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andrewduckerI spent the last four days in deepest Yorkshire, with 13 family members (including 3 under 6 years old) and 4 dogs. You can thus imagine that I might spend a few hours sitting in my room with a PDA and a keyboard, writing up a Worldcon report. I didn't mean to write 3,500 words, but such are the perils of young children.
Herein you will find mention of various people, including![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
surliminal, nhw, coalescent, greengolux, the entirety of the Plokta Cabal, zarabee, swisstone, repeated Mike Abbott's and many more - I know that I saw many more people than this, and can only humbly apologise for missing you out, but a 10,000 word write-up would seem extreme. I've included mainly those people I was actually seeing at a panel, out to dinner with or otherwise thrown into extended contact around. flickgc will undoubtedly complain that she's not mentioned at all. I was writing this some distance from an internet connection (about half a mile, to the village shop), and thus have used real names, as my only reference was a copy of the Con Guidebook. If you know the people you can undoubtedly match them up to their LJ tags - which is more than I can generally manage.
Looking back at my Eastercon write-up (handily at my side, thanks to its inclusion in Lilian's final (ha!) fanzine), I note that it finishes with me looking forward the Worldcon, thankful that it's significantly closer to Edinburgh than Hinkley is. In hindsight I can now appreciate that this proximity is both a blessing and a curse.
This was my third convention (not counting Corflu, which I didn't actually attend any of, the delights of Las Vegas far outweighing the pull of aged fanzine creators - with a few exceptions), and I was looking forward to chatting to The Plokta cabal, Third Row fandom, miscellaneous Cambridge people and the others who had repeatedly surfaced at previous events.
My brother Mike, on reading my Eastercon write-up, pointed out the obvious - which is that write-ups of events tend to end up as lists of "things wot I went to", so rather than attempt to find a way of subverting that format, I'll play straight into it, with a list of panels attended, meals eaten, etc,and then attempt to stick in some context and opinion at the end.
Thursday -
3:30 - leave work to meet Lilian, who is parked nearby waiting for me, already fully packed and prepared.
3:45 - rain starts. Lilian realises she's only packed light clothing, having forgotten that Scotland is not Barcelona…
16:00 - Having returned to Lilian's flat and picked up somewhat warmer clothing, leave for Worldcon again.
17:20 - discover that the motorway exit for the SECC is closed. The process for discovering this simple - I notice that the junction number is at least three too high already, and getting higher. We pull off, turn around and head back. Some swearing involved.
17:45 - Complete navigation of side and back streets of Glasgow and arrive at our hotel. Check in, dump clothes, resist urge to collapse onto bed as if have just crossed Atlantic rather than Central Scotland, and head to check-in.
17:55 - arrive at convention proper and realise that not enough time left for check-in before Lilian supposed to be talking about The Digital Divide…
18:02 - Panel - The Digital Divide
Arrive at panel, find seat, shove Lilian towards the front and realise that I'm about to attend my first ever Worldcon panel. Huzzah!
Panel actually rather good. Nicholas Whyte works for some kind of institute researching politics and democracy in the Balkans, and has a large supply of fascinating insights and anecdotes. One of the other panellists has lots of experience working with mature students who aren't quite so internet-manic as the young-uns, so there's much discussion of what it's like when 'outdated' channels are closed down in favour of the internet, as well as the effect it has on countries that are new to the internet - while vast numbers of languages are now supported, English is frequently seen as a politically neutral second language shared by everyone. How politically neutral English actually is is another matter...
19:00 - 21:00 - registration occurs, and we are given bumper packs of Stuff. We wander briefly about, oohing at the people, the fans, the fans who are also people, and the occasional small furry creature from Alpha Centauri. Lilian blags a free glass of wine, and I get an orange juice, cheering us both up, then we head over to The Moat House, where 'fannish' stuff is to be found. I somehow seem to have induced an understanding of the difference between 'fans' and 'Fans', but am not sure if I could explain it well, or if more than 5% of fandom would agree anyway. In either case, we see many people we recognise and Lilian social butterflies her way across the fan-room, in a blur of Brownian ping-pong.
21:00 - Panel - Living in Old Structures: Church, State. Academia.
Luckily, I don't have to go to this one, so I leave Lilian to her panel-dom and retreat to the fan-room, where I bump into several people before discovering Mike Abbott, and spend a good 40 minutes talking about how we're going to humiliate him at a panel two days hence. He's very good natured about it, and makes several useful suggestions, which sadly won't help when the time comes (wait and see!).
