 So I'm sitting there in Winnipeg,
resplendent in my tuxedo, and morbidly wondering how many fans have called me 'Mr.
Resnick' instead of 'Mike' since the worldcon began three days ago.I don't feel like a Mister. I
feel like a fan who is cheating by sitting here with all the pros, waiting for Bob
Silverberg to announce the winner of the Best Editor Hugo. He goes through the
names: Datlow, Dozois, Resnick, Rusch, Schmidt.He opens the envelope and reads off
Kris Rusch's name, and suddenly I am walking up to the stage. Bob is sure I thought
he called out my name, and looks like he is considering clutching the Hugo to his
breast and running off with it (although that is actually a response common to all
pros when they are in proximity to a Hugo), but finally he sighs and hands it over
to me, and I start thanking Ed Ferman and all the voters.What am I doing here, I wonder,
picking up a Hugo for a lady who is half my age and has twice my talent and is
drop-dead gorgeous to boot? How in blazes did I ever get to be an Elder
Statesman?# # # #
Well, it began in 1962, which, oddly
enough, was not just last year, no matter how it feels. Carol and I had met
at the University of Chicago in 1960. We'd gone to the theater on our first date,
and wound up in the Morrison Hotel's coffee shop, where we talked science fiction
until they threw us out at 5 in the morning. It was the first time either of us
realized that someone else out there read that crazy Buck Rogers stuff (though we
might have guessed, since they continued to print it month after month, and two
sales per title would hardly seem enough to keep the publishers in business.)Well, 1962 rolls around, and so does
a future Campbell winner named Laura...but the second biggest event of the year
comes when Ace Books, under the editorship of Don Wollheim, starts pirating a bunch
of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, and a whole generation gets to learn about Tarzan
and Frank Frazetta and John Carter and Roy Krenkal and David Innes all at once.But the important thing, the thing
that unquestionably shaped my adult life, was that one of the books had a little
blurb on the inside front cover extolling ERB's virtues, and it was signed 'Camille
Cazedessus, Editor of ERB-dom'. Well, you didn't have to be a genius to
figure out that ERB-dom, at least in that context, was an obvious reference
to Edgar Rice Burroughs.A whole magazine devoted to one of my
favorite writers? I could barely wait until the next morning, when I took the subway
downtown and entered the Post Office News, Chicago's largest magazine store. I
looked for ERB-dom next to Time, Life, Look,
Newsweek, and Playboy. Wasn't there. I looked for it next to
Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF. No dice. Wasn't anywhere near
Forbes or Fortune or Business Week either.So I go up to the manager and tell
him I'm looking for ERB-dom, and he checks his catalogs and tells me there
ain't no such animal.I grab him by the arm, drag him over
to the paperbacks, pull out the operative Burroughs title, turn to the inside front
cover, and smite him with a mighty "Aha!"So he promises to get cracking and
find out who publishes this magazine and start stocking it, and I return to our
subterranean penthouse (i.e., basement apartment) to await the Good News.Which doesn't come.I nag Post Office News incessantly.
I nag my local bookstore. I nag the public library. I even nag my mother. (This
seems counter-productive, but she has been nagging me for 20 years and fair
is fair.)Finally, I look at my watch and it is
half-past 1962 and there is still no sign of ERB-dom, so I write to the
editor, Miss Cazedessus (so okay, until then I'd never heard of a guy named Camille),
in care of Ace Books, and a month later the first five issues of ERB-dom
arrive in the mail, the very first fanzines I have ever seen, along with a long,
friendly letter that constantly uses the arcane word 'worldcon'.Within two months I have written
three long articles for ERB-dom #6 and have become its associate editor.
