached to a needle in such a way that the differences between them in this regard make that needle point to the temperature. What really impressed me was the display, which had a mercury thermometer embedded in it. This was to encourage people to think about possible sources of inaccuracy in the device by comparing the two readings, which were indeed different. The idea of uncertainty in a set of results can be a hard concept to illustrate, so I was impressed they made it so visual and practical!

I often spend time thinking about how science communicators can get key points across to an audience. I am very interested in science communication and education, and actually applied to work at the National Space Centre in Leicester1, so I was quite excited to see what treasures the museum held from that standpoint as well as from the usual geek perspectives.

After the awesome thermometer we went inside and bought tickets before heading to the visiting reptile exhibition. They had, amongst others, a really cool turtle, a chameleon and several snakes! They also had a few models around the exhibits that explained about specific aspects of reptiles (one devoted to the mechanics of a snake closing its mouth particularly interested Colin), which were a nifty addition. After looking at the reptiles we went into a room full of crazy random stuff, including several fascinating robotic fish and what appeared to be an area for people to design their own shoes…

We then decided to see a show in the IMAX theatre. When you queue for a film, you can see the room in which the projector is set up. It has a glass wall in order to let you see how it’s done. This was a running theme throughout the museum; the server room was also something that visitors could peer into and the escalator in the entrance hall had Perspex to allow people to see the mechanism working, which was a great idea! I used to work at a cinema so I’ve seen projectionists working up close and personal before, but I’ve never seen an IMAX projectionist at work so the behind-the-scenes glimpse was really nice.

However, I was talking about the IMAX, and the film we went to see was Hubble. Hubble is a film primarily about the final repair mission to the telescope, although it also has some of the photographs captured by the telescope, a short introduction to the telescope and footage of previous repair missions. It’s narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and I recommend seeing it, if you get a chance to do so!

I kept an eye out during the credits and, sure enough, an astronaut called Jeffrey Hoffman was listed. This made me happy, since he is a visiting lecturer at the University of Leicester. He’s a really engaging, interesting and nice chap, and I actually took his human spaceflight course in my third year (scoring a high first, which didn’t do anything negative to my impression of the man!).

He appeared in the credits because he was a member of the first repair crew to use the Shuttle to repair the telescope, which is pretty awesome. I have his business card, somewhere. The ROM also has a Canadarm (used to effect repairs to spacecraft by astronauts on the ISS and the Space Shuttle), which was cool.

After Hubble we tried to visit the planetarium, which was full. This was slightly unfortunate, since I was really looking forward to seeing it. A lot of places that have planetariums use them more as dome-shaped IMAX theatres, rather than just showing the stars in the night sky. I think that’s a shame. It was an inflatable planetarium that got me interested in astronomy, at EUREKA!, the children’s science museum in Halifax, Yorkshire.

Having said that, I didn’t mind missing the show too much, since it gave us a lot more time to explore the sizable exhibit on space that surrounds the planetarium. There was a wide range of pretty awesome stuff, including a black hole model and a rocket chair (there was a huge queue of kids so I didn’t have a go). The star projector from the old planetarium was on display, and effectively impossible to photograph. The exhibits were all really interesting, especially the one on meteorites – it had several samples, including a couple you could touch!

Eventually it was time to hit the CSI Live show, which was billed as an interactive experience. It was quite clearly aimed at a young audience, which I found a little strange given the branding, but since children will be more interested in the live shows than adults, it makes sense. I must confess I wasn’t aware that kids were into CSI, but maybe that’s just a sign that I’m getting old2. After the CSI show we went to see a wicked contraption. It is a ball-moving machine constructed by an artist, somewhat like a cross between a perpetual motion device and a Rube Goldberg machine. You insert a billiard ball and it goes down one of several tracks. There are so many it takes a good while to watch every permutation, so it was a great way to end the visit!

The next stage of the day was First Thursday, which is a monthly Toronto fan meeting. Catherine later told me that it was the best-attended meeting they’d been to in years! I met such a variety of people I’m going to have trouble remembering them all, but here we go: Lloyd Penney, Kat Strader, Phil Paine, Terry Fong, Keith and Nancy Soltys, Taral Wayne, Diane Lacey, Alex von Thorne and Marah Searle-Kovacevic. If I left you out please accept my humblest apologies, but I drank too much beer and consequently don’t remember the evening as well as I might (hence the worse-for-wearness to which I alluded at the start of this entry)!

The First Thursday meeting is held in what is billed as an “English Pub”, the Foxes Den3 (the apostrophe is omitted by the management, sadly). Now, being English, and also being a rather big fan of pubs, I was a little curious to know what Canada considers the English pub to be. It turns out that the answer is actually pretty close to the reality of an English chain pub, which I suppose is technically still an English pub, so they get marks on that front! The number of mirrors on the wall with Guinness ads on the front was also comforting, and the burger I ordered tasted rather nicely of burger, so I was, broadly speaking, feeling happy and at home.

The point at which they rather lost me is conveyed in what I can already tell will become one of my oft-used anecdotes from the trip: I finished my first beer, a microbrew from somewhere in the area, and the waitress asked whether I’d like another beer. “Sure,” I said, before realising I couldn’t see a menu. I decided, therefore, to say, “I like beer, and I’m new around here; surprise me!”

She brought back a Guinness. I will confess that I was surprised.

At the end of the night, I wound up in a Tim Horton’s with Colin, Catherine and Kat eating maple ring donuts. I’m reliably informed that Tim Horton’s is the most Canadian thing I’ll do in my trip4; it appears to be a bit like a Canadian cross between Costa and Gregg’s (or, for readers from the USA, a cross between Krispy Kreme and Starbucks).

This morning I got a phone call at 5am, which was vaguely annoying, especially as we planned to get up early so I lost valuable sleep. It turned out to be a PR company inviting me for a job interview. However, the date on which they would like to interview me happens to be a date on which I will be staying with Randy Byers, and I didn’t fancy flying home for the day. In my defence, I had told them I was travelling, and I’m not sure I’d want to work for a company that can’t read their email properly! I’ll be honest, I’m just glad I got an interview, given that my application consisted of a video of me playing Minecraft (no, really).

We got up and out of the house quickly in order to go visit the Merril Collection, getting the stacks tour from Lorna Toolis. As you may remember, if you were paying attention to my earlier writings, I visited a book launch there on my first full day in Toronto and so we arranged a tour of the collection then. The Merril Collection is one of the most impressive collections of SF in the world, and we got a tour from the woman in charge! It was so huge and fascinating, I got to see some Douglas Adams books, including an Arthur Barker edition of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe! I also got to see the Ian Watson collection (I like Ian), which was sizeable – I was quite proud that I was able to tell Lorna about a 40K book I couldn’t see on the shelf, though, so she’s going to look out for that!

After the Merril Collection we went on an adventure around various University of Toronto buildings, including seeing some artefacts related to acoustics and sound in the physics building (continuing the theme of percussion!) and looking at an awesome sundial. The university campus is absolutely huge, and we browsed the bookstore (as is necessary when visiting anywhere at all) in addition to grabbing a Coke from a hot dog stand on the side of the road.

For lunch, we ate at the restaurant on top of the CN Tower, and got to see Toronto from the skies. Catherine pointed out buildings of fannish interest (like the Royal York hotel) and we ate delicious food. When my frittata came it had about four new potatoes on top, so I presumed that it didn’t actually have potatoes in it – but it did, and I was very, very full by the time the waiter came to clear our plates away! It was very disconcerting to have the whole skyline moving from the corner of your eye, though! Afterwards Catherine strode boldly across the glass floor whilst I meekly tiptoed across it. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) was the afternoon’s entertainment, but it is now very late and I am very tired, so I think that will have to wait until later in the week before I write about it.

Since writing this, I’ve become the lead of a public engagement project called the Planeterrella at the University of Southampton. We go out to schools and events and show people our vacuum chamber, which contains an artificial aurora. I think public engagement is super important, and I don’t think that’ll ever change.

I was 22. What?

Not to be confused with a male strip club called the Foxxes Den, which (at the time of writing) comes up in a Google search for “Foxes Den Toronto”. Although now I’m aware that there is one of those, I am somewhat disappointed I didn’t go to both and do a “spot the difference” feature on the two.

Of course, in these international times, there is now more than one Tim Horton’s in the UK.

Toronto III

I closed the last journal entry in a fit of tiredness and lack of vocabulary, whereas today I am feeling refreshed and awake (due in no small part, I am sure, to the iced coffee sitting on the table in Catherine and Colin’s living room). This leaves me in fine form to write more of my report! Let’s see, where were we…?

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) was Friday afternoon’s entertainment, which was an awesome idea on Catherine’s part. The two of us left the University of Toronto’s campus and made our way to the museum, which is very, very striking from the outside. As usual, I totally failed to take a photograph in order to illustrate this1, but just trust me when I say it had angles. Lots and lots of angles. In fact, more angles than I think it is probably reasonable for a building to have.

You have to check rucksacks and bags in before you’re allowed to explore, but the corollary of that is that checking such things in is free, which is really nice. I just had my camera, which was unfortunately running out of battery fast by this point in the day, whereas Catherine’s purse escaped the need to be checked in and so held my visitor’s guide for much of our trip!

The first step on our adventure through the museum was the dinosaurs on the second floor. I say “second floor” because it was a Canadian museum, but if you’re British, it was of course the first floor (I apologise, at some point I started using the lingo!).

I found the exhibit very interesting and engaging; I don’t think I’ve visited an exhibit about dinosaurs since the Natural History Museum in London many years ago2, so it was really cool to see lots of skeletons and the like! What I found particularly interesting about the dinosaurs was the focus on juvenile/baby dinosaurs, which was something that was prevalent throughout the exhibit but really got the limelight in a section all about dinosaurs’ nests, eggs and babies. The ROM has done research on such things in collaboration with the University of Toronto and there were several discoveries made in South Africa that are incredibly interesting to hear about and look at. The models of a baby Massospondylus were especially cute and awesome, and it was interesting to discover that many dinosaurs started as quadrupeds before moving onto two legs!

After the dinosaurs we also visited an exhibit on birds, which had models of many, many different species, including some really awesome and colourful ones! There was also a bat cave, which was a really nifty exhibit. Unfortunately, it wasn’t about Batman, but rather just about bats. The cave is inspired by a cave in Jamaica and the narrator was clearly of Jamaican descent, which was attention to detail. The models of different species of bat were really interesting and there was a nursery and stuff, too. It was a really unique and different way to bring across the information (showing my interest in science communication again!) and I was a huge fan.

After the life sciences stuff we grabbed a drink in the museum’s basement before we decided to go back upstairs and see the minerals and gemstones. I was mainly just going up for the meteorite stuff they have on display, and it was cool seeing more meteorites after the displays at the Ontario Science Centre!) but I was glad we did go, because the rest of the displays also proved extremely interesting. The meteorites were fun3 but the range of other awesome and interesting rocks was really impressive. It was a shame they didn’t have more amethyst, though... The colours and the variety were completely stunning – it was one of the most colourful science displays I’ve ever seen. I was really impressed with it and it was well worth looking around!

Next up was the fluorescent rocks, which were oddly presented in that they were in a darkened cabinet but next to a huge light bulb. It was possible to see most of them glowing, but a couple just looked like generic rocks and the descriptive text on the back wall was unreadable in the shadow. This seemed like it could have been better presented, but it was really cool seeing all these glowing rocks! The gemstones were really a sight to behold. There’s a couple of total beauties in the collection, which are completely beyond my ability to describe them.

After the variety of rocks and other geological artefacts, we looked around some cultural things, and wandered around the exhibits on the classical world (Greece/Rome/Byzantium) as well as the Oriental world (China/Japan/Korea). There were some really interesting things, including three huge pieces of Chinese artwork as well as a few fine specimens of Japanese armour and a collection of other awesome pieces.

Eventually we hauled ourselves back to the house. The ROM is amazing, but part of that is also its size, and eventually your feet do complain, rather! I can imagine it taking a good number of visits to fully explore, and Catherine said they still haven’t seen the whole thing as a result.

Vietnamese food was promised on the Saturday and so we rolled into Toronto and hit a restaurant Colin and Catherine know for its rocket fuel. Diane Lacey met us there, which was great! For the uninitiated, rocket fuel is a variety of iced coffee4 made with about three shots of espresso and condensed milk mixed with ice, and it’s incredibly gorgeous, especially because I really do like iced coffee. I had never eaten Vietnamese food prior to that Saturday but I had pho and it was incredibly yummy! After Vietnamese food, we explored Kensington Market, which was a cool experience. Extremely busy, extremely hot, extremely awesome place. I had my first butter tart and my first churro, both of which were very, very tasty!

Kensington Market having been plundered for treasure, we returned to the house and relaxed whilst listening to other fans in a meeting (it’s always relaxing to hear other people being productive, especially when they’re in the next room!). The meeting ended and David Garland, Marika Kamaras-Garland and Kevin Grücock showed me around the myriad of bookstores on Bloor St. That was pretty awesome despite the fact I managed to avoid buying anything, but we also picked up Hodo Kwaja. Those are awesome Korean walnut cakes that contain a variety of fillings which David very kindly bought for the party! We also picked up some coffee before heading back for the festivities. We were slightly late, but I always maintain it’s bad form to be on time for your own party, as Tobes Valois, a former TAFF delegate, will gladly corroborate (ask him about Eastercon 2007 sometime).

The party was already getting started when we returned so we dropped the coffee in the kitchen before Catherine threw us out. We reluctantly left the awesome smells emanating from their cooking and made our way into the party proper. It was awesome. I chatted to loads of different people, including a bunch of people from the First Thursday meeting: David and Donald Simmons, Merle von Thorn, Ryan Bisci5, Lloyd and Yvonne Penney and Hope Leibowitz.

I generally had an absolutely wicked party, chatting to everyone, taking photographs and talking about socialised healthcare (or, as we Brits refer to it, “the NHS”). Alex and Marah brought Nanaimo bars6, which marked the first time I’d had those, too; clearly Saturday was a day of firsts! At the end of the party, about 4am, Merle and I sat on the porch and listened to the early morning pass by whilst watching some raccoons having fun in the neighbour’s trash. I had never seen raccoons before, so that was another first to add to the list, despite it being Sunday at this point.

Sunday was a day on which I awoke at about 1pm, mainly because it was a very good party. This was encouraging since it means I’ll be waking up at 9am/10am in Seattle, which seems reasonable (hurrah for time zones!). I checked the Internet, added a whole host of fans on Facebook after First Thursday/the party, and generally relaxed before grabbing bagels with Catherine and Colin. Since we were all pretty tired out from the party, breakfast lasted pretty much until 3:30pm, at which point we ventured outside to visit Bakka, the SF bookstore in Toronto. I picked up two books that are a little harder to find in the UK: Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi and David Weber’s The Short Victorious War. I eagerly anticipate reading both of them!

After Bakka, we went shopping for beer, which was good times. I am liking trying Canadian beer, and today I put all the beer we’ve drunk since I arrived into Untappd. This did result in me unlocking several badges, but I would have unlocked them at the Peterborough beer festival anyway so I don’t feel too guilty. The one that amused Colin and Catherine the most was the one that told me, very earnestly, that twelve beers in the space of an hour was probably a little much and I should slow down a bit. After acquiring beer, we also acquired ingredients to make more Nanaimo bars, since the ones from the party were all gone. They’re currently refrigerating as I write this, and I’m very much looking forward to eating them!

One more thing before I sign off for the day: Colin has given me a copy of the 1988 and 1989 Lego product catalogues, because I was born in 1988 (I am disgustingly young, it’s true). It is a much geekier thing than having the newspapers on the day you were born, so I’m really stoked that I have them!

Thank goodness for Creative Commons.

Having recently re-visited the Natural History Museum, I must say I prefer the ROM. Sorry, London!

By this time my camera had run out of energy, so I don’t have photographs – this must be the fourth time I’ve typed that.

Vietnamese Iced Coffee, in fact.

I miss you, Ryan.

Effectively, the Canadian version of fridge cake.

Toronto IV

I write this just as I’ve finished packing my stuff into my case ready to move onto the next stop. It’s totally odd to think my time in Toronto is over; I feel like I only just arrived in the city and I have to leave already! Colin and Catherine have been such brilliant hosts and I’ve been totally spoiled at every turn by them. For example: tonight we ate bison meatballs with pasta and mushrooms (including these awesome conical fungi whose names completely escape me). Not only that, but we drank apricot wheat beer and finished with corn on the cob and Nanaimo bars, which are exceptionally yummy!

Today, the original plan had been to go to Niagara Falls, but that involves getting up early and spending time in the car (and also acquiring a car!), so we decided to hit the Toronto Islands instead. We wound up having lunch (smoked turkey sandwiches, mmm) at the house before setting off to get the ferry mid-afternoon. We met up with Trish Murphy at the dock and caught the ferry to the islands with her, before going to the beach and having a dip in the water. I love beaches; they’re a brilliant way to put aside time to read!

After the beach we explored the Toronto Islands. Trish is very knowledgable about botany and plantlife and whatnot, so it was really interesting to look at all the flowers and trees with her to guide us through what is a completely beautiful part of the world. The walk from the beach to the next beach was very tranquil and awesome, especially seeing people busily cycling past whilst we dawdled along, chatting and enjoying the sunlight.

Eventually we arrived at the next hub of activity on the islands, which is near to where the Synthecycletron is. Created by a chap named Barry Prophet, it’s basically a largeish structure surrounded by four exercise bikes coupled to boxes. Catherine and Colin actually both helped in the creation of the thing, which made it extra awesome to see it!

It’s an incredibly odd-looking piece of the surroundings, acting both as visual and aural artwork. The way in which it is aural artwork is primarily due to it being a massive musical instrument that can be played by four people at a time. In order to create noise, one sits on a bicycle and cycles, and the cycling makes noises happen. I took quite a bit of video of Colin (and some random people) making it make noises, which can be found at youtu.be/VD8GmLt20vM.

After the excitement of the musical instrument we saw a statue of Edward Hanlan1 and a pretty funky church before heading to the petting zoo. The petting zoo was awesome: we saw peacocks and some crazy chickens (look how fluffy it is!) and some really, really pissed off looking Shetland ponies and I sat in a huge chair. It was a lot of fun! Eventually we rolled over to the ferry and made our way back to Catherine and Colin’s place, which was a welcome relief after all the walking and activity we’d engaged in during the day. Dinner was served and we talked about various things until we became too sleepy to stay awake!

Next stop: Seattle.

No, me neither.

Seattle I

It’s been a couple of days since I’ve had time to do any trip report writing. Seattle has kind of run away with me like that and it’s all been very exciting stuff!

I flew from Toronto to Dallas, and then from Dallas to Seattle, on Tuesday. Catherine, Colin and I all grabbed breakfast at a place that they know near where they live called Grapefruit Moon. I instantly loved it; there were board games evident for the patrons to play1, and also a variety of exciting-sounding microbrewed beers (although, given that it was breakfast time and I had to fly, I avoided those2). We ate sandwiches and whatnot whilst watching a variety of people deliver beer throughout the course of our meal, and then we finished and headed home.

On the way back, we stopped by Honest Ed’s. This was An Experience, since I truly believe the shop sells everything one could possibly wish for, and it was slightly bemusing to realise just how big this place was. It’s four buildings, I think, merged into one, and in some cases you have to cross bridges above alleyways to make your way from one area of the shop to another, which is just crazy! We also stopped by Sonic Boom, which was one of the locations in that neighbourhood that was featured in Scott Pilgrim. I bought some DVDs, since I like supporting independent shops, and also picked up a free newspaper that had an interview with Colin’s band in it (I will read that at some point, honest...).

Eventually, the time to leave for the airport rolled around, and I gathered my stuff and went down to the subway with my guides one last time. Getting to the airport involves taking the subway westwards as far as you can go, and then catching a bus to the airport from the station at which one finds oneself. It was bittersweet in many ways, since I was excited to get on with the next stage of my TAFF trip but also disappointed that my time in Toronto had flown by so quickly. I suspect the feeling that I want to spend more time in places will be a common theme on my trip!

The airport was a kind of scary experience. I had to get my boarding pass and stuff from a self-service machine, which was one of the least intuitive things I have ever had the misfortune to use. Fortunately the only cost I incurred was the fee for a checked bag, rather than the upgrade to first class or anything similar. I checked my bag in before going into Toronto Preclearance, run by the lovely folks at US Customs and Border Protection. It’s always somewhat nervewracking, but this time was doubly so, since the guy behind the desk clearly thought my passport photograph was a little bit too old and took a while to stamp my passport and ticket and wave me through. Note to self: obtain a new passport3!

Upon entering the terminal I grabbed some food at the branch of TGI Friday’s next to my gate. Rather peculiarly, I found that the food on offer wasn’t as good as the food from the same company’s British branches. Given that it’s North American fare, this seemed quite strange to me. However, the wait for the flight wasn’t long, and I was soon boarding my flight to Dallas4. Rather luckily, I wasn’t sitting next to anyone, and I managed to watch several episodes of Stargate Universe as well as finishing off The Dervish House, one of the Hugo finalists this year. Dallas involved an hour long wait for the next flight, so I grabbed a Mountain Dew. It had caffeine in it, and was very gratefully received!

