I've been to lots and lots of science fiction conventions, and in recent years I've been hitting sometimes three or four a year, but there will always be a special place in my geeky little heart for I-Con. This year's I-Con, at which I was a guest last month, was number 23 -- my first was, I think, number 4. Man, am I a dork or what?
I first starting attending I-Con in high school -- my family lived near the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where the con is held. Oh, it was a lot different, then, way back in the mid 1980s. It was a lot smaller, for one thing, small enough for the entire convention to be held in one small lecture building called Javits, quite possibly the ugliest structure crafted by the hands of man, a squat, hideously octagonal building that looks like it was designed to survive a direct nuclear hit. (A photograph would not do it justice, which is fine because I forgot to bring my digital camera with me to the con so I don't have a photo anyway.) Back then, the con was mostly small rooms running Doctor Who and Star Trek (when all we had was the original series) and Blake's 7 videos, SF movies running all night in the big lecture hall, and the "Cosmic Cafe," a barbecue stand set up outside that sold cheap hamburgers and cold cans of Coke.
Today, fandom has changed dramatically. It's all live-action role-playing gamers and medieval reenactors and Goths and dweebs and furries. *shudder* (Under the STOP on a campus stop sign, someone had scrawled "furries" -- so it read "STOP furries" -- and that was the moment that I missed my camera the most.) And today there's so much SF on TV -- which is what launches most really devout fandoms, as opposed to film -- that it's impossible to keep up with it, and everything geeky and cool is on DVD now and easy to slap into a player so that, say, Sapphire and Steel can run all day for your viewing enjoyment. (I watched my first-ever episodes of The Avengers at this past I-Con, and I'm hooked. I'm planning on spending the summer catching up.) As geek goes mainstream, geeks are fracturing into smaller and smaller cults -- whereas we older fans have all have memorized every episode of the Shatner-and-Nimoy Star Trek, there are fans today, particularly the young college-age crowd that predominates at I-Con, who can claim no familiarity whatsoever with a currently airing, long-running, and immensely popular show like Stargate SG-1 but know intimately all 14 episodes (three of which never even aired, they will gladly inform you, not that anyone was watching anyway, and are only available on the DVD box set) of Firefly. Which, of course, many other fans have never even heard of.
And I-Con is the place where all these people run into each other: buxom women in Renaissance wench costumes and too-skinny kids in Stormtrooper armor, gangs of Gothy kids draped in black reading comic books and many many many many people in jeans and T-shirts bearing anime characters or punny sayings only fans get ("Nobody expects the fannish inquisition!") or jokes you need a degree in astrophysics to understand. It's pretty much the stereotypical sci-fi con. I love it to pieces. Geeks, as my punny T-shirt proudly states, are my peeps.
Today, I-Con is 5,000 geeks spread all across campus, and the Cokes are sold by whatever Conhugeco Ltd. runs the campus concessions and hence are ridiculously overpriced (though still ice cold). If there's one thing that makes I-Con very different from other cons, it's the location. Most other cons are held in hotels with conference centers, and much of the fun isn't officially part of the con programming: the room parties in the evening (which can run into the very a.m.), hanging out in the bar and getting caught up in conversations you'd never have had anywhere else with people you'd never have otherwise met. There's a social aspect to fandom that's missing from I-Con.
But I still managed to meet some amazing people and see old friends. In the dealers' room, I ran into Terry McGarry, one of my oldest pals in fandom, whom I've known so long that I'm not sure exactly when we met. She and I were trying to figure this out recently -- how the hell did we meet? -- and we think it was through a Doctor Who email roundrobin fan fiction story, way back in the prehistory of the Internet, before the Web, when everyone's email address looked like this: 78,50*03$53#@compuserve.com. Terry's been writing short SF for years, but in 2001 Tor Books published her first novel, Illumination, a big chunky fantasy with a fresh look at the perils of magic; I bought the sequel, The Binder's Road, from the book dealer right in front of us and got her to autograph it for me.
