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among international fandom.... I hope this particular TAFF controversy can be resolved without creating more bad feeling and dissension between fanzine fans and convention fans. As someone active in both areas, I really hate the Us vs. Them attitude that's grown in recent years between these groups."
It's a political split acutely felt by fanzine fans but only recently suspected by convention fans. Most Worldcon runners who have any opinion on the subject want to nurture the fan funds, whose delegates heighten the profile of traditional fandom at the con. In the same spirit, they keep the First Fandom awards as part of the the Hugo ceremony, trying to steer by a fannish pole star despite the winds of popular culture.
In the early '80s, fans amended the Worldcon rules to recommend ways to distribute Worldcon profits that placed fans funds almost at the top of the list. But rich brown's flaming online about comp rooms for fund winners resonates disturbingly with comments by other fanwriters over the last ten years characterizing the TAFF winner's obligation to attend the Worldcon as a burdensome courtesy performed on the way to visit real fans. Now, some of the same fans who installed that rules change wonder if they are being exploited by TAFF supporters who scorn convention fanac. For the first time there is resistance to contributing convention profits to fan funds, if not yet a refusal to do so.
Convention fans Martha Beck and Samantha Jeude didn't simply lose two TAFF races a decade apart, both times their very right to participate was sharply attacked in fanzine editorials and lettercolumns.
What would it take to set things right? Two opposite possibilities come to mind.
The most unattractive choice is for TAFF to declare that its mission is to exchange fanzine fans between North America and Europe. TAFF should also announce whether it will continue to send those delegates to the Worldcon whenever there's an opportunity. By taking these two steps, TAFF would eliminate the double-message being sent to convention fans. No doubt that would lead directly to the fund losing much of the financial support it gets from Worldcons. But many irksome contrasts between the TAFF concept and its reality would cease to exist.
A better choice would be one that fulfills TAFF's promise to all of fandom. Let there come a breakthrough, when a prominent convention fan stands for TAFF -- and wins -- in a race as closely contested and as cleanly fought as the Glasgow and Atlanta bids the 1995 Worldcon. I choose that example purposefully. The campaigners treated each other with great respect, an example TAFF candidates and their supporters should follow. Also, Glasgow's win ended a different kind of historic imbalance. Never before had an overseas Worldcon pre-empted the Eastern Zone in the 20-plus-year period that the rotation system had been in place. Fans' belief in the potential for fairness is strained when too many years pass without the balance being struck, and, in the case of TAFF, there's not even lip-service given to ever balancing the run of fanzine fans with a delegate chiefly known for her convention fanac.
Tom Disch Loses His Way:
Guest Editorial by John Hertz
A cover story about science fiction in a national magazine. Sounds great, doesn't it? I don't mean The New Yorker for July 17th. There was nothing newsworthy for us there. The streamer "The Sci-Fi Speaker, Hendrik Hertzberg on Newt's New Books" was what we'd expect, and so was the article on page 6.
No, the magazine was The Nation for February 27th, and the story was by a leading s-f writer, Thomas M. Disch. Here we may have a lower circulation, and no pretense of being mainstream -- The Nation is well to the Left of The New Yorker, and proud of it -- but the magazine is literate, the article was feature-length, and Disch knows something about science fiction. Or should.
In The Nation's cover drawing, men in flying saucers, escort a smug Gingrich, zap juice beaming from their pens: "Future Shockers: Sci-Fi Writers Invade Newton's Brain!" The headline, "Speaker Moonbeam: Newton's Futurist Brain Trust". Evidently neither Disch nor The Nation remember this was the name rightists threw at a certain California governor not long ago.
Disch hardly breaks custom by pressing literature into the mold of politics. And I can forgive the diction. But I never see how it's supposed to be impressive to use a word one obviously doesn't understand. Even under the standards of The Nation, I suppose it's too much to ask that Jerry Pournelle not be called Robert Heinlein's heir apparent -- Heinlein is dead, and an heir apparent is a person who will inherit if he outlives his ancestor.