Arriving at Seattle was painless; no customs or immigration to go through, and Ulrika O’Brien, my host for the night, was able to wait for me by the baggage claim due to the rather strange way the airport is laid out. We chatted, and I eventually found my suitcase, allowing us to retreat to her and Hal’s place in order for me to sleep. I met quite the menagerie whilst I was there: two cats and two dogs. My presence was very much annoying to Kaylee, one of the dogs, but the others were all pretty happy with me so I made a fuss of them in the morning time. Ulrika made awesome breakfast, and we chatted before I rode to the University of Washington with her.

I got the bus into town from the U District and immediately did something very cultural and worthwhile, in that I went to Starbucks. The advantage of being in Starbucks is that it has free wifi whilst not being McDonald’s, so I was able to go online and work out what might be in my immediate surroundings and therefore plan to go to a few shops and sort various things out.

Whilst in Starbucks I also managed to call my parents, via the wonders of Skype (fast, free wifi + VOIP calls to landlines = happy parents!). It really is brilliant to be living in the future5. My day included me wandering around several shops; discovering the tourism centre and then discovering that they didn’t have the bus timetable I wanted; discovering the internet could give me the bus timetable I wanted; discovering that US bookstores are also record stores; discovering a branch of AT&T and buying an American SIM card; discovering that Gap jeans are just as expensive as the UK if you’re on the high street; discovering that I really suck at finding shoes; discovering the wonders of Chipotle Mexican Grill; and discovering that Starbucks would give me another coffee if I went back after 2pm. All in all it was rather exhausting.

I caught a bus back to the U District and explored the campus a little bit. There are some cool buildings and statues and whatnot around, so that was fun! I saw totem poles and a crazy metal sculpture thing, which I took photographs of because I had no idea what it was. Ulrika and I intersected and then we met up with Randy Byers, my host in Seattle.

We met in a second-hand bookstore before we headed back to his. On the way back, we intersected with Archie McPhee, which is a really mad store that sells all kinds of weird things, including a bacon car air freshener and zombie mints (good entries to the fan fund auction, I felt!).

I met Denys Howard (Randy’s housemate) and Luke McGuff at Randy’s place and got chatting about old fannish controversies before going to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The movie theatre we visited still had proper cinema tickets instead of tickets that look like receipts, so I was happy!

Afterwards we attempted to go for a drink, but the first place we went was Big Time. For the first time ever, I got carded in the USA, and my driving licence came out. The bartender looked at it, screwed his nose up and said, “This isn’t American”6. As I didn’t think to bring my passport, we wound up going to the Hi-Life instead. This was, as it turned out, an excellent Plan C, since they had a happy hour going and beers were $3 a pint. I also got some suicide sliders for $4, which was pretty awesome, and the venue is set in this delighful old fire station, so I’d recommend it to anyone drinking in the area.

The next day, I gave Janice Murray a call, since Randy had furnished me with her phone number. She picked up Stuart Shiffman on the way to get me, and we headed over to the Museum of Flight. The reason that Seattle has a Museum of Flight is because one of the (many) companies based out of Seattle is Boeing, and they operate a museum as part of their operations in the city. It was very interesting, with multiple exhibitions of space-related stuff; I’m not sure whether Janice and Stu were expecting me to spend so much time or get so much out of the space stuff, but I have been, and always will be, a massive astronautics geek! Another feature of the museum was a really interesting history of Boeing, which is contained in the red barn in which the company was started. We eventually became peckish and ate in the museum café, which was surprisingly good, before looking at some actual planes.

The variety of aircraft is truly staggering and the stories and flavour text that go along with them was really good stuff. This was definitely not hurt by Janice and Stuart providing brilliant ancillary knowledge at various points, although seeing the pro-Boeing bias (inevitable, really) was quite fun at times. One of the many highlights for me was the airfield across the road, which had a Concorde and an old Air Force One, both of which had been opened to the public and could be explored, which was pretty nifty. Alongside those was the first Boeing 737, which was used by the company as a test plane and then bought and used for experimental flight by NASA when Boeing had finished with it. That was really cool to see!

After the Museum of Flight Janice very kindly dropped me off at the Fremont Troll, which is something every visitor to Seattle should see since it’s epic and bizarre. Randy and I went out for a drink or two at the Elysian, which is a brewpub in Capitol Hill. Whilst we were there I met Dave and Maryse O’Neill, as well as John Berry. Maryse and I went to grab ice cream from Bluebird, which is just a few doors down from the Elysian and actually sells an ice cream based on Elysian’s stout, which had unfortunately sold out when we went.

On the plus side, we did get free ice cream for rating Bluebird on Google Places, so that was more than okay – and we were allowed to eat the ice cream in the alehouse, which was very kind of them!

After talking about several things including international travel and mobile convention apps, the six of us disbanded before I headed back to Big Time with Randy, this time with my passport! We drank beers and talked about a number of things, including the Hugos (we are proper SF fans, us), US politics and team sports (yes, really). It was an incredibly awesome evening and I thoroughly enjoyed myself! Seattle’s pubs and alehouses are really impressing me so far.

I’m writing this today as I wait for Ulrika and her husband Hal to come pick me up and take me on adventures. I’m not sure what is going to be happening today, but later we’re intersecting with Dave Cake, the DUFF winner, and going for some more beers at some different places, which sounds like it could be very good fun!

One of the things that immediately dates this report is that it pre-dates the advent of the board game café.

In hindsight, I ought to have had a beer.

This was good advice that I did not heed, nearly not being allowed home from a conference in 2012 as a result. But that’s a different story.

Yes, that Dallas. Because why not cross a continent to save $200?

Nowadays I just FaceTime my parents, which is much more like the future.

He was an astute chap.

Seattle II

There’s nothing like settling down in the morning (well, late afternoon) after an awesome party to stare at a computer screen and get some writing done. At least I escaped the hangover that usually ruins a Sunday morning’s relaxation! But before I recount tales of partying I’ll recount tales of exploring Seattle with those two most excellent fans, Hal and Ulrika O’Brien.

Friday lunchtime saw Hal, Ulrika and I head into downtown Seattle in order to get something to eat (and a beer to drink, naturally) by way of the Pike Brewing Company, which is a bar and restaurant located in the Pike Place Market. It was a really awesome experience; I had a totally awesome burger (gotta love North America’s selection of grilled meat in various types of bread) as well as a totally awesome beer to go with it. One thing I was a huge fan of was the suggestions of beers to go with the food, something which more alehouses and pubs should introduce!

I also liked the museum bar which we sat in: it had a variety of really interesting factoids and artefacts on the walls, including a couple of tip trays from 1920s America and 19th century Germany. The addition of a wide range of souvenirs, including T-shirts of the beers’ various iconography and a variety pack of beermats, was a nice touch and it took willpower not to buy a T-shirt, even though they didn’t have one for the beer I’d been drinking!

Reluctantly we left the place of beer and made our way down the epic long staircase from the market to the waterfront (the place we parked). Taking a cue from our surroundings we decided to take the water taxi from West Seattle to the waterfront and back again, which was also very lovely. I continued to read the Hugo nominee I was working on (Cryoburn, at that point) and enjoyed the views from the water.

Randy and Dave Cake met at the airport and made their way to Hal and Ulrika’s where we chatted to Dave and then chatted amongst ourselves as he grabbed a much needed shower (anyone needs a shower after having been on aeroplanes for that long!). The logical next step seemed to be to go for a drink, and luckily this was something for which ample plans had been set down. Our first port of call was Airways, which was a tiny little brewpub, if you can call an industrial unit nestled away in the heart of a business park a brewpub. However, despite the fact that they’d just sold the last pint of their cask-conditioned ale to Scott, I managed not to hold a grudge against Airways nor Scott, which I was proud of me for. Scott is, of course, Scott Kreidermacher, and we enjoyed a couple of beers before they closed and we made our way to the Dog & Pony.

This was where I was introduced to carl juarez, one of the co-editors of Chunga and an all-round very intelligent and erudite conversationalist. The ensuing company, combined with a brilliant and extensive selection of beer, made for an extremely good night, and the food I ate did nothing to detract from that! The menu had a variety of nice-looking meals, but it was the text around the food that really showcased the individuality of the owners.

The next day saw Randy and I grab breakfast at Roxy’s, which is a delightful diner with some East Coast flavours located in the heart of Fremont. My favourite policy of theirs is their refusal to serve anyone who is on their phone: despite my appdiction, even I appreciate that. We sat at the bar, which is something I don’t do nearly enough, and ate large amounts of extremely good food. I had corned beef hash with homefries, which were lovely, and an everything bagel, which was as good as the bagels I had in Toronto on my trip! Eventually Hal and Ulrika turned up with a DUFF delegate, and I drank coffee with them as they grabbed some breakfast before we hit the road for adventuring!

Adventuring took the form of an epic roadtrip up Washington state, culminating in our arrival at Mount Vernon. We almost went to a beer festival, but entry was $25 so we decided, on balance, it wasn’t worth it. Me being British, I assumed that the entry fee was on top of the price of the beers within, but I was later informed that it probably also covered the drinking; even still, we weren’t going to drink $25 of beer each that day! We actually ended up going to Skagit River brewpub, which is located in the same town. Due to eating at Roxy’s earlier we were all completely stuffed, but we got the wood-fired smores between the four of us whilst we enjoyed some alcohol in the form of beers! I tried the English bitter they had on tap before switching to a Belgian-style ale, which was very good indeed. We discussed a variety of things including beer, Australian fandom, British fandom, beer, convention-going, smartphone apps, beer and everything else that needed setting to rights.

Eventually the conversation and the beer waned and the decision was taken to make our way back south, coinciding with Wal-Mart and an outlet mall on the way. I attempted to buy some shoes at the outlet mall, but my card was rejected. I later learned that if you have a Visa Debit card, and you admit to it being a debit card, it doesn’t work. Pretending it’s a credit card goes down much better with everyone! Fortunately, I worked this out before buying sixty (yup) SpongeBob SquarePants Band-Aids (or, as we’d call them in the UK, “plasters”). These are necessary to avoid being lynched by my best friend when I return to my homeland.

There was one thing that we had not managed to cure our retail-lust for, and that was beer1. As such, Hal and Ulrika directed us to a bottle shop near to a shop selling a thing called gyros. Now, for the uninitiated: a gyro is what a British person would call a doner kebab, and gyro is pronounced all kinds of crazy (ask an American next time you meet one; I can’t do it justice here). Hal used to work in the region and they know the shop from back then, so we purchased some beer each (I got a bottle of Fat Woody and a bottle of High Five Hefe, which was possibly the nicest beer I’ve had in the USA, although it’s up against stiff competition) before getting a gyro each (I got a lamb one, because that seemed like the tradition).

When we got back to Hal and Ulrika’s, the assortment of pets were very interested in the meat products we had brought into their home! This is also the part where I told Dave I would buy him a beer, since he let me plug my iPhone into his MacBook and I was finally able to get the US SIM card I had purchased working, getting a cellphone number and also 3G data without having to spend millions of pounds (that’s not even that much of an exaggeration, given current roaming charges...).

Now, for those who have been waiting for this part since the first paragraph, I bid you wait no longer – the party started before the fan fund delegates arrived but, by golly, did we wave and generally introduce ourselves when we got there! There was crazy good food in the kitchen and beers aplenty, alongside bottle openers to help us drink them. I got chatting with Janice, which was awesome, in addition to seeing a variety of other people I saw earlier in the week. I also met Suzle (Suzanne Tompkins) and Jerry Kaufman again after Corflu Cobalt2 as well as meeting Andi Shechter, Vijay Bowen3, Julie McGuff and Andy Hooper for the first time, and generally enjoying the hell out of myself.

As people began to leave we repaired downstairs to Randy’s bedroom and chatted bollocks for quite a while. We started with Dave, Hal, Ulrika, carl, Andy, Randy, myself, and other people I’m sure I’ve forgotten (hey, I’d had some beer at this stage). At one point it got so noisy I suggested that we have a policy of having the person with the fez allowed to talk and everyone else had to be quiet, but Randy went and fetched a second fez with the words “I will not be silenced!”. In any event it was an awesome second half of the party. Eventually, Dave and Hal and Ulrika left us and the party began to wind down, so I finally went to bed, and slept very soundly!

This morning saw Randy suggest coffee (ohmyGodyescaffeinewherehaveyoubeenmywholelife) and going down to Fremont market to get tacos. Both sounded like incredibly good ideas, and so I readily agreed before settling down in front of my netbook to do some writing (the results of which you’ve just been reading!). The tacos came from an awesome stand being manned by Mexican people, and I also got a mole chicken tamale, which was great stuff. We ate by the river near the Google office. The river was beautiful, calm and serene. We walked along the river to Gasworks Park, which is a great juxtaposition between the industry of humanity and the serenity of nature. It had a sundial that works using the shadow one casts by standing on it, and also a lot of kites, as befits a park containing Kite Hill!

I wrote my contribution to WOOF when we got back. WOOF stands for World Organisation Of Faneditors, and is an APA that will be distributed at Renovation. In honour of Renovation being the 69th Worldcon, 69 copies will be printed and given out to people, and mine is one of the contributions, alongside a bewildering amount of fannish talent (Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer are contributing, Chris Garcia is contributing, Lloyd Penney, and more...). Mine has the last journal entry I wrote in it, alongside a bit of writing about TAFF’s 20% rule and some thoughts on Seattle’s beer scene (expanded upon in this journal entry) as well as a short article about convention apps for smartphones. If I don’t totally screw up, most of the writing from my WOOF contribution should make it into this trip report4, so don’t worry if you missed it: you haven’t missed out. Unless you skipped through the trip report and just read that one sentence, in which case, go back and read it properly.

I timed my visit to Seattle well, since I successfully managed to intersect with a pub meeting whilst I was there, and I feel that’s a very important fixture of any local fan group. Even better was the fact that, it being Seattle, it felt as much like an English pub as anywhere in America can, so it was kinda nice to sit down and enjoy it; the only difference between it and a British pub meeting was that it started in the mid-afternoon and finished in the early evening (this suited me down to the ground, due to being tired and needing to pack and whatnot).

The beer was good and it flowed freely; nobody had told the barmaid that we were coming, or that we’d be there in such large numbers, but she managed with aplomb and friendliness, which was awesome of her. There were various snacks on the table, since the bar in question (the Pig and Whistle) offered cheap eats at happy hour and a kind soul had decided to order them for the table. They were awesome, and I wound up having a few beers and a sandwich amongst the fantastic conversation and company that were available. I remember a couple of fairly long conversations, including a very engaging one with John Berry at the bar (I like being at the bar!).

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and Randy drove me and Vijay back after the meeting had wound down. Vijay offered to take me to a karaoke bar as we dropped her off, but since I had to be at Seatac airport the next morning I had to tell her I couldn’t make it. That’s a shame, since Vijay’s singing voice is lovely and I would have loved to hear her on the stage (although I’m sure the venue we visited would collectively have had entirely the opposite opinion of my attempts!). In the end, I hung out with Randy chatting about a variety of stuff before I packed my suitcase, had a shower and crawled into bed, anticipating a busy day travelling in the morning. In some ways I am completely distraught to be leaving such a fantastic town, since Randy is amazing (I am so glad I met and stayed with him!) and Seattle is brilliant. On the other hand, I am seeing James Bacon and Chris Garcia tomorrow, who are two of my very favourite people, and Worldcon is rapidly looming on the horizon. I cannot wait for Reno!

Reading this report eight years later, I really did drink quite a lot of beer, didn’t I?

Which was held in the UK in 2010.

I miss both of you, Andi and Vijay.

My WOOF contribution, not including the part that is excerpted from this trip report, is reprinted (with some small layout tweaks to reflect the page size difference) shortly. If you feel robbed that I did not include the excerpt from the report, please feel free to head back to the start of my Seattle writing and read it again.

The Man With Two Fezzes

So, this year has marked many personal milestones for me. It’s marked, most notably, the end of my degree in Physics with Astrophysics, which has been a major part of the last four years of my life and through which my activity in fandom could charitably be said to have waned when compared to how active I was whilst I was at school. However, another huge milestone this year has been my Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF) win, which was genuinely a huge surprise to me (and, in actuality, several other fans!).

This contribution to WOOF was originally just going to be a contribution consisting of some of my report so far, and whilst I have included the journal entry I wrote in Seattle earlier this week, I thought I might take the opportunity to do some musing on TAFF’s 20% rule, too (for obvious reasons it’s something I’ve had to think about in the time since my win). This all snowballed from there, which is interesting, especially in light of the fact I am writing this on a tiny little Asus Eee PC!

I must immediately acknowledge some fine fans, without whom my trip would have fallen flat on its face from the first hurdle. First, I shall mention Mr Randy Byers, without whom I would not have had nearly as much fun in Seattle and also would not be writing this now. Secondly, my other TAFF guides, in the form of Hal & Ulrika O’Brien, Janice Murray, Catherine Crockett and Colin Hinz, who made sure that my time in their cities was as fantastic as it could possibly be. Fourthly, Chris Garcia, who is making sure I get to and from Reno okay. Fifthly, all my other nominators (James Bacon, Dave Langford, Claire Brialey and Steve Stiles), who made this trip possible for me. Sixthly, Dave Haddock, for saving my bacon and providing me with a netbook on short notice when I broke my poor MacBook. Seventhly (this is getting ridiculous) Denys, for giving me the idea for the name of this WOOF contribution; as well as Randy and Dave Cake for providing the fez-friendly atmosphere. And finally, the people who voted in this year’s TAFF race, even those fans who didn’t vote for me!

Twenty Percent: Winning in Third Place

As will be abundantly clear by now, I am travelling around North America (including attending my first ever Worldcon) due to winning the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund, or TAFF. Although I did win TAFF, and am therefore the delegate, I did so despite only receiving the third largest share of the votes, due to a quirk of how TAFF works called the 20% rule. In short, the rule is this: in order to qualify to be a TAFF delegate, one has to receive at least 20% of the vote on both sides of the Atlantic. Liam Proven, who won the largest share of the vote, came short on North American votes. Graham Charnock, who won the second largest share, came short on European votes. I, coming in third, was the only person who ran for TAFF who was not disqualified by this rule, and so I won the fund and I am now having a great time.

But does this rule make sense in a world where TAFF races are being contested by four people? In a race between two people, then yes, a twenty percent rule makes perfect sense, and even with three people it might. But four is tricky, since an evenly split vote would only be 5% higher than the 20% requirement. If more than four fans ever ran for TAFF, the possibility would be very real that nobody would win, requiring the funds to be held over until the next year. Does this make sense?

Initially, my answer was “no”. I felt that a much better system would be one that scaled with the number of people, so in a two-person race, quarter of the vote would be needed, and in a three-person race, a fifth, and so on (increasing the denominator by one each time, to get fractional about this). This, to me, would make perfect sense and would have allowed, in this case, the person with the largest share of the vote to come to North America.

However, since arriving on this fine continent, I have put this to a number of fans who disagree. One of the arguments I heard was the issue of TAFF getting easier to win with more people running. Should the number of votes on either side be permitted to be lower just because it’s a many person race, or should candidates be held to the same standards as the candidates in a two-person race would be? Another fan opined that the rule, in this case, had worked, since two fans who are less known on different sides of the Atlantic have been disqualified because of that.

In short, what I thought was a clever and elegant way of fixing what I perceived to be a problem has been received by most of the people I’ve talked to thus far on my trip as a fix to a feature of TAFF that doesn’t need fixing. So, perhaps I shouldn’t be pushing this after all? If you have an opinion (and especially if you are a previous TAFF or fan fund delegate), please let me know. I’m interested in having a dialogue about this so that next time something similar happens, it isn’t quite such a surprise.

Smartphone Programming

The first conversations I had about the place of the smartphone in the science fiction convention were at the most recent Eastercon, Illustrious, in Birmingham, England. I talked with Dave Haddock about an iOS app he had seen in the App Store called pSchedule, which appeared to be an app designed to allow convention committees to easily publish information through a smartphone. This piqued my interest, but unfortunately the app is, in my opinion, horribly designed and hard to use.

However, two people on my trip have got me thinking about smartphones’ role in the science fiction convention more recently, and both of them are also called Dave. First up, we have Dave O’Neill, a Seattle fan who I met just this week (as you will undoubtedly have read earlier in my small slice of WOOF!). He and his startup are involved with iOS development and have released a free app for iOS and Android on behalf of Renovation which includes a variety of information about the participants (including short biographies) and lists of what panels they are on, as well as the ability to follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook from the app.

There are a couple of holes in the Renovation app, however. The list of participants can take a long time to load and the app can feel sluggish when the user moves from page to page, and if you click through to a panel that looks interesting from the program section, you can see a list of participants, but doing the same from a participant’s page doesn’t give you that list. You can add panels to the My Program section, but there’s no easy way to tell the app who you are in order to allow it to add the panels you’re on in one go. However, these minor issues aside, it’s a functional app that shows a lot of promise.

I mentioned this app to DUFF delegate Dave Cake, and he responded by telling me that his friend Brendan Ragan has also written an app for convention programs called LiveCon, which is also available for iOS or Android devices. I downloaded this app to have a look at it, but I couldn’t download any convention data from the app. I presume this is because no forthcoming conventions are using the service, but I do know AussieCon 4 was using it, so it may well be something of which many Worldcon-goers are already aware.

