27 September, 2010

MadCon Recap 2

While Harlan Ellison was the guest of honor, he wasn't the only guest there. I got to meet Ace!



(I think that she's even taller than Sylvester McCoy!)


Sophie Aldred played Ace on Doctor Who from 1987-89. She was the final companion of the classic series and the template for Rose. She blew stuff up with Nitro 9, beat the crap out of a Dalek with a baseball bat, and generally kicked some butt. I think that it also had to do with the fact that she was relatively close to my age. I recall seeing Sylvester McCoy in La Crosse as part of a promotional tour he was doing. We would get to see DW not long after it had aired in the UK instead of having to wait for years for PBS to show them. Ace and the Seventh Doctor were current, as it were. They were of my time instead of a recent past.

Sophie was a real sweetheart and told some good stories. She talked about how she got into acting and recalled when she got the part of Ace. At the time she was doing Fiddler on the Roof. The guy playing a rabbi had also been on DW – he'd been a Dalek. When Sophie got the call that she'd been given the part, the guy gave her a postcard with three Daleks on the front. On it he had written "Welcome to the family. You will not be exterminated."

Sophie also related how she was a DW fan as a kid and had always been terrified of Cybermen. She had only recently tried to listen to any of the DW audio dramas she'd done for Big Finish. Her first was The Harvest, a Cyberman story. She'd put her children to bed one night and put it on only to turn it off after a short time because it was too damn scary to listen to alone at night. Along these same lines, Sophie also talked about the new series. One night, again after having put her kids to sleep, she and her husband watched "The Empty Child" – the Ninth Doctor episode with the kid who has a gas mask attached to his face and who goes around saying "Are you my mummy?". As they were watching it, she heard one of her kids saying something but couldn't quite make it out as the living room door was closed and the kids' bedrooms are upstairs. So she opens the door and looks up the stairs. All that can be made out is this short shadowy figure at the top of the stairs pleading, "Mummy!" Sophie said she was petrified.

As I said above Sophie was a great. Luckily she and her handler (a friend of hers) went downtown and around campus. They saw the Capitol, wandered State Street, and eventually made their way to Memorial Union. She said that it was lovely and was surprised at the lack of tall buildings here. I say she was lucky because I ran into one of Harlan Ellison's friends outside who finished a sentence with an emphatic "Fucking Madison!" as I approached. When he saw me he apologized and I asked what the problem was. He said that, whenever he comes to Madison (the guy is from the UK), he always gets stomach problems from the food. This, I discovered, was because he always stays out by East Towne Mall and eats at buffets in the area. He said he was friends with Jamie Oliver, has taken meals with Anthony Bourdain, and used to be a chef and restaurant consultant.

I told him that his problem was that he sticks around the 1960s suburban mall part of town. "Head downtown," I urged him. "We do actually have good food here." I directed him to the Japanese restaurant across the street and to Maharaja. I hate to see a visitor come here all the way from England get stuck eating crappy food in a crappy mall and not seeing the more scenic aspects of town and eating some of the great food we have on offer.





Above are some of the other guests at the con. You've got sci-fi authors Mark Tiedemann, Gene Wolfe, and Pat Rothfuss plus uber-fan Richard Russell. I believe this was from a panel discussion the topic of which was "Style or Substance – What Got Us Into Science Fiction & Fantasy in the First Place?" Now, aside from Harlan, I didn't know squat about these other guys. I'd heard of them but had never read anything by them. (Rothfuss is from Madison originally and he now resides up in Stevens Point.) This was one of those panels that I hadn't originally decided to attend but did because of the way my schedule turned out and I found it immensely interesting. (This is often the case at cons.)

There was a long, rueful discussion about how sci-fi/fantasy was, at some point, segregated from literature generally. It's like there's mainstream fiction and then its bastard children of sci-fi and fantasy. I believe it was Gene Wolfe who brought this up first. I was reminded of a book that I'd read recently - The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. In it the author talks about how royalty would often listen to books being read to them. One example was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There was a time when stories of the fantastic were mainstream. They weren't considered unserious or childish but rather to be fit for adults and part of the corpus of great literature. (Oh, and poetry too.) I suspect that this view didn't end with the arrival of the Renaissance and is more likely a 20th century phenomenon.

