This is a brief report on Anticipation, the Worldcon held in Montreal August 6-10, 2009. My full report will also include panel descriptions, but will probably not appear for some time (though I hope before the next Worldcon!).

We were staying in what was supposed to be a quiet hotel (the Hyatt). The only problem was that there was an outdoor rock concert going on across the street from our room from the time we checked in on Wednesday through Sunday night. This is probably not the convention's fault, but it was an omen of things to come.

(Well, actually, another problem was that the reception staff seemed very snooty. On the other hand, we were able to check in at 10AM, which was great.)

Parking seemed cheaper than what the convention web page said; maybe they were talking about valet parking. It cost us C$110 for six days (143 hours). We found a space very close to the elevators, but the layout was such that we had to take one elevator to the lobby, walk up a half-dozen stairs, then take another elevator to our room!

The convention centre was about a quarter of a mile away, and reachable without ever going outside. The programming seemed very spread out, but that is just the nature of how these centres are built.

The convention provided free WiFi in the main hall, where the Dealers Room, Art Show, displays, etc. were. One problem was that it did not open until 10AM and programming started at 9AM, so one saw lines of people sitting on the floor against the room's walls trying to get connected and read their mail early.

Someone complained that there wasn't free WiFi throughout the convention centre. He wanted people to be able to "set up a Twitter backchannel" at panels, and even thought that having a screen behind the panelists where audience members could post comments that the panelists could not see was a good idea. The day that happens, I stop being a panelist. A panel presumes the panelists know more than the audience, and so does "privilege" the panelists. A discussion group makes everyone equal. But this suggestion privileges the audience over the panel, and basically allows them to carry on long exchanges that distract everyone while the panelists are talking. It is even worse than cell phones.

Some rooms had microphones and some not. In general, they got it right, but one small room had a panel with a very soft-spoken panelist who desperately needed a microphone.

There were complicated recycling bins throughout the centre, but there was also bottled water provided for the panelists. This seems inconsistent, but I am sure the bins are mandated by law and pitchers rather than bottles are not.

Registration went quickly at noon on Wednesday, but there were problems. There were no programme grids (which apparently took the place of pocket programmes) or restaurant guides in the registration packets. (These did show up later, and I suppose that this is just one of the downsides of early registration.) The change sheets were also not in the packets--more on this later.

There were only small generic plastic bags to hold the materials. This is not the convention's fault--I guess with the new economy, publishers and stores are less willing to donate fancy printed bags to conventions as advertising. Oh, well, we still have a supply from previous conventions (lightweight shoulder bags from ConFiction, heavy cloth tote bags from LaCon some-number-or-other, and so on).

In the bag there was a copy of what appeared to be a book of French fantasy (in translation) from Bragelonne but was actually a sampler. However, it seemed to include several complete stories in addition to an excerpt from a novel, so it was more like a "real" book.

One freebie that appeared on the "Freebie Table" was a book I had been looking for: Nick Mamatas's Move Under Ground. Other freebies included Rich Horton's Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2006, Frank Ludlow and Roelof Goudriaan's Emerald Eye, and a 2009 Robert Jordan calendar (well, it will be accurate again when 2014 rolls around). There were also various books that members dropped off, including a lot of Stephen King in French. (I tend to drop off old science fiction on convention freebie tables rather than the local thrift shop, since there is definitely an audience for them.)

I have no idea who (if anyone) was in charge of putting publishers' freebies out on the table. I do know that the Horton did not appear until Saturday (though the boxes were there under the tables from the start), and then seemed a glut on the market. If they had started appearing earlier, this might not have been true.

There was a souvenir book, a programme book, a programme grid, and a restaurant guide. The biographies that programme participants sent in appeared in none of these. The programme grid was too big for a pocket programme and also poorly designed (each day was the back of one sheet and the front of the next instead of the front and back of a single sheet). However, the real problem was that the programme book and grid were grossly inaccurate; see my comments under programming.

Typos abounded--the best on the grid was "Editiing" for "Editing" on a panel about editing! (And, no, it was not intentional, as elsewhere it was spelled correctly.) At the Hugo Ceremony, in the necrology they misspelled Philip José Farmer's name as "Phillip".

Speaking of which, the Hugo Awards Program was printed back-to-back in both English and French, like an Ace Double, but very poorly assembled. It was done on regular-size paper, then stapled midway and folded in half, but the sheets were not "squared up" very well before stapling.

Newsletters came out late (for example, I generally did not see the evening editions with the list of parties until the next morning), and were not well distributed. The rack next to the Voodoo and Party Boards was frequently empty of any issues of the newsletter, and one would often see (for example) only issues 1, 3, 7, and 11 in a rack at one end of the hall, and only issues 6, 8, and 10 in a rack at the other.

(There was also a problem with the Voodoo Board which turned out beneficial for the members. When the sheets were first printed, there was a problem, so they reprinted them while the boards to hold them were set up. When the second printing was done, it was discovered that the font size had been enlarged, so more boards were needed. However, this made it a lot easier for members to find names on it!)

The restaurant guide was almost useless. Admittedly there are so many restaurants in downtown Montreal that they cannot all be listed, but the ones that were had insufficient information. There were no hours listed, so the fact that that all the cheaper restaurants on Rue de Notre Dame closed by 6 PM came as a surprise after we walked over there. Nor was there any indication of which served breakfast, or when. And though addresses and a map were given, the restaurants were not located on the map. You might know that a restaurant was on Rue de Notre Dame, but you had no idea which block it was in.

They also did not list the food court in the nearby Complex de Desjardins at all, and probably missed a few others I was unaware of.

The one saving point of all this was that Chinatown was literally just outside the convention centre and one could rely on getting good food there--even breakfast at a couple of places! And one could always find fans wandering this area looking for food (and dinner companions--one morning we had breakfast with Jean Lorrah and talking about our respective trips to India).

(Tip for choosing the best Chinese restaurants: they are the ones with primarily Chinese patrons, or those where the tables are preset with chopsticks rather than forks.)

Ever since the Minicon Restaurant Guide got nominated for a Hugo a few years ago, people seem to have decided to get creative with their convention's restaurant guide. This is a mistake. Yes, there are those who will enjoy the clever writing and the descriptions of distant, expensive restaurants. But most fans, I think, prefer a straightforward list of the restaurants closest to the convention centers and hotels with the categories, price range, hours, and special details (wheelchair-accessible, serves family-style, or whatever). If possible a short list of breakfast places and late-night places is useful (though the hours should help there). Any restaurants further away that are listed should be there for a reason (kosher, best in town for smoked meat, serves its meals in a ferris wheel, etc.).

These are not new complaints. In 2000, I wrote that the Chicon "Dining Guide", while a good restaurant guide for someone visiting Chicago, was not as good for people attending a science fiction convention in Chicago. The restaurants included were too widely distributed geographically, and more heavily weighted towards more expensive restaurants. And the main flaw in the guide was the lack of geography, or map.

The next year, Millennium Philcon did such a good job that I used the guide for several years following. But then in 2002, at ConJose the restaurant guide was a triumph of style over substance. Oh, the descriptions were fine, but there were no hours listed for restaurants, and NO MAP!! Yes, they had addresses, but you couldn't figure out where on West San Carlos number 140 was. (We think, alas, it was actually in a site then under construction.)

What ConJose overlooked was that the primary purpose of a restaurant guide should be to give people useful, complete, current information on where they can eat during the convention rather than a fancy book with cover art by the Guest of Honor and great write-ups of restaurants no longer there or three thousand miles away. (I'm not making this up.)

For example, ConJose listed only three restaurants as both "short walk" and "breakfast." This included the aforementioned defunct restaurant, but did not include Express Deli (listed as lunch and dinner but no breakfast) or McDonald's (not listed at all, though you passed it one block before the Jack-in-the-Box that was listed).

Let me re-iterate my main point: The purpose of a convention restaurant guide is to guide people to restaurants. Anything that gets in the way of doing this, or supersedes it, is a bad thing.

Or most specifically, here are my requirements for a convention restaurant guide:

Regardless of how long, detailed, or elaborate the full guide is, there must be a single sheet (two sides) that has a list of all restaurants nearest the hotel or convention center (two blocks, three blocks, whatever radius fits) with description of what they serve, price range (in typical cost, such as "entrees $15-$20," not "$" to "$$$$$$"), and hours. The hours should be the hours for the weekend of the convention--this is critical for conventions over holiday weekends. It should include all fast-food restaurants and grocery stores. And there should be a map with all the restaurants on it. People who want to go farther afield can use the full guide, which should also have a map for the closest ones, directions for the rest, and distances for all.

This was smaller than usual for a Worldcon, perhaps because crossing the border and dealing with customs was a real hassle for United States dealers--so hardly any came. An additional complication was the bilingual nature of the convention. The result was while half of the dealers were selling books, half of them were selling books in French. Ironically, everyone I talked to about the lack of English-language used books in the Dealers Room said the same thing: "Just as well, because the last thing I need is more books."

The art show was similarly small, probably for the same reason. In Europe, the show is small but at least one sees a wide variety of cultural influences. (I still remember some of the Czech and Dutch artwork from ConFiction in The Hague.) Here there were mostly the same artists, or at least styles, that one always sees.

The programming itself was fine, but the organization of it left something to be desired. The participants were sent their draft schedules about one month before the convention--at the same time as the programme book and grid went to the printer! This meant that there were a lot of changes to the printed programme that could have been avoided if the drafts had been sent out even a week or two earlier. So there were seven pink pages of changes before the convention even started. In addition, the grids had been laid out incorrectly, and starting times were often off by a half-hour. Signs soon appeared throught the convention centre (in English and French) saying that the grids were incorrect and to use the pink sheets. But the pink sheets had only the changes; the unchanged items were not listed there at all, so one needed to reference the grids as well.

One really major example: the conversation between Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman and author Charles Stross was listed for three different times and two different rooms, depending on which piece of paper you looked at.

In addition, the film programme was not listed anywhere (nor were the hours for the Dealers Room). The filk programme was also supposedly grossly wrong.

"Plokteur" (the hoax newsletter) was not far off the mark when it said, "The Pocket Programme Convention Guide is the definitive source for programme items that were added to the programme database on Tuesdays or on Friday mornings, and the first edition of the Moose-Baiting and Franglais-Language programme streams, while the daily pink sheets will let you find items that have been relocated to an alternative space-time continuum, that other newsletter that doesn't exist will include all the programme changes that are now too late to be any use, the second edition of the programme grid is 23.2% more accurate than the first edition, and the bits of paper stuck to the walls will tell you how to avoid the filk, children's and WSFS programming."

There were also other problems. For example, Mark was supposed to be on an item where the convention would show the film Primer and then the panel would discuss it. When he walked in, someone from the back of the room by the DVD player asked him, "Do you have the film?" To make a long story short, no one on the committee had thought to arrange for the film. Now it turned out that when Mark heard he was on this item (only two days before we left New Jersey), he put the DVD in his luggage to watch on the trip. So he was able to say that if the audience could wait a half-hour while he ran back to the hotel room, he could provide the film. What are the chances of that?! (Slim--the other two similar items with other films were canceled.)

He also had the problem that whoever wrote up his origami workshops said that Mark would be teaching specific figures, but never discussed this with him. Additionally, when he asked before the convention who was supplying the paper, they sent him email asking him to buy it and they would reimburse him, this email arriving while we were in Newfoundland. Luckily, Michael's had branches in several towns we were going through later in the trip. (At the convention, no one seemed to know how to reimburse him.)

I heard that the Regency Dance had no sound system provided, and was given a room still set up for panels, so they had to move all the chairs out of the way themselves.

Now, I heard from someone that one entire department of programming quit fairly late in the game, and I know that programme planning started late, because one person told me when he was given names and panels and asked to start matching them up (late June, if I recall). Panelists who did not have or provide an email address sometimes found themselves left out in the cold regarding panel placement and so on. (One said that even a letter or phone call explaining that it was too difficult to try to work without an email address and could they try to get one would have been better.)

Whether the committee's convention centre liaison was inexperienced, or Canada is stricter, I don't know, but the Green Room had very little in the way of refreshment, probably because all of it was provided by the convention centre at inflated prices. There was coffee (usually) and tea, with some muffins and bagels in the morning, and a couple of small cheese and veggie platters during the day. There were no cold beverages (other than water), no chips, etc., and when there was food, it disappeared very quickly.

There was no clock. I doubt the convention centre would have insisted they pay a corkage fee if they had put one in. (Someone else claimed there was a clock. All I can say is that I did not see one, and I did look for it.)

The convention seemed to think all the people in the room were there for the next panel, and that all the panelists would show up. Announcements of changes in the "5-minute-warning" system were posted in the Green Room but nowhere else. Moderators, as usual, seemed ill-formed about the actual length of the panels.

This is the last part of my brief report on Anticipation, the Worldcon held in Montreal August 6-10, 2009. My full report will also include panel descriptions, but will probably not appear for some time (though I hope before the next Worldcon!).

The parties (and the Con Suite) were in the Delta, which was about a kilometer away from our hotel (and it was an uphill walk to our hotel). We went to the Reno party on Wednesday night, and it was very crowded, with a long walk back afterwards. So we decided to skip the parties after that, and this was probably a wise decision. One night the Delta shut down at least one party, and there were reports of people having to stand in line in the lobby waiting for people to leave the party floor before they could go up.

I also heard that while the Con Suite had a lot of good food (including Montreal smoked meat), it was open only in the evenings. This could well be true, given how far it was from programming (a half a kilometer)--it was not possible to just "drop in" for a while during programming breaks. (The woman who seemed to be running the Green Room whenever I was there commented on how often I dropped in there. Well, if there had been a Con Suite, or even more chairs in the display hall, I might have used those instead. There were a few sofas scattered around the centre, but they were usually occupied.)

(After I posted this, several people told me that the Con Suite was open all day as well.)

Description: "The appropriation of Scotland, Ireland and Wales as lands of 'Celtic fantasy' by North American authors whose Celtic experiences appear to begin with Sir Walter Scott, travel through Brigadoon, and conclude with bad Hollywood movies."

Attendance: 160

Ó Guilín said he could talk about "Celtic myth, the hideous American abuses thereof." He also mentioned The Inferior as "one of the five best books written from the point of view of a cannibal" (making me wonder what the other four are).