It’s a really nifty idea, having a list of cons that are using the app and letting the user download the appropriate data depending on what convention one is attending, and conventions are apparently able to put their data on the app at a cost of two memberships to the convention. Unfortunately, due to being unable to download convention data, I can’t effectively test it, but I hope to develop an opinion on it at some stage in the future.

Now that smartphones are becoming prevalent, I think fandom is going to have to start adopting them in order to keep up. Given the apps that are coming out, this is clearly something which is already becoming clear, but Reno will be the first convention where I’ve been able to use a smartphone in order to enhance my con-going experience (thanks to Dave O’Neill). This is something I hope to see more cons (including Eastercons!) adopt in the future; preferably involving someone called Dave.

Alehouses in Seattle

When I was first emailing Randy and Ulrika about what I might want to get up to in Seattle, one of the things I tentatively suggested it might be good for me to try was beer. I’ve always been a huge fan of the real ale in the UK, and I love trying new styles when I’m abroad, especially from the North American craft brewers that are beginning to really get rolling. This is an attempt to quantify the many places I have been where I have had beer, so that future visitors may know where is good in the city.

The Hi-Life

The Hi-Life is a pub in Ballard that I went to on my first night in Seattle. It occupies an old Firehouse (Firehouse 18, to be exact) and so the atmosphere is very awesome. As we went after a movie, it was happy hour (10pm-close) so a beer was $3 and a small pizza was $4. The selection of beers was limited to maybe half a dozen different brews, but that is still better than a lot of places even in the UK, and the prices were closer to what I’m used to paying for ale back home. Recommended.

Elysian Brewing

One of three brewpubs operated by Elysian, this one is located in Capitol Hill and is their oldest venue. The interior is lovely, with large windows letting a lot of light in; the service matches! I enjoyed some cask conditioned ale here, which is something I always treasure upon finding it in the US, since a lot of craft brews are keg-based. The steak I ate was lovely, and although they forgot about Randy’s order they also didn’t charge for it, so it’s definitely somewhere that looks after its customers.

Big Time

Big Time is in the University District, so if you look young enough to be a student you’re going to need ID (and, if you’re foreign enough not to have a US driving licence, you probably need your passport). It’s got real character and the fact they usually cater to students makes it inexpensive compared to some of the other places I’ve been to on this trip. Definitely closer to the stereotypical American bar than the previous two venues I’ve described, and this is another location with cask-conditioned ale!

Airways

Airways is located in Kent, which is a little way out of Seattle. A friendly place, it’s hidden away in the middle of a collection of industrial units, so you need to know where it is before setting out, or in our case, cheat by having local guides take you there. Due to the small venue, the staff are extremely friendly and get to know you as you’re drinking, but if you want the cask-conditioned stuff you need to make it on Thursday night since Friday will see it all gone. Also worth noting the opening hours are slender, so make sure it’s open before you visit, too!

Dog & Pony

Another venue that’s more bar than pub, I’d say, but this particular place has more beer than any of the others I’ve visited in Seattle. The blackboard on which the beers are listed is nearly as long as I am tall! I recommend this place purely for the variety, but the owners clearly have a sense of humour and character which also pervades the bar itself.

Pike Brewing Company

Pike Brewing Company is probably the easiest out of all of these to get to if you’re downtown, since it’s located in Pike Place Market. The bar has real character, including a museum bar which has displays and artefacts regarding anything alcohol-related, including Prohibition. I had a burger here and it was lovely, and the menu is pretty comprehensive, including beer recommendations for all of the food on offer. Definitely somewhere good to visit!

Skagit River

Located a way north of Seattle, in Mount Vernon, Skagit River is a brewing company that sell good beer. They also sell huge portions of rather nice-looking food, including the smores, which defeated four of us combined (although, admittedly, we did have breakfast at Roxy’s). Although this place is awesome, it might be best visited if you’re planning to leave Seattle anyway, although the scenery around Washington is amazing enough that the drive could well be worth it.

Malt & Vine

Although this is really a bottle shop instead of an alehouse, it’s still worth a mention since it does serve beer for consumption on the premises, and it’s sort of on the way from Skagit River back to Seattle, so you can make it a combined trip (which is what we did!). The selection of bottled beers was rather overwhelming, so I only bought two (this is my natural reaction to lots of choice). The High Five Hefe, which combined ginger and honey and wheat, was extremely nice, and I haven’t gotten to grips with the Fat Woody yet.

South Lake Tahoe

So, I could pretend I’m writing this in South Lake Tahoe, with the sun shining down on me and the serene tranquility of our motel1. Unfortunately, I’m not. I’m writing this, in fact, almost a full month after the events I’m describing, whilst sitting in a Starbucks in Peterborough2. I blame this, roundly speaking, on Worldcon, for reasons which I will attempt to detail in my con report, but are basically “I had a really good time and there was far too much going on to take notes every evening”.

However, since I’m pretending that it’s 10am on the first day of Renovation, and since I am still not at the convention yet, I don’t know anything about that, and so I shall stop ruining the journalistic (and structural!) integrity of this TAFF report and start writing about things that I would know about at this point.

I flew out from Seattle on the Monday morning at some ungodly hour (10am counts as ungodly, right?). Janice Murray, who took me around the Museum of Flight, had very kindly offered to give me a lift to SeaTac airport, and so she picked me up around 8am, for which I was very glad. The reason I was very glad was that we had originally arranged for 8:30, but I had had a nightmare that I’d miss the flight, and had awoken early as a result. Her spontaneous offer of arriving half an hour early did a great deal to placate my sleepy brain, so that was very much a boon! We drove to the airport and then she very kindly bought me a coffee from Starbucks before I went through security to board my flight, along with my ridiculously heavy rucksack (I put all my books and fanzines in it, as my suitcase had nearly been over the limit flying from Toronto to Seattle).

SeaTac airport is a bit odd (and, according to the Museum of Flight, about as far from downtown Seattle as Heathrow is from Zone 1, although the fact you can catch the Tube to Heathrow from King’s Cross kinda obscures that). It claims to have free wifi but I’ve been twice now and I’ve never managed to get any out of them, despite the multiple unsecured networks that my iPhone told me were present3. This is always a bit of a pain, since airports are not naturally thrilling places and having the Internet would be great. However, on the Monday, it was even more of a pain than usual, since it was my mother’s birthday and I wanted to call her via Skype, as I had done in the city earlier in the week. Fortunately, the 3G signal from AT&T was fairly strong (remind me to rant about Americans and their mobile networks – sorry, cellphone networks – elsewhere in the report...), and I was just about able to call on it. The lag was about five seconds, which made protracted conversation almost impossible and shouting at each other the order of the day, but I was able to communicate my desire to wish her a happy birthday successfully, which was the main thing.

The flight from Seattle to Sacramento was alright. I wasn’t lucky enough to be sitting next to an empty seat, as I was on the two flights between Toronto and Seattle, but my seatmates were quiet and the dude next to the aisle let me go to the john without much complaining, so I had no grumbling to do. I believe I finished Cryoburn on that flight, which marked the second Hugo nominee to crumble before my reading skillz. I enjoyed it a great deal, actually, although if I’d known it was part of an ongoing series I probably would have tried to locate the first book, rather than starting at the end, as it were.

The best part of arriving in Sacramento airport was seeing the one, the only, Christopher J. Garcia. I know, I know – you’d think baggage claim would be the highlight, but you’d be totally wrong! He got my suitcase wedged into his car (I have no idea how, since there was no room whatsoever for massive suitcases anywhere in said car) and we rode into the historic part of Sacramento. They have buildings that are really, really old there. Like, thirty-six years old, or something! Arrival in Sacramento heralded us walking in a massive circle. Chris swore blind he knew exactly where we were going and where we were meeting Linda, but the massive circle kind of undermined his authority on the matter. Eventually we resorted to the miracle of the mobile telephone, but not before we got vouchers for saltwater taffy.

So, I should explain something about the old part of Sacramento at this point. The important thing to note is that 98% of the world’s total number of sweet shops are in the town. Seriously. Chris and I counted them, and it’s definitely 98%. Well, even if I am lying, there are many, many sweet shops. After rendezvousing with Linda successfully, we went into one, and purchased two bottles of a delightful beverage called Leninade, which is a must for any thirsty communist. As a Briton, I count as a Communist in the USA (my father works for the NHS, surely I’m practically a member of the Communist Party4), and so I enjoyed it greatly. I even saved the bottle! Out of a sense of monogamy, we didn’t visit any of the other sweet shops, not even the one that we had vouchers for. We’re that dedicated.

We also visited a costume shop. Top tip: if you want to have the most fun you’ve ever had whilst shopping for clothes, go shopping with Chris and Linda as they rush around a costume shop squeeing. It’s brilliant. Chris found an old arcade machine (one of the ones that’s a shooting range with 25 shots) and exclaimed as to how much he loved this one before proceeding to suck at it on two separate occasions, which was also pretty fun. No idea what the arcade machine was doing in the middle of the 1920s gangster section, but hey, it was just that kind of place! We also had donuts. For a sort of pre-lunch snack (this was necessary, since I had not had breakfast and had been walking around in the sun and just generally felt like putting calories in my belly would be a good plan before I keeled over from a mixture of hunger and an English reaction to the sunshine).

Eventually, it became time for James Bacon to enter the story, and so he did, smiling and greeting me warmly and, I think, quite glad to hear an accent that wasn’t American. It’s weird: speaking as a Briton, whenever I go to the States, just hearing British and Irish accents makes me smile. It’s like there’s an instant camaraderie between you, caused by some weird side-effect of the Atlantic Ocean. Now, don’t get me wrong – I love the American accent. I have visited the USA on previous occasions, and I’ve now finally visited Canada as well, and I’m very fond of both of them. But there’s something about where you’re from that creates a bond between two people in a foreign land, regardless of how epic a time you’re having. When it’s an old mate, well, it just throws everything into relief, somewhat.

After having met with James, I met Katrina Templeton for the first time, who you may know better as Katster. She’s a Sacramento-based fan, so it makes sense to meet up with her when in Sacramento! We decided that we needed food, and so we headed down some stairs next to a building that promised all-you-can-eat pizza for $7 (or something ridiculous), because we’re classy. The all-you-can-eat pizza came in three varieties: pepperoni, meat and vegetable. The pasta next to it came in three varieties, too: red, green and yellow. The soda came in brown, brown, brown, BRIGHT ORANGE or yellow. Gotta love USA food colouring; it is so much more vivid than the colours that are legal to give to human beings in the UK! The red pasta was particularly yummy, and the pizza was actually much better than it could’ve been for the price we paid. Over dinner we asked Kat if she wanted to run for TAFF, talked about board games, asked Kat if she wanted to run for TAFF, talked about comics, asked Kat if she wanted to run for TAFF, talked about beer, asked Kat if she wanted to run for TAFF, talked about how stupid it is that Mountain Dew in Canada doesn’t contain caffeine and asked Kat if she wanted to run for TAFF5. Hey, you can’t say I wasn’t plugging the Fund when I was on my trip! I would’ve asked the other people eating whether they wanted to run for TAFF, but given that James and Chris are previous delegates and Linda joined Chris on his TAFF trip, that would’ve seemed a little disingenuous.

It became time to leave James and Kat to make their way forward on their own journeys. Linda went back to her car, Chris and I piled into his, and we had a road trip to South Lake Tahoe, where the majority of this story is allegedly set (although given we just passed the 1,500 word mark I guess I had more to say about SeaTac and Sacramento than I thought!). The drive down was pleasant, although the nature of TAFF is that you end up a lot more tired than you thought you would be and, as such, I slept in the car until Chris stopped somewhere that sold Mountain Dew. Then, unsurprisingly, I was a lot less sleepy, and we chatted animatedly about God knows what until we reached the motel in South Lake Tahoe, checked in, got the Internet working (priorities are important, folks) and waited for Linda to arrive.

When she did arrive, we had a blast. I don’t quite remember the order in which the evening happened, but we definitely played Guillotine that night, which was immense fun. When in Leicester I am a gamer, not an SF fan, mainly due to the incredibly prone-to-schism university SF society looking less awesome than the incredibly prone-to-going-to-the-pub university gamesoc, aka the Leicester Sabres. As a result, I love playing card games. However, I had not played Guillotine before, despite it being a fairly popular card game. Although I got thrashed in the first game by an all-conquering Chris, I gained enough knowledge that I managed to claw my way to a win in the second game via some sneaky underhanded tactics (my hand was so ready for me to be a total dick, it was awesome).

As well as playing cool card games, we went to the hot tub and the pool. It turned out that the pool was pretty cold, though, so mostly the hot tub. I was busy reading John Scalzi’s The Last Colony, which was a very good book, in between reading Mira Grant’s Feed on my iPhone (which I didn’t feel like exposing to a hot tub, owing to it being expensive, and all).

The final thing we did that night was go out for dinner to a place called Fire + Ice, which is a Mongolian barbecue restaurant in the town. I’ve never done Mongolian barbecue before, because I rarely eat outside of Peterborough and/or Leicester, and neither of those cities has one, but I am usually raring to try new stuff, so it was all good. For those who don’t know, Mongolian barbecue consists of (raw) ingredients that you put in a bowl. You then get a smaller bowl and fill it with a sauce, and then you take it to two crazy men with paddles who put it on some fire6 till it’s ready for you to eat. You get to choose from a variety of meats, and vegetables, and stuff like kidney beans and noodles and whatnot, and they bring rice and tortillas to your table for you to have with whatever it is you concocted.

The menu has some suggestions for things that are nice. My first was a noodle-based thing with steak, prawns (or shrimp, depending on your nationality) and sweet chilli sauce that was really very nice indeed. My second was a chicken-based thingy with kidney beans and whatnot, which I was aiming to eat with the tortillas. I deliberately tried to emulate a fajita with that one, and it was awesome! The third one was interesting... the dude got my sauce mixed up with the other guy standing around the fire, and so we decided we were gonna swap dishes and I had the ingredients he’d picked with my sauce, and he had my ingredients with his sauce. The guy serving thought this was brilliant, and shouted delightedly to his manager that we were nuts. I dunno what the other guy picked, but whatever it was, it was good!

Chris wanted to go gamble some money after we’d eaten, and so we walked the block to Nevada in order to visit Harrah’s casino in South Lake Tahoe. Now, the border between California and Nevada used to be delineated by a line on the ground, but the line’s no longer there and the sign saying “Nevada” is hidden behind a tree, so the only signal that the state is different is the FOUR HUGE CASINOS that line the road. Harrah’s is big, and it has many, many flashing lights, and it had people gambling in it. Chris went to the roulette table and put chips in different places until he didn’t have any chips left. Some other men came and got lots and lots of chips and so he was allowed to put them in many different places in stacks of five. As is probably evident from the whole of this paragraph, I have no real clue as to how roulette actually works, but hey, people seemed to be enjoying it, and there was a spinny wheel thing which kept me occupied just fine (ah, simple pleasures!).

The next morning was the day of going to Heidi’s. Heidi’s, Chris reliably informed us, was a mile away from the hotel, and so we were going to drive. Everything was dandy until we pulled out of the hotel’s drive and realised than when Chris had said “mile”, what would have been more accurate was “block and a half”. We promptly christened a short walkable distance as a Garcia mile, and things were a Garcia mile or two away for the rest of the trip. For instance, “the Chinese place near Garcia’s old apartment is about a Garcia mile’s walk”. I urge fandom to adopt this as a very useful unit of measurement!

Heidi’s was pretty cool. There was wifi (with the password written on paper that looked at least ten years old) and friendly people and what looked like a building decorated in the Netherlands. I had a burger patty and over-medium eggs and hash browns and toast (which is my favourite American breakfast, right up there with Eggs Benedict). Chris had something or other which he then followed up with what is apparently called a biscuit and country gravy. As a Briton, I call bullshit. Biscuits are about, oooh, five centimetres in diameter and gravy is made from gravy granules. Whatever he had, it was not in any way a biscuit and gravy. It looked more like a scone that had gone soft covered in a thin custard, and I instantly decided I never, ever want to try it (which is an extremely rare reaction to any food, for me). It looked horrible7. Still, Chris enjoyed it, so I guess that’s the main thing...

After Heidi’s we went to Lake Tahoe, via a post office which took far too long to find given that we started from where it was, drove around a bit and then eventually noticed it was where we’d set off from in the first place. Whilst Chris and Linda did other shoppingy things, I bought stamps and sent wave #1 of postcards. It’s important to send postcards to people!

The drive to Tahoe was interesting since it was all mountain and cliff and no-safety-barrier-next-to-the-road. We parked the car and I got to fill in a form, which is one of my favourite things to do (there’s something satisfying about filling in all the boxes, alright?!). We put the form in an envelope with a $5 bill, tore off a stub to put in the car’s window and posted the envelope in a box, which apparently meant we were good for parking. This reminds me to mention something: in Seattle, we parked before we went to the Elysian and there was a parking meter which required the user to poke bills into a hole. So, if you were in parking spot #27, you’d be poking the bills into hole #27. And then in Tahoe, you had the system I just described. In Britain, I literally cannot remember ever having seen a non-electronic parking meter. Here, you put coins into a machine that then spits out a sticker which you put in your car window, letting the authorities know that you paid. We don’t even have the parking meters lining the pavement (or sidewalk) for on-street parking. Are there any manual parking meters still in the UK?

Tahoe was beautiful. I can’t really write about how beautiful it was, so this journal entry is probably going to be surrounded by a lot of photographs when I actually lay the report out. What I can tell you about is walking in the extreme heat, 6,000m above sea level, up a massive hill. Now, I’m from a place called Peterborough, which is in a place called East Anglia. East Anglia is, it will not surprise you to learn, in the East of England. The defining features of this area of the world are threefold: it’s not very warm (except for a few weeks of summer), it’s at sea level, and it’s entirely flat (great for arable farming!). As such, I am probably one of the least prepared people on the planet for going up massive hills in extreme heats at large distances above sea level. On the way down the massive hill, everything was fine because gravity was happy to help, and I figured I could buy drinking water at the bottom. Whilst, at the bottom, I did manage to procure both two postcards and a bookmark, drinking water was not to be seen, and so Linda and I took the walk back up the huge mountain at a rather leisurely pace (especially because I’m clumsy and didn’t want to be the first TAFF delegate to die by falling down a steep incline/thirst/exhaustion on his TAFF trip).

Fortunately, as you may have gathered, I survived without dying, which I greatly appreciated. On going back to the hotel, we chilled out, and I finished the Scalzi book by the hot tub. Then we all decided to go grab some Mexican food, and so we headed to a chain restaurant whose name eludes me. Unfortunately for Linda it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, and thus the cheap margaritas weren’t on, but I really like Mexican food so I thoroughly enjoyed it! In the evening, we watched a film called OSS 117, which is a French parody of James Bond films. It was decidedly odd, but it provided a catchphrase which Chris and I quoted to each other for the rest of my trip, and it’s probably odd enough that you should watch it, even if that’s only so you understand just how odd it is.

That night we got to bed early because this morning, we’re off to Reno8! I am very, very excited for Worldcon – my first American convention, my first convention outside the UK, and my first Worldcon! I cannot wait to see what it’s like, and to see the sights. I must also confess I’m looking forward to having a hotel room to myself; it’ll be nice to have a space to call my own. I hadn’t realised how non-stop my trip would be before I came out here, which is absolutely fantastic; but it’ll be a relief to have a little oasis of calm that I can retreat to. Next stop: IHOP9, and pancakes (yum!). Stop after that: Reno, baby!

Super 8, not to be confused with Motel 6 or Lucky 7 or National 9 or whatever all the others are – seriously, why are there so many motel chains with numbers in the name, and why are all of them different?!

At the time, probably the best coffee available in that fair city; thankfully, this is no longer true.

Is there any finer part of this trip report than my seven-year old opinions on airport wifi? No, no there is not. (Sales are final and refunds are not available....)

I am not a member of the Communist Party.

Despite my best efforts, Kat has not yet been the TAFF delegate to Europe. I will keep working on it…

Despite whatever Claire Brialey says, I have never set fire to a lake.

I have since tried them and they’re pretty good! Not as good as chicken and waffles, though.

Well, not really, because I’m in Peterborough. But remember: we’re maintaining the integrity and suspension of disbelief, here.

I really wish the “I” in “IHOP” was a little more literal.

Renovation: the 69th Worldcon

My experiences at the 2011 Worldcon have all somewhat blended together into a haze of emotions, abstract concepts and characteristics of the convention, including good company, fun, excitement, trepidation, alcohol, intelligent discussion, walking around a lot, sleeping (but not much), awesome food and more good company. I think I underestimated just how little free time there would be in Reno between panels, events, parties, meals and just meeting awesome people. I was fully intending to write copious notes as I went through, but that was almost entirely replaced with a desire to meet more people and do more stuff!

It’s worth noting, at this stage in the con report, that when I talk about differences that I perceived between British and American conventions, what I’m actually talking about are differences between Renovation (the only American event I’ve attended to date) and those conventions that I have attended in Britain. However, since my first was the 2007 Eastercon, Contemplation, in Chester, I’ve only actually attended ten: five Eastercons, one Novacon, two Unicons, one Year of the Teledu and one James ‘n’ Stef con. As such, I do talk from the perspective of an inexperienced congoer, which means that what I see as differences may be bred from the fact that I’m a massive n00b, rather than being valid commentary (to be fair, a lot of my fan writing is improved if you bear that in mind).

