Albacon 2016 Convention Report

Albacon (link goes to page for next year) is the long-running traditional SF/F convention located in Albany, NY. The venue has changed over time, as with many long-running conventions. This year it was held in the Best Western on Wolf Road. I've been in attendance since 2003 (and I attended one or two of the earlier ones years before).

 

I'll get my one gripe out of the way, because I prefer to say anything negative up front. In this case, it's a gripe about something that doesn't personally impact ME, but does impact other people that I know and care about: Accessibility. While the convention was at a hotel that was all one floor, which eliminated many accessibility issues, it's still important to check out a few other points, one of which is whether the hotel recognizes that people who don't walk anywhere need more space through things like doorways. The Green Room in particular had a VERY narrow doorway that made it extremely difficult for people in motorized chairs (of which there were several, including my friend Melissa Mead and guest David Kyle!) to get through, and I presume the same was true of at least some other doors in the hotel.

 

That, however, was my only complaint, and the rest of the convention seemed to go swimmingly!

 

 

 

The first event of the con wasn't actually part of the convention. My editor at Baen, Tony Daniel, came up to help support Baen people (primarily David Weber, but including me) at the convention, and offered to take us all out to Yono's, a very fine restaurant in downtown Albany, on the Thursday prior to the convention.

 

The day was made rather hectic by the fact that my son Gabriel had an operation rescheduled for that day; fortunately it was a fairly simple procedure and Gabriel came out of it with no real issues, so Kathy and I didn't have to cancel. We swung by Flights of Fantasy bookstore to pick up Maria Perry (owner and operator of Flights of Fantasy) who had also been invited.

 

Yono's is one of the, if not the, fanciest restaurants I've ever been in. It's the sort of place where you have multiple waiters and things are solely described as "courses" and you can have an eight-course meal. The food lived up to the fanciness; this was one of the best dinners I've ever had, and Kathleen felt the same way; it lasted about four hours from start to finish!

 

The major highlight of the dinner, though, was meeting David Weber and Tony Daniel; I already knew Chuck Rothman and Maria, who were the other two guests. Tony's a fairly quiet and reserved guy (at least based on my experiences during this con!). David Weber, by contrast, is one of the people I can actually describe with the word "ebullient". He wasn't as intimidating as I thought he might be (hey, the author of the Honor Harrington series carries a lot of gravitas by his nature), but instead was cheerful and talkative, with a vast array of anecdotes and stories that made the night actually seem too short. His wife Sharon, unfortunately, had been unable to come, but we got to meet her later.

 

The convention proper started on Friday, with a panel on "Point of View Waltz". Besides myself, the panel included Carl Fredrick, William Freedman, Jim Cambias, and Llalania Ghose (I hope I got the name right?). The major question of the panel was the different uses (and possibly abuses) of different points of view, which actually separated into two discussions: first, what the use/effect of the particular PoV styles themselves (first, second, tight third, broad/omniscient third) might have on a work or the reader, and second, what changing the point of view within a work might do. This was an interesting and energetic panel, with divergent points of view – some held, for instance, that first person tended to be a distancing choice, while others held it was the opposite – more intimate and direct. The second aspect is of particular interest to me as I use point of view shifts to direct attention of the reader and emphasize or minimize events or facts so as to produce specific effects at the right part of the novel.

 

My next panel was with Joe Fludd and Andrew Lieven: A Surfeit of Superheroes, discussing whether there were too many superhero shows/movies/etc., and why we might feel the answer was yes or no. (My main answer: "I sure hope not, because I've got an unpublished superhero novel right now".) Discussion was also pretty brisk, and I think the audience got fairly heavily into it.

 

As usual on Friday night of Albacon, we had the Ice Cream Social, in which everyone gets to pig out on ice cream and hang out together. This was where we finally got to meet Sharon Weber, and talk more with David.

 

(I am rarely jealous of anything about my fellow authors, except in the momentary spurt of "I wish I didn't have to have a 9-5 job" sense. However, at the convention for most of its run there were a couple of gentlemen dressed in fine military regalia of the Royal Manticoran Navy, holding down a table that was clearly a recruiting center! So I will admit I am very envious of David for having organized fans that dress in the uniforms of his universe's organizations and promote his work in such a highly stylish way!)

 

Saturday was the heavy-lifting part of the convention (and more so than I had expected, for reasons I will mention shortly). I had two regular panels, the Baen Roadshow, the Eye of Argon reading, and both a reading and a signing on Saturday!

 

First off were two panels, the first being "Great but Forgotten" – a discussion of works of SF literature, or authors, which the panelists felt were unfairly obscure. This was a fascinating panel, not merely because of the wide variety of works and authors mentioned, but also because in addition to Chuck Rothman, Anatoly Belilovsky, and myself, one of the panelists was someone who wasn't even present: Ramsey Campbell, whose health prevented him from traveling but was able to attend with full-video conferencing technology! His voice was clear and it was very science-fictional to see a panel running in real-time with a large proportion of participation from someone who otherwise could not have been a part of the convention.

