Caveats: A few disclaimers:

• This is all personal opinion, I've noted in a few places where my opinions seemed unpopular but maybe not in all places;
• I wrote this some time after attending the convention, and from memory (the trigger was someone suggesting the Futurians should do a con report) so it's appallingly unreliable and incomplete; and
• My memory seems much better at recalling the bad bits than the good, so let me say now that I had a good time, despite what it may sound like, in particular
• the organisation was generally OK.

If this report has any value at all, I suspect it's as a cautionary tale to convention organisers: a "lessons learnt" report.

Before the Convention: Some American fans came to Sydney before heading down to Melbourne, and dropped in to a Futurians meeting. They included

Janice Gelb, this year's Down Under Fan Fund (DUFF) traveller. DUFF alternates between sending American fans to Australia and Australian fans to America. Thus, nature balances itself. Janice is an experienced con scene person with impeccable organisational commitment credentials. After writing this I was told Janice made a major contribution to wresting order from the ur-chaos of which conventions are created and to which they return if left even momentarily unsupervised. For multiple reasons, a fine choice.

• Mark and Evelyn Leeper: legends in the USENET community. Mark holds the record for continuous reviewing of movies on the net, he's been doing it since 1981. Evelyn has more Hugo nominations for fan writing than a media fan could count. Evelyn wrote up a short warts-and-all description of this meeting for the web, and I hear Mark did one too.
• Barry, Judy(?) and Merida Newton: a fan family, travelling in a pack for mutual protection.
• "Wombat", apparently a nickname predating any visit to Australia.

The friendships made here were a significant part of my Aussiecon experience, and I spent some time with the Newtons and Leepers at the con.

2100 Registration: I showed up on Wednesday night to register and found out that nobody was around (it had closed at seven). Fortunately plenty of other people had the same problem and we had a buffet at the Crown Casino. For ideological reasons I hate to say anything good about that place but I thought the buffet was quite good (not everyone agreed with me).

0900 Registration: This all worked rather smoothly as far as I was concerned. I was briefly drafted into doing some carry work, though, and found that the place I was supposed to take something didn't exist yet, so perhaps there was more confusion underneath. The badges we were issued struck me as a little odd: they gave point of origin as a suburb, in the style of addressing a letter but without the postcode. So unless you knew the city you probably weren't going to know what the name meant. The string version was also impossible to keep facing forward: I should have got the pin variant.

1000 "A Newcomer's Guide to Aussiecon III": This being the first science-fiction convention I'd attended, I supposed I better go along. It turned out to be rather directionless. Most of the advice seemed aimed at someone else: "don't forget to eat some time during the day or your blood sugar level will go through the floor and you will collapse" for instance (but I found someone who didn't follow this advice and had a problem, so I guess they knew their audience). The "Newcomer's Guide" was repeated every day, and was intended as a guide to the day, which seemed to me excessive: there's no way I'd want to invest a whole hour a day on listening to previews. I walked out of this about halfway through (it was a big theatre and this sort of thing happened a lot during the con). I think all this could have been done better as a written handout.

1100 "The Scientist in Science Fiction": I thought this was billed as John Foyster (a Melbourne fan, from something he said apparently related to Benford by marriage) and Gregory Benford. In practice, John Foyster did all the talking while Gregory Benford sat very quietly, doing a pretty good job of hiding an increasingly pained expression. John Foyster made at least one interesting point: that the talk's title was very different from "Science in Science Fiction". Lots of stories include real science in them, but it's rather rarer to see scientists doing their stuff: to see the scientific method applied in a story.

Unfortunately, his method of illustrating this was to read out a thousand word (his statement of length) extract of a bad (his evaluation) depiction of a scientist in a bad (his evaluation) science fiction story. I can't see why anyone would want to hear this (although to be fair to John Foyster several people later told me they liked this bit, and had to be given entries on my "list of people I don't understand", alongside the bloke who couldn't find anywhere to eat on Lygon street ... but I digress).

John Foyster then praised Gregory Benford (justifiably, in my opinion) for his Timescape, one of the great portrayals of the scientific method in literature. Wishing to make the point that such works were not being produced today, he contrasted this with one of Benford's later works, Great Sky River (?). He'd found an extract from this book which he thought especially bad, and yes, he was going to read it out. Another thousand words, again selected specifically on the basis of not being worth listening to, were sloshed out over the audience. All this while the author sat beside him suffering the humiliation in silence. You pick your wife and you get the in-laws, Greg.

Since writing this it's been explained to me by John Foyster that Benford's wife's maiden name was Foister: there's no known relationship.

