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

even Margaret Brundage; only J. Allen St. John was missing from
among the handful of artists whose work I knew and admired.
They had an auction. It even had a little booklet telling you
what items would be auctioned when, so you knew which session to
attend to get what you wanted. Stan Vinson, a famous Burroughs
collector who had been corresponding with me for a year, bought a
Frazetta cover painting for $70. Friends told him he was crazy;
paintings were supposed to appreciate, and no one would ever pay
that much for a Frazetta again. I bought a Finlay sketch for
$2.00, and an autographed Sturgeon manuscript for $3.50.
In the afternoon we decide to go to the panels. I do not know
from panels; like any neo, I take along a pencil and a notebook.
The panels are not what we have these days, or at least they did
not seem so to my untrained and wondrous eyes and ears.
For example, there is a panel with Willy Ley and Isaac Asimov
and Fritz Leiber and L. Sprague de Camp and Ed Emsh and Leigh
Bracket, and the topic is "What Should a BEM Look Like?". (I have
a copy of the _Discon Proceedings_, a transcript of the entire
convention published by Advent, and to this day when I need a new
alien race I re-read that panel and invariably I come up with
one.)
There was a panel with Fred Pohl and a tyro named Budrys and
a gorgeous editor (though not as gorgeous as the one I accepted a
Hugo for) named Cele Goldsmith and even ***John Campbell
Himself***, on how to write stories around cover paintings, which
was a common practice back then, and which remains fascinating
reading today.
There was a sweet old guy in a white suit who saw that we
were new to all this, and moseyed over and spent half an hour with
us, making us feel at home and telling us about how we were all
one big family and inviting us to come to all the parties at
night. Then he wandered off to accept the first-ever Hall of Fame
Award from First Fandom. When they asked if he was working on
anything at present, he replied that he had just delivered the
manuscript to _Skylark DuQuesne_, and received the second-biggest
ovation I have ever heard at a worldcon. (The biggest came 30
years later, when Andy Porter broke a 12-year losing streak and
won the semi-prozine Hugo in 1993.)
Since we didn't know anyone, and were really rather shy (over
the years, I have learned to over-compensate for this tendency, as
almost anyone will tell you, bitterly and at length,) we ate
dinner alone, then watched the masquerade, which in those days was
truly a masquerade ball and not a competition. There was a band,
and everyone danced, and a few people showed up in costume, and
every now and then one of them would march across the stage, and
at the end of the ball they announced the winners.
Then there was the Bheer Blast. In those bygone days, they
didn't show movies. (I think movies turned up in 1969, _not_ to
display the Hugo nominees or give pleasure to the cinema buffs,
but to give the kids a place to sleep so they'd stop cluttering up