Our big purchase this past weekend at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention was this Michael Whelan painting, which is the cover for Michael Shea’s World Fantasy Award winning novel, Nifft the Lean. Both Deb & I are big fans of the book, as well as the art, so we were thrilled to pick it up!
[Click the image for a bigger version.]
There is a saying that you should never meet your heroes. The golden god may have feet of clay, and all that. I don’t agree.
Now, I adore my wife. Let me make that plain up front, so there are no misunderstandings. But there is another woman in my life – my goddess of writing, Tanith Lee.
Tanith Lee is the reason I’m a writer today. She inspired me in a way that nothing and no one else did or could. I’ve always hoped that if I worked hard enough and long enough I might one day be a tenth as good a writer as she was. I don’t know that I am, but I’m working on it. Drake is nothing like a Tanith Lee book, but I like to think that at the heart of it there is a little of her voice.
Tanith passed away last year and it my greatest professional regret that I never got to meet her and just tell her “thank you.” But then how many people get to meet their deity?
This Easter weekend though I did get to meet her husband, John Kaiine.
John is an absolutely lovely man and a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. We were at EasterCon in Manchester, UK, and John was there to speak on a panel held in tribute to Tanith. Hosted by Storm Constantine, the panel consisted of John and the Night’s Nieces – Kari Sperring, Sarah Singleton, Freda Warrington and Liz Williams, all writers who Tanith had inspired and mentored. John and the others spoke beautifully about Tanith and her work. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room by the end of the hour.
Ah, March in the Windy City.
The snow is (mostly) gone, the grass isn’t really grass but mud mixed with the lovely remnants of road salt and temperatures have snuck just high enough to wear spandex without fear of frostbite; which can only mean one thing.
It’s C2E2 time in Chicago.
With the holidays over and Chicago immersed in the dark, cold days of March, which precede the somewhat less dark but still cold days of springtime in the Windy City, it is once again time for we here at Goth Chick News to surface from the underground offices at Black Gate headquarters, and venture forth into a new year.
With only six short months until the official kick off of the 2016 “season” (Halloween if you haven’t guessed), the calendar is already filling up with a plethora of gooey event invites from which we will extract, forcibly if necessary, all the steaming fresh tidbits we share with you here each week.
As the city that originated the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, The Eastland Disaster, H.H. Holmes and Resurrection Mary, it should come as no surprise that Chicago is a mecca of opportunities for the aficionado of all things unnerving. It is therefore unnecessary for BG photog Chris Z and I to venture too far afield to dig up content, and this year’s calendar is even more bloated than usual.
From time to time I’ve posted in various places material I acquired at an auction many years ago from the estate of Jack Darrow. In the 1930’s, Darrow (whose real name was Clifford Kornoelje) was pretty much science fiction fan #2 behind Forry Ackerman.
Darrow’s best friend was science fiction pulp author Otto Binder – who, with his brother, Earl, formed half of the writing tandem of Eando Binder (their other brother was pulp/comic artist Jack Binder). By 1936 however, although the byline often continued to read Eando, the stories were written solely by Otto. In 1939, Binder also began working in comics, particularly for Captain Marvel and the other Fawcett titles, though he would eventually work for all the major publishers. Among the material in Darrow’s estate was a box of correspondence between him and Binder about a foot thick.
Among these letters was one from Binder to Darrow, dated July 10, 1937, which was accompanied by two snapshots. On the back of each, Binder writes that these are photos of “science fiction authors at Mort Weisinger’s home June 1937” (the home was in New Jersey). At the time, Weisinger was the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories.
Granted, snow in the windy city in November is not exactly unexpected. But it is a bit surreal to be making our way to the last horror show of the year in white-out conditions.
And yet this is precisely the situation Black Gate photog Chris Z and I found ourselves facing last Saturday morning. Thankfully, the Chicago BG office is well equipped for such emergencies, though attempting to get John O out of bed before noon to requisition the keys to the company urban assault vehicle turned out to be only the first of many challenges we faced that day.
Still, we trundle into the unplowed parking lot of the venue in our jacked up Jeep Wrangler precisely at 9:45, to find roughly 500 other hard-core horror fans bent double against the howling wind, making their way through 18” of snow to pay homage to the season’s last genre-specific event.
Was it worth it?
Oh, hell yes.
Here’s a photo from the first Worldcon, taken by Bill Dellenback. In this one, Jack Darrow is signing something, while P. Schuyler Miller (holding a pipe), looks on. Forrest Ackerman — or 4SJ — looks a little bored. I think the guy standing to Darrow’s right, in the foreground, is his good friend Otto Binder, but I’m not certain on that.