22:00 - Panel - I'm Sorry I Haven't an SFing Clue.
Tony Keen (lovely chap, very funny, completely failed to have an actual conversation with him at the convention) chaired an SF version of I’m sorry I Haven't a Clue. For those of you who weren't raised on the BBC, this is a comedy radio programme where quick-witted panellists come up with humorous answers to ludicrous questions. It's also the origin of Mornington Crescent, which is funny even when Downbelow Station isn't one of the locations en route. Tony's run one at numerous conventions and was apparently so tired of them that when asked to do one for Worldcon he refused to do it unless he got some authors. Unluckily for him, but luckily for the rest of us, they managed to procure a few, including Christopher Priest and Ken Macleod, and the wit flowed remarkably well for a very good hour.
23:00 - Panel - After Dark. Alison Scott, con-runner extraordinaire, organised this one, based on the TV series whereby various 'personalities' would be fed a few drinks and then asked to talk about the issues of the day. I volunteered to be on the panel, and luckily enough she was desperate enough to take me. In fact, it was hardly a panel at all - more of a discussion circle where some people were louder than others. I sadly can't remember any of the topics, except that when we inevitably got onto US politics we very quickly got ourselves back off of it again, and onto something more fun instead. When we'd gone round for an hour or so, we reconvened in the bar (handily 50 feet away) and shortly after that I collapsed into bed...
Friday
10:00 - Panel - Pseudo-Hard SF
Yes, you read that right, 10am. I made it to the start of the programming in time to see Ian McDonald and Geoff Ryman argue about Mundane SF. Or rather, since Geoff turned up 20 minutes late, to see Ian McDonald defend Mundane SF by proxy until it could be defended in person. Various people seemed baffled by the idea that SF with certain limits might be considered particularly interesting, and Geoff was very careful to describe the whole thing as "rules for a particular game that I'd like to see played" as opposed to "How SF should be written".. Some members of the panel seemed slightly confused that FTL might not fit into hard SF, or that just because the story was obviously fiction didn't mean it was ok for absolutely anything to happen. Anyway, it was all fascinating, and hearing Geoff talk about the fact that Cyberpunk was effectively SF written after the fact, because people were so busy looking 3000 years into the future they weren't looking 30, made for a good discussion.
11:00 - Went and got some breakfast. In this case, a hot dog and a sandwich. Wandered around the dealers hall. Got my programme participant pack so that I could display my ribbon with pride. Felt ribbon envy towards those with 5 or 6 ribbons.
12:00 - Panel - Time Travel in Practice.
I was actually on this panel, which was fun. We were to come up with items we'd send back to the 1965 UK Convention, and a 60s fan would send stuff forward. The irrepressible Zara Baxter was the other 00s fan and Pete Weston the 60s fan, with Sandra Bond moderating. The game mostly turned into metaphorical cricket, with myself and Zara bowling ideas at Peter, and him easily knocking them for six. Almost everything we could send back would either be confiscated by the government or socially unusable. To the modern fan it seems incredible that people went to conventions in shirts and ties, let alone that they wore shirts and ties when relaxing at home - the proffered t-shirts would be sadly unusable. Sending back the latest season of Dr Who (on a laptop) would be incredible- but more for the laptop than the TV - and most fans of the time looked down on things like Dr Who as children's nonsense - Niall Harrison would be proud. We also discussed which authors we could swap back and forth - at one point I had to protest that sending Charlie Stross to an era without an internet would count as cruel and unusual punishment. Overall, Pete's reminiscing was fascinating, and the back and forth was great fun.
13:00 - headed for Edinburgh to see The Prodigy in concert. I find concerts even harder to review than conventions - so I'll stick to a brief mention of the fact that they were extremely loud, played all of the favourites and the venue was so hot I ended up dancing without my t-shirt - a first for me.
Saturday
The morning was spent recovering from the previous night's concert and then slowly getting myself back to a semblance of life. I therefore didn't make it back until:
17:00 - Panel - Geek Eye for the Technophobe Guy.