 

The following panel was one I had myself suggested: "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12". This derives from Peter Graham's statement to that effect, meaning that the fiction you encounter and become enthralled by between the ages of, roughly, 10 through 14 will be the ones that will be most fondly remembered and influential on your later participation in fandom. Thus, the participants (Jim Cambias, Elektra Hammond, Rick Ollerman, and myself) were to enumerate and discuss the various works that were part of our "Golden Age". Occasionally the discussion veered into the more general Golden Age as well, since at least a couple of our panelists such as myself had been influenced directly by the works of the Golden Age itself. There was much nostalgia to be had (though probably a lot of puzzled looks from younger members of the audience who didn't know half the references!).

 

By this point I was feeling startlingly exhausted, and while I managed to grab a bit to eat (a big shout-out to the Green Room staff, who kept things going all through the convention!), I still was feeling oddly wonky. By the time I got to my reading, I was really kind of out of it, although I think I managed to look reasonably okay. Still, I was actually having to focus hard for a while on my reason for being there, and while I recognized several of the attendees, I actually couldn't put names to the faces at the time (something acutely embarrassing to me, and the more so since one of those faces was none other than Tony Daniel himself!). This fogginess had actually been plaguing me for a while, but it was only the next week that I found out what was causing it: I had become significantly anemic, something which is only now being treated.

 

It was a pleasant thing to find that there WERE people at the reading, at least; last year there had been none, at least in part due to the fact that the prior year the reading room had been far, far away from all other events. Fortunately, once I managed to decide on what I was reading, my brain slowly started to come back online as I sat and read. The fogginess returned once I had to get up to move on, but now at least I understand why; physical effort puts more demands on the oxygen in the system, and with less hemoglobin to work with, well, less oxygen.

 

At the subsequent signing I had two pleasant surprises. One was the arrival and introduction of Richard Shetron AKA "Multics", my email provider for about the last 20 years as the main mover of Wizvax/SGEinc.

 

The other was a gentleman who introduced himself as Joe Buckley. Yes, the ORIGINAL Joe Buckley, the archetype of all the Buckleys that we Baen authors have been killing (or in the case of me and Eric's Boundary series, almost killing) for years. It was a great pleasure to finally put a (real) face to the name of the man I'd been tormenting since 2005. He had me sign a couple of books, and I gave him a copy of Paradigms Lost so he could read about the latest way in which he'd met his demise.

 

The Baen Roadshow was next, a presentation about what Baen had currently and upcoming for release, and it was presented with excellent multimedia support by Tony Daniel; both David Weber and I were up front for the presentation. This included of course material on David's and Tony's own new releases, and also something on Phoenix Ascendant (Tony had me give a brief talk on the Balanced Sword trilogy) and showed a beautiful large-scale image of Bob Eggleton's new cover for the forthcoming Castaway Odyssey.

 

I went home for a short time, but I was back in time for the Eye of Argon reading. For those unfamiliar with this, The Eye of Argon is a sword-and-sorcery story obviously modeled after the work of Robert E. Howard in Conan… as written by a teenage boy named Jim Theiss. The story was found at a convention where someone had left a dittoed copy, and has been widely regarded (though, I think, incorrectly) as the worst SF/F story ever written. An Eye of Argon reading is an event in which participants attempt to read the story aloud – including any mis-spellings and similar errors, and without breaking out in laughter. Failure to meet these requirements forces the participant to drop out of the reading… and then proceed to act out the florid and sometimes bizarre action of the story as other readers continue from where they left off. I was eliminated somewhat less quickly than I was the first time – I managed two or three paragraphs – but still spent the majority of the time playing the part of the mighty-thewed barbarian Grignr. Much fun was had by all.

 

(note: were Jim Theiss still alive, I think I would not participate in this event; Lord knows I'd not particularly like the thought of strangers reading and mocking the stuff I wrote when I was still in high school. However, he unfortunately passed away at quite a young age, and this amusement can no longer harm him)

 

Sunday had two highlights to conclude the convention. First was Equal Rights for Robots, a panel that included myself, Tony Daniel, and Herb Kauderer; Debi Chowdhury was supposed to be on the panel, but had been double-booked to another. This panel discussed when, how, and why robots/AIs might or should be given the rights of human beings, and was pretty energetic in discussion, bringing up real-life and SF examples to argue various points; the panelists and the audience participated enthusiastically, with considerable divergence of opinion and perception highlighted.

 

Finally, at 6PM, David Weber and I had a book signing at Flights of Fantasy. Technically, this was supposed to be a reading-and-signing, but instead it became more a discussion and talk session culminated by book signing. This was a good signing – while of course David had a lot more to sign, I wasn't sitting there watching, but actually had people buying and getting their books autographed. Following this, both David and I signed some stock, and while David was going through his mountain of books (mine was more a molehill) he continued to regale us with stories – including a wonderful tale of playing a Japanese-setting RPG with people including Roger Zelazny, in which David took an NPC and ended up diverting the entire party down a course that ultimately took them a continent away from where they really should have gone.

 

I also have hope that next year I may also be attending Genericon, which this year was on the same weekend; for next year, Albacon has shifted their event about a month forward (to early April) and this will hopefully ensure that the two local conventions won't overlap! This is important if Albacon wants to attract a younger demographic and start becoming relevant as a convention to the up-and-coming generation of fans; we can't be competing with an anime and gaming convention and expect the younger people to show up in anything like significant numbers.

 

Overall I think this was one of the best convention experiences I've had and I certainly look forward to next year's!