ROOTS AND A FEW VINES by Mike Resnick So I'm sitting there in Winnipeg, resplendent in my tuxedo, and morbidly wondering how many fans have called me "Mr. Resnick" instead of "Mike" since the worldcon began three days ago. I don't _feel_ like a Mister. I feel like a fan who is cheating by sitting here with all the pros, waiting for Bob Silverberg to announce the winner of the Best Editor Hugo. He goes through the names: Datlow, Dozois, Resnick, Rusch, Schmidt. He opens the envelope and reads off Kris Rusch's name, and suddenly I am walking up to the stage. Bob is sure I thought he called out _my_ name, and looks like he is considering clutching the Hugo to his breast and running off with it (although that is actually a response common to all pros when they are in proximity to a Hugo), but finally he sighs and hands it over to me, and I start thanking Ed Ferman and all the voters. What am I doing here, I wonder, picking up a Hugo for a lady who is half my age and has twice my talent and is drop-dead gorgeous to boot? How in blazes did I ever get to be an Elder Statesman? * * * Well, it began in 1962, which, oddly enough, was _not_ just last year, no matter how it feels. Carol and I had met at the University of Chicago in 1960. We'd gone to the theater on our first date, and wound up in the Morrison Hotel's coffee shop, where we talked science fiction until they threw us out at 5 in the morning. It was the first time either of us realized that someone else out there read that crazy Buck Rogers stuff (though we might have guessed, since they continued to print it month after month, and two sales per title would hardly seem enough to keep the publishers in business.) Well, 1962 rolls around, and so does a future Campbell winner named Laura...but the second biggest event of the year comes when Ace Books, under the editorship of Don Wollheim, starts pirating a bunch of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, and a whole generation gets to learn about Tarzan and Frank Frazetta and John Carter and Roy Krenkal and David Innes all at once. But the important thing, the thing that unquestionably shaped my adult life, was that one of the books had a little blurb on the inside front cover extolling ERB's virtues, and it was signed "Camille Cazedessus, Editor of _ERB-dom_". Well, you didn't have to be a genius to figure out that _ERB-dom_, at least in that context, was an obvious reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs. A whole magazine devoted to one of my favorite writers? I could barely wait until the next morning, when I took the subway downtown and entered the Post Office News, Chicago's largest magazine store. I looked for _ERB-dom_ next to _Time, Life, Look, Newsweek,_ and _Playboy._ Wasn't there. I looked for it next to _Analog, Galaxy,_ and _F&SF._ No dice. Wasn't anywhere near _Forbes_ or _Fortune_ or _Business Week_ either. So I go up to the manager and tell him I'm looking for _ERB- dom_, and he checks his catalogs and tells me there ain't no such animal. I grab him by the arm, drag him over to the paperbacks, pull out the operative Burroughs title, turn to the inside front cover, and smite him with a mighty _"Aha!"_ So he promises to get cracking and find out who publishes this magazine and start stocking it, and I return to our subterranean penthouse (i.e., basement apartment) to await the Good News. Which doesn't come. I nag Post Office News incessantly. I nag my local bookstore. I nag the public library. I even nag my mother. (This seems counter-productive, but she has been nagging _me_ for 20 years and fair is fair.) Finally, I look at my watch and it is half-past 1962 and there is still no sign of _ERB-dom_, so I write to the editor, Miss Cazedessus (so okay, until then I'd never heard of a _guy_ named Camille), in care of Ace Books, and a month later the first five issues of _ERB-dom_ arrive in the mail, the very first fanzines I have ever seen, along with a long, friendly letter that constantly uses the arcane word "worldcon". Within two months I have written three long articles for _ERB-dom #6_ and have become its associate editor. There is a worldcon in Chicago that summer, not a 20-minute subway ride from where we live, but the future Campbell winner chooses August 17 to get herself born, and we do not go to the worldcon. When she is 8 days old I decide to forgive her and lovingly show her off to her grandparents, and she vomits down the back of my Hawaiian shirt (which, in retrospect, could well have been an editorial comment), and it is 27 years before I willingly touch her again, but that is another story. There is one other thing that happens in 1962. We are living at the corner of North Shore and Greenview in the Rogers Park area of Chicago, and right across street of us is this old apartment building, and on the third Saturday of every month strange-looking men and women congregate there. They have long hair, and most of them are either 90 pounds overweight or 50 pounds underweight, and often they are carrying books under their arms. We decide they are members of SNCC or CORE, which are pretty popular organizations at the time, and that they are meeting there to figure out how to dodge the draft, and that the books they carry are either pacifist tracts or ledgers with the names and addresses of all the left- wing groups that have contributed money to them. We have to go all the way to Washington D.C. a year later and attend Discon I to find out that they are not draft dodgers (well, not _primarily_, anyway) but rather Chicago fandom, and that they have been meeting 80 feet from our front door for 2 years. * * * So I wend my way back through the audience, and I find my seat, and I hand Kris Rusch's Hugo to Carol, because I am also up for Best Short Story, and I think I've got a better chance at this, and when I run up to accept the award it will look tacky to already be carrying a Hugo. Besides, Charles Sheffield is sitting right next to us, and he is up for Best Novelette, and he is getting very nervous, and wants to stroke the Hugo for luck, or maybe is considering just walking out with it and changing the name plates at a future date. (In fact, I am convinced that if he does not win his own, neither Kris nor I will ever see _her_ Hugo again. Charles will probably deny this, but never forget that Charles gets paid an inordinate amount of money to tell lies to the public at large.) So Guy Gavriel Kay begins reading off the nominees, and suddenly I realize that I am not nervous at all, that this is becoming very old hat to me. I have been nominated for nine Hugos in the past six years. I have actually won a pair. Worldcons are very orderly things: you show up, you sign a million autographs, you eat each meal with a different editor and line up your next year's worth of work, and then you climb into your tux and see if you won another Hugo. It's gotten to be such a regular annual routine, you sometimes find yourself idly wondering: was it _always_ like this? Then you think back to your first worldcon, and you realize that no, it was not always like this... * * * Right off the bat, we were the victims of false doctrine. Everyone we knew in fandom -- all six or seven of them -- told us the worldcon was held over Labor Day weekend. So we took them at their word. The problem, of course, was the definition of "weekend". We took a train that pulled out of Chicago on Friday morning, and dumped us in the basement of our Washington D.C. hotel at 9:00 Saturday morning. At which time we found out that the convention was already half over. (Things were different then. There were no times in the convention listings. In fact, there were no convention listings. Not in _Analog_, not anywhere. If you knew that worldcons even existed, you were already halfway to being a trufan.) Caz (right: he wasn't a Miss at all) met us and showed us around. Like myself, he was dressed in a suit and tie; it was a few more worldcons before men wore shirts without jackets or ties, even during the afternoons, and every woman -- they formed, at most, 10% of the attendees, and over half were writers' wives -- wore a skirt. If you saw someone with a beard -- a relatively rare occurrence -- you knew he was either a pro writer or Bruce Pelz. When we got to the huckster room -- 20-plus dealers (and selling only books, magazines, and fanzines; none of the junk that dominates the tables today), I thought I had died and gone to heaven. The art show had work by Finlay and Freas and Emsh and 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 exa...
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