Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (11 page)

After lunch, we drive down to the ferry slip at Armsdale, get our tickets, and then wait in a long line of cars for the ferry, which arrives about a half hour later. On board the ferry, we go up to the upper deck and stand by the rail as we cross to the mainland (this crossing takes about a half-hour, covering a much greater expanse of water). We stand there by the rail in the sharp cold wind, me holding my hat on my head with one hand to keep it from blowing away, watching military jets swoop by as they play chase-and-hunt games overhead, one screaming by us quite near to the water, as though it was about to strafe us, probably targeting us for practice (the air war in Bosnia is heating up at just this time, after all).

Back on the Scottish mainland, at Mallaig, we drop Amy off at the station to catch the train for Glasgow, telling her to warm the convention up for us; we have another night on the road before we’re scheduled to get to Glasgow, on Thursday, and plunge into the chaotic swirl of the Worldcon. Waving at Amy as we leave—she’s already found someone else she knows, waiting for the same train, before we’re even out of sight—we drive on down the twisting A830, past the coves and beaches of the Sound of Arisaig, and up into the mountains, where it begins raining lightly again. Down into a pocket of clear weather in the valley. At Fort Williams, the west bank of Loch Linnhe, where we just came from, is in dazzling sunlight, while the east bank is grey and threatening, with ominous black clouds swirling up where Ben Nevis is, although the mountain itself is invisible. Turn on to our old friend, the A82 (we would have ended up in just this spot if we’d continued south from Drumnadrochit a few days ago, instead of turning west toward the Kyle of Lochalsh), and climb sharply up into the mountains again, past the still-invisible Ben Nevis, which is buried in grumbling clouds, past Glencoe, through Rannoch Moor. At last, two-and-a-half hours after leaving Mallaig, we come to our last inn of the pre-convention part of the trip, the Alt-Chorrin House (which, we learn, is pronounced Alt HOOR-in House), situated right off the A82 between Tyndrum and Crianlarich.

The inn is a little closer to the road than I’d thought it would be—the train line to Glasgow is clearly visible from here, so that Amy, if she’d looked out the train window at the right time during her journey south, could have seen us standing in front of the inn—and there’s no lake here, as the photo in the brochure seems to indicate that there is (it turns out that the photo was taken in extremely forced-perspective by someone laying on their belly next to a small pond, making the pond look like an extensive mountain lake), but the view from the glassed-in front porch out over the mountains
is
very nice, including a fine view of Ben More with its head lost in clouds. The sun is struggling to come out here at the end of the day—although it never entirely succeeds—and we sit for a while on the front porch, watching the patterns of light and darkness shift dramatically along the hillsides, waves of shadow sweeping over the hills as clouds rush by, swallowing the sun for a moment, and then setting it free again, sending fans of brilliant light scything across the mountains; because of the way the light falls, it’s possible to see one peak picked out in dazzling white sunlight while an adjacent peak is half-lost in gloom and shadow. Light and shadow wash back and forth, up the hills and then down again, like some sort of tide.

Have dinner at the inn—good thing we booked for it; there’s nowhere else to eat within dozens of miles, except for a Happy Eater fast-food place way back up the road near Tyndrum—and then sit up for an hour or so on the front porch with a few of the English couples who are staying here, discussing small cultural differences. We talk about how you can’t seem to get real custard in America anymore, of the sort that’s served on pies here, and, for their part, they lament that you can’t get
really good
ironing-board covers in England, of the sort that you can buy in America. In fact, these ironing-board covers—made of “a sort of fabric we don’t have over here,” probably Teflon, is my guess—are really all that seems to impress them about American culture; they go on for some while about how wonderful these ironing-board covers are, and how they never wrinkle or need to be replaced, and we work out a mutually profitable scheme that involves them sending tank-cars full of custard to America in exchange for boatloads of the wonderful and invulnerable ironing-board covers. Then, with future international amity thus ensured, we go to bed.

You can tell that it gets
cold
here in the mountains, particularly in the winter. The room is equipped with electric blankets, the only ones we see in Scotland, as well as piles of more conventional blankets. The Alt-Chorrin House is also the only place in Scotland we visit that has double-glazed storm windows (still no screens, though).

