CHAPEL HILL - No one expected any fantastic battles or shoot-outs last weekend at ChimeraCon 3, UNC's third annual science fiction convention, and there were no casualties.
But as a precaution, officers of Chimera, the University of North Carolina's Fantasy and Science Fiction Club, included a "weapons policy" in their program booklet, a policy from the state General Assembly: "It shall be unlawful for any person to possess, or carry, whether openly or concealed, any gun, rifle, pistol, dynamite cartridge, bomb, grenade, mine, powerful explosive...bowie knife, dirk, dagger, slingshot, leaded cane, switchblade knife..."
No one even tried to sneak in a laser gun or phaser..
There were writer's workshops with titles such as "Cats in (and out of) Fantasy and Science Fiction"; "The Effects of Technology on Society"; "Religion in Fantasy and Science Fiction". Some of the authors holding workshops and panel discussions included Orson Scott Card - whose works have been published in "Analog", "Omni", "and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" - and Allen L. Wold, who has written several novels and sold his latest one, Jewels of the Dragon, to Warner Books.
A local writer of science fiction and fantasy novels, David Drake, was one of the guest panelists. Drake, 40, who lives near Chapel Hill, most recently has published a novel called Bridgehead, which was released last February by Tor Publishing Co. [ed note: Bridgehead is dedicated to Bernadette Bosky.] In a telephone interview, Drake described the book as as tale of "aliens building a dimensional travel apparatus in the basement of the Duke University engineering building."
"I hope that I can show them passages in other people's lives, lives that I hope they don't live themselves," he said.
In what was called the Dealer's Room, a large array of items were displayed for sale, such as "The Klingon Dictionary", written in the tongue of the race of beings created in the old television show, "Star Trek". The book's cover claims that the language can be translated from Klingon to English and vice versa.
A steady crowd of fantasy and science fiction enthusiasts looked over thousands of comic books, Japanese-made model kits of robots and space ships, and a bumper sticker that read, "My Karma Ran Over My Dogma". Star Trek jewelry was available, as were "Dr. Who" necklaces.
Joyce Mahoney, a UNC senior studying physics, was one of the convention managers, along with Karen K. Fisher, a UNC senior majoring in English and political science. Ms. Mahoney said in a telephone interview that the aim of the convention was "mainly to be fun, but it very much encourages art and writing."
Chimera has about 40 members on campus and is named after a creature from Greek mythology that breathes fire and is represented as having a lion's head, a goat's body, and the tail of a serpent.
This year's two-day convention was serious enough to have a display of several kinds of new computers and telecommunications software, along with a slide show about Halley's Comet. And it was whimsical enough to offer for sale a large, battery-operated version of "Robby the Robot", a character from the movie The Forbidden Planet.