What follows has been painstakingly reconstructed. I’m sitting in my parents’ kitchen in England. I have beside me a mug of coffee (from grounds, not instant – sometimes you can’t settle for anything less than the proper stuff1) and a copy of the Renovation Convention Guide. There’s also a tiny spider wandering around watching my giant fingers bash on the keys of my MacBook, but that’s perhaps somewhat less relevant.

This isn’t a full account of everything I did in Reno at Worldcon, but it’s an attempt to capture some of the awesome atmosphere and the amazing time that I had there. If I’ve missed you out from this account, I sincerely apologise – any one of a number of my friends will gladly testify to how terrible my memory is and my memory for names suffers, especially when I’m sleep-deprived and/or drunk. Contact me, and I can try to address any omissions! But, regardless, I hope you enjoy it.

I arrived in Reno with one Christopher J. Garcia on the Wednesday, after we had set out from Tahoe that morning. He needed to be there to help set up the Fanzine Lounge and I had a panel at 4pm, so we both figured being there in good time was an excellent idea. This being my first Worldcon, my first event of any kind in a conference centre, my first American convention and my first foreign convention, I knew, going into the con, that I would be able to count the number of people I already knew on my fingers (obviously excepting the people I had met on my TAFF trip, a fair number of whom made it to Renovation).

This feeling was rather compounded by the fact that Chris knows everyone. Or, more accurately, everyone knows Chris. It’s hard to miss the kind of guy who has the hair, beard and T-shirt collection that Chris is famous for, and so as we walked through the convention centre everyone was saying hi and stopping to talk to us, and I knew nobody at all.

What this did mean, however, was I very quickly met about five hundred people (this may be a lie) before joining the queue for registration, which was moving at a fair pace. I was holding a place for Chris, who had arrived in the queue and then left to use the restroom, and so I was minding my own business when I heard the chap in front of me complaining about the queue in great detail. “What about Japan?” he exclaimed. “Does nobody remember Japan?!” As an Englishman, I felt obliged to say absolutely nothing and just queue quietly and without fuss. This was by far the best way of dealing with things, especially since I do own an iPhone and it has games and Twitter on it.

Eventually Chris came back and we made it to the registration desks and I picked up my con badge. Apparently, none of my personal details were in the Renovation database, so I gladly informed the volunteer on the desk of my address. Upon being asked what city I lived in, I said, “Peterborough,” at which point the volunteer looked at me and enquired as to where that was. “Um, England,” was my reply, which he carefully considered before politely enquiring whether that meant Peterborough wasn’t in a State. I gladly informed him that no, Peterborough is indeed not in a State (unless you count what the council are currently doing to it, but I was guessing his knowledge of local politics in England was limited).

Having successfully gotten my badge, I went to grab my programme details from Mary Kay Kare before heading into the Fanzine Lounge with Chris to see what was happening there. Since Chris is one of my best friends in fandom, I anticipated I would be spending a lot of my downtime just chilling out over there, and so I was interested to see what it was like!

There were sofas and armchairs and tables and more chairs and two computers and a printer and a lot of fanzines, all of which made both of us happy. The other thing that made us happy was the Tiki Dalek2 opposite the Fanzine Lounge, which turned out to be the best way to indicate its location to other people. “So, uh, where’s the Fanzine Lounge?” “Well, you know the room with the dealers in it? Just walk in there, look for the Tiki Dalek and we’re right opposite.”

The Fanzine Lounge marked the first culture shock between British and American conventions, I think; certainly, I’ve not been to anything quite like the fanzine lounge at a British con, but then I’m a relatively new congoer so I’m hesitant to make any definitive comments. If it wasn’t the first culture shock, the ribbons definitely were. I’ve never been to a convention with ribbons before, so this was my first time! Chris gave me some ribbons at this point; his ribbon was grammatically incorrect and was thus edited by Claire Brialey, who was also there with Mark Plummer. He also gave me two TAFF ribbons, which occupied pride of place at the very top of my badge! I believe Kat Templeton, Lloyd and Yvonne Penney and a variety of other people were also present – it’s also possible that I met Craig Glassner at this point, since I remember I met him in the Fanzine Lounge at some point and don’t really remember what day that might have been.

I definitely remember that this was when I met the brilliant and sophisticated Steven H. Silver, to whom there was a fair chance I would present a Hugo on the Saturday night; I remember this because the Chicon 7 ribbon is the second ribbon on my badge3.

Fortunately, he turned out to be a rather nice chap and we spent some time chatting, in which I managed to bewilder and annoy him by insisting that he was pronouncing Chicon 7 wrongly (something I continued to pronounce in a variety of different ways, each of them unique, for the rest of the convention).

I also believe it was between this and the Opening Ceremonies that I met a group of people including España Sheriff and Leigh Ann Hildebrand. I cannot for the life of me remember who else was in that group of people, but I’m completely sure that that’s when it happened, since I’m looking at the stream of ribbons that were on my badge and I got ribbons from España and Leigh Ann before the ribbons I collected at the Opening Ceremonies. Trust in the ribbons, is what I’m saying! I also happen to know that, at this point, I went to the London in 2014 table to volunteer for service, since I have a London in 2014 ribbon immediately after Leigh Ann’s! Additionally, I remember this being the point at which someone claimed I could pass for Mexican if I tried; my response was incredulity, which made Claire giggle.

Eventually, it was time to stop looking through fanzines and greeting people who were coming along, and the Opening Ceremonies occurred. I believe it was here that I had my first exposure to Norman Cates, who was holding a massive camera4 and was great to very quietly have a laugh with whilst people were being introduced on stage. I make a point of being at the open and close of every convention I attend, for reasons I’ve never worked out; I guess I’m a completist and it’s my way of collecting the convention? Or maybe I’m just boring and predictable, who knows? But it was worth going either way, because Dr Demento was there (hurrah!) and also because I got two new ribbons from Norman.

After the Opening Ceremonies I went to the Green Room, and what ensued was my second big culture shock of Worldcon. I went up to the desk, and said, “uh, I’m me, and I’m here for the panel on ‘The Real Revenge of the Nerds: Geek as Hero’?” I got two blank stares. It rapidly became clear that the British idea of what a Green Room is and what it does is vastly different to the American idea. The American idea is that the Green Room is a cafeteria where people who are on the programme can go and grab a bite to eat whenever they’d like to do that, but there’s no more organisation to it than that. There’s coffee, and a selection of drinks, but it’s basically up to you to get to where your panel’s at in time to be on it.

In Britain, this is vastly different, in my experience. I don’t think I’ve ever really been to a Green Room where there was food for programme participants, although we oftentimes do have coffee facilities (and tea, being British and all that). What we do have, however, is someone at the Green Room who is ticking names off a list of the programme participants who are supposed to be in the Green Room, and telling them whether the rest of their panel has checked in yet, and if they have where they might be (whether it’s in the room, discussing the panel, or whether they’ve already gone to the programme room because you’re running late). If you’ve never met them, someone will probably introduce you, if you look nervous, and the staff in the Green Room will generally look after you pretty well.

It’s made very clear to everyone that being early before a panel is necessary, and most people actually do follow that recommendation, which means discussion of what might be said or discussed on the panel becomes possible. I was finding, at Reno, that most of the time I was turning up to panels and just reacting to whatever it was the moderator or the other panellists wanted to discuss; in the UK, that tends to be something you’ve already gone over in the Green Room immediately before the panel – although, to be fair, I did have email conversations with a couple of people about panels before arriving in Reno at all. On the other hand, culture shock #3 (which is coming up) did mean that I was really glad about the food in the Green Room being available freely, and I do think the American model works really well – it just works in a way that is almost completely different from what I’m used to, as a Brit.

But anyway, it’s time to tell you about the first panel I was on. As I previously mentioned, it was entitled “The Real Revenge of the Nerds: Geek as Hero”, and we had a jolly old time. When I say we, I’m talking about Ginjer Buchanan, Laurie Mann, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Connie Willis; needless to say, with a panel like that, the room was both significantly larger and significantly fuller than I had been expecting. It was also rather nice to be the token man on the panel, something that was pointed out by the moderator before we started. Unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me remember who the moderator was. My copy of the programme says that Ginjer was due to moderate, but I’m almost positive that Laurie did it instead. Anyway, we had an awesome time; this was the point in the convention at which I learned the true extent of Connie’s love for Primeval (she really, really likes that show!) and I caused a ripple to go through the audience by comparing Buffy to Glee and then hiding under the table.

After panelling it up and thanking the other panellists for being such a pleasure to talk with, I finally managed to intersect with the elusive and hard-to-find Christopher J. Garcia by going to a panel that he was on entitled “Fandom Online: Is the Argument Over? What Was (Is?) the Argument About?” Unfortunately, Claire Brialey wasn’t able to be on the panel, but Chris moderated John Scalzi and Teresa Nielsen Hayden excellently, so her loss was missed slightly less than it otherwise would have been. I saw a number of people I knew in the audience (David Cake, Colin Hinz and The Lovely and Talented Linda Wenzelburger), and about ten minutes into the panel I also learned that the chap I was sitting next to was Cory Doctorow, which prompted an excited tweet out of me immediately. I then saw him looking at it on his phone, which made me even more shy!

After the panel, I got to meet Teresa, which was cool since I’ve heard a lot about her but never actually had the pleasure. (I would love to meet John Scalzi at some stage, too, but that didn’t happen at Reno, much to my chagrin.) We chatted a little, and someone came up to me and asked me for my opinions on iOS apps; I seem to remember giving him one of the Moo cards I took on the trip, but I never heard anything from him, so no idea whether anything ever came of that! Eventually I rendezvoused with Chris and Linda and persuaded him to take me to the Peppermill so that we could check into our room. On the way to the room, I met Sydnie Krause, who was wearing the TAFF scarf that Leigh Ann made for a TAFF auction at one point. It was the first time I’d seen the scarf, so obviously it was necessary to spend time talking to Sydnie, too – fortunately, she’s lovely, so that worked well.

A lot of people, during the week, said that the Atlantis was more tasteful than the Peppermill. If, by “more tasteful” you mean “LESS AWESOME” then I wholeheartedly agree. I liked the crazy anachronistic Roman paintings and the fact that getting from the hotel check-in desk to one of the eateries actually made me seriously consider leaving a trail of sweets so I could retrace my steps. They also had my favourite soap, which always meant I was going to talk about it in glowing terms afterwards. To be honest, though, I found the Peppermill okay. I know that a couple of fans with allergies had real problems, but fortunately I am lucky enough that that didn’t affect me. I found getting to and from the hotel was just fine; it was only a short walk to and from the hotel and I kinda liked ending every day walking back from the Atlantis in the cool desert air5. But I’m very aware that other people had reasons for not being so keen on the walking-for-half-an-hour-whilst-the-sunrise-was-occuring-in-the-background thing!

I went out for dinner with Chris and Linda. Linda looked incredible in her Pink Drink Commandos get-up, which is just so cool (I want one). What this meant was I went to a place called Roscoe’s Joint, which was an Oakland-style barbecue place that sold various meats that came with various sauces and various breads. So, you picked pulled pork (natch), with the medium sauce, and the bread. And maybe a side. I adore a place that picks a thing to do and then does it well, and so I was totally unsurprised that I loved it there. We went with Steven H. Silver, Deb Bretschneider and Ric Bretschneider, since Deb and Linda are both PDCs (and seeing the outfits match is amazingly awesome), and we bumped into Chris Hensley, who Garcia knew and introduced to us all.

Dinner being concluded, we hit the Atlantis because we wanted to party. This was the second time I met Leigh Ann and España, and I also met Deb Kopec, Ant Kopec and Jason Schachat at this stage (I met Bryan Little and Mette Hedin later in the evening, amongst the parties, but I cannot remember a precise time so I’m mentioning it here!). I hit plenty of parties, none of which I can remember to my total satisfaction: there was the Christmas Worldcon 2020 party, and the NASFiC 2010 party which was using up some of the money they’d had left over, and some other parties, and some alcohol, and some parties. I bumped into Warren Buff and Sydnie Krause at the NASFiC party and chatted with them, which was cool. The Christmas party saw me get an awesome ribbon for telling someone a beer-related anecdote – but I didn’t get her name and I didn’t see her again, so if you’re reading this, thanks for the great ribbon!

I met a group of four fantastic women in the Christmas party, who go by the names of Alaina Evans, Jenn Johansson, Natalie Sage and Nichole Giles; they were awesome to talk to and whenever I bumped into them over the weekend it was good times! Spike gave me a FWA membership ribbon too, despite the fact that, um, I’m not a member of the FWA (apparently that’s really a technical point). Jesi Lipp and Meg Totusek were floating around, and I’m fairly sure I met both of them at this stage, although I spent more time with them and actually got to know them later in the convention, which was great.

Eventually I headed back to the NASFiC party, via the hotel lobby; I was going to go back to my hotel and actually catch some winks, but on my way out of the elevator I bumped into España and Jason. España promptly gave me her drink on the news that I was considering going to bed, and they dragged me up to the NASFiC party which, by this time, had split into a public party of lameness and a somewhat more exclusive party of total awesomeness and hot tubs. Sydnie introduced me to a gaggle of people she knew. They were Ben Gould, Amos Meeks, Tristan Ryng, Jordan Sears-Zeve, Jamie Tinney and Sara Weinstein. All of them were really fun people I ended up having a great night with, after talking with Warren (who was in the hot tub, which was awesome) and España and Jason (who weren’t, but were still awesome).

Thursday happened (this tends to happen after Wednesdays) and brought with it a panel at noon, which was entitled “Where to Start with Comics”. As such I got up in the morning (yes, really) and promptly didn’t have breakfast.

This is culture shock #3: at every convention at which I’ve previously stayed in a hotel, there’s been one breakfast, that was provided as part of the price of the room. As a result, having to pay attention to the cost of breakfast was a bit of a weird thing anyway, but the fact that there were approximately ten places to get food in the hotel didn’t help; I’m used to just turning up on my own at the place where breakfast is at, and sitting with the first table of people I’m friendly with who wave me over. That didn’t happen (not even slightly) at Worldcon! But it all worked out for the best eventually, so that was fine.

I’ve done enough panels about introductions to comics at British cons that I didn’t really pay much attention to the noon panel on my programme, beyond noting that it was with James Bacon (who I know already), Tanglwyst de Holloway, who I had not heard of but who is very cool, and Lauren Beukes, Campbell nominee and Clarke winner. What I didn’t notice, therefore, is that it was on the kids’ programme. I intended to talk about how I got started with comics, but what actually happened is we sat and listened, enthralled, as a group of four kids talked to us about a whole host of stuff. Mostly comics, it must be said, but there was also discussion of gender politics and dragons, which was really encouraging (because gender is important and dragons are dragony, respectively).

Afterwards, Lauren asked where was good for lunch and I said I was going to grab something in the Green Room since I hadn’t had breakfast; she agreed this was a fine idea and so we ended up grabbing a bagel and chatting for a bit. I was slightly starstruck by the fact that Alastair Reynolds and Ian McDonald were at the same table as us for a bit before zipping off to programme, and so I was fairly quiet and boring company (my reaction to being starstruck is to shut my mouth and fade into the background, since audible squeeing must be so annoying), but ah well.

At some point on this day, Kat Templeton decided that, just for me, she would replace her policy of giving shiny things to TAFF delegates at American conventions with a policy of giving Mountain Dew to TAFF delegates at American conventions. This went down well with this particular TAFF delegate since, if you know me at all, you know that I adore Mountain Dew when I’m in the States. Although, I must confess, I’m not sure if I’d adore it quite as much if it wasn’t a treat I could only get overseas (yes, we do have a drink called Mountain Dew: Energy in the UK now, but it’s not the same and it has a somewhat odd aftertaste that you don’t get in the USA).

As well as being the first time I did a panel in kids’ programme, ever, Thursday also marked the first day that I’d ever been on the table for a London Worldcon bid. I’m glad to support the bid for London in 2014, since London in 2014 is going to be the best convention ever in every conceivable way6 (yes, I am biased; no, I’m not ashamed about it), and so I spent a couple of hours peacefully manning the table with Mike Scott, of Plokta and running-a-London-Worldcon fame. We were able to field questions, and show genuine enthusiasm for the bid, and several people came up to pre-support or become Friends of the bid (so many, in fact, that by the end of the convention only Friends who paid at Reno were allowed ribbons since we were running real low!).

I got off the table on Thursday at about 4pm and promptly went to a panel about “SF Canon Within Comics” with Jordan, who wanted to go. It was pretty interesting, but I felt more like it was a panel of generic SF comic recommendations than a discussion about anything deeper. Having said that, when I looked at the description of the panel that was exactly what it was supposed to be, so kudos to the panel for paying more attention than I did!

I was going to go to parties and stuff on the Thursday evening, and I did definitely attend the London in 2014 party, but what really ended up happening was that I flaked out somewhat before going to bed fairly early that night. In so doing I missed España and Leigh Ann’s party, which I heard was pretty awesome, but hey, you always have regrets after any convention when you’re hearing the stories of what people got up to in places you didn’t visit at the right times, right?

Friday rolled around, bringing with it breakfast at the Peppermill; specifically, in Cafe Milano. I was joined by Sara, since she had masquerade rehearsals in the Peppermill that morning and we figured we might as well grab a bite and a chat before engaging with our programmes for the day. I had my favourite US breakfast7. My breakfast came with a pastry; it turned out to be massive, so I kept it for lunch, since I suspected I wasn’t going to be überhungry anyway.

I then headed to the Fanzine Lounge, collected my daily rations of Mountain Dew from Kat and chatted to various people who were in attendance, including Mark and Claire. Since Mark was shortly going to be interviewing me, we discussed what he might ask and generally psyched ourselves up for the panel. When we got there, it was roughly as full as I was expecting (by which I mean, “it wasn’t at all full”). Randy Byers could be seen, as could Claire and Alice Lawson (an integral part of the London Worldcon bid and an awesome person to boot). Janice Murray was also present, and there was also someone there who I didn’t know. What he thought he was going to get out of the proceedings, I’ll never know, but heck, he seemed to enjoy himself, so I guess I am more interesting than I give myself credit for, or something. Talking with Mark is always good fun, but talking with him for the entertainment of others was a little surreal; although it does make me slightly sad it didn’t occur to me to try and record it. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I didn’t even manage to finish the pastry for lunch; Janice had to help me with that!

My Friday afternoon also saw me manning the desk alongside Mike Scott for the London in 2014 bid, but this time it was a little different, since I had the enormous pleasure of meeting David Kyle, who also presented the Big Heart Award prior to the Hugo Awards Ceremonies on the Saturday evening. He was the first of three fans that I met at Renovation who had attended the first Worldcon, and due to his poor memory, he asked both me and Mike to write something in a little pocket book he was carrying around with him. I thought this was a great way to commemorate the convention!

The Friday evening was supposed to be the Faneds’ Feast, which I totally didn’t manage to attend since I suck. It was really annoying since I had been invited by Murray Moore, who I find enthralling to talk to and was looking forward to catching up with; but these things happen when you’re at your first Worldcon and you’re still finding your way around. I did eventually have dinner with Warren Buff and a bunch of people, under the guise of the Secret Journeymen of Fandom (SJOFs) dinner. Amos, Sydnie and Chris Hensley were in attendance, as were some people I hadn’t met before: Crystal Huff, Kris Snyder and Vylar Kaftan. It was a great time, and I was glad to meet them!

After dining with the SJOFs, Sydnie, Amos and I went to the Peppermill to watch the Masquerade, since Sara was one of the people taking part. I also wanted to see the last entry, which was the one that Mette, Bryan, España and a bunch of other folk were involved with, so I was excited to see what they were going to be doing! (And I must confess, as an Englishman who does listen to a lot of BBC Radio 4, Just a Minute will always possess a special place in my heart.) Sara’s entry was awesome, since her costume was entirely constructed out of ring pulls. And yes, I do mean ring pulls; I don’t care if they’re called “tabs” in America, they’re ring pulls! However, the last entry – the one I was waiting for – was amazing. It was a Doctor Who entry, and I genuinely couldn’t tell the difference between the costumes on stage and the costumes from an episode of Doctor Who8. You could have told me that they were costumes taken from the television show and I would’ve been entirely in agreement with you.

The half-time entertainment came in the form of a game of Just a Minute. This was awesome despite some initial technical issues, and Paul Cornell did a really good job of chairing whilst Caroline Symcox kept score. John Dowd told me later in the evening that he’d given the other three players (Lauren Beukes, Seanan McGuire and Bill Willingham) some tips on how to play the game since, as the reigning Eastercon champion, he was the only person who’d actually heard it before, let alone played it before. Seanan used some of Clement Freud’s old tricks with great aplomb and romped home with the win, which was something that Clement often didn’t manage to do in the olden days, may he rest in peace! I watched with Amos and Sydnie, who are both American, and to whom this was an entirely new experience. Both of them were in stitches, which made me oddly proud to be British – although neither of them was rooting for the underdog, which is how British comedy panel games are supposed to work!