There is a worldcon in Chicago that summer, not a 20-minute subway ride from where
we live, but the future Campbell winner chooses August 17 to get herself born, and
we do not go to the worldcon. When she is 8 days old I decide to forgive her and
lovingly show her off to her grandparents, and she vomits down the back of my
Hawaiian shirt (which, in retrospect, could well have been an editorial comment),
and it is 27 years before I willingly touch her again, but that is another story.There is one other thing that happens
in 1962. We are living at the corner of North Shore and Greenview in the Rogers
Park area of Chicago, and right across street of us is this old apartment building,
and on the third Saturday of every month strange-looking men and women congregate
there. They have unkempt hair, and most of them are either 90 pounds overweight or
50 pounds underweight, and often they are carrying books under their arms. We
decide they are members of SNCC or CORE, which are pretty popular organizations at
the time, and that they are meeting there to figure out how to dodge the draft, and
that the books they carry are either pacifist tracts or ledgers with the names and
addresses of all the left-wing groups that have contributed money to them.We have to go all the way to
Washington D.C. a year later and attend Discon I to find out that they are not draft
dodgers (well, not primarily, anyway) but rather Chicago fandom, and that
they have been meeting 80 feet from our front door for 2 years.# # # #
So I wend my way back through the
audience, and I find my seat, and I hand Kris Rusch's Hugo to Carol, because I am
also up for Best Short Story, and I think I've got a better chance at this, and when
I run up to accept the award it will look tacky to already be carrying a Hugo.
Besides, Charles Sheffield is sitting right next to us, and he is up for Best
Novelette, and he is getting very nervous, and wants to stroke the Hugo for luck, or
maybe is considering just walking out with it and changing the name plates at a
future date. (In fact, I am convinced that if he does not win his own, neither Kris
nor I will ever see her Hugo again. Charles will probably deny this, but never
forget that Charles gets paid an inordinate amount of money to tell lies to the
public at large.)So Guy Gavriel Kay begins reading off
the nominees, and suddenly I realize that I am not nervous at all, that this is
becoming very old hat to me. I have been nominated for nine Hugos in the past six
years. I have actually won a pair. Worldcons are very orderly things: you show up,
you sign a million autographs, you eat each meal with a different editor and line up
your next year's worth of work, and then you climb into your tux and see if you won
another Hugo.It's gotten to be such a regular
annual routine, you sometimes find yourself idly wondering: was it always
like this?Then you think back to your first
worldcon, and you realize that no, it was not always like this...# # # #
Right off the bat, we were the
victims of false doctrine. Everyone we knew in fandom -- all six or seven of them
-- told us the worldcon was held over Labor Day weekend. So we took them at their
word.The problem, of course, was the
definition of 'weekend'. We took a train that pulled out of Chicago on Friday
morning, and dumped us in the basement of our Washington D.C. hotel at 9:00 Saturday
morning. At which time we found out that the convention was already half over.(Things were different then. There
were no times in the convention listings. In fact, there were no convention
listings. Not in Analog, not anywhere. If you knew that worldcons even
existed, you were already halfway to being a trufan.)Caz (right: he wasn't a Miss at all)
met us and showed us around. Like myself, he was dressed in a suit and tie; it was
a few more worldcons before men wore shirts without jackets or ties, even during the
afternoons, and every woman -- they formed, at most, 10% of the attendees, and over
half were writers' wives -- wore a skirt. If you saw someone with a beard -- a
relatively rare occurrence -- you knew he was either a pro writer or Bruce Pelz.When we got to the huckster room --
20-plus dealers (and selling only books, magazines, and fanzines; none of the junk
that dominates the tables today), I thought I had died and gone to heaven. The art
show had work by Finlay and Freas and Emsh and even Margaret Brundage; only J. Allen
St. John was missing from among the handful of artists whose work I knew and
admired.They had an auction. It even had a
little booklet telling you what items would be auctioned when, so you knew which
session to attend to get what you wanted. Stan Vinson, a famous Burroughs collector
who had been corresponding with me for a year, bought a Frazetta cover painting for
$70. Friends told him he was crazy; paintings were supposed to appreciate, and no
one would ever pay that much for a Frazetta again. I bought a Finlay sketch for
$2.00, and an autographed Sturgeon manuscript for $3.50.In the afternoon we decide to go to
the panels. I do not know from panels; like any neo, I take along a pencil and a
notebook. The panels are not what we have these days, or at least they did not seem
so to my untrained and wondrous eyes and ears.
