Monthly Archives: August 2005

This morning I joined a partial Locus Magazine retinue, including Gary K. Wolfe, for breakfast with HarperCollins Eos editor Diana Gill over at the Marriott, a brief cab ride away from the Moat House hotel and conference center. By the time we finished, the sun was out and blue sky prevailed, so Gary and I decided to walk back to the SECC, a distance of only a mile or so. Within five minutes, the sun disappeared and it started to rain. Then we got stuck in an office park cul de sac and had to backtrack a couple blocks before finding a way across the expressway and back to familiar territory. By which time the sun was out again. Our little adventure.

I bought some more books — between yesterday and today, new titles by David Langford, Gary K. Wolfe, Michael Bishop, Paul McAuley (2), Kim Stanley Robinson, and a couple others — chatted with Justin Ackroyd and John Picacio, then headed for a panel on the ‘aesthetics’ of SF, with Robert Silverberg, John Clute, Ian Watson, and Ian McDonald. (Scheduled Kathryn Cramer was, as she described in her blog, unable to attend.) The panel dwelled on the differences between SF and fantasy, with Clute’s precise if overwrought distinctions challenged by Silverberg, who said he considers SF simply a branch of fantasy, described why he’s never read Tolkien, and declared that his aim as a writer has always been to produce in the reader the sense of wonder he felt at age 10 reading the final scenes of Wells’ The Time Machine.

After a nap (I’m not entirely over the jet lag) I sat in on an academic panel with Graham Sleight, Paul Kincaid, and Andrew M. Butler discussing the work of con Guest of Honor Christopher Priest (who didn’t attend the panel himself, and who though I’ve passed in him the concourse a couple of times I’ve yet to see speak himself) — whether his narrators can be trusted, how he deals with multiple versions of reality. It was a fascinating discussion that makes me want to go back and reread his recent novels and catch up on the one or two I haven’t yet gotten to…if only I can find the time.

Later, I listened to most of a panel with Connie and Cory and Sean McMullen about the assumptions SF makes about gender roles, with two of the panelists offering insightful remarks based on their reading and their perceptions of history and society, and the third recounting detailed examples of problematic characters from his own work. A quiz panel following, a SFnal version of ‘Call My Bluff’ in which one team offers competing definitions of some word and the opposing team tries to guess which definition is the true one, had the audience spilling out of the room, with quick-on-the-uptake Gary Wolfe presiding between teams with John Clute and Esther Friesner on one side, David Hartwell and Roz Kaveney on the other. Words in play included ‘franchulate’, ‘interstitial’, ‘foma’, and ‘agenbite’.

Then came my second panel, ‘In Memoriam’, where I nominally moderated Laurie Mann, Rich Lynch, and one no-show in a summary of notable SF people who’ve died in the past year. The panel ran from 7-8 p.m. — rather ruining dinner/party plans I might otherwise have made — and was attended by barely more than a dozen people in the audience. I had the list of obits I’ve posted on Locus Online, while the con program book has a much longer list (including fan and media people that Locus doesn’t usually cover), so with Rich and Laurie covering most of the fan notables, and I most of the professional folks, we did a fair retrospective in the 45 minutes or so of the panel. If I’m tasked to do this sort of thing again, though, I’d prepare better and have more material in hardcopy for quick reference.

After that came the familiar dinner companion troll, where the unaffiliated con-goer, without any formal plans for dinner, strolls through the lobby and bar looking for people he knows that he might hook up with to have a meal. But it was late–after 8–and the people I knew in the bar, and sat with for a while, had already eaten; so I got a table of my own in the casual diner section of the hotel lobby and ate while jotting down notes on the day’s events. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast…

There was an Asimov’s/Analog party in the SFWA suite, which unlike last night was packed. I chatted with a few people before letting myself be squeezed out, then returned to my room to go through e-mail and post items, and write this blog entry, for a couple hours.

I got a decent night’s sleep and don’t feel particularly jet-lagged. The path from the Moat House hotel to the convention center is remarkably reminiscent of Heathrow; more narrow hallways, jags, steps, and doors than you’d think would be needed for such a short distance. Check in at the pre-reg desk was quick and easy. Badged and beribboned, I had a late breakfast/early lunch from a sandwich stand in the center, strolled around and chatted with people I ran into for a while, including Charles Brown and his retinue back in the Moat House having their lunch, then was back in the center at 2 p.m. when the dealers’ room opened. A remarkable number of book dealers, even used/rare book dealers, except that many of them, for some reason, aren’t taking credit cards. The art show looks very good, though many of the booths aren’t occupied yet.

I caught most of the opening ceremonies–Vincent Docherty introducing the guests of honor, mainly, followed by a welcoming speech from some Glasgow city official, and a recorded welcoming speech from the Scotland national poet. Then, everyone in the audience was invited to a ‘reception’ in the room behind the curtain, which entailed free wine or juice for everyone — the staff even roamed the room, a bottle of red in one hand, a bottle of white in the other, offering refills. It was like a publisher’s party, or something; surely a Worldcon first. People mingled and chatted while a 2-person musical-act played on keyboard and theremin.