Sperring described this as a variant on "the bloody Celtic history panel" and said she was "put on these because I have a rant." She followed in J. R. R. Tolkien's footsteps as a Celtic philologist, and had an academic's disdain for the "common knowledge" about the Celts. For example, she said that "everyone knows" that Celts painted themselves blue, wore blankets, had large clans and female equality, and were pagans. "The trouble," she said, "is that this is bollocks." And not jus bollocks, but "large, economy-sized bollocks." First, there were no such people as the Celts. The notion arose from diffusionism theory in the 1950s. The divisions into Gaels, Irish, and Welsh are actually linguistic, not cultural. Women were property; children were the property of the men.

As an example of how pervasive all this is, she said, in a bookshop in Glastonbury she saw Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon in the history section!

Ó Guilín asked, "What's the harm?"

Martin wanted to know in all these Celtic myths where are the leprechaun girls--all he ever saw were men. He noted that he had no pretensions to academic credentials. It seemed to him/her that Celts are always the heroes and Romans always the villains, and in this the Romans are getting a bad rap. The Celts originally came from Asia and Turkey and "got their asses kicked from the entire Asian landmass" and made up sad songs about it.

Sperring said that this theory of Celtic origin is no longer accepted as accurate, but that in this as in other ways, Americans generate myths that are then fed back to Ireland. Ó Guilín said this was true of songs as well: "Danny Boy", "Tura Lura", and McNamara's Band". Storytellers in days gone by told stories as inaccurate as the movies are today. "Hollywood does the same thing" with all cultures, he said. Why make us miserable (with the truth)?

Sperring noted that disinformation is dangerous; people get death threats over it. "When we lose ownership of the past, we loose ourselves, ...who we are." As another example of this, he cited the Slavonic model of the history of Kiev versus the Swedish one.

Martin noted that Americans have a different take on "mongrelization", and find that mixtures of Irish, German, Italian, and so on are quite normal. We have, however, he said, shifted from the "melting pot" to the "salad bowl", but added, "I don't like the salad bowl, I like the melting pot." One problem, he added was, "You Europeans know too much history; you don't forget. Someday we may have just Europeans and that would be good." He pointed out that in science fiction, there were just Earthmen, not Irish, English, French, etc. Later, someone in the audience noted that the Earthmen always seemed to be American. Martin acknowledged this and added that in Stanislaw Lem's work, they are Polish, in the Strugatskys', Russian, and so on. In Wild Cards, he added, the international superheroes tend to fall into stereotypes (e.g., the "bull-fighting guy").

Sperring mentioned Thomas Cahill's book How the Irish Saved Civilization and pointed out that the Irish were Christian and scholarly before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and that it was unfair to trash Christianity by transferring its virtues to the supposed paganism of the Irish.

In fiction, Martin wondered, should one write what is accurate or what is best for the story? He quoted the coda from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Sperring pointed out that by ignoring the facts, "Braveheart has re-invented Scottish nationalism in a rather scary way." Martin observed, "I'm sure a Scot is perfectly capable of writing a bad book" as well as an American.

In defense of the Scots, Sperring cited Margaret Elfenstone as a good Scottish writer. And Martin added that people also sometimes get it wrong accidentally.

Someone in the audience said that people get history wrong from watching movies. Martin said that at least it gets people interested in history, but that television (in particular) likes to look at a mirror, not a telescope.

Sperring said all this started in the 19th Century with Sir James Frazer. (My notes say that Frazer took Jessie L. Weston's work but I must have written it wrong, because it was the other way around. Weston started the Arthurian emphasis in folklore, and influenced other scholars, and also the modern Wiccan movement.

Sperring said the biggest thing incoming students seem to focus on is "lesbian poetesses." (Apparently at least one came to her saying that their interest in Celtic history was to find their "inner lesbian poetess.") She says that the closest she can find to anything like lesbian poetesses in Celtic history is a reference to "women satirists" in some division of laws into nine categories. Apparently Gael Baudino's Gossamer Axe has helped to feed these fantasies, along with The Mists of Avalon. Sperring said that she liked The Mists of Avalon as a book, and was complaining only about its pernicious influence. But she pointed out that Morgaine is the heroine, but all the other women seem to be incompetent.

Martin recommended Evangeline Walton's books, which were discovered by the Ballantine "Adult Fantasy" series. Lin Carter, he observed, was one of the worst writers but a very astute editor.

Description: "Studies of complex chemical systems, AI, neuroscience and MRI are beginning to find answers to this question. What are the results and what do they mean for our sense of self?"

Attendance: 120

Binsted's background is in AI; she wrote a program that made up puns. She said, "When Kim starts talking about consciousness at a party, it's time to go home." She said that the aspects of consciousness are awareness, self-awareness, free will, qualia (sensory impressions), and time.

Watts is a marine mammal biologist. He began with, "What's consciousness good for? Damned if I know?" He said that other researchers have come to a similar conclusion: consciousness is non-adaptive, etc. As for the aspects Binsted listed, Watts noted that a thermostat has qualia, and a video camera or a mirror has self-awareness. He suggested that something like "What is it to perceive red?" is a quale. And he thought you could have consciousness without time.

Binsted talked about how we are conscious only of "now". Watts asked, "How long is now?" and Binsted replied, "That long." Binsted also said that some people see red differently than others.

Someone in the audience asked, "Is consciousness a property of a sentient being?" and mentioned pan-psychism, which says that everything has consciousness.

Watts said the latter sounded like John Conway's theory that electrons have free will. Watts feels that free will is incompatible with consciousness, because he divides everything into deterministic versus randomness. (But randomness is not free will.)

Binsted said that even if free will is a delusion or illusion, it still has value in being able to say, "I want chocolate cake." Watts said that even that didn't guarantee consciousness, because a Roomba can say, "I want to recharge."

(Is intelligence consciousness?)

Watts claims that the bit rate of consciousness is 15-50 bits per second, and that we "outsource" images to generate notions such as "face", "chair", and so on. (This may be related to the autism aspect described by Dr. Temple Grandin, where she does not (cannot?) visualize a generic chair when she hears the word "chair" but rather images of every chair she has ever seen.) Jeste de Vries says that consciousness generates modules for non-conscious behavior.

Binsted pointed out that you cannot run consciousness backwards.

Watts said that evolution is messy, and so we should ask, "What do we use consciousness for? Is it necessary? Can you posit a non-conscious agent for everything?" His response was that one could posit a non-conscious agent for everything but aesthetics (as in Frederik Pohl's "The Midas Plague"). He added in passing that supposedly artists get laid more often (by more women). (This assumes, I think, that all artists are men.)

Someone in the audience said that assuming free will assumes an actor, hence using it to defend consciousness is circular. And what about unconsciousness, such as driving somewhere without being able to remember any of it? Binsted said that the latter was actually a function of transferring memories to short- or long-term memory.

Regarding other species, Watts said that cephalopods have the ability to place themselves in space (often considered as aspect of consciousness).

Someone in the audience suggested consciousness as the storyteller. (This seems to be a premise of Ted Chiang's short story, "What's Expected of Us".) Watts recommended what he called "The Body-Swap Illusion" paper, in which people self-identified with a manikin. Someone thought that road rage may be due to people identifying themselves as their cars. Watts said you have the same effect in kayaking; John Sloan said it also happens with motorcycles. Watts made a reference to "body-swap boxing" and said that consciousness is an "artifact of brain lateralization."

Watts said that when we talk about social bondings we presuppose consciousness. And emotion is not philosophy or intelligence, so it implies consciousness. Binsted said that consciousness is not required for our social nature, but it is useful. She said that Luc Steeles has created computational consciousness.

Watts said that we have a richness of sensory input, but most of it does not make it into consciousness. We do not perceive directly through senses, citing Anton's Syndrome and blindness. We use a brain simulation model. The "brain in a bottle" is generating its own input--that's what dreams are, after all.

Binsted asked whether an octopus in a rover (?) moves the same way a dog does, and talked about "the beast that sits on your back." Sleep paralysis kicks in early, she said.

Watts asked if Korsakov's Syndrome implied a lack of consciousness. When you do a corpus callosotomy (an operation that divides the two halves of the brain), the latency between the halves exceeds the threshold for self-awareness. There are aspects of this in Vernor Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep, and also in the psychology of people with multiple personalities.

Binsted asked, "Are we going in the other direction, where consciousness controls the system?" Watts said no, that the signal to move (for example) is gone before consciousness comes in.

Binsted addresses the Cartesian problem of other consciousnesses by saying that she believes the audience members are conscious because we are similar to her, and because the claim is credible. But how, she asks, would we judge the credibility of such a claim for aliens.

Someone in the audience said that "consciousness collapses the wave form." Someone else thought that was a good premise for a Greg Egan novel. And a third person pointed out the distinction between "knowing" and "knowing that". (A color-blind person may know all there is to know about the physiology of seeing the color red, but still does not know what it is to see the color red.)

Watts brought up the "Chinese room" question: You have a man who does not know Chinese in a room with stacks of dictionaries and instructions such that when he is sent a question in Chinese, he can construct an answer--even though he understands neither the question nor the answer. This would seem to pass the Turing Test, but most people would not claim the room had intelligence. Binsted said that a non-English speaker would fail the Turing Test if it were given in English. Watts noted that Larry Niven's works are hard science fiction to high school students, but fantasy to Ph.D.s. This means that "hard science fiction" is a function of the reader; similarly, the Turing Test is also a function of the user. Binsted agreed, saying that there seemed to be a couple of unspoken assumptions: that both the tester and the conscious answerer be fluent in the same language, and that neither have brain damage. Binsted thought the test "much too strong"--things that are obviously intelligent do not pass it. (I do not remember if she gave examples, but higher primates would certainly seem to fall into this category. And of course babies do not pass it either.)

Someone pointed out that superbeings testing us would think we were not intelligent. Binsted said that Henry Lieberman was building a database for a Turing Test. Watts suggested that in a Turing Test, you really have two people testing each other, and someone added, "That's a chat room." Someone else noted that "chatbots" with bad English got people to hand over credit card numbers, leading Watts to announce, "That's the Turing Test!"

Binsted talked about a "psycho-neurological realistic level of emotions" and how it is possible to have a machine display the obvious signs of emotion. (This sounds like more Greg Egan, as in "Reasons to Be Cheerful".) Watts said that this is merely porting over structures that have evolved.

Description: "Our panelists have read the Hugo-nominated novels: they tell us what they want to win, what will win, and why."

Attendance: [unknown]

My notes say that the format of this was not very good, but I cannot remember what it was. The comments were more negative than positive, and I left fairly early.

Description: "Our information about SF outside the English language is often provided by (mediated by) Anglophone experts who have been to the foreign land in question and brought back what interests them. Here, instead, we gather experts from SF/fantasy traditions outside English to tell us what we should look out for."

Attendance: 50

[For purposes of this panel description, "X-ish science fiction" will mean "science fiction written in the X language" unless I note otherwise. So "English science fiction" means science fiction written in English, no matter what the country of origin.]

De Vries mentioned Shine, an optimistic science fiction anthology with more non-Western viewpoints. H&oring; was from Norway and had suggested a panel on German fantasy, but it got lumped into this one. He observed that in Nordic countries, science fiction and fantasy are lumped together. (That used to be true in the United States as well until around 1980 or so.) Zinos-Amaro was from Spain and said he could talk about Spanish science fiction, by which I think he meant science fiction from Spain, though he did later indicate that there was more interaction between peninsular science fiction (from the Iberian peninsula) and Latin American science fiction. And Ogushi was from Japan, where science fiction is found more in movies, anime, and manga, with stories being the least common.

H&oring;ie said that for German science fiction, Berlin is a cultural center, and East Germany still has their own cultural identity. Germany is also still dealing with World War II as a major focus. De Vries asked what the difference was between German science fiction and English science fiction. H&oring;ie said it was hard to define, but that perhaps German science fiction is more experimental. Zinos-Amaro suggested that some English science fiction authors are more global than others, and named Ian McDonald as an example.

Zinos-Amaro mentioned magical realism as a strong field in spanish, particularly in Latin America, and said that similar to Nordic countries, science fiction and fantasy are marketed together. He said this highlights the idea that cultural attitudes are brought to the text, not inherent in the text.

Ogushi said that one reason for major differences between Japanese and English science fiction is that the Japanese language is right-brain and the English language is left-brain. So the Japanese want good illustrations as well as a good story. The science fiction market is very small, with the "light novel" (what we would call "YA" or "young adult") a major part of it. There are about a hundred new light novels every month, they are read by all ages, they are usually in series, and they can sell up to a million copies each (in a population of about 128,000,000). (That would be like selling about 2,5000,000 in the United States.)

In Spain, Zinos-Amaro said, there is a denial of any decline, and they are now claiming that a Spanish author was the true inventor of the concept of a time machine. Enrique Gaspar wrote El anacronopete (translated into English as The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey in 1887, seven years before H. G Wells's THE TIME MACHINE. (For details, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12900390.) There was an explosion of science fiction in the 1970s, led by the magazine Nueva dimension. This was probably the result of Francisco Franco's death in 1975, since under Franco the "New Wave" had been banned. There was even an Isaac Asimov equivalent, "El Buen Doctor", Carlos Saiz Cidoncha, who wrote galactic empire stories. What are popular now are novels of "social critique. Hard science fiction tends to be optimistic, while social science fiction is pessimistic. One work he cited was Eduardo Menoto's News from Earth, which he said was more a parody than a serious work.

H&oring;ie said that more Norwegian literature was translated into German than vice versa, which implies than Norwegian science fiction may have more influence on German than vice versa. De Vries thought the optimistic works were driven by the market; the writers themselves prefer to write pessimistic works, but publishers will not let them.

As I mentioned earlier, Zinos-Amaro said there is more interaction these days between peninsular and Latin American science fiction, with the latter being heavily influenced by a post-colonial sensibility. One also sees the rise of previously suppressed regional literatures (e.g., Catalan), as evidenced by the prize awarded by the University of Catalonia.

The main problem with this panel was that it was too diffuse, with each panelist talking about his area or language of expertise, but no general themes. In addition, the questions from the moderator seemed to be close-ended, not generating any discussion.

Description: "Welcome to Anticipation; brief introduction to the convention and presentation of the guests."

