Eurocon 2004: A Personal, Eastern, Diagonal Fly-through
by Prof. Dr. Alexander B. Nedelkovich, of Serbia, a fan
The loudest and most insistent part of this, 27th Eurocon, held in Bulgarian city of Plovdiv 5th-8th August 2004, was Dave Lally's promotion of everybody please come to Glasgow next year and grab the best place you can on the later-apply-higher-cost "curve" etc, which interested us, the East European majority, as much as the last year's snow, because most of us do not even remotely have the cash for any place on the curve. I was one such. Each time he talked about it, I, as many others, gazed into the unfocused distances, contemplating our East-European poverty. Lally also described how an airline offered a London-Glasgow ticket for only 2 pounds (unbelievable) – but later, in September, I turned, decided to find the money after all, and did so, and I willll be in Glasgow in August 2005! So please forgive me Dave Lally for not listening attentively, because, ultimately, you were rrrigggghhhhhht!
Thank you Dave Lally!
Dave said it is going to be 63rd Worldcon. But nobody had any idea which Eurocon this, in Plovdiv, was. I kept asking. At my insistence, Quaglia and Lally took their pencils, got together over a sheet of paper, and after a lengthy calculation pronounced that this was 27th Eurocon. I spent the rest of the con trying to find an opportunity to say this to everyone, but failed. So everybody went home not knowing this.
HEY YOU out there across Europe! IT WAS THE 27th !
But the opening ceremony really showed to what extent the East is still a different world. The opening began 24 minutes late; then, the president of the organizing committee, Ivan Krumov, officially welcomed everybody and said the event is open, and read the message of greeting sent by the Bulgarian President, Georgiy Parvanov. Can you imagine a SF convention in Boston, for instance, and an approving letter by George Bush publicly read there? What would be the reaction? – But in the East, President is still the pater of the entire nation.
Then, oh, then. The kultura (pronounced kool-too-ra; the culture). In the large, dilapidated Dom kulture (Home of Culture). Tock, tock, tock, on the painted wood planks of a totally empty, large stage, the heels of an official-looking girl, as she marches in dead silence all the way to the microphone, to announce the first classical-music piece which will be played. Tock, tock, tock, in dead silence she goes away; a boy appears, plays something like Bach, nods to applause, leaves. Tock, tock, tock . . . about 15 times she comes out thus, a goodly 15 meters to the center of the stage, and goes back left. Which computes to at least 450 m of her walk; something like 900 steps, and we heard each one distinct.
Announcement, violin; announcement, piano; announcement, piano for 4 hands; announcement, a folk song; announcement, an aria by a lonely girl at the microphone; etc. etc. One song praised the national hero Pitou Gulli; another song suggested, easy for us Serbs to understand because all four words are identical with Serbian words of the same meaning: "more Mile, slavuy pile" – "Oh hey you, Mile man, you nightingale's chicken (you very very young nightingale)". With all due respect, none of it had anything to do with SF. In the end, they all (all performers) come out in a single column, stop, turn to us, nod to applause, file out. It was, oh, totally sotz-realizam (socialistic realism). It was so 1954. – This is what the guy whose report is published on p. 50 of November "Locus", a certain Yulian Stoinov, the guy whose accuracy is strongly disputed by one of my Bulgarian Eurocon friends, ironically calls "a lively opening ceremony".
Hmmm. . . if we Serbs organize some distant day an Eurocon in this same manner, we will parade out a bunch of girls to sing our ancient folk song (it is supposed to be sung in a particularly loud and shrill, piercing, from-mountaintop-to-mountaintop voice) "poyi Mile volove na reci" – "Mile (man) is watering the oxen at the river-bank". It will have exactly identical to-do with SF.
I did ask, later, the above-mentioned Ivan Krumov, the young, friendly, cool-in-control chief organizer, why no SF in the opening ceremony; and he said they had been trying, to the last moment, to prepare some sort of SF theatrical performance by some group from somewhere, but it did not materialize. – But I believe the Ministry had to be satisfied that there is sufficient kultura performed. Mendelsohn, Wagner, Mozart, Aram Khatchaturian, Beethoven kultura.