By the time all this was done, only a few minutes remained for Benford to say anything. He said a few words in his own defence and answered some questions. But the opportunity to hear from one of the few real scientist-writers had been lost. The strange thing is that I agree with most of what Foyster said: Timescape is, as he said, brilliant; Great Sky River is, as he said, far from Benford's best work. But the way he said it was appalling: rude as well as boring.

Some time after I'd written this John Foyster read it on the web. He pointed out a couple of things he thought were in error, and praised the document as a whole as worthy of inclusion in his fanzine. I can only hope everyone spattered by my ill-aimed abuse is as calm about it. In particular, John hadn't been expecting Benford to be present, and didn't know they were related (I guess I misunderstood something he said). I'm pleased to have this concrete example of unreliability to dispel any authority I may accrete.

1330 Hosted Lunch: The organisers set this up and it seemed a good idea: a host puts his name on a sheet of paper at the information desk, and anyone who wants to show puts their name under it. Then the group goes off together to a restaurant. Unfortunately the specifics weren't that easy.

First, the time of the lunch was surprisingly late, a 1330 assembly at the information desk. In a con where everything else happened at even hours, we could easily have been there twenty-five minutes earlier, but I assume the time was chosen to fit into organiser schedules. At 1330 the guests were there, but neither of the hosts were. After waiting for about twenty-five minutes, I suggested we all go off to the restaurant without them (we had a map) while leaving a note so they could follow. Just as we were about to set off, one of the organisers appeared, apologised for everyone's absence, and told us to wait while they found the hosts. Fifteen minutes later they hadn't been seen again. I found this pretty irritating, since the only contribution of the organisers had been entirely negative. Eventually the main host came in, and explained she'd been caught in traffic while organising some other aspect of the con. After a short side trip to find the other host (who showed no sign of a sense of urgency) we headed off to the restaurant, which turned out to be full (I don't suppose a reservation would have helped, since we were now very late).

By the time we got seated we had a choice between a leisurely lunch getting to meet the other people there, or eating fast and ducking back to catch the 1500 session. Most chose the former, I chose the latter. Once the dinner proper started the first thing the host told us (literally, as some of us were sitting down) was that she had just staved off an attempt to depose her from whatever position she held. Melbourne SF club committee types seemed to have a tendency to think that random passersby would be interested in the details of their clubs' internal politics. From the viewpoint of Sydney (motto: "lack of politics by Balkanisation") this was all kind of bewildering. But perhaps it's the contempt of the barbarian for civilisation: the problem (petty politics) is a symptom of a capability (large scale organisation) that Sydney lacks.

I'm being a little churlish in this section: critiscising the organisers is an easy thing to do and especially safe if you aren't organising anything yourself. But the organisers here could have used a dose of Hippocrates: "first of all, do no harm". It's one thing to fail to organise, or not to turn up. It's another to actively sabotage the guests' own improvised solution, while providing none of your own.

1500 "Impromptu Space Opera": This is apparently a regular feature, where a couple of writer-cartoonists generate a space opera parody from scratch on the basis of shouted advice from the audience. I found this very entertaining in an ephemeral sort of way. I think any overseas visitors would have found the Australian elements very confusing, for instance the references to Pauline Hanson. But by and large a good time was had by all.

1600 "Are We the Last Generation of Mortals?": A slightly depressing title for a panel on life extension, since many people would hope to be in the first generation of immortals, but I suppose even SF writers don't like to extrapolate too wildly. An interesting subject, and if anything the theme of the convention: for the rest of con any scientific panel, regardless of topic, would stray toward life extension. Unfortunately, the panel was too elementary for me (or anyone who, say, regularly reads New Scientist) to learn much. That isn't a criticism of the panel, exactly: it's an inevitable consequence of a broad subject that an hour doesn't permit any depth. I'd call this one of the lessons I took home from the con, and would like to pass on here: if you think yourself well-read, or if you are organising a panel aimed at the well-read, choose a relatively narrow and specific subject. It took me a while to figure this out, and I wish either that someone had told me when the con was starting, or that I'd grown a brain and figured it out myself.

1700 "Science Fiction Across the Media": I'm not sure if I went to this, I suspect this is the talk I saw on video, replayed during the video screening program. If so, it was interesting for reasons not exactly those I expected. The format was two of the con organisers interviewing Joseph Michael "JMS" Straczinski, famous for Babylon 5. It quickly became clear that the organisers weren't, perhaps, quite as well prepared or quite as skilled presenters as they might have been.

If the guest had been Gregory Benford, he would have suffered in silence (or so I believe: from my very limited acquaintance Benford seems to be considerate almost to a fault). But today's guest came from Hollywood, and lampooned their awkwardness unmercifully (for instance, pretending to hang himself while they spoke).