Alas, this was done with flat seating, so it was hard to see the speakers.

Quotable quote: "For science fiction, the sky is no limit." (Dr. Marc Garneau)

Description: "Noted author Charles Stross and economist Paul Krugman talk on a variety of topics"

Krugman started by asking what the world would look like in thirty years. Stross said it would be more complex unless there was a major disaster, in which case it would be simpler, but in a bad way. Krugman thought there was less change in the last thirty years than was expected. Stross thought it was more that things had changed but in different ways or areas than expected. For example, in 1809 it took two days and a month's wages to cross the Home Counties. Now for the same time, cost, and discomfort, you can go to New Zealand. But improvements in flights have flattened off because of energy considerations.

Krugman said he had thought we would have undersea cities, super-sonic transports, etc. We don't, but a kitchen from 1950 would seem "pokey". The biggest changes, though, were between 1840 and 1920 or so. Someone from 1950 might have problems in a 1909 kitchen, but someone from 1909 would be completely hopeless in an 1840 kitchen.

Stross said of one of the classic futuristic tropes, "Flying cars are a really bad idea." Krugman added, "But the robot driver...."

Stross reiterated that there has been a lot of progress in unexpected and unrecognized directions, e.g., "happy slapping." (It is certainly unrecognized by me.) Other areas he mentioned included information technology and biotechnology. Advances in information technology, he noted, were what led to outsourcing, which has had a major impact.

Krugman said that the current global economic crisis is traditional, similar to the Great Depression.

Stross suggested that living in a future shocked civilization: people did not like coercive rapid change. Religious fundamentalism boils down to wanting certainty, hence its rise. Krugman disagreed, saying we had had religious fundamentalists since at least the 1920s (in the United States). He then noted that the 1920s brought radios and the penetration of the mass culture to even remote areas (which would seem to reinforce Stross's premise).

Stross formulated the basic question people ask as "Is [threatening entity] going to [do something hideous]?" And this is reinforced y a "pathological news media who have discovered that by terrifying people they can sell more papers." (Well, other than the rapidly obsolescence of papers, this was noted specifically in the 2011 Hugo nominee Feed by Mira Grant.)

Both agreed there is a huge latency in information technology.

Returning in part to the flying cars, Stross forecast the end of allowing humans to drive cars in thirty years. (Presumably he did not mean this to be the end of cars themselves.) Krugman responded, "In New Jersey it can't come a moment too soon." However, he felt that outsourcing was not the big thing--freight containers are the big thing.

Stross predicted the end of cheap energy because of carbon dioxide emissions, but we will continue using oil (although possibly biofuels rather than petroleum-based). Krugman said that Atlanta's economy seems to be about the airport. What does Atlanta have that anyone wants? What does Cleveland have that Atlanta wants? (My note here says "VV"--I wish I knew what that meant!)

Krugman asked Stross (humorously), "Where do you get your ideas?" Stross avoided the answer regarding Schenectady (then again, Stross is British).

Stross talked about artificial intelligence, saying that it is a set of moving goalposts. Krugamn said that a chess-playing computer teaches us about chess, not about consciousness. Stross said that asking whether a computer can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim.

Krugman said that "page rank" means we have a cyborg, not an artificial intelligence. The recommendations at amazon.com, he said, are astonishingly accurate. (This is interesting--many people find them seemingly random, and of course if you purchase a lot of gifts for other people there, they will be almost totally useless even if they are accurate, a fact Stross noted.) However, Krugman added, the TiVo algorithm needs work.

Krugman said that regarding defeating senescence, I think about what it will do to the finances of Social Security."

Stross talked about the criminal sues of 3D printers, and observed that the first use of any new technology is pornography. They both touched briefly on copyright issues and financing information. Stross suggested that a tax on broadband pays content providers.

Krugman said , "Roomba is great for YouTube if you get your cat to sit on it, but ...."

According to Krugman, the current spike in top incomes is mostly in English-speaking countries. And as for the difference levels in education makes, Krugman noted that hedge fund managers and high school teachers have the same education level.

Stross added that between 1960 and 1980 the United States economy flipped from wealth creation to wealth concentration. Krugman blamed a lot of it on "Monday Night Football": it increased sports salaries, which induced CEOs to demand more as well. Salary distribution is fractal, Krugman said. There are superstar dentists.

Krygman asked Stross, "Your novel on 3D printers is going to cover how they collect VAT, right?" to which Stross replied, "Oooh, I hadn't thought of that!"

Stross said that a consumerist society is infinitely sustainable if what we consume is information.

Krugman said that we could all be working twenty-hour weeks if our needs stopped at a 1950s level. But doing less work cannot be an individual effort, it must be collective. [I will note, however, that one can do forty hours of work a week, but for fewer years.] "The biggest mystery is society," Krugman said, but changing it is harder than building a flying car.

Description: "Once upon a time, very little science fiction was to be found that didn't appear either as a novel of ideas with a dash of action (Wells, Rosny) or a juvenile yarn with a dash of ideas (Verne, E. E. Smith). Today, science fiction runs the entire gamut from the pulpish to the mainstream (Chabon, McCarthy) and ideas may be served up wholesale in many other media."

Attendance: 25

Gregory is an author. Adams is an anthology editor. Lerner has written Modern Science Fiction and the American Literary Community and also a book on the history of libraries. McGalliard and Morrow are both authors with degrees in English.

Morrow said there still is a "lingering academic prejudice against science fiction," leading McGalliard to ask, "Has science fiction conquered the mainstream?" Morrow said no; the tropes and elements have influenced culture, but not so much the literature. As a bookseller, she said, "mainstream" equals mimetic. What people read are mysteries, romances, and (presumably) science fiction, not "mainstream" literature.

Lerner said that science fiction is defined by what it is about, how it is told or read (reading protocols), or by provenance (i.e., written by science fiction writers). When we talk about science fiction conquering the mainstream, do we mean science fiction in the wider media, more people using science fiction reading protocols, or more science fiction authors?

Adams pointed out that nine of the top ten movies are science fiction. Comicon attracts 125,000 people. If "mainstream" equals pop culture, science fiction has conquered it. The result is somewhat ambiguous, though, leading to a panel at Readercon titled, "We Won, We Lost".

Morrow asked whether it was science fiction that conquered the mainstream or what James Morrow called the "cargo cult" (the artifacts of science fiction). Adams referred to this as "the furniture of science fiction."

Gregory said that the approach these days was to remove the "SF" stamp and sell (e.g.) The Road by Cormac McCarthy as mainstream. Morrow said that Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem are the only mainstream authors to embrace science fiction. McGallaird said that genre labels will drive sales, but successful mainstream authors do not need that boost. Lerner asked whether the labels are a service to the reader. "Theoretically," replied Morrow. Gregory though that for many, labels are what not to look at in a bookstore.

[One area where labels completely fail is the religion section, where people are looking for something more specific than "Religion", but any attempt to subdivide it suffers from the biases of the divider.]

Grgeory thinks that affinity selections via the Internet are more successful than labels. Lerner said that in many cases, the publisher serves as a de facto label. For example, Tor Books have a definite connotation to the reader that Company X does not. It is true, however, that many readers are unaware of this because they do not notice the publishers' names.

McGalliard said that literary fiction pretends it is not a genre, but it is. Morrow suggested another genre, "philosophical fiction". Science fiction, she said, is about something. Mainstream fiction, on the other hand, seems to be mostly about "rich, white people from dysfunctional families."

Lerner said another (sub-)genre would be novels of the immigrant experience, which he said were similar to alien and alien contact stories. Gregory said, "Historical fiction gives me the same kind of buzz as science fiction." McGalliard noted that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has both kinds of world-building.

Morrow said that some people feel guilt about reading fiction because it was not real. Historical fiction avoids some of this guilt. (Presumably science fiction makes it even worse.) Lerner thought this was senn in students from families in which they are the first generation to go to college, but Morrow said that she also saw it in professors.

Adams said that among mainstream science fiction, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is considered literature, as is The Road, but the latter would never succeed as science fiction because it has nothing new and nothing happens. Adams also claimed, "Pride and Prejudice is too boring, even with the zombies." (I have not tried that one, but I gave up on Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters because I decided to read Sense and Sensibility instead.

McGalliard said that the claim that modern college students never read any radical literature anymore isnores the fact that science fiction is by its nature radical.

Lerner said that literary criticism is starting to recognize neglected areas and genres. McGalliard said that H. G. Wells and H. P. Lovecraft are in a twilight zone between literature and science fiction, and that Mary Shelley is more Gothic than either literature or science fiction. (I did not realize that "Gothic" and "literature" were non-intersecting.) Morrow said that even if they are not fully accepted as literature, they were and are still very influential. And Lerner pointed out that the science fiction community has preserved its history and produced its own studies.

Someone in the audience said that the film Gattaca will seem a boring social commentary in fifty years. (I am not sure what led to this comment.)

Someone in the audience said that on Oprah's show, she taped over the phrase "Pulitzer Prize Winner" on the cover of The Road. Gregory said that if you want to read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress on the bus, just tape over "The Moon Is a". Someone in the audience noted that in Britain there were two sets of covers for the "Harry Potter" books; Grgeory added that one of them were done as "Penguin Classics". [Other examples of this would be Connie Willis's The Doomsday Book and Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife, though for those, the different covers were not simultaneous.]

Someone else in the audience pointed out that there are sub-genres of science fiction (e.g., alternate history), and the same is true of mainstream. John Updike and Nora Roberts are not in the same category.

McGalliard thought that fantasy was more mainstream than science fiction because it was broader and had a longer literary tradition. Adams attributed this to the fact that science scares people. McGalliard noted again that in movies, science fiction has taken over, but Morrow said that the real genre category was explosions. Someone in the audience said the positions of science fiction and fantasy were reversed in Japan.

Description: "The evidence seems to suggest that more books are selling to fewer people, but does this mean that literacy is declining, or that it is taking new forms? Have we over-estimated the rates of literacy and engagement with books in the past?"

Attendance: 50

Bradley said he has no minor in English, so he cannot teach science fiction at West Jefferson High School, but he does sponsor the science fiction club there. Wagner was wearing a T-shirt that said "Movies: Ruining the Book Since 1920". (Of course, there were literary adaptations before 1920, and they were not necessarily better adaptations than the later ones.) She described herself as a "Librarian in Waiting". Fichtelberg has assembled a bibliography of speculative fiction for grades 6 through 12 (middle and high school, ages 11 through 18) (available at the "Encountering Enchantment" website). Morrow is a well-known author.

Morrow said that literate-ness, not literacy, is what is in question. There is a strong strain of American anti-intellectualism--Kurt Vonnegut said that Ronald Reagan never made a learned reference. After this, he asked the other panelists, "Can you cheer me up a little bit?"

Bradley said that Jefferson Parrish is very diverse, but the reading is more segregated. Whites read the "Twilight" series, blacks read erotic urban fiction (e.g., Zane) and Obama. Boys read the sports section. And he said that he has not seen enough of the Middle Eastern population reading for pleasure to categorize them.

For the science fiction club, they usually do a movie/book combination. Bradley said that he worked to recruit the cheerleaders to join, because if you get the cheerleaders in, the football players will follow.

Fichtelberg said that the libraries are busier than ever, and circulation is up. This is due in part to such series as "Harry Potter" and "Twilight". Librarians can also lead people from on-line games to books. One factor that promotes books is that they are free, while other entertainments are not (even from the library).

Wagner pointed out that on-line games require reading for content and putting together clues, so actually promoted literacy. Fichtelberg mentioned the non-science-fiction series "39 Clues".

Morrow said that Marshall McLuhan thought that television added a lost aspect of communication for the global village. (Apparently McLuhan saw it the way it was depicted in Fahrenheit 451, with no words.) "It's heartening to know how wrong McLuhan was about the future of the print media." But, Morrow asked, have we romanticized the past?

Wagner asked, "What counts as reading?" If a kid is told that reading a magazine does not count as reading, she will not self-identify as a reader. It used to be that fiction did not count. Now non-fiction does not count, "Twilight" does not count, etc.

Bradley said that even things people do not want to count can lead to things they do. He said that if he saw a student reading Obama, he would steer them to Octavia Butler.

Wagner said that there are many more non-traditional outlets for literature now. For example, there are text-message poets in China. And there is definitely a shift in what we mean by literacy.

There was a discussion of language. Morrow said that the printing press "froze" language in a way it had not been before. Someone in the audience disagreed a bit, saying that Chaucer, Mallory, and Shakespeare show a slowing of language change that started even before the printing press.

Morrow said, "It almost feels like cheating to use the Internet."

An audience member talked about the literacy of reading versus the literacy of writing. Reading is associated with fun.

Someone else thought that they should make communication and thought separate from English courses. [And of course English courses are somewhat misnamed, since they usually include non-English authors in translation.]

Morrow closed by saying, "Public education is the best idea we ever came up with, Manichaean dualism the worst."

Description: "Economist and current Nobel recipient Paul Krugman talks about why science fiction lead him to entering the field of economics. Q&A follows."

Attendance: 400

Krugman won the Nobel for economics in 2008. (This is not technically a Nobel Prize, but the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.)

Krugman said when he was young, he read Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series (well, only a trilogy then) and immediately wanted to become a psychohistorian. More recently, Krugman said, he likes Charles Stross's work, in particular the "Family Trade" series. "We have a Third World we can't always transform either," Krugman explained.

The problem, Krugman said, "Psychohistorians have closed-form solutions for this stuff," and this is impossible in the real world. "History is about the forces working out."

Most fiction is about how things are, not why things are the way they are. How does change happen? To answer these questions, Krugman took more history than economics. But history is still mostly about what, not why. Krugman said that he tries to get away from preconceived notions. One trap is believing that simple models are true. As Krugman says, "Economics is really about two stories. One is the story of the old economist and younger economist walking down the street, and the younger economist says, 'Look, there's a hundred-dollar bill,' and the older one says, 'Nonsense, if it was there somebody would have picked it up already.' So sometimes you do find hundred-dollar bills lying on the street, but not often-generally people respond to opportunities. The other is the Yogi Berra line 'Nobody goes to Coney Island anymore; it's too crowded.' That's the idea that things tend to settle into some kind of equilibrium where what people expect is in line with what they actually encounter."

