I got back from Deep South Con/Mid South Con in Memphis Sunday night. It was scheduled with David Brin as the Guest of Honor, and Todd Lockwood, who I've never heard of because he seems to do mostly fantasy illustration, as the Artist Guest of Honor. Kevin Lenagh of _Contacting Aliens_ fame, and C.J. Cherryh were listed as guests.
The bad news:
David Brin couldn't attend the con in person, because he got sick shortly before it started. The doctor wouldn't let him on the plane, because he was afraid everyone on board would catch whatever flu bug he had. So, he attended the con panels via speakerphone. He said he'd only missed two cons in the last 23 years, and both of them were in Tennessee.
The good news:
I spent a good bit of time talking to Kevin Lenagh during the course of the con, and everything else was fun.
The schedule:
My Dad and I left Hartselle, Alabama at around noon on Friday, and we started driving to Memphis. We arrived in town, checked into the nearby motel he'd set up reservations with a few days before, and found out it was right next door to the con, so we walked over.
By a little before 5 PM, we were standing in a very slow line to get registered, which wasn't too bad, because we got to talk to some of the folks in line. About an hour and a half later, we got close enough to the registration desk to read a sign there: "David Brin will not be appearing in person. He will attend panels by speakerphone." About half an hour after that, we were finally registered, but the printer that would have printed our badges ran out of ink right before they got to us. So, the lady in charge made temporary hand-written badges for us, and the people behind us in line were allowed to use their registration cards stamped "Paid" as temporary badges. So, we were the only ones with handwritten badges, which probably looked kinda suspicious. We eventually got real badges Saturday night, and I'm thankful to the people who worked so hard to deal with a *much* larger flood of people than they expected.
When we were done, I took a stack of about ten of the flyers I'd made up, advertising my shirts, and put it on the handouts table. I went back to check every now and then during the run of the con, but as far as I could tell, no one ever took one.
By the time we got registered, we'd missed the opening ceremony, but we were fortunately in time to go to Kevin Lenagh's slide show of his _Contacting Aliens_ illustrations -- which was basically a web page he'd put together, including icons he'd designed, written to a CD-ROM. He also showed some concept art that never made it into the book. When he forgot some of the names of Uplift stuff, I reminded him, and he noted that he liked my Streaker shirt, but I didn't officially introduce myself then. I was too shy to go up to talk to him, so I came up with some rationalization to put it off, like I tend to do.
After that, we attended a NASA Update slide show, hosted by Les Johnson, the leader of the In-Space Propulsion Program at Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, who I'd met a few years ago at Con-Stellation. He discussed NASA's new direction, and talked about his recent work on solar sails.
We left after midnight, and since the con was in a pretty rough-looking neighborhood, we nervously walked back to our motel.
The next morning, we *drove* to the con's hotel, and ate breakfast at the hotel restaurant. They had a breakfast buffet with lousy selection and service, okay food, and high prices. When we got done, we attended a panel on teaching the Foundation books in the Classroom. It was pretty interesting, and David called in on speaker phone about halfway through. He made a lot of interesting points, but when someone is speaking over speakerphone, I never know where to look! ;-) We sat through another interesting education panel, about whether media SF is hurting education, and again, he called in about halfway through.
We ended up talking to Les Johnson a good bit during lunch at the Con Suite.
A little later, we went to Les' panel about Space Exploration and Environmentalism, with a good bit of discussion from the audience.
After that, we spent a great deal of time in the Dealer's Room, where my Dad looked for rare old SF books on his list, while I mostly just looked around for anything interesting, mostly just window shopping. We also went to the art show, and made paper bids on three pieces. He bid on a proof showing a nice view of a planet's rings from inside its clouds. I bid on two Babylon 5 lithograph prints: one with portraits of the whole cast, with the station in the background, and one with portraits of G'Kar and Londo with Shadow ships. They also had originals of some of Kevin's _Contacting Aliens_ sketches, which were unfortunately out of my current budget range, or I almost certainly would have bought one.
