  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 example, there is a panel with Willy Ley and Isaac Asimov 
and Fritz Leiber and L. Sprague de Camp and Ed Emsh and Leigh 
Bracket, and the topic is "What Should a BEM Look Like?". (I have 
a copy of the _Discon Proceedings_, a transcript of the entire 
convention published by Advent, and to this day when I need a new 
alien race I re-read that panel and invariably I come up with 
one.) 
     There was a panel with Fred Pohl and a tyro named Budrys and 
a gorgeous editor (though not as gorgeous as the one I accepted a 
Hugo for) named Cele Goldsmith and even ***John Campbell 
Himself***, on how to write stories around cover paintings, which 
was a common practice back then, and which remains fascinating 
reading today. 
     There was a sweet old guy in a white suit who saw that we 
were new to all this, and moseyed over and spent half an hour with 
us, making us feel at home and telling us about how we were all 
one big family and inviting us to come to all the parties at 
night. Then he wandered off to accept the first-ever Hall of Fame 
Award from First Fandom. When they asked if he was working on 
anything at present, he replied that he had just delivered the 
manuscript to _Skylark DuQuesne_, and received the second-biggest 
ovation I have ever heard at a worldcon. (The biggest came 30 
years later, when Andy Porter broke a 12-year losing streak and 
won the semi-prozine Hugo in 1993.) 
     Since we didn't know anyone, and were really rather shy (over 
the years, I have learned to over-compensate for this tendency, as 
almost anyone will tell you, bitterly and at length,) we ate 
dinner alone, then watched the masquerade, which in those days was 
truly a masquerade ball and not a competition. There was a band, 
and everyone danced, and a few people showed up in costume, and 
every now and then one of them would march across the stage, and 
at the end of the ball they announced the winners. 
     Then there was the Bheer Blast. In those bygone days, they 
didn't show movies. (I think movies turned up in 1969, _not_ to 
display the Hugo nominees or give pleasure to the cinema buffs, 
but to give the kids a place to sleep so they'd stop cluttering up 
the lobby.) They didn't give out the Hugos at night, either. (An 
evening banquet might run $5.00 a head, and the concom got enough 
grief for charging $3.00 a head for rubber chicken served at 1:00 
PM rather than six hours later.) They didn't have more than one 
track of programming. (Multiple tracks came along 8 years later, 
and evening programs even later than that.) 
     Well, with all the things they _didn't_ have, they needed a 
way to amuse the congoers in the evening, so what happened was 
this: every bid committee (and they only bid a year in advance 
back then) treated the entire convention to a beer party on a 
different night. We could all fit in one room -- I know the 
official tally for Discon I was 600, but I was there and I'll 
swear that there were no more than 400 or so in attendance; the 
other 200 must have been no-shows, or waiters, or bellboys -- and 
the bidding committee would treat us to a small lakeful of beer, 
with or without pretzels, and then the next night a rival bid 
would do the same thing. (You voted -- if you could drag yourself 
out of bed -- on Sunday morning at the business meeting. A fan 
would speak for each bid, telling you how wonderful his committee 
was. Then a pro would speak for each bid, telling you about the 
quality of restaurants you would encounter. The better restaurants 
invariably carried the day.) 
     After the beer blast was over, everyone vanished. The 
Burroughs people, all of them straighter than Tarzan's arrows, 
went to bed. We remembered that Doc Smith had mentioned parties, 
so we began wandering down the empty, foreboding corridors of the 
hotel, wondering if the parties really did exist, and how to find 
them. 
     We walked all the way down one floor, took the stairs up a 
flight, repeated the procedure, then did it again. We were about 
to quit when a door opened, and a little bearded man and a thin 
balding man, both with thick glasses, spotted our name badges and 
asked if we'd like to come in for a drink. We didn't know who the 
hell they were, but they had badges too, so we knew they were with 
the con and probably not about to mug a couple of innocents from 
Chicago, and we decided to join them. 
     Turns out they were standing in the doorway to a huge suite, 
and that their names were del Rey and Blish. Inside, wearing a 
bowtie and looking not unlike a penguin in his black suit, was 
Isaac Asimov. Randy Garrett was dressed in something all-satin and 
not of this century. Bob Silverberg looked young and incredibly 
dapper. Sam Moskowitz was speaking to Ed Hamilton and Leigh 
Brackett in a corner; this was many years before his throat 
surgery, and it was entirely possible, though unlikely, that no 
one in the basement could hear him. 
     _And every last one of them went out of their way to talk to 
us and make us feel at home._ 
     Later another young fan wandered in. Much younger than me. I 
was 21; Jack Chalker was only 19. We sat around, and discussed 
various things, and then something strange happened, something 
totally alien to my experience. 
     Someone asked Jack and I what we wanted to do with our lives. 
(No, that's not the strange part; people were always asking that.) 
     We each answered that we wanted to write science fiction. 
     And you know what? For the first time in my life, _nobody 
laughed._ 
     That's when I knew I was going to come back to worldcons for 
the rest of my life. 
