It comes colored red, for reasons I don't know, but with your eyes closed you'd think it was grilled on a backyard gas grill. Kate actually claimed to like Tandoori Chicken. She may have been just being polite, but she certainly appeared to eat it.
We finished just about in time to go running off to see our evening play, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD by Tom Stoppard. This play has been recommended by friends over the years so I was anxious to see it. It was Stoppard's first and he built his reputation on it. As the first work of a new writer, it is good. It is sort of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET HAMLET with a few minor philosophical twists. But overall it was nothing to write home about. So I won't.
After the play we returned with Kate to Victoria Station (via Underground) and then continued on to Sloane Square--our stop. And went back, wrote in our logs till midnight, and went to bed.
When we got up this morning we had to decide what to do. At some point we would have to go to Brighton but we had a whole day to do it in. Evelyn thought we should go early and see the boardwalk. My reasoning was, where was time likely to be more valuable? London, where we'd already spent four days, or Brighton with its Crystal Palace and its boardwalk. No question in my mind at all. London. Ah, but what to do? Well, last time I'd enjoyed the Imperial War Museum. It has a good collection of artifacts from the two World Wars. Lots of military hardware, uniforms, the like.
Well, we went there and it was a worthwhile look at the army and the home front for the two wars. Of interest were Lawrence's Arab robes and a lot of interesting propaganda posters. Particularly interesting were the type that said, 'Ladies, don't you think your husband or boyfriend should be in the army? Other women have given up their men and they are protecting you. Will a man who is not faithful to his country be faithful to you? Tell your men to enlist.' Downstairs they had goodies like unexploded V-1s, war planes, etc. There were taped discussions on things like what it was like in the trenches (Bloody Awful!).
Well, I was thinking through this that we'd seen the Navy's museum (the National Maritime Museum) and the Army's museum (the Imperial War Museum). What I would like to see is a museum for the Air Force. Well, on the way out we saw a small poster that said some sort of aircraft paintings would be seen at the RAF Museum. So there was one? We could go to Brighton a little later and have time to see it. So we hopped a train for Collindale where there is the Hendon Aerodrome. There they have the RAF Museum right next to the Battle of Britain Museum, right on an RAF base.
We went to the RAF Museum first. It is considerably smaller than the other two museums. It is on two floors around a large floor that has a collection of maybe thirty aircraft from the biplane days forward. The planes were worth seeing. The museum part is full of models of airplanes, instruments, etc. The Battle of Britain Museum was similar, smaller, and concentrated on one battle. I like seeing airplanes. Evelyn sort of went along, but as she pointed out, she'd lived half her life (actually I pointed out it was less than half) near Air Force bases. Can I help it if I grew up without all the advantages?
August 27 (1:47 PM): The RAF Museum takes you on a chronological walk where you see things like engines, trophies, medals, flying suits, and propaganda posters--that sort of thing. Well, when we finished that, we head back on the train to our hotel to pick up our luggage. Our feet were starting to get sore from all the walking.
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There was an uneventful trip to Brighton except that we have already bought more books than we wanted to on the whole trip and the lug-around is getting a bit much. Our room is nice for 41 pounds/night. The Massachusetts people are three to a room, further from the festivities, the room is older and has a bath but no shower, and they are paying 75 pounds per night.
We got to Brighton about 6:15 PM and got to our hotel by about 6:45 PM. At 7 we went out for fish and chips. I had a giant slab of skate and chips for about $5.65 American. We talked to some local fans from Scotland over dinner. Afterwards we looked for a nice place to have our anniversary dinner (which will be tonight).
The weather is just about perfect for Brighton, which is to say grey and cold but not raining. I hope this weather stays nice through the weekend rather than turning grey and cold and rainy.
We went back to the room and listened to a humourous radio play (as far as I can 'humourous' is like 'humorous' only drier). This one was about some poor benighted fool who was bucking the system to try and get his train to work to run on time. It was not really science fiction but was in many ways like HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY.
I wrote in my log. After a little while the phone rang. Dave Bara had arrived. We went over to his hotel and talked with him and Kate until about 11:30 PM, occasionally being entertained by a very strange hotel manager who talked in baby-talk to the hotel cat.
Well, then back to the hotel and I stayed up and worked out on the graphics calculator on the problem of how far away the horizon is at very heights above the water (mid-ocean).
This morning I discovered my stomach did not like the skate last night as much as my mouth did.
We had English breakfast (it comes with the room), including things like grilled kidney, grilled tomato, fruit, and a few things a little more prosaic. The mushrooms were pretty good.