Which I was on, but didn't actually enjoy that much. The format was quite simple - myself, Steve Davies and Tanya Brown were to turn pseudo-technophobe Mike Abbott into a geek. The problem being that this set up an immediate conflict where we ended up largely teasing Mike and he had to retreat into defensiveness. In retrospect, a panel where four geeks answered questions on 'how to unleash your inner geek' would have worked far better, and we could have laughed at ourselves, which (in my opinion) makes for better humour. Still, it was fun in parts, and we did persuade Mike that a PDA might be useful.
18:00 - Panel - SF in other Media.
This one was a bit odd - the topic description indicated that the panel was to be all about SF imagery in advertising, but in fact, advertising was hardly touched upon, with most of the time being spent discussing various media, especially theatre and radio, neither of which I'm that interested in. There were still a few interesting moments, and I was able to formulate my theory that SF movies/TV have entered the mainstream at about the same time that computer games have - and for the same reason - now that we can make things that look good, and don't require so much imagination on the part of the consumer, more people are able to see what we've been getting at. Most people were initially unable to get past either wobbly cardboard aliens, or the fact that alien creatures were made of 4 pixels. Once they look 'real' those with less imagination are able to get it just as well as we always could.
This was, sadly, all I made it to on Saturday, as I was whisked off to the Ashoka for an Indian meal, in the company of various fans from numerous countries. I did make it back to The Hilton later, where I went to the Livejournal party. This was great, largely because I got to engage in an actual SFnal conversation, with Zara Baxter, Niall Harrison, Geneva Melzack and other people whose names I didn't get. I did make the mistake at one point of discussing Stephen Baxter when Niall wasn't about, so he insisted I rewind it and start again when he got back. Oh, and I got to ask Mike Abbott about Hero Quest, which was useful, as I'm trying to get my brother to run a campaign in it. Rather good fun, and my thanks to Max for organising it .
Sunday
I was determined to make Sunday as productive as possible, it being my only full day at the convention. So once again I was up early, and headed for:
10:00 - Panel - AI: The Aliens We Make?
Which was fascinating, largely for the debates about whether AI was going to be anything like human I, the dangers of imperfect simulation, Augmented Intelligence and other fun stuff. I remain sceptical about uploading in the near future, but hopeful about AI in general.
11:00 - Panel - Fannish Etiquette: A Primer
Where the inability of fans to deal with etiquette was dissected, along with their frequent disagreement that they should be doing so in the first place. Much discussion of whether con-goers, con-runners or authors were the worst behaved, with (semi)-anonymous stories abounding. Aspergers reared its ugly head once more, with a perspicacious person behind me pointing out that diagnosed sufferers make an effort. Possibly the problem is that more people haven't been properly diagnosed.. Lilian contributed, especially on the topic of sexism amongst fans, and an inability to deal with the word 'No'.
12:00 - Panel - Genre Killing Ideas
Started with the singularity, and worked out the way, via mobile phones and space probes, to discuss the various different ideas which have to be taken into account when writing modern SF (if only to dismiss them). Interesting, even if it did tend to meander somewhat from the subject. I could have done with more examples, but even so it was reliably fun.
13:00 - Panel- Anarchy versus Technology
Was sadly held in a room that was far too small, which is a shame, because I'd have loved to see it, if only I'd arrived ten minutes earlier. If nothing else, I'd like to see some libertarian butt kicked... Instead I went and lay on the grass with a baguette and introduced Tom Becker(San Francisco fan and con-runner) to Simon Bisson (UK fan, technology journalist, and lucky frequenter of briefings all over the world – frequently in San Francisco). On re-reading this, I just expanded SF to San Francisco – otherwise the last sentence might have been confusing even if you _do_ know either of them.
14:00 - Panel - When I Were a Lad, We used to Dream of 64k
Terry Pratchett was the highlight of this for me, with him and Simon Bisson swapping excessively geeky stories of circuit boards and computers with wobbly external RAM packs (along with a variety of other knowledgeable grey-bearded geeks). While I remember, kudos to Simon Bradshaw, who moderated a few panels I saw with considerable style and efficiency. Anyway, there was much discussion of the good old days, when you could hack straight into the processor and send commands directly to add-on boards so that your £99 home computer could read you the barometric pressure at the touch of a rubber button. When asked later, none of the panel were tempted to swap their computers in, but they did lament the day when you could understand every bit of your computer. PTerry pointed out that even if one did build a crystal radio set nowadays, you wouldn't be able to pick anything much up on it. Roll on digital programmable radio!
