"Mike Resnick - Roots and a Few Vines" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

So I wend my way back through the audience, and I find my
seat, and I hand Kris Rusch's Hugo to Carol, because I am also up
for Best Short Story, and I think I've got a better chance at
this, and when I run up to accept the award it will look tacky to
already be carrying a Hugo. Besides, Charles Sheffield is sitting
right next to us, and he is up for Best Novelette, and he is
getting very nervous, and wants to stroke the Hugo for luck, or
maybe is considering just walking out with it and changing the
name plates at a future date. (In fact, I am convinced that if he
does not win his own, neither Kris nor I will ever see _her_ Hugo
again. Charles will probably deny this, but never forget that
Charles gets paid an inordinate amount of money to tell lies to
the public at large.)
So Guy Gavriel Kay begins reading off the nominees, and
suddenly I realize that I am not nervous at all, that this is
becoming very old hat to me. I have been nominated for nine Hugos
in the past six years. I have actually won a pair. Worldcons are
very orderly things: you show up, you sign a million autographs,
you eat each meal with a different editor and line up your next
year's worth of work, and then you climb into your tux and see if
you won another Hugo.
It's gotten to be such a regular annual routine, you
sometimes find yourself idly wondering: was it _always_ like this?
Then you think back to your first worldcon, and you realize
that no, it was not always like this...
* * *
Right off the bat, we were the victims of false doctrine.
Everyone we knew in fandom -- all six or seven of them -- told us
the worldcon was held over Labor Day weekend. So we took them at
their word.
The problem, of course, was the definition of "weekend". We
took a train that pulled out of Chicago on Friday morning, and
dumped us in the basement of our Washington D.C. hotel at 9:00
Saturday morning. At which time we found out that the convention
was already half over.
(Things were different then. There were no times in the
convention listings. In fact, there were no convention listings.
Not in _Analog_, not anywhere. If you knew that worldcons even
existed, you were already halfway to being a trufan.)
Caz (right: he wasn't a Miss at all) met us and showed us
around. Like myself, he was dressed in a suit and tie; it was a
few more worldcons before men wore shirts without jackets or ties,
even during the afternoons, and every woman -- they formed, at
most, 10% of the attendees, and over half were writers' wives --
wore a skirt. If you saw someone with a beard -- a relatively rare
occurrence -- you knew he was either a pro writer or Bruce Pelz.
When we got to the huckster room -- 20-plus dealers (and
selling only books, magazines, and fanzines; none of the junk that
dominates the tables today), I thought I had died and gone to
heaven. The art show had work by Finlay and Freas and Emsh and