Little of what Straczinski said seems to have left distinct memories, except for a perhaps unfair impression that it was a little self-complimentary. The most interesting aspect was his story of a practical joke vendetta between himself and Andreas Katsulas, a story he at first declined to tell because he assumed everyone would know it. I won't repeat it here since it must be on the web.

JMS wasn't real happy with his current producers, who had just cancelled Crusade. If I understand correctly these are the same people he was praising enthusiastically last year, when they saved Crusade from its cancellation by the producers he had before them. I'm probably being a little unkind here. Straczinski lives in Hollywood, and his style of communication has perhaps been adapted to his environment.

In summary, a lot of data about Straczinski, and probably a lot of information ... if I could think of how to extract the latter from the former. Interesting mostly for an insight into his character ... if I could with confidence see past the public persona. The contrast with Benford's tolerance of Foyster was vivid.

1930 Opening Ceremony: This was quite well put together, with a spiffy video to open it. The opening patter was witty and reasonably professional.

2000 Guest of Honour Speech by Bruce Gillespie: Bruce Gillespie is a Melbourne fan, and produces the fanzine The Metaphysical Review. His talk was largely historical, discussing the early science fiction clubs in Sydney and Melbourne. In the course of this he implied that Sydney SF fandom in general and the Sydney Futurians in particular were now defunct, which wasn't greeted with great approval in the Futurian quarter of the theatre.

And now the nasty bit. Bruce Gillespie modestly claimed that there were others who were much more deserving of being Guest of Honour than he was. In particular, he mentioned Graham Stone, a member of the Sydney Futurians both today and in its original instantiation (joining in the 1940s). But, he said, it wasn't possible to honour Graham in this way, because Graham refused to come to conventions in Melbourne, and nobody knew why.

Altogether, Bruce Gillespie invested ten minutes making fun of Graham, of a one hour speech. This in front of two-thousand people with no interest in the argument, but whose opinion Graham may value. I'm still angry as I write this, weeks later.

Thog's Masterclass: David Langford has a fanzine Ansible which regularly wins Hugos. One department in it is "Thog's Masterclass", where Thog the Barbarian lists turns of phrase from science fiction and fantasy that are "differently good".

Absolutely hilarious. Best of the con.

2200 "Ausslam": This was something to do with professional wrestling (i.e. the choreographed kind) video synchronised to music. Having no interest in wrestling, I didn't go. I later heard this was a mistake.

Parties: I think perhaps I went to the "Con Jose" party (a bid for having the 2002(?) Worldcon in San Jose, later successful). There was some friction here because American fans expect to be able to bring in food cheap from outside, whereas the Centra hotel expected to cater. An issue to resolve if you are organising a con.

1300 Guest of Honour Speech by Gregory Benford "Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia": I walked out of this before he started speaking, when I decided it looked like it would be exactly the same as the one I heard in Sydney. Perhaps a mistake, as an offhand remark by a listener suggested there may have been fresh material. A good talk, anyway.

1400 "Damon Dark": This is an Australian-produced SF series. After thirty seconds all I'd seen was really bad acting and no plot, so I left. Not something I'm really proud of (anyone can stuff up a beginning, and it might well have been watchable later). But when you start to grit your teeth and squirm in your seat there's only a few options, and I didn't have any extraneous limbs to gnaw off.

1600 "Other Awards Ceremony": A perhaps unfortunate name, since it rather devalues it. The intent of the name is "Awards Other Than Hugos Ceremony". A friend suggested it should have been called something like "Australian National Awards Ceremony", but that would exclude, for instance, the Japanese translation prize (awarded in a semi-traditional Japanese way with kimonos and the like). It felt a little odd to hear the Japanese award prizes to Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, and other books of its era. A bit like having someone tell you their next car will have fins.

I'd gone to the trouble to read almost all the nominations for the Ditmars, and hadn't been all that impressed with the quality, but perhaps I have inflated ideas of how good the best in a given year should be. My opinions on which was best didn't seem to have all that much to do with those of the judges. But the correlation was roughly zero, not negative: they weren't picking things I thought bad any more often than those I thought good.

One of the awards was the Chandler prize. This is given to an Australian who has made a great and long term contribution to science fiction in Australia: an early winner, for example, was George Turner. This year, the prize went to Graham Stone, who hadn't come to the convention (Graham is in his early 70s and needs a good reason to travel).

Looking around, I realised Eric Lindsay, who probably should have accepted the prize for Graham, wasn't present either (I'm not sure where he was but I'm sure it was something useful). Concluding that made me as good a choice as anyone (I'm rarely accused of being reluctant to put myself forward) I walked up to accept the prize, fortunately without competition.

