| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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A quick summary of what we learned is that, as I suggested, Germany had a thriving science fiction market before the war, but German science had been somewhat discredited by World War II, so there was little international interest in science fiction from Germany. Their fandom developed isolated from other science fiction fandom in the world. Also discussed was how science fiction affected one's spare time. I was the only one who really felt that it had its manifestations in pretty much everything I do. When I travel, it is to see how different cultural assumptions manifest themselves in actual cultural differences. It is, of course, a question that is central to science fiction.
We went to two more panels. One featured Evelyn Leeper and was called 'Anthropomorphics' and was on the question of whether having realistic aliens was possible in stories or whether it would give the reader too little to identify with. Evelyn was on this panel. The final panel of the evening for us was a discussion about whether the science fiction film was killed by STAR WARS. The two people who ran the discussion were two very strange-looking Dutch fans who, I guess from context, put together the film program. They were sort of an odd-looking pair. One I suspect may have had some sort of wasting disease but was very thin. His arms seemed no bigger around than a fifty-cent piece. The other fellow had a sort of pasty complexion and looked much like a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD zombie. They were really into nihilistic art science fiction films such as ALPHAVILLE. Their main contention was that science fiction films had their Golden Age in the 1950s and had somewhat deteriorated under the influence of STAR WARS. That is something I have said myself, so while we quibbled on the value of some films, we were basically in agreement. To me the tongue-in-cheek approach and the teach-the-computer-poetry denouement really ruins ALPHAVILLE, which they admire. On the other hand, I think they underrated the first two-thirds of BRAINSTORM, which is a very fine piece of science fiction, well grounded in the real research community and covering real technological issues. Had Natalie Wood not died and had they been able to complete the film in the tone of the first part, it would have been the most intelligent science fiction film ever made. One could have made thirty sequels without ever exhausting the implications of the concepts in the film. And it was a post-STARWARS film.
So that was Thursday at the con. We returned to the room, watched the fireworks at 11 PM, and not too much later went to bed.
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Friday the first panel was at 10:30 AM and was a discussion of the works and influence of Jules Verne led by French author Jacques Sadoul. It mostly dealt with the influence of Verne and his popularity in France even though he was considered to be a juvenile writer. They had not heard of two early works that were just turned up this year, a book of poetry and an account of a trip to England with discussion of social issues that was described as being Dickensian in tone. The discussion shifted to Verne's style of suing only natural extensions of existing mechanisms. H. G. Wells invented new mechanisms; Verne exaggerated existing ones, often to the breaking point. The famous example if Verne's dislike of FIRST MEN IN THE MOON because it depended on a fictitious metal that cut off gravity in order to get its characters to the moon. Verne used the existing if inappropriate technology of firing the people to the moon from a gun. The acceleration would kill the passengers that way but at least guns existed in Verne's time. Verne's approach is what we would now call 'hard science fiction.' Wells wrote more speculative science fiction. Apparently Verne really did dislike Wells's writing because Wells invented (and probably also envied Wells's popularity, though Verne himself had a substantial following). I had heard rumors that some of Verne's writing was passed off as true (a la THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER), but Sadoul denied this. I also asked Sadoul if he liked any of the films that had been based on Verne. He really detested filmmakers insistence on putting in female characters who were not in the story (I pointed that 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA did not do that). His favorite was a Czech animated film which I identified as the film known in the United States as THE FABULOUS WORLD OF JULES VERNE. As I pointed out, the same people had done a version of HECTOR SERVADAC called ON THE COMET but THE FABULOUS WORLD was better, using an animation style in which the frames looked like engravings by Gustave Dore.
A panel on Homo universalis turned into a discussion of space travel by down-loading the entire human personality into a machine. Oddly enough, this seems as if it would be feasible with technology not too far beyond what we have now, but if your personality could be down-loaded, how long would it remain like you? It now presumably would not feel the need for food and sex, since there is no real need to put these needs into a machine. The argument runs that because of this it could not be like us. My contention is that all the things that separate us from such a being are things that interrupt us. It could be more like what we want to be that we are ourselves.
Following that Evelyn and I went out for a walk and visited an odd local museum. It is hard to put my finger on exactly what this museum was. Evelyn described it as being a science museum, but the Museon is not quite a science museum. It's not clear what it is unless it is just sort of a museum of everything. It has artifacts of many cultures such as Arab, Indonesian, American Indian, Chinese, etc. Then there is a room devoted to nothing but spiders. There is an exhibit about ancient Egypt and another about the Netherlands in World War II. Another room has physics experiments. Then there is one on the North Sea petroleum drilling experience and exhibits of extinct animals. I'll let you figure what kind of a museum it was.