15:30 - Panel - Jackson's Lord of the Rings
In which they looked back at the trilogy with two year's hindsight, discussing what worked and what didn't. Or at least, I assume they did. Due to an accident with an elastic band and a time machine, this was rescheduled to two hours earlier, which made it a tad tricky to get to it (I'd left my own Chrono-manipulator in my other trousers). Instead I wandered the halls disconsolately, said hi to Lilian (lying outside on the grass) and then collapsed in the hotel room for half an hour.
17:00 - Panel - Cyberpunks vs Humanists - The Battle for SF’s Heart.
This was exactly the panel I'd been looking forward to. If only it hadn't been cancelled at the last minute. So I quickly checked my program guide, dashed downstairs and 200m to:
17:00 - Talk - Deep in the Heart of Empire
Where Bryan Talbot took us through Heart of Empire, showing us where the influencces came from, what the themes were, and which of the people in the background was Iain Banks. Fascinating stuff, and despite my belief that authors don’t get the final word on how their work is read, I’d love to go through similar things with a number of other authors too.
18:00 - Panel - Fannish Question Time
Tony Keen moderated a bunch of fans there to answer any questions we had. The first set of answers took 42 minutes of the 45 we had, but were well worth it, as we talked about the focus on words over art, creative writing, reading Graphic Novels and other pictographic topics. I managed to just squeak in a question on what the panellists favourite part of the convention was - sad to say none of them mentioned me, although two of them did mention 'talking until 4 in the morning' (and had been chatting to me just the previous night). Two of them also voted for 'I'm sorry I haven't an SFing Clue', but as one of them was Tony (organiser of said comedy extravaganza) I'm not sure that should count...
19:00 - avoiding the Hugo Awards.
In retrospect I'm not sure why we decided to avoid the awards, except possibly for a general dislike of ceremonies. Had I thought about it in more detail I might have decided that as several people I knew were up for it I should go and see if they won. However, Lilian and I decided to head off for a fantastic Teppanyaki restaurant with Anne (Wilson?) and Mike Abbott, where we were very impressed with the knife tossing and spice-juggling, as well as with the quality of the food. The fact that 2/3 of the other people there were Japanese was surely a good pointer to the worthiness of the place...
21::00 - Post Hugocalypse
Lilian arrived out of the toilet waving her phone and announced that pretty much everyone we knew had won something, so we paid up and headed back, congratulating people as we passed them. The Plokta crowd seemed completely shattered by their win, although organising the fan-room for the previous 5 days might have contributed somewhat. We dropped over to the Hilton for the parties, went round all of them once (the Finnish vodka + lingonberry juice was lovely, and the Irish dry-ice beer-cooler was a great touch), then headed back to the fan-room so that I could attempt the Astral Pole. It turns out that my body just doesn't bend that way, and my arms nearly came off, but the other games at the Fannish Olympics were also good silly fun, and after exhausting myself with them, I headed back to the hotel and fell over.
Monday
10:00 - Panel - Why does the Left like Military SF?
Damn good question, which I was looking forward to Joe Haldeman and Harry Harrison answering. Sadly, the room was once more overfull, and the acoustics were terrible, so I ended up running away for breakfast instead.
11:00 - Panel - The world we are making now: Politics
Caroline Mullan was running a series of three items under this banner, and having made it to the third, I wish I'd made it to the first two as well. Nicholas Whyte was once-more fascinating, and Caroline managed to steer a course around the rocks of personal politics in favour of looking at the systems themselves. Personally, I'm of the opinion that systems don't change unless there is general consensus that they have failed. So, for instance, while the recent UK elections were _nearly_ a failure, the party with the most votes still won. If there had been a 1% higher swing to the Conservatives (meaning that Labour would still have won, but with a minority of the actual vote) then pushing for a replacement for first past the post would have been much easier Anyway, lots of fascinating discussion, ranging from grumpy resignation to blue-sky futurism.
At which point I had to head off to catch a train home, due, as I was, in Yorkshire a few hours later.
I can honestly say I had a good time, and I'd recommend it to anyone - but try not to book anything else in on the same days, and always make sure that you have a backup panel in case the one you're looking forward to is cancelled.
Eastercon next year is also in Glasgow, so I'll look forward to seeing a load of you there again!
