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Page 136
And fourth, there were the other science fiction editors, writers, and enthusiasts, whom I got to know with a rush at the 1949 World Science Fiction Convention, the Seventh, the "Cinvention." (. . .)
(. . .) The convention was for me a revelationI just hadn't guessed how many people there were in this thing called science fictionand a dizzying mixture of lost weekend and getting-acquainted party. I met Fred (Pohl), of course, and his wife Judith Merril, Lester del Rey, Horace Gold, a very young Poul Anderson, an engineer-author who was a lush like me and told me how he banished hangovers with hot-cold showers, even a "Miss Science Fiction of 1949," and any number of editors and publishers, especially editors and publishers soon-to-be. Nor was I too drunk to engage in and appreciate enough conversations about the fascination and exciting possibilities of science that told me I was really with my sort of people. (. . .) I got a tremendous shot in the arm that weekend and met a not inconsiderable fraction of my lifelong friends-and-colleagues.
Fritz Leiber, "Not So Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex: An Autobiographic Essay," The Ghost Light: Masterworks of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1984; rpt. New York: Ace, 1991), pp. 35860
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John Huntington
"Coming Attraction" describes a grim futuristic New York in which a few elements of fifties technology (automobiles, for instance) have become slicker and more dangerous. In this world emotion appears in perverse forms: erotic attention has been displaced from genital areas to the face, and women wrestlers who defeat men appear as objects of fascination. Having women display their bodies and mask their faces is a way of satirizing current prudishness about the display of the body. And the wrestling matches challenge conventional ideas of male domination, though, since the main effect of such matches is a masochistic humiliation of the man, it might well be argued that this particular violation of convention finally serves only to reinforce it. The story's knowingness about prudery and masculinity leads to a profound ambivalence.
The story itself is aware of its complicated attitude toward the place of emotion in the American future it depicts. A policeman's confused response to "Girls going down the street bare from the neck up"an act of almost pornographic self-display in the storyis exactly the reaction we would expect of one of the story's readers to have to a woman bare from the neck

 
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