Since I got an invitation to the Fan Editors’ Luncheon (why, I don’t really know), I now have an obligation, I believe, to say a few words about this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, currently under weigh in Montreal.
We’ll get the bad part off my chest right away. The Montreal airport is not warm and friendly. Being that it is named after Pierre Elliott Trudeau, I ought not to have expected it to be warm and friendly. In fact, I’m not sure that I wanted it to be. For the benefit of future travelers, let me warn you that, if you enter a huge, empty room with not a soul in sight and see an Attendre ici sign, attendez ici sans mouvement, no matter how long it takes. The instant that you proceed past the sign, an ill-tempered gendarme will materialize, full of Gallic wrath. I did have the good sense to learn from Professor Gates’ errors and keep my denunciations of his anti-American racism under my breath.
Otherwise, Montreal is a wonderful tourist city. It isn’t clear, in fact, that it is anything else. The most common billboard is Espaces à Louer, suggesting that there may be too few inhabitants in relation to the available structures. That, however, is not a problem for visitors. There is, in particular, a delightfully low ratio of patrons to restaurants, and the cuisine that I’ve had has been excellent.
I’d been told that practically everybody in the city speaks English but that they’re touchy about languages and want to be addressed in French. So far as I can tell, that is a myth. I haven’t been given the opportunity to use more than half a dozen words of my amateurish Français. Maybe I just look like an American imperialist and the locals are afraid not to converse with me in the language of hyperpower hegemony.
Turning to the Worldcon itself, the concomm seems to have put too much off to the last minute (hardly the first to do that), but, when the last minute arrived, the work got done. The most serious problem is the program grid, which has a tendency to put panels in the right room at the wrong time. Otherwise, the convention center (oops, Palais de Congrés, though all the actual Montrealers I’ve spoken to say, “convention center”) is attractive and well laid-out, with a mall on its ground floor hosting beaucoup shops and eateries. The aforesaid Fan Editors’ Luncheon took place in one of them, the Fourquet Fourchette (forky fork?), where I consumed an admirably cooked whitefish.
The HQ and party hotel, the Delta Centre-Ville, is a couple of very long blocks from the convention center, but that’s cozy compared to some recent Worldcons, and the weather has been blissfully free of Global Warming. The parties have not. While the 28th floor suites, where most of them take place, have two-story interiors, which is nice, their square footage is on the low side, which is less so. Crowding wasn’t too bad Thursday night, but Friday has been jammed. That is not, let me hasten to add, a wholly bad thing.
The elevator crunch was handled in a way that I haven’t often seen before. Half of the elevators were dedicated to express runs to the party floors; the rest would go only to non-party floors, with some reserved for convention members only and others for non-conventioneering hotel guests. To make this work, elevator operators were needed. They were mostly young British fans. Naturally, some people assumed that these kids were Quebeçois and tried to ask questions or ask for floors in French. That didn’t work very well.
My own room is in the Embassy Suites, across the street from the convention center, albeit at the far end of the block from the entrance. Apparently, if I may return briefly to languages, hotels are divided between Francophone and Anglophone. In the former, such as the Delta, the monitors in the elevators display news headlines in French. At the latter, of which the Embassy Suites is one, they carry television feeds close-captioned in English and pretty obviously aimed at Americans.
A freebie for convention members was a trade paperback from the Parisian publisher Bragelonne, consisting of translations of stories from the “new French school of fantasy”. What I’ve read of it so far doesn’t yield many clues as to how la nouvelle fantaisie française differs from la vieille anglaise. This could be a complicated inquiry. After all, one of the primordial English fantasies, William Beckford’s Vathek, was composed in French. I noticed that a Bragelonne story takes it for granted that readers will be familiar with
There is no surprising news about future Worldcon bids. The long awaited Texas in 2013 bid made itself official, announcing that its site will be San Antonio, as in 1997. The facilities will consist of the convention center and the two face-to-face Marriotts, all familiar from LoneStarCon, plus a newly built Hyatt. A Japanese bid for 2017, without many details, also appeared. Somewhere-in-Britain-in-2014 threw a large, crowded party but isn’t yet ready to name a location. We still don’t know whether San Diego in 2015 will become a reality. Meanwhile, after interminable fumbles by the D.C. city government, construction of a Marriott Marquis next to the new (well, no longer all that new) Washington convention center is supposed to start in October. The hotel will have 1,100 sleeping rooms and 100,000 square feet of function space. All that a Washington in 20?? bid needs now is someone to launch it.
No future year yet has competing bids, and none of those announced to date is likely to attract opposition. There is thus an excellent chance of at least a five year run (2010 through 2014) without a Worldcon contest. I’m fairly sure that would be unprecedented.
For those who pay attention to such matters, the first day of the WSFS business meeting passed a couple of innocuous “sense of the house” resolutions and sent to oblivion a proposed constitutional amendment that would have mandated at least one female nominee in every Hugo Award category. Appallingly, ten people voted in favor. Saturday’s session will consider the abolition of the Best Semiprozine category, a measure that won preliminary approval last year but whose dynamics may have altered dramatically with the death of Locus publisher Charles N. Brown. We shall see in a few hours.
A convention highlight that I somehow managed to miss was an hour-and-a-half dialogue between former economist Paul Krugman and Scottish SF writer Charles Stross. To see Professor Krugman on the program startled me at first, but it’s entirely appropriate. His recent writings furnish overwhelming evidence that he lives in an alternative universe.
Hors de congrès, I saw that a cinema only two miles away was showing Moon, which has been highly recommended to me but has a very limited release. So I strolled over to see it. My quick verdict: Beautiful lunar photography, an intriguing concept, and a plot so full of holes I had trouble detecting any cheese. Sadly, I must consign this one to the “Wait for Netflix” category, even if the small screen will diminish the imagery.
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