12 April 1998: Minicon 33

Sunday, 12 April 1998:

Minicon 33

Friday morning I got my butt in my car and drove to Minicon 33 up in the Twin Cities area. The day was a little on the chilly side, but it was sunny. I'd decided to drive up the Mississippi River valley, which it turns out takes only marginally longer than taking the Interstate. We haven't yet reached the spring bloom - okay, the grasses and flowers are going, but the trees are still bare - so it was a little more drab than it might have been, but it was nice to drive along the water like that, and avoid the traffic on the Interstate.

I'd rented a copy of Frank McCourt's childhood memoir Angela's Ashes from the public library to listen to on the way up. I tell ya, there's nothing that raises your self-esteem like listening to the story of a guy who grew up in Ireland in the 1930s. No matter how bad your middle-class problems are, at least you're not trying to convince your husband or father not to blow the dole money on liquor each Friday. McCourt reads the book itself - the tape is over 15 hours long - and it's pretty powerful. He doesn't really leave anything out, but it sounds a bit sanitized perhaps because not many people would want to hear every little detail about the fleas and diseases that they probably dealt with every single day. It's pretty powerful stuff, though.

I got to the con around 5 pm, a perfectly respectable time. However, programming had actually been going on for about four or five hours by the time I arrived, which is unusual for a con in my experience. Even WisCon, which is very programming-heavy, doesn't start until mid-afternoon. So I did miss a couple things I'd have liked to have seen, but no big deal.

I hit the dealer's room shortly after registering. Minicon has a good, large dealer's room, and I quickly spent over fifty bucks on books. One was a book I'd been looking for for a while: Jack McDevitt's The Hercules Text, his first novel. I've been reading his novels in reverse order (not a problem, since none are connected to each other), and his earlier ones seem to be his better ones. But I also picked up his most recent one, Eternity Road, in paperback. Actually, it's not quite his most recent one, since he has a new one that just came out in hardcover. But until I find myself enjoying his newer books more, I'll stick to paperback. (I'd love to get his second novel, A Talent For War, in hardcover, though.)

I picked up Steven Gould's new novel, Helm, which I think is his first hardcover. His first two novels, Jumper and Wild Side, were both quite good. And I grabbed the rest of C. J. Cherryh's Chanur series.

Then I grabbed a couple of books which caught my eye: Avon Books has started a new imprint, called Eos, and their first few books are being published at $3.99. Surprisingly, both of their books I saw at the con looked interesting. John Cramer's Einstein's Bridge appears to be a hard science alternate-reality story, which intrigued me. (My friend Jim Rittenhouse recommended it in a review, although of course that didn't influence me in the slightest. [Yeah, right]) And then an author named Stephen Leigh has a novel from Eos called Dark Water's Embrace, which is about a colony trying desperately to survive on a hostile planet with a very low gene pool and a very high mutation rate. I've read about a third of it and it is good. Very grim, but very well-written and very emotional; it spends a lot of time exploring sexual issues in such a situation, and includes some backstory of a native population which died out very suddenly (geologically speaking) before the settlers arrived.

Most of the people I hung out with during the weekend I ran into during the first few hours of the con. A couple of longtime Madison fans showed up - people who I thought didn't care for huge cons like Minicon. Well, in general they don't, but they decided to come up for the last such con before the con starts changing itself next year. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw them there (had I been in a chair)!

I also saw my ex-girlfriend who was with a local friend of hers. And I ran into another woman who I met through said ex-girlfriend and who I run into around town sometimes (mainly because she works at my bank). I knew she was a fan, but I hadn't seen her at a con before. Apparently this was the first one she'd been to in a while.

And I saw some Minneapolis friends - but not too many folks I know from the Chicago area, it seemed. I also saw a woman from a nearby city whom, well, I find attractive and who may have been giving off a reciprocal signal (though I'm terrible at deciphering such things), but I didn't see her after Friday. Ah, well. (It'd have been nice to have talked to her at more length anyway, since she's always pleasant to chat with.)

