Eastercon Diary Sunday 16th April 2017 - Keeping It Weird

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The second event I attended in a very busy convention day was a panel discussion on the weirdest of weird science fiction. I went along knowing it would draw reference to the work of my favourite author, H P Lovecraft. Ren Warom moderated with panellists Tom Hunter, Tom Boncza Tomaszewski, and Susan Bartholomew. So much science fiction deals rather conservatively with space travel and humanized aliens, it is refreshing to find characters and situations that are totally out there, inexplicable and in defiance of our efforts to understand them. Lovecraft was the master of the outright weird, often describing everything as indescribable over many pages. Other weird writers cited included Stanislav Lem and Charles Stross. To me the real weird horror is the conventional kind. Watch the standard Universal and Hammer vampire movies featuring Dracula. Characters with no reason to believe in the evil Count find out he is real, and rather quickly get over the shock, behaving rationally enough to dispose of the blighter with appropriate stake, garlic, sunlight, act. The reality is that encountering a real vampire isn’t the same as encountering a knife-wielding human maniac or an escaped hungry lion. That would be dangerous but we could accept its reality. Faced with something we are totally taught is not remotely possible would cause our sanity to disintegrate. Dracula would find his victims reduced to blubbering hysterical wreckage. Weird literature shows us how weird our ordinary sense of normality really is. Arthur Chappell