Unable to make it to Paris this spring, my wife Linda and I, along with our cats Bill and Betty, are heading towards the Mississippi Delta, via a science fiction convention in Biloxi.
With its tall Greek-columned houses, the holiday homes of southern aristocrats, Biloxi was once a rather genteel resort: Hove to New Orleans’ Brighton. But, after Hurricane Katrina, she is taking longer to restore herself than New Orleans and, sadly, might never come back as she was.
Flat, gleaming white sands again stretch down to the water of the Gulf of Mexico; the occasional hotel stands where there used to be a “steamboat gothic” mansion. But a few yards from our hotel, all that remains of a family and its memories are the foundations of a house, a weathered For Sale sign, and huge heaps of newly delivered sand giving an alpine contour to the landscape. Bulldozers stand ready to lay the beach down as soon as a viable property has been erected on the other side of the promenade. But there are more lots for sale than have been sold.
I rarely attend SF conventions. Sentiment got me involved in this one. Biloxi is in my wife’s home state and my old friend and illustrator, John Picacio, was a guest of honour. The people running it were courteously southern. But I haven’t really been to a regular SF convention for years, so was unprepared for the changes I found.
Now, such conventions are frequently supported by role-playing gamers. They play for hours, rolling dice and muttering as they perform mysterious strategies and move tiny figures in what HG Wells called “little wars”. Frequently, the participants dress as elaborately as the characters they represent. If so much of what I see strikes me as vaguely familiar it’s because, along with Tolkien, I’ve been a main influence on gaming ever since the publication in the late 1970s of the first Dungeons and Dragons rulebook, which contained my fantasy “pantheon” of characters, demons, deities, magical concepts, symbols and other stuff drawn from my stories.
Having created so much of the fundamental elements found in fantasy games and fiction, it’s weird for me to observe my own private tools passing into common ownership. For instance, the kid wearing that “Chaos” sign on his T-shirt has no idea that, circa 1963, I was trying to think of a symbol for entropy and drew the thing on a piece of scrap paper in our kitchen. Arthur C Clarke used to complain he never got a penny for predicting the communications satellite. Now I know what it’s like to be old.
As a group of us discuss the work of Balzac in relation to French imaginative fiction, I say that these days it is impossible for anyone to tell you they don’t like science fiction. SF is so diverse it would be like someone telling you they don’t like poetry. While I’ve read almost no SF or fantasy for decades, I still believe that a reader merely reveals their lack of education by dismissing such an extraordinarily broad field out of hand. Readers of PD James might not consider her novel Children of Men (1992) to be science fiction, for example, but if it isn’t SF, then there is no such thing as SF. Several of us agree on this, if nothing else.
We pass Hattiesburg, where a few years ago my son Max got his degree, and travel on to Laurel. Here, we once shared a great southern experience. Taking Max up to see his Mississippi grandmother, we spotted a sign for the local county fair. One of its chief attractions was all-day pig racing. Linda has never been able to resist the prospect of a really good pig race. Like most old-fashioned fairs of its kind, this one was a mixture of carnival, freak show, travelling zoo and church fête.
We were enjoying an evangelical Punch and Judy show, when Beau attached himself to us. Beau was about the size and shape of Ratso Rizzo, Dustin Hoffman’s character in Midnight Cowboy. He wore a filthy white cowboy hat, cracked, worn-out western boots and a greasy red, white and blue shirt. He was grotesquely ugly, stank and was clearly simple. Fixing us with a friendly eye, he elected to be our tour guide. “That’s the carousel, this here’s the bearded lady. Over there’s your two-headed man. And here’s the zoo!”
He brightened. The zoo was horrible: a stinking tent filled with rows of various sizes of pet cages containing mostly common forms of local wildlife. “He’s a alligator. He’d bite y’all’s arm off soon as look at y’all. Thet there’s a raccoon. Make good eating if y’all kin ketch yerself one. See the bobcat? Hey!” The dying animal looked up through tired, uncaring eyes. Beau produced a stick and began inserting it through the wire. “He’ll liven up if ya poke him!” The cat uttered a halfhearted snarl; the nearby alligator tried to sink into its too-shallow water.
We fled from Beau into a tent where, to our astonishment, a cheerleading contest was being held. In the deepest heart of the Baptist Bible Belt, these cheerleaders were aged between four and nine, and heavy with make-up (mascara, blusher, lipstick) and perms. They looked like downmarket Tokyo whores. The creators of these creatures, good Baptist pimp-moms to a woman, urged their offspring on to greater deeds of hip-jutting, chest-thrusting, bottom-pushing cheerleading prowess.
We slipped out and were just able to catch the start of the pig race – black ones running against white. The prize? An Oreo cookie. Those pigs were as hooked on Oreos as some of their human equivalents were on steroids. Just as well there was no betting or I’d have felt obliged to complain to the pig racing authorities.
The road from Laurel to West Point grows more and more beautiful. Red clover rises from the lush grass; redbud trees are in bloody bloom, dogwoods are bursts of white against evergreens dripping with wild blue or white wisteria. The air is warm and smells dry. The sun sets, a ruby blaze against gold, hiding sad recent histories. Clarksdale in the spring. Only a bit of a change from Paris.
Michael Moorcock’s latest book is ‘Duke Elric’ (Del Rey Books). His latest record is ‘Michael Moorcock and the Deep Fix: The Gloriana and Entropy Tango Sessions’ (Noh Poetry Records).