I was on a panel at 5 about reviewing, with Gary Wolfe, Liz Hand, and Paul Witcover (even though, shh, I don’t write reviews any more… but I used to… and I edit them occasionally… and I read a lot of them…) It went well, with a good-sized audience for early in the con, asking some intelligent questions, though despite the hour-long time slot the monitor cut the panel off after 45 minutes.

After 6, the dealers’ room was closed; I chatted with a couple other people (the usual random tag ups), checked back in my room, then hung around the Moat House bar with various people as they gathered and waited and departed for dinner reservations. I ended up eating dinner in the bar itself with Lawrence Person, chatting about movies and reviews and Austin and Philip Glass.

No parties in this hotel, except that the SFWA Suite is here and was open after 8:30. Not many there, but the few who were were worthy–Harry Harrison, Charles Stross, Beth Gwinn, Sharyn November. Came back to the room for more email checking, though haven’t posted anything on the site today. But I should get to sleep; have more things scheduled tomorrow.

Overriding initial impression: the wireless internet access at the Moat House hotel isn’t high-speed, or free (as it is in many US hotels). It’s expensive, low-speed wireless access; 69 pounds for a week, and I feel like I’m back in the days of modem connections, thrumming my fingers while every webpage loads, going off to wash my face while the e-mail downloads. But there doesn’t seem to be any choice.

My flights went well enough to a point. American Airlines’ LAX-London connection, leaving around 9 p.m. PDT, provided a meager dinner and an adequate (though non-cooked) breakfast; the seating in coach, on the Boeing 777, was relatively non-claustrophobic, with screens on each seatback displaying route information or videos; and I managed a few hours awkward sleep before the breakfast serving, around 5 a.m. LA time (1 p.m. UK time), as passengers opened their window covers to let the sun shine in as the western coast of Ireland appeared through layers of midlevel clouds.

Heathrow is a maze… not amazing; a maze. I thought I had plenty of time between landing and boarding for the connecting flight to Glasgow–an hour–but walking the maze, waiting for trams, taking trams, standing in customs lines, walking some more, and then finding the departure display for my flight advising only ‘delayed until 1450′ with no gate information… amounted to an hour delay before we did actually board (with yet another tram between the departure gate and the faraway pad where the plane actually waited) and then another hour of waiting for a tug to move the plane, and rush-hour clearance to take-off… resulted in a 2-hour later arrival in Glasgow than I’d anticipated. I do try to be philosophical about these things; I always have a book to pass the time, so the time isn’t ‘wasted’; but I don’t travel often enough (only 2 or 3 times a year) to take these things entirely in stride, and I can’t help but wonder if such inefficiency is an indication that the terrorists, to some degree anyway, haven’t already won.

I’m at the Moat House hotel, adjacent to the convention center, and checked in around 8 p.m. local. I unpacked, checked out the wifi, downloaded the past day’s e-mail, then wandered around the lobby for a while. A fan room around a corner was full of fans drinking ale — as the con newsletter #3 described — but I didn’t see anyone I knew (but then, I don’t actually know more than a few fans, not really being a fan, myself, in public anyway, that is), and so sat in the Moat House’s 5-star restaurant to have a dinner of blackpudding and monkfish, though I must say for a 5-star restaurant I might have expected them to bring me at least a glass of water, not to mention the glass of wine I’d ordered, before I was half-way through my first course.

It’s been a long day.

Tomorrow it begins.

Amidst the cheerful news that everyone survived the crash-landing of an Air France jet in Toronto this afternoon, I am setting off for LAX shortly to embark for Glasgow, via London, on American Airlines and British Airways. So posts on the website will be fewer and farther between than usual, for the next couple weeks; my partner Yeong arrives in Glasgow Saturday night, and on Monday we will transit to Amsterdam, then Paris, for just a few days in each place, so that I’ll not be home and back to regular schedule until mid-month. I do have data mostly compiled for New Books and Classic Reprint listings, on my trusty laptop, so depending on how jet-lagged I am the next couple nights, they should appear later, or sooner.

I’m rushing to catch up on things before flying out tomorrow night for Glasgow. So quickly–

I finished reading the new Harry Potter over the weekend, and liked it just fine. Yes, they’re too long, yes they have a certain repetitive episodic quality about them (with one major ‘guest star’ character in each book–Umbridge; Slughorn). What I haven’t seen noted about the new book is that the insights into the evil Lord Voldemort’s past are analogous to the purported background of the evil character in another current pop-fantasy series–Star Wars. For all the disdain and neglect of Harry Potter by the Sf genre insiders, it would be nice to at least see that Rowling is acknowledged as a far better writer than Lucas.

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Here’s an item I can’t figure out how to Blink; it’s too complicated to summarize in just a few words. An article in yesterday’s LA Times Magazine is about one Sophia Stewart, who sued the Wachowski brothers, not to mention James Cameron and others, for having plagiarized a 120-page manuscript she wrote in 1983 and submitted to a contest in 1986. She filed the suit after seeing The Matrix in 1999, and an inaccurate report of the suit on the Salt Lake Community College’s Globe’s website got copied and repeated around the web until the impression in the black community — since Stewart is African-American — is that she actually *won* her lawsuit and the truth about her millions of dollars of winnings has been suppressed by the mainstream media… Whereas in fact, of course…