The Dom kulture people, my friends too (I love them all; they are good people) sincerely wished to assist the young organizers, and, to assist me specifically, but, nyema ventilaziyi – nyema pari: the air inside was 3 years old, because there was no ventilation, because there is no money to fix it. (But I am somewhat asthmatic now. So, at my big 2-day insistence, at the brink of making scenes, on the third day they unglued and un-nailed and bravely tugged some windows and doors – long ago crusted shut – and drafts of air streamed in! in, in from the gardens around! the first oxygen in three years, it felt so-ooooo good.) The brilliant, run-everywhere young organizers, including Ms Rositsa Rossie Decheva (whose photo you got in "Locus", the only female face; young and nice), and others, had to bring a laptop privately, from home, and to personally borrow a video-beam from a rich friend in town; and to carry these things to Dom kulture for use and back, each time, after use; because the only TV set in the Dom did not look like having a "video-in" hole, their video-recorder was in any case rash-tchukan (broken), and video-beams and other dreams (such as computers and Internet connection) remain unthinkably expensive, for that particular Dom. – But the sincere good will, yes, it was there. They are good people, but the Dom is in deep poverty.
(In the capital city of Bulgaria, Sofia, the new central bus station is a true dream, a clean glass-aluminium-and-marble spaceship descended from the skies of the future, but right across the boulevard are the most miserable favella-style food-and-trinket shops, hovels really, that can aptly be described by three Turkish words: chepenak, chumez, and udzeritsa. Somebody leans with an elbow on the wall of the first one, the next twelve will collapse. – In the old city centers, do not drink water from the water-supply system: be advised: better buy mineral water. Sewerage tubes and water-supply tubes are equally ancient, decrepit and cracked, under the same ground, and, well... they intermingle somewhat... This land was, like Serbia, for four centuries enslaved under the Islamic Turkish Empire. We did the resistance and the dying, the West did the progress.)
Many Bulgarians absolutely do not speak English, and those who do, largely are hesitant or afraid to admit publicly that they speak it, because English is still felt to be an anti-communist language. (Wanna be reported? fired? go to jail? your family blacklisted?) Serbs had their revolution against the last communist dictator in Europe, Slobodan Milosevic, whom they deposed and arrested, in the year 2000; Bulgarians did not, they replaced theirs peacefully. I, a Serb, felt this difference, so very clearly.
At the first working day (Friday, 6th August), on the first lecture, the Bulgarian speaker talked for some time purely in Bulgarian, on and on, and then asked, in a rather threatening raised tone of voice:
"Does anyone demand a translation into English?"
Only this question itself was translated into English. When one of the surprised Western participants spoke up, from the ranks of chairs, "Yes", the Bulgarian shouted angrily: "Who said that!!!"
(Precisely as Nikita Hrushchev, the communist leader after Stalin, when at a Party congress in Moscow somebody asked from the vastness of the ranks of delegates "Why is there no democracy?", replied by shouting mightily "Who said that!!!" and after a minute of horrified absolute dead silence, pointed a finger at the 2000 delegates and told them, "There, comrades: that's why there is no democracy.")
Being a foreigner, behind my secure fortification of a foreign passport – a situation I remember from the opposite direction so vividly from the 1950s, from the Lawrence-Durrell Belgrade, when I was part of the ugly-frightened-grey masses around Durrell; now in Plovdiv, 50 years later, I was the bold foreigner with the passport – well, I dared to speak up too – "I said that!" – and even to wave a hand! which meant that now I could not hide, I would inevitably be seen by the comrade and by all the Party cadres; identified, located, caught – and then, as he realized the extent of the capitalist brazenness and combativeness on that day, the Nikita Hrushchev capitulated. Translation began. – Old communists are still in power in the East, especially in small towns. The men in power only changed the name of the party or parties, but they (although now in NATO) are the same persons and mentalities, apparently.
Oh my Bulgarian bratko (brother).
The European premiere of I, Robot was given in the nearby "Lki" (Lucky) cinema (new and modern; all glass, metal and concrete) but without any person(s) introducing the movie or promoting it in any manner, and consequently without any applause: we just walked in with our free tickets, saw the movie (which is very good, and true to Asimov's spirit, I think, except for the usual commercialist year-too-near; the best by far in the movie, unforgettable, are the disinterested, I-don't-care faces of the robots), walked out. Luckily for us, the sound remained in English, with only subtitles in Bulgarian; but, but, many films in Bulgaria, and (I hear) all films in Russia, in cinemas and on TV, are re-synchronized into local languages, and it is unutterable sadness and grotesque to listen to Sylvester Stallone saying to James Woods, in a flat cautious voice of a B'lgarski (Bulgarian) actor, something like: a be bratko, ke se tepame.