Thursday, August 24th—Monday, August 28th—
Glasgow

Up about 7:30, pack, have breakfast, check out. The weather is miserable and grey, the wind occasionally gusting so that sheets of rain sweep by. The drive into Glasgow Airport takes about an hour, past the choppy waters of Loch Lomond, where the tour boats are out in spite of the stormy weather. At the airport, we have difficulty—as usual—finding the car rental place, but finally do, turn our car in, and take a taxi into the city, discovering that we have no cash left on us to pay for the ride. The driver very courteously (the Glasgow cab-drivers turn out to be almost uniformly polite and considerate) waits outside the Glasgow Marriott while I run inside and borrow twenty pounds from Lee Wood, who is almost the first person I see, with which to pay the fare.

Check in to the Marriott, and the Worldcon begins.

It would be more than usually tedious to detail a day-by-day report of the convention—although I did keep up with my diary every day, it’s mostly filled with such things as what panels we did and which publishing parties we went to when—so I’ll just give a series of brief impressions instead.

My first impression of the cavernous space of the Scottish Exhibition and Convention Center, with its high, latticework glass roofs, is that it’s like having a Worldcon in a train station, an impression reinforced by the little stands along the walls selling hot-dogs and pizza. The acoustics are so bad in the program area, because of those high ceilings, that it’s more like trying to do a panel in a bus station, with the voices spilling over from adjacent panels (no interior walls, just partitions) constantly rolling around under the roof, like an announcer with a bad PA system continually calling out the destinations for which buses are about to depart. I’ve never heard worse acoustics at any Worldcon anywhere—even people in the front two or three rows can’t hear what the panelists are saying, in spite of the functioning microphones.

A pall is cast over the convention, for the professionals, anyway, by the death of John Brunner on Friday afternoon. We speak to him briefly on Thursday afternoon when we arrive at the SECC, and I see him again in the SFWA Suite that night, noticing, when I leave about midnight, that he looks unusually tired and depressed (this isn’t retrospective foreshadowing, by the way, because I mention it to Susan when I get back to the room that night, long before we hear anything about John’s stroke). In the morning, Friday morning, we hear that John has had a stroke in the early hours of the morning, and is in critical condition at the hospital. By the afternoon, he is dead, and word of his death passes like a shock wave from person to person throughout the HarperCollins party—which is being held in a barge anchored in the River Clyde—leaving small thoughtful silences behind. Odd to be chatting to someone one moment and have him dead only a few hours later; it’s spooky, and it puts the thought of our own mortality into everyone’s minds, where it lingers like a morbid background hum for the rest of the convention.

Of course, the British professionals seem gloomy enough even before Brunner dies, and for good reason—the British science fiction industry is in ruins, with one major publisher openly stating that the science fiction market in Britain is “no longer big enough to bother with.” This impression is reinforced by the American writers who talk with British publishers about British editions of their SF novels, and who are more or less told that if they’re not writing Celtic fantasy trilogies, no British publisher is going to bother with them. One well-known middle-level British writer says that the only way he can get a science fiction book into print in Britain any more is by disguising it as fantasy, changing what otherwise would have been aliens into vampires or werewolves. In spite of the rush to fill the shelves with nothing but fantasy and horror, the dealers in the huckster room who run bookstores in Britain tell me that their customers keep telling them that they’re sick of Celtic fantasy trilogies and vampire novels and want more science fiction instead. Something is wrong here somewhere. But if the perception of the publishers that no one wants to read science fiction
is
wrong, there seems no way to convince the publishers of it. And the result, especially for the younger British writers, is that it’s impossible to make even a mediocre living writing science fiction unless you can sell a healthy proportion of your work to the American market. No wonder the British professionals look gloomy.

