![]() ![]() (Cut me some slack, okay? I was 19.) We were entered as characters from “National Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings.” Dave was Goodgulf the magician, and I was the Ballhog. The problem was that a friend of mine, Dave Klapholz, and I were entered in the costume competition Saturday evening. Now three blocks may not sound like a tremendous inconvenience. A hotel three blocks away was designated as the overflow hotel, and we had to haul all of our luggage and material to the other hotel. We stood there, waiving our confirmation slips, and the desk people shrugged at us. Not only that, but I, along with several friends, were among dozens of fans who arrived at the hotel to discover that our hotel rooms were already chock full of Shriners. Function space was cut down to a fraction of what had originally been promised. The hotel gave preference to the Shriners. My understanding was that the SF fans had booked the space first no matter. Booked the same convention space, the same hotel rooms…everything. I will never forget the year that there was a science fiction convention booked into a Philadelphia hotel…and, the hotel double booked the Shriners in at the same time. When I was growing up and first seriously getting into fandom, I lived about 20 minutes outside of Philadelphia, and attended a number of SF cons there. So the stories are true, but the names have been omitted to protect the innocent. ![]() And if a convention is advertising a con at that hotel, I don’t want people saying, “Oh, I’m not going there Peter David wrote what a lousy hotel it is.” That wouldn’t be fair. I don’t want to name the hotels because, for all I know, managements have changed over time. Hotel horror stories, on the other hand, are invariably tales of hotels run by managements that simply didn’t care. With horror stories of fan behavior, you could argue that these are fans who cared too much, to the point where they lost all sense of reason and proportion. You will quickly develop a litany of incompetence, rudeness, thoughtlessness, and just plain poor organization. Get a bunch of fans together and swap those for a while. No, all of my horror stories of my convention going history have to do with hotels. I have, I’m embarrassed to say, no real fan-related true horror stories. Just think what I have to look forward to. So yes, I’ve encountered the occasional rude fan, but none who have crossed the line into maliciousness or vindictiveness. The fact that I didn’t remember him, or what he said, and barely even recalled the convention, was all secondary to the guilt that he was carrying which had magnified an off-hand joke into some sort of massive insult over which I was, no doubt, still nursing a grudge. In fact, I recall the fan who sought me out at a recent convention and said, “I wanted to apologize for something I said to you at a convention three years ago.” He seemed really eaten up about it. ![]() Sure, there’s been the occasional rude fan, but then again, I run into plenty of rude people outside of conventions. Thus far, however, my career is still young enough that I haven’t yet become the target of the sort of behavior cited in Xenogenesis. ![]() Perhaps familiarity, or presumed familiarity, breeds far more than contempt. Maybe they wouldn’t have cared if they did know…or instead assumed that there had to be something wrong with me.Īt any rate, my professional career doesn’t stretch remotely as long as Harlan’s…nor, for that matter, as long as any of the people mentioned in Xenogenesis. And several people wrote to me saying, “Do a column that rips apart Harlan Ellison.” These people didn’t know Ellison is a friend of mine. Hëll, I’ve already mentioned how, when I first started this column, I asked people about subjects they’d like me to talk about. Or cheer or encourage others to “get” him. So those fans who think they know Harlan Ellison for what he is lie waiting in the high grass, anticipating their moment to get back at him. But heck, just because hearsay isn’t allowable in a court of law, that doesn’t mean it’s not good enough for the real world, right? Rarely have they ever met him, chatted with him, or suffered any sort of abusive acts at his hands. Whether these stories about Harlan have any basis in fact is, of course, besides the point. Perhaps part of it, at least in Harlan’s case, is that some fans “know” what a dirtbag Harlan Ellison is. I, as were most (I would imagine) of CBG’s readers, was appalled at the litany of appalling, spiteful and downright vindictive behavior on the part of various fans throughout the years, as portrayed in Harlan Ellison’s scathing Xenogenesis. ![]()
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