Herein you will find mention of various people, including
surliminal, nhw, coalescent, greengolux, the entirety of the Plokta Cabal, zarabee, swisstone, repeated Mike Abbott's and many more - I know that I saw many more people than this, and can only humbly apologise for missing you out, but a 10,000 word write-up would seem extreme. I've included mainly those people I was actually seeing at a panel, out to dinner with or otherwise thrown into extended contact around. flickgc will undoubtedly complain that she's not mentioned at all. I was writing this some distance from an internet connection (about half a mile, to the village shop), and thus have used real names, as my only reference was a copy of the Con Guidebook. If you know the people you can undoubtedly match them up to their LJ tags - which is more than I can generally manage.Looking back at my Eastercon write-up (handily at my side, thanks to its inclusion in Lilian's final (ha!) fanzine), I note that it finishes with me looking forward the Worldcon, thankful that it's significantly closer to Edinburgh than Hinkley is. In hindsight I can now appreciate that this proximity is both a blessing and a curse.
This was my third convention (not counting Corflu, which I didn't actually attend any of, the delights of Las Vegas far outweighing the pull of aged fanzine creators - with a few exceptions), and I was looking forward to chatting to The Plokta cabal, Third Row fandom, miscellaneous Cambridge people and the others who had repeatedly surfaced at previous events.
My brother Mike, on reading my Eastercon write-up, pointed out the obvious - which is that write-ups of events tend to end up as lists of "things wot I went to", so rather than attempt to find a way of subverting that format, I'll play straight into it, with a list of panels attended, meals eaten, etc,and then attempt to stick in some context and opinion at the end.
Thursday -
3:30 - leave work to meet Lilian, who is parked nearby waiting for me, already fully packed and prepared.
3:45 - rain starts. Lilian realises she's only packed light clothing, having forgotten that Scotland is not Barcelona…
16:00 - Having returned to Lilian's flat and picked up somewhat warmer clothing, leave for Worldcon again.
17:20 - discover that the motorway exit for the SECC is closed. The process for discovering this simple - I notice that the junction number is at least three too high already, and getting higher. We pull off, turn around and head back. Some swearing involved.
17:45 - Complete navigation of side and back streets of Glasgow and arrive at our hotel. Check in, dump clothes, resist urge to collapse onto bed as if have just crossed Atlantic rather than Central Scotland, and head to check-in.
17:55 - arrive at convention proper and realise that not enough time left for check-in before Lilian supposed to be talking about The Digital Divide…
18:02 - Panel - The Digital Divide
Arrive at panel, find seat, shove Lilian towards the front and realise that I'm about to attend my first ever Worldcon panel. Huzzah!
Panel actually rather good. Nicholas Whyte works for some kind of institute researching politics and democracy in the Balkans, and has a large supply of fascinating insights and anecdotes. One of the other panellists has lots of experience working with mature students who aren't quite so internet-manic as the young-uns, so there's much discussion of what it's like when 'outdated' channels are closed down in favour of the internet, as well as the effect it has on countries that are new to the internet - while vast numbers of languages are now supported, English is frequently seen as a politically neutral second language shared by everyone. How politically neutral English actually is is another matter...
19:00 - 21:00 - registration occurs, and we are given bumper packs of Stuff. We wander briefly about, oohing at the people, the fans, the fans who are also people, and the occasional small furry creature from Alpha Centauri. Lilian blags a free glass of wine, and I get an orange juice, cheering us both up, then we head over to The Moat House, where 'fannish' stuff is to be found. I somehow seem to have induced an understanding of the difference between 'fans' and 'Fans', but am not sure if I could explain it well, or if more than 5% of fandom would agree anyway. In either case, we see many people we recognise and Lilian social butterflies her way across the fan-room, in a blur of Brownian ping-pong.
21:00 - Panel - Living in Old Structures: Church, State. Academia.
Luckily, I don't have to go to this one, so I leave Lilian to her panel-dom and retreat to the fan-room, where I bump into several people before discovering Mike Abbott, and spend a good 40 minutes talking about how we're going to humiliate him at a panel two days hence. He's very good natured about it, and makes several useful suggestions, which sadly won't help when the time comes (wait and see!).
22:00 - Panel - I'm Sorry I Haven't an SFing Clue.
