"Norman Spinrad - He Walked Among Us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

тАЬCheaper than a mistress in a tight dress of the same color,тАЭ he would say.

It was an old joke that had long since ceased to be funny, and an old threat that had long since ceased to
have bite.

Ellie knew that he would cop one of the readily available quick ones at a science fiction convention from
time to time when she wasn't around to stop him, but she also knew that he was not likely to screw
anyone at such scenes that he would care to contemplate in the morning, and he knew that she didn't
really care as long as he respected her need not to know.

Both of them knew all too well what on between writers and fans at these conventions. Both of them
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knew what it was to be the belle and the beau of such a masquerade ball. Which is what they had been
when they met at that publisher's party at the Seattle Westercon.

Dexter D. Lampkin had won the Hugo for best science fiction novel the year before, a silvery rocketship
admittedly awarded by the fans who staged these conventions rather than his literary peers, but an
appropriately phallic trophy for someone not entirely above using it to add to his reputation as a
convention cocksman.

This was more a matter of getting stoned and/or plastered enough quickly enough to lose one's sense of
sexual esthetics than honing one's jejune skills as a seducer. Any published writer who bathed monthly
and weighed less than three hundred pounds, and some who didn't, could get laid at these things. The
question was, bywhat ?

Why did science fiction fans of both sexes tend to be so overweight? Why did they tend to be
pear-shaped and look strange about the eyes? Why did masses of them crammed into convention hotel
room parties exude such clouds of anti-sexual pheromones?

The story that Norman Spinrad told Dexter at some con or other had the awful ring of scientific truth.

тАЬMy girlfriend, Terry Champagne, had a theory which she took quite seriously that allegiance to science
fiction fandom is genotypically linked to a minimal distance between the eyes, narrow shoulders, and an
enormous ass. One time, we were going to a convention in some horrible fleabag on Herald Square in
New York, crowds of people going into the subway, Macy's, Gimbel's, movie houses, your bell-shaped
general population curve on the random hoof. As a scientific experiment, we stood across the street from
the con hotel trying to predict who would go inside. Terry scored better than seventy-five percent."

Ellen Douglas, however, would have gone undetected as a science fiction fan by the genetic criteria of
Spinrad's former girlfriend.

True, Dexter had known of her by reputation before he ever set eyes on her, for Ellen was what was
known in the science fiction world as a Big Name Fan, what in the rock biz would have been called a
Super Groupie; someone, in other words, who was famous for being famous.