Loscon-38\Program Book

$Loscon-38\Program Book$ 1 Contents Chairman’s Message 3 John DeChancie Writer Guest of Honor 4 Where's My Flying Car? 8 Col. Rick Searfoss, ret. Science Guest of Honor 17 Aldo Spadoni Artist Guest of Honor 19 John Hertz Fan Guest of Honor 23 Convention Features and Hours of Operation 25 Loscon 38 Guest and Panelist Bios 27 A Brief History of LASFS 68 A Brief History of Loscon 75 LASFS Awards 82 The Forry Award 82 The Evans-Freehafer Award 83 The Rotsler Award 84 Panel Topics 89 List of Loscon 38 Panels 89 Committee and Staff 97 2 Chairman’s Message Arlene Satin As I pondered on the theme for my Loscon 38 bid I considered all the science fiction and science I have either seen or read. Even with all the vast resources at my fingertips I was stumped until I had a conversation with some friends. This conversation sparked some interesting questions such as, where are our personal jet packs, where is our flying car? I knew immediately that this would be my theme. Have you ever been stuck in traffic? Frustrated by other drivers who can’t seem to get out of your way? I would imagine myself pressing a button on my dash and watching as wings and propellers would appear on my car much like “Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang”. I would slowly rise up above the traffic and laugh at the cars still stuck in traffic as I soared above them. Then, I’d wake from my dream like state and realize I hadn’t moved an inch in the past 5 minutes. !@#$%^&*! Flying cars, Jet Packs, Robotics, Space Exploration, and many other related subjects are just some of many topics we will be examining at Loscon 38. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Costuming and many other interests will also be included. All of us associated with Loscon38 hope you will join us in pursuit of answering the question Where’s My Flying Car? 3 John DeChancie Writer Guest of Honor Man of DiCiancia ...an appreciation by Thomas F. Monteleone (Bram Stoker Award winner, author of Blood of the Lamb and other horror and dark fantasy fiction) Every once in a while as we careen along the twisting tracks of our lives, we lean on the brakes long enough to look back at where we've been. Sometimes those retrospective glances serve to remind us what kind of mooks we've been; but on other more salubrious occasions, we conjure memories of the events and friends that have shaped our lives in good ways. And so with a potential mixing of metaphors, as I peer through the wrong end of the timescope for a moment, I see that I met John DeChancie almost thirty years ago (!). It was at a sky-fie convention, the name of which has long ago fled my overcrowded memory cells, standing around in a crowd when this guy walked up to me and started talking. I remember at the time thinking there was something very odd about him-he looked totally normal-an anomaly at a science fiction gathering. I mean, his hair was clean and his clothes not only fit his trim body, but they were not ill-matched or hailing from some distant fashion zipcode where things like Renaissance doublets and Regency waistcoats not only live, but flourish. So we sat around talking for awhile and I rapidly discovered that I liked this guy a lot. He told me he'd been wanting to meet me because he was Italian and since there were so damned few Italian SF writers, well, at the very least we should all know each other (all four of us). I agreed and asked him his name and he said John DiCiancia (at least that's the way I heard and saw it in my mind). He told me he'd sold his first novel, but I can't remember if it had been published yet or if it was on the schedule . and then he told me that he spelled his name "d-e-c-h-a-n-c-i-e" because his father had it legally changed and Americanized shortly after coming to our wonderful nation. The original Italian spelling had been exactly what I assumed upon hearing John pronounce his last name. But you know what? Spelling isn't what makes you Italian, and Johnny the Scribe is a pure-bred specimen of Italian heritage, both sides of the family. He was born in the thick-thewed town of Pittsburgh, and grew up atop one of its many promontories that peer down upon the mystical place where the Monongahela and the Allegheny conjoin to form the Ohio. I told 4 him I'd always liked Pittsburgh because it had a similar personality to my own Baltimore. In fact I had even picked the Pirates as my National League fave team back when I was a kid. If you were a real baseball fan, you had a team you followed in each League. But I digress. I was just getting ready to say that John was Italian to the bone because the more I got to know him the more I realized he was a consummate Renaissance man. Not only was he an excellent writer, he was a voracious reader in every discipline. He could discuss the vast differences between the architectural styles of Corbu and Sullivan just as easily as he could define the correct tempo for a Rachmaninoff scherzo. As comfortable as he was sitting at his typewriter, he assumed a posture of equivalent confidence at a piano or an easel. I can remember the first time I was at his parents' house at Mount Washington (a Steel Town neighborhood) when he sat down at the piano and rattled off the Moonlight Sonata . flawlessly and without sheet music. Yeah, I was impressed, and I reminded myself to resist the urge to ever pick up a guitar and clang out my rendition of House of the Risin' Sun when he was around. I kinda felt the same way after he showed me a roomful of canvasses he had not only stretched but painted. Incredible stuff with bold colors and shapes and a commingling of styles and visions. I vowed never to touch another crayon the rest of my life. The more I got to know him, the more I liked him. He had an easy, unassuming demeanor that quietly told anyone who met him he was a very smart guy. His wit is the one they were thinking about when they started putting the word in the same sentence with "rapier." In all the years I've known him, I've never seen him shrink from a verbal joust, and I have no memory of him ever losing one either. Which leads me to his most endearing quality-his sense of humor and his ability to say funny things in uniquely original turns of phrase and never-before-heard metaphors. Johnny was doing Dennis Miller way before Dennis Miller was doing Dennis Miller. (When he got his first computer-a Kaypro that looked like an East German Army surplus oscilloscope-he told me it was so primitive it ran on "64 trilobites.") And so, as they say, time passed. Johnny D. and I became really good buddies. He would drive down to Baltimore and we would hang out downtown at the Fells Point bars and Little Italy's restaurants. Other times, I would head up to the Burgh and hang out at his suburban grown-up people's house. I remember on one of those early trips that I noticed that he had done all kinds of work on his house-yeah, he was also a master carpenter, plumber, and stonemason. His father, like mine, had been a blue-collar man, who knew how to use every tool in the box, and the old man had taught John well. And you probably thought this guy you picked to be your Guest of Honor was just a writer . But while we're on the subject of writing, it would probably be a good idea to talk about some of the books and stories Johnny has created for us. His Skyway trilogy is one of my favorite SF series ever. In fact, I will happily go on record to state it beats the living crap out of the Foundation Trilogy-if 5 for no other reason than the sheer quality of John's prose. The rollicking story and colorful characters of the Skyway novels are endlessly engaging, but I maintain that it's the writing-full of style and wit and sheer bravura-that makes the trilogy so special. Without a doubt, your GoH can write the rest of us under the table with one hand tied behind his keyboard. The coolest thing about the Skyway Trilogy is that it's the purest of pure Science Fiction. While reading it, I was continually impressed with how John had captured the gosh-gee-wow! feeling I'd had as a teenager reading stuff by Van Vogt and Clarke and Simak and Heinlein. The trilogy is a testament to John's profound understanding of the genre and why it can be so powerful and grand. John had grown up reading SF just as I had, and since we were just about the same age, we had a lot of shared experiences. I can remember his telling me he picked up one of my very early novels because it sported a domed city on the cover, and he just had a soft spot in his science-fictional psyche for domed cities.

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