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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an attendee at a World Fantasy Con will leave with enough free books in a bag, and enough free food in a stomach, to offset the entire membership cost. This year's did not disappoint.
The large platters of sliced melons and unsliced cheese outside the autograph session Friday evening, and again at the art show reception Saturday evening, were for me the perfect substitute for the more decadent restaurant desserts I do not care for. There were richer snacks to be found, also, including what appears to be a WFC sine qua non: platters of complicated little hors d'oeuvres placed in dark corners where you could not tell what you were getting until you ate it.
Somewhere out there on the web there has to be a photo of Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birthday cake, a chocolate and red velvet concoction in the form of an ascension balloon, which was served triumphantly in the con suite Saturday evening. The secret to this unusual shape was an interior construction borrowed from the skeleton of a typical three-story over-parking-garage building.
As for book swag, I'm happy to have been gifted with such items as the last novel and short story collection of the late Tom Disch (a writer who got weirder and more fascinating with age), more collections by Gene Wolfe and Theodora Goss, a 1992 mystery novel by Dick Lupoff with an introduction by Donald Westlake, a reprint edition of The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett (a book whose title always makes me think it should have been written by Evangeline Walton), and much more. But not content with that, I also bought some:
We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle. Tachyon. The publisher was out of it, and I wondered if I'd only imagined hearing about this new collection. Then I saw a pile sitting on another table in the dealers' room, along with several other Beagle books. What I did not notice at first was that the man quietly sitting behind them was the author. When he finally said hello (he remembers me from Mythcons), I jumped. And now I have an autographed copy. Beagle's recent novels have been very lyrical; I was not expecting the acidic humor of the stories herein. Like the first one, in which an artist is interrupted by an angel who appears and announces, "I am to be your muse." The artist basically replies, "Dot's nice. Could you stop blocking the light, please?" The one about the man slowly turning French is even better.
The Fantastic Horizon: Essays and Reviews by Darrell Schweitzer. Borgo. Another advantage of knowing authors: when I came to Darrell's post at the autographing session, he had me pegged well enough to pick up this book and say, "I have a new essay collection." "Then I'll buy it," I replied. I consider him the best polemic essayist in the fantasy field, and there's lots of good stuff in this book, starting with a vigorous piece on Tolkien. Unfortunately there are also a lot of typos. A reference to a 1929 pulp story blurbed with "Sea Seas Treasure"? Probably "South Seas Treasure" was correct. And, Poe did not move to Philadelphia in 1938, though it would have been interesting if he had. Etc.
The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy. Penguin. Her YA novel, first published two years ago, but I hadn't seen it before. This is what I go to cons like this for.
The Best of Henry Kuttner. Ballantine, 1975. For some reason long my only hole in that series, now filled.
The large platters of sliced melons and unsliced cheese outside the autograph session Friday evening, and again at the art show reception Saturday evening, were for me the perfect substitute for the more decadent restaurant desserts I do not care for. There were richer snacks to be found, also, including what appears to be a WFC sine qua non: platters of complicated little hors d'oeuvres placed in dark corners where you could not tell what you were getting until you ate it.
Somewhere out there on the web there has to be a photo of Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birthday cake, a chocolate and red velvet concoction in the form of an ascension balloon, which was served triumphantly in the con suite Saturday evening. The secret to this unusual shape was an interior construction borrowed from the skeleton of a typical three-story over-parking-garage building.
As for book swag, I'm happy to have been gifted with such items as the last novel and short story collection of the late Tom Disch (a writer who got weirder and more fascinating with age), more collections by Gene Wolfe and Theodora Goss, a 1992 mystery novel by Dick Lupoff with an introduction by Donald Westlake, a reprint edition of The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett (a book whose title always makes me think it should have been written by Evangeline Walton), and much more. But not content with that, I also bought some:
We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle. Tachyon. The publisher was out of it, and I wondered if I'd only imagined hearing about this new collection. Then I saw a pile sitting on another table in the dealers' room, along with several other Beagle books. What I did not notice at first was that the man quietly sitting behind them was the author. When he finally said hello (he remembers me from Mythcons), I jumped. And now I have an autographed copy. Beagle's recent novels have been very lyrical; I was not expecting the acidic humor of the stories herein. Like the first one, in which an artist is interrupted by an angel who appears and announces, "I am to be your muse." The artist basically replies, "Dot's nice. Could you stop blocking the light, please?" The one about the man slowly turning French is even better.
The Fantastic Horizon: Essays and Reviews by Darrell Schweitzer. Borgo. Another advantage of knowing authors: when I came to Darrell's post at the autographing session, he had me pegged well enough to pick up this book and say, "I have a new essay collection." "Then I'll buy it," I replied. I consider him the best polemic essayist in the fantasy field, and there's lots of good stuff in this book, starting with a vigorous piece on Tolkien. Unfortunately there are also a lot of typos. A reference to a 1929 pulp story blurbed with "Sea Seas Treasure"? Probably "South Seas Treasure" was correct. And, Poe did not move to Philadelphia in 1938, though it would have been interesting if he had. Etc.
The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy. Penguin. Her YA novel, first published two years ago, but I hadn't seen it before. This is what I go to cons like this for.
The Best of Henry Kuttner. Ballantine, 1975. For some reason long my only hole in that series, now filled.
