Worldcon Report
Well, let’s see… The short and simple is that Worldcon was a blast. It is now, of course, a bit of a blur.
Earlier in the year, Craig Miller, who was running programming, and I had spoken about scheduling, both of us particularly concerned to not overwork Mum. “You however,” Craig had declared, “I’ll work like a dog.” And he did. As I’ve known Craig for over twenty years now, it’s not like I hadn’t expected it. (Also, I’d prefer to have me overworked than