Eventually it came time to head back to the Atlantis and party. We elected to leave after Just a Minute, in order to beat the post-masquerade rush; but in so doing, I missed out on Chris renewing Bryan and Mette’s vows, which was a great shame. Fortunately, the vows made it into the Worldcon Ustream channel, so I’ve since rectified this injustice. We got back to the Atlantis and I totally went to lots of parties (I already mentioned London in 2014, right?) and found lots of awesome people to talk to, but the highlight of the evening was drinking a lot of Soylent Green with España before getting back to the Peppermill and sinking gratefully into bed.

I woke up fairly early on the Saturday of Renovation and blearily phoned Chris Garcia before hitting the rehearsal for the Hugo Awards at 9am. I wanted to get there early, because I had a panel at 11am and I wanted to allow enough time to go through my role as presenter, grab something to eat and then haul myself over to the convention centre in time for my panel.

Arriving at the rehearsal was quite funny, since they clearly weren’t expecting fans to be up and about at the beginning of the time slot and the arrival of the two of us caused a little consternation. I bumped into Crystal Huff and said hello, before Chris and I were expertly walked through the presenting-a-Hugo and receiving-a-Hugo procedures. Afterwards, Crystal, Chris and I went to get coffee in the lobby of the Peppermill. Crystal gave me an awesome neck massage, so I totally zoned out. Chris chatted with Rachel Swirsky, who must have thought I was very rude due to how out-of-it I was; she was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novella, so I decided to root for her later that evening.

After breakfast Chris and I drove over to the convention (with a stop at Walgreens so I could put more credit on my AT&T SIM card). My day started with a fanzine panel called “Are There New Fan Editors and Fan Writers?”. Emails had been flying back and forth between the panellists in the run-up to the panel, which was cool; I like discussing panels before the fact, and the culture shock of the Green Room meant that I was especially grateful for this.

Initially, I had presumed that it was a straight-up panel, but a closer inspection of the grid prior to the Saturday had revealed that it was to be held in the fanzine lounge. I’ve done a couple of more informal panels in my time (we’ve all been in that situation where there are more panellists than audience members, right?) but I’d never done one in a fan lounge before so that was to be a new experience. The idea of putting on a workshop, or some sort of interactivity, was suggested by España; but there was dissent in the ranks, so we decided that we would just play it by ear.

Since my programme item was in the lounge, I hung out there beforehand and chatted with people. I’m fairly sure that it was at this point that I got to meet Art Widner, the second of the three fans that I met at Renovation who attended the first Worldcon. It was really interesting to talk with him and Chris Garcia, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

There was A Sofa (not to be confused with Fran Dowd) in the area, so when it came to the fanzine panel, chairs were put around the sofa. That way, the panel could sofa it up and the audience could engage in a round-table discussion, as befitted the location of the item. España was also on the panel, and so I was confident that she, at least, would be as sleep deprived as I. Joining us was Jean Martin – I hadn’t met her before, but she instantly seemed interesting and engaging. Jerry Kaufman was our fourth member – but he didn’t sit on the sofa, instead preferring to join the audience – and Guy H. Lillian III was unfortunately unable to complete the set.

The panel got going and was, broadly speaking, a hoot. I ranted and was ranted at by España, whilst Jean kept things vaguely civilised and Jerry provoked comments and opinions from the floor (where “floor” is a term meaning “not sofa”). A couple of times I had to tell people that we were actually having a panel, due to various interruptions; this is the peril of having programme items in the fan lounge, since they can often just look like huge conversations! But I came out of the panel feeling optimistic and enthusiastic about the future of fanzine fandom, which is a refreshing feeling to have after a fanzines panel (so many I’ve been on seem to focus on doom and gloom).

At this stage, I had a couple of hours before the reception for the fan fund winners. Now, there were two fan fund delegates at the Worldcon: the TAFF delegate (that’s me!) from the UK and the DUFF delegate, Dave Cake, from Australia. As such, the three countries involved in TAFF and DUFF are the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Australia9. Guess when the panel on UK, US and Australian fanzines was on. Go on, guess! If you guessed “at the same time”, then you were right! This is somewhat annoying, since I was looking forward to seeing that panel. Chris Garcia, España Sheriff, Alan Stewart, Suzle, and Mark Plummer all sounded like good reasons to go!

That being said, the reception was awesome, and I was sincerely surprised that so many fans attended! Anne and Brian Gray, the previous year’s TAFF delegates, bought me a drink, which was good (I like drinks). Dave Cake and I actually had crowns of fan fundery, too10! I chatted a lot about my trip and the like, which was awesome. It was really great to talk to people about the fund and about the sense of community in fandom, as well as recounting some of the anecdotes I’d picked up along the way.

Eventually it became 3pm, which was the time at which the fan fund auction was supposed to go down. Liz Zitzow and I had gone over to her room in the Atlantis in order to pick up some donated items, which were duly transported to the main stage (opposite the fanzine lounge). Liz also had the donations that had been made in the consuite, which were also brought down and basically used as a float for people paying.

The auction started a little slowly, with a few people buying and bidding but the audience generally seemed a little hesitant to get the ball rolling and the money flowing. Eventually, one of the huge banners featuring some awesome artwork from Boris Vallejo uncorked the bottle (with some cajoling and bullying from Liz and me) and people started getting more comfortable with spending money.

A couple of pieces of artwork sold for big money (I love it when an item goes for more than $500), and we even auctioned a co-editor position on The Drink Tank which was eagerly purchased by Dave Cake. There was also a mysterious lady who I had not met, picking sets of fanzines out of the boxes at the front of the stage (there was too much to sell in two hours so we had to take audience suggestions). Everything she picked out went for at least $20, so if you are reading this you have my most sincere thanks!

Brian, who was taking monies, did a fantastic job of keeping on top of the event, which was moving pretty quickly. Liz was a great auction master, and honourable mention must go to Dave, Anne and Chris Garcia (a previous TAFF delegate!) who all helped sell various items. We raised a significant amount of money for the fan funds, which is always an exciting thing to do, winding down at about 5pm. After letting people have some T-shirts, which hadn’t been selling for much, at $5 each, I ended up getting away at about half past, and got back to my hotel room at around 6pm.

As a fan fund delegate, I was presenting the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. I was doing this after another TAFF alumnus, Stu Shiffman11, who presented Best Fan Artist; I was incredibly nervous about the whole thing and decided to grab a shower and get my suit on as soon as I got back to my hotel room. When you ask people about transporting a suit across the Atlantic, you may well find that a commonly repeated piece of advice you receive is to hang it up in the shower and get the creases out. I tried that, and it turned out that two weeks of gallivanting around North America had taken its toll, and those creases were not shifting.

At this point, I’m going to reveal something I probably shouldn’t. In Britain, we have a popular chain of clothes shops called Marks & Spencer. You may have heard of them: they’re name checked in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, amongst other slices of British media. The salient point of this is that M&S do suits, including my suit. But, because I am poor, mine is not a terribly expensive one; in fact, it set me back £50. The advantage of having a £50 suit whilst on an epic TAFF trip is that, when push comes to shove, it has instructions for ironing on the label.

So there I am, merrily ironing my suit jacket and shirt. Meanwhile, the text messages from people at the Hugo reception were becoming more and more urgent, which was a sure sign I had started to run late. I eventually got my suit into a state suitable for presenting an award in front of thousands of people, and made it to the reception in the nick of time. Thank God I was in the Peppermill!

Upon arriving at the Capri Ballroom for the reception, Crystal decided to be my date for the evening. I was entirely fine with this, since she looked stunning. I made it known to Susan de Guardiola that I had arrived, which made her very happy, since I believe I was one of the last people to do that. Eventually it became time to head down to the Tuscany Ballroom for the ceremony. We all walked together, which was quite a sight (suits and dresses and snappy clothes were prevalent!).

The ceremony itself was really great. If you didn’t manage to make it on the night, or if you didn’t see the live stream, there’s actually a video on Ustream of the proceedings, linked from Renovation’s website at the time of writing. If you just want to see the part with me in it you can view it on YouTube at youtu.be/fPqACqFy_ok (sorry, I don’t have YouTube links for the rest of the ceremony!). I was presenting the second award, so I got to see the Hugo unveiled before going backstage and collecting my thoughts.

Then it was my turn to go out. I was incredibly nervous and excited! I’ve been on some panels that drew large audiences in my time (the largest was a panel with Neil Gaiman at Eastercon one year that pretty well filled the main function space of the con), but the Hugo Awards are in an entirely different league, and so my nerves were running completely rampant. I got to the lectern, took a deep breath, and said my bit. I did this without a script, or a speech, or any notes. Some people find that it’s useful to have something to work from when speaking in public, but I’ve always found that, doing that, I fumble and stammer and go back on myself, which is never a good look.

It came time to read out the names of the nominees: James Bacon, Claire Brialey, Christopher J. Garcia, James Nicoll and Steven H. Silver were up for the award. If you read Banana Wings, you’ll already be aware that I pronounced Claire Brialey’s surname wrong; I was a lot more nervous than I appear on the video from that night, so I will be apologising to her for that until the end of time12.

Then, I opened the envelope, and I saw the name of the winner. If you watch the footage of me presenting, you’ll notice that when I open the envelope, I grin very widely before schooling my expression into something a little bit more neutral – I was having trouble staying in control during the entire experience, so I’m surprised I didn’t let out a whoop of joy!

The winner was Claire Brialey, as you may already be aware. Claire is the co-editor of Banana Wings with Mark Plummer, and they were the first people I met during my very first foray into proper SF fandom events13. As such, it was an absolute pleasure to present her with the award, and I couldn’t resist telling her “I told you so” when she took it from me. Her speech was brilliant, conveying very accurately her total sense of shock and also squeezing in a plug for London in 2014 (we are very good at plugging that Worldcon bid, as you may have noticed).

The rest of the ceremony was also brilliant. I saw Chris Garcia and James Bacon receive the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine for their work on The Drink Tank, which is entirely deserved (well done, both of you, if you’re reading this!). It almost entirely upstaged anything that had happened before that with how brilliant Chris’ reaction was. If you ever wanted to see a man have a breakdown due to pure joy whilst on a stage, you need to watch Christopher J. Garcia winning his Hugo Award. It was a sight to behold!

Another highlight of the ceremony included the presentation by Robert Silverberg of Best Novella, which had me laughing uproariously. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. Now. It’s the penultimate award, and he is amazing. I have no idea how he managed to keep such a straight face through what was a masterful performance! Sadly, however, Rachel Swirsky didn’t win, which was a shame; I was also rooting for How to Train Your Dragon to win in Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Clearly my support was more of a hindrance than a help!

After the Hugos, I found Crystal and we made our way back to the Capri Ballroom for the Hugo Losers’ Party, which was a lot of fun. We had our photograph taken, and mingled; I congratulated Claire again on her win (she lost, in the Best Fanzine category, so she was eligible to be there, naturally) and met a bunch of people, apologised to Susan for being so late for the reception (which must have been about the fifth time I had done so), and generally enjoyed the hell out of myself.

The real highlight of the party, though, came as it was winding down somewhat (or at least, that’s how I remember it). I was chatting to the bartender, as I ordered another couple of drinks for me and Crystal, and I asked for a bottle of Anchor Steam Beer. I didn’t quite have enough money for the round, so he let me off a few cents, which I appreciated! As he handed it over, he made some comment about how he didn’t like it all that much. I replied by saying that it wasn’t the best beer in the world, but you can’t get real English ales in the US, and expected that to be the end of the discussion. However, he responded by agreeing with me (which I wasn’t expecting, given the American accent) and told me that he’d spent a bit of time in Leicester, and he’d had a good beer there called Tiger from a brewery called Everard’s. I responded, slightly bewildered, saying that I had just graduated from the University of Leicester and that I knew both the brewery and beer well; in fact, it’s one of my favourite examples of a proper bitter. His face lit up, and he said, “We used to drink at a pretty weird pub just near the university. I think it was called the Old Horse?”

The Old Horse is my local.

Now, this may not apply in the States – it might be a British thing, I don’t know – but when you meet a man who shares your local (and by “local” we mean “favourite pub”), that practically makes you family. When it’s five thousand miles from home and you can’t find a decent ale to save your life, that makes that bond a little stronger. Finding out that he used to frequent the same fast food place as me after having nights out in the Horse sealed the deal, and we became fast friends.

Eventually, we got bored of the afterparty and headed back to the Atlantis to join the parties that were happening there. I had received a telling off from España for missing her party on the Thursday, and since London in 2014 wasn’t having a Saturday party, I made her shindig a top priority. I got talking to her and Jason and a few other people, and we wound up drinking in the bar till about five in the morning, which was rapidly becoming a habit! Jason took some awesome photographs that night (including what I think is my favourite photograph from the whole convention), and I had a great time – especially because the barmaid didn’t know how to mix the Soylent Green, and it was coming in a pint rather than in a martini glass!

Jason and España insisted on walking me back to the Peppermill, since it was dark and dangerous and I couldn’t go on my own (both were scandalised14 to learn that I had made the trip on the Thursday and the Friday). This worked well, though, since we walked back just as the sun was coming up. It was a beautiful view, and the conversation continued for an extra half-hour, which was great, since I didn’t particularly want it to end. I then promptly stayed up until some absolutely insane hour, as I realised I needed to pack before checking out and everything was all over the place from preparing for the ceremony. I really should have made sure I’d packed everything properly earlier in the day (since I’m sure I forgot things in that room), but it was too late to worry, so I just did it drunk and tired.

Sunday arrived, and I must confess I kind of wished it hadn’t. I promptly checked out of my room, and wheeled my case down to the room in which the Hugo Award-winning editor Christopher J. Garcia was staying with the Lovely and Talented Linda Wenzelburger. We said hi, before going to grab breakfast. At breakfast, Chris had a buffet whilst I had my favourite breakfast (I don’t want to bang on about this but whoever decided burger patties were a breakfast food was a genius). Several people came up and hugged and congratulated Chris, which was pretty awesome. He looked so excited and happy all day!

I had panels on Sunday. Three panels, in fact. In a row. Now, I don’t mind doing panels, but three in a row was something I was slightly suspicious of; but, what the hell, I was having a great time and I decided to just go ahead and do it. This turned out to be entirely the right reaction, since all three were fun and entertaining. The first, which was called “One More Season”, was the most light-hearted of the three. It starred Mary Kay Kare and me, with two fans I had not previously met; Eytan Kollin and Irene Radford, who moderated. We discussed a wide range of shows, with Firefly coming up, but also talking about Pushing Daises, the remake of Knight Rider, Stargate Universe and others.

At this point in the narrative I should make one thing clear: I love Stargate Universe. I love the plot arcs, and the characters, and the sense of futility and doom. I am aware that this is, apparently, an unpopular opinion; it might help to explain that it was my first introduction to the Stargate franchise so I wasn’t coming to it with preconceptions born of SG-1 or Atlantis, although I plan to watch both, after Universe’s impact. The best way I can think to describe how good I think it is is to tell you that I watched the entire second season on my iPod Classic (which has a 2.5” screen) during my trip, on various plane journeys and the like, and still loved every second. I apologise most sincerely if you now hate me.

So we argued about Universe, which Eytan wasn’t a fan of. It was at this point that Eytan and I discovered we were going to be on a panel about the show at 2pm (my third panel of the Sunday) and so we decided to purposefully steer clear of further debate on the subject and save it for the panel. We did talk about stuff that should have ended more quickly, too; it turned into quite an interesting discussion, and despite the fact I figured it would be fairly light-hearted we ended up making some serious points.

The next panel saw five people with opinions about manned spaceflight arguing in front of an audience, on a panel called “Man vs Robots: Who Gets to Travel Space First”. The answer to the question posed by the title is clearly “robots”, since robots have beaten humans to every single place in the solar system already. However, the panel was very interesting, covering a lot of ground with several very fascinating and very vehement arguments. It was just like being an undergraduate again, and I felt a little bit starstruck by how much more experience in the field every other panellist had.

The third panel was the one on Stargate Universe. This saw me saying Universe was great, Eytan saying it was okay but wasn’t a good Stargate show, and Inge Heyer (the third panellist) declaring it rubbish. It was all good-natured, despite the fact that we all had such hugely different views on what the show’s strengths and weaknesses were, and the audience seemed to have a good time, with several coming up and having a chat with us at the end before I eventually headed off to the Closing Ceremonies.

At the Closing Ceremonies, we found out that Worldcon hadn’t yet started. This caused some confusion, since we had all been under the impression that a Worldcon had been going on; we were wrong, however, since Patty Wells had forgotten to officially declare it open. She did so, before declaring it closed again, resulting in what has to be one of the shortest Worldcons ever held. I feel privileged to be a part of such history. The handover to Chicon 7 was conducted with aplomb and videos, and I must confess that since attending my first Worldcon I now imagine I may become a bit addicted to them. I clearly need a job that can sustain a Worldcon habit!

With the convention officially over, I headed off to meet with Warren, Crystal, and a bunch of other people. It was basically a reprise of the SJOFs dinner from the Friday night, but with a slightly different group, and we chatted in the New York-style deli in the Atlantis before heading up to the room that had become the fanzine lounge. We looked after the room for Catherine Crockett, and I’m pretty sure I remember Chris Hensley, Jesi Lipp, Meg Totusek and others being there, too. I was absolutely knackered, though, so my memories are hazy!

Eventually I went back down to the deli to actually eat, meeting up with Deb and Anthony Kopec and Jason Schachat before being joined by Bryan Little and Mette Hedin. Since España was actually getting sleep (boooo), she caught up with us a bit later, and we had a fantastic meal. We caught some beer in the sports bar next to the deli before we split up and went up to the party floor. I wound up being in the party for chairs of previous Worldcons (still not entirely sure how that happened, beyond a certain British fan being of the opinion that it needed more young people in it). I wound up talking with Russ Hodgkins for a bit, who was the third fan I met who attended the first Worldcon, and actually chaired the second, Chicon 1.

España and Jason came upstairs and also met Russ, and we headed back down to the sports bar we’d been inhabiting earlier, meeting up with the same people as before, too. Warren Buff joined us, and we chatted and talked and generally had a good wind-down. I eventually became too lame to stay up (why I didn’t just drink, like, five espressos, I’ll never know) and headed to the room in which I had arranged to stay, in the Atlantis. That was the end of my convention: talking bollocks in the bar with a group of people I call friends.

That’s how every convention should be.

I used to find that sometimes I wanted proper coffee instead of instant coffee. These days, I always find that I want proper coffee instead of instant coffee.

I didn’t know Kevin Roche and Andrew Trembley at this point, and they are two very talented men.

Most of this con report was written by using my ribbons to get a sense of the events of the convention.

I said “exposure” because he had a camera. Get it?

While proof-reading this, Claire Brialey wrote: “I had a factual query about this “cool” desert air, but then realised that you were out in it at about five in the morning. So never mind.”

It was eventually called Loncon 3, and it was fun, but not as good as Renovation. My biases were misaligned.

See South Lake Tahoe.

This entry won, and the photographs are now in my wife’s study. Read more on p74Spoilers, sweetie…

The Europe/Australasia fan fund is known as GUFF, and it completes the triumvirate.

If anyone has a photograph please send it to me…

I miss you, Stu.

If I ever win a Hugo Award, my entire speech will simply be to apologise to Claire for this.

At Plokta.con π: The Dangercon, in 2006.

More so than usual, anyway.

San Francisco Bay Area

We left Reno early on the Monday morning. Well, actually, it wasn’t that early. It just felt very early, due to sleep deprivation on my part. Since I am the narrator, you have to believe my version of events (oh, the power!) and so you will just have to take my word for it that we left Reno early. Chris and Linda were both staying in the Peppermill, so all my stuff was in their room. As such I rendezvoused with them there after breakfast in the Atlantis, and we went down to check out.

On the way past check-out, we bumped into Patty Wells (the chair of Renovation). Now it’s worth noting that España Sheriff is a terrible, terrible influence on me, and so I stole one of the signs advertising the shuttle schedules before leaving the Atlantis for the final time1 (judging by how easily I got past the front desk with it, I’d say nobody really cared, but whatever. Ironically, as she was scared of going past the front desk with it, España left hers in the room...). So when we were checking out of the Peppermill, I had a sign advertising the shuttle schedules. Patty saw this, and we chatted about how I’d blatantly stolen it from the Atlantis (I dressed it up in pretty language a little, but I’m not the world’s most subtle chap), before she decided she should go get one before they took them down.

Eventually we made our way from the Peppermill back to the Atlantis and picked James Bacon up outside, before we set out to Santa Clara and Chris’ place (where James and I were staying; James left on Tuesday morning, so he wasn’t around for long). The trip back to Chris’ place from Reno was fun. I rode with Linda, who was excellent company, and I believe I may have been a little bit asleep for part of the road trip, but only a little bit. We were also overtaken by Chris and James, who wanted to show me that James was drinking my Mountain Dew (I waved my fist and made faces at them, appropriately).

We stopped, on the way to the Bay Area, at a Taco Bell, which marked my only Taco Bell visit of the TAFF trip. I had a burrito that had chicken in it (hurrah!), and a taco (hurrah!) and a Mountain Dew (hurrah!). I love Taco Bell.

Chris’ place beckoned, and we eventually made it back. I went to the laundromat and did some laundry. Linda and I were tempted to get dumplings from the Chinese place next door, called 4-5-6 Restaurant, but we decided to wait for dinner instead. This place is rapidly, apparently, becoming a staple of fans who stay with or visit Chris; a phenomenon that was explained easily! Our wait was incredibly worth it; the dumplings were the finest Chinese dumplings I have ever tasted, and were served in a delicious Chinese peanut oil. The main courses were really good, too, but the dumplings, man. The dumplings2.