For example, there is a panel with
Willy Ley and Isaac Asimov and Fritz Leiber and L. Sprague de Camp and Ed Emsh and
Leigh Brackett, and the topic is "What Should a BEM Look Like?" (I have a copy of
the Discon Proceedings, a transcript of the entire convention published by
Advent, and to this day when I need a new alien race I re-read that panel and
invariably I come up with one.)There was a panel with Fred Pohl and
a tyro named Budrys and a gorgeous editor (though not as gorgeous as the one I
accepted a Hugo for) named Cele Goldsmith and even John Campbell Himself, on how to
write stories around cover paintings, which was a common practice back then, and
which remains fascinating reading today.There was a sweet old guy in a white
suit who saw that we were new to all this, and moseyed over and spent half an hour
with us, making us feel at home and telling us about how we were all one big family
and inviting us to come to all the parties at night. Then he wandered off to accept
the first-ever Hall of Fame Award from First Fandom. When they asked if he was
working on anything at present, he replied that he had just delivered the manuscript
to Skylark DuQuesne, and received the second-biggest ovation I have ever heard
at a worldcon. (The biggest came 30 years later, when Andy Porter broke a 12-year
losing streak and won the Semiprozine Hugo in 1993.)Since we didn't know anyone, and were
really rather shy (over the years, I have learned to overcompensate for this
tendency, as almost anyone will tell you, bitterly and at length) we ate dinner
alone, then watched the masquerade, which in those days was truly a masquerade ball
and not a competition. There was a band, and everyone danced, and a few people
showed up in costume, and every now and then one of them would march across the
stage, and at the end of the ball they announced the winners.Then there was the Bheer Blast. In
those bygone days, they didn't show movies. (I think movies turned up in 1969,
not to display the Hugo nominees or give pleasure to the cinema buffs, but to
give the kids a place to sleep so they'd stop cluttering up the lobby.) They didn't
give out the Hugos at night, either. (An evening banquet might run $5.00 a head,
and the concom got enough grief for charging $3.00 a head for rubber chicken served
at 1:00 PM rather than six hours later.) They didn't have more than one track of
programming. (Multiple tracks came along 8 years later, and evening programs even
later than that.)Well, with all the things they
didn't have, they needed a way to amuse the congoers in the evening, so what
happened was this: every bid committee (and they only bid a year in advance back
then) treated the entire convention to a beer party on a different night. We could
all fit in one room -- I know the official tally for Discon I was 600, but I was
there and I'll swear that there were no more than 400 or so in attendance; the other
200 must have been no-shows, or waiters, or bellboys -- and the bidding committee
would treat us to a small lakeful of beer, with or without pretzels, and then the
next night a rival bid would do the same thing. (You voted -- if you could drag
yourself out of bed -- on Sunday morning at the business meeting. A fan would speak
for each bid, telling you how wonderful his committee was. Then a pro would speak
for each bid, telling you about the quality of restaurants you would encounter. The
better restaurants invariably carried the day.)After the beer blast was over,
everyone vanished. The Burroughs people, all of them straighter than Tarzan's
arrows, went to bed. We remembered that Doc Smith had mentioned parties, so we
began wandering down the empty, foreboding corridors of the hotel, wondering if the
parties really did exist, and how to find them.
We walked all the way down one floor,
took the stairs up a flight, repeated the procedure, then did it again. We were
about to quit when a door opened, and a little bearded man and a tall bearded man,
both with thick glasses, spotted our name badges and asked if we'd like to come in
for a drink. We didn't know who the hell they were, but they had badges too, so we
knew they were with the con and probably not about to mug a couple of innocents from
Chicago, and we decided to join them.Turns out they were standing in the
doorway to a huge suite, and that their names were del Rey and de Camp. Inside,
wearing a bowtie and looking not unlike a penguin in his black suit, was Isaac
Asimov. Randy Garrett was dressed in something all-satin and not of this century.
Bob Silverberg looked young and incredibly dapper. Sam Moskowitz was speaking to Ed
Hamilton and Leigh Brackett in a corner; this was many years before Sam's throat
surgery, and it was entirely possible, though unlikely, that no one in the basement
could hear him.And every last one of them went
out of their way to talk to us and make us feel at home!Later another young fan wandered in.
