LACon III - WorldCon 1996
Con Report by Avery Davis
Copyright (C) 1996

WED, 8-28-96:  The flight out.  I traveled on Continental, with a
change of planes in Houston.  I had never been in the Houston airport
before, and I was in it about an hour longer than planned due to a
"minor technical difficulty" with the aircraft.  Landed at the Orange
County airport about 8:00 PM PDT, and arrived at the Anaheim Hilton
hotel about 9:00 PM.  When I checked in to the hotel, I was informed
that my roommates had not yet arrived.  After putting my stuff in the
room, I went back to the hotel lobby and wandered through the
convention levels, and eventually found one of my roommates, Joe
Mayhew, in the artshow filling out his bid sheets.  I sat and talked
with him while he finished this, then we went up to the room where I
met my other roommate, Bernard Bell.  We chatted a little while before
getting to sleep.
TH, 8-29-96:  Got out of the room about 9am, got a quick breakfast in
the hotel lobby, then went across the street to the Marriott to get my
convention registration.  This went very smoothly with almost no
waiting in line.  I got a nice looking program book, and a nifty
little pocket program.  Since the convention center and programming
didn't open until 12 noon, I hung out in the Marriott convention area
lobby where all the flyers and freebies were located.  At noon, I went
over to the convention center, and once inside got in line (the only
line I stood in for any convention function) for the KaffeKlatsches,
where I was able to get in on the one for Spider Robinson (Sunday at
3pm).  Then on to the first panel: #1, "Moonbase Science".  Les
Johnson from NASA-Marshall and a recurring guest at DragonCon was on
this panel, and it went very well.  2:30pm: I started with #17 "The
Delta Clipper" for about 20 minutes, until the presenter showed the
video of the crash. Then I went to #12, "Politics and the Future".
Brad Linaweaver was on this panel, and I also saw J. Neil Schulman for
the first time as he commented from the audience.  4:00pm, I joined a
group of people leaving the #12 panel, including Brad, J. Neil, Alex
Lucyshin, Bill Ritch, and several others, for an expedition into the
dealer's room/exhibit hall.  While wandering through there, I met my
old girlfriend, Sue "Who" Abramowitz-now-Schroeder.  Since we were
both going in different directions, we didn't talk long, just the
usual pleasantries and a hug, but I did see her several more times
during the convention.  Her husband, Larry, was involved in running
"tech" for the Major Events in the arena, so I didn't see him until
Monday evening.  I also talked to Dave Kyle at his table.  Dave was
amazed that I remembered his Fan GoH speech at the Baltimore WorldCon
in 1983.  Finally, I got back together with Brad and J. Neil and the
rest for a dinner run.  But first, we had to hang out in the hotel
lobby for a while to get everybody together.  Then we walked about a
block to an Indian restaurant, Ashorka.  Normally, I don't care for
Indian cuisine because the curry is too hot for me, but Ashorka also
had Tandoori, which is a kind of grill, so I had grilled chicken and
fried rice, and it was excellent, spiced to be flavorful without being
hot.  With the interesting conversation, we stayed until after 8pm,
missing the opening ceremonies and enough of the ice cream social that
the ice cream was all gone by the time we got there.
Well, I stopped making my daily diary entries after Thursday, so I
will have to reconstruct the rest after the fact, and just hit the
highlights.  The big problem was that there were just too many tracks
of excellent programming!  I missed several really wonderful events
because I was at some other wonderful event, or in the dealer's &
exhibit hall.  Oh, well, on with the highlights:
Friday, 8-30-96:  I met Hugh Gregory, who moderates the Space Base
echo conferences on Fidonet, at his panel, "Soviet Space Disasters"
(66), in which he showed a lot of impressive video, such as the
"Nedelin disaster" where the Soviet's Moon rocket blew up on the pad.
I also attended "Faster Than Light Or Slower Than Molasses" (142), and
"Debate: Science Fiction Is Inherently Liberal/Conservative" (188)
with Brad Linaweaver and Frederik Pohl.  This last actually went very
well, except the "moderator" showed up about a half hour late and
really wasn't necessary - Brad and Fred were being very civil to each
other in their disagreements.  That evening, the parties really got
underway.  Some of those I remember:  NSS, Babylon5 in 2258,
DragonCon, Circlet Press.
Saturday:  Missed the Babylon 5 presentation by JMS at 3pm because the
room filled up (1200 capacity!) before I got there, but JMS repeated
the presentation at 5:30, which was not full even though it was in a
smaller room, and a few of us who hung around after main presentation
got to interact directly with JMS, and he gave out B5 fan club poster
which he proceeded to autograph (I was so caught up in the
conversation, I neglected to get my poster autographed!).  ...  I
attended the Prometheus Awards by the Libertarian Futurist Society.