After the dumplings we decided to head over to a meeting of BASFA, the Bay Area Science Fiction Association. This was, for want of a better phrase, really fucking weird. It was entirely not in line with what I was expecting, in that it wasn’t a pub meeting. When I hear “fan meeting”, I immediately think “pub in England with real ales and people drinking and chatting in small groups”. What I don’t think is “restaurant in California with a secretary taking minutes and people taking it in turns to speak when they’re pointed at by a man holding a ray gun”. So, it was a little bit of a culture shock. I saw España at the meeting, and met Joe Price (JP). We agreed that we would hang out in San Francisco on the Tuesday. I also met Tom Becker, who invited me wine tasting with him, Spike and Alex Stewart on the Wednesday before I left, which sounded awesome!

The next day, Chris and I went to get breakfast. I was gonna have a burger patty with hash browns and over-medium eggs, but then Chris just went the whole hog and ordered the cheeseburger, so I figured I’d do the same. Munching our burgers, we chatted about various stuff and things before Chris dropped me off at the Caltrain station in Lawrence so that I could get the train to San Francisco.

(However, there’s something that they don’t tell you about Caltrain: it only accepts debit cards. However, when you say “debit card” in America it doesn’t mean quite the same thing as it does in the UK. In the UK, all our debit cards are effectively just credit cards with a credit limit of the content of the relevant account. They work differently in principle but the underlying technologies and mechanisms are identical to a credit card. However, in the US, a debit card is actually fundamentally different from a credit card, and so when something requires a debit card, it will not work with any British plastic.

This was something that tripped me up in a Seattle outlet mall where I hit “debit” and my card got rejected, and España was unable to use her credit card to get BART tickets and we had to use her debit card to travel to the airport on the Wednesday. This was a fucking pain: the nearest ATM was ages away, according to the AroundMe app I have on my phone. In actuality, it was not where the app I checked said it was, necessitating me tripling my trip length to get to the next nearest ATM according to the app, which actually turned out to be just up the road from the train station I’d started at. That app promptly got deleted, and I finally got a goddamn train ticket.)

San Francisco is cool. I got there and promptly hit Walgreens, because I’d used all my mobile data searching for an ATM near the train station in Lawrence. In order to get more data you have to ring AT&T and the woman asks what you want, and you have to tell her. Out loud. Which pissed me off for two reasons: firstly, hitting numbers on a keypad is much quicker than doing this. Secondly, the first thing is even more true if you do not have an American accent, as it keeps double-checking what you said and the whole thing takes twice as long. I said hi to España by walking alongside her and saying things to the AT&T woman, which made her look at me as if I was odd, but eventually me and the AT&T woman had concluded our affair and we went to grab coffee.

It was really fun, walking through San Francisco with España. We talked about all kinds of stuff, none of which I can now remember well enough to write about3, on our way to a place at which we could get breakfast. Except that, by this time in the day, I think it was actually lunchtime, and I’d already had breakfast, so it doesn’t really count. Either way, we got to a place that looked awesome and sold beer, which suited both of us down to the ground. Unfortunately, we managed to annoy the waitress by assuming it was table service when it wasn’t, so to make up for it we tipped pretty well and apologised profusely.

Fortunately the place was amazing, being a public house (or as close as one can get in the colonies) belonging to a brewery called Rogue Ales. Rogue Ales sold nice beers, which helped make up for the torrent of continuing abuse coming from España; I had this amazing juniper pale ale, since I am a fan of gin. I had had a burger for breakfast and I elected to continue this theme by having a burger for lunch. España had the Kobe sliders, and she didn’t want the little miniature burger that it came with, so I had that, making three burgers in one day, which is a new record for me!

Eventually, JP joined us and we spent a while longer there before moseying over to the Garlic Rose, which is a restaurant based around garlic (lots of garlic). JP was too cool to have visited prior to going with me and España, but she swears by the garlic ice cream so we visited anyway to catch dessert after the excellent food at Rogue Ales. I was absolutely stuffed to bursting after we’d hit the Garlic Rose, so we went for a drive. Initially JP drove us up to see San Francisco from some highlands, which was awesome. However, it occurred to us that it would be a good idea to drive somewhere we could get out and see it in person.

Corona Heights was decided upon as being an excellent place for this to happen, and so we went and we got out and we adventured. The views of San Francisco are amazing from up there, and my breath was truly taken away. It was so stunning that España almost forgot to keep being mean to me (almost). We took photographs of ourselves against the backdrop. JP in particular looked very suave in these shots, because his hair wasn’t long enough for the wind to wreak havoc in the way it did on mine! We even discussed science fiction, as Franz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness features Corona Heights as a pivotal location4.

Eventually it became time to find a tiki bar. The first port of call was Smuggler’s Cove, which we eventually located and went into, but it was a) rammed and b) not as tacky as España was hoping it would be, so Forbidden Island was our next port of call. After a couple of really interesting cocktails, I settled on something sweet and banana-y that had froth and sugar in it, and stuck with that all night. Cocktail umbrellas were placed in hair, and much fun was had, especially when The Lovely and Talented Linda Wenzelburger joined us for the night, which was an awesome surprise: she was supposed to be seeing Chris that evening, but it later transpired he was feeling like death warmed up, so she joined us instead. Eventually, it became time to head back to Chris’ place, and I went to bed happy.

Now, I was aware that I’d been invited to go wine tasting, but what with Chris being ill, he had called in sick to work; and so I figured I would let Spike and Tom know that – despite the awesome offer – I was going to decline in favour of having one last breakfast with Chris. We ate at a place which did a fine breakfast, and Chris had biscuits and gravy again (bleurgh). Chris didn’t feel up to hanging out much after that so we agreed that he would bring my stuff to San Francisco airport, and I would meet him there after going souvenir shopping in San Francisco itself (I hadn’t got my parents anything, and I felt like I probably needed to rectify that). By lucky happenstance, España was free again that day, and so we rendezvoused at the Caltrain station before she showed me some good places to get touristy stuff for my family.

Eventually, San Francisco airport beckoned. Which sucked, as I didn’t want to leave, but I understand that the border protection people aren’t so keen on you just staying indefinitely, so I reluctantly headed there with España to meet Chris. SFO probably isn’t as confusing as we found it, but we were confused enough that it took a little while to find him. I got my suitcase and my camera off him, hugged him and España goodbye, and queued to check my bags in. Naturally, the woman at the check-in desk didn’t think my passport looked like me, but I patiently explained it had been taken six years previously, at the age of 16, and she seemed to think that was acceptable (also, I was clearly an Englishman going home, which helped). I got onto the plane and sent some last text messages from my US SIM card, before I turned my phone off and got ready for the final flight.

It didn’t fit in my plane luggage, so as far as I know it’s still in California somewhere.

The restaurant has closed and Chris has moved since then, but it’s eight nine years since the trip and I still think about those dumplings.

She definitely tried to push me into traffic, though.

As a result, the first gift España ever gave me was a copy of this book. It was very sweet!

The End

If you’re reading this you’ve made it to the end of my trip report. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I actually hope you enjoyed it more, since I got to do it for free and you paid to read it.

I wrote this report while I was on my trip, and in the month after returning, in 20111. It was published in the months thereafter in Banana Wings (Toronto), Chunga (Seattle), The Drink Tank (Lake Tahoe and the Bay Area) and SF/SF (Renovation). It has taken me a very long time to compile it into this document, but I started my PhD in January 2012 and I’ve somehow just been busy ever since (it is not a coincidence that my fanzine, Procrastinations, has not had a new issue since 2014…). But it is now finished, even if it’s probably at least seven years after I intended it to be available. However, it’s better to suffer the embarrassment of publishing late than the sadness of never publishing!

A lot has happened to me since I wrote these words. Most notable is my courting, engagement, and marriage to España, who I met at Renovation. There are words from her elsewhere in this issue, which she emailed to me on 6 October 2011. We got engaged on Christmas Eve in 2014, and were married on 7 May 2015 in San Francisco City Hall. San Francisco now has a very special place in my heart, and Renovation will always be my favourite Worldcon for so many reasons.

More sad are the passings of several of the people I talk about in this document. The death of Randy Byers, in late 2017, hit me particularly hard but I miss everyone I met on my trip who has since passed away, including Ryan Bisci, Vijay deSelby-Bowen, Andi Shechter, and Stu Shiffman.

This chapter contains a few bits and bobs from people who are not me. We start with a contribution from Randy, who writes about his experience at Renovation, before we move onto writing by España Sheriff, James Bacon, Claire Brialey, Warren Buff and Lloyd Penney. Thank you to all of them for agreeing to let me (re)print their words herein.

Finally, I want to thank Catherine Crockett, Colin Hinz, Randy Byers, Denys Howard, Christopher J. Garcia, and the Lovely and Talented Linda Wenzelberger for putting me up and putting up with me during my trip. Thank you to Crystal Huff for being my date to the Hugo Losers’ Party, and to España Sheriff for being my date ever since. And thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to everyone who voted. TAFF has probably had more of an impact on me than anything else I’ve done, and that’s no understatement.

Fandom is a way of life.

John Coxon

Southampton, England, September 2019

Some of the footnotes are later additions, something which will not surprise the attentive reader.

Randy Byers: The Biggest Little City in the Worldcon

Renovation wasn’t my favorite of the seven Worldcons I’ve been to (1984, 1993, 1996, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2011). My favorites are still Interaction and Anticipation, which just goes to show that Tobes is invaluable at a Worldcon. But Renovation easily stands with the 2006 L.A.con in the next rank amongst my post-TAFF Worldcons: a great deal of fun even if not stratospheric.

One of the things that Renovation had in common with that L.A.con was the presence of Lucy Huntzinger and Ulrika O’Brien (although, alas, not Geri Sullivan this time). I had breakfast with Lucy on Thursday morning, and it was great to get caught up on life, since we really hadn’t talked since 2006. She told me about her trip to Stockholm for Eurocon and her new career in the pet care industry. Then on Thursday night (I think it was) I ran into Lucy and Ulrika wandering the halls trying to figure out if any of the parties looked inviting, and we headed down to the casino instead to find a beer and a quiet place to talk, which actually proved more difficult than you might imagine, since they apparently want you to be sitting at a slot machine before they’ll serve you. Anyway, that was another great conversation, again on the topic of travel. Throughout the convention I ran into Ulrika at various points as she patrolled the halls in the guise of a facilities facilitator of some kind or another, even trying to facilitate the stapler at the WOOF collation. She was one of Suzle’s team, and I kept running into Marci Malinowycz too, on her rounds as party liaison. Always comforting to run into members of the Seattle contingent, of which there were more than usual probably because of the Far West location of the convention.

The daytime fanzine lounge, run by Christopher “What Just Hit Me?” Garcia, was located in the exhibition hall and was a magnet for people who needed a spot to rest their weary legs after a stint in the art show or dealers’ room. Hopefully they were exposed to fanzines while resting, and a new generation of faneds will spring up tomorrow – although Chris seems to be doing a fine job of generating new faneds all on his lonesome. For those of us who like to spend the convention drinking, there was a convenient bar nearby, with two nice beers on tap and a variety of bottled beer and spirits also on offer. By Saturday I could expect Paul Wrigley to walk by on his way to his table in the dealers’ room and call out cheerfully, “Ah, there’s Randy with a glass of beer in his hand. All is well.” Indeed, Wednesday evening, which was my first at the convention, was largely spent in this bar with Mark Plummer discussing the London in 2014 bid in great detail. Mark was drinking the Firestone Walker Double IPA, which I believe ended up doing some serious damage to his sobriety. It was a reprise of our drunken discussion in the wee hours at Corflu Zed, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I shared a room in the Atlantis (the main convention hotel) with carl juarez and Dave O’Neill. We drove down together via Klamath Falls in a rental car full of goods destined for the London in 2014 parties and the Fanzine Lounge After Dark, and that was a fun trip. In fact we discovered a brewpub outside of Eugene called Hop Valley that was very nice, and we got a growler and two bottles to go so I could have a taste when we got to the motel room in Klamath Falls. Renovation was carl’s first Worldcon, and I was happy to be an enabler on that front. Not sure how well the convention suited him, but everybody should go to a Worldcon at least once.

My personal take is that, while I’ve enjoyed every Worldcon I’ve been to, the ones I’ve gone to since I won TAFF have been the best because I now know so many people within fandom that I almost always have somebody to talk to at a Worldcon. There’s not so much time wandering around feeling lonely and at loose ends. Maybe it’s actually just a matter of going to enough Worldcons that you get to know more of the regulars. For instance, this year I renewed my acquaintance with a number of people I first met at Anticipation in 2009, including Joel Phillips, Craig Glassner, Kevin Roche, Andy Trembley, and Danny Lieberman. Not sure I made as many new connections this year, although that’s partly because John “Chick Magnet” Coxon already felt like an old friend due to his TAFF visit in Seattle the week before. There was also Kim Kofmel of the London in 2014 bid parties, who along with Spike formed a formidable partnership of Responsible Adults while Dave “God of Pimm’s” O’Neill and James Bacon ran wild. And I met the current North American TAFF administrators, Anne and Brian Gray, and their beautiful baby. Oh right, and I also met Dean Gahlon, courtesy of WOOF, so maybe I did make quite a few new connections, come to think of it.

Right. So, WOOF. I was the OE this year. WOOF is an APA distributed annually at the Worldcon since 1976, and despite the naysayers who think it’s a waste of time it ended up going fairly well this year. When I arrived on Wednesday, Chris Garcia had already set up a drop-off spot in the fanzine lounge for the deposit of contributions to WOOF, and there were already three contributions on the table. Everybody who had promised me a zine before the convention delivered, even if Kat Templeton insisted on exercising the grand fannish tradition of printing her zine while the collation was going on. (She first tried to print it in the fanzine lounge, but when she killed the toner cartridge there, she took it to the newsletter room, where her earlier gift of chocolate to the newsletter team provided the karma she needed for them to print the zine for her then and there.) One person promised a zine at the convention but didn’t come through, so the final listing in the ToC is for a ghost zine. The collation was Saturday at noon, and a good crew showed up. I was amped up on adrenaline, but the people I remember circling the table were Chris “Holy Shit!” GarCIA, Claire “Um, What?” Brialey, Mark “Sugar Pine” Plummer, John “Some Awe” Coxon, David “Gently Now” Cake (who had never participated in an APA before), and David Shallcross, whom I hadn’t met before so he’s spared a collation nickname. Once Kat showed up with her zine, I began to staple – only to discover, after a half hour of jams, swearing, unjamming (bless Dean Gahlon for his leatherman) and experimentation, that I had brought the wrong staples with me. Off to Office Depot with Kat, where we got the necessary heavy duty staples. It was smooth sailing after that, and we ended up with exactly 69 copies of the distribution, in honor of the 69th Worldcon.

To a large extent, Worldcon is comprised of a long sequence of conversations with a variety of people, and the process of trying to remember Worldcon becomes a process of remembering who I talked to, which too easily becomes a list of names: John Hertz, Lise Eisenberg (with whom I had a great conversation about immigrant communities), Art Widner (whose comment that it’s extremely difficult to find a typo in Chunga was perhaps my favorite of the convention), Paul Wrigley and Debbi Cross (who slagged off lutefisk to a Norwegian’s face!), Brian Brown (who had the goods on Garrett P. Serviss), Janice Gelb (recovering nicely from recent surgery), Michael Heath (last seen at the 2006 Worldcon), Alice Lawson (last seen at Novacon putting out fires), Lisa Freitag (whom I’d never met, though we’ve published her in Chunga)…

It’s true that once again I made it to very little programming. I think the only program item I went to was the interview with John Coxon, where once again I was impressed by his calm intelligence and goofy sense of humor. Is this guy really only 22? Far too self-assured for that! I caught a bit of the fan fund auction as well, but other than that I can’t think of any program items I went to. I did make two expeditions into the dealers’ room, where I resisted first editions of Serviss and Leigh Brackett and French editions of Moebius and ended up only buying Vanguard Productions’ RGK: The Art of Roy G. Krenkel. A good dealers’ room, as this one was, is always an education, if nothing else. This time around I revealed myself as a complete boob by being astounded, as it were, that Galaxy was a digest-size magazine. Three people turned as one to say “Duh!” when I expressed surprise at this. No, there really is no excuse for not having known that before, I quite agree.

Other than the WOOF collation, the only other work I did at the convention was helping Catherine Crockett with the evening fanzine lounge. carl and I went shopping with them at the Food Source on Friday, which was the first night EFL was open (and even then it was taken over by Randy Smith’s 50th birthday party, which wasn’t properly considered the fanzine lounge itself – although it was a good party in its own right, even if several people thought it was my party and apologized to me for not making it). We bought massive quantities of beer, pop, and munchies, and while the beer selection was acceptable, it was nowhere near as amazing as what was available in Montreal, where we stocked the fanzine lounge with Unibroue, amongst other things. Anyway, on Saturday after dinner at the Hong Kong Diner, carl and I helped Catherine with set-up in the EFL, and that was pretty much it for my working life at the convention. Colin Hinz took over from there, assisting Catherine as they rolled out a steady flow of food and drink. It was also Colin who came in during set-up to gleefully announce that Claire Brialey, Chris Garcia, and James Bacon had won fan Hugos.

Saturday in the EFL was definitely a high point of the convention. When Colin announced who the fan Hugo winners were, there was instantly a palpable excitement in the room. Sometime later James showed up with his Hugo, and the room just exploded. He handed the statue to me, and cameras materialized out of thin air. Pretty soon the rocket was being passed around, camera flashes were popping, and Craig Glassner was promising to set up a My Hugo page on Facebook with all the pictures. What a fuss! I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. When Claire arrived a while later with her own rocket, the room burst into applause and I turned from my conversation with John Hertz and shouted, “Bravo! Bravo!” John and I had just been talking about how fannish traditions and institutions are not oppressive (or not only oppressive) but a way of passing information forward, and here the Hugo voters were informing the future of a fan writer worth reading.

Well, it was really something. I suppose that same scene was playing out all over the convention at other parties where Hugo-winners made an appearance. I guess the only other time I’ve really hung out with Hugo-winners right after the ceremony was with the Plokta Cabal in Glasgow in 2005, and that time my enthusiasm was overwhelmed by ungracious disappointment that Chunga had not been the winner. It was a pleasure to be unencumbered by such envy this time around. I don’t think I’ve ever seen James Bacon in such a vulnerable state. I don’t think he knew what to feel, especially after Chris’ epic, YouTube-classic meltdown on stage at the ceremonies.

Around 3:30am I thought it was probably time to go to bed, especially since we were planning to hit the road to Oregon in about twelve hours, but then Dave Cake arrived and pushed the energy levels back up. Whenever I saw Dave at the convention I was reminded that I was one of his DUFF nominators and that therefore I could claim some of the credit for his glorious presence. I first met Dave at the 2005 Worldcon, so our connection is another testament to the Worldcon community. He got to talking about natural disasters in Australia, as you do. The topic was the flooding in Queensland and wildfires in Western Australia last year. “I took to telling people that I wasn’t from the part of Australia that was under water,” Dave said, “I was from the part that was on fire.” It’s only fitting then, I suppose, that Dave was off to Burning Man the following weekend.

Earlier in the party I’d been in a conversation with Paul Wrigley (a British immigrant to the US), Debbi Cross (his American wife), and a Norwegian fan named Tore Audun, whom I suddenly remembered having chatted with on a convention shuttle bus in Glasgow. (He didn’t remember me, unsurprisingly. Americans are a dime a dozen at Worldcons, but Norwegians are relatively rare.) A little later I was happily chatting away with Mark Plummer of England and Alan Stewart of Australia and thinking cosmic thoughts of global fandom. I’ve been saying for the past few years that Corflu and Worldcon are my favorite conventions, and there’s no doubt that a big part of it is that they are the conventions where I see fans from other countries. I like hearing the news of the world, or at least the gossip. I like the sense of global community. These are the two conventions where I can get the biggest dose of it, aside from traveling to other countries myself. Even if Renovation didn’t hit the stratospheric heights of the two foreign Worldcons I’ve been to, it gave me a healthy blast of what I craved.

España Sheriff: Renovation 2011

Worldcon this year was fantastic but odd. I ridiculously overcommitted myself without quite realizing I was doing so, and as a consequence my experience teetered dizzyingly between awesomeness and total catastrophe, threatening to collapse into pure misery at any moment but miraculously righting itself just at the last second back into the awesome column, every time. My commitments looked fine on paper: three panels and two parties, Thursday and Saturday respectively, in honour of Campbell nominee Lev Grossman. However, I also agreed to be part of a Masquerade entry, which ate most of my Friday, and I do tend to stay up late plus it turns out there are things to do and see during the daytime at Worldcon! Something had to give, and in this case it was sleep. Well, sleep and some small amount of sanity.

I traveled up to Reno on Amtrak’s California Zephyr and met my first fellow congoers along the way, first being a gentleman waiting in the Amtrak Ferry Building, who I had half guessed might be a fan. He turned out to be Andrew Porter, the Hugo award-winning editor of Algol, who surprised me by being aware of SF/SF. He said he had used the calendar to visit the SFinSF Tad Williams event in the city the previous evening. Randy Smith, Father John Blaker and a few other folks were also on board making for some nice pre-con geekery.