There was mention of the Ricardian Theory of Land Rent (after David Ricardo), where the income of a farmer is based on the worst land (because rents are determined basically by subtracting the yield from the worst land from the yield of the land in question, and declaring that the rent). Krugman cited the 1970 paper by S. A. Delmart, "Economic Causes for Slavery and Serfdom".

Krugman said that when the lights go out, it is "not technology, but the mysterious workings of human society." Being na economist now, he said, "is like being a vulcanologist when Yellowstone finally decides to explode."

Unfortunately, in economics small-scale examples are not exactly the same as testing. He described an example in 1977, from a paper by Joan and Richard J. Sweeney titled "Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Babysitting Coop Crisis". A group of parents decided to form a babysitting coop, using scrip instead of money. Each family started out with ten hours' worth. But most families wanted to hold more than ten hours' worth, and this led to a recession: people would not go out, so there was no way to acquire more. This in turn led to a feedback loop and the entire scenario is an example a the Keynesian view of economy and recession. (More details can be found in Wikipedia.)

The problem, Krugman, is not the lack of experiments, but the complexity of the environment.

Regarding the current economy, Krugman said that the good news is that "things are getting worse more slowly." And further, "the plunge into the abyss seems to have been canceled." But a "lost decade" (similar to that of the Japanese) is still possible.

He cited Robert Shiller's Irrational Exuberance, which in 2000 predicted the tech bubble. (The title is based on Alan Greenspan's comment of December 5, 1996: "Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?"

He also talked about the doctrine of secular stagnation. As he has written elsewhere: "This theme actually goes back a long way. I once stumbled across Robert Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, a very early novel that's actually inspired by the then-popular doctrine of secular stagnation, which argued that rising savings and declining investment opportunities would lead to persistent problems in getting people to spend enough. Oh, by the way--it's a terrible novel.... Charles Stross's 'Merchant Princes' novels, on the other hand, are economic science fiction worth reading."

The situation is that economic journals are now tombstones serving only as official records because they take so long to publish submissions (two years). By the time a work is actually published, hundreds of papers in response have come out.

Someone in the audience asked whether there were derivative papers on Krugman's paper on interstellar trade. Krugman said that his paper was finally getting published--he wrote it as a non-tenured professor in 1978. So there were no derivative works yet. He described it as a serious paper on a silly subject, as opposed to most papers on economics, which are the opposite.

Talking about the poor participation numbers in 401(K) plans. Krugman said that rationally, whether a plan is opt-in or opt-out should not make a difference--but it does.

There was a surge in globalization in the 1970s due to the development of shipping containers. It resulted in a loss of 800,000 longshoreman jobs. Now we have shifted from shipping only final goods to verticalization, where materials and parts are shipped to somewhere where assembling them is cheap. Still, lots of areas are not included, but we are now starting to trade services as well as goods. However, we cannot outsource everything--two examples Krugman gave were haircuts and deliveries.

We are a long way from when incomes equalize from globalization.

One unexpected outcome is that "surprisingly similar stuff is traded between surprisingly similar places."

Voicing a more general maxim, Krugman said, "You don't want the to be perfect the enemy of the good."

Regarding health-care, Krugman said that he personally prefers a single-payer system, but we cannot get that this year. What the current proposal contains is no exclusions, a subsidy for the poor, and some competition. What he really wants to see implemented is the principle of universal access. Massachusetts has a sort of plan which has improved the situation, and the pressure is to gix it, not to abandon it.

However, Krugman noted, "You can never be cynical enough."

Krugman also said, "The real economy is more virtual than you think." And banks, even when run by orcs and trolls should be subject to regulation as banks.

Description: "If you've just discovered the SF field, or you are a long time reader who knows you've missed a lot out: what are the books you should read to get an idea of its range? Especially if they're older works, you may not stumble across them easily... but they can be just as good as something published last week."

Attendance: 75

Hertz introduced Silverberg by saying to him, "You know more about science fiction than any living writer, " leading to Silverberg responding, "I've forgotten more about science fiction than any living writer."

Whitley said that an academic course gives one a grounding in the classics (something like Harold Bloom's "Western canon"). There seems to be a lack of that in fandom.

Hertz thought we should at least define what we meant by "classic" and suggested that it was an artwork that survives its time. One corollary of this is that we cannot have classics that are too recent--or at least, we cannot know they are classics.

Someone in the audience suggested that Asimov's and Heinlein's works are classics, but that "Harry Potter" has changed everything.

Hertz said that classics also have to be influential.

Silverberg said that his generation could read all the science fiction ever published--and did, to avoid rewriting something already done. They would write responses, though--Silverberg's Up the Line spoke to Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" without rewriting it. But you have to be familiar with the Heinlein to understand that. Part of what makes books dated is "political correctness," according to Silverberg. (Maybe, but I think what he thinks of as political correctness may be an acknowledgement that things are different. For example, when one sees women only as housewives in 1950s science fiction, thinking that dated is not political correctness, it is recognizing that the societal model has changed.)

Silverberg said that the authors that influenced him were Thomas Browne, Henry James, William Butler Yeats, and Ernest Hemingway.

Klages said that she hears "Tolkien is derivative" from students who read all those who copied him before ever reading Tolkien himself. Hertz added, "And Shakespeare is full of quotations." Hertz noted in passing that we were using the literary present tense, as in "Tolkien is doing thus and so."

Regarding knowing what the classics are, it is true that most older works still in print are in some sense classics, but as Klages asked, "How many nine-year-olds are going to read the fine print on the copyright page?" Hertz responded, "Didn't you?"

Silverberg made references to "ignorant armies" and the general ahistoricity of our society. He said that he is adding introductions to his books explaining their context. Talking of becoming older, he said that Robert Sheckley once told him, "I don't like getting old any more than you will."

Hertz said that one thing we need to do is to disabuse ourselves of the belief that science fiction predicts the future.

Classic said that another definition of "classic" is something that can be read with the same enjoyment years later. (This is a little different from Hertz's definition. Hertz assumes different readers over time; Klages assumes the same reader.)

Silverberg thought it was wrong to try to say something is a classic, because often we say that because it just reinforces one's beliefs.

Someone suggested that NESFA Press is a good source of classics.

Hertz said that to find classics, you just need to look around.. This may be true, but it is directed at the wrong audience, because everyone here is already interested in the classics--the question is how to get other people interested in them.

Silverberg said that another aspect of a classic is that it is a book that can survive all the obstacles that our society throws in front of it.

Klages suggested that people go into a used bookstore and find copies of the "Year's Best" volumes (presumably the older one, not the recent ones). Of course, this assumes the person has a used book store near them, and that it has these books, not just current science fiction and a wall of romance novels.

Silverberg recommended that people start with H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and the various volumes of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" (as well as other anthologies of the era). Hertz said that anthologies edited by Anthony Boucher, Groff Conklin, Gardner Dozois, Judith Merril, and Silverberg were good choices.

Silverberg than added Philip K. Dick and Jack Vance, William Gibson's Neuromancer and Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. Klages added Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

Klages thought for first-timers good choices were Asimov's I, Robot, Wilmar H. Shiras's Children of the Atom, Zenna Henderson's "People" stories, Olaf Stapledon's Odd John, and the "Science Fiction Hall of Fame" or Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas's Adventures in Time and Space.

Description: "Despite abundant evidence people still refuse to believe that humans have an impact on the climate. Why is this? How might these attitudes be changed? And what does this say about our attitudes to science more generally?"

Attendance: 60

Lynch noted that there are many intelligent skeptics, e.g., Michael Crichton. Tuell noted that measurements cover a short period of time, and the amount of error is substantial. For example, instruments may get moved or recalibrated.

Trenholm said that many people find a lot of things convincing. There is always a healthy skepticism of complex things. Bacigalupi said there were pressures on the media to shift the tone. Fratz thought that there was polarization because it was politicized.

Lynch said one question to ask skeptics is, "What would it take to convince you?" McMillan said that models would have to work out.

[After this it pretty much turned into a discussion of actual climate change, rather than of the pathology of attitudes towards it, and I left early. It would have been interesting, for example to have the panelists discuss what seem to be the three branches of climate change denial. No, not Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, but 1) global climate change is not happening, 2) global climate change is happening, but humans are not the primary (or a major) cause, and 3) humans are the major cause of global climate change, but there is nothing we can do about it.]

Description: "Evelyn Leeper and Steven H Silver explain and present."

The Sidewise Award for Long Form was won by 1942 by Robert Conroy.

The Sidewise Award for Short Form was won by "The Fixation" by Al Reynolds (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Three (edited by George Mann).

Description: "What can we learn from shows like Firefly and Life on Mars? What makes good television, and why do good shows fail to find an audience?"

Attendance: 100

First, my take on all this is as follows: There used to be only one or two science fiction shows on television. Now there are dozens, not to mention the variety of other entertainment choices. In addition, many people decide to wait for the full season of a show on DVD rather than trying to figure out when it will be on, how to tape it, etc. Viewers do not want to be "locked in" to one show as much, and stations fool around with changing time slots, lengths, etc. (All it took was one instance of them deciding to have a seventy-minute episode of CSI which started ten-minutes early to sour me on the television series experience.)

Oakes said that the problem is that a television show needs to make a certain rating in a certain time period. But many ultimately successful shows start off with dismal ratings, e.g., The X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Nussbaum said that the people making shows change and the new ones do not care about the creative aspects of the show.

One problem, Oakes said, was that Fox moves things around to accommodate local sports. Someone in the audience mentioned that Firefly was shown out of order.

Some shows have episodes are really chapters of a single story and you really cannot miss any.

Nussbaum said that another factor is that there is no niche market in television. But she does not want to want just any science fiction show, she wants a show set in space. (My observation on this is that people have gotten spoiler and want very specific things. Fifty years ago we watched The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and were happy to have them. A little while later it was My Favorite Martian.)

Whiteside said that ratings are done differently now, measuring not just live viewers, but also viewers who watch within a day, and viewers who watch within a week.

Oakes felt that the basic problem was that the networks' patience is low, and their expectation is high.

Nussbaum said that the new model for Fox seems to be a couple of seasons on television, then to move to direct-to-DVD.

Mealy said that a common attitude now is "I'll wait for the DVD" will kill the show. Nussbaum said that might be true, but people will wait to see if it's worth their time and effort.

A couple of one-season wonders mentioned were Quark and Salvage-1. Nussbaum suggested that for some shows one season might be one too many. (Ball Four--not science fiction--comes to mind.)

Oakes said that she wished the SyFy Channel would run some of these one-season wonders: QED, Brisco County, Jr., Jules Verne, and Cliffhangers.

The panelists did not seem to address the fact that science fiction shows are expensive, and reality shows are cheap. Or that science fiction shows need not have the open-ended structure they have here; the BBC shows have a planned end.

It used to be that a season of shows was 39 new shows followed by 13 re-runs. Now you get something like 5 new shows, 2 reruns, 3 new, 1 pre-emption, 2 reruns, etc. Frequently the new shows are saved for "Sweeps Week". This does mean that shows can self-correct because they are still filming.

Description: "Mad, bad, dangerous to know. How much of a stereotype is it?"

Attendance: 50

James is a Professor of Medieval History at University College Dublin and really made this panel. He said that he finds he has to include the Vikings, the Crusades or the Hundred Years' War in his courses in order to attract students. He has also written a book titled Europe's Barbarians covering the period from A.D. 200 to A.D. 600.

James said that people's images of Vikings are full of stereotypes, such as the horned helmet. (One just has to look at the Classic Frazetta painting, where the horns are so long they obstruct the movement of the hero's arms.) "Viking" really means "to go raiding", and it was a part-time activity in the summer as opposed to an ethnic category. James said that our sources for information on the Vikings were all written by their victims, who did not make these distinctions. But now "Viking" is used as a shorthand for Scandinavian of the era.

Someone asked, "What about the sagas? Didn't the Vikings/Scandinavians write those?" James said that 800 to 1066 was the Viking era, and 1200 was the earliest saga in Iceland. (1200 to 1400 was the era of the sagas.) Someone in the audience asked specifically about "Egil's Saga". James said that Egil was a total psychopath who committed his first murder at age 6 (of someone who beat him at hockey). Egil died around 970, but the sage was not written until 1200.

McNaughton said that the sagas may have been written down, but they sound as though they were originally oral. An audience member described them as having "more than homeopathic amounts of history." McNaughton said that the story of L'Anse aux Meadows was discovered through information from local resident George Decker. We still do not have much information about the Viking religion.

James said that all the accounts of Vikings were written by Christians (and one Muslim, Ibn Fatlan). The Vikings got as far as Byzantium (Constantinople). (Constantine VII wrote a book on how to receive barbarian delegates, and some are clearly Vikings.) The Varangian Guard had a lot of Scandinavians. There were Vikings in Kiev in the 9th century, and with the Mongols in the 12th century. Runes have been found in the port of Piraeus (Athens). But hardly any Viking runes do survive.

McNaughton said that there was some Viking graffiti in a Neolithic tomb where they had sheltered for a while. They seem to have been very superstitious, and thought the Skraelings (Native Americans) might be supernatural. They projected on dragons their own worst traits. (In her book Dragonseer, dragons are the remnants of pterosaurs.)

James said that although the Normans were originally the "North-men", or Vikings, by the type of the Conquest, they were no longer Vikings--they were French.

McNaughton said that all the place names in the Orkneys have Scandinavian roots, so everyone who was there before (the Picts) were either killed or driven out, but usually the Vikings blended in and adopted local ways.

James said that "Njal" is really an Irish name, and that Irish women were brought to Iceland. Someone in the audience said that DNA studies show a large Irish female input.

James thought that the sagas read a bit too well. a bit too much like a modern fantasy novel. McNaughton mentioned one, Eric's Dottir by Joan Clark. James said that in the sagas the women are portrayed as nasty, malicious, scheming people.

Regarding further reading, James said not to read R. I. Page's Chronicles of the Vikings. He recommended either The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, or The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings by John Haywood. Someone recommended Richard Hall's The World of the Vikings.

James said that some important to remember is that the Vikings really united Europe. McNaughton thought there was an irony in the Normans finally driving out the Vikings in the "Harrying of the North."

In fiction, James mentioned The Long Ships by Frans Gunnar Bengstsson and The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison.

