But there were other, quiet Worldcon moments that stick with me. Like the time that Tim Powers, Jim Blaylock and their gang held a bunch of us riveted late into the night with stories of Philip K Dick... then sent us into stitches with amazing, wondrously paranoid fantasies about the Nineteenth Century, made up on the spot -- "coincidences" that had to be hints at dark conspiracies... or conspiracies that could only be explained by marvelous coincidence.

That was when I became convinced that excessive pattern recognition, combined with dazzling storytelling, must have been genetically rewarded, some time deep in the human past. Else how do you explain a shaman like Tim Powers. Dang, I'm glad he's on the side of progress and the enlightenment and belief in the future. If he used his... er, powers... for the dark side, we'd be doomed!
 

The first time is maybe always the best. But Baycon in 1968 probably should have a memory page all to itself. If you've read my often-republished con report, "I HAVE HAD NO SLEEP AND I MUST GIGGLE", it sorta does have one.

And the first out-of-country Worldcon (Heicon, for me) is also bound to be one that will leave an impact.

Beyond that -- well, it's a jumble of people, places, images and even odors -- Lester Del Rey inveighing against the elevators in St Louis; the moldy smell of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami (Not a good thing, since this was a con I worked on!); watching Heinlein really, really appreciate the burlesque show in Kansas City; getting up one morning at Brighton to find both Chip Delany and a transsexual fan asleep on separate couches in the living room of the suite; Joe Haldeman doing terrible things with his Hugo and a balloon at a Hugo Losers party in Chicago; hosting a champagne reception for Anne McCaffrey in Winnipeg; going to dinner with Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow in Toronto and almost being able to follow the conversation; introducing my newbie author Sharon Shinn to the world of sf cons and fandom in Boston (Next thing I knew, she was attending the Regency Dance!); the Big Blue Bear in Denver, the single funniest piece of city-art I've ever encountered... the list could go on -- and on -- and on.

And I'm looking forward to Renovation to see what memories will be added there!
 

Awards systems are magical ceremony: all they are is what people want them to be. But the power of collective thought, that these should be meaningful awards that cause serious competition, that they thus have the power to heal and hurt, has in this case always won over cynicism and tiredness. As soon as we stop thinking of them as special, the Hugos will vanish. But as long as we regard them as a true measure of ourselves, as what we long for and might one day achieve, then we'll get nights like that.
 

I worked on a handful of worldcons, including doing some heavy-duty stuff like being Treasurer. They're mostly just a blur of non-stop activity and stress for months on end (and then a handful of days that never seemed to end or to contain enough time for sleep.

Then I made the transition to working in publishing and I had a wonderful built-in excuse for meeting and talking to a lot of authors whom I'd admired for years. Of course, there was some of that blurring going on again because when you throw a pro party at a Worldcon you have to be prepared for everybody at the con to try to show up at your door.

Once the expense account went away, so did some of the packed schedule and that meant that I no longer ended up going years on end without managing to see the dealer's room or the art show. There's something to be said for not being over-scheduled ...

There was the time I stayed up pretty much all night and watched an amazing light-show of a lightning storm on the horizon going on for hours on end while having some seriously intense and very funny conversations with some tired, slightly drunk writers and fans. There have been many, many times when essentially the same thing occurred -- minus the lightning storm -- and I think it's the conversations, that are the best memories, even if some of the details have gotten blurry over time.
 

The first is from my happy stint as ToastMistress at the Millenium PhilCon in 2001. I have mixed feelings about giving speeches. They are like kittens: Everyone thinks they can give them easily, and that others must surely be glad to get them. So I thought I would do something different. And how. I came onstage in an elegant, sparkly evening gown, took a baseball cap and gold chains out of the bag I'd brought with me, donned them in the appropriate manner...

And somewhere in the audience, my husband's seatmate uttered, in tones of subdued horror: "Oh my God, she's going to rap!" Which I did. (Ending with the words, "Now let us never speak of this again." But I've kind of ruined that now, haven't I?)

My second WorldCon memory is from a subsequent event, in Boston, when Sir Terry Pratchett was GoH. Originally, my husband Walter and I were married in a civil ceremony and were finally able to have a Jewish one. We wanted to have this at the WorldCon, since so many of our friends would be there, and were given kind permission to do so ... Our chupah was a wonderful piece of patchwork art made by friends, and at the ceremony -- conducted by the late Rabbi David Honigsberg -- was held over our heads by four dear people including Harry Turtledove and the WorldCon GoH himself himself. After which it was my privilege to explain and demonstrate to Sir Terry exactly why people say what they do about Manischewitz wine.
 

What really impressed me, for whatever reason, was the fanzine room. There was a table with a big pile of miscellaneous freebies on it, and we both carried off a handful of oldies like Yandro and Double: Bill Symposium. Amateur magazines about science fiction! It totally croggled my mind.

Then in the evening we party-hopped from room to room, overwhelmed by fellowship and free booze. People talked more about SF in those days, before fandom was balkanized. I saw a 75-year-old woman and a teenager arguing about SF movies, treating each other as equals. I had halavah and ouzo for the first time, and a dizzying mixture of creme de menthe and Scotch over ice.

