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So now, my final Eastercon report. I know there are all sorts of stories flying around on Tumblr and Twitter about what happened at the They Wrote What, When? panel on SF&F works of 20th century British authors not primarily associated with the genre. Someone -- not me -- has raised formal complaints under the harassment policy and they are being taken seriously. I believe that as a consequence of that and a number of other issues someone was asked to leave the Convention early Sunday morning and is likely to be banned from future Eastercons. Given the spin that's been put on most of the posts I've seen, I suspect either that person or their friends may be the source of some of the wilder claims being made about what happened.
Since I did attend the panel and was present at the incident in the bar, I can at least say what I saw and heard, and it absolutely was not what it's been represented as. That is: there were no "women who'd come there with an pre-determined agenda", it was not a case of people "latching onto innocuous comments and preparing to be offended", it wasn't "blatant anti-Christian discrimination of the sort which would have had the whole left-liberal idiocracy howling in outrage if it'd been directed at a Muslim" and it really, really wasn't (as I'm sure you'll all be aware) about people "demanding the right to post their sick paedorastic fantasies wherever, whenever and to whomever they like."
First, a bit of background.
The panel in question was scheduled immediately after the Hugo nominations. BTW, massive thanks to everyone who nominated the BBC dramatisation of And So Did I for the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. We never thought we'd get it this far, back in January, so well done everyone who made it happen. I hope to catch up with lots of you in Dublin in August, and while I hope we'll see Mark Gatiss lifting that rocket, even getting it on the ballot is a tremendous step, especially for those of us who remember the days when we weren't a fandom so much as a fandot. It's just such a shame that what ought to have been the best moment of the con should have been hijacked like this.
Obviously, this is not the time to drag up the perennial question of whether And So Did I really is a first contact SF story at all or whether it's just the hallucinations of a sailor dying of dehydration and exposure on a life raft in the middle of the North Atlantic. Fwiw, the original story was published in Analog (who you might think ought to know from SF) back in 1963, it was anthologised in one of the Out of This World anthologies of SF for younger readers and as we discussed when it came out, the final scene of the TV version comes down as hard it can on the "aliens did it" side without distorting the whole premise. If R.R. hadn't then gone on to become much better known for his thrillers, I don't think the question would ever have been raised at all.
Full disclosure, I believe it must have been the first Lanyon I ever read, and it took me quite a few years after that to make the connection that the author of And So Did I was the same person who wrote Mr McGregor's Garden and the others.
The hall was packed for the Hugo nominations and I was surprised just how much squeeing there was when And So Did I was announced as having made it onto the ballot; if there were lots of you there and I missed meeting up with you -- well, we'd better make plans in advance for next year as well as for Worldcon. To be fair, I think some of that reaction probably was down to the Chris Eccleston factor -- obviously the place was packed out with Whovians -- even though AB Satterthwaite couldn't be further from the Ninth Doctor. Anyway, that meant there was a good bit of overspill into all the panels that started immediately after the noms announcement, which included They Wrote What, When? and everyone was pretty hyper. I was there for the Kipling, Shute and Buchan stuff which had been highlighted in the original panel description, and, with everything they had to cover, I didn't expect Lanyon to be mentioned at all.
Unfortunately it turned out to be one of those panels where the panel members hadn't co-ordinated what they were going to say at all (in fact, one of them has since posted, and I gather they didn't even meet in the green room before because of the mod wanting to hear the Hugo noms). One of them (I didn't catch his name, he was a late substitution for someone -- the Shute expert, worse luck -- who'd gone down with con-crud) actually did come out with the classic "I don't know why I'm on this panel" (and to be honest, nor did any of the rest of us!)
So rather than the discussion I'd been hoping for, about whether publishing categories were more fluid in the past, and whether sticking genre labels like "SF" and "urban fantasy" on things was actively unhelpful, everything wandered all over the shop and basically came down to the panellists namechecking obscure authors they liked and not having long enough to tell us anything about them.