Description: "Edward James, holder of the Chair in Medieval History at University College Dublin, explains the myths, preconceptions, and the political realities of the barbarians in the Roman world."

Attendance: 75

Word must have spread about how good James was the previous night, because the room was packed!

[Since this was a one-person panel, I am not going to keep saying "James said" or "James continued".]

Barbarians are non-Roman peoples. James said he would cover the popular image, who the barbarians were, the archaeological evidence, and their origins.

The popular image of barbarians is either mindless superstitious thug (Italy and France) or bold, vigorous, and young (Germany). Some of these attitudes are affected by 20th century naturalism. One popular image is that of Robert E. Howard's Conan. And while the popular term is "the Dark Ages," no historian calls it that.

A map usually shows the Roman Empire as empty and united, beset by many outside forces. The truth is that in 376, the Goths broke through, and by 476 there were really lots of smaller parts of the Western Roman Empire, not a united whole.

Who were the "barbari"? "Barbari" was a technical legal term. The Theodosian Code prohibited intermarriage between Romans and "barbari", but you still had instances such as Stilicho, who was the son of a Vandal soldier and a Roman woman, yet rose to a high position. Apparently the division was not as clear-cut as it first appears.

What historians call "Frankish cemeteries" are just those that do not look Roman. Why are they not Roman? Because there are grave goods and (supposedly) Romans did not bury grave goods. This is, however, circular reasoning. And it turns out that the Franks started burying grave goods at the same time they became Christian.

James said that some of these items were called, for example, "Thuringian brooches" and asked if brooches really have an ethnicity? (Well, one can certainly look at some jewelry and say that it is Spanish, or Southwestern, or Japanese.) All of this, by the way, ties into the dating of L'Anse aux Meadows.)

Row-grave cemeteries was also supposedly barbarian, but not this is being questioned. And "Anglo-Saxon cemeteries" may not be, either. Burial with horses is definitely barbarian (certainly not Roman/Christian). (Of course, nothing in the Bible says, "Thou shalt not bury the dead with a horse," so even Christian barbarians might have buried horses.)

The most famous barbarian grave is Sutton Hoo, which was discovered in 1938. However, the findings were not published until 1975.

"Anastasis Childerici I Francorum regis" was published in 1655. The Childeric were both barbarian and Roman in some sense. Napoleon patterned his cloak after a Childeric "cloak" with gold bees, but it turns out now that the cloak was probably a horse harness. The horse burials around the grave indicate that it was probably pagan.

Cremation was a pagan (Germanic) custom even though there was no Christian theological reason against it.

Before 1940, skull measurements were very important in research on "barbarians". Skulls were divided into dolichocephalic (narrow) and brachycephalic (broad). This was supposedly of help in deciding, for example, if the French were descendents of the Gauls or the Franks, and the debate on whether Vercingoritex or Clovis was the ancestor of the French. Demonstrations against celebrations of the 1500th anniversary of Clovis's baptism indicate that feelings still run strong. Or maybe it is that it does not take much to get the French to demonstrate.

Where were the barbarians from? Traditionally, it is considered that the Goths originated in Sweden and migrated everywhere else. Getica was a history of the Goths written by Jordanes in 550. Walter Goffart has written two books, The Narrators of Barbarian History and Barbarian Tides. Barbarian history was invented by the Romans. (Herwig Wolfram disputes this.)

There were various reasons for the origin of new groups. The consolidation of armies formed the Visigoths. The emergence of new political units formed the Burgundians. And the settlement of new territories formed the Cantwara. Individuals had layers of identity ("I am a Frankish citizen, a Roman soldier under arms"). We know that Northumbria was a new term in the time of Bede, because he defines it every time he uses it.

In response to an audience question, James said it was unclear how Roman citizenship was acquired (or proved).

James was unfamiliar with R. A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome, but said that the great science fiction novel of this period was Lest Darkness Fall.

James said people think that what people wear is an expression of ethnic identity, but this probably came from the 19th century rebirth of ethnic dress. (But there must have been something ethnic to be reborn, right?)

Cemeteries in the Baltics have very mixed goods, clearly from trade. James recommended Lucian Mersee's The German Invasion. (I cannot find any reference to this anywhere, so the title or author may be wrong.)

Attendance: 50

This was the first of two half-hour academic presentations listed as a single item but actually completely distinct.

Many science fiction films have nostalgia for the past. And many rely on a moral compass. So to some extent science fiction film has replaced the Western as the standard for cultural critique.

There are many common themes between Westerns and science fiction: the effects of new technology on society (in the Western, most often the technology if the railroad), man taming nature and the environment, and a romanticized vision of the past (e.g., Unforgiven, Bladerunner).

Further evidence can be found in various crossover films and series such as Firefly and Westworld.

One difference is the timelines. In the Western everything occurs earlier than the viewer's own timeline. (Well, that depends on whether you consider movies such as Thelma and Louise as Westerns.) In science fiction, the "past" can be the viewer's present, so some actions are not "fixed." That is, you know where a Western is going in some sense--to our present. But you do not know where the "past" (our present) of a science fiction film will lead.

As for relevance, the Western becomes less relevant and loses context while the science fiction film retains it. So the science fiction is more resilient and more flexible.

Someone in the audience said that the superhero was replacing both science fiction and the Western. Klein said that the superhero film is looking for a deus ex machina, not real answers.

Attendance: 50

This was a very superficial summary of time travel in film, done as a PowerPoint presentation. Elder covered the films she knew but was not familiar with others than were mentioned.

Means of time travel include:

• machines (The Time Machine, Back to the Future)
• magic (Frequency, The Lake House
• pseudo-science (Kate & Leopold, Deja Vu, Primer
• futuristic tech (Terminator, The Time Shifters, Happy Accidents, Minority Report)

[Yes, I know Minority Report does not have time travel. This was the first of several mistakes.)

Regarding causality, "time travel to the future creates no paradoxes." (What about the conservation of mass?) Time travel to the past raises the issue of the Grandfather Paradox, for which she cites René Barjavel's "Le Voyageur Imprudent" (1943) as the earliest.

There are two types of solutions to the Grandfather and similar paradoxes. You can postulate alternate timelines, which allows these actions that have results that change the present (e.g., Back to the Future, or you can postulate that the universe will block any attempt to change things (e.g., Kate & Leopold. In the latter sometimes the actions explain the past (e.g., Robert A. Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps"). (A blocked universe would seem to imply determinism.)

Elder referred to "bilking paradoxes," but said that you usually can do it. It could result in the destruction of the universe (John Varley's "Cosmic Disgust Theory": "If you're going to be like that, I'll just take my toys and go home. Sincerely, God.").

A timeline implies "personal temporal dissociation." But what happens to the person from line 2 when the traveler gets dropped into it? Timeshifters and Frequency are examples of parallel universes.

Star Trek uses physics and results in an alternate world.

Description: "The rapture is beginning to feel a bit like the Second Coming. Any moment now! Do we live for it? Do we live in hope? Are we learning to think of it as a future we desire only in theory?"

Attendance: [unknown; I forgot to count]

Someone asked, "Who's going to take out the rubbish bins after the Singularity?"

Wilson described himself as "a Singularity agnostic." Walton thought that the Singularity was the result of extrapolating too far, and as a result was damaging science fiction. She quoted Charles Stross as having said that "the Singularity is the turd in the punch bowl."

Carson said that if we cannot understand the post-Singularity, then we cannot write about anything after the Singularity.

Wilson said that the Singularity is like telepathy and dianetics: it was adapted with almost religious fervor. He said that he cannot advocate for it, because it puts us in a passive position.

Leibowitz said she was seeing less science fiction about the Singularity than she had a while ago. Carson said the choice seemed to be transhuman science fiction or urban fantasy, but that is too restrictive a choice. He felt that it was not passive, but that it was based on feature creep in cellphones, which is marketing rather than engineering.

Walton noted that scientist rebellions were common in science fiction, but not in real life.

Carson said that people see the Singularity as saving them from society. Davis said that travel speeds are dropping now, rather than rising, indicating that anything based on constant improvement in everything is becoming less likely. Someone quoted Damon Knight's observation on extrapolation: "If commemorative postage stamps expand at this rate, they will cover entire continents." (And of course, there are Mark Twain's extrapolations about the length of the Mississippi River.)

Walton thought that we were starting to emphasize the wrong things. Steel blades are much better in a razor than the current alloys, but all anyone cares about are the number of blades. She recommended The Shock of the Old by Dave Edgerton. She say that Ikea had a revolutionary idea that was really reactionary: wooden furniture you finish yourself. She claims with this idea they made more than Microsoft. And the bicycle rickshaw was invented in 1926, well after automobiles came along.

Carson said that the idea that technology would do something we do not understand is very unlikely. The automobile is not anything drastically new, just a faster chariot.

Davis said that technology has social effects we do not understand. A quantitative change over time becomes qualitative. We are headed towards ubiquitous computing, and saw that as the Singularity. Walton said that was "a small-s singularity"; it is not that humanity becomes as far from us as we are from goldfish.

Leibowitz said that there is a hard limit to speed, but none to intelligence, although someone in the audience sad that there were thermodynamic limits.

Walton said it was probably worth noting for the record that the Singularity was defined in Marooned in Real Time by Vernor Vinge. At some point, Vinge explained the gap by saying that if Socrates found himself at a Worldcon, he could understand it (modulo the language difference), but a goldfish could not.

Someone in the audience suggested using the Singularity to look at earlier times. Carson said that the invention of language was a singularity. Walton thought that random earlier-era people might have more problems than Socrates.

Wilson asked, "How would the Singularity look like from Darfur?" The City and the Stars, Childhood's End, and a Poul Anderson story about a mouse on the battlefield were cited as pre-Vinge stories with aspects of the Singularity. There was also the story "Bounded in a Nutshell" by Charles Sheffield, in which everyone is linked and the question is, would people willingly detach? (I would add Brain Wave by Poul Anderson.

Wilson talked about the plasticity of the human mind, and said that there is evidence that London taxi drivers' brains are physically changed by the Knowledge.

Carson suggested, "Nobody wants to buy anything that hooks directly into their brain and has a MicroSoft logo. It brings a whole new meaning to the 'blue screen of death.'"

Walton said that if something wants something, it has agency, hence consciousness. (This begs the question, because it does not define "want" and "want" carries a connotation of consciousness. Does a light bulb "want" electricity?) She also said that trying to convince someone that consciousness does not exist seems futile and/or meaningless.

Walton said that the first people who have hard-wired connections will have problems upgrading, and be told things like "the new version doesn't work with your dopamine." It is the same problem people have with pacemakers.

Someone in the audience suggested that the early adopters would be people like quadriplegics, who have the most to gain from the technology. Other people mentioned The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter and Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold. Someone thought another use would be surveillance through implants.

In response to the question "what is the next step to the Singularity?", Carson said that would be a brain-computer interface. A nano-assembler is nowhere in sight, and superconductors are not getting there. In fact, nano-assemblers make no sense thermodynamically--you would have to eat a lot more. But they might have a use as a diet aid.

Wilson talked about "the expected unexpected" and said, "Some of these questions are intrinsically unanswerable until we answer them."

Harking back to an earlier comment, Walton said all science fiction is a set of footnotes to Poul Anderson.

Davis said that as new technology comes along, the support structure for the old technology goes away.

Description: "Best Fan Writer Hugo 2009 nominees recommend the fan writers that you should read and why you should read them. An excellent introduction to the current fan writing scene."

Attendance: 6

The panelists did not outnumber the audience, but as you can see, it was close. It was implied that the panelists were this year's Hugo nominees, but that was not quite accurate. The nominees were Chris Garcia, John Hertz, Dave Langford, Cheryl Morgan, and Steven H Silver, so Langford was missing, and Bailes and I were extra.

Hertz began by saying that fan writers were in the tradition of essayists and journalists, and spoke of Samuel Johnson's fan writing. Someone asked if podcasting was a form of fan writing. Morgan said yes, Hertz said no.

Silver said that fan writing was writing done for the love of writing., but it also needs a connection to fandom. However, Walt Willis wrote non-science-fiction stuff. Morgan found this ironic; she had been told by someone that Emerald City should be ineligible because it was about science fiction.

Morgan recommended Matthew Cheney, Karen Burnham, and Larry Nolan. Silver said he recommends anyone whom he publishes in Argentus, but named Michael Thomas, Lynn Thomas, Fred Lerner, and Kat Templeton. Bailes listed Paul Kincaid, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Andy Hooper, and Avedon Carol. Gatcia got a bot carried away and named James Bacon, Lloyd Penney, Lianne Hildebrandt, Earl Kamp, Liz Batty, Taral Wayne, and Niall Harrison. Hertz named Milt Stevens, Lenny Bailes, Bruce Gillespie, Mike Glyer, and Yvonne Risseau. Morgan said that in Finland there was Jukka Halme, and there is also Terri Frost's paleocinema podcast.

Description: "Panelists discuss military history around the world and how to get it right in your work, whether you're writing fantasy, science fiction or alternate history."

Attendance: 30

Hewitt gave a long biography, while Durham said, "I just make up stories." Modesitt was former military and writes alternate history.

Modesitt asked, "What is the most important thing to keep in kind when dealing with [history]?" Hewitt said, "Don't project our values onto people in the past." Durham said to tell the story, and use details and research only when needed. Modesitt agreed, "The story has to come first; work in the details as best you can." He suggested using ellipses when a character is relating background to another character.

Modesitt said that if a knight requires a thousand acres, that means 10,000 knights require way too much land. So having a battle with 10,000 knights is problematic.

Modesitt said that simple numbers are almost impossible to find, e.g., iron production in 1840.

Someone in the audience asked if the media are getting more sophisticated in economics. Modesitt said, "They couldn't have gotten any worse."

Hewitt said that Barbara Tuchman's

A Distant Mirror has statistics. Modesitt said that what is important is believability, even if it is inaccurate. Durham gave an example of something not believable: a city in middle of hundreds of miles of lava fields. Someone in the audience said that can work if it is magical [or surreal]. (There is a difference between realistic and unrealistic fantasy.)

Someone asked, "How would the presence of magic affect industrial production?" Modesitt said they will not have magic unless it is useful. (One example would be David Brin's The Practice Effect.)

Someone asked how you make strategies match magic et al. Durham responded, "I live in fear of that."