Much younger than me. I was 21; Jack Chalker was only 19. We sat around, and
discussed various things, and then something strange happened, something totally
alien to my experience.Someone asked Jack and I what we
wanted to do with our lives. (No, that's not the strange part; people were always
asking that.)We each answered that we wanted to
write science fiction.And you know what? For the first
time in my life, nobody laughed.That's when I knew I was going to
come back to worldcons for the rest of my life.# # # #
So Guy Gavriel Kay reads off the list
of nominees, and then he opens the envelope, and the winner is Connie Willis, and I
am second to her again for the 83rd time (yeah, I know, I've only lost 76 Hugos and
Nebulas to her, but it feels like 83), and everyone tells me I've won a moral
victory because I have beat all the short stories and Connie's winner is a novelette
that the Hugo administrators, in their infinite wisdom, decided to move to the short
story category, and I keep thinking that moral victories and 60 cents will get you a
cup of coffee anywhere west of New York and east of California, and that I wish I
didn't like Connie so much so that I could hate her just a little on Labor Day
weekends, and my brain is making up slogans, modified slightly from my youth, slogans
like Break Up Connie Willis, which is certainly easier than breaking up the
Yankees, and I am wondering if Tonya Harding will loan me her bodyguard for a few
days, and then I am at the Hugo Losers Party, and suddenly it doesn't matter that
I've lost a Hugo, because it is now 31 years since that first worldcon I went to,
and it is my annual family reunion, and I am visiting with friends that I see once
or twice or, on good years, five times per year, and we have a sense of continuity
and community that goes back for almost two-thirds of my life. Hugos are very nice,
and I am proud of the ones I've won, and I am even proud of the ones I've lost, but
when all is said and done, they are metal objects and my friends are people, and
people are what life is all about.And I find, to my surprise, that
almost everyone I am talking to, almost all the old friends I am hugging and already
planning to see again at the next worldcon, are fans. Some, like me, write for a
living; a few paint; most do other things. But we share a common fannish history,
and a common fannish language, and common fannish interests, and I realize that I
even enjoyed the business meeting this year, and you have to be pretty far gone into
fandom to enjoy Ben Yalow making a point of order.# # # #
A lot of pros don't go to worldcon
anymore. They prefer World Fantasy Con. It's smaller, more intimate, and it's
limited to 750 members -- and while this is not official, there is nonetheless a
'Fans Not Wanted' sign on the door.That's probably why I don't go. It's
true that worldcons have changed, that people who read and write science fiction are
probably a minority special interest group these days, that bad movies will outdraw
the Hugo ceremony...but the trufans are there. It just means you have to work a
little harder to hunt them up.One of the things I have tried to do
with the new writers I have helped to bring into this field, the coming superstars
like Nick DiChario and Barb Delaplace and Michelle Sagara and Jack Nimersheim and
all the many others, is to not only show them how to make a good story better, or to
get an editor to pick up the check for meals, but also to understand the complex and
symbiotic relationship between fandom and prodom.Some of them, like Nick, luck out and
find it right away. Some, like Barb, wander into a bunch of Trekkies or Wookies or
Beasties who won't read anything except novelizations, who are watchers rather than
readers, whose only literary goal is to tell second-hand stories in a third-hand
universe, and she wonders what the hell I'm talking about. Then I drag her to a CFG
suite or a NESFA party and she meets the fandom I know, and suddenly she
understands why we keep coming back.# # # #
So I'm sitting in the airport, waiting
to board the plane from Winnipeg to Minnesota. I think there are three mundanes on
the flight; everyone else is coming from worldcon. Larry Niven's there, and Connie
Willis, and maybe a dozen other pros, and one of the topics of conversation as we
await the plane is whose names will make the cover of Locus if the plane
crashes, and whose names will be in small print on page 37, and how many obituary
issues Charlie Brown can get out of it. Then the topic turns to who you would
rescue if the plane crashed: Connie and Larry and me, because you wanted more of our
stories, or Scott Edelman and me, because you wanted us to be so grateful to you that
we'd buy your next twenty stories. (That goes to show you the advantages of being
able to do more than one thing well.)Now, in any other group, that would
be a hell of a morbid discussion, but because they were fans, and almost by
definition bright and witty, it was the most delightful conversation I'd heard all
weekend, and once again I found myself wondering what my life would have been like
if Ace had not forwarded that letter to Caz 32 years ago.And then I thought back to another
convention, the 1967 worldcon. I was still very young, and too cynical by half, and
when Lester del Rey got up to give his Guest of Honor speech, he looked out at the
tables -- every worldcon until 1976 presented the GOH speech and the Hugo Awards at
a banquet -- and said, "Every person in the world that I care for is here
tonight."And I thought: what a feeble thing to
say. What a narrow, narrow life this man has lived. What a tiny circle of friends
he has.
