Barker interviewed her for about five minutes in front of the audience, getting details of what post-mortem care was and what various tasks it involved. Barker had a real curiosity for detail. He made wisecracks through the whole thing, but it was clear the details might be useful to him in horror writing.
A couple of other interesting points of the panel: One told an anecdote about a hospital that had hired a hunchback to carry around the dead bodies. It apparently included carrying them across a courtyard. It was not the kind of job that has a whole lot of applicants, nor could it pay very well. This rather scruffy-looking unfortunate was willing to take the job. But the hospital had to fire him because patients would look out their windows and see this hunchback carrying around dead bodies and the image was a little too evocative of cheap horror film.
For a couple of hours we walked around and socialized. I had a ginger beer with Cynthia and Kate. I went back to the room, got the book catalog of all our books, returned to an inexpensive book- seller, and bought a couple of inexpensive books of horror stories. I sat and talked with Dave while he drank a beer. Then at 3 PM I went to a panel on how necessary violence is in literature. There were people like Ramsay Campbell and Orson Scott Card. These are people who do tend to put some violence in their writing. They discussed the recent Hungerford massacre in which a gunman killed a dozen or so people. These are relatively common in the United States but in Britain this sort of massacre is very unusual and has been front-page news for over a week. They talked a little about the psychology of reaction to violence. When people hear that the gunman killed 13 people there is not a lot of reaction. When they say that the first woman killed was a mother who was laying out a picnic lunch for her two small children, that personalizes her and people feel a lot worse. What they said was more profound than just that personalizing makes writing more real, but for brevity I won't go into it all.
One comment I ought to make. Last British convention I was impressed with how much more polite and interested in science fiction British fans were. Things seem to have deteriorated somewhat in the last eight years. There seems to be more drinking, more drunkenness. The punk movement seems to have made rudeness more of an 'in' thing. The partying sort of American fans were less willing to cross the Atlantic so the Americans fans are no better or worse than they were eight years ago. But now that same level of etiquette is much closer to the level of the British fans. If anything, on the whole Americans seem better-behaved than the British.
Next came one of the more interesting discussions, at least as far as I was concerned. Several people who had written books on the science fiction film got together to discuss the question of when was the 'Golden Age' of science fiction film. Most seemed to share my feeling that it was the 1950s when it has its greatest number of new ideas. When THEM!, for example, came along the producers were trying to create a new science fiction idea. After that, a lot of films just tried to recreate THEM!. I think one thing that contributed was that science fiction films were only a small part of the studios' budgets so they afford to be somewhat experimental. In 1965, 2% of film ticket sales were for science fiction/horror/fantasy films. By 1985 that figure jumped to 58%. One of the more interesting and humorous speakers is Bill Warren. Warren really knows science fiction films, has a good sense of humor, and actually looks very funny. He must be extremely nearsighted; his glasses are very thick and shrink his eyes down to looking like they are about 2/3 scale. The effect is sort of like Ernie Kovacs used to have for a character he called something like Percy Dovetonsils. In any case, it really adds to his facial expression.
(5:00 PM): People were meeting in the lobby of our hotel for dinner at 6:15 PM, so I went back to my room to work on this log. On the way we stopped at a local candy store and I got some very good lime chocolates.
Cynthia came up to the room with us and we talked. Dave came up later. At 6:15 Dave, Cynthia, Evelyn, I, Dale, and Jo went out to eat. We found a very good Italian restaurant. I had an appetizer of Spaghetti Carbonara. First time I tried it and it was very good. I also had chicken in a cream and tomato sauce and it tasted very good also.
The convention masquerade was scheduled to start at 6 PM, but these things never start on time. Well, after dinner Cynthia and I set off to see the masquerade. Well, for once apparently the masquerade did start on time and was over by the time we got there. While we were in the convention center I did see the local newspaper had done a big spread on the science fiction convention. Now this convention and most these days try to discourage the wearing of costumes (except at the masquerade). However, the paper had managed to find some attendees who'd come in costume and their picture was plastered over the front page (whose headline was 'The Force is with us'). They then got some women, dressed them up in outfits that tastefully combined a futuristic look with the look of hookers, put dayglow orange wigs on them, and sat them into the convention center to sell the newspapers with the odious story. Regrettably, nobody strangled them and unfortunately some people actually bought newspapers from them. Newspaper coverage of science fiction conventions uniformly misinterprets things to an appalling degree. I am not too impressed with a lot of fans, but they are a heck of a lot better than they appear in the papers.
Dave Bara had said that he'd read that the BBC would be showing THE DEVIL RIDES OUT at 8:45 PM, so we went back to our room to watch it. Unfortunately, it was actually scheduled for 10:55 and we'd already planned to be busy at that time.