Someone in the audience claimed that there cannot be stealth in space, but Modesitt disagreed.

Of writing, Modesitt said he had no readers or proofreaders before his editor. On the other hand, Durham said his wife reads his work first. Modesitt replied that "too many cooks spoil the broth." Durham agreed, saying, "Yeah, and sometimes I think they want to."

Durham thought Naomi Novik's dragons were cool. Modesitt said that Novik seems to be working almost entirely in two dimensions (as if on the ocean), rather than in the three dimensions a flying dragon would use.

Modesitt thought that the-economical factor was often overlooked in weapons: "An RPV is not as effective as one guy with a rocket launcher." But Hewitt observed that taking out power plants in the Balkans did not end the war. (I assume she meant the latest one there.) Using low-tech can defeat an opponent's obsession with high-tech. Even so, she acknowledged, the Ewoks would have been slaughtered. Someone in the audience said that science fiction seems to have a technological plateau that lasts for many millennia.

Modesitt said that given a situation in his book, he picks a battle to match, rather than taking a specific battle and then attempting to replicate it.

Modesitt talked about the idea of a water empire and said it is possible only if there is something one can maintain tight control over. The Chinese empire went through cycles.

Durham said he approaches the large scale with a mosaic of small scenes. He also said that he would follow dubious sources if they served his end.

Hewitt noted that in war, the peacekeepers end up sympathizing with whomever they are stationed with.

Description: "A lot of near-future SF novels duck the problems we read about in the news--climate change or energy shortage--in favour of problems which look more solveable. We all know that SF shouldn't be pure prediction, but how much of a duty does it have to be based on realistic assumptions?"

Attendance: 30

[kyle cassiday may not capitalize his name, but I will here so you can scan for it more easily.]

Cassidy likes realism in science fiction. In Greg Bear's Blood Music, for example, scientists behave like scientists; the same is true of Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain. He described books like these as the "Hill St. Blues of science fiction." However, there also exist shows and books with little realism but a great following.

Polowin said one question is how explicitly wrong or right is something. For example, in Star Trek: Enterprise they talked about a nitrogen-sulfur atmosphere, but an atmosphere of nitrogen-sulfur compounds is unstable and would blow up. A reference to a layer of liquid helium has similar problems. He referred to this as "We are on the Starship "Make-Something-Up," and referred to a filk song with a refrain, "Bounce a particle beam off the deflector dish."

Polowin concluded that something apart from science makes "Star Trek" appealing--perhaps it is Samuel Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief."

Howard asked the panelists to be more specific; for example, what about climate change? He suggested that maybe for that, however, Kim Stanley Robinson has done it so well in his "Science in the Capital" series that no one else can follow it. Polowin said that the problem with being specific is that the book has to come out very promptly or it will be outdated even before it is published. (Think Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad.)

Someone in the audience said that Charles Stross has a novel based on computer fraud (Halting State) which Stross has said he has had to revise repeatedly to keep up with current knowledge.

Howard said that as far as climate change, Robinson lives that lifestyle, and finds the man versus nature plot engaging, but most readers want conflict between people instead. (I am not sure about this--a lot of classic science fiction is about the struggles on a new planet, etc.) Someone said that Scott Adams had written an article about why engineers like Star Trek. Cassidy pointed out that Star Trek was tackling social issues as well. Someone else mentioned that Star Trek even looked at fields such as linguistics. (I have mentioned previously how a language Jorge Luis Borges described in "Tlöon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was very similar to that in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Darmok".)

Some else said that it was more important for the behavior of people to be realistic than for the science to be so. Polowin said that realism was "the nominal subject of this panel" and that one could claim that since sex is so important in general, all novels need lots of explicit sex. But, he said, a novel may be dealing with other things. (That is true, but this ignores the difference between just writing with a different focus and setting a story in Miami in 2150. Another example of a "failure of realism" would be Snowcrash, which talks about globalization and income leveling, but does not follow through with any of the consequences of these.)

Cassidy said that stories about nuclear war which seemed realistic at the time now seem dated. Polowin said that Lois McMaster Bujold's Brothers in Arms, set around the "London Dikes", implies at least some climate change.

Someone said it was hard to envision a market-based solution to the current fiscal crisis, and science fiction authors tend toward libertarianism in any case.

Cassidy said that writing in a far future distant world avoids datedness and makes things too easy with very advanced technology. Some suggested, and Cassidy elaborated on, the idea that writing prequels can lead to a technological disconnect: authors tend to create their technology based on some sort of current, real-world parallel or level, and this is constantly improving. The result is, for example, that the light savers in the prequels of the original Star Wars are more advanced than those in Star Wars or its sequels.

Someone compared the quest for realism to Jules Verne's attitude as opposed to that of H. G. Wells. Someone else said that realism is not always desirable; for example, real-world archaeology would be boring and filled with lots of drudgery.

Cassidy pointed out that sometimes what one reader perceives as a lack of realism is merely a set of differing beliefs (e.g., the "Left Behind" series).

Someone asked, "Is science fiction trying to be more predictive of three thousand years from now than reactive to now?" Maybe, but as Polowin noted, "It does sell books,"

[What does it mean for "SF" to have a "duty" to be based on realistic assumptions? Isn't this anthropomorphizing SF to an enormous extent, as if it had volition and wrote itself?]

Description: "This Canadian filmmaker is one of the most visionary SF storytellers of the big screen: The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, eXistenZ. An examination one of the genre's giants."

Attendance: 15

Kimmel did what all panelist/authors should do: held up his book, said this was his latest book, then laid it down flat and never referred to it again.

Grace said that he thought Cronenberg was "not just 'one of the most visionary SF storytellers of the big screen,'" but the most. Kimmel demurred, suggesting that Stanley Kubrick should be considered his equal. (And I might add Ridley Scott.) Kimmel added, "I didn't mean to interrupt but my writing was on the line" (presumably for an article claiming Kubrick was the most visionary). Kimmel cited Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove, but Grace said that even Cronenberg's non-science fiction has a science fiction aesthetic.

(Personally, I'd give the nod to Cronenberg, because Kubrick works primarily from other people's writings, while Cronenberg wrote the original scripts for his ground-breaking films as well as directing. Grace later pointed out that eXistenZ (2001) is the first film since Videodrome (1983) that Cronenberg wrote himself.)

Grace then asked what made Cronenberg move away from science fiction (with such films as A History of Violence) and Eastern Promises (2007). (Of course, he was doing this as early as Dead Ringers (1988).) Kimmel thought this was because Cronenberg matured as a filmmaker, but I am not sure why there was even a question of why Cronenberg should take other offers or make other types of films. Kimmel pointed out that The Fly (1986) was Cronenberg's most popular (and successful?) science fiction film, but still was not as popular as A History of Violence.

Cavelos said that Cronenberg's early horror films showed a great revulsion for the physical, for the mutation of the body, rather than having tension or suspense in particular. Cronenberg makes us confront "our own mortality," she said. Kimmel said that The Fly was another example, with its "gooey effects." Kimmel later used the phrase "uneasy and queasy".

Kimmel stated, The Fly was one of the best films of the 80s" (not just one of the best science fiction films). According to Cronenberg, it was not a metaphor for AIDS (as some have suggested). Kimmel said that he suggested to Cronenberg that he do an adaptation of Greg Bear's Blood Music, and Cronenberg replied, "You're not the first person to suggest that to me."

Cavelos said that Dead Ringers was one of her favorites. (My sister-in-law knew the actual twins on which the story--at least the non-surreal part of the story--was based, though she was not one of their patients.) Cavelos also likes The Dead Zone (1983), which she felt marked Cronenberg's turn to deeper characters. However, Kimmel noted than even in Dead Ringers, Cronenberg's fascination with the flesh comes through--apparently the studio wanted them to be lawyers rather than gynecologists.

Kimmel also said of Dead Ringers, "It's not a science fiction film, but it feels like one." (This is similar to what people have said regarding Memento as well. However, I've probably seen more real gynecological instruments than Kimmel, and the ones in Dead Ringers look pretty science fictional to me, as if they were left over from one of those alien abduction stories.)

Grace said that because of Dead Ringers and other films, Cronenberg is often accused of being a misogynistic filmmaker, but Kimmel said it was important to remember that "the filmmaker is not the film." He said that an double example of this was when Martin Scorsese, who made Taxi Driver, met Cronenberg and told Cronenberg that he "looked so normal."

Regarding women in films, Cavelos said, "I want to see the ugly heroic woman"; she is tired of films like Catwoman et al. But she has no problems with Cronenberg's films.

[The only ugly heroic women in films Mark could think of were the latest Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska, 2011) and Erda in Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold. This says something about the frequency of such characters.)

Grace mentioned Cronenberg's avant garde beginnings in films such as Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970). (Actually, Transfer (1966) and From the Drain (1967) predate even these.) He followed these with Shivers (a.k.a. The Parasite Murders, a.k.a. They Came from Within) (1975), [Rabid (1976), Fast Company (1979)] and The Brood (1980). Grace later noted that the DVD release of Fast Company has Stereo and Crimes of the Future on the second disc.

Cavelos said that these days, horror is seen as silly, ridiculous, and for teenagers, but there are other types of horror that are for adults. Unfortunately, the artistic community often overlooks horror (much the same way they overlook science fiction).

Kimmel said that after seeing Videodrome, "I never looked at my TV the same afterwards." (Now here's a surreal double feature: The Twonky and Videodrome!) Cavelos claimed that just as Cronenberg had shelters for the homeless so that they could access televisions, we have PCs in libraries. Kimmel pointed out that this is similar to how the underlying sensibility of Network seems to be the reality of today.

Kimmel said that after Videodrome, Cronenberg wanted to establish himself in "mainstream horror," so he did The Dead Zone. Grace claimed that The Dead Zone was the best adaptation of a work by Stephen King. (Again, I would disagree, citing Stand by Me or The Shawshank Redemption.) Kimmel said that The Fly was then don as a response to errors in the original. Cronenberg then went on to do more adaptations: Naked Lunch (1991), M Butterfly (1993), and Crash (1996)).

Grace pointed out that eXistenZ is straight science fiction, and not an adaptation of anyone else's work. Kimmel suggested Videodrome and eXistenZ as an obvious double feature in "Philip K. Dick territory with a reality breakdown." Grace pointed out that Fast Company, like Videodrome, deals with the human-technology interface, even if it is not literalized.

Someone claimed that everyone watches Cronenberg films on drugs, leading me to respond, "I have never taken drugs before watching a Cronenberg film. A couple of aspirin afterwards, maybe." This got a few laughs. Cavelos thought that drugs in movies (as in Naked Lunch) added to the hallucinatory feel. She also thought that part of the appeal of a Cronenberg film was a feeling of a loss of control.

Mark Leeper pointed out that A History of Violence was based on The Fastest Gun Alive. An audience member claimed that there was a dream sequence deleted from A History of Violence in which [Cronenberg? the main character?] says, "I wish you would reach into your stomach and pull out a gun, but I've already done that."

Someone asked, "Who copies Cronenberg?" Kimmel answered, "I wish more people did try to copy him." Someone further claimed, "David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers fails, but it fails at something no one else attempts." Audience members suggested that David Lynch and the Coen Brothers (e.g. Fargo) have some of Cronenberg's sensibility.

Grace concluded by observing that Cronenberg's ambivalence, downbeat attitude, and passivity are what make him Canadian.

Description: "The nominees: who will win, who should win, who was overlooked? What does it say about the state of the art as of 2008?"

Attendance: 40

Leeper began by observing that it was not a great year, and saying there was nothing as notable as The Man from Earth.

Garcia said, "It was a year of peaks and very serious valleys." It was a good year for audiobooks (which most people seem to want to include in this category). He also said it was "a crime that Twilight wasn't on the ballot." (I think he was being sarcastic here.)

Regarding what was missing from the ballot, Leeper said he would have liked to see Let the Right One In on the ballot. This year's Dead Snow, a Norwegian zombie film that seemed to be copying it, was not as good, he added.

Garcia recommended The Substitute (a Danish film available through Netflix) and The Antenna (either Mexican or Spanish, and not really available in the United States, according to him). This led Leeper to mention Timecrimes (Spanish) and Green to add Tempus Fugit (Catalan).

Leeper said, "Clifford Simak would have loved Wall-E." The sequences on Earth were better than those on the ship, he added. Garcia said he was not a huge fan of Wall-E, but added, "I loved the Wall-E character." Green thought that oddly enough, Monsters vs. Aliens "looked more Pixar."

Garcia said of Hellboy II: The Golden Army that he liked the first one better, but he loved the visual style. Leeper said that Guillermo del Toro does two kinds of films: horror films and comic book films. He is the best in the world for horror films, where he does not really use the demonic aspects that appear in the comic book films. Green thought that Hellboy was "gruff, moany, and likes to hit things," and the film did not have the depth that del Toro's Pan's Labyringh had.

Leeper rated The Dark Knight a step or two below The Prestige, which he considers Christopher Nolan's best. He said that most comic book films have a safety net, but The Dark Knight does not. Instead, it covers serious philosophical issues.

Garcia said that The Dark Knight was not a "comic book movie, but an intense thriller that eschewed the comic book theme," and that Heath Ledger's Joker was a role that will be remembered. He added that his expectations for this were "in a completely different head space."

Green felt that the term used for both Hellboy II and The Dark Knight should be "graphic novel" rather than "comic book".

Of Iron Man, Green had a bunch of phrases that sounded like they were taken from the ads: "fun fun fun fantastic", "fantastic performance", "wonderful comedy", and "excellent adventure." Leeper thought it an okay story, but nothing special, and compared it to the film Transatlantic Tunnel in its use of the wrong technology and old thinking. As he said, drones are the new technology, because "the best armor is a few thousand miles," not a super-powered suit." One notable difference in Iron Man, though, is that the main character is doing it without a secret identity. Green said that he loves his flying suit, and Leeper said that he likes the flying suit, just not the fighting suit. And Green agreed that the tendency to always have a great battle at the end was not good, but Marvel comics always had it, and this is yet another stitch in the knitting together of the Marvel films.

Leeper observed that in chase scenes, you expend a lot of bits to convey a single bit: did the pursuer catch the pursued or not?

Garcia said there had been an explosion in audiobooks, with Neal Stephenson's Anathem one of the best science fiction sellers (at 34 hours long!). But he feels that METAtropolis does not have a chance in this category.

