Once More With Footnotes

speech following "Christmas Dinner" at Beccon '87 ... that is, the pre-awards banquet at the 1987 UK Eastercon.]
     
    It's not very su btle, but I reckoned that ten o'clock at a British convention banquet (where you have ALCOHOL) was not the time for Oscar Wilde. I don't know if I delivered this speech, but I must have said something because I got some laughs.
     
     
     
     
     
A lien C hristmas
     
                  Th is is a great idea, isn't it? So much nicer to have Christmas at this time of the year instead of at the end of December, when the shops are always so crowded. Reminds me of those clips you used to get in the Queen's Christmas broadcast to the Commonwealt h back in the '50s, with the traditional shot of Australians eating chilled prawns, roast turkey, and Christmas pudding on Bondi beach. There was always a Christmas tree planted in the sand. It was decorated with what I now realize was probably vomit.
     
                  Las t week I got this fortune cookie sort of printout which said Your Role Is Eater. I thought fantastic, I like role-playing games, I've never been an Eater before, I wonder how many hit points it has?
     
                  And then I saw another printout underneath it which sai d that at 2200 my role was After Dinner Speaker, which is something you'd expect to find only in the very worst dungeon, a monster lurching around in a white frilly shirt looking for an audience. Three hours later the explorers are found bored rigid, thei r coffee stone cold, the brick-thick after dinner mint melted in their hands.
     
                  That reminds me why I gave up Dungeons and Dragons. There were too many monsters. Back in the old days you could go around a dungeon without meeting much more than a few ores an d lizard men, but then everyone started inventing monsters and pretty soon it was a case of bugger the magic sword, what you really needed to be the complete adventurer was the Marcus L. Rowland fifteen-volume guide to Monsters and the ability to read ver y , very fast, because if you couldn't recognize them from the outside you pretty soon got the chance to try looking at them from the wrong side of their tonsils.
     
                  Anyway, this bit of paper said I was to talk about Alien Christmases, which was handy, becaus e I always like to know what subject it is I'm straying away from. I'll give it a try; I've been a lot of bad things in my time although, praise the Lord, I've never been a Blake's 7 fan.
     
                  Not that Christmases aren't pretty alien in any case. It's a funny old thing, but whenever you see pictures of Santa Claus he's always got the same toys in his sack. A teddy, a dolly, a trumpet, and a wooden engine. Always. Sometimes he also has a few red and white striped candy canes. Heaven knows why, you never see th e m in the shops, and if any kid asks for a wooden engine these days it means he lives at the bottom of a hole on a desert island and has never heard of television, because last Christmas my daughter got a lot of toys, a few cars, a plane, stuff like that, a nd the thing about them was this. Every single one of them was a robot. Not just a simple robot. I know what robots are supposed to look like, I had a robot when I was a kid. You could tell it was a robot, it had two cogwheels going round in its chest and its eyes lit up when you turned its key, and why not, so would yours. And I had a Magic Robot ... well, we all had one, didn't we? And when we got fed up with the smug way he spun around on his mirror getting all the right answers, we cut them out and stu c k them down differently for the sheer hell of it, gosh, weren't we devils.
     
                  But these new robots are subversive. They are robots in disguise.
     
                  There's this sort of robot war going on around us. I haven't quite figured it out yet, although the kids seem i ncredibly well-informed on the subject. It appears that you can tell the good robots from the bad robots because the good robots have got human heads, a bit like that scene in Saturn Three, you remember, where the robot gets the idea that the best way to l ook human is hack someone's head off and stick it on your antenna. They all look like an American footballer who's been smashed through a Volkswagen.
     
                  They go around saving the universe from another bunch of robots, saving