Wolfe also said that mainstream literature today is dominated by those in the upper-middle class, i.e. – university professors. True or not, I don't know but it made me wonder about sci-fi/fantasy. If the guests at the con that weekend were anything to judge by, I'd say Tor Books doesn't churn out fantastic fiction by a coterie of blue collar workers. Wolfe is surely right to say that railroad engineers don't write mainstream fiction but I'm not sure they write sci-fi either. And, in looking at the con's attendees, I have to wonder about the fans' class status. I recently found the blog of Christopher MacDonald who wrote the book Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown and I just couldn't help but wonder if sci-fi/fantasy is, however fantastic lit had been considered in the past, a middlebrow pursuit. (There's my deep thought for you, my antagonistic anonymous commenter.) I have no statistics to back up this view but I would offer it to anyone reading this who finds him-/herself in charge of programming at a con. "Is Science Fiction/Fantasy a Middle-Class Pursuit?"

Another writer I encountered there was Allen Steele. Again, heard the name but have never read him. He seemed like a really nice guy. Can I retract that? Nice guys finish last. Steele seemed to me to be a very dorky guy. Friendly and dorky – the perfect combination. He broke down during a reading of his and had to leave the room to regain his composure. Apparently a tragedy had befallen his family and there was some stuff in the story that brought him back to it. I met him outside afterwards – he's an evil smoker like me – and chatted briefly. I told him that that same tragedy nearly befell my family so I was sympathetic and kinda sorta vaguely understood his pain. He thanked me for the kind words before heading in to take a seat at the banquet. I hope to meet him again and hear him talk more at a future con.





These are just some of the people behind Night of the Living Dead – The Puppet Show. Some crazy theater geeks in Milwaukee devised it. They weren't able to perform it live and so instead we got shown the DVD and had a Q&A afterwards. It was pretty funny. Definitely a lo-fi production deserving of some more technical virtuosity which I'm sure will come with time. I can imagine that seeing it done live is a much better experience. The next performance is on the 28th of next month at the Oriental Theatre in Milwaukee.

Maddie – the significant other of Dane 101's Jesse Russell and whose last name I don't know (sorry, Maddie) – was also in the audience and asked if they'd ever performed in Madison. They have not. She got that look in her eye which led me to believe that this situation might be changing soon. Keep an eye out at Dane 101 for its sponsoring of a weird zombie/steampunk night out on the town.

On Sunday I attended a panel on the book Chicks Dig Time Lords which is a compendium of essays and interviews by and about women in Doctor Who fandom. I'd seen a similar panel at Chicago TARDIS last year but at MadCon there were eight contributors instead of just a couple. I'm sure I'll write more about this subject after I read the book. But let me offer two things:

1) Christa Dickson contributed an essay on DW slash. She's firmly in the pro-DW smut corner. So does she just enjoy slash or is she also a kinky vixen? I personally don't have a problem with people writing and reading stories about The Doctor getting buggered by Captain Jack. It doesn't ruin the show for me, doesn't insult me – go for it. Dickson doesn't have to defend it to me. But what does it say about slash fans?

2) Secondly, Carol Barrowman, sister of John (a.k.a. – Captain Jack) was a stitch. She was a funny lady in her own right plus had some hilarious tales of hanging out with her brother in Cardiff, where Torchwood is filmed. For example, there's a Doctor Who exhibition in Cardiff. While they were there one time, John had Carol guard the entrance to the new series section. He proceeded to remove the wax figure of Captain Jack and take its place. So a couple children walk up to him and he jumps out at them screaming which scares the living crap out of them and they go running off. Good times.

I brought home a sonic screwdriver for the kid as well as a couple fantasy novels. I’d bring him to cons but he’s just not ready in either age/temperament or geekiness. But you’ve gotta start somewhere. Of course there were a couple books for me as well. I grabbed one by James Roberts who, in addition to being an author, is also on the board of the August Derleth Society. We chatted for a bit and I found that he was a really nice fellow. Plus I got to hang out with my fellow bus rider Paul who is also a chair of OddCon.

All in all, a successful weekend.

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