Of course, I had nothing to say. I settled for "As you can see, I'm not Graham. I'm sure if he were here he'd say something very eloquent and generous in acceptance ... so let's assume he did."

I got about halfway through this before it was interrupted by a strange experience. People started taking pictures of me. It was surreal: what were they going to put on the caption? "Gate-crashing non-winner of the Chandler prize David Bofinger accepts unhis trophy?" I told them I had no idea why they were taking my picture ... and yet, I did. It seems ridiculous, but I think this is the experience of the con that I will remember the longest. Every step in the logic chain makes sense (Graham gets an award, Graham isn't present, I stand up, people take pictures for completeness sake or out of reflex) but the final result is a bit like Germany invading Belgium because a Bosnian shot the archduke of Austria, or American policy in Vietnam, or our drug laws. I think this sort of perception creep is a great thing to be able to induce in a reader: gradually adjust their worldview until they see as reasonable actions which they would have dismissed as insane at the start of the novel. Then have a character walk in, point at them and say "you're mad!" and have the reader say "Hey, no I'm not ... oh, wait, maybe I am.".

1900 "Taking Graham's Horribly Fragile-Looking Trophy Back to My Hotel Room and Finding Packing Materials For It":

2000 Hugo Awards: I'd also gone to the trouble of reading all the Hugo nominees I could (which was nearly all of them). The Hugo judges had much more in common with my taste than did the Ditmar judges. In particular, Connie Willis got the Hugo I voted her. Greg Egan also got a Hugo, and while it was for a story I didn't think deserved one my admiration for Egan is sufficient that I'm happy when he gets any kind of Hugo.

Straczinski was something of a surprise loser: certainly it came as an unpleasant surprise to him. I wondered if the fact that Sleeping in Light hadn't yet screened in Australia was a factor. But experienced con goers told me that the bulk of votes in the Hugos come from Americans anyway. Straczinski was announcing a winner and took the opportunity to make fun of the presentation organisation, telling people they didn't really need escorts to hold their hand while they came up to get an award.

Greg Egan's publisher, obliged to respond in some fashion, leapt up onto the stage from the front. He then explained that he'd never met Greg Egan. Makes you wonder if Greg Egan is an AI ... I guess his writing would probably fail a Turing test, too: sure ain't nobody else does anything similar.

Parties: I think this is the night I had dinner with some Melbourne fans, in a sort of pub-restaurant I'm sure I could never find again. Pleasant, though apparently not all that memorable.

1000 "The Interstellar Precursor Probe" by Gregory and James Benford: The concept is to have a light sail, driven by light pressure from a very large maser or laser. The sail's payload is enough instruments to do a once-over survey of another solar system and a transmitter to send the reply to Earth. I get the impression it's more James' project (he's an engineer) than Greg's. On the other hand, Greg is a much more polished speaker.

It's another of these ideas that's got just a bit too long a timescale to feel really plausible. It's very easy to imagine new improved interstellar probes waving gaily as they sail past the Benfords' first try, still en route to its destination. Also, the space engineering involved to build the launch maser is colossal.

1400 Art Gallery: I have a vague idea this is when I checked out the art show. The usual range of work, from Nick Stathopolous' Dreaming Down Under to works inspiring "Well I wouldn't want to be associated with that". Perhaps a little smaller than I'd expected.

1600 "Liars' Theatre": I knew nothing about this when I decided to come, more or less on the basis of the panellists (Haldeman, Silverberg, Benford, etc.) What it turned out to be was a panel on the subject of writing, editors, other writers and the like, modified by the rule that nobody was allowed to say anything true.

It didn't start with all that much promise. Having come to Australia, the panellists decided to make a joke about something Australian, and they chose vegemite. Now eating vegemite is, observed dispassionately, at least "odd" and perhaps "weird". But it isn't funny in and of itself. And about all the panel had on line to try to make it funny was smut.

I think part of the problem is that the panel fell into a trap, one which is easy to fall into when writing humour for a foreign audience. The trap is this: any material you think up on the subject of something with which you are unfamiliar has a pretty good chance of being a cliché. Terry Pratchett (normally a very entertaining speaker) fell into just this trap when he spoke (in Australia) about his upcoming book The(?) Last Continent, in which an Australia-analogue appears. One of the characters is an exaggeratedly claim-happy Australian aboriginal land rights activist, prone to declare almost anything a sacred site. To Pratchett this was obviously a new and original thought he believed would tickle an Australian audience. To the audience it was an overdone cliché associated with politically conservative paranoia. The reason it's so interesting that science fiction writers should fall for this (yes, I do have a reason for the anecdote) is that it's a classic failing of non-SF writers trying to write SF without sufficient familiarity with the field: "I know, I'll have the two main characters turn out to be Adam and Eve, that'll be a clever twist!". I suspect a similar effect occurs in other genres, mystery for example, or noir.