Tony Keen (lovely chap, very funny, completely failed to have an actual conversation with him at the convention) chaired an SF version of I’m sorry I Haven't a Clue. For those of you who weren't raised on the BBC, this is a comedy radio programme where quick-witted panellists come up with humorous answers to ludicrous questions. It's also the origin of Mornington Crescent, which is funny even when Downbelow Station isn't one of the locations en route. Tony's run one at numerous conventions and was apparently so tired of them that when asked to do one for Worldcon he refused to do it unless he got some authors. Unluckily for him, but luckily for the rest of us, they managed to procure a few, including Christopher Priest and Ken Macleod, and the wit flowed remarkably well for a very good hour.
23:00 - Panel - After Dark. Alison Scott, con-runner extraordinaire, organised this one, based on the TV series whereby various 'personalities' would be fed a few drinks and then asked to talk about the issues of the day. I volunteered to be on the panel, and luckily enough she was desperate enough to take me. In fact, it was hardly a panel at all - more of a discussion circle where some people were louder than others. I sadly can't remember any of the topics, except that when we inevitably got onto US politics we very quickly got ourselves back off of it again, and onto something more fun instead. When we'd gone round for an hour or so, we reconvened in the bar (handily 50 feet away) and shortly after that I collapsed into bed...
Friday
10:00 - Panel - Pseudo-Hard SF
Yes, you read that right, 10am. I made it to the start of the programming in time to see Ian McDonald and Geoff Ryman argue about Mundane SF. Or rather, since Geoff turned up 20 minutes late, to see Ian McDonald defend Mundane SF by proxy until it could be defended in person. Various people seemed baffled by the idea that SF with certain limits might be considered particularly interesting, and Geoff was very careful to describe the whole thing as "rules for a particular game that I'd like to see played" as opposed to "How SF should be written".. Some members of the panel seemed slightly confused that FTL might not fit into hard SF, or that just because the story was obviously fiction didn't mean it was ok for absolutely anything to happen. Anyway, it was all fascinating, and hearing Geoff talk about the fact that Cyberpunk was effectively SF written after the fact, because people were so busy looking 3000 years into the future they weren't looking 30, made for a good discussion.
11:00 - Went and got some breakfast. In this case, a hot dog and a sandwich. Wandered around the dealers hall. Got my programme participant pack so that I could display my ribbon with pride. Felt ribbon envy towards those with 5 or 6 ribbons.
12:00 - Panel - Time Travel in Practice.
I was actually on this panel, which was fun. We were to come up with items we'd send back to the 1965 UK Convention, and a 60s fan would send stuff forward. The irrepressible Zara Baxter was the other 00s fan and Pete Weston the 60s fan, with Sandra Bond moderating. The game mostly turned into metaphorical cricket, with myself and Zara bowling ideas at Peter, and him easily knocking them for six. Almost everything we could send back would either be confiscated by the government or socially unusable. To the modern fan it seems incredible that people went to conventions in shirts and ties, let alone that they wore shirts and ties when relaxing at home - the proffered t-shirts would be sadly unusable. Sending back the latest season of Dr Who (on a laptop) would be incredible- but more for the laptop than the TV - and most fans of the time looked down on things like Dr Who as children's nonsense - Niall Harrison would be proud. We also discussed which authors we could swap back and forth - at one point I had to protest that sending Charlie Stross to an era without an internet would count as cruel and unusual punishment. Overall, Pete's reminiscing was fascinating, and the back and forth was great fun.
13:00 - headed for Edinburgh to see The Prodigy in concert. I find concerts even harder to review than conventions - so I'll stick to a brief mention of the fact that they were extremely loud, played all of the favourites and the venue was so hot I ended up dancing without my t-shirt - a first for me.
Saturday
The morning was spent recovering from the previous night's concert and then slowly getting myself back to a semblance of life. I therefore didn't make it back until:
17:00 - Panel - Geek Eye for the Technophobe Guy.
Which I was on, but didn't actually enjoy that much. The format was quite simple - myself, Steve Davies and Tanya Brown were to turn pseudo-technophobe Mike Abbott into a geek. The problem being that this set up an immediate conflict where we ended up largely teasing Mike and he had to retreat into defensiveness. In retrospect, a panel where four geeks answered questions on 'how to unleash your inner geek' would have worked far better, and we could have laughed at ourselves, which (in my opinion) makes for better humour. Still, it was fun in parts, and we did persuade Mike that a PDA might be useful.
18:00 - Panel - SF in other Media.