For me, the centerpiece of a convention is the programming. Minicon's programming was better this year than it was two years ago (it was probably quite good last year, but I was laid low by food poisoning Friday night last year and missed more than half the con). Strangely, I went to a lot of editor-oriented panels (the pro guest of honor was Gardner Dozois, editor of Asimov's Science Fiction, but he wasn't on every panel I saw). This was an interesting contrast from the writer panels I've gone to in the past. Editors have their own foibles (who doesn't?) and seeing how they view the business (and the writers) was intriguing. ("Writers sit at home along in front of a computer and make stuff up" seems to be the excuse for a lot of weird behavior by writers.)

I went to an interesting panel on language and how it shapes us (and vice-versa), which gave me some ideas, such as "What would it be like to lack the concept of hypotheticals in one's language? To lack words like 'could' and 'might' and associated concepts?" (This led me to wonder why we always seem to design aliens as humans which lack certain elements of humanity. Of course, "we" don't always do this, but it's a very common pattern nonetheless.) Also went to a panel on the nature of ethics, law and justice in space frontier colonies (e.g., on the moon).

As I mentioned a little while ago, there are some big changes coming for next year's Minicon, some of which are unpopular with large subsets of the attendees. Two new cons will be starting up in part due to (or as a backlash against) these changes. There was a two hour question-and-answer session on Saturday about these changes. It was pretty well-done, I though, although I was familiar with much of the discussion. I generally support the changes they want to make, but it's becoming clear to me that the people making these changes are much more interested in bring Minicon back to focus on fandom, as opposed to science fiction and fantasy. In a two hour session, which included discussions of key issues such as the dealer's room and some statements about what fandom is, the words "science fiction" and "fantasy" passed the lips of the speakers maybe three or four times.

I find this perplexing, if not downright disturbing. There seemed to be a consensus that fans are people who self-identify as fans. I'm not sure I want to self-identify as a fan if the criteria are that loose. I'd be happy to be part of science fiction fandom, but I'm not too enthusiastic about this beast known simply as fandom.

A related matter here is that I'm finding that conventions for me end around 9 pm. By that time, the dealer's room has closed, the art show has closed, and most of the programming has petered out. People are mostly going around to parties, and I simply can't get the hang of the partying thing. I go into them, see no one I know, don't see any evident basis for why I want to know the people there, and turn around and leave. Many "true fans" seem to have the outlook that everyone is a potential friend unless there's some reason one can see that they shouldn't be; I'm the other way, in that I am not very outgoing and I am uncomfortable talking to someone without some fairly specific basis for conversing with them.

I ended up getting kind of miffed on Saturday night, too, because there was a Minicon 34 party being held in a room in the con suite, but I couldn't find the room! I'd wanted to meet some of the people from the Minicon mailing list, but I couldn't find it. None of the doors to the rooms of the con suite were numbered from the front, and the back hallway was cordoned off with a sign saying "party volunteers only" ("party volunteers"? I've never heard that term before). It turns out the party was actually almost under my nose, but it was - get this - in a room whose door had a big sign (clearly put there by someone In Authority in the con suite) over it reading "EXIT ONLY". It also turns out that the way to get to that room was through an adjoining room where they were serving beer - and I never figured this out because I didn't know the rooms were connected, and because I don't drink beer! Sheesh, was a comedy of errors.

So I was in something of a grumpy and surly mood Saturday evening, and spent most of the evening reading Dark Water's Embrace (which probably didn't help my mood, given that it's a grim book despite being a good one).

That's pretty much the whole con. I bought a print from the art show (a very nice ink rendering entitled "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"; I've seen the original for sale for $2000.00), and headed out a little before 4 pm during a huge wind storm (with intermittent rain), which made for an exciting ride home.

I was happy to get home and see that the cats had behaved themselves, and I petted them for a while before logging on to write this.

I am quite glad I have a day off tomorrow. My main priorities are to do my taxes and fix a bug in the fantasy baseball stats program that was pointed out to me on Friday by e-mail (it's a small bug; should be an easy fix). Otherwise, I don't plan to exert myself much; maybe do a bunch of reading and go for a bike ride.

Then it's back to the salt mines to work like a dog for the rest of the week... sigh...

Michael Rawdon (Contact)