Saturday and Sunday

The very long explanation of the hall costume rules, directed towards the gaijin, includes the following: “When wearing revealing costumes, be sure to wear underwear”. And if you forget, you can always get some from one of those infamous vending machines… (actually, I’ve never seen one, though I keep my eyes peeled). This intrigues me, though, since it implies a dispensation - even a veiled recommendation - to go commando as long as one is not outwardly dressed like Dita von Teese. During the rest of the weekend I wonder whether I am actually the only person here wearing underwear beneath my trousers and shirt, and whether other people are noticing and laughing at me behind my back.

I get grabbed for a panel on slipstream fiction, about which I know nothing. Thankfully the other gaijin panellist, Mark Van Name, seems to know quite a bit. And it turns out that the panel isn’t exactly about slipstream but about strange unclassifiable fiction in general (or is that slipstream? I don’t know!). The point is raised that a lot of recent strange fiction is urban. I have a half formed thought that in high fantasy there’s something going on - or there can be something going on - between the heroic and the pastoral, whether an agon or a cooperation, whereas in urban fantasy there generally is no pastoral. Aspects of urban life that can be kinda sorta bucolic - parks and gardens, even tree-lined streets in the better suburbs - don’t tend to feature. This, I think, must have some effect on the characters. One thing I like about both Melbourne and Bangkok is their greenery, and in Bangkok, the wild and half-wild animal life. Call me a sentimentalist, but all those embassies of nature in the city seem to send out signals of hope. They certainly soothe the spirit and lubricate one’s own sense of connection to the natural world (a sense which, I am starting to think, may not be irrelevant to human wellbeing - or my wellbeing, at least). I don’t think I played up that aspect of Ashamoil enough. I suspect it would have been good for Raule, particularly.

Farah Mendelsohn has done a survey of some 900 SF readers with the aim of discovering what they look for and whether there is actually a particular type of person who goes for SF. The results, broken down into age and gender groups, revealed some interesting patterns. A detail that intrigued me was that among male readers a “sensawunda” was highly valued, but not among female readers, who valued “strange other worlds” instead. A subtle difference? A remarkable feature of the survey was that Farah didn’t give people multiple choice options, instead simply asking them to write their own description of what they liked, and the survey categories were then drawn from these responses.

There was a lot less in the way of manga than I’d thought there would be. Nanny Mouse said manga fans have their own convention, but I somehow expected there to be enough overlap between fandoms that SF and fantasy manga would have been for sale in reasonable quantities. There was actually very little for sale - the dealer’s room was very scanty. I went down to the fanzine room, where I stumbled onto some rather strange shota. The style was delicate, old-fashioned, rather reminiscent of May Gibbs, but the dear little children had fully developed genitals and were doing very adult things with them. The artist had obviously let her (I think) imagination do exactly what it liked, which was intriguing in itself. The characters seemed to be adventuring in an eroticised otherworld, which featured oddities - friend or foe I wasn’t sure - like a tree with breasts hanging from its branches like fruit. I was tempted simply because it was so well-drawn and uninhibited - but I don’t find shota easy to look at (my normally silent inner Puritan tends to go “squick!” loudly at the subject matter, however artistically it’s presented), so I didn’t buy it. I did collect an origami Nazgul, which one group of magazine sellers were giving away for free, and a random manga called “Birth” featuring a hot long-haired guy with a big sword and lots of demon beasties.

I’m going to stop the Worldcon report there, because I’m more than a week behind with this blog. I enjoyed the panels I was on and it was great to catch up with old friends and meet new people, but I was sorry that there weren’t more bilingual program items, particularly in the writing and academic tracks. My impression was that this rather kept Japanese and foreign attendees apart (only my personal impression, I must emphasise).

Coming up: Svankmajer and ‘Holy Land’ exhibitions, Akihabara, the strange melancholy of Tokyo, Harajuku again.