On Saturday 7th August 2004, a guest of honor, from Poland, Mr. Andzej Sapkowski, insulted women, saying that aliens don't come to abduct our women because the women are not worth it. A joke; but a put-down, anti-woman, patriarchal joke, in full knowledge that women of Eastern Europe will not stand up for themselves, will not reply. And, they didn't. But then Sapkowski proceeded with a specific type of Eastern put-down of America and West, saying, in effect, that Western consumer-society audiences are stupid, unthinking, are slaves of marketing, ready to glub huge quantities of cheap commercial pap, the totally worthless SF, while eastern-European audiences and authors – he obviously meant his nation, mostly – are more discerning, smarter, more intellectual. His disparaging remarks were against the West: this is a strong recidive of communist and Nazi attacks on everything English and American (in Nazism and communism, both European products, it was obligatory, a mandatory ritual, to attack America and Britain, as main enemies; Sapkowski merely continues this tradition). But he was not only anti-Western: he was also anti-SF. He was saying that SF as such is idiotic. But then – oh I know this game so well; I heard it so many times from leftists; and from Stanislaw Lem too – but then he proceeds to hint that his countrymen are far better in SF, which is, in their hands, a valuable genre. The game goes like this: SF, it is so worthless, sub-literature, an idiot commercial blah-fui genre, but when we do it, we, my nation, then it is so valuable and intellectual. As you may guess, I did not like Mr. Sapkowski's stand, because it felt pro-communist, anti-woman, anti-SF, cheap-anti-American, and twofaced. And self-praising.
In his GoH speech, Ian Watson proposed that each of our 10 finger-nails should be replaced with a computer chip, so that we become cyborgs: one chip the cell-phone, another the TV, etc. He forgot the toes.
In "Locus", Yulian Stoinov incorrectly claims that there were "250 people on the day with highest attendance". I observed, counted, calculated, and I wrote down. The largest audience at any one point was about 600 people, on Saturday at 16 h, for Sheckley GoH speech. Sheckley is really big in Bulgaria, and at this Eurocon, he was grand.
Autographs? I signed about 5. He signed about 500. Grmlph.
There were no incidents, but . . . lunatics? Yes, two or three mentally imbalanced persons did appear. They annoyed us, at various times. I suppose it is very hard to forbid them entrance.
Sheckley admitted he does not know what Lexian key is. He also told us a joke: on a desert island, an old Jew builds, over the years, 3 buildings: a house, a synagogue, and a synagogue he does not go to.
Patrick Gyger in his GoH speech tried to persuade us that this is the best definition of SF: "SF is what Pierre Versins thought SF is" – (in French) "conjecture romanesque rationnelle". He also explained one of his problems as director of a SF museum: people often confuse SF with futurology. The point of this is: Gyger's presents SF as an esthetic activity, not technological-prognostication thing. I understand his stand and his position clearly; what he says will sit very well with the authorities; but, pardon me! I want to know what the future will be, really, and I never was interested in SF as a purely esthetic, Boris-Vallejo-paintings exercise. So there is here a substitutio thesis, by Gyger: people don't "confuse", they want, and not "futurology", but to experience future via SF.
Last GoH speech, on Sunday at 16 h, was Roberto Quaglia's, and it was mostly jokes, obviously well-practiced. Quaglia, who is Italian, tall, athletic, and young, was the vice-chairman of this Eurocon. He said that he spent many years of his life as a manic-depressive, which is good, he says, because it gives you something to do all day. His shortest joke consisted of 1 word. He said "sex!" and some in the audience laughed. Then he said "sex!" again, a little louder, and the audience laughed even more. – I asked Quaglia, how is it that he is a permanent resident in 2 quite separate cities, does he have 2 wives too? – and he said he is against marriage because it implies an external authority allowing sex.
