Sunday turned into a strange dead time. It didn’t begin that way. I managed to be up, breakfasted and into the Hyatt Regency by 10 o’clock, in time for the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) Business Meeting, part 3. I confess, somewhat proudly, to missing parts 1 and 2 on Friday and Saturday. WSFS sounds very grand, but mostly it consists of people who like constitutions and arguing about changes to constitutions. This is not usually me, but Part 3 contained the voting on the 1984 worldcon (1983 having been decided the year before on a two year cycle). WSFS doesn’t have a decided membership, it seemed, since anyone at the con could just turn up and vote, so I did.
The first motion was about splitting off semi-pro zines from fanzines in the Hugo awards, where the options were to split them off, leave things as they were, or abolish fanzine Hugos altogether. I voted, out of devilment, for abolition, but the split won out, contributing no doubt to Dave Langford’s run of success in the fanzine Hugos thereafter (a run dwarfed by his 1989-2007 unbroken run as best fanwriter).
The 1984 worldcon vote was won by Los Angeles.
John Foyster was given a vote of thanks for the brevity of his announcement of Melbourne as a candidate for 1985, to quote: “ I couldn’t possibly tell you all about Melbourne in only five minutes.”
The cheers and rapturous acclamation from the audience were rather spoilt by Joyce Scrivner standing up and going on and on about it thereafter.
Joyce and I then adjourned to brunch, and afterwards, I could find no fans about the place, so I decided to walk down to Lake Michigan, taking little heed of the “No Pedestrians to Cross” signs. Well, I couldn’t see otherwise how you’d get from the hotel to the lake shore. I wasn’t going to take a taxi to go maybe 200 yards.
These were my actual, at-the-time, deep thoughts: Lake Michigan is wet, green, and has boats on it.
You don’t get writing like that today.
Back in the hotel I tried ‘Rumours’, the expensive bar which might or might not have been named after the Fleetwood Mac album. I got in there at five to three, ordered a dry martini and was given two. Happy hour was running up to three o’clock. You see! – if I’d tried to find the pedestrian routes to Lake Michigan, I’d have missed out on a free dry martini. The only pity was that I couldn’t take the second one with me to the panel I was on at four. Illinois state law prohibited open drink in corridors, so I was forced to knock it back before I left.
The panel was called “The Two-Ocean Fanzine: Australia to North America to Great Britain”, and I was with Jan Howard Finder, John Foyster, Joyce Scrivner (again, and misspelled, again) and Ted White. What was that all about ? I have no idea. Blame it on the martinis.