Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (12 page)

At the Hugo Awards ceremony, Bob Silverberg gives a memorial to John Brunner which I think is heartfelt and very tastefully handled, with an especially nice touch being Silverberg’s request that the audience rise and give John a standing ovation rather than observing a moment of silence for him. Wonder which I’ll get when I go? If either.

Joe Haldeman wins a Hugo for
Asimov’s
with his story “None So Blind,” and Mike Resnick looks
very
relieved not to have lost four Hugos on the same night when he wins for Best Novella. I am very pleased to win the Hugo for Best Editor, my seventh (and no, to answer the question I’m most often asked at Worldcons, you
don’t
get bored with winning them after a while. Trust me on this.).

The fireworks display over the River Clyde, after the Hugo ceremony, adds a nice touch of class to the night.

Susan spends much of Monday in our room, still sick, but she stumbles out to join me, Jane Jewell and Peter Heck, George R.R. Martin, and Walter Jon Williams for dinner at a restaurant called The Ubiquitous Chip, so called because they don’t serve any chips there, the idea being that chips are ubiquitous everyplace else. Or something like that. None of the local people have been able to describe the interior of this place to us, just saying that it was “strange” or “bizarre,” and as soon as we get there, I see why; it’s a place outside of their experience, and so hard for them to get a mental grip on, although familiar enough to all of us—it’s a fern bar, perhaps the only one in Britain, almost certainly the only one in Scotland. They serve Nouveau Cuisine Scottish, which I find an odd and not entirely satisfactory combination. George and I, in fact, keep complaining that the meal isn’t “hearty” enough—Scottish food is supposed to be hearty, isn’t it?—although George, who loves turnips, is somewhat placated by being served a big bowl of “neeps & tatties.” Walter entertains us during dinner by describing a delicacy he came across in England, a “chipbuttey”—which turns out to be a french-fry sandwich, the cold french-fries placed on a slice of bread, mashed down a bit, slathered with butter, and with another slice of bread then placed on top to complete the sandwich.

This sounds sufficiently “hearty” even for George and me, but it’s also something you can’t order in The Ubiquitous Chip, where chips have, if you recall, been banned. We try not to be
too
disappointed over this . . .

On this note, the Worldcon ends.

Tuesday, August 29th—
Glasgow, Dumbarton Castle, & Tarbert

Up about 8 A.M., go down to breakfast, chat briefly with Andy Porter, who is all agog, understandably enough, about the hotel right next door to his apartment in Brooklyn having burned down the night before, which news he has just discovered in the local Glasgow paper. The lobby is full of people checking out of the Marriott, and we chat briefly with folks such as Paul McAuley, Stephen Jones, Kim Jones, Mandy Slater, Janis O’Conner and her husband Bob, Marti McKenna, Charles de Lint and his wife, Norman Spinrad, Lee Wood, and so on. Go upstairs and get our suitcases, which are heavier and more bulging-at-the-seams than ever, check out ourselves, and then sit in the Marriott lobby waiting for David Kogelman to come over from the Moat House in his newly rented car and pick us up.

Susan is sicker than ever, at the stage where she’s stumbling around like a zombie, seeming only partially conscious and practically bumping into the walls, and I’m having severe doubts about the wisdom of taking this post-convention trip with her in the state that she’s in. I’m exhausted myself, and in that bleakly depressed state that conventions usually leave me in these days, so it seems as if, all things considered, we might be better off just staying in the Marriott for the few days between now and Friday, when our flight home is scheduled to leave from Glasgow Airport. We committed ourselves before we left home, however, to this trip up to Tarbert in Argyll, where Lisa Tuttle and Colin Murray live, and we already have reservations at the Tarbert Hotel there; George R.R. Martin and Parris and David Kogelman are also headed up to Tarbert today, Scott and Suzi Baker are already there, staying with Lisa and Colin, and the idea is that we’re all going to get together for a post-Worldcon party . . . an idea that looked a lot more desirable before the trip than it does now. But Susan says that she may as well be sick there, with friends nearby, than sick here in the hotel by herself after everyone we know has left, which makes a certain amount of sense, and David has made a car rental reservation based on the idea that we’re going to share driving and expenses with him, so I guess we are going to be going to Tarbert after all, in spite of everything—although I doubt that Susan, who can barely lift her head, is going to be doing all that much of the driving.