Quaglia described funny events from various earlier Eurocons and Worldcons. But this involved mention of times long past. And, in the audience were two or three old fans, gray-haired, I think one was called Pascal, with big hair, beard, and mustache. Now, anything human connected with much time, no matter how funny and happy, ultimately turns sad. Ian Watson said, then, something which struck me as wise, and long-sighted, and seriously deeply sad in a nostalgic, world-pain (Weltschmerz) kind of way: there is, said he, a "de-localized tribe" of traveling SF fans, the tribe which meets from time to time at various places (conventions) but never, never all together; so you meet an old such friend at yet another SF convention, somewhere, after 3 months, or after 7 years . . .
In one panel-discussion, the prominent Bulgarian publisher Atanas Slavov (very much present at the convention; a smallish middle-aged man with thin but extremely long hair, and with grey-black beard) complained of malen pazar (small market) for SF in the numerous local European languages, and explicated extensively on his idea to start a yearly Euro anthology of 1-SF-story-from-each-country, or something like that. I told him that this was tried and tried again, and failed and failed again, because the product was: one story, but poor story, from each geographical unit, and nobody wants to buy that. I hesitated to tell him totally openly that people die of boredom when they see such a book in a book-shop-window. And that this will happen with his anthology. I suppose I disappointed many people with this pessimism born from experience.
I told him to beware of advisers from each country, because they will send him the stories of their friends, or relatives, or political mentors, etc., and not good stories.
As an illustration of what I meant, I told him of one town in the time of communism, when the Party directive came to one Dom kulture (not in Plovdiv, no . . . ) that a ballet performance must be organized. So they had to find a ballerina. The Party chief for the town chose one: a fat woman 60 years old, with moustache, who could not dance. When asked, "Why did you choose a fat woman 60 years old, with moustache, who can not dance?" he explained: "Well, she did a lot for this town, in war time; she is a very important drugaritza (comrade, a female one) in our Party organization here, and besides, she is my aunt."
... so my final advice to Atanas Slavov was, to publish "Best of the World" antho, but with many of the best Euro stories included each year if they are best and if they deserve to be there. But he said it would be a project altogether other from his.
Jim Walker, a fan from England, then discussed the Europeanness of European SF, and the Britishness of British SF.
Ah, that fatal moment when they disrespected the orders of captain Ripley, and the Alien entered the "Nostromo"! It comes back again and again. It is probably the most famous disrespect-of-command moment in all history of SF. On the Sunday panel, we discussed whether Alien 1 is a feminist movie, and whether she was sent by the Company to command the "Nostromo" because the Company knew that the human crew (Ash was the Company robot, not human) would take her commands loosely because she was a woman.
Ian Watson mentioned in very concise and exact language that mainstream authors "have the annoying tendency" to write a SF story, a novel or a play, once or twice in their career, but to continue to deny that they are SF authors, while we (we the SF people) detest and renounce them as amateurs, discoverers of warm water.
In fact, Ian Watson's GoH speech was mostly about his cooperation with Kubrick on the IA movie. Here Ian criticized America: IA got no Oscar nomination (a Kubrick movie! so loooong prepared; artistic value guaranteed) because the quality was too high for the American tastes, said he. In fact, says he, scenario means very little in Hollywood, and is often changed, several times, during filming. – This was such a European-patriotic thing to say: it implied that we Europeans are more intelligent than Amers. Later he commented that the idea of a humanoid robot (except for house-maid service) is "a bit daft" because a robot can be any shape and size, for instance the size "of a power-station". (True! say I.) Ian also said, very wisely and accurately, that the Cosmos is "mostly very hostile to us organic life forms" but not so hostile to AIs, who need no oxygen, no water or food, no gravity, need just a little energy, endure immensely more radiation and a much greater range of temperatures . . . an artificial intelligence (AI), said he, belongs, in fact, to the entire Cosmos.
But when he said that love in the AI movie is a tragedy because the loved person dies, I had to remind him: every love is a tragedy, say I, because in every love, the loved person, sooner or later, dies. (Yes?)
There were only two bids for 2006, Moscow and Kiev; Russia being represented by a very hesitant man with mustache, who only occasionally interrupted his bemused long silence with a word or two, and Ukraine being represented by a boisterous, shortish, all jump-wave-and-shout young man. The Ukrainian announced that the sponsor will be a major beer brewery, and he guaranteed unlimited quantities of free beer for all participants all the time; this got loud and long cheers; but what really decided, I think, was a calculation murmured among us, around the room, that Moscow in early February could be minus 40 Centigrade, while Kiev, much more to the south, in April, will likely be only minus 10, so we should freeze much less in Kiev. You see, we know our side of Europe.
