The Sixth National SF Con in Bulgaria

Bulgarian cons are usually held in Plovdiv, and the Sixth all-
Bulgarian Con was no exception. The city of Plovdiv was founded
more than 3000 years ago and during these past millennia has
succeeded in wrapping itself with a very specific and
incontestable charm. Another reason for its popularity as a con
center is the most attractive assembly hall in Bulgaria (and
maybe in the whole of Europe too), created by the 21st Century
club. The city council and the 21st Century club started
organizing these meetings in 1980 and since then this tradition
has been broken only once, by the Ivan Efremov club in Sofia.
That is why the Bulgarian fans started getting ready for Plovdiv
with the onset of autumn.

So the Sixth SF Festival, as the Bulgarian cons are officially
called, took place from the 19th to the 22nd of November, 1990,
running concurrently with the Plovdiv "Neochron" con. About 200
Bulgarian fans from 16 SF clubs and 42 guests from the Soviet
Union and Poland took part in the con. Among the guests of honor
were Lyubomir Nickolov, Agop Melkonian and Peter Kurdzilov from
Sofia, Velitchka Nastradinova from Plovdiv, Igor Rossohovatsky
and Vitaly Savtchenko from Kiev, and A. Balabucha and A.
Shtcherbakov from Leningrad.

The program was rich and varied - several round-table discussions
on "Present and Future", "Man's unknown abilities", "SF in the
age of change" and "Schools of the Future"; meetings with
writers-scientists and foreign clubs; films and videotapes;
bazaars and a Fantasy Party.

The most interesting meeting was that with the extrasensitives,
as people with ESP powers are called in Bulgaria, which timidly
passed under the name of "Man's unknown abilities". This shyness
is probably due to the fact that many people and authorities
still distrust these phenomena and are opposed to any kind of
publicity and public discussions about it. Kalina Fenerkova,
chairman of the Helios club in Vratza, nearly succeeded in
establishing a psychotronic society in Bulgaria. Vratza fans also
showed off a computer bank with the plots of over 3000 SF works.
This software is available to anybody - you only have to go to
Vratza to get it, which is, after all, a beautiful town and
produces some of the best beer in Bulgaria.

The "Present and Future" round-table was mostly centered around
the hypotheses of some Soviet writers. V. Savtchenko thinks that
all the atomic experiments diminish the elements' resistivity,
thus hastening the coming of Armageddon. Igor Rossohovatsky's
prognosis was somewhat less scary: Earth, according to him, is
the experimental flask of an alien alchemist!

The meetings with the writers went off as everywhere in the
world. Every SF-writer seemed inspired: it was as if an
extraordinary man was standing in front of the fans, both their
contemporary and an adept in the secrets of the future and the
Universe. That is why it is difficult to describe such meetings -
there is alaways a great deal of the impromptu in them and you
have to be there to be able to assess them.

The Fantasy Party has every time stirred the imaginations. This
time we were promised a new play. I was expecting something of
the "Bewitched castle" or "Strange planet" type and dreamt of
saving a glamorous beauty-queen from flying leeches or of winning
a five-million-carat diamond in a scientific dispute with The
Reasonable Orchid from Knocks VI. Instead of that, we were told
that agents of an alien civilization had sneaked in among us to
steal our neochrons (the fan-money in circulation during the
festival). The said agents looked like ordinary fans who would
talk with you until they caught you alone and unawares and then
they would...

During the first 20 minutes I almost jumped out of my skin when
anyone of my friends stopped by and addressed me (nobody knew
whether the aliens weren't able to change their shapes). But I
soon cooled down and started behaving in a more befitting manner.
I danced, talked, watched videofilms sent by an australian fan,
pored over books. And then a pimpled lout brushed by me and stole
both my neochrons and the real money I had in my pockets. I never
imagined that the first alien I met would be a pickpocket of the
common, or party variety, but I can assure you that this
encounter of the third kind put me off aliens forever! I am now
heavily into brownies.

But the club conference was a real failure. Half of the clubs
didn't send representatives, one of the reasons being the last-
minute arrangements. In addition to the many preliminary hurdles,
all these events took place two weeks after the 10th of November,
when the totalitarian system in Bulgaria began disintegrating,
and even the fans were more interested in politics than in SF,
which made for a comparatively small attendance of the con as a
whole. During the talks it became clear that the small-town and
college clubs suffered from a lack of material resources to keep
the SF movement going. The representatives were mostly interested
in the re-establishment of the Coordination Council of the clubs,
which in the 70's created one of the largest fandoms in Europe.
That is why the only really constructive action taken at the
Sixth Con was the decision for the establishment of a new fan
association in 1990. Moreover, the founding of an association of
SF professionals was declared at the con.

But, or so it seems to me and to some other friends who are
regular visitors to these cons, things are beginning to repeat
themselves - the same people are planning and doing the same
interesting things. Something must obviously be changed.

Let's hope that the new fans and the new associations manage to
stir things up, so that the next, Seventh Con, turns into an even
more memorable occasion!