This one was a bit odd - the topic description indicated that the panel was to be all about SF imagery in advertising, but in fact, advertising was hardly touched upon, with most of the time being spent discussing various media, especially theatre and radio, neither of which I'm that interested in. There were still a few interesting moments, and I was able to formulate my theory that SF movies/TV have entered the mainstream at about the same time that computer games have - and for the same reason - now that we can make things that look good, and don't require so much imagination on the part of the consumer, more people are able to see what we've been getting at. Most people were initially unable to get past either wobbly cardboard aliens, or the fact that alien creatures were made of 4 pixels. Once they look 'real' those with less imagination are able to get it just as well as we always could.
This was, sadly, all I made it to on Saturday, as I was whisked off to the Ashoka for an Indian meal, in the company of various fans from numerous countries. I did make it back to The Hilton later, where I went to the Livejournal party. This was great, largely because I got to engage in an actual SFnal conversation, with Zara Baxter, Niall Harrison, Geneva Melzack and other people whose names I didn't get. I did make the mistake at one point of discussing Stephen Baxter when Niall wasn't about, so he insisted I rewind it and start again when he got back. Oh, and I got to ask Mike Abbott about Hero Quest, which was useful, as I'm trying to get my brother to run a campaign in it. Rather good fun, and my thanks to Max for organising it .
Sunday
I was determined to make Sunday as productive as possible, it being my only full day at the convention. So once again I was up early, and headed for:
10:00 - Panel - AI: The Aliens We Make?
Which was fascinating, largely for the debates about whether AI was going to be anything like human I, the dangers of imperfect simulation, Augmented Intelligence and other fun stuff. I remain sceptical about uploading in the near future, but hopeful about AI in general.
11:00 - Panel - Fannish Etiquette: A Primer
Where the inability of fans to deal with etiquette was dissected, along with their frequent disagreement that they should be doing so in the first place. Much discussion of whether con-goers, con-runners or authors were the worst behaved, with (semi)-anonymous stories abounding. Aspergers reared its ugly head once more, with a perspicacious person behind me pointing out that diagnosed sufferers make an effort. Possibly the problem is that more people haven't been properly diagnosed.. Lilian contributed, especially on the topic of sexism amongst fans, and an inability to deal with the word 'No'.
12:00 - Panel - Genre Killing Ideas
Started with the singularity, and worked out the way, via mobile phones and space probes, to discuss the various different ideas which have to be taken into account when writing modern SF (if only to dismiss them). Interesting, even if it did tend to meander somewhat from the subject. I could have done with more examples, but even so it was reliably fun.
13:00 - Panel- Anarchy versus Technology
Was sadly held in a room that was far too small, which is a shame, because I'd have loved to see it, if only I'd arrived ten minutes earlier. If nothing else, I'd like to see some libertarian butt kicked... Instead I went and lay on the grass with a baguette and introduced Tom Becker(San Francisco fan and con-runner) to Simon Bisson (UK fan, technology journalist, and lucky frequenter of briefings all over the world – frequently in San Francisco). On re-reading this, I just expanded SF to San Francisco – otherwise the last sentence might have been confusing even if you _do_ know either of them.
14:00 - Panel - When I Were a Lad, We used to Dream of 64k
Terry Pratchett was the highlight of this for me, with him and Simon Bisson swapping excessively geeky stories of circuit boards and computers with wobbly external RAM packs (along with a variety of other knowledgeable grey-bearded geeks). While I remember, kudos to Simon Bradshaw, who moderated a few panels I saw with considerable style and efficiency. Anyway, there was much discussion of the good old days, when you could hack straight into the processor and send commands directly to add-on boards so that your £99 home computer could read you the barometric pressure at the touch of a rubber button. When asked later, none of the panel were tempted to swap their computers in, but they did lament the day when you could understand every bit of your computer. PTerry pointed out that even if one did build a crystal radio set nowadays, you wouldn't be able to pick anything much up on it. Roll on digital programmable radio!
15:30 - Panel - Jackson's Lord of the Rings
In which they looked back at the trilogy with two year's hindsight, discussing what worked and what didn't. Or at least, I assume they did. Due to an accident with an elastic band and a time machine, this was rescheduled to two hours earlier, which made it a tad tricky to get to it (I'd left my own Chrono-manipulator in my other trousers). Instead I wandered the halls disconsolately, said hi to Lilian (lying outside on the grass) and then collapsed in the hotel room for half an hour.
