Lunacon '99

Sunday, 7 March 1999

I spent the weekend at Lunacon, the New York-area's big regional SF con. Well, some of the weekend. Rather than renting a hotel room, we did what we usually do for Lunacon, which is stay over with Arthur, Kevin, and Bernadette, who live nearby, and commute. This means I don't stay up as late as I usually do at cons, but it's a considerable financial savings for a con that, in recent years, hasn't been worth paying hundreds of dollars to attend.

I had more fun than I usually do at this year's Lunacon. Partly because more of the crowd I hang around with attended than usually do, partly because I ran into a greater than usual number of people I hadn't seen in a few years, and partly because I spent quite a bit of time in the anime room.

I got to see almost all of Princess Mononoke (I missed a bit at the beginning), the most recent Miyazaki anime, and it was well worth seeing. I hear Disney will have a dubbed version out soon, go see it. It's a wonderful tale of conflict between the forces of nature and human progress, and refreshingly free of absolute villains. I also saw a bit of an episode of something called Revolutionary Girl Utena, a very strange-looking fantasy that could be described as "Sweet Valley Highlander." And the opening credits for a recent series called Cowboy Bebop, described in high-concept mode as "not space opera, but space jazz." This is so recent that I haven't been able to dig up any good descriptive pages on the Web, but the credits sequence was very, very slick.

My old teenage enthusiasm for anime has been coming back recently, at about the same time that I've been getting tired of most live-action media SF and fantasy. (Except Buffy, of course.) I think that anime strikes a chord in me that is struck by golden-age SF in many other SF fans. That rush of "oh, this is so cool" that otherwise sober literary fans get from rereading van Vogt and Doc Smith is, for me, a largely visual thrill best evoked by moving drawings. Maybe it's because I was raised on Kimba the White Lion, Gigantor, and Speed Racer. At least, that's my theory for this week.