After a stopover in Truckee to visit with Leigh Ann Hildebrand and Leo Schwab, I arrived at the Peppermill Tuesday night, crashing with Mette Hedin and Bryan Little for the evening. The Peppermill was the hotel for the big events: Masquerade, Hugos, etc., while my hotel, the Atlantis, was the one connected to the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, where the panels and exhibits where held, and also was the official party hotel.

Coming in Tuesday allowed me a reasonably early start on Wednesday to get my badge and hang art before checking into my room. Awkwardly, the convention had chosen, in one of its few obvious mistakes (as opposed to things going wrong despite their best efforts) to make the official ribbons all vertical. Now, in California fandom at least, horizontal ribbons are pretty much the norm now, and the two types are not really compatible. The result being that all of us who spent money on ribbons either for fun or to promote a group, book, fanzine or other fanac were suddenly stuck with ribbons that anyone participating in programming, art show, masquerade, etc. might not be able to wear at all. I simply chose not to wear any of my official ribbons (of which I had three by Friday anyway, which fills the badge), but I really do think this was a very odd decision and unnecessarily inconvenient to the membership.

A better decision was the shuttle. The con ran a bus between the two hotels on a constant cycle, which was very helpful. There were plenty of cabs too, five bucks or so for the inter-hotel trip and easy to share with two or three other fans. But the psychological distance was such that I think that ended up being the worst part of the convention, having these two big islands of fandom. I ended up doubly glad to have picked the Atlantis and easy access to panels and parties. Luckily, the people I wanted to see the most from the Peppermill made it over to the Atlantis to run parties or just to visit, so it worked out fine for me personally. The party scene was curious, spread over two floors and waxing and waning from night to night–possibly due in part to hotel issues (which on the one hand were regrettable, but on the other hand it was nothing as bad as the Denver situation), but there was something good going every night, 24 hours of casino to boot, so we managed.

The first thing I noticed while running around before checking into my room was the amazing signage. People were tweeting pictures of the Renovation banners hanging at the airport, and the convention centre itself also had big banners with the art of the Artist Guest of Honour (GOH) Boris Vallejo, plus a giant screen scrolling through the pieces submitted to the artist showcase. Additionally, the Atlantis had signs along the Sky Bridge, which connects it to the convention center, designating it as the “Official Renovation Party Hotel”, something I have never seen before. Along the lobby and elevators there were also signs with the shuttle schedule, and little cards for the drinks specials both done up to fit the convention aesthetic.

The two hotels were an interesting contrast. Where the Peppermill had gone Full Vegas, with hilariously clashing décor layered on top of a basic Caesar’s Palace Lite foundation, the Atlantis was relatively classy (for values of that word that apply in a casino). I greatly enjoyed wandering the Peppermill the first day, seeing what I now think of as the Liberace Memorial Sushi Buffet, the creepy faux-Roman paintings lining the room hallways, the awesome 80s planets ‘n’ rainbows carpet that was sadly being torn up, and the admittedly pretty cool central bar outside the Tuscany ballrooms. Mette and Bryan taught me how to play Pai Gow poker, and I only lost $20 (well, $40, if you consider I still have the chips I never cashed out). The whole place had an appropriately hallucinatory vibe with which to start the convention.

The Atlantis, meanwhile, was still certainly a casino but hadn’t quite committed to layering every flat surface with monitors and flashing lights, and was therefore a relative oasis of calm. The staff was uniformly friendly and helpful, in my experience. Although I saw some complaints about not having a central “con bar”, I can only imagine that was from Peppermill folks since the Atlantis had a bar right beside the hotel desk that was our primary starting and meet-up point, plus the Sports Bar, which was also conveniently located and had the comfiest chairs I have ever had the extreme pleasure of sitting in. I would have smuggled one home in my luggage if there had been any way to make that happen.

I made it to Opening Ceremonies, very much enjoying Boris Vallejo and his refreshingly pragmatic views, then once Jason Schachat and Anthony and Deb arrived on their respective flights, we grabbed a group meal at the Bistro, along with Leigh Ann, Leo and Sean Healy. The chef was very friendly and the food excellent, ending with a surprise plate of cotton candy, which was just unbelievably good.

The rest of Wednesday was pretty relaxed, by which I mean we looked at the drink menu and thought, “Five drinks… that sounds like a recipe for a drinking game!” Not feeling particularly creative, I decided on “Five in an Hour” as the Official Renovation Drink Challenge™ and tweeted accordingly. Five out of seven of us “won” handily, despite two of the drinks being frankly terrible. As we wrapped up, Chris Garcia and John Coxon dropped by, presumably having seen our ravings on the Twittersphere1, and we shared the esoteric secrets of the menu (Don’t Drink The Matrix, Soylent Green is Nom).

Done with that, we headed upstairs to check out the parties, which were pretty decent for the first night of the convention. But eventually Jason and I retired to the bar and watched some poor band try to entertain gamblers too addled to make even the pretence of clapping. I overcompensated until I felt complicit in the whole humiliating mess and decided to call it a night.

When I woke up Thursday morning it was much earlier than strictly necessary, and after laying there for an hour, it became clear that I wasn’t going back to sleep. I saw a tweet from Leigh Ann saying she was awake as well, so we met up for breakfast at the Purple Parrot. Now, before I go on, please indulge me a brief expositional interlude: three years ago at Denvention, I had the oddest experience in which every time I sat down for a meal I seemed to end up at the table next to George R. R. Martin. After the third or fourth time, I swear I would catch him glancing over with a glint of panic in his eyes as his stalker-radar went off (keep in mind this was during the “Where the Fuck is Book Five” era). I wasn’t even staying at the same hotel as he was, but it kept happening! So, of course at my first breakfast of the con proper, we were guided to our booth and George R.R. Martin was one booth over, half a dozen feet away, glancing sidelong as I approached and was probably wondering what the process for getting a restraining order in Nevada was. It was an awkward meal, but the pancakes were top-notch.

Afterwards, we rushed over to the Preliminary Business Meeting, which was at the rather cruel hour of 10am. It was interesting but long and I didn’t make it to any of the subsequent ones. But I will do my best to participate more frequently in the future, and I encourage all Worldcon members to do their best to attend one of these now and again. The business of Worldcon is the business of fandom after all. Among the topics discussed were proposed changes to the Hugo Award categories, which I think most fen might have an interest in. I was also glad to see efforts seem to have been made to encourage participation and easier access.

When that ended, I headed to the BOF for Fillory (one of the settings in Lev Grossman’s Magician novels) Fandom, at which I finally had the pleasure of meeting Lloyd and Yvonne Penney. The original plan had been to do a Fillory Tea so I had found a late 1940s salmon dress to wear and when the tea was scrapped I couldn’t resist getting it anyway, vintage being a fun way to do some comfortable hall costuming. The Penneys were wearing great steampunk ensembles and it was a treat to finally talk in person, and even more so to get a chance to chat with them about the book.

My only panel of the day was a workshop, but it was scheduled against the Magical University Challenge–a quiz show played with teams representing Hogwarts, Brakebills, Unseen University and Miskatonic. I dearly wanted to attend but dutifully went to my thing, which started off slow but ended up with some decent hands-on fun. I rushed from the panel to catch the tail end of the Challenge, in which Miskatonic took the gold handily. Sadly, I missed Brakebills failing big and then attempting to kidnap Harry Potter from the Hogwarts team, but I did get the chance to meet up with a bunch of friends I hadn’t seen yet, which almost made up for missing the fun.

I distributed the posters and did the relatively minimal decorating and set-up for that evening’s party, themed for the Magic Safe Houses described in The Magician King, the second of the Magician novels. Then I changed into my “goth reject” canonical cosplay and it was time to party. We opened at 8:30pm, much earlier than usual, so it started slow – but within an hour the room was pretty much constantly full, and by 2am we ran out of the last drop of booze, which all in all I would call a success. Viking Press had sent along some temporary tattoos: small blue seven-pointed stars and larger ones with “50” in the centre, meant to represent your magical level in the Safe House. We decided that the 50-stars would be earned by doing shots of the worst liquor we could think of: Frenet Branca. However, we forgot to actually buy any, so we started with some disgusting orange liquor for star one, then two shots of something else for star two, then sadly the good stuff was all gone and for our third star we had to make do with shot glasses filled with cider. Not wanting to give up so easily, we headed down to the lobby bar and asked the bartender for four shots of whatever the worst thing he could think of was. Without missing a beat he poured us some Campari. We earned those last ones, I tell you.

Friday morning, I again woke up unreasonably early. I left the roommates sleeping and headed over to the convention center, stopping at the invitingly enormous consuite for the first time. The enormous consuite, which was completely out of coffee. Disbelief made me positively faint until I remembered I was also entitled to visit the Green Room. I popped over there, hoping no one would chide me for not wearing my vertical program participant ribbon, and grabbed some much needed caffeine and a scone; then I figured this was as good a time as any to sneak in a panel. Not having my pocket guide handy and being unable to load the app, I simply wandered Hall A looking at the posted schedules, eventually landing at “Comics of 2010–2011 That Rocked”, which was very good for the first half but then sort of wandered into a general discussion of comics, at which point I snuck back out, content with the half-page of recommendations I already had.

From this point on, Masquerade prep ate my Friday. I shuttled over to the Peppermill for the tech rehearsal, which ran late, then went back to the Atlantis where I ate lunch and dithered over whether to catch the first part of the Mary Robinette Kowal puppet show, eventually deciding there was no time, since I had to be back at the Peppermill at 5:30pm to get in costume for workmanship judging, official photography and so on. As a warm body in one of Mette’s costumes, my nerves were limited to stage fright, and strangely I found that had all but vanished since WonderCon. Having been able to rehearse on the actual stage (something we never got to at WonderCon) eliminated my fears of not knowing the terrain, and I ended up pretty chill. Knowing the quality of the costumes, I also felt confident on Bryan and Mette’s behalf. So we all watched the show on the monitors provided backstage and next thing I knew it was our turn. I sent up a little prayer that I wouldn’t trip over something and ruin the whole bit and we headed up the ramp.

Practice served us well, and we got through intact, hitting our marks with nary a stumble. I came off stage confident that whether or not we had been any good, which is subjective, we had certainly done our best, which was all we could really ask for. Another round of photos and then it was all over but the waiting. We could hear Paul Cornell hosting Just a Minute during halftime, and I had some pleasant Gallifrey One flashbacks, and then they started to announce names. To my admittedly inexpert eyes, the overall quality of the entrants was top-notch, with some of my favorites being the Blue Meanie (made from clown wigs!), Princess Penny Arcade and the Night at the Sci-Fi Museum.

Our group won in two categories: Best in Show Workmanship and Best in Class: Master Presentation, both of which I can comfortably say were entirely deserved since, as mentioned, my involvement was limited solely in the wearing of the thing. Or the carrying, in the case of Lady Cassandra. We got on stage, accepted the awards and then it was time for carousing!

Tempting as it was to stay for Music Night at the Peppermill, costumes involve a whole lot of sweating, unfortunately, so I retreated to the Atlantis to shower and change. The parties were fewer and smaller than I had expected for a Friday, doubtless due to the events drawing people over to the Peppermill. While not actually that vast, the distance seemed far enough not to want to bother going back, so I ended up visiting with the cleverly decorated and just generally excellent London in 2014 bid party for an hour or so before kidnapping TAFF delegate John Coxon down to the bar for some more Soylent Greens, and by the time we headed back up to the party floor, it was pretty much shuttered.

Saturday morning, you guessed it, I woke up too early again. I went down to The Purple Parrot for breakfast before heading over to the first of my two panels for the day. This one was listed as a “workshop” and therefore held at the Fan Lounge instead of a room, which probably contributed to it being attended almost entirely by established fanzine fans despite being titled “Are There New Fan Editors and Fan Writers?” (apparently not). Our own Jean Martin was the moderator and, pro that she is, had an agenda and moderated the fuck out of the thing despite the best efforts of John and myself – seated on each side of her – to get into fights with our audience/co-panelists. All in all it was a fun opportunity for me to engage with a bunch of fanzine fans that I’ve barely had a chance to meet previously. I was sad to see I was down to my last two Hardcore Fandom ribbons, but I gave those to Mark Plummer and Claire Brialey who thoroughly deserve them, so that worked out nicely.

I hit the art show to squint at my art on display and was delighted to see I had several bids, making up for the fact that I finished no new art for the convention. While there, I ran into Mo Starkey, who informed me that as a participating artist I was entitled to a copy of the Artist Showcase book. I gladly picked one up from Elaine Pelz and had time for a quick look through the rest of the art show (top notch) and the Art Collection, which had some amazing classic SF artists including two of my favorites, Ed Emshwiller and Richard Powers.

Then it was time for my 2pm panel, in which I was seated with four other faneds any one of whom knows a thousand times more than I do about the world of fanzines past or present. Garcia moderated, throwing us each some questions, which I mostly flailed at. However, I did take the opportunity to mention how much Mette Hedin deserves your Hugo nominations for best fan writer next year for her work over on Yipe!

Saturday was Hugo night and our second party, themed for the Two Moons Inn featured in The Magicians, and which would hopefully serve as a celebration of Grossman’s Campbell win. I was also looking forward to seeing the post-ceremony screening of Radio Free Albemuth. Unfortunately, the decorating ended up taking a whole lot longer than planned despite the help of various folks like Bill Howard (who is tall!). Eventually it became obvious that, in order to get it done right, Jason and I would have to power through and skip the awards entirely. Even had the evening turned out differently, this would have made me very sad; the Hugos are by far the big event of the convention for me, a vital part of the continuing history of fandom regardless of whether one’s particular choices win or lose. But there was nothing to be done about it, so at 8:30pm when I finally got back to my room, I had my phone in my hand watching the #hugos twitter hashtag. I had barely walked in the room when Lev Grossman was announced as the 2011 Campbell winner for Best New Writer! I cheered, my roommates cheered and I felt a little better.

As we got changed, I saw the win for Claire Brialey come through, and then The Drink Tank, I reminded myself again not to feel bad for missing the number one best Hugo evening EVER in which my friends and people I admire ran away with the lot. Or not too bad, damn it. I changed into my Watcherwoman outfit,while Jason became The Beast – both characters from the book – and we headed down to the Two Moons in time to get some last minute touches done and open the doors. Although a lot of folks were still at the Peppermill, the room filled up quickly. After a while, Grossman entered the room to resounding cheers, wearing the Campbell tiara and looking appropriately chuffed with the course of his evening so far. Viking also sent amazing cupcakes for the party, so we distributed those and let the party roar.

At some point the party started winding down and, to no one’s shock, Jason, John and I ended up getting a nightcap down at some casino bar or other where the waitress didn’t know how to mix the Soylent Green and compensated by making it in a pint glass, bless her heart. We overtipped and when dawn rolled around we saw the TAFF delegate safely back to his hotel as the sun came up, trying and mostly failing to explain MST3K along the way, despite the fact that it really didn’t need explaining.

Sunday started in the usual fashion, despite my having nothing at all to do other than pick up my art before tear-down. I lay in bed for an hour or two in a bit of a panic, wondering whether I had simply broken my sleep mechanism for good. The answer appeared to be yes, so I got up and headed over to the art show. I had sold five pieces, which was pleasant, and I ran into Warren Buff along the way, which was nice since I hadn’t managed to chat with him much either at Westercon or here.

We both headed over to attend one last panel of the con, which was “The Fisher King in Myth”. It was a subject I was interested in anyway but, just as importantly, allowed me after five days of near misses to finally say hello to the GOH of Renovation, the one and only Tim Powers, who is after all SoCal fandom with NorCal ties and therefore One of Us. Afterwards, pretty much everyone was running off to Closing Ceremonies but I decided on one last ditch attempt at sleep before I succumbed to nervous exhaustion. It took a while, but eventually I remembered I had earplugs, used my wild-eyed manic demeanour to scare the roommates into terrified silence and managed a few blissful hours, awaking around 9pm, refreshed and more importantly with a renewed belief in my ability to sleep again.

I joined folks finishing up their meal at the Manhattan Deli and then headed up to Leigh Ann’s going away party before making some last rounds hoping to catch up with all the people I hadn’t had a chance to see during the con, or had only seen briefly. I visited the Fanzine Lounge PM but missed Garcia who, naturally, had already gone to sleep. I accidentally ended up crashing the Former Worldcon Chairs’ party not realizing what it was. I left when I realized, but not before shaking the hand of Russ Hodgkins who helped run the second ever Worldcon, Chicon I, back in 1940 and who I look forward to meeting again at Chicon 7 next year. There was more drinking and chatting and a brief detour when I remembered I hadn’t packed yet, and finally around 3am we ended up at the Purple Parrot one last time. I had the Southern Fried Steak and a side of biscuits and gravy and thanked the ghods for the Atlantis-RSCC Sky Bridge exercise plan, which was the only thing that kept me from putting on 50 pounds over the weekend.

Two hours of sleep and then I was off to catch my 8:30am train home. As it turned out, I could have slept another two hours since flooding in Colorado delayed the train. But once aboard, I slept most of the way home, so that was fine. Arriving in Emeryville, the inimitable Joe Price picked me up and whisked us over to BASFA in order to suck the marrow of the extended Worldcon experience, since Chris Garcia and James Bacon would be attending with their Hugo, as would John Coxon, who was staying at Garcia’s place for the end of his trip.

I introduced Mr. Price and the Junior TAFF Delegate from Gnomeville and informed him that the poor soul had no plans whatsoever for his final days in the Bay Area. So we hatched a plan to hang out the next day. Which we did, starting with “brunch” at Rogue up in North Beach, a quick detour to Corona Heights (made famous in Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness) and then over to Alameda for the Tiki wonderland that is Forbidden Island. The Lovely and Talented Linda Wenzelburger joined us for a while and we drank many sugary drinks before dropping John back off at the Den of Garcia, feeling as though the true Flower of American Culture had been properly presented at last.

Nope, I just like being in bars—John

James Bacon: What is That Kid Doing?

Here in London all I need to say, in work or among friends, is “Scalextric”, and we all know exactly what I mean: the superb British invention of a pair of racing cars that suck power from a pair of metal strips either side of a slot that guides the car, speed being the key control and skill needed to power them around a track. Usually the scale is 1/32, but smaller can be found.

In America it’s called Slot Car, and it’s not at all unpopular. Yet it is not the same sort of institutional toy that it is in the UK.

I soon realised with Chris Garcia that slot cars are not the same as here. When we went to the San Jose Super Toy Fair in the showgrounds, I had such a ball; we were cruising for a wide selection of things – old consoles, old games, things that would be cheap and add to the children’s programme at Renovation – and despite the size of the venue, and the amount of sellers, there were very few slot cars and those that we did find were very expensive.

It’s a different type of hobby in America: as I travelled up and down the El Camino Real – the long six- or eight-lane road that travels from San Francisco south through many cities which in London would be boroughs – the toy shops just did not know what I was looking for or had poor ersatz versions.

Scalextric is not an expensive toy. I can walk into any Model Zone (a chain of model shops, of which there are a lot in the UK) and find a Scalextric set – no doubt on offer – from about £70. As we did. Unsure how we would fare we bought the Need for Speed (by EA Games™) set, and sent it over with James Shields (well, he won a fan fund, so it’s payback) and then over there we bought some more sets. In fairness, the prices were not atrocious, although something else was.

I went to RC Unlimited down past San Jose, and, well, it wasn’t exactly the experience that I expected. It’s not that there wasn’t a wonderful girl serving (with her child in her arms, which I like) who knew what she was talking about and showed me what I needed; it was that her boss or superior was a bit of an eejit. You know, if things are unmarked, I expect a simple price and if parts of sets have been broken open and I want a part, I expect it to be actually slightly less. If the girl who served me was in charge, they would have had more dollars in the till.

As it was I learned something. The Americans love slot car racing in a big-track kind of way. There were a number of massive six- and eight-lane slot car tracks, all purpose-built and with massively banked curves to ensure a maximum speed – similar in a way to what many clubs do here, but you could hire these tracks for the hour or day, which didn’t seem very “skate park” in intent.

I soon realised the difference. In the UK, Scalextric is still a game, a toy, and perhaps this is because of Lewis Hamilton, Transformers, James Bond, Disney’s Cars or the availability: it is still associated with kids. There are adult collectors – and I have been now to Swop Meets, which are like a dealers’ room full of slot cars – but essentially it’s a toy for kids. In the States, it’s a hobby for adults. Over the years you could get Kitt, the General Lee, the Batmobile, Skating Turtles, and so on.

The experience at D&J Hobby, in Campbell, was a much better time; not only did I get a good deal on a set, but they also sold me parts (that they had taken apart from a couple of broken sets) at extraordinary prices. I was dead chuffed. They were an awesome shop, with a remote control track and a Ninco slot car set laid out as well as models and roleplaying games: the place was indeed special.

Yet it’s the reaction at Worldcon that was so telling; so many kids had obviously just never ever seen or played with Scalextric. We had a total of three sets, although one was a “starter” set which turned out to be a bum buy; it’s cheaper track, but with different connectors, for goodness’ sake. What a foolish move. Luckily for me D&J had converter bits of track, so all was pretty good.