Moving on to what the panelists thought should win, and what they thought would win, Leeper thought that The Dark Knight should win, and that either The Dark Knight or Wall-E would win. Garcia thought The Dark Knight should win, but that Iron Man would win because of a backlash against The Dark Knight as not really being science fiction. Green was exactly reversed, saying that Iron Man should win, but that The Dark Knight would. [Note: Wall-E won.]

As for what to keep an eye on from this year (2009), Leeper mentioned The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Knowing. Garcia named Moon, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, G.I. Joe, and Watchmen. Of the latter, Leeper observed that it had the "best treatment of someone getting hot oil poured in their face; it has never been done more tastefully." Green named Star Trek and Twilight. An audience member named Torchwood: Children of Earth. Dan Kimmel listed Coraline, District 9, and The Time Traveler's Wife.

Description: "How do we as a field decide that a work or an author is a "classic"? Do all the awards we give out help? What about Year's Best books/lists, reviews, and indeed panels at conventions? And what about authors whose reputations fluctuate over time?"

Attendance: 30

Benoit (a Quebeçoise) said she learned English from science fiction.

Resnick felt that two important characteristics for a work to be canonical were longevity and influence. [Mary Shelley's The Last Man has longevity, for example, but little obvious influence, while her Frankenstein has both. Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century, not published until a few years ago, is not canonical because it does not have longevity.]

Resnick mentioned E. E. "Doc" Smith's work as canonical. He also noted that Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles was canonical even though both James Blish and Damon Knight hated it.

R. A. Lafferty is problematic. His short stories are each a lush "one-shot" (somewhat like those of Jorge Luis Borges), and it is difficult to point to what influence they had, yet they seem canonical.

Resnick said that Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man influenced the entire New Wave.

When it comes to influence, Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" seems to have inspired enough responses Deborah Wessell's "The Cool Equations", Don Sakers's "The Cold Solution", and so on) that one could make an entire anthology of them. (Many address the flaws in the original, such as the unrealistic precision of the fuel supply. It always reminds me of the line from the film The High and the Mighty--SPOILER--about how there was not enough gasoline left in the tank to clean a tie.)

A distinction was made, but not defined, between canonical and classic.

Description: "How does a writer incorporate events like the past 12 months into their future society? How does a writer extrapolate economic theory into far future societies?"

Attendance: 225

The attendance would probably more due to the presence of Stross on the panel than to the visceral fascination with the topic. And indeed, Schroeder asked, "How exciting can a book about economics without a revolution be?" Stross said that reminded him of when Alfred Hitchcock was asked how long a screen kiss should be. "Thirty seconds, but first put a bomb under the seat." [I could not find a citation for this.]

In spite of this, Trenholm pointed out that economics is central to stories, which are often just "you have something, and i want it." Klein said this can help make economics exciting for students.

Trenholm noted that there is only one quantum physics but there are many economics. (I am not sure the former is absolutely true.)

Schroeder said that even "non-economic" subjects such as terraforming Mars raises questions of (for example) the economics of the environment. (Klein described himself as a libertarian who believes in a carbon tax.)

Someone in the audience said that there are distinctions between exchanges between people and intrinsic value. Trenholm said, "whenever economists don't want to deal with something, they say, 'It's an externality.'" Someone else said (quoting Ronald Reagan), "An economist is someone who sees something working in reality and asks if it can work in theory."

Stross pointed out that smart AIs could model human beings so well that they could out-trade/out-maneuver us; some people thought we were there already.

Trenholm asked what happens when goods are free, but Klein pointed out that we but bottled water even though water is effectively free to most people.

Schroeder said that market economics is a totalitarian system, and Stross suggested that a quantum central planning system may be more efficient than a market system. Trenholm said that market economics is based on the theory that individual choice is important. But in China, individual choice is valuable only if the state benefits from it. Rational individual choice, he said, was invented by British empiricists.

In this regard, someone in the audience connected Kollin's novel about economics titled The Unincorporated Man with John Locke's "Social Contract". Another person said that what China has done is to re-invent nineteenth century capitalism. Yet another averred that most centralized economies are economic drains, although Freakonomics suggested that social rewards need to be considered. Trenholm said that we have the latter now, and Schroeder said that we want status as well as money. Trenholm felt that in North America we have basically attached status to money and vice versa, while in Europe this was not as true. Klein noted, however, that the most popular kid is not necessarily the richest. Stross said that in Japan you are defined by your place in society and havinga lace is what is important.

Stross noted that families are generally communistic.

Trenholm recommended "The Logic of Everyday Life". (I cannot find anything with that title. (My note here says, "In general, people want something of limited availability.") Schroeder said (in regard to "Monday Night Football"), "The jocks are getting all the girls--again!"

Trenholm mentioned "freegans" as leading a chosen economic lifestyle (i.e., eating only what food they can get for free, either by foraging, gleaning, or dumpster diving).

Schroeder mentioned Jared Diamond's writings on economic collapse (in Collapse).

Stross said that Ian Banks said of his "Culture", "Money is a symptom of poverty." Schroeder said that in science fiction, you are given permission to be wrong, and that science fiction is the business of creating conceptual outliers. Someone mentioned (as an example?) Robert Anton Wilson's coinage that had a half-life, which led Schrooder to cite Larry Niven's coinage made of plutonium. (This sounds a bit like the goods in David Brin's The Practice Effect.

(All of these remind me of the "Planet Money" podcast explaining why gold (and to a lesser extent, silver) has been so popular for coins.)

Trenholm said that we actually have other things that stand in for money. For example, a street person may have a lot of tattoos. It would be dangerous for them to carry money around, but the tattoos demonstrate that they are competent, capable, etc. (e.g., they must have been able to get enough money to pay for the elaborate tattoos they have). Someone said that economists call that "signaling".

Klein cited the aphorism, "You own nothing you cannot carry at a dead run." (The principle behind this is often cited as why Jews value education so highly.) Klein also mentioned the custom of potlatch, and added, "We have that in Western civilization too--we call it a wedding." Trenholm said that he though that potlatch is not really understood.

Stross reminded everyone that correlation does not imply causation. He also talked about the theory that philanthropy went down after the New Deal was implemented because it was perceived as less necessary. (Conflicting theories are that philanthropy continued, but was more focused on culture and education than on assisting the needy, or that philanthropy aiding the poor continued at almost the same level.)

Kollin closed by saying that the United States has "corporate socialism" (i.e., the corporations get all the government hand-outs).

Description: "If you've just discovered the fantasy field, what are the books you should read to get an idea of its range? Especially if they're older works, you may not stumble across them easily ... but they can be just as good as something published last week."

Attendance: 70

(For this, Canavan desperately needed a microphone. I also have to point out that a panel titled "Fantasy Classics 101" should produce a reading list suitable for a one-semester course, or at most two semesters. This one started adding massive series and authors' entire ouevres, resulting in a multi-year project for the reader.)

Thomson recommended the obvious starting list, the "Ballantine Adult Fantasy" series edited by Lin Carter. But she also named other works such as Thomas Bulfinch's Mythology, Andrew Lang's "Fairy Tale" books, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Canavan started with Lloyd Alexander's "Prydain" series, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea" trilogy, and David Eddings's "Belgariad", which she described as light and fresh. She also mentioned Robert E. Howard's "Solomon Kane" series and John Norman's "Gor" series (the earlier books).

Thomson added George R. R. Martin's "Song of Fire & Ice" as a recent classic, saying it represented a change in that it did not take a moral position.

Canavan named Louise Cooper's "Timemaster" series. (Have you noticed now much of this are series rather than stand-alone novels?)

Thomson suggested Mary Gentle's Grunts, but said it was not for the fainthearted. Regarding Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" collection, she suggested starting with the "Tiffany Aching" young adult sub-series of the Lancre Witches thread of the novels: The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith. (There are probably a zillion web sites devoted to Discworld, each recommending a different starting point.)

Canavan suggested Mercedes Lackey's "Last Herald Mage" series. Thomson countered with Lord Dunsany's short fiction, leading to someone in the audience asking, "How do you spell that last name?" Boy, do I feel old!

Both liked Gene Wolfe's wiring, but agreed that he was a tough read. Canavan said that he "seems too Boris Vallejo"--whatever that means. Thomson suggested Jack Vance, and Canavan named Tanith Lee's books. (We seem to be moving from series to entire ouevres.)

Thomson named George MacDonald's The Light Princess, C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" series, and Ursula K. LeGuin's (non-fiction) "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie".

Canavan later recommended all of Michael Moorcock's works. Thomson responded, "One or two too many of the 'Elric' books for my tastes." She also warned against Stephen Donaldson, but liked Avram Davidson and Fritz Leiber.

Canavan added Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series; Thomson named Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Darkover" books. Leo Duroshenko thought T. H. White's The Once and Future King should definitely be included, leading Thomson to add Bradley's The Mists of Avalon.

Thomson listed Emma Bull's Finder and Territory; Esther Friesner's "Chicks in Chain Mail" series; Cordwainer Smith's works; the "Nasreddin Hodja" stories; Catherynne M. Valente's "The Orphan's Tales" series; James Thurber's Fables for Our Time and 13 Clocks; William Goldman's The Princess Bride; the works of James Branch Cabell, Roald Dahl, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jane Yolen; and everything the original Arkham House published.

Duroshenko also named C. L. Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" series, Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword (which is in the "Ballantine Adult Fantasy" series previously mentioned), Thorne Smith's The Night Life of the Gods, and Mervyn Wall's The Unfortunate Fursey. I've read the last; it is okay, but hardly something I would put in "Fantasy Classics 101". Then again, a lot of this I would not call "Fantasy Classics 101". My suggestions were Homer's The Iliad and especially The Odyssey, the Norse sagas, and Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" series.

Pete Rubinstein suggested Manly Wade Wellman's "Silverjohn" stories and John Myers Myers's Silverlock. Mark Leeper added John Collier's short stories. Others suggested Anne McCaffrey's "Pern" novels (are they fantasy or science fiction?), Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, the writings co-authored by L. Sprague deCamp and Fletcher Pratt, and the writings of Andre Norton, Diana Wynne Jones, Robin McKinley, and Patricia McKillip.

Attendance: [a lot]

[I time-stamped a lot of things just to give some data point for people who try to figure out where there is too much time spent.]

[8:07 PM]

Regarding cell phones, Master of Ceremonies Julie Czerneda said to turn them off and added, "And if they're vibrating and you're having a good time, please keep it to yourself."

[8:17 PM]

Andy Porter received the Big Heart Award, now apparently named for Forrest J. Ackerman rather than E. Everett Evans. James Gunn was added to the First Fandom Hall of Fame, as was Walt Doherty (posthumously). There was a technical glitch on the international awards, they misspelled Philip José Farmer's name in the necrology (though I did not note whether it was that they left off the accent, though it was included on other names, or doubled the 'L' in his first name), and listed such peripheral (to science fiction) figures as Paul Newman, Maurice Jarre, and Walter Cronkite.

[8:26 PM]

They announced the new official Hugo logo (designed by Jeremy Katz) that publishers et al can use, and displayed this year's Hugo base.

[8:34 PM]

The actual awards began. At first there was no nominees list displayed, but that eventually got sorted out.

[8:41 PM]

The awards were given in reverse order, but for clarity's sake, I will go with the traditional listing:

• Best Novel: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (Recalling his acceptance speech in 2003, Gaiman said, "Rule 1: Don't swear.")
• Best Novella: "The Erdmann Nexus" by Nancy Kress
• Best Novelette: "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear
• Best Short Story: "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang
• Best Related Book: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 by John Scalzi ( Scalzi said, "Next year give it to someone else.")
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: WALL-E, story by Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter; screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon; directed by Andrew Stanton (Pixar/Walt Disney)
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: "Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" (The presenter included a long pause after reading the first word of the winner's title, since there were also two "Doctor Who" episodes nominated.)
• Best Professional Editor, Long Form: David G. Hartwell (Hartwell announced he was withdrawing for future consideration in this category.)
• Best Professional Editor, Short Form: Ellen Datlow
• Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
• Best Semiprozine: Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Stephen H. Segal
• Best Fanzine: Electric Velocipede, edited by John Klima, Cheryl Morgan, and Frank Wu
• Best Fan Writer: Cheryl Morgan (Morgan gave a tearful thank you to Kevin Standlee.)
• Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu
• Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, written by Kaja and Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, color by Cheyenne Wright (Phil Foglio said of this new category, "This is a significantly better [solution] than when The Dark Knight won 23 years ago for Best Non-Fiction.")
• John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (not a Hugo Award): David Anthony Durham

The ceremony ended at 9:45 PM.

Description: "As more and more items, from cars to computers to TVs, are filled with computerized, closed black boxes it becomes harder and harder for people to tinker with things or fix their own property when it goes wrong. Is this a boon for the service industries or a bane for the enthusiast? Where is this going to lead? And what are the challenges to this way of thinking? Can we reopen the black box?"

Attendance: 125

Bell started by saying, "The idea that you can't open something up and fix it is just wrong." Meeks said something about computers in schools for which the teachers do not have the passwords. Doctorow said, "If you can't open it, you don't own it." He talked about someone he knew who had a magnet implanted under his skin and said there was a market for prosthetic feet (among rich diabetics), but not prosthetic arms. He said, "I want to make you an arm so good you'll cut your own off to get it."

Davidson said that we used to build mechanical stuff to get an sense of how things work, but now "it comes in a box and there is no origin to things." Meeks said that SUGAR came from one-laptop-per-child as a GUI on LINUX, and then gave an incomprehensible (to me) explanation of what this meant.

Bell asked, "Why do I need to know how to fix a car?" Doctorow asked the audience, "Does anyone not know what jailbreaking, DRM, ... are?" (That was me waving my hand, at least for some of the terms.)

There was the expected discussion of repair versus replace.

Doctorow said that the impact of the 3D printer remained to be seen. Railroads, he said, put oat-bag manufacturers out of business (much less horse transport), and let robbers get away more easily. He thinks 3D printers will destroy patents and be used to make AK-47s, even though neither will be the primary effect.

Given that I was having difficulty following this panel, I left after maybe ten minutes and went to an alternate choice.

Description: "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Writers talk about whether writing about the future requires a solid knowledge of the past."

