Posting this a little late, but I’ve been busy this week. More on that story later.
I spent last Saturday watching obscene ukelele ballads, arguments about ray guns and grown men attacking each other with fish. Yes, it’s Picocon time again.
Despite being an unabashed geek I’d never thought of myself as a con-goer until last year. Isn’t that where the scary people are? The ones who never go outdoors except in Star Trek uniforms and leather trenchcoats? I love my science fiction but it really didn’t sound like my sort of thing. Then we were invited to Imperial College’s mini-convention, held on one day in one lecture theatre with a cast of literally dozens, and I went away an evangelical convert.
It feels like a festival. You see people wandering around in the middle of the day drinking ale and smiling. Smiling! At complete strangers! It’s as if we’ve been teleported from London to a completely different city.
The day opened with a reading from Michael Marshall Smith, who gave us a story about a salesman on a shopping channel who has a very strange night. He remarked afterwards that there seems to be a kind of nihilistic hatred in the work of writers who have worked in television. Pat Cadigan teased us with a bit of her story for a new anthology paying tribute to Poe. Later on she told us that she danced the tango with Robert Heinlein on her 23rd birthday. Classy lady. Everyone did what she told them. She’s the person every geek would like for a godmother.
Robert Rankin was the only writer whose work I was even slightly familiar with. He has books with titles like The Dance of the Voodo Handbag and Sprout Mask Replica. I assumed he would be like a cuddly Terry Pratchett.
He started by marching to the front of the lecture theatre and hurling chalk at the audience. He banged the board pointer on the desk, exploring it for trapdoors, and then launched into a series pf stories about his electric blue suit and the mind-bending drugs he was given by a weirdo in his local pub. He leered into the video projector. He threw more chalk. He brought out a flying-v ukelele and performed a one-chord medley of rock standards before his wife joined him for the filthy and funny ditty he called ‘Writing Far-Fetched Fiction.’ When I woke up on Saturday morning I did not expect to see a 59-year-old man singing about golden showers.
I was sorry to miss most of the destruction of dodgy merchandise auction, but it was a pleasure to see a crap plastic imitation of Mjolnir being dipped in liquid nitrogen and smashed with a sledgehammer. The Batman action figure that fired miniature chainsaws suffered a similar fate.
After lunch there was an attempt at a panel discussion on ray guns, which none of the guests were interested in. It was rapidly derailed by Robert Rankin seizing control of the video projector and getting his wife to show us her seahorse tattoo. He also insisted on using the swiveling stool to demonstrate centrifugal force. He’s a crazy man and I love him.
Pat Cadigan claims that she invented the turkey reading at a party in the 60s. People bring in gloriously dreadful passages of SF writing and read them until you pay them to stop. Bidding wars commence if others want to hear more. The traditional Eye of Argon was given an outing, as well as the erotic masterpiece Anal Planet. However, the undisputed highlight of the event (and perhaps the entire convention) was a complete read-through of ‘The Carrot of Doom.’ In which a wizard battles a giant telepathic vampire carrot. It even had illustrations. The prose defies useful description, but the room raised an unbelievable £91 to hear it in its entirety.
Silly games followed, with Just A Minute on the subjects of borg cooking, cyberman ballet and the judicial procedures of cyberpunk Japan. As the sun went down, UCL and Imperial students emphatically did not have a fish duel. Nobody attacked anybody with a dead trout at all, nor did anyone shout “grab it by the gills, you’ll have a better grip!”
The pub quiz was as fiendishly difficult as ever, but the UCL team managed a respectable place in the top half of the table. After praying for a comics question I think Michael may have become a little overexcited when asked to recite the Green Lantern oath. Just a little. He’s a very shy person really.
The proper way to end a Saturday is with a cocktail party, preferably at Tom’s house where there are guaranteed to be funny and excellent people and home-made ale. I retired around 1am, having avoided the Tabasco-based beverages that had such a memorable effect on our friend Francisco.
“Hurry up, I think he’s going to be sick.”
“I don’t feel good, man…”
“Look, I’ll go on the loo and you can use the sink. Ah, here we-”
“BLEURRGH!”
“Oh god, it’s red!”
I slept like a log.