David arrives, we load our stuff into his rental car, and we drive over to the Moat House hotel, where we have a quick lunch in the lobby bar with George and Parris. Finally, in the usual Glasgow drizzle, we all set off, Susan and I in David’s car (David has good-humoredly agreed that Susan is probably not in the best shape in the world for driving at the moment, so he does all the driving himself—but, as he says, he’s an ex-cab-driver, and so is used to long uninterrupted stretches of driving . . . although this
is
the first time he’s ever driven in Britain before, which makes for a few unnerving moments), following George and Parris in their car. The idea is that we’re going to drive to Tarbert caravan-style, led by George and Parris, who have been there before, with a stop just outside of Glasgow at Dumbarton Castle. Unfortunately, we overshoot Dumbarton Castle, going almost all the way to Helensburgh before we realize that we’ve missed the turn. Determinedly, George turns around and we all caravan back through Dumbarton, this time spotting both the turn-off and the Castle itself, which, coming south, dominates the horizon, looming up as it does on the top of a very high hill; it’s amazing we all managed to miss it coming the other way.

We drive down to the car park at the foot of Dumbarton Castle. Susan decides that she is too sick and exhausted to climb up the several long flights of very steep stairs to the castle ruins on top of the hill, so she stays behind in the car, reading a Brother Cadfael book, while the rest of us set off up the stairs, through a steep and narrow passageway where the portcullis once was, and so up to the open grassy area on top of Dumbarton Rock, where the castle’s artillery batteries were once set into the side of the hill, and several huge old cannons still point their mutely gaping mouths out over the wide estuary of the River Clyde, commanding the approach from the sea. George says that he likes “manly” castles, grim foreboding fortresses and frowning military strongpoints rather than places full of tapestries and fancy furniture, like Cawdor, and he seems pleased with Dumbarton; although there’s not really much of the original structure left intact, the castle—or what’s left of it—does have an impressive location, perched several hundred feet up in the air on top of dome-shaped Dumbarton Rock (said to be the last bit of their homeland many Scottish refugees from the Highland Clearances saw as they sailed into exile, never to return)—it’s not difficult to imagine the castle defenders pouring boiling oil and flaming pitch down on unfortunate Vikings or Englishmen or whoever might be trying to scramble up the steep cliffs in order to press home an attack. I doubt that many of them made it—and, indeed, I don’t think that Dumbarton Castle was ever taken by direct assault.

Leaving the Castle behind, we stop for a snack at a little pub in Helensburgh—George finally finding someplace where the food is hearty enough for him, having a steak pie that he raves about for the next three days, whenever we eat somewhere else—and then make the long but extremely pretty drive to Tarbert, through a high mountain pass and then south along the side of Loch Fyne, where, after having hidden all afternoon, the sun comes out at the end of the day long enough to paint the water with orange and gold.

At Tarbert, a small fishing village set along either arm of a V-shaped harbor, we find that the Tarbert Hotel is being used as a location for the filming of a BBC mini-series called
A Mug’s Game;
the downstairs pub, where a scene in the show is being shot as we arrive, is full of actors and cameramen, and the only flight of stairs leading up to the guest rooms, a steep and narrow one, is snarled with wires and lights and blocked by loitering members of the technical crew, who also spill over into and have taken over much of the cramped and tiny hotel lobby, where the registration desk is. We have trouble even getting
into
the hotel, as a member of the tech crew is stationed outside to refuse anyone entry, then have trouble getting anyone to come out to the registration desk to give us our rooms, as the hotel proprietor is off somewhere seeing to the needs of the TV crew. Then we have to wait, impatiently, in order to be able to get up to our rooms, since there’s no way to get up the stairs while the scene in the pub is actually being shot. (For most of the next two days, the TV crew will swarm over the hotel, making it difficult to get in and out of it as we wish, and visiting on us a host of other inconveniences—probably we should all spurn the Tarbet and go to another hotel somewhere, but we’re too tired to deal with that, especially Susan, who, by this point, can barely stay on her feet.) George, who has worked extensively for the movies and TV at home for the past decade or so, is boggled by the fact that he has traveled thousands of miles to a small and very isolated village in rural Scotland only to run into, of all things . . . a TV shoot! I tell George that he should tell everyone that he’s a
real Hollywood producer,
instead of a mere BBC TV producer, and then all the local people who are swarming worshipfully around the TV producer, especially the wide-eyed local girls, will swarm worshipfully around
him,
instead. He doesn’t act on this suggestion, though, although it probably would have worked.