But I do want Disch to get his s-f right. Let's start with facts. "Heinlein's first book, in 1950, was The Man Who Sold the Moon" -- as Ted White says, get real! Then let's read the stuff. Disch picks out Heinlein on a theory that, you guessed it,
In Starship Troopers (1959), his seminal work, Heinlein uses the gosh-wow conventions of pulp-era space opera to advance a political agenda that celebrates America's future as the Rome of the space age. With the skill of Leni Riefenstahl, the author glamorizes the trappings of military power --- the uniforms and macho rituals -- while lecturing the reader, as if he were a raw recruit, on the need to obey one's officers and to exterminate the enemy (the Bugs, in this novel) utterly.
Maybe that's Disch's own fantasy, but it isn't Starship Troopers. Heinlein was a Navy man, who with the Greek historian Polybius thought "war is a fearful thing, but not so fearful that we should submit to anything to avoid it". He warned against the trappings of military power, from Starship Troopers to Space Cadet. He was the Father of Modern Science Fiction for not lecturing readers, and in his best, of which there is a bushel, he never did. As for his seminal work, can Disch be unaware of the commotion when Heinlein followed Troopers with Stranger in a Strange Land, the yin to Troopers' yang, conspicuously absent from this article? For decades people asked Heinlein "How could you write both those books?" Heinlein himself joked how Stranger resembled John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy, another famous novel which, like Hesse's Nobel Prize winner The Glass Bead Game, never gets credit as science fiction. He scorned the cheap reader's notion that art "advances a political agenda". When he answered at all, he said "I'm a science-fiction writer. I make things up."
Why is Disch treating us to this? Because Disch's way of attacking Gingrich is to insinuate that Gingrich is ticky in the coco, and the evidence is that Gingrich is tarred with the brush of science fiction. Oh, and religion, too. "In short, vote for me and someday your children will inhabit the Star Trek of their video dreams.
When some mundane clod hits science fiction for the crime of being imaginative, I expect it. The news is that Disch, who should know better, turns this tired old taunt on Gingrich. Disch does not explore how amazing it is -- no pun intended -- that Gingrich professes to like science fiction at all. That when To Renew America came out it had thirty lines in the first thirty pages about science fiction. Disch has a sidebar that Gingrich is co-writing a book with Pournelle, but the point is only made to show how Newt is a nut and advancing a political agenda. The Speaker of the House is writing a science fiction novel with a winner of the Campbell Award! Even Heinlein didn't foresee this future.
So why does Disch do it? Because he's careless? Because rather than take on Gingrich's ideas he'd prefer to sling innuendo? I don't know. I know he's disappointed me. And he's left as a great big hole for conservatives that he accuses Gingrich of having imagination.
Star Trek: Voyager Creates New Universes to Conquer
by Francis Hamit
Copyright 1995. All Rights Reserved. First appeared in Advanced Image. It is perhaps the most successful entertainment franchise in history, having produced seven major motion pictures, four television series, dozens of novels, and a large and loyal legion of fans. It is a future where crew members refer to their starships affectionately as "she", and, in fact, at least one Star Trek producer confides that he thinks of the Enterprise as a character (or rather a succession of characters) in the play. The vision of the future that the late Gene Roddenberry had in the original Star Trek series in the late 1960s has been renewed and enhanced, most recently in Star Trek: Voyager, which has entirely new characters and debuted with some of the most spectacular special effects yet seen in a drama produced for television.
Special effects are an essential part of most television productions with an action adventure theme. Where science fiction is concerned, they are so important to the creation of a believable scenario and the viewer's suspension of disbelief that the production cannot be done without them.
While the elements of story, performance, directing and editing are essential, the special effects supervisor creates the final elements that make a quality production. That, in turn, requires meticulous and painstaking attention to details that are never noticed by members of the audience.
Paramount's new series, Star Trek: Voyager, chosen to flagship the Paramount United Network, continues a long tradition of quality. Dan Curry, a Special Effects Supervisor and second unit director for both Voyager and it's older siblings Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: The Next Generation, will work for two weeks completing the effects on a one hour episode; twice as long as everyone else.
While some effects are generated with computer graphic techniques, Star Trek: Voyager uses highly detailed models and sets to create its title starship. Well-established film techniques using motion control and multiple camera passes are used to create the elements that are used to render the Voyager and its surroundings.