It got better later. The skit that sticks best in my mind was a choreographed fugue on the subject of having one's books adapted for film. The first writer said that he'd never had any trouble with pitching to Hollywood producers. The second that pitching was unnecessary, they came to him. The third that "I never talk to producers, but every now and then I check my bank balance and it's larger". A fourth that he never bothered to check his bank balance "but every now and then I go to the movies ...". I think this is a nice way to do large panel comedy, and would like to see more of it.

1700 "FTL Travel and Non-Einsteinian Relativity": Futurian John August has a strong interest in Ritzian theories of electromagnetism. Ritz was a physicist roughly contemporary with Einstein, and wrote his own attempt to explain electromagnetism about the same time Einstein was working from Maxwell's equations to obtain special relativity. Ritz retains Galilean relativity, modifying the electromagnetic force instead.

Ritz's work has been in the back of physics' cupboard ever since (in my opinion deservedly, but John would disagree). John organised the panel, and drafted Ian Woolf and me as panellists and Gary Dalrymple as a moderator. Ian Woolf turned out not to be able to make it (I believe he was interviewing James Benford for his radio segment on 2SER) so Erwin "Filthy Pierre" Strauss, an institution at worldcons, took his place. My function was supposed to be that of the orthodox scientist who didn't believe a word of it, but Filthy Pierre turned out to be every bit as cynical as I was about Ritzian theory and got in first, so I felt a little redundant.

I was pretty pleased with the turnout, which was in the forty to fifty range with nearly everyone hanging around for the whole talk. Considering how abstruse the topic was I thought that was pretty good. To put it into context, there were well over a thousand people at the convention (but less than two thousand?). On the other hand, we were booked against Straczinski.

2000 Masquerade: The masquerade was preceded by a reasonably long skit by the presenters. A gutsy thing to do, in my opinion, since that wasn't really what people had come for, but the skit was funny so they got away with it. In fact, the presenters did a pretty good job throughout the masquerade in particular and the con in general.

The costumes were (to my somewhat distant and undiscerning eye) of very high quality, and the choreography entertaining. Of course there's always one prat who postures about for too long, but otherwise everyone tried to entertain and generally looked very professional. In some ways that's not a good thing: you don't want a big gap in this sort of event, between experts and novices. If I were contemplating making a cheap scratch costume then I'm sure the quality of entry would have been rather intimidating.

It was a very long wait indeed, with the presenters obviously desperately trying to think of something, anything, to say. Towards they end they were telling us about a dog one of them had owned, which he claimed was the inspiration for Babe. We only later got a hint of why it might be they were doing this.

Finally the judges announced they had a winner. In fact, several winners. In fact, almost everyone won. And each of them received a certificate, in hand calligraphy. Except for a couple, who, they said, would get theirs later, because they were running behind time and the calligraphy took a long time. Yes, a thousand people or thereabouts had been waiting while someone hand calligraphed all the other certificates. I salute the person who figured out this was a bad idea and stopped it: thanks, whoever you were. I get the impression that the presenters were a bit more organised than this, but of course they were out the front writhing in embarrassment and doing a damn good job not showing it.

Parties: I think this is the night I went to the "Minneapolis in '73" party, a perennial party at worldcons. Apparently Minneapolis put on very good parties for their bid for the 1973 WorldCon, but were unsuccessful in their bid. The committee therefore decided to leverage their core strengths by becoming a pure party-throwing organisation, and have been throwing WorldCon parties ever since. Interesting conversations about stuff that wouldn't interest most people. And interesting architecture, parts of the roof looked like they had been made out of a corrugated iron water tank.

Sometime during the con I also went to a party at the Newtons' apartment. Interesting people, doing something really silly (watching the gas torches on Crown Casino). Well, not all the time, but that was how the party was advertised.

1400 "In Defence of Hard SF" by Gregory Benford: Presumably some of the things I claim happened at 1100 Saturday really happened here. I have no idea which ones.

1600 Closing Ceremony: Another look at the video they used for the opening ceremony. Benford praised the con as the best he'd ever been to, including 1968 "when they had free drugs". I clapped loud, and I mostly meant it.

I welcome feedback at David.Bofinger@dsto.defenceSpamProofing.gov.au (delete the spamproofing).