I acquired this photo many years ago, along with a whole batch of other material, from the estate of Jack Darrow. In the 1930’s, Darrow was pretty much fan #2 behind Ackerman. Among the material in Darrow’s estate were a number of photos that had been taken by Bill Dellenback (later staff photographer for the Kinsey Institute) at the first World Con in NY in 1939, which both Darrow and Dellenback attended.
I have a carbon copy of a letter dated August 16, 1939 that Darrow wrote to his friend, Walt Dennis, concerning the first Worldcon. In part, it reads as follows.
The Saratoga Hilton, site of the 2015 World Fantasy Convention
Ask a literary agent how writers should pursue representation, and they almost always say, “Go to any convention, and we’ll all be in the hotel bar.”
In years past, I’ve tried agent/author speed dating at the Nebulas weekend, pitch sessions with agents at writing conferences, commenting on agents’ manuscript-wish-list blog posts — all the in-person variations but the bar, because the bar is not my natural habitat. Then again, in years past, I didn’t have an award in my pocket. Lots of people may be ambivalent about awards, but agents like them. This year I figured I might be out of my element, but I would no longer have that aura of desperation that surrounds unpublished novelists with no specific prospects. I finally had something an agent might want.
So I set my sights on the World Fantasy Convention, a con known for a base of attendees consisting almost entirely of professionals in the field. I love a good panel, I love a good reading, I love a good casual schmooze, but I had a mission. One that was certain to throw me into a wide variety of interactions that would range from the awkward to the absurd, with perhaps a little sweet spot of productivity in the middle.
When John O’Neill asked me to write a con report, I told him I had none of the kinds of impressions people record in them. What I had instead was my misadventures in agent hunting. John was laughing already, and urged me to post it.
If you want to know about the World Fantasy Awards and their banquet, memorable quotes from notable figures, the controversy over the toothless harassment policy, I’m not your girl. Not this time, anyway.
But you can time-travel back to the start of my most recent unfinished agent hunt and watch me indulge my hubris.
One of the great things about science fiction conventions is getting to rub shoulders with your heroes.
Some years ago I received an advance proof of an upcoming fantasy from Bantam Spectra, just before heading to Archon in St. Louis. I threw it in my luggage, and brought it to the author’s reading. There were only seven people in the audience, so afterwards I got to have a nice chat with the author, and he graciously signed my book for me. The writer was George R.R. Martin, and the book was A Game of Thrones.
In fact, writers who will draw huge crowds in public can often be vastly more approachable at small conventions. Perhaps this is because seeing Neil Gaiman at your local library is a big deal, but hanging out with him at the bar at World Fantasy is just a lot more casual.
Of course, there are rare exceptions. There are a few writers treated like superstars, even among fellow professionals. I saw it happen when Stephen King came to my home town of Ottawa for the World Fantasy Convention in 1984, and autograph lines spontaneously formed whenever he sat down. I got in line an hour early just so I could be in the front row during his reading from The Talisman (and ended up giving up my seat anyway, just so Tabitha King wouldn’t have to stand in the back.)
And I saw it happen again in June of this year, when the hottest new writer in science fiction, Cixin Liu, author of the Three-Body trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End), arrived in Chicago for the Nebula Awards weekend.
Mr. Liu was in making his first trip to the United States as a published author to be on hand for the presentation of the awards. His first novel in English, The Three-Body Problem, published by Tor in November of last year, was up for Best Novel.
For one glorious weekend each summer, Chicago stops being The Windy City and instead becomes Metropolis. The urban crime rate takes a giddy plunge, not for lack of playing host to some fairly spectacular villains, but likely because the bad guys are too busy comparing breathable fabrics with their super hero arch-enemies.
Yes it’s August – ComicCon time in the city…
Wizard World Chicago, commonly known as the Chicago ComicCon, is the annual bacchanalia of pop culture held at the fairly ginormous Donald E. Stephens Convention Center near O’Hare airport. The four day event is among the largest comic book convention in the United States, in third place for overall attendance behind only the New York ComicCon, and the granddaddy of all entertainment cons; ComicCon International in San Diego.
Chicago ComicCon consumed nearly the entire 840,000 sq/ft facility and though at this time, attendance numbers for the 2015 event have not been officially stated, local media estimates the participants at well over 100,000.
Originally showcasing comic books and related popular arts, the convention has expanded over the years to include a larger range of pop culture elements, such as professional wrestling, science fiction/fantasy, film/television, horror and animation.
In addition to an impressive array of vendors, ComicCon played host to a large, daily offering of programming and events such as, “Advanced Costuming and Armor,” “Costumes + Playing = Cosplay,” and “Legal Basics for Game Developers.”