“Gloomy” is perhaps too strong a word to be used to characterize the convention in general, but “quiet” is probably moderately fair. For me, it seems like an even quieter Worldcon than last year’s convention in Winnipeg, although I think it’s technically bigger. Although there are a fairly large number of people in attendance, they’re stretched out over five or six hotels that are miles apart, much too far to walk, and so little party-hopping goes on, people tending to congregate at the bar of whatever hotel they’re staying at, and not venturing out into the dark and rainy Glasgow streets looking for other parties. We make it to the SFWA Suite in the Trusthouse Forte Hotel several times, which is probably the place where you are most likely to find at least some other professionals on any given night, but we never make it to the Central Hotel, for instance, where several big bidding parties take place, or to several of the other hotels where convention parties are going on; it’s just too much of a hassle to get there and then get back. The only night we do any real party-hopping is Friday night, when there are several publisher parties scheduled back-to-back-to-back. These have mostly blurred, although I do recall that the Orbit party, held in a grotto-like bar called The Arches, which is under the train-station, so that the whole place quakes when a train rumbles by overhead, features, on sale at the bar, a drink called a “slippery nipple,” which nobody has the nerve to ask the pretty young barmaid to give them. And that Susan and Michael Swanwick and I walk out singing “Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar!”, getting a very odd look from the doorman, and then get in a cab and go to the Tor party.

Glasgow itself strikes me as a grey and fairly uninteresting city, considered as a tourist destination (although, to be fair, we don’t do as much touring here as we’ve done elsewhere); much the same could be said about Philadelphia, after all, which is a pleasant enough place in which to live, but which doesn’t have all that much to really interest the tourist, once you’ve seen the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. The weather may help to give me this impression of Glasgow, since it remains overcast and raining throughout most of the convention, and few cities are at their best when seen under these conditions. Still, I have occasion to walk into Center Square one afternoon, and, when I get there, find myself surrounded by Woolworths, Burger Kings, Tie Racks, Baskin-Robbins, McDonalds, Pizza Huts . . . almost nothing of real interest to a tourist, nothing that is quintessentially Scottish, and much of the rest of the city, as we shuttle in cabs past a maze of highway interchanges and overpasses from one hotel to another (it’s almost impossible to walk from one to the other, in some cases, even if the hotel is in plain view a block or two away, because of the Motorways you’d have to cross), seems similarly plain and utilitarian. On the other hand, the people of Glasgow seem almost universally cheerful, friendly, and helpful, which probably counts for a lot more in the long run than how many interesting ancient monuments the city has. Glasgow might well be a nice place to live, but, to invert the old cliche, I’m not sure you’d want to visit there.

When I go over to give my condolences to John Brunner’s widow, several days after his death, she breaks into sudden hysterical tears, seizes my hand, puts her head down on it, and sobs on it for several minutes.

A piper starts playing in the SFWA Suite one night—at least one thing I’ve never seen in a SFWA Suite before. His bagpipes are almost—not quite—as loud as the voices of some of the SFWA members.

At one point, one of the Glasgow newspapers runs a story about the convention under a headline that reads something like “GROTTY WEIRDOS INVADE GLASGOW!!!!” Inside, they run a photograph of a transvestite dressed in a Las Vegas-style cat costume, his five-o’clock shadow clearly visible, with a line under the photo that says “TYPICAL SCI-FI READER.”

We have a good dinner with Mike and Carol Resnick at an Indian place called Mr. Singh’s, which had been recommended by George R.R. Martin, and where the waiter’s accent, a heavy Indian accent overlaid with a strong Glaswegian accent, is so impenetrable that we finally give up trying to comprehend what it is he’s trying to recommend to us and just gesture for him to bring it (fortunately, it doesn’t turn out to be flambéed rat head in octopus sauce, or somesuch). We have another good dinner, at a place called the Thai Royale, recommended by Daniel Korn and others, with Joe and Gay Haldeman, John D. Berry, and Eileen Gunn, during which I give Eileen her present, the Clan Gunn history, and she immediately begins to make plans to send everybody strange missives decorated with the “Weathered Gunn” tartan. Have an overpriced but congenial dinner in the French restaurant in the Marriott with Ellen Datlow and Scott and Suzi Baker.

In the midst of all this merrymaking, about half-way through the convention, Susan gets sick, the stress of the trip finally catching up with her. She spends parts of several evenings and almost all of Monday in bed, while I bring her infusions of new Brother Cadfael books.