So back to the kids. We set up two tracks – a tri-oval which was about 21 feet long, and then a proper banked oval about 16 feet long – while over in the teen lounge they set up the extended figure of eight with a jump ramp.

After the first day, no cars were undamaged; in actual fact, about six were well broken, but William Timeaus, James Shields, and others set to fixing them as best they could. The extra resistant Sport endurance cars were not as resistant as I hoped, but the more expensive and stylish Nascar cars of Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson proved hugely successful, despite warnings from my US friends that Nascar would not be popular with SF folk – obviously wrong.

Of course, we broke a lot. It’s damn unusual for the actual plastic slot guide to sheer off. Now the whole slot can be replaced, with a squeeze or screw, but for the plastic vertical piece to sheer? Now, that takes a special skill. There were many kids with special skills, that’s for sure.

High impact corner crashes were not only impressive but also very popular. I wondered, as a young lad put his head on the table – so he could be at the end of an eight-foot straight and have a more realistic view with his eye at track level – if that was safe; eventually I decided it wasn’t, but his mom had already suggested it was not the best way to watch.

Then at a later stage – as superglue, duct tape, good will and strange resins were being used to cobble the cars together – I noticed a boy shaking and smiling standing, still enough, at an angle from one of the corners; suddenly a car flew by at head height, so I put a stop to that adrenaline junkie behaviour, as they realised they were caught playing a strange version of voluntary chicken.

There were fights, and of course kids just wandered up and in wonderful acts of sociopathy would just knock a car off the track, which I would gently explain was not so nice. The girls were especially clever at creating games where they would stay on and boys would lose, which was interesting to watch for a moment, but eventually I would boom out, “Play fair”, “Everyone gets a turn”, or “Ah-ah”, and generally they did as I said.

The tracks were taken apart many times and put back together again, the boxes were used to make banks or bridges, complex slaloms were made, and two tracks were raced side by side. The big tri-oval was back again, we stole the cars the teenagers had, and overall it proved very popular. Parents wondered about it all, and I was keen to point out that a decent set was available at $100, which is about the price of two Xbox 360 games – so not that expensive – and the best way to get started.

Will, James and I wondered at the parts we were left with at the end of the weekend, wondering really how the Ford Escort Mexico from the late 70s had survived some 30 years only to meet an ignominious end: not only in bits, but missing an axle.

Next year, we will have more science fictional cars – we already have two Batmobiles and a Gotham City Police Department car – as well as some unusual vehicles such as a couple of Leyland Trucks and some Nascar cars, including one with a Union Jack on it. And we hope to have Fred, an actual electrical engineer, who has agreed not only to do repairs but run repair workshops with the kids. We packed up as much as was not broken and sent it to Chicago, and we took parts home to fix. It was indeed fun and play was good-spirited.

Not very science fictional, but it was being played for 36 hours of Renovation, which is quite a lot really. Not what you’d expect.

Warren Buff: Encounters with John Coxon

Wednesday afternoon: With the badge, I could enter the big room of dealers, artists, exhibits, gaming, and lounges. So of course, the first stop was the fanzine lounge. In short order, I found Chris Garcia, who was busily telling stories about everyone who walked up which he insisted were true and all involved us being in Sparta, NY. I’ve never been to Sparta, NY. I also got to meet Jean Martin, Mo Starkey, TAFF delegate John Coxon, and Anne Gray. The fanzine lounge seemed to be a popular destination for Californians and Brits (though, to my knowledge, Anne is neither). After a good time in the lounge, I made my way over to the fan tables to check in with the various folks I owed time to and see a few friends. About this time, Glug called, so I went back to the hotel to meet him and get checked into the room. It wasn’t ready, so we sat around the lobby waiting and making conversation with whoever dropped by. The place looked like what the Venetians would have built if they’d had our technology, but the music clashed pretty hard with it – stuff like “Wichita Lineman”.

Wednesday night: The ReConStruction thank-you party was quite the success, as it stayed full but not overly crowded until around midnight, almost all of the food disappeared, and folks seemed to be having a good time. On top of that, it was able to do that with no fliers, no alcohol, and no decorations. The write-up the next day in the newsletter said we’d been the place to hang out for old conrunners, which I think was a way of saying “smof” without cussing. I even managed to duck out of the room and see what was going on in some of the other parties – Christmas in Boston 2020 was a blast. After midnight, we made the sleeping room portion a semi-private party where the booze came out, the hot tub got filled, bubble bath got added, and I generally just soaked in it and sipped a beer (thanks to Glug and Kevin Standlee for making the beer run). I was joined by some friendly hooligans from California (oft associated with Chris Garcia and fanzine lounges). Leigh Ann joined me in the hot tub, since she’d brought the bubble bath (she left her green full-on period dress gown on for this). Later on, Eric Zuckerman made a joke about how if we got John Coxon to get in, it would be the TAFF baff, and I tried to holler at John about it. He was roundly ignoring me, preferring the conversation of Sydnie, who I couldn’t see, so I just hollered louder until they got up and left, leaving me feeling like an ass. We made merry until around two, when someone accidentally broke a really poorly balanced glass shelf and we had to go down to the front desk to let them know about it and make sure they knew he was taking responsibility for it. Seven hotel employees came to look at it and, to the best of my knowledge, didn’t charge the fellow for it. At that point, I realized I’d have to go back to the Peppermill one way or another, ceded the bed in the awesome room to Glug, and walked back in my jeans and shoes without proper undergarments or socks. I should have taken a taxi.

Thursday: After the preliminary business meeting, I ran into Helen Montgomery and proposed a best worst idea for Chicago: Business Meeting Bingo (Glug’s idea, acutally). The format we came around to would have blanks for people’s names, with a rule that you could only use each name once. Some things are rare enough to just get a slot (committee of the whole), while some need the blanks (_____ glares at _____). The idea caught on, so it sounds like it’s happening. The trick would be coming up with something good for the free space and some means of a winner communicating that to the other players. I managed to find John Coxon and apologize to him for being a bit of an oaf the night before. He said it was no matter, which was a relief.

Friday night: When six rolled around, my site selection shift was over, and I promptly got a text from Sydnie asking where I was. I responded that I had just gotten off shift, and would meet her at the fanzine lounge. See, I’d arranged something new for this Worldcon – a dinner outing of young, involved fans, in the mode of the faneds’ feast (which had been at 4:30, when my shift kept me from attending, and the unfortunate timing meant that some of us who would have liked to do both only got to do one). We wound up with a party of eight, and a request for a vegetarian-friendly option, non-seafood place. We decided Italian would satisfy that, and headed over to the Atlantis (which got a whole damned ton of my food dollars). Our party consisted of myself, Glug, Sydnie, Amos Meeks, TAFF delegate John Coxon, Crystal Huff, Kris “Nchanter” Snyder, and Vylar Kaftan (whose name I hope I’m not butchering). We were far from the only young, involved fans, and knew this, but also knew that no single one of us knew all of the other seven before dinner, and it was really a very good time hanging out like that. We resolved to try it again in future years, with a hope of including a greater number of fans. See, we found that getting together like this was good for encouraging the sense of community that so clearly persists among our elders. There are a lot of us out there, and fandom as we know it isn’t in mortal danger, but it would sure help keep our resolve up to not feel as isolated as we can at times. No revolutionary ideas were discussed, just building community over dinner. I gave the ribbons I’d made for this Worldcon (“SJOF”, with the J standing for “journeyman”) to Crystal and Sydnie, as I felt that after election to the MPC, I could no longer reasonably claim not to be a smof. I’m not certain I can advance a claim yet to being one, but I’ve certainly begun to walk like the proverbial duck.

Sunday night: So, finally, we made it to the deli in the Atlantis, and got down to the business of ordering. This was another group that might as well have been the Friday night group, and it worked well. We were done with the convention proper, and the silly was already coming out. John Coxon joined us, and ate some of my fries (there were just too many; it only made sense to share). Crystal and I got to joking, and the line “I like my women like I like my Scotch – straight and at least 21 years old” was bandied about. She also, on a more serious note, pointed out that Rene Walling wanted to sit down with me, if I could find the time. I like Rene, and apparently he was concerned that I might potentially get involved in further MPC shenanigans, so I definitely wanted to clear up any misunderstanding in that regard.

When we finished the meal, we decided to go upstairs to the fanzine lounge dead dog party, which was the blissfully wet, open party of the evening. The hostess had just opened it, and asked if we were going to be there a while – as it turned out, she really wanted to be back in her room, continuing the sex she’d had to interrupt. We told her to get on back there, and we’d hold down the fort. There was a ton of bheer in the bathtub, and we started in on that, then decided that the king bed seemed like a good place to relax. A bit of a people puddle formed, with me on one side of Coxon and cute girls on the other (I think he got the better spot on the bed), while parts of the group took the chairs, instead. We had lots of good conversation about conrunning (I know, we ought to be talking about fanzines in the fanzine lounge dead dog), cuddles, and almost sorta some of us napped. At one point, some of the group (I recall Crystal, definitely) headed off to get actual naps, but I stuck around.

Later (long after I’d sat down with Rene), I decided I ought to make my exit so I could actually get some sleep, and made a final round in the fanzine lounge dead dog. At the elevator, I ran into Nolly again, and we sat for a bit and talked. I started excusing myself to finally go, and stepped right into an elevator with España and a few of her friends I’d seen but not met. That was the tipping point. I decided I’d party with them, and damn the need for sleep! I was flying home first class, after all, and those seats should be comfortable enough for sleeping in. We stopped by their room, then went down to the lobby. The plan was to meet up with John Coxon in one of the bars. Along the way, I spotted James Bacon walking ahead of us and talking on a phone. He was then walking our direction, and got off the phone and fell into conversation with me. He noted that he was looking for the main dead dog (in the consuite), and I told him I’d help him find the way up there. I traded numbers with España to try to catch up with her later. They had diet cola, which I wanted badly, and Baby Ruths, which he turned out to like even more than I do. Telling me to take as much food and beverage as I can carry were the first words Mr. Shirt and his wife, Stacey, had spoken to me since ReConStruction, and we’d all done our part to avoid each other to that point in the weekend. Feeling awkward at the contact, I made my exit. James, luckily, had found interesting conversation with folks I didn’t know.

I got a text from España letting me know where to meet them, and headed back down to the bar. We ordered a round, and the conversation got rolling. Folks had apparently needed a break, as some of the personalities at the con were getting overwhelming. I’m fortunate to have not had that experience, but I definitely heard about tensions among other groups of friends. John finally made it down, and joined us for beer, and the bullshit got thick enough that we started bandying about fanzine ideas. Jason Schachat has a zine in the works, and I agreed to write for that, and pressed some of the others to write for some projects I’m working on. The really great thing about this con was that it left me riding a high of fannish energy, and conversations like this did a lot for that. At some point, John left for bed, as he hadn’t worked out whether he’d be cuddling or trying to get real sleep that night.

Claire Brialey: Chris Garcia’s Warm-Up Act

…since one of the features of Tahoe is a great big lake it seems a shame not to go out on it and we adjourn to a catamaran for the happy hour tour. I have wine, under sail, surrounded by mountains. This is fantastic; and with a (fortunately not literally) sinking feeling I remember again that it’s Worldcon tomorrow.

About twenty minutes into the boat trip one of the crew points out a tall column of smoke on one of the surrounding hills. We subsequently learn that Chris Garcia and TAFF delegate John Coxon are also in Tahoe today, and inevitably wonder whether the smoke is a result of them getting over-excited. It transpires – after several days of quite significant smouldering and firefighting – that in fact it’s down to two 15-year-old boys who built a fort and then lit a fire inside it which got out of control. This seems like such an Awesome Brothers activity that we wonder whether John, and especially Chris, have lied about their age.

A small rumour spreads that Chris and John have set fire to a lake. John maintains that in twenty years’ time people will be convinced this is true.

***

Just before we start to go downstairs for the Long Trek through the casino to the room where the ceremony is being staged, John Coxon introduces me to his date for the evening, Crystal Huff. Pronouncing my name faultlessly, he explains that I am the best fan writer in the world. I point out that we’re about to receive clear confirmation that this is not, in fact, the case.

Stu Shiffman has presented the Best Fan Artist Hugo to Scott Bobo on behalf of Brad Foster. John Coxon, looking very smart and serious in his suit, steps out onto the stage. He speaks well but briefly about fanzines and fan writing, and then reads out the short-list for the Best Fan Writer Hugo. He mispronounces my surname and I mutter that I’ll be having words with young Mr Coxon later.

Then he opens the envelope, pulls out the card, and grins. The winner, he says, is one of his oldest friends in fandom. Chris, then, I think; then, a second later, No, of course it’s James after all. And then he mispronounces my name again.

I’m on my feet quite quickly, moving automatically because I know the drill even if not for the Hugos, conscious that I’m looking quite shocked and unaware that I’m looking quite shocked on several big screens. As I hit the aisle people are still applauding and no one’s trying to make me turn back, but I suddenly have the nightmare that I’ve misheard, that it wasn’t me, that I’m about to do the most embarrassing thing of my life. John’s smiling on the stage so presumably he is expecting me up there; and then I realise that I’m still about to embarrass myself since of course I haven’t got a speech. Because of course I wasn’t ever going to win.

As I approach John I murmur, “Awesome!” to him; it seems to be one of the few experiences away from a mountain for which this isn’t hyperbole. “Told you,” he says equally quietly, although I gather he was standing nearer the microphone than me. And he gives me the award which I’d thought only an hour or so before was the most beautiful Hugo base I’d ever seen.

Then I face the audience, and say… something. And we’re leaving the stage – in a bit of a blur I say hi to DUFF delegate Dave Cake who’s waiting in the wings to present Best Fanzine – and there really are catchers by the stairs in case people fall down at this point, and then I’m back at the side of the hall and an usher is asking me where I was sitting. I give some semi-coherent description, and get back to the row and sit down, and put my Hugo carefully on the floor.

And then I turn to Mark and say, “Fucking hell.”

***

More Worldcon fragments:

• “You mean he’s a better Tim Powers than I am a Mexican?” – John Coxon, bested by Chris Garcia’s powers of impersonation

• “I don’t think I’ll ever get the smell of Pimm’s out of my shoes” – Spike, encountering another

• “It’s not that I’m not manly; it’s just that I’m not awake” – Coxon again, at the old farts’ party

Lloyd Penney: A Trip to the Reno Worldcon

In some publications, I said we weren’t going, in others, we weren’t sure, and in others, we were definitely going. Money is always a problem, but we needed a vacation, so we bit the bullet and went to this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada. Worth it! And we had a great time.

I guess the airline we flew (American) kept it a well-guarded secret, but it was extra for the luggage you were bringing with you… shows you how often we fly. And for what they charged, I had hoped for something better than the over-packed 737s they used, but at least they got us there and took us home.

We stayed at the Atlantis Casino and Hotel… in that order, too. So much flash and jangle, the casino was a distraction. The hotel rooms were okay, I guess, but we had roommates, and it was a little tight. It was a very long walk from room to elevator to walkway to the convention centre. Speaking of mobility… I think when the Portland committee advertised that the Atlantis Casino and Hotel and the Reno Sparks Convention Center were connected by a walkway, I think we may have assumed that they were thereby close together, and we all know now that it was a 15- to 20-minute walk from your room in the Atlantis to the convention area in the convention centre. Yvonne could have used a scooter.

Ah, but once in the convention centre… I called it elsewhere five days of crazy. There was lots of room for the masses, registration was fast and efficient, lots of places to sit and rest from the long walk, good places to grab a quick bite and drink, and my favourite area, Hall 2, where there were the displays, the dealers’ room, the art show, and the fanzine lounge. We used the very comfortable fanzine lounge, close to the main stream of people going to dealers’ room and art show, as a good base camp from which to go and explore the small but well-stocked dealers’ room and the even smaller but still wondrous art show. We got to meet George R. R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series of books – which is now a series on HBO, I believe – and we sat in the throne of swords, a massive prop to promote both books and shows. We met Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and The Magician King… he won the Campbell, and enjoyed the various Fillory-based events and parties. Ran into Greg Benford in the fanzine lounge, too.

The consuite was a welcome oasis, perfectly placed between hotel and convention centre, and full of good eats and cold drinks, plus lots of very comfortable chairs. The Green Room was a comfortable room of banquet tables and chairs, with lots of snacks and drinks as well. I’d use both as examples of exactly how to run both. The panels we were on were lots of fun, and well-attended. Some of those panels kept us from the Faneds’ Feast, but what can you do? We don’t have time machines yet. So much to go and see, but so much to miss; I could have used a few more days, or that time machine. Do I need to say much about the Hugos? Great event, lots to clap about, and no one accepts a Hugo like Chris Garcia. We were joking about how we should nominate him next year for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: for many, that’s no joke, and I expect to see him listed on the Chicon Hugo ballot1. Chris’ Hugo made it into the fanzine lounge, and many of us had our picture taken with it.

Yvonne and I ran into so many old friends from the past… Jeanne Mealy from Minneapolis, Fran Skene from Vancouver, and Delphyne (Joan Hanke) Woods from Chicago. We all made the observation that the average attendee at Worldcon is aging. (See my remarks above about scooters.) And there were plenty of friends we knew through the zines, but had never met before, like Jean Martin, Leigh Ann Hildebrand, Maureen Starkey and España Sheriff. Lots of hugs all around, and now we know what we really look like.

Assorted observations: the Masquerade was a great sight to see, marvellous costumes, and well run by Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley. Erika Mulkey is Unwoman, and she gave a short concert in Hall 2 which sounded great. Wonderful voice, and great cello. Chatted with Alan Stewart finally, even after seeing each other in the hallway for a number of past Worldcons. Parties, parties, parties… and all together, which made it easier to stagger downstairs to our room.

We always find it impossible not to have a good time at the Worldcon. It’s the events, the goodies to see and buy, but most of all, it’s the people. It’s become the annual family reunion. Next up is Chicon 7 in Chicago in 2012 and LoneStarCon 3 in San Antonio in 2013… but saving for Reno was a hard go for us. I expect we’ll need the time to save to go to the London Worldcon in 2014 – should they win, of course. Thanks to all the fans in Portland who staged the Reno Worldcon… well done, all.

This actually happened—John

España Sheriff: The Last Word

One the one hand, I already have several thousand words in this TAFF report, since my SF/SF piece covering my time at Renovation is someplace in here1. But, on the other hand, I do love all my pretty little words and I am excited to be contributing more of them to an actual TAFF thingie, since the fund has lately become near and dear to my heart.

I first became aware of TAFF when the Bay Area’s own Chris Garcia ran for it. I may or may not have been dimly aware of it before then, but I honestly don’t recall. However, in 2006 when Garcia became a candidate it was difficult to be in local fandom and not to become a bit of an expert. The man is not subtle. Which, come to think of it, is probably one of the more useful traits for a TAFF delegate. But I digress. I became aware of TAFF, and then I became involved in helping Garcia, mainly with art, for his all-encompassing campaign. We were all so very excited when he won, and off he went to England! No one bothered to explain that they would be sending him back…

Still, ever since then I have been fond of the fund, not always following closely but voting now and then, helping with the TAFF scarf promotion, and enjoying the process and keeping an eye to a lesser extent on the other funds like DUFF. I’ve not been familiar with every candidate, and didn’t vote every year, but I was excited to see John on the list of candidates this past year. Garcia had published some of his work in The Drink Tank and I had seen his writing around enough to believe he would be a fun person to meet and a fine candidate to represent British fandom. As it turns out I was right; he is in fact a marvelous chap (he may have told me to write that) and made my Worldcon quite unexpectedly better than it otherwise might have been, and if the ballot were not secret I would be tempted to send a thank you card to each and every fan who cast their vote his way.

But the bottom line is that I am now a TAFF fan for life. I will be voting, contributing art and evangelizing to the masses of fandom, because I have now become a True Believer. Whereas before it seemed like a Rather Neat Idea, now I can firmly say that TAFF is a Damned Good Thing. You see, I have become rather ridiculously fond of a delegate, and were it not for the fund odds are that our paths would not have crossed until 2014 at the very earliest, and that is a truly terrible thought.

I know what you’re thinking. That is probably not the exact intention of the TAFF race. It is not some fannish Russian bride service, surely? Well, fine – you look at it your way, and I will look at it mine. But whatever the case, I will be sure to cast my vote each year from now on as though lighting a votive candle, with a little superstition and a lot of gratitude, and a firm knowledge that TAFF is a good thing that makes fandom in general and my world in particular a brighter place.

See p74—John

Credits

This trip report, with the exceptions detailed below, is © John Coxon 2020.

My sincere thanks to those I commissioned to produce imagery for this report: Claire Brialey, Ulrika O’Brien, Alison Scott, and España Sheriff. The cover artwork for this trip report is © Alison Scott 2020. Thanks also to Claire Brialey for proofreading, and to Claire Brialey, Anne K & Brian Gray, Jacqueline Monahan, and España Sheriff for all their help with administrating the fund during my tenure.

This trip report is unstapled because they use fancy bindings at print-on-demand services, and if you’re reading electronically, I don’t think it’s fair for me to staple your iPhone/PC/Kindle/Internet-connected toaster.

If you would like to send letters of comment, highlight any mistakes in the text (especially mistakes with pronouns or names) or generally email someone cool, please feel free to email at taff@johncoxon.co.uk. Thank you.