It’s all about the cats: Worldcon 1st part
(Versione italiana)
Arriving in the town where the World Science Fiction convention is taking place to hear the bus driver speak like Scotty - especially a few days after James Doohan beamed himself to another, maybe better life - has quite a puzzling effect. You don’t understand a word of what he says, to begin with, and in addition to that, you imagine he’s telling you: “Warp 7, and a wee bit more”, and you don’t know which planet you’re in anymore.
But the Worldcon is literates’ stuff, Star Trek is not at home here. Of course, you may spot a few Klingons here and there, but it’s clear they’re not in the right place, sort of illegal immigrants who somehow managed to have a residence permit. Here the protagonists are others.
Because the great truth revealed at this year’s Worldcon is that science fiction, fantasy and reality have the same protagonists: cats.
Let’s start from the beginning.
I arrive in the afternoon, around 4, after the puzzling experience with the warp bus driver, at the Exhibition Centre, where I register at the press room. Although I had announced in advance my presence, they haven’t prepared a badge with my name on it, so for three days my name will simply be “Press”.
Someone, considering the badge position, will be tempted to actually “press” something”. Someone will do it. But the details are not supposed to be made public. Not in this part of the story, at least. Which doesn’t mean you’re not authorized to ask in private. However, someone else has preferred to avoid misunderstandings on this respect.
As for the badge, you can easily understand that when I had to take it off I felt a bit “de-press-ed”.
I wander through the long and large corridors and the vast rooms of the Exhibition Centre, my back heavy with the laptop in my rucksack and too many missing hours’ sleep: in Paris, where a friend hosted me, so that I could take the 7 a.m. shuttle to what is optimistically called the Beauvais-Tillé “airport”, I had woken up at 2.30 and never been able to sleep again.
I have got here convinced I would have no problem in orienting myself, because, as I always say, I could make it in Turkey all by myself, why shouldn’t I here?
In half an hour’s time I find myself sitting at a table, on the verge of crying. I take my mobile phone and send Silvio Sosio an sms, asking him where he and the other Italians are. Where can Italians be? At Ritazza’s, of course! (I’m sorry, no Ritazza pix, maybe I should have taken one).
Then I meet Silvio with ever-present Roberto Quaglia, and to speak frankly, from that moment on I don’t remember a lot. Maybe, being so sleepy and in the meantime feeling the relief for having found my fellow creatures, must have made me somehow drunk. I just hope I didn’t vomit on anyone.
Whatever it is, anyway, somewhere in the line of time I meet Anna Feruglio Dal Dan. That’s a turning point in my life. Because Anna, a Worldcon expert, starts dragging me around and introducing me to people from anywhere in the world (mostly Americans) and in the end I feel even more drunk than before.
To begin with, we try to slip into a room where is scheduled a panel with China Miéville, but we realize soon that breaking through the wall of groupies is an impossible mission. I must admit he’s a very fine male specimen of the human race. I can even swear I heard a male fan (even married, if my memory doesn’t fail me) say: “I’m straight, but I must admit that China...”. The person’s name will be revealed, of course, only to the highest bidder.
So, we have a walk, and after some time we go back to the same room, where the panel has finally ended. Here, while Anna chats with China awakening the groupies’ envy and suspicions, I ask Ellen Kushner if she remembers me. We met a couple of years ago in Lyon, at a friend’s home. She must be as good in remembering faces as I am, because she can’t remember me - on the other hand, if she hadn’t had a badge I wouldn’t have remembered her - but she recalls the occasion and asks me news of our mutual friend, that I actually haven’t seen for months. I take a picture of her, and after that Anna introduces me to China. I take a picture of him as well but, maybe the excitement, maybe hormones, whatever it is, the result isn’t exactly a masterpiece.
Then Anna introduces me to a real human volcano: Benjamin Rosenbaum, Hugo nominee in the Novelette section, an American who lived for some time in Italy - Siena - and in Switzerland, and who speaks some Italian. His description of the fights between the Sienese “contrade” has a hilarious effect on us, perhaps a stimulating one on him and surely a retarding one on my many lost hours’ sleep (I don’t know if the sexual joke works in English, but if it doesn’t, be aware that in Italian it was meant to be a sexual joke… well, I hope so).
We keep on wandering through corridors, and that’s how we meet John Scalzi, a guy who tells us he once put his first novel on his blog and that’s how he was found by a publisher, who decided to publish it, and after this experience he didn’t follow the advises of friends who told him not to try again the same technique, put another novel on his blog, and was published once again. I say: “Then you should take part to the panel we are going to, ‘Is Blogging Helping or Hurting Your Career?’.”. He replies: “Actually I’m the moderator in that panel”. Ah. Oups.
Well, we go to the panel. Interesting and amusing at the same time. I advise you to have a look at the videos I shot. You may download them here: first part, second part and third part. Be careful: they are between 20 and 30 megabytes each.
Unfortunately I didn’t record the happy ending, which gives the title, or at least part of it, to this post. At the beginning of the panel the participants had spoken of the huge success cats have on blogs (for instance, apparently Anna’s cat, Zip, here in the last picture uploaded by Anna on her Flickr page, has her own fan club), so in the end, when Eileen Gunn obliged Benjamin to pronounce no more than 10 words, he said: “Only five: It’s - all - about - the - cats”. Which became this convention’s refrain.
In the next episodes we’ll speak of towels. And maybe we’ll add something about cats, unless we find it more practical to do it in another episode.