We have a “nonaggression pact” in my family. We try to buy each other something small, but which requires a lot of thought.
It’s better to ask Santa Claus for a pair of slippers for Christmas rather than peace on earth. You might actually get it.
Big, jolly fat men with beards can’t deliver world peace. That’s something we have to work at ourselves. And there is no better way at this time of year, than to start with the people next door.
ALIEN CHRISTMAS
1987
[A postprandial speech following “Christmas Dinner” at Beccon ’87 … that is, the preawards banquet at the 1987 U.K. Eastercon.]
I’m Dreaming of the Right Christmas.…
It’s not very subtle, 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.
This 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 Commonwealth back in the fifties, 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.
Last 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 said 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, their 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 orcs and 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 very, 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, because 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 them 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, and 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 stuck 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 incredibly 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 3, you remember, where the robot gets the idea that the best way to look 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 the universe in this case consisting of great laser battles. The universe doesn’t look that good by the time they’ve saved it, but by golly, it’s saved.
Anyway, none of her presents looked like it was supposed to. A collection of plastic rocks turned out to be Rock Lords, with exciting rocky names like Boulder and Nugget. Yes, another bunch of bloody robots.
In fact the only Christmassy thing in our house was the crib, and I’m not certain that at a touch of a button it wouldn’t transform and the Mary and Josephoids would battle it out with the Three Kingons.
Weirdest of the lot, though, is Kraak, Prince of Darkness. At ￡14.95 he must be a bargain for a prince of darkness. He’s a Zoid, probably from the planet Zoid in the galaxy of Zoid, because while the models are pretty good the story line behind them is junk, the science fiction equivalent of a McDonald’s hamburger. I like old Kraak, though, because it only took the whole of Christmas morning to put him together. He’s made of red and grey plastic, an absolute miracle of polystyrene technology, and he looks like a chicken that’s been dead for maybe three months. Stuff two batteries up his robot bum and he starts to terrorize the universe as advertised, and he does it like this: what he does is, he walks about nine inches ve-r-ry slowly and painfully, while dozens of little plastic pistons thrash about, and then he falls over.