Brad Linaweaver introduced James P. Hogan, who presented the awards:
Best Libertarian Novel of 1995 went to The Star Fraction by Ken
MacLeod, and the Hall of Fame award for best classic SF novel went to
Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein.  ...  In the Fan Hospitality Room, I
found Jack Hennigan, who was in charge of the room at that time, and
we spent a while renewing an old acquaintance:  we were both active in
Washington D.C. area fandom in the late '70's.  I also had a chance to
talk to Sam Moskowitz in the Fan Room.  I had a question for him that
J. Neil Schulman had mentioned to me about a rumor that during WWII,
while Robert A. Heinlein was working in a shipyard with Isaac Asimov
and L. Sprauge DeCamp, he also had a second, secret, assignment, and
that was with the Manhattan Project.  Sam seemed to recall that
Heinlein did work on something classified during the war, but couldn't
recall exactly what it was.  He was pretty sure that it was not the
Manhattan Project.  He also couldn't recall a reference that might
have something documented about this.  The only reference I have is a
footnote by Heinlein to the short biography by Isaac Asimov in the
MidAmeriCon (Worldcon '76) program book: "During '42-'45 I held two
assignments, one public and one classified."  While on the subject of
MidAmeriCon, I found a publication of a story I have been looking for
that was originally published in on of "Big Mac's" progress reports,
"How the GRINCH Stole Worldcon" by Bill Fesselmeyer, in Alternate
Worldcons and Again, Alternate Worldcons, edited by Mike Resnick,
which includes all of the stories from Alternate Worldcons.  The new
stories are about WorldCons that might have been in the years 1939,
1945, 1964, 1967, 1982, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2001, 2101, and ????.  ...
Skipped seeing the Masquerade, went to dinner afterwards with Bill
Ritch, Caran Wilbanks, Alex Lucyshin, and two friends of Bill's from
Cleveland who's names I can't recall right now.  I am afraid I was
doing some "showing-off":  I pulled my little GPS receiver out of my
pocket and was "navigating" to the restaurant.  It was an interesting
conversation piece, and it was amusing to see it tell me that my car
back at the Atlanta airport (whose location I had marked right after I
parked) was 1,919 miles away on a bearing of 067 degrees magnetic.
Sunday:  I attended the Kaffee Klatsche (roundtable discussion with
one author and about a dozen fans per table) with Spider and Jeanne
Robinson.  They sat together with two tables pulled together so they
could interact with the fans together, and it was really wonderful,
with them telling stories on each other.  I will retell one story
Spider told on himself about his collaboration with another author,
John Varley, whom Spider kept calling "Herb".  This is a kind of
background on a reference to Varley's story, Press Enter, made in
Spider's book, The Callahan Touch.  Varley's story is about a
spontaneously occurring artificial intelligence that becomes
malevolent and destructive to humans, and Spider's feeling was that
such an AI would just as likely be at least pacifistic if not
benevolent to humans, so he wrote a short story expressing this theme,
titled it Touch Return, and sent it to Varley. "Herb" responded with a
short story titled Yank Chain, which was a viscous parody of a
Callahan's story, including many new and awful verses for "That's
Amore". After the hour, Spider signed autographs, and I got three
including his new book, Callahan's Legacy, was available pre-release
from one dealer at the con.  I finished reading this new book on the
plane back to Atlanta, and it is very good, taking place about eight
months after the preceding book ends.  Dustcover art includes a
portrait of the author.
I attended the Hugo awards as a guest of my old friend Joe Mayhew, who
was nominated for Best Fan Artist, so I got to sit with him in the
seats down front.  He had carefully not gotten his hopes up for
himself, but he was hoping that Ian Gunn would win instead of William
Rotsler.  The Hugo Losers party afterwards was very good, but crowded.
Monday was slower and calmer, kind of sad with lots of people leaving,
such as my roommates.  I caught the latter portion of a very
interesting presentation by Dr. Jack Cohen, "Why flying Saucer Aliens
Can't Be Real" (562).  Cohen is an evolutionary biologist who uses
very logical and reasoned arguments on why space aliens would be so
greatly different from any terrestrial life form that we couldn't
imagine what they would look like, so all of the "reports" of aliens
from "abduction victims" describe beings that are too human to be
credible as real space aliens.  He also plugged his new book, Figments
of Reality, and his earlier book, The Collapse of Chaos.  He also
recommended a book by Jack Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee.  The books
sound interesting and I mean to look them up.  ...  Closing ceremonies
were interesting, but it was depressing when it was all over.  ...
The Sci-Fi Channel was there taping a lot of the goings on, and they
cut it down to a one-hour special, "Worldcon 96", that caught a slice-
of-life of LAConIII.  It was real good in spots, quite silly in
others, and tended to give better coverage to media related people and
exhibits (but, after all, this Worldcon was just a few expressway
exits away from Hollywood CA).  Also, it cut the few times I was in
front of the camera when they were taping.