                          *   *   * 
     So Guy Gavriel Kay reads off the list of nominees, and then 
he opens the envelope, and the winner is Connie Willis, and I am 
second to her again for the 83rd time (yeah, I know, I've only 
lost 76 Hugos and Nebulas to her, but it _feels_ like 83), and 
everyone tells me I've won a moral victory because I have beat all 
the short stories and Connie's winner is a novelette that David 
Bratman, in his infinite wisdom, decided to move to the short 
story category, and I keep thinking that moral victories and 60 
cents will get you a cup of coffee anywhere west of New York and 
east of California, and that I wish I didn't like Connie so much 
so that I could hate her just a little on Labor Day weekends, and 
my brain is making up slogans, modified slightly from my youth, 
slogans like _Break Up Connie Willis_, which is certainly easier 
than breaking up the Yankees, and I am wondering if Tanya Harding 
will loan me her bodyguard for a few days, and then I am at the 
Hugo Losers Party, and suddenly it doesn't matter that I've lost a 
Hugo, because it is now 31 years since that first worldcon I went 
to, and it is my annual family reunion, and I am visiting with 
friends that I see once or twice or, on good years, five times per 
year, and we have a sense of continuity and community that goes 
back for almost two-thirds of my life. Hugos are very nice, and I 
am proud of the ones I've won, and I am even proud of the ones 
I've lost, but when all is said and done, they are metal objects 
and my friends are people, and people are what life is all about. 
     And I find, to my surprise, that almost everyone I am talking 
to, almost all the old friends I am hugging and already planning 
to see again at the next worldcon, are fans. Some, like me, write 
for a living; a few paint; most do other things. But we share a 
common fannish history, and a common fannish language, and common 
fannish interests, and I realize that I even enjoyed the business 
meeting this year, and you have to be pretty far gone into fandom 
to enjoy Ben Yalow making a point of order. 
                          *   *   * 
     A lot of pros don't go to worldcon anymore. They prefer World 
Fantasy Con. It's smaller, more intimate, and it's limited to 750 
members -- and while this is not official, there is nonetheless a 
"Fans Not Wanted" sign on the door. 
     That's probably why I don't go. It's true that worldcons have 
changed, that people who read and write science fiction are 
probably a minority special interest group these days, that bad 
movies will outdraw the Hugo ceremony...but the trufans are there. 
It just means you have to work a little harder to hunt them up. 
     One of the things I have tried to do with the new writers I 
have helped to bring into this field, the coming superstars like 
Nick DiChario and Barb Delaplace and Michelle Sagara and Jack 
Nimersheim and all the many others, is to not only show them how 
to make a good story better, or to get an editor to pick up the 
check for meals, but also to understand the complex and symbiotic 
relationship between fandom and prodom. 
     Some of them, like Nick, luck out and find it right away. 
Some, like Barb, wander into a bunch of Trekkies or Wookies or 
Beasties who won't read anything except novelizations, who are 
watchers rather than readers, whose only literary goal is to tell 
second-hand stories in a third-hand universe, and she wonders what 
the hell I'm talking about. Then I drag her to a CFG suite or a 
NESFA party and she meets the fandom _I_ know, and suddenly she 
understands why we keep coming back. 
                          *   *   * 
     So I'm sitting in the airport, waiting to board the plane 
from Winnipeg to Minnesota. I think there are three mundanes on 
the flight; everyone else is coming from worldcon. Larry Niven's 
there, and Connie Willis, and maybe a dozen other pros, and one of 
the topics of conversation as we await the plane is whose names 
will make the cover of _Locus_ if the plane crashes, and whose 
names will be in small print on page 37, and how many obituary 
issues Charlie Brown can get out of it. Then the topic turns to 
who you would rescue if the plane crashed: Connie and Larry and 
me, because you wanted more of our stories, or Scott Edelman and 
me, because you wanted us to be so grateful to you that we'd buy 
your next twenty stories. (That goes to show you the advantages of 
being able to do more than one thing well.) 
     Now, in any other group, that would be a hell of a morbid 
discussion, but because they were fans, and almost by definition 
bright and witty, it was the most delightful conversation I'd 
heard all weekend, and once again I found myself wondering what my 
life would have been like if Ace had not forwarded that letter to 
Caz 32 years ago. 
     And then I thought back to another convention, the 1967 
worldcon. I was still very young, and too cynical by half, and 
when Lester del Rey got up to give his Guest of Honor speech, he 
looked out at the tables -- every worldcon until 1976 presented 
the GOH speech and the Hugo Awards at a banquet -- and said, 
"Every person in the world that I care for is here tonight." 
     And I thought: what a feeble thing to say. What a narrow, 
narrow life this man has lived. What a tiny circle of friends he 
has. 
     Well, I've sold 72 books of science fiction -- novels, 
collections, anthologies -- and I've won some awards, and I've 
paid some dues, and I don't think it's totally unrealistic to 
assume that sometime before I die I will be the Guest of Honor at 
a worldcon. 
     I've done a lot with my life (all with Carol's help, to be 
sure). I've taken several trips to Africa. I've bred 27 champion 
collies. I've owned and run the second-biggest boarding kennel in 
the country. I've sired a daughter than any father would be proud 
to call his own. I've been a lot of places, done a lot of things. 
I don't think I've led a narrow life at all. 
     But when I get up to make my Guest of Honor speech, I'll look 
around the room just the way Lester did, and, because I'm a 
reasonably honest man, I won't say what he said. 
     But I _will_ say, "With three or four exceptions, every 
person in the world that I care for is here tonight." 

                             -end- 