We had lunch in the museum cafeteria and I got back to go to a 4 PM presentation which was basically a history of magazine illustration in the pulp and early magazine days. I retreated to the Green Room to write for an hour and then went to a panel with Evelyn and David Kyle on 'The Detective in Science Fiction.' As it turned out, the panel was more about cross-fertilization between the detective fiction field and science fiction. That gave us about a half hour before our next panel so I went to the program room and volunteered to be on a panel about science fiction television shows.
The next panel was about United States books on the Common Market after 1992. The subject was what effect was the coming unification of Europe was going to have on the European market for American books. Also what effect it would have for English books. There was also a persistent fan in the audience complaining about the high price of British books in other parts of Europe. I stayed about a half hour, but I have to admit that publishing industry problems are not really one of my more central concerns. Evelyn and Kate stayed while I retreated to write more on my log. It seems that no matter how much effort I out in I am staying 45 hours behind and by then I am forgetting some of the details.
I got about a half hour to write, then Evelyn and Kate came out and we returned to Scheveningen for dinner. The first tram went right be us and we were starting to get concerned but eventually a tram stopped. I think the buses go pretty much the same route as the tram tracks, but of course they are not electrified so they sort of go along humming to themselves 'I got no strings to hold me down/To make me fret or make me frown.'
Anyway the tram finally came and we headed out to the beach area looking for a place to have dinner. None seemed really good and most were closed. We settled on a pancake restaurant. Evelyn and I split one chocolate pancake and one apricot pancake. Kate got a tuna fish pancake which was very strange, but she said was good. It was tuna and egg in a sauce on top of a powered sugar pancake. She said it was quite good and I admit some curiosity as to what it must have been like.
After dinner there was a fireworks display on the beach (it was 10 PM). Then Evelyn and I returned to the area around the con, in this case the Bel Air Hotel, which is next to the convention center, in order to get to the @-sign party. This is a party of people who know each other from Usenet. Evelyn knows many of these people and is outgoing and brings along her pet husband who often finds nobody to talk to. At least that is how I describe it. Evelyn claims I am a slow starter and then when she wants to leave she cannot pry me away from my conversation. I made some effort to talk to some of the people, but I am not so well-known as Evelyn and could not find anyone really to talk to. I sort of orbited Evelyn and exerted a low-level tidal pull. We arrived about 45 minutes before the party was due to close because it was in a rented room and another party was due to start. So we left and were standing near the elevator when somebody from Turku, Finland noticed my name. He had read SFLovers before his site had cut it off and he recognized my name. I think his name was Salminen and he was here with someone named Engholm, also from Finland. (Apologies if I got the names backward.) Well, I started talking to him about what it was like to drive through Europe to get here. I had told him we had been to Helsinki but I had not remembered Turku. In fact, we'd been there also, as Evelyn pointed out when she joined the conversation (that we had been to Turku also and had caught the ferry there). She was not sure the two Finns believed us that we'd been to Turku. They had a car parked nearby but we walked back to the tram most of the way with them because they were returning to a car parked in the same direction. We got back to the room and to bed.
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Saturday. Good breakfast, much the same as previous days. We had breakfast and came to the con. My first panel was 'Disappointed in SF?' The first disappointment was that only one of seven scheduled panelists showed up. Talk about disappointments! The panel was a discussion of modern writers and did not really touch on what I find disappointing in science fiction. In fact, their disappointment seemed directly opposite to mine. The others thought that style was not keeping pace with the time. Me, I am less interested in the style than in the ideas. I want to read new ideas written in stories with simple, straightforward and unambiguous style. At one time I read mostly short stories which were ten and twenty pages long. Now when I read novels, I tend to think that many would make very good twenty-page stories. Short story ideas are still very big in science fiction and few make it to works that brief. Short stories are simply not where a writer makes money. If you take the fifteen pages of idea and 380 pages of style, you have a full-length novel. I rarely find a novel that I think is really tightly written and really should be of novel length to express its idea. Too little science fiction really looks at a likely future any more. How many writers really extrapolate from AIDS and global warming? For the most part, current science fiction writers ignore the important trends rather than incorporate them into their writing and extrapolate.
At 1 PM I went to Forry Ackerman's 'My Collection in Slides. |
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