The man who didn't know why he was on the panel didn't seem to let it stop him talking over the other panellists; the only woman on the panel (who kept trying to get a word in edgeways about Naomi Mitchison) was visibly face-palming towards the end. To make matters worse, they overrun on the panel part so badly it only left about three minutes for questions, and the first one they got was from one of Those fans (yes, he even had the hat!), the sort who begin "This isn't really a question, but ..." The moderator should have cut him off at the knees there, of course, but he didn't, so That Fan gave a long rambling speech about how the greatest work of literary science fiction of the 20th century was Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday but fools and knaves insisted on whoring after the false gods of political correctness (yes; he really said that) to the point where they were unable to see the simple truth before their noses and were ensnared by delusions of equality, when in fact the Divine plan for the world depended on order and degree and everyone playing their part in the position God had ordained, otherwise you ended up with women pretending to preach and everyone redefining marriage to suit their vile and perverted lusts (again, yes, honestly) and as far as I could tell next thing you knew people would be petitioning to marry their sofas.
Of course, everyone in the room was just too gobsmacked to say anything, and the mod sat opening and shutting his mouth like a goldfish.
At which point, the woman sitting next to me said, perfectly audibly, "What utter bollocks" and That Fan turned round to skewer her with a glance and found himself on the wrong end of the most perfect "drag that rating to the grating" stares I've ever seen. To make matters even funnier, she had one of those frighteningly upper-crust English accents and the manner to match, and it was pretty clear that the field in which she grew her fucks might as well have been the Sahara Desert.
So then, thank goodness, the mod found his backbone and brought things to a halt.
Well, she and I found ourselves in the bar -- to be honest, I thought the entire audience owed her a drink, and the least I could do was offer her a pint of Doom Bar on account. And she spotted my Wild Goose T-shirt and said, "What, another R.R.Lanyon fan? I thought I was going to be the only one here and then I don't seem to have stopped meeting them."
She turned out to have been in the fandom since practically the start -- she'd even had her copy of If There Should Follow A Thousand Swords signed by R.R. himself (jealous? Hell, yes!) -- though she said she didn't find much time for online fandom these days. Anyway, she was full of stories about cons in the 80s and 90s. when they'd literally had to hide the slash 'zines in boxes under the dealers' tables and hand them surreptitiously out in brown paper bags to people who asked for "The other 'zines -- you know, those ones." How far we've come!
We were on our second round when something told me we were being watched. I looked up and there was That Fan looking down at us with a sneer on his face. He gestured at our glasses and said, "I won't address you as ladies, since you plainly aren't. But I was taught only sluts or dykes drink pints. Which one do you claim to be?"
There was just a split second when she caught my eye and it was obvious what she was thinking (is there a word for the opposite of l'esprit d'escalier?) And then we both chorused, "State alternative preferred, with reasons etc."
He looked so nonplussed -- I can't imagine what he'd expected us to do (slink off shamed into the night, probably) -- that we collapsed into giggles. And he literally fled. Presumably he'd been prepared for every reaction possible except that one. And that was literally it. Someone from Ops did contact me the next day -- someone else who'd been in the audience for the panel had raised a complaint and I confirmed what I've set out above.
So that was it.
BTW: I hope I don't have to repeat this, but the belaying pin is out and at the ready and we will freeze threads if I or one of the other mods think fit.
To wash the taste of that out of our mouths, we are gearing up for the annual fic exchange. Rules and signups will be sent out shortly, but in the meantime, please could you give us an indication in comments whether you think we should include Mistress of her Trade as one of the novels people are offering. I'm aware quite a few of you dispute that it's fully canonical given it was unfinished, set aside in about 1960 and only published after Lanyon's death. Also, if we are treating it as a book open for fic writing, are we going to accept both published versions as canonical, the 1985 Odell version which only has outline notes of how he believed it was intended to end, or last year's edition with the Anthony Horowitz completion?