On the other side of the dealers' room, I ran into a real blast from my fannish past: comic artist Ted Slampyak. Ted and I were producing fanzines at the same time in the middle and late 80s -- except his were in comic-book form. He put out a Blake's 7 zine called Freedom City Gazette that was a hoot. Most zines were (and are) absolute, total crap, and that I remembered Ted's name 20 years later is a testament to how good his stuff was. And is. Now his work is online at Jazz Age Comics, which aren't like anything else you'll find on the Web: "The Power of Silas Rourke," for instance, follows "the adventures of Harvard archaeologist Clifton M. Jennings, private eye Ace Mifflin, and their friends and cohorts as they fight the forces of evil in 1920s Boston!" Cool. Ted was doing Jazz Age on paper in the 80s, too, and he was kind enough to sign some vintage issues for me. I'm afraid I gushed quite a bit over his work right to his face, but he was most gracious and appreciative.
[Ted writes me to ask for a correction: He didn't actually publish Freedom City Gazette or any other zines, though his work did appear in many. FCG was published by Joe Nazarro.]
Web comics are another burgeoning obsession in fandom, and lots of practitioners of the art were on hand, like the guy (whose name I didn't get -- doh!) who does the disgustingly cute and cheerfully vulgar Goats. He's got lots of cool stickers, like the "Republicans for Voldemort" one I bought.
Right next to the Goats.com guy -- this is in an area where fan groups have tables trying to scrounge up new members, artists are signing autographs, flyers and freebies are for the taking, and so on -- are representatives from the 501st North East Remnant, aka The Fighting 501st, a Star Wars fan club that does some serious costuming -- their scarily realistic Stormtroopers often act as faux security, ushering big-name guests into their appearances and the like. But they're obviously branching out into Stargate SG-1, because here they were in Air Force uniforms. And on their table was a laptop running a totally geeky and awesomely cool sim of the SGC dialing program that took Sam Carter years to MacGyver in the absence of a DHD (and if you don't know what that means, never mind) that you can download here. It's only for PCs -- Mac people are slighted yet again -- which makes me very sad.
Across from the Stargate guys was Voltaire's table. He's kinda the king of New York's Goth underground, and he's an actual renaissance man (though he'd probably prefer to be called a medieval man). He makes animated films and commercials. He writes and illustrates comic books, like Oh My Goth! and the upcoming Deady the Malevolent Teddy. And he's one of my favorite musicians. His music defies categorization: it's only a little Gothy, mixed with tinges of Celtic and European folk music and more than a hint of rock; it's melodic and actually sweet under a coating of rage and bitterness; and he's got a voice that's devilishly angelic. He did a concert on the Friday night of the con, as he typically does each year, and it was a huge geekfest, as it always is, cuz not only is Voltaire the world's most vocal Star Trek nerd and sings about it, but with tunes like "God Thinks" (sample lyric: "I hate people who blame the devil for their own shortcomings / And I hate people who thank God when things go right"; it's on his album Almost Human) and his anti-hymn "Going to Hell in a Handbasket" (not yet recorded), his shows invariably turn into something approaching an atheist revival. I know Voltaire a little, and he's the coolest. I can't recommend everything he does highly enough. Go buyhis stuff.
And in the midst of running around all this fun, I did actually sit on some panels and expound on all things filmic and geeky, from "Comic Book Heroes on Film" to "SF Film Journalism: Interviewing and Writing About Films," "The Perfect SF Film" to "To the Moon, and Then to Mars, on Film." And more. I didn't even get a glimpse of author Guest of Honor ConnieWillis (though I have spoken to her -- that is, I worshipped at her feet -- at other cons), but I did share panels with some other terrific writers, including Bill Latham and Esther Friesner. I met Bill at last year's I-Con, and at that time he gave me a copy of his novel Mary's Monster, which is a really interesting extrapolation/continuation of the Frankenstein story -- Shelley's, not Hollywood's -- written entirely in streams of dialogue. It's a fascinating read. Esther, of course, has edited the SF/F anthologies Chicks in Chainmail, The Chick Is in the Mail, Chicks 'N Chained Males, etcetera, and has written a bunch of Star Trek novels, among other stuff. And at Boskone this past February, she read my hamster, which is a complicated system of divination that involves a stuffed rodent and a wheel. Seriously. Well, not seriously, but this did occur in actuality.
I also met, last year, Tony Tellado, and we kept running into each other this year, usually because we were on the same panels. Tony hosts Sci-Fi Talk, a daily Live365 talk show featuring interviews with people behind the scenes and before the cameras on, yup, all sorts of SF and geeky stuff, horror, fantasy. Check it out.