The process of designing and constructing the models used is a slow and meticulous one. First a 3/4 elevation of the space craft is drawn and then Rick Sternbach, who has designed Star Trek productions for many years, makes a detailed set of drawings of the craft. These, done mostly by hand on a drafting board rather than with a CAD system, show how the compartments represented by individual sets relate to each other within the models. The models are built and carefully detailed by hand. They are then shot from a number of angles with a 4x5 view camera and many different angles and distances. These images are then digitized to create a database that will provide an integrated and continuous image. Sternbach also creates a "bible" of all of the visual elements, for future reference by writers, directors and technicians. This assures continuity from one episode to the next.
This does not mean that the models are then put aside. In fact, they are used most of the time, posing in an intricate ballet with the motion-controlled cameras. And the level of detail is such that color transparencies of the permanent sets representing the interiors of the starship are taken and placed in the proper windows on the models, which are made in several different sizes so that long, medium and close-up shots can all be set up easily.
It is this attention to detail that makes the illusion such a convincing one. It is painstaking work. Complex calculations precede the set-up of each shot, and it is slow. As Curry put it, "Watching motion-control camera work has all of the visceral excitement of watching cattle graze." Some of the time required is cut by using the new Kodak 5298 film stock, a fine grained, 500 ASA emulsion that can capture even minute points of light. This cuts the time required to make one light pass from two hours to about 20 minutes. Because of the varying intensities of the lights used, as many as seven passes are used for a single shot. The 35mm film originals are then electronically mastered on a D-1 video system, electronically composited, and output on a D-2 videotape system for release.
The starfield is a backlit hemispherical pinhole panorama, draped with black at the sides with a fixed point of view so that a motion control camera can pass its lens lovingly over a model in a continuous shot again and again as the "beauty" (showing the hull of the starship in its environment), matte and lighting shots are perfectly matched. The matte shot is done with ultra violet light on an orange background to provide visual separation of the models from the background.
Post-production work includes preventing or eliminating visual artifacts created by the three-two pulldown ratio between film and video and by the compression of digital images.
The fire-explosion created in the pilot episode, where one spacecraft rammed another, was created with liquid nitrogen controlled by a stream of compressed air and lit with tinted gels. The same effect will be used again, and the final version may be enhanced using computer graphics techniques. Other effects are sub-contracted.
The morphing of the "Odo" shapeshifter character in Deep Space Nine is done by Vision Arts. From a design provided by Curry, Santa Barbara Studios created the background for the Voyager title sequence. Amblin Imaging, a new unit of Stephen Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, created the plasma storm and vortex effects used in the series pilot episode. There are two special effect teams on each series which work on alternative episodes. The effects, perhaps ten percent of the entire production, must be both entirely believable and unobtrusive, to create the essential "suspension of disbelief" for the members of the audience.
The sets have interactive elements such as backlit control panels with flashing lights, and video monitors that play coordinated feeds of material that is essential to a script. Color transparencies of the sets, from the proper angle, are placed in the windows of some models so that even the audience's subconscious can be persuaded that what they are seeing is real.
The sets are also constructed and detailed to look and feel like the real thing. The railing in the bridge set behind the Captain's chair is brushed aluminum rather than painted wood. The chairs are meant to be sat in for long periods of time and the television and computer monitors are "live" meaning that they work in the shot during the action.
The other sets are equally sturdy. They fill several sound stages at one end of the Paramount lot, and production offices and other facilities are also close by.
"Dan's amazing," said Brannon Braga, one of Star Trek's producers and one of their most prolific writers, "He's one of those guys you can say 'we need an asteroid field, and it can't look like any other asteroid field the audience has ever seen -- and it's got to be cheap!' -- and he always come through. And it's convincing, and it's not always high-tech. He'd as soon use a piece of tin foil as a computer. I don't know the full extent of these techniques. When I write something, I just know it will be accomplished. We try to be explicit in our description of the effect. Sometimes we can't. We sometimes have no idea of what it should look like, as in the Voyager episode where they entered a space anomaly, and just ask that it look different.