Nobody mentioned Chernobyl. That Kiev is in kind-of vicinity of. At the convention, that night, nobody noticed much when the lights went off, because everybody was sufficiently glowing already ... Then the chairman wiped all his three noses ...
(That was my feeble attempt at a joke.)
Death intruded in another way: Dave Lally kept saying that at the previous Glasgow Worldcon, 10 years ago, John Brunner died on the spot, of a heart attack. So we were all mulling on the obvious implication that in August 2005, someone else . . . but, who? . . .
I enclose with this article for "Emerald City" a scan of the "Lki" cinema free-entrance talon (ticket) with which I was admitted for free to the European premiere of I, Robot; and, the "Lki" promo card with I, Robot written in Bulgarian; pronounced, oh my Western colleagues, very similar to English – "Az, robot". This "az" means "I". Not a coincidence; an Indo-European common linguistic root, at least 5,000 years old. In Serbian it would be "Ya, robot". Same root.
Voting for awards . . .
The absurdly named award category "best artist, author of 1 or more works in the last one year" (into which practically all the painters on this planet, even the most professional, would fit; not only the beginners and amateurs, which was vaguely intended when rules were formulated at some earlier Eurocon) was just-simply not awarded; not voted to be not awarded; the award (under Dave's sometimes extra-fast digression-over-digression English) just fell through the cracks in the wooden floor and was not seen again. The remaining 10 categories were voted for. Nick Perunov of Russia is the best writer; Otto Frello of Denmark the best painter; "SF Reality" of Ukraine the best magazine; "Minotauro" of Spain the best publisher; but, the publisher Atanas Slavov of Bulgaria is the best promoter; Vladimir Bakanov of Russia is the best translator; "Emitor" of Serbia is the best fanzine – and why not, with 445 mainly-monthly issues published, which is probably near the European and world record, and with more than 10,000 pages of text and illustration so far, which is probably the absolute world record for SF fanzines, and remaining serious and constructive for 23 years in continuo. (First issue of "Emitor" came out in December 1981.) The honorary award went to the webzine "Concatenation"; and encouragement award went to 6 people, Brian Ronald Larson of Denmark, Martinova Zdravslikova of Czech Republic, Kiril Benediktov of Russia, Yana Polevaya of Moldavia, Vladimir Arenyev of Ukraine, and Ivan Popov of Bulgaria. That's 9 categories.
And . . .
The Film! The Film! Everybody was delighted that Europe finally has a strong, Hollywood-quality, market-viable film in some kind of fantastic genre, so they overwhelmingly, with a totally happy acclamation, voted for the Russian Night Patrol, although it is horror-fantasy (about witches), not SF. Next-door neighbor to our genre, eh. But the award is to a person, not product; the question soon arose, who "the author" of Night Patrol might be; and in the Eurocon rules, this is, surprisingly, not specified, for films. Under David Lally's chairmanship, and Roberto Quaglia's assistant-chairmanship, the issue was this time resolved by voting ad-hoc that two authors should share the award: the script writer Sergei Lukyanyenko and director Timur Bekmambetov.
Who voted? Seventeen European countries did. – Don't ask me who won various awards at the parallel Gamecon and at Bulga(rian)con, but winners there were. And don't ask me about the parties, the Middle Earth masquerade, etc. – lots of good people, there, but I did not attend. Since when do university lecturers attend all such fannish late-night events?
(Prof. Dr. Aleksandar B. Nedelkovic teaches English Literature at the Philological-Artistic Faculty in Kragujevac, Serbia. You can find his biography at:
http://www.alexandria-press.com/Bio/dr_aleksandar_b_nedeljkovic.htm
and the contact address is:
srpskodnf@yahoo.com
and you can download the complete, full English text of his doctoral dissertation about SF from:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/8396/disertacije.htm
while the official (Bulgarian, but, in English) Eurocon report, with several pictures, is at:
www.bgcon.org
so that would be it.)
(Attachments:
I, Robot, free ticket to European premiere, 29 KB;
I, Robot, promo card in Bulgarian, 'Az, robot', 34 KB; and,
Eurocon 2004, E Simon, R Sheckley, A B Nedelkovic, 54 KB)