Well, I've sold 72 books of science
fiction -- novels, collections, anthologies -- and I've won some awards, and I've
paid some dues, and I don't think it's totally unrealistic to assume that sometime
before I die I will be the Guest of Honor at a worldcon.I've done a lot with my life (all
with Carol's help, to be sure). I've taken several trips to Africa. I've bred 27
champion collies. I've owned and run the second-biggest boarding kennel in the
country. I've sired a daughter than any father would be proud to call his own.
I've been a lot of places, done a lot of things. I don't think I've led a narrow
life at all.But when I get up to make my Guest of
Honor speech, I'll look around the room just the way Lester did, and, because I'm a
reasonably honest man, I won't say what he said.But I will say, "With three or
four exceptions, every person in the world that I care for is here
tonight." - - - - - - - - - -
Ben Yalow wrote of Mike's article that "it speaks to what fandom means to all of us
who consider ourselves part of it. I'm honored to be recognized by name, and hope
I've been able to help add to his fandom, as he has to mine." Vincent Clarke also
commented on Mike's article, saying that "I guess Mike Resnick's article explains
why I've been a fan for 50-odd years. I don't know about other folk, but I needed
that extended family -- and got it."And so we come to the end of first
half of this Fanthology. The first 16 issues of Mimosa were all printed the
traditional way -- by mimeograph on warm-and-fuzzy mimeotone paper, except for the
covers which were done commercially. We didn't know it at the time, but there would
never be another Mimosa reproduced that way. By the end of 1994, we had
thought we'd reached the point where we'd taken Mimosa about as far as we
were going to, at least in production and appearance. We were wrong, though;
something would soon take place that would not only cause a change in the appearance
of Mimosa, it would also turn our world upside down and prevent us for
publishing another issue for almost a year. It all happened on the afternoon of
January 3, 1995:Date: Tue, 3 Jan 1995 21:15:06 0500 (EST) E-mail to: FanFriends Distribution List From: Richard Lynch Not sure if this is the best way of
passing on some news, but it's probably one of the quickest. About six hours ago,
there was a fire in the townhouse next door to us. We smelled the smoke before we
saw it billowing out from under the front door of the neighbor's place (10 feet
across the small courtyard, facing our front door). The fire departments (several
of them) arrived pretty quickly, but the neighbor's place was a total loss. In the
process of putting out the fire, our home was severely damaged. The fire brigades
had to chop open roofs, break down firewalls, etc. to make sure the fire did not
spread.The Fire Marshall let me back in our
home, briefly. It was pretty discouraging. Ceilings and walls were down in all
rooms. We're staying in a hotel now (the Holiday Inn in Gaithersburg). We are down
to the clothes on our back for tonight, at least. It will be several weeks, perhaps
months, before we can return home to live.Oh well, life goes on...Best regards for the new year for
everyone,from Richard and Nicki LynchWhen we finally did publish another
issue, in October 1995, the fanzine had changed to a more modern appearance.
But for that story, and a collection of our favorite essays and articles from those
ensuing issues, we invite you to read Part 2 of this Fanthology, which we hope
to publish by the end of 2002. See you then!All illustrations by Joe Mayhew |
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