We went to the official autograph guest signings a little later that afternoon. We were a little early, so we didn't see Kevin there, or I would have approached him then. He came in on time, when my back was turned, so my Dad flagged him down. We talked for a few minutes, and then a spark of realization popped into his eyes... "Oh, you're *that* Steve Sloan! I've been communicating with you by email for years!" David had sent him pictures of my early Streaker models, as examples. It felt really good to be remembered. I got him to sign _Contacting Aliens_, but I hadn't thought to bring _Brightness Reef_ and _Infinity's Shore_, so my Dad ran out to the car to get them, and we talked some more. He talked more about the challenges in putting the guide together. He complained about the name change, and how they decided to shrink most of his pictures down from full pages, often to very small sizes in the final book. A lot of that was because the book's text grew much bigger than originally planned, and writing and putting together the text was the part he found most difficult about the whole project.
He offered to scan in all his finished work for the book for Bantam, but they were nervous about using newer technologies, and since they didn't know much about it, they were afraid that he wouldn't either. So, instead of just letting him scan them himself and email the results, they had him FedEx his art to them, where it got relayed to their old-fashioned print house out-of-state, then it went back to the home office, then back to him. In the end, it cost them a lot of money in shipping and artwork insurance, but they still felt better about it.
When he sold the movie rights to Mace Neufeld, David put in a requirement that Kevin be in charge of concept design for the movie. I feel a lot better about any possible movie because of that.
Several years back, during the Trevor Sands era, Kevin hd been subscribed to Brin-L, but not for very long, because the volume was just too overwhelming.
He read, liked, and took a copy of the Trilateral Commission flyer, that Vilyehm wrote, and I printed, but I never found a good time to talk to him about V's other project ideas. He also took one of my T-shirt flyers.
He doesn't go to cons very often, so I was lucky to catch him at this one.
He asked me what software I used to create my Streaker pictures. I said it was pretty obscure, Hash Animation: Master. He had actually heard of it, and considered getting it at one time.
He pointed out a particularly funny error in _Contacting Aliens_ on page 182, in the Urs patronymics. He wrote placeholders there, to be fixed later, then forgot to fix them: "a Urs/ -ab some / -ul a few". Stefan Jones came to the rescue, by correcting his spelling in the new edition of GURPS Uplift, page 58: "A-Urs, ab-Som, ab-Afue, ab-Mani." :-)
My Dad took pictures of us together with his camera, my camera, and Kevin's. I was honored that he also wanted a picture of me. I will put the picture up on the memberpix page eventually.
During a break in the conversation, I went over and got C.J. Cherryh to sign all the books I own of hers. She was the only other person I'd really heard of there, so she was really the only other autograph I asked for.
After the autograph session, we went to the Humor in SF panel. One fun standout was the author of _Fat White Vampire Blues_. I've only read a snippet of the book in F&SF, but it sounds pretty funny.
We then attended the Art Auction, hosted by the con's toast master, actor Michael Sheard, who is originally from Aberdeen. He was an Admiral in Star Wars, a Nazi and Hitler in Indiana Jones movies, and he was in an incredible number of Dr. Who episodes. He was pretty funny, with a very impressive voice. The three pieces we'd bid on did not have enough bids to actually be in the auction, but it was still pretty fun, even though it was also a butt-numbingly *long* three hours. :-)
Masquerade was fun. It started with a goofy skit involving some of the guests, starring a goddess, Michael Sheard, Carolyn Cherryh in a motorcycle helmet, Selina Rosen playing what I gather is her loud, brash, cigar-chomping character from the Queen of Denial books (after seeing her at Con-Stellation and DSC, I don't think it was much of a stretch ;-) ), and some other wacky characters. After that, the actual contestants started...