Back at the room we read and eventually Dale and Jo dropped over to join us watching the movie which we weren't going to see. So we did have someone to talk to. At 11 PM, we went to the Odeon to see DEATH LINE, a very weak British film concerning a killer in the London Underground. He apparently is the offspring of Irish laborers trapped in a cave-in in 1890. There are some humorous lines, but overall it isn't that good. So that was it for Saturday, day 3 of the 5-day convention.
Sunday is Hugo day. It is now 8:05 PM and I am sitting at the Hugo awards. Evelyn slept a little late, having gone to the Odeon movie last night.
ANSIBLE just won for fanzine. Brad Foster was fan artist. Dave Langford won for fan writer. LOCUS wins as semi-prozine. Terry Carr--editor. Jim Burns--artist. ALIENS--dramatic presentation. TRILLION YEAR SPREE--non-fiction. 'Tangents' by Greg Bear--short story. 'Permafrost' by Roger Zelazny--novelette. 'Gilgamesh in the Outback' by Robert Silverberg--novella. SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD, Orson Scott Card--novel. Karen Joy Fowler--John W. Campbell Award.
August 31 (11:09 AM): If the last words are hard to read, I wrote them in the dark at the Hugo awards. Well, I am now over a day behind in covering the con in spite of setting aside writing time. The faster I run the behinder I get. I now have a good deal more respect for people who write convention reports. I thought it was pretty tough just writing a trip log where you might do two things that need a describing in a day. At a convention you are doing something different each hour and what you do for one hour may need as much description as a visit to Hampton Court. What is more, when you are done at Hampton Court you get on a train whilst Hampton Court is still fresh in your mind. Here you go running to the next event and you cannot write while you are running. Okay. So here goes. Back to the fray.
Yesterday we had a late breakfast, much like every other breakfast we have had here. The major variation is whether there are kidneys put out on the buffet. Some days there are; some days there are not. It actually does not impact greatly on my breakfast, but is a noted variation.
The first panel I went to was at 11 AM and was 'Gothic SF-- Where Horror meets Science Fiction.' This discussed things like science fiction novels with vampires. Someone talked about how horror intersects with science fiction. In the 18th Century the concept was that the universe worked like a well-oiled clock. In the 19th there was the same concept but occasionally there was a mouse in the gears. Things can go wrong with the orderly progress of the universe (I would have to say, as the speakers did not, that this concept is mostly late 1800s with authors like Wells.) Even Verne seemed to believe in the orderly progress of the universe. There is a vast spectrum in writers. John Campbell believed all things were knowable In 'Who Goes There?' we have the humans confronting the alien and defeating it. by analysis of the alien's blood and our analysis works. The other extreme is H. P. Lovecraft, where you may not see some of the true lands of the earth. People who see as little of them as their shadows on the wall go mad. One says that the universe is all-knowable; the other says that we are incapable of handling any knowledge at all about the universe. All science fiction novels fall somewhere on this axis.
Following that, I met with Evelyn and we went back to our hotel to see an episode of an old British television show called COL. MARCH INVESTIGATES. Its claim to fame and the reason it is being shown at the convention is that it stars Boris Karloff. The story involved a skull, supposedly of a missing link, stolen from a museum. The solution to the mystery involved the jawbone being from a very old species and the cranium being from a murdered member of the scientific expedition that found the supposed fossil. For many years of intense scientific study, nobody noticed that the two didn't really go together. I suppose this was inspired by the Piltdown forgery, but that was many years earlier. The idea that the forgery would go so long undiscovered is absurd. Someone was asking this weekend why filmmakers didn't hire scientific experts to clean up technical problems in story plots. The answer is simple: in a story like this, to clean up the inaccuracies would be to throw out the entire story.
After that it was back to the room for 'writers' workshop.' Actually, writers' workshops are officially a convention activity to help people improve their writing style, but we have come to use the expression for working on the logs.
After about an hour we went to see another half-hour television show from the 1950s, THE ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU, with Glen Gordon playing the Chinese arch-criminal with a really absurd accent. This episode was about a plot to ruin the United States economy by counterfeiting billions od dollars with perfect copies and then dropping them on major cities, hence making real money worthless. Curiously, the stories are set in the United States with a Denis Nayland Smith on loan from England and an American Dr. Petrie.
Next we went to the Guest of Honor film show and interview with Ray Harryhausen. Growing up, I had two real heroes connected with film. One was Peter Cushing. He is an actor who was vastly underrated because he was known mostly for horror film roles. He claimed never to do his roles tongue-in-cheek. I might disagree about one or two films, but on the whole there were many films that were vastly better for his performance. The other hero was Ray Harryhausen, who for 20 years did the most creative and imaginative special effects of anyone alive. His films include BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, VALLEY OF GWANGI, GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD, and most recently CLASH OF THE TITANS. He talked about his experiences filmmaking, particularly in making SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD. It was a project that he had sketches for and wanted to do for years, but nobody thought there was much money to be made with an Arabian Nights film. He had worked up sketches of what he could do with the concept in 1948. |