I remember talking with Robert Silverberg about the Galápagos, which I pronounced gal-la-PAY-goes, and he politely corrected me. Forty years later, we would visit those islands together.

What an interesting world to enter.
 

In 2006, I'd lost the Hugo Award once before and the Campbell Award twice, so I knew that I shouldn't get my hopes up too high and I was trying not to get too excited. But when Harlan Ellison -- HARLAN ELLISON! -- took the stage to present the award, I realized that the Short Story Hugo really is a very big deal, and then he called out my name and said "Getcher ass up here."

It was like my heart exploded.

I was moving so fast when I hit the stairs that they broke into two sections, the lower section sliding sideways by about six inches. I got up on stage and Harlan was standing there with his arms outstretched and I gave him an enormous hug. In fact, I climbed him like a spider monkey.

You have to understand that I have been in fandom since I was sixteen years old. Winning a Hugo Award has always been the pinnacle of possible achievements that I could reasonably aspire to. And here I had won it -- I had won a Hugo of my very own. My little story about a guy and some bugs was going to be listed with Soldier, Ask Not and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and Neutron Star and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones. Written in the Book of Life forever.

I read my prepared speech, including the top line: "2006 Hugo acceptance speech, which will never be used," which got a laugh, and although I was trembling all over I managed to hold it together and not start sobbing until I got off stage, where Janice Gelb held me up and offered me water, which I was silly enough to refuse. I have never before or since sobbed from sheer joy.

Edward Morris posted on the Asimov's website's message board later: "David Levine was on cloud 9 from outer space the whole night. I have never seen a human being so transported with joy. Good for him."
 

I always made it a point to arrive early and spend a few days looking at the city. Dean and I and Debb Cook (Debb DeNoux now - she married a mystery writer she met at a convention) went on a walking tour of Boston that remains one of the highlights of my travel life. You got a map and followed markings on the sidewalk of the city to see all of these marvelous historic places. We saw things I still remember, and would like to return to. Great stuff.

The convention is always fun, but it seems like one ongoing convention at different locations. I can't tell you if the dinner Dean and I had with Julius Schwartz and Samuel Delany took place at a Worldcon (come to think of it, it might have been Icon or Lunacon), but it was a marvelous dinner, with great food and even greater company. I've had many of those, so many that they're all tending to blur unless something triggers the memory.

The Reno Worldcon will be the first Worldcon I've gone to in a city with which I am very familiar. Dean and I have traveled in and out of Reno since we met in 1986. We stay there quite often and love the city. In fact, we even had a Rusch family reunion there about ten years ago - shocking my Midwestern relatives by staying in a place that encourages gambling (oh, my!). The Ruschs were bad for Reno's economy though - they didn't gamble at all.

So I'll be in Reno, pontificating on panels, and hanging out in the bar that the pros choose as their own. I've already seen the area, so I'll be at the convention more than usual. And I'm really looking forward to that.
 

Harlan Ellison and I were teenage fans and had arranged to room together at the con. When we arrived, Harlan startled me with the suggestion that we rent a suite at the hotel -- the Bellevue-Stratford, at that time one of Philadelphia's finest hotels. Suites at the con cost something like $12 or $15 a night, a fantastic amount in those days, when Worldcon membership itself was $1, but Harlan's idea was that we would run the place as a fan dormitory, renting out couch and floor space to our friends at $5 (I think) a night. Harlan and I would keep the beds for ourselves.

It sounded like a good idea to me, but I had no idea how good an idea it was or what kind of salesman Harlan was. He proceeded to find us a dozen or more roommates each night; the place was packed, we had a kind of running party going all night long every night, and at the end of the con he and I split a huge wad of cash. I went home as rich as I had ever been in my life. (And I had never been more tired, either, because I figured that I got about eight hours of sleep during the entire weekend.)
 

My proof that Worldcon people know everything? Well, I saw this great movie on Academy Matinee when I was a kid. It was about these people on an ocean liner, and they were supposed to be going to America, but really they were all dead, and...

Well, anyway, I'd been trying to find out the name of this movie for years -- this was before Internet Movie Database -- but I couldn't remember who was in it, and no one I talked to had ever heard of it.

"You should ask at Worldcon," Ed Bryant suggested. "Somebody will know." So at the next one, on my first panel, I did just that, though without much hope of its working.

"Okay, there's this movie about people on an ocean liner," I said, and had barely started into my description when not one but a dozen hands shot up.

"It's Between Two Worlds," the first person said.

"It stars Edmund Gwenn and Sidney Greenstreet," another piped up.

"It's a remake of the movie Outward Bound."

"Which was a play on Broadway starring Leslie Howard."

"It was made from the book Outward Bound by Sutton Vane."

That may well be my favorite Worldcon moment of all time. Well, that, or getting thrown out of the Tupperware Museum.

Hope to see you all in Reno. Can't wait to hear what everybody has to say -- have you seen the British series Primeval? What about Syfy's Alice? Is Andrew Lee Potts not the cutest thing you've ever seen? -- and can't wait to see what we get thrown out of this time. See you there!