17:00 - Panel - Cyberpunks vs Humanists - The Battle for SF’s Heart.
This was exactly the panel I'd been looking forward to. If only it hadn't been cancelled at the last minute. So I quickly checked my program guide, dashed downstairs and 200m to:
17:00 - Talk - Deep in the Heart of Empire
Where Bryan Talbot took us through Heart of Empire, showing us where the influencces came from, what the themes were, and which of the people in the background was Iain Banks. Fascinating stuff, and despite my belief that authors don’t get the final word on how their work is read, I’d love to go through similar things with a number of other authors too.
18:00 - Panel - Fannish Question Time
Tony Keen moderated a bunch of fans there to answer any questions we had. The first set of answers took 42 minutes of the 45 we had, but were well worth it, as we talked about the focus on words over art, creative writing, reading Graphic Novels and other pictographic topics. I managed to just squeak in a question on what the panellists favourite part of the convention was - sad to say none of them mentioned me, although two of them did mention 'talking until 4 in the morning' (and had been chatting to me just the previous night). Two of them also voted for 'I'm sorry I haven't an SFing Clue', but as one of them was Tony (organiser of said comedy extravaganza) I'm not sure that should count...
19:00 - avoiding the Hugo Awards.
In retrospect I'm not sure why we decided to avoid the awards, except possibly for a general dislike of ceremonies. Had I thought about it in more detail I might have decided that as several people I knew were up for it I should go and see if they won. However, Lilian and I decided to head off for a fantastic Teppanyaki restaurant with Anne (Wilson?) and Mike Abbott, where we were very impressed with the knife tossing and spice-juggling, as well as with the quality of the food. The fact that 2/3 of the other people there were Japanese was surely a good pointer to the worthiness of the place...
21::00 - Post Hugocalypse
Lilian arrived out of the toilet waving her phone and announced that pretty much everyone we knew had won something, so we paid up and headed back, congratulating people as we passed them. The Plokta crowd seemed completely shattered by their win, although organising the fan-room for the previous 5 days might have contributed somewhat. We dropped over to the Hilton for the parties, went round all of them once (the Finnish vodka + lingonberry juice was lovely, and the Irish dry-ice beer-cooler was a great touch), then headed back to the fan-room so that I could attempt the Astral Pole. It turns out that my body just doesn't bend that way, and my arms nearly came off, but the other games at the Fannish Olympics were also good silly fun, and after exhausting myself with them, I headed back to the hotel and fell over.
Monday
10:00 - Panel - Why does the Left like Military SF?
Damn good question, which I was looking forward to Joe Haldeman and Harry Harrison answering. Sadly, the room was once more overfull, and the acoustics were terrible, so I ended up running away for breakfast instead.
11:00 - Panel - The world we are making now: Politics
Caroline Mullan was running a series of three items under this banner, and having made it to the third, I wish I'd made it to the first two as well. Nicholas Whyte was once-more fascinating, and Caroline managed to steer a course around the rocks of personal politics in favour of looking at the systems themselves. Personally, I'm of the opinion that systems don't change unless there is general consensus that they have failed. So, for instance, while the recent UK elections were _nearly_ a failure, the party with the most votes still won. If there had been a 1% higher swing to the Conservatives (meaning that Labour would still have won, but with a minority of the actual vote) then pushing for a replacement for first past the post would have been much easier Anyway, lots of fascinating discussion, ranging from grumpy resignation to blue-sky futurism.
At which point I had to head off to catch a train home, due, as I was, in Yorkshire a few hours later.
I can honestly say I had a good time, and I'd recommend it to anyone - but try not to book anything else in on the same days, and always make sure that you have a backup panel in case the one you're looking forward to is cancelled.
Eastercon next year is also in Glasgow, so I'll look forward to seeing a load of you there again!
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 10:02 am (UTC)ps
Date: 2005-08-13 10:04 am (UTC)Re: ps
Date: 2005-08-13 10:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-20 04:04 pm (UTC)Mundane SF generates lots of talk in US, as least judging by parties during the summer here. Would like to see someone write something and claim it as Mundane so we have something we can point to when when try to define it.
Vodka and lingonberry juice, along with chat with Jukka Halme, was one of my highlights of Sunday night.