Attendance: 100

When I arrived, Willis was saying that her research showed, "Okay, these guys got really likkered up" for most of history. On a more serious note, she said, "Nothing compares with seeing the actual thing," such as Scott's journal.

Stirling said that in researching history, one finds entries such as, "Anne fined for encroaching on the King's Road. Excused because mad."

Turzillo said that people in the 17th century did not have coffee (in Europe, anyway), so they drank small beer in the morning. Stirling said that they also cut their wine with water, which at least made the water a little safer. One reason travel was so dangerous, he said, was because of the different water, even ten miles away. (We still have that to some extent, though considerably less.)

Turzillo said that in reading sources, you often find entries such as, "They all died." That's history, she said, and gave Toni Morrison as an example of a fiction author who writes books where everyone dies.

Stirling said one critical factor to remember was that infant mortality used to be 30% to 50% (for foundlings it was greater than 90%), which tended to lower the "life expectancy at birth" figure. People died at all ages, though, some living what we would consider reasonable life spans. Willis said that this high infant mortality was perceived differently by people then--it was not unusual.

Similarly, Willis said one reads memoirs of women during the Blitz who wrote, "We were young girls, fresh out of the country for the first time, and there were all these men...." It was not all gloom and doom even during the Blitz. Willis and Turzillo contrasts this with Morrison's writing, where there is no happiness, and the author makes everyone want to kill themselves.

Skeet said that you cannot take 21st century attitudes back in time. Stirling said that as another example of differing world views, Cotton Mather's diary sees everything as Providential. There is no such thing as coincidence, just depressing Calvinist theology.

Turzillo said that the Society for Creative Anachronism is not very historically accurate. Willis compared this to when she used to play at being Anne of Green Gables as a child: she did not care about things like plumbing, fleas, and the lack of fresh fruit. Stirling did not see this inaccuracy as a problem "as long as they enjoy themselves, are consenting, and don't frighten the horses," and Willis added, "And don't get all likkered up." (I suspect that re-enactors may be much more accurate, but of course the era is also much closer to our own.)

Willis said that a common problem was that of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman"--the people are all wrong for their era. John Jakes got it wrong in his historical series also, she said. But of course, if the people were accurate to their time, "there are no points of connection" to the modern reader.

Stirling thought that Mary Renault was pretty good in this regard.

Skeet said another historical problem is where something important changes, but everything else stays the same for fifty years, or a hundred years, or even more. (The classic example given is one in which the Roman Empire manages to survive unchanged to the present day in spite of massive technological change.)

Willis said that putting all your research in a novel is not good. (I believe Kim Stanley Robinson once claimed only 10% should go in, but I could be mis-remembering.) Stirling said that it is not what you do not know, but what you know that is not so that gets you into trouble, and gave the example of teenage marriage in the Middle Ages.

Turzillo said that historical novels usually have far too much of young girls hopping into bed too easily., though Stirling said that the actual facts depended on the era and the region.

Someone in the audience said, "Those who don't know history or condemned to pastiche it."

Someone else asked why North American writers are talking about Europe. Willis said that authors write about what they are interested in, which is not necessarily where they live. Skeet said that he was interested in Japan rather than Europe. (Authors also write about what they are taught in school, and let's face it, there is a much longer documented time span in Europe to serve as setting.)

Willis described what she called her "St. Paul's moment". When she finally saw St. Paul's and the area around it, she thought, "Shit, this is a disappointment." Then she realized that everything around St. Paul's had burned during the Blitz, so of course the area looked very modern compared to what she had been expecting. (Apparently large numbers of tourists go to Paris expecting to see that symbol of the French Revolution, the Bastille.)

Stirling also pointed out that at least until 1776, British history was our history.

Someone asked about how authors cope with spin (i.e., history is written by the victors). Stirling said the same as one copes with spin now, but acknowledged that it was harder. Skeet said one does the best one can. (Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time is a good example of trying to deal with spin.)

Willis said that when researching, "You don't have to read everything; there are no footnotes in novels." (Alas, this sounds a little hollow given the number of glaring errors Willis made in Blackout/All Clear regarding Underground lines and stations, British coinage, telephones, and so on.)

For time travel (or historical fiction in general, I suspect), Stirling said that there is an advantage to using a period about which little is known, and Skeet closed by saying, "Think small."

Description: "How well do we judge risks? How does this affect individuals and society? From vaccination to security, judgments of risk are now more important than ever. Should we just leave it to politicians and newspapers?"

Attendance: 80

Nordley said that the first thing to know in assessing risk was the difference between risks in series and risks in parallel. You also need to look at a large number of instances. (Isaac Asimov was at least aware of this in psychohistory.)

Someone suggested that in such fields as portfolio management the understanding of correlations can be incorrect.

Stephenson mentioned the two Chalk River Reactor accidents in the 1950s and said that since Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People nothing had changed. (A more recent fictional reference might be Jaws.) Nordley said that in this situation one must weigh the risk of the failure of the Chalk River Reactor against the risk if one does not have access to the medical isotopes it produces.

Porter said when assessing risk there are also political and financial realities to consider (for example, when advocating universal flu vaccination). Stephenson said there is also individual risk versus gross risk.

Nordley gave an example: if we had $100 million, should we spend it on asteroid avoidance or health care? The former risk has a much lower probability but a much higher impact if it occurs (pun intended), but the latter is a higher risk of events affecting far fewer people in smaller ways.

Someone suggested we focus more on extraordinary risk than ordinary risk. Stephenson thought it was that we focused on the personal, and that we looked at short-term benefits rather than long-term deaths. Also, politicians seem to want absolute certainty.

Someone asked who calculates the cost of major events; Stephenson said it was primarily insurance companies.

Porter recommended Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic. We perceive driving as safe, she said, but 80% of drivers in hospitals after an accident who were deemed to be at fault think they are better than average drivers.

Someone said that politicians do not have a sense of probabilities.

Macdonald said that some decisions we make are not obvious, e.g., living too far from an ambulance is a decision that if you have a heart attack, you die.

Macdonald gave as an example of risk analysis that during World War II, destroyers were built to last only six months, because the average life of a destroyer was three months. However, Nordley said that most military equipment is over-engineered and hence costly. Stephenson gave as an example the Mars rovers, which have a lot of redundancy. Nordley said it was very important that they last one year, which makes a longer life more likely.

Someone in the audience said this reminded him of the quote from Apollo 13: "I don't care what it was designed to do--what can it do?" Stephenson said that the designers had actually thought about using the lunar module as a life boat (though not without the service module). Someone said that the problem was that the public wanted no risk, and thinks risk is measured on a single scale.

Kushner said that lawyers and judges have no training in risk and no science or math background, but they do have advisors. Nordley claimed that the Tennessee Titans cheerleaders have a higher percentage of people with scientific training than Congress.

Stephenson pointed out that the scientific community works by peer-to-peer consensus, and that Lysenko set Soviet biology and agriculture back ten years.

Stephenson thought that global climate change was believed more in Europe than in the United States because the effects are more visible there: the French heat wave, birds arriving earlier, and so on. He is worried, though, that we are so risk-adverse that we are slowing progress.

Description: "Mundane SF aims to extrapolate from the science of today. But science doesn't work like that. What's happened to the paradigm shift?"

Attendance:

Ryman introduced himself as the author of the "Mundane Manifesto". He said he was not a scientist, but a writer, and was responding to writers at Clarion who were science-oriented, left-wing, and impatient. Ryman described the manifesto as being similar to Dogme 99 in filmmaking, but thought they would not get published.

The Mundane Manifesto disallowed faster-than-light travel, time travel, telepathy, and so on. Writers were not allowed to "cherry-pick" relativity. Some messages embodied in "traditional" science fiction were problematic (e.g., that there are beautiful worlds available out there cheaply), and some issues had been glossed over. Ryman and others hoped for more science fiction based on exciting real science (e.g., space stories meant that we missed the information technology revolution). In short, the paradigm shifts in traditional science fiction were not wrenching enough.

Olson said that the idea of paradigm came from Thomas Kuhn. Before Kuhn, science was seen as a continuous process, but Kuhn claimed that there are steps in which science incorporates the old but make major changes to it. He gave the examples of the transition from classical to Newtonian physics, and from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. Spencer noted that there was a lot of resistance to this theory in the scientific world. Olson said that Kuhn made have foreseen this when he said that the shift happens when the old generation dies off and is replaced by the next generation.

Ryman emphasized that Mundane Science Fiction is an aesthetic movement, not a scientific one. A paradigm shift is like the blue fairy in Pinocchio--it gives you what you want. Science fiction is about science, about people working over time for real solutions, not some deus ex machina. A deus ex machina undermines science and presumes a benign, anthropic, deistic universe.

Olson said that some scientist portrayals in science fiction that he liked included those in James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars and in Jack McDevitt and Michael Shaara's "Cool Neighbor", and in Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed. He referenced what Isaac Asimov said: that scientific discoveries were more likely to be prefaced by "That's odd..." than by "Eureka!" Burnham thought the scientists in Gregory Benford's Timescape were realistic, along with those in Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain.

Ryman said that Gregory Benford, Philip K. Dick, and J. G. Ballard formed the canon that guided Mundane Science Fiction.

Of science, Spencer said, "You come up with the gem after digging around for a year in the mud." And Ryman continued that then "authors summarize the struggle and dramatize the result."

Ryman felt that Mundane Science Fiction was there in part to answer the question, "What if we don't get to the stars?"

Olson said that Hal Clement would have liked the Mundane Science Fiction Movement, but even he allowed himself one change as an author. This led to a discussion of the relationship between limitations and creativity.

Ryman thought that bad science was used to get around new ways of thinking about social relationships, etc. (That is, it is easier to write "Star Trek" as "Wagon Train to the Stars" with all its impossible science than to think about how society itself may have change in hundreds of years.) "Why don't we have a whole genre of time dilation?" he asked, referring to a realistic portrayal of relativistic effects. (Olson said that Poul Anderson had a couple of novels [Tau Zero and The Boat of a Million Years] about time dilation.)

Spencer responded, "I cherish a great deal of affection for the idea that we will get faster-than-light travel."

Someone in the audience mentioned Orson Scott Card's comments on magic and how it made too much too easy. Spencer agreed, but (referencing Gregory Benford's favorite metaphor) said that while we must have a tennis net, it needn't be our real one.

Burnham asked what the effect of the Mundane Manifesto was, and Ryman replied that it "became much more difficult for most of us to write." He said, "I'm allowed one magic wand a story, but it's a new magic wand." Science fiction authors get new ideas, he added, but mainstream authors go into fantasy.

Olson thought that scientists and engineers might see science fiction as a sort of dreaming or free association. Spencer said there is inspiration if no direct influence. Olson noted that Nature has been running science fiction stories.

Returning to Star Trek, Ryman said that it copies the past onto the future, though he saw it as Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. Spencer said (of Star Trek and others), "There are vague good intentions [in hiring scientific advisors for films].

One audience member said there seemed to be almost nothing about medicine in science fiction. (I'm not sure all would agree. In fact, Judith Berman's complaint about science fiction seems to be that there is too much focused on medicine, especially in the context of old age and the infirimities thereof.)

Olson said that baroque science fiction gets its power from using all sorts of science fiction tropes (e.g., Charles Stross's Iron Sunrise). On the other hand, there is no science fiction about urban planning because readers do not see (or do not want to see) urban planning as a science. But Ellen Klages later cited Nicola Griffith's SLow River, about sewer planning.

Burnham recommended Gene Krantz's Failure Is Not an Option.

Olson said that in such works as "Vinland the Dream" and Icehenge, Kim Stanley Robinson treated history as a science.

Ellen Klages noted that most Analog science fiction is science-driven, not character-driven. Olson mentioned a work from Analog, Michael Flynn's "Quaestiones Super Caelo Et Mundo", but I would say this does not qualify as Mundane Science Fiction because it went beyond the then-current science.

Burnham mentioned Ted Chiang as an author who seems to follow the manifesto, and Greg Egan's "Incandescence". Olson thought there were possibilities in a story about a pre-Newtonian discoverer of the speed of light. Other people mentioned Harry Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken" and Joanna Russ's "When It Changed".

Ryman closed by saying that he wanted to force people to write about changes in society.

My suggestion for a panel, or more likely a two-person conversation/debate would be Geoff Ryman and Judith Berman on "Mundane Science Fiction" versus "Sense of Wonder".

The Gaiman autographing could have been handled better. There were two sessions, each in an afternoon slot, but you had to stand in line for tickets which were given out at 9AM those mornings, and then again for the autographs. And although they knew how many tickets they had to give out, no one bothered to count the ticket line and tell people past a certain point that they would almost definitely not be getting tickets.

The major events were in a ballroom with flat seating (rather than raked or stadium seating), which meant that a lot of people could see things on the stage only on the screens. As a result we decided to skip the masquerade, which seems to have been a wise decision. First, there were more prizes given out than there were costumes. And many people reported that most of the costumes/presentations were recreations that depended on your being familiar with the originals in anime or wherever.

At one point, I thought I had lost something, so went to Program Ops to ask about it. They said that lost-and-found was in the Delta! Well, it was not quite that bad--things were taken to the Delta at the end of the day. Still, having the lost-and-found a half a kilometer away from where items were lost makes no sense.

We met a lot of old (and new) friends, of course, including J. J. Pierce, the son of the Bell Labs science fiction author J. R. Pierce, who also wrote as J. J. Coupling. And a big thank-you to Robert Anstett, who helped me figure out why my netbook was not finding any wireless networks on day.

Someone referred to "Worldcon formal" (as opposed to "business casual") and asked about my tuxedo. I told him, "I've packed that tux away. When I'm nominated for a Hugo, I'll take it out again."

The editing (or "editiing", as it was spelled in one place) could have been better. This is becoming a standard problem. More microphones are needed. It really makes things difficult to have more than two people sharing microphone, and three is the absolute maximum. And there needs to be an improvement in the five-minute warning system, since many times no one showed up, and moderators seem incapable of tracking the time themselves.

There were about 3000 pre-registered members; the actual attendance was about 3921. The economy undoubtedly played a part, and high airfares kept some away. (Dan Kimmel said that in the spring when he checked airfares from Boston, they were in the $500-$700 range. He took the bus, which was $68 round-trip!)