"My only regret about using digital effects," Braga added, "Is that you lose some of the spontaneity you used to have, like when you were fiddling with lights and angles and you would accidently kick it -- and there it was."
The broad range of techniques used in special effects, from the simplest prop to the most advanced computer graphics software, has made the field an art form in itself; one that, like all good stagecraft, enhances but never intrudes upon the story.
Zagreb Again
in 19-fill-in-the-year
The first 1999 Worldcon bid officially filed with L.A.con III has arrived and it's from....
Zagreb. Krsto Mazuranic is back. Krsto writes, "Mad Bidders Never Desist. In order to prove this is not merely a witty slogan and an empty phrase, we hereby announce our intention to bid the city of Zagreb for the site of the 57th World Science Fiction Convention to be held in 1999."
His announcement came with a letter from by Maja Fabris, Vice President Marketing of ATLAS Travel Agency in Dubrovnik, Croatia. ATLAS confirms "in case of Zagreb being accepted as the site of the... Worldcon in 1999, it will provide hotel accommodation for the participants and accompanying persons/guests as well as function space for the Worldcon program."
Aussiecon 3, we'll leave the light on for ya....
Conventional Reportage
Can*Con '95
Ottawa, Canada
May 12-14, 1995
Report by Lloyd Penney
Can*con '95 took place at the Talisman Hotel in Ottawa. This gathering had many titles. Can*con was the 4th Annual Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Literature, the 15th CanVention, Boreal 12, the newly-revived Canadian Francophone SF&F convention, the First Annual Academic Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Literature, and Computer Expo II. It was co-host to the opening of the National Library of Canada's new exhibit on Canadian science fiction and fantasy. Lots of promises were made here, but I'm not sure how much was actually delivered.
The con was well-run but did have some problems. The program book never did arrive, which meant that the first day's worth of programming did not happen for the most part. People didn't know if they were on panels, or where they might be. A quick program guide was produced and distributed en masse to as many of the attendees as could be found. The con suite was small, hidden away and underused, as were the con office and green room. The hotel promised rooms they did not deliver for that weekend, so the art show and computer expo were shoved into the back of the dealers room. The function space was strung out through the entire length of the hotel, and so much of the weekend was spent walking from room to room. Directional signs were nonexistent, and room signs indicated what was in the room, but most of these signs did not go up until Saturday afternoon. I'm sure the pros would find this convention a marvelous gathering for their own interests, but I wonder how many of the fans and readers would agree with me in this con report.
Now, here's some other comments some may not like. I find that many Canadian cultural events are extremely snobbish and pretentious, and based on my experiences that weekend Can*Con '95 (etc.) wasn't much different. I guess I should have expected that such a highly literate and pro-oriented event should have little for the fans or readers, but chairman Jim Botte assured me there would be something for everyone. I left the convention a little disappointed and alienated. I recognize the hard work and effort that Jim Botte, Farrell McGovern, and the rest of the committee put into the con and I think, despite the few cavils above, the con was a success. It's just that I think a Worldcon caters to all interests of all its attendees, and a CanVention should do the same thing.
Yvonne and I went to Can*con '95 because of Jim's assertions of variety for all, and because of our nominations for the Auroras. I guess we're just used to fannish conventions with the enjoyment of SF&F and fun foremost in mind, not the professional self-absorption and the ultra-litcon.
The Bottom Line on Can*Con:" "Can*Con '95 lost about $2,000, it would have been more but Smith books came through big time." [[ConTRACT, Jul/Aug 1995]]
Disclave 1995
Washington, DC
May 26-29, 1995
Report by Martin Morse Wooster
Having been rejected by yet another suburban hotel, Disclave returned to downtown Washington to the Renaissance Hotel. This was a smart move, since the Renaissance Hotel was not only located near several inexpensive restaurants in Chinatown, but also seemed to welcome Disclave. There weren't as many people as in years past; if attendance was over 800, I would be amazed. And while most of the big-name out-of-town pros (such as Gardner Dozois and his friends) were out of town, the con was also free of the destructive punks that have cluttered Maryland conventions, although there was one party for "people in black." (Calling them "Goths," I'm told, is now politically incorrect.)