* Cute little kid costumes. * A nice Princess Amidala gown, a Princess Leia, and a Jedi. * The dueling Boba Fetts entry was fun, with two guys dressed as the Star Wars character, where one whips out a guitar and starts playing "Dueling Banjos." :-) * Leeloo from "Fifth Element" (very nice! ;-) ) * One of those Sand People from Star Wars -- there was a *lot* of Star Wars! * A buff, tentacled Jedi knight who had just added a new weapon to his arsenal -- a tight outfit and large codpiece! * Another funny one was a guy dressed in a white outfit, who was covered by mutant radioactive pollen spores, because he'd just escaped from the planet Clarinex. * An impressive costume of a fox-like Digimon. * A woman pirate, leaving my Dad wondering what pirates had to do with science fiction. * Princess Fiona in ogre mode from Shrek. A nice costume, with good ogre ears, but the padding in her dress made her a little chunkier than the actual character. * A *very* detailed and realistic Predator, from the movie. * A cat-girl, who had been in the skit earlier. * The Beetle-Buster Blues -- Beetlejuice and a Ghostbuster get together to do a Blues Brothers act. One of my favorites, and the judges agreed. :-) * Some really good costumes of Rogue and Gambit. He tossed cards into the audience, she kissed him, he keeled over. :-) * A woman with a nice fantasy gown, and a pet dragon draped over her arm -- her iguana. * A 16th century Florentine gown * Some space bunnies from an Alan Dean Foster book I've never read, so they were probably too obscure to do really well.
While the judges were tallying scores, a guy walked up to my Dad and asked him about the T-shirt he was wearing -- my new Streaker design, which I'll add to the site fairly soon. Dad flagged me down, and I gave the guy a flyer. So, I managed to give out a grand total of two flyers that weekend. :-) I worry that there were other people out there who came to see David Brin, and noticed our shirts, but didn't see the flyers on the table, and didn't approach me like that one guy did.
It was after midnight when Masquerade ended, so we left to go get some food, before the drive-through windows all closed, then we hit the sack.
The next morning, we ate at McDonalds, which had slightly better breakfast food than the hotel restaurant, for less than half the price.
We ran into Kevin on the way into the hotel, so we talked and headed for the ConSuite. We talked there for a while, and also met a guy who creates Poser props, so he, Kevin, and I talked about 3D modeling.
My Dad and I then went to the art show, to see if we'd won the pieces we bid on. We had, so we paid up. I also bought a con T-shirt, which I probably should have done earlier, and luckily, they had two left in my size.
We then went to the obligatory Transparent Society panel, with David on speakerphone, Carolyn Cherryh, and M.M. Buckner (who wrote a Philip K. Dick Award nominated award, _Hyperthought_, which I'll probably look for one of these days). Another interesting panel.
We stuck around in the same room for DC Comics on TV, a panel about the recent TV shows, including Smallville, Justice League, Teen Titans. That was pretty fun, and I even got a couple of comments in. My Dad also enjoyed it, even though he hasn't seen many of the shows they were talking about.
We stuck around for one last scheduled event, "Guy & Rosie Go to Australia". Former DUFF (Down Under Fan Fund) winners Guy and Rosie Lillian showed a slide show of their trip to Australia. I'd seen an earlier version of the show at Con-Stellation, but Dad hadn't. Among other things, I learned that a platypus is *much* smaller than I always pictured. I'd always assumed they were about beaver-sized, as did my Dad and Mom, but they're actually closer to squirrel-sized.
There weren't really any other must-see events on the schedule after that, so we decided to head home. We got back suprisingly early that evening. The highway from Memphis to North Alabama is *much* nicer than it used to be, just a few years ago.
Overall, I was disappointed that David couldn't make it, but I'm very glad I went. ______________________________________________________________________ Steve Sloan ......... Huntsville, Alabama =========> [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brin-L list pages .............................. http://www.brin-l.org Science Fiction-themed online store ..... http://www.sloan3d.com/store Chmeee's 3D Objects .................... http://www.sloan3d.com/chmeee 3D and Drawing Galleries .................. http://www.sloansteady.com Software ................ Science Fiction, Science, and Computer Links Science fiction scans ......................... http://www.sloan3d.com
-- ______________________________________________________________________ Steve Sloan ......... Huntsville, Alabama =========> [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brin-L list pages .............................. http://www.brin-l.org Science Fiction-themed online store ..... http://www.sloan3d.com/store Chmeee's 3D Objects .................... http://www.sloan3d.com/chmeee 3D and Drawing Galleries .................. http://www.sloansteady.com Software ................ Science Fiction, Science, and Computer Links Science fiction scans ......................... http://www.sloan3d.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