After breakfast we registered for the convention, cashed a check, bought some lime candy, and returned to our room to map out what we wanted to do for the rest of the convention: what talks we wanted to go to, etc. (Oh, we did go to the Dealers' Room to see what books were for sale.) At about 3 PM we went to the discussion on what are the style differences between British and United States science fiction. Now, I had thought that United States science fiction was pessimistic, but the general opinion of this panel seems to be that American science fiction has much less downbeat writing than do British books. Toby Roxburgh bemoaned that it is getting harder for new British writers because each book has to be a known quantity to make a profit. American writers sell much better here than British writers. I see this as affirming my belief that readers don't want downbeat stylistic experiments. One editor told the story of getting one of her company's books returned to her by mail with a note saying, 'Please refund my money or send me another book. There is something wrong with this one. It doesn't make sense.'
The next panel was a retrospective on H. G. Wells. It started with Brian Stableford quoting Wells talking about the forwardthinking man versus the man more rooted in the present. He had his giants in FOOD OF THE GODS represent that forward-thinking man.
Wells himself turned against his own 'scientific romances' later in his career. He began to think and write about them in a condescending way.
This panel was not so much discussion but Stableford reading a lecture.
Before this lecture, in fact, at the British science fiction panel, I talked to a sightless fan who happened to sit next to me. I asked him about his science fiction reading. Apparently this is his first convention. He reads some of the classics but as I had guessed, he could read only what someone else thought was a classic. He'd read authors like Clarke, Asimov, Wyndham, a little Ballard, but he was hearing about the new writers for the first time. A sightless fan who can read only what has been translated into Braille is really reading a different science fiction than the rest of us.
It is interesting that my writing of travel logs, which I started eight years ago, has spread to Evelyn and now Dave Bara is writing one too. The three of us are sitting in the Wells lecture writing logs. There is a room full of people listening and in this one little pocket there are three people writing like mad while they listen. It must be an odd sight.
New point made by Stableford: between the World Wars Europe was rebuilding and the speculative writers were more used to seeing horrors of the present, so stressed more horrors of the future. Again a reason why European science fiction is more downbeat than American science fiction. I guess I hadn't realized European science fiction is considered so downbeat. I have been complaining that American writers who might be catching the imagination of youth are instead writing anti-technology diatribes thinly veiled. When a nationality gets in a position where wonder is dead and the future is something to fear and dread, then the young decide to make it while they can and the prophecies become self-fulfilling.
In Japan the popular entertainment is full of high-technology and battling robots. Now the robots thing sounds bad but it retains its sense of wonder. The philosophy is that we may have bad times ahead, but technology and a human will-to-live will eventually triumph. The way of the future is to live among the magic machines. Authors should be allowed to write about whatever they want, but science fiction is more self-fulfilling prophecy than self-averting, and a civilization that never dreams and only has nightmares really does have reason to fear the future.
I guess once you get into the practice of having nightmares, your nightmares get to be worth having.
Well, after the Wells presentation we met up with Kate, who'd left early, and Saul Jaffe who is a big honcho on the electronic bulletin board SF-Lovers Digest. (He edits the digest from Arpanet). Dave, Kate, Saul, Ev, and I went to the Aberdeen Steak House. I had lambchops; Ev had the grill platter. From there it was back to our room for some writing. Dave and Kate went to their room but later brought Cynthia to our room and we talked till about midnight. Then the women went to their respective rooms. Dave and I went to the Odeon Theatre to see EXPLORERS. The con has rented a local theater next to the convention center and after it would normally close they are showing two films a night--theater prints. That is a very nice touch.
EXPLORERS is the kind of story I loved to read when I was 10 or 11 years old. It is not great science fiction, but it has some charm and considerably more than I had expected. It came out of the Spielberg factory about the same time as an actively bad film called THE GOONIES and it got tarred with the same brush. I gave it a +1 and Dave gave it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. While it had a fair number of in-jokes, it also had a great respect for science fiction films in general and science fiction films of the 1950s in specific.
That went to about 2:30 AM and I set my watch to wake me up at 5:30 AM to see a film running in our hotel. I slept right through the alarm and woke about 6:30. It is now about 7:30 AM.
August 28 (1:13 PM): Breakfast was mushrooms, eggs, the like. After that we went to a poor excuse for a film called 99 and 44/100% DEAD. It had a good three minutes at the beginning and another good minute at the end. The rest was action scenes stuck together like pop-it beads. I rated it -2. Dave gave it -1. Evelyn liked it apparently and gave it a +1. Richard Harris plays Harry Crown, a sort of James Bond in an American gangster. He is the main character and the greatest characterization they give him is that he takes his glasses off and puts them back on a lot. This was directed by John Frankenheimer, who once did things like THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. This is sheer garbage except for Bradford Dillman, whose inconsistent speech defect and erratic performance don't even reach the standards of this film. |
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