At last, we take advantage of a break in the shooting to get upstairs to our rooms. I very nearly kill (or at least herniate) myself hauling Susan’s suitcase up to the third floor (as usual at small British hotels, there’s no one to help with the bags, and the hotel proprietor, an old woman in her seventies, seems sensibly disinclined to lend a hand), and only get my own suitcase up there because David volunteers to help, and we both haul it upstairs by its straps (the handle is broken off, remember?) like Army corpsmen hauling a wounded soldier to safety in an old World War II movie. When I get up there, I find that our room is almost literally the size of the proverbial broom-closet, the smallest room of our trip, with just enough space in it for the bed, from which you can touch the wall on either side without needing to straighten your arm; somehow I manage to jam the suitcases in there too, although this leaves almost no place in the room where you can stand, and you have to crawl over one of the suitcases to get to the toilet.

Susan crashes hard, falling onto the bed and into a heavy sleep almost immediately, telling me, before she topples over, to bring her a sandwich from somewhere; she has no interest in going out to dinner, or going anywhere—she’s down for the night. Parris also says that she’s not interested in dinner, and also goes to bed immediately, which leaves George and David and me on our own, three wild and crazy guys, free to seek adventure in the streets of swinging Tarbert! . . . which, unfortunately, are by this point almost completely shuttered and deserted, although it’s only about eight o’ clock by now, and there’s still light in the sky. Tarbert folds up early. Except for a swirl of activity around the TV shoot at the Tarbert Hotel, everything is closed down, except for another pub up the street and one restaurant, and, once you get a few blocks away from our hotel, there’s almost no one around on the streets.

We walk up the road along the shuttered seafront, looking for a restaurant, and finally make a reservation at a tiny place called The Anchorage, where they kindly agree to sit us late, at nine o’clock, although they’re technically closed by then; since the pub at the Tarbert Hotel is being used by the TV crew, there’s really no place else in town to eat, except for the somewhat seedy looking other pub, so we count ourselves very lucky to get into The Anchorage, even if we will have to wait an hour.

To kill time, we walk further up the road and sit for awhile in the gathering dusk on a bench overlooking the harbor and, past a few small humped islands bristling with trees, like miniature versions of the offshore islands near Skye, out over Loch Fyne itself. Seagulls wheel and scream overhead, returning to rest on the harbor mud flats for the night, occasionally sweeping low over the water in hopes of a last-minute fish to snack on before going to sleep. We discuss whether or not we could live in a tiny village like this. George thinks that it would be a wonderful place to live, so remote and quiet and picturesque, but I think that it would drive me crazy to live here in hardly any time at all, and David, a big-city boy, tends to agree with me. George counters by waxing eloquent about the peace and solitude and serenity to be found here, and how inspiring and uplifting that would be, pointing at a seagull that is skimming the surface of the waves and crying repeatedly as it flies and saying, “Listen to that! Where else could you hear something like that? You couldn’t hear it in the city!”, and I reply, “I’ll make a tape.” It’s almost full-dark by now, and we think we see a seal swimming along below, on its way out of the harbor into the deeper waters of the open loch, although, in the dusk, it could be anything from a seabird to a selkie. Perhaps it’s a Lake Monster.

Dinner at the Anchorage is quite good, although the dinner conversation is a bit gloomy. The recent deaths of Roger Zelazny and John Brunner have left us all a bit somber, and the talk turns to the economically ravaged scene of the British science fiction publishing world, and whether the same thing is likely to happen in the States. Whether it does or not, we all agree that it’s gotten tougher to make even a marginal living as an SF writer in the last decade or so, and that it’s likely to get even tougher in the future—that, in fact, it may now be impossible for all but a very fortunate few to make any sort of decent money at all out of writing SF. We all know five or six SF writers, in fact, who are only a step or two away from having to sleep out on a hot-air vent. This depresses George. Although he has a yen to live in baronial splendor, and to this end is planning to build a luxurious house on a private mesa of his own in New Mexico, he is soft-hearted enough to wish that everybody else could live in baronial splendor as well—or at least that his friends could do so. Instead, although George himself is moderately financially secure, many of his friends probably will end up living on hot-air vents, or the next thing to it, and this distresses him. I’m quite likely to end up on a hot-air vent myself, sooner or later—editors don’t have retirement plans. We suggest that perhaps George should prudently make provisions for his soon-to-be-indigent friends by thoughtfully providing a row of hot-air vents for us outside his baronial manor . . .