GoH Charles Sheffield gave a very amusing speech full of anecdotes about various writers he's dealt with in his career. Other programming was, in the Disclave tradition, very light. The spacious "Discave" consuite continued to be one of the better hospitality suites at a convention.
Most of the parties were convention bids, and rumors swirled thick and fast about Worldcon bids. The smofs I talked to were agreed that Atlanta now has a lock on the 1998 Worldcon because of the relaxation of the rule about submitting Worldcon bids [sic]. Everyone is convinced that the DragonCon committee will convince about 5000 members to buy supporting memberships which will then be "hand-carried" by DragonCon committee members (with capacious hands!) to Glasgow. Some say that DragonCon is doing this because they already have the largest con in America, and holding a Worldcon would be slightly easier than running a DragonCon. Others claim that DragonCon has already signed agreements with the hotels they plan to use and that they have decided to go for broke and get the Worldcon. They have apparently announced that if Baltimore wins the Worldcon, then DragonCon will be held over Labor Day. In any case, it's clear that Atlanta will be the first Worldcon to be dominated by comics, gaming and media fandom.
Chicago in 2000 continued to offer its cards of pros for presupporting members. Shamelessly copying the L.A.con III sticker book, Chicago plans to offer 41 different cards of pros, complete with baseball-card-like stats on the back. Turn in 20 of them to the committee and you can convert your supporting membership to attending. Get all 41, says big chair Tom Veal, "and you'll have a very nice collection." As an added benefit, the cards can also be used in Magic games. Asking around, people concluded that Gordy Dickson had the power to control Tully bottles, while George Alec Effinger could control sand. But what powers does Fred Pohl have? Suggestions to the Chicago committee.
ConQuest 26
Kansas City, MO
May 26-28, 1995
Report by Mike Glyer
Only 25 years late, I've learned ConQuest is too good to miss. These people are true conrunners. The con chair had a nine-year-old kid left with her during the con and instinctively decided, "That boy don't need a babysitter, he needs a job!"
ConQuest 1995's theme, "Alternate Hollywood," found a dozen creative outlets. They covered the con suite walls with a series of humorous variations on classic film posters such as Cthulhublanca. The committee paraded through Opening Ceremonies in costumes satirizing famous movie roles and personalities. They even chose the perfect toastmaster, Alternate- anthologies editor Mike Resnick.
Resnick introduced author Octavia Butler and the con's other guests at Opening Ceremonies, myself included. He admirably carried the load of entertaining the audience with his misadventures. Resnick concluded with the story of how a Cape buffalo interrupted him while he was trying to answer nature's call behind a large bush: "[In Africa] you're never alone. No matter how empty and desolate the plains are, do one embarrassing thing and you've got an audience Lawrence Olivier would die for."
There was a ready audience at ConQuest for all kinds of humor. The Masquerade was essentially a tournament of costumed wits. Some took a morbid turn, like the "SCA widow, who grieves every day for her husband who was slain -- at her hands." There was also a vampire who declared, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for I am one of them...."
Other favorites included the Animaniacs, whose red noses kept falling off and bouncing into the audience. They still won Best in Show. A man in a kilt and cowboy shirt came as "Rob Roy Rogers." "Fannish Gump" twisted the film's clichéd line into: "Fandom is like a box of chocolates: a lot of fruits and nuts in skimpy wrappers."
On a panel about humor in fandom, I got my first look at those kings of comedy, the pilots of "White Knuckle Airline" from Wichita, Kansas. I think it was one of them who said, "The only thing you have to remember about Kansas fandom is that Kansas wasn't flattened in a day." Roger Tener and Leonard Bishop told frightening stories about almost making it to conventions in private planes, stories now graced with humor because everyone made it through unscathed.
I highly enjoyed my long conversations with Ken Keller at ConQuest. I specially note that because three fans watched us talking in a corner of a room party for 20 minutes, then tried to rescue me. Thoughtful, but quite needless: we became engrossed in analyzing the impact of 1976's Big MAC, the first mega-Worldcon, which he chaired.
Of course, Keller enjoys a certain reputation. A one-sheet distributed on the last day of the
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