BLACK SIKE "X" Brought to you by Leigh Edmonds who is normally from PO Box 74, Balaclava, Victoria 3183, AUSTRALIA, but for this time only this magnificent SAPSzine is brought to you from inside the USA through the kindness of all those who gave their dollar to DUFF and a let of a@her things which could get a bit complicated if l could remember it all but I reckon I might not be able to so let's call an and to this colophon and get down to the real business of keeping the magical chain unbroken and also to save an even more important SAPS membership. By the way I've no real idea of what day or date it is (taking a long holiday does that sort of thing to a person) but at the moment I'm sitting in frant of a typar which belongs to Fred Haskell and is situated in Kinneapolis, which is a long way fram Phoenix but a lot closer than I'm used to. For a very obvious reason there won't be any mailing comments this time, maybe next time but that depends on a lot of things, like what's going to be going on when we get back to Australia. So instead of the usual I might find myself reduced to writing about various things that have happened in the last month like the beauty of downtown Albuquerque or DISCON II. A lot of people have asked me what I thought of the WorldCon but it seems that I really don't know what I thought about it. I reckon that's to be expected since it's the only WorldCon I've ever been to and certainly the biggest convention I've been to ( though that goes for everybody most likely). A lot of people have complained about the population but I didn't notice it very much or at all. While I might not have met all the people X wanted to meet I got to meet so many people that I seem to have forgotten a lot of them. For people who attend the WorldCon every year I'm told that the standard operating procedures are to try and find a dozen or so really close people and count the rest as a bonus. I imagine that a lot of the trouble I had in finding people I wanted to meet wouldn't exist for US fans because they usually have the advantage of having met the people they want to meet before and so they know tham when they see them. I reckon it was pretty lucky that AUSSIECON had set up a table where we were selling memberships because I was there an awful lot of the time and just about everybody would have wandered thxough that area at one time or another and since they were doing that and fans seem to be curious by nature a lot of them came over to see what was going on and a lot of them even came over to see me, which is kinda nice. Of the programme there is very little that I can say because I attended very little of it. On the first day Susan Wood talked me into going and seeing Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison toss insults up and down the room but I was quite unimpressed by it so I didn't stay to see it all. When Harlan said the audience were assholes for being so interested in listening to himself and Isaac I thought he was more or less right and since I was getting very rapidly bored (and fust a bit disgusted) I left well before the event finished. On the same evening we went and saw "2001: A Space Opera" which was okay I suppose but I didn't engoy it too much as there vere lots of references which I assumed were not internationally directed and anyhow, apart from the singing, I thought that the "Joe Phaust" that we did a while ago was a whole lot funnier. But then I'm obviously biased so don't pay any attention to me. The fiasco of "A Boy and his Dog" was just about the only event I didn't get bored with totally and maybe it was sympathy for Harlan Ellison that brought it about. What I saw of the film looked as if it would be good but the DUFF/TAFF party that Dick End organised for the next day meant that I couldn't get along for the showing of the whole thing but since the party want well I didn't mind too much. Getting back to the next day of the Con I seem to remember that just about the only thing we got to see was the masquerade and the thing that amazed me about that was the amount of not particularly good costumes that got to be paraded. I had been under the mistaken impression that a pre-judging meant that all the costumes 62