In the Clammy Embrace of the Hell-Thing

[jducoeur]

Now that we're only living a few miles away from Readercon, we decided that we really should check it out; that was the main project for the day. It turns out to be a fine convention, so long as you enjoy panels. (Which I do, even if I'm not on them.)

First up was the greatly-oversubscribed "Quantum Mechanics" talk. This was a valiant but slightly doomed lecture, attempting to explain entanglement in 50 minutes, starting with the two-slit experiment and its implications. It wound up wandering a fair bit, as the questions drifted across the subject terrain, but it was a lot of fun along the way. The teacher, Carl Frederick, emphasized that if you're not confused, you don't understand the subject well enough yet.

Next up was "Everybody Dies", moderated by editrx, which may have been the most emotionally-loaded panel I've ever seen. The topic was fiction about the end of the world, principally about stories where absolutely everyone dies. (Markedly different from the stories where almost everyone dies.) It started out in the usual somewhat detached academic mode, but got much more earnest when Thomas Disch started bringing the topic around to the subject of tragedy and death. He clearly felt strongly about it himself (coming to tears several times), and that really drove the rest of the panel, which got rather less analytic and more personal. Very good stuff.

Next up was "Architecture and SF", a fascinating (if somewhat rambling) monologue by Kathryn Cramer, who I had never heard of before, but clearly need to get to know. The name aside, the topic was essentially "My Crazy Year", describing how she started the year intending to write a book about using Mathematica for teaching kids, and wound up mildly world-famous in the wake of the year's natural disasters, and started becoming expert on the shadowy world of modern military high-tech. Along the way, she got drawn into Francis Yates' work on the nature of memory (the book that describes the principles that underlie Masonic ritual), and began developing new software for assisting in the development of narrative (which seems to be touching on much the same ground that I'm getting into with my advanced Wiki work). Fascinating stuff, wandering quite freely from cognitive science to politics to humanitarianism -- definitely someone to pay more attention to.

Then on to this year's "exception" -- the Battlestar Galactica panel. Readercon is quite adamantly about Books, Dammit, but they apparently tend to have one panel a year about a TV show, and BSG was the obvious choice this time around. Fun and freewheeling. jenwrites was one of the panelists (apparently as the sole representative of the non-40-something-male crowd), and managed to get all the best lines.

Next was a few hours out, to take a spin through the Bookshop (Readercon's Dealer's Room is almost entirely books, naturally), and do the obligatory daily trip to our storage unit. (We're down to about four carloads, then I can close down the big unit -- yay!) Dinner was from Flatbread down on Route 62, a seriously earthy-crunchy pizzeria. Not bad: the crust is a smidgeon chewy, and I don't really care about the more organic than thou thing, but the pizza was flavorful and different. Nice as a change of pace.

Then back to the con for the 20th Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition. This was one of the major motivations for going to the con -- Christian has been talking it up for years, and I trust him to have good taste in silliness. In fact, it was even better than I expected, ranging from amusing to chokingly funny. The whole experience reminded me that there is a *long* ways down from I normally think of as "bad". Craig Shaw Gardner was reliably the funniest (and least convincing), but the other contestants all did a fine job of fooling the audience. Even if you don't do panels, this contest may well be worth the price of admission for the con...

Comments

re: Flatbread

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

There's one in Amesbury, up the road from us. Maybe Wolfie and I will take a ride up there one of these nights; the cheese and herb flatbread sounds good. We rarely go up 495; we usually go up 95 into NH. This would be a nice change.

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

Heh. Thanks. I felt at a loss when the panel began, but once I realized I was the "plucky comic relief," at least I understood my niche.

[jducoeur]

I could tell that you were a little unsettled when he started going down the row with "this is the guy who wrote the novelization of the miniseries" and "this is the guy who wrote the prequel". But you held your own well. (The vibrator line was the most memorable part of the whole panel...)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

(The vibrator line was the most memorable part of the whole panel...)

[*]

[jducoeur]

jenwrites should probably tell this one -- I suspect I can't do it justice...

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

In a nutshell, it's my cheap and quick solution to the "Cylon test" problem. Why do a long and complicated blood test when you can just whip out a vibrator and see if their spine glows?

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

In fairness, we have no evidence that a human (other than the viewer) has ever observed that phenomenon. (Maybe Cylons are careful to avoid doggy-style when undercover?)

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

That also raises the question of sex vs. arousal as the mechanism, since we have seen humans rape Cylons, and the rapists didn't give the Cylons much choice in their position.

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

Was it that obvious? Ah well. Yeah, there's nothing like suddenly wondering why you're sitting on stage next to actual professionals with insider knowledge. And it didn't help any that he really didn't introduce me well at all. I'm grateful that he asked me how to pronounce my name in advance, but it would have been nice if he'd also asked me about my credits. The "latest stories" that he mentioned were actually my oldest sales. Feh.

But I'm glad I got out a good zinger, if nothing else.

...There was a silent explosion of crimson light.

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

she got drawn into Francis Yates' work on the nature of memory (the book that describes the principles that underlie Masonic ritual)

I was at Kathryn's "My Wild Year" talk as well, and made note of her reading list. From what you say here, I'll move Yates way up the queue. And note for those who weren't there: she never did (=hasn't yet) gotten around to the original "Mathematica to teach elementary students" project :-)

Re: ...There was a silent explosion of crimson light.

[jducoeur]

I should add: I don't believe Yates talks explicitly about Masonry (it's been many years since I read the book). But it is blatantly obvious that the book and the ritual are drawing from exactly the same traditions -- the Masonic second degree is a direct incarnation of the concept of a "memory palace", and I teach it as such...

[cellio]

I assume that "everyone dies" means "everyone is going to die"? Or are there folks out there who've somehow written compelling stories set after (or as) everyone dies? (The closest I can think of to that is The Quiet Earth, but depending on how you interpret the ending, then 1, 2, or 6 billion people survive.)

[jducoeur]

The main focus was on books where everyone dies at the end of the story -- apocalypse stories of various sorts. I gather that that's a modest but real subgenre of science fiction, although I haven't read many myself. One major point of the panel was that it seems to break down into two sub-subgenres: the ones where everyone just dies, which tend to be tragic in nature, and the ones where everyone is somehow *transformed* (such as Blood Music or Childhood's End), which tend to have a more hopeful tone. The emotional part of the panel mostly focused on the former, touching on the way that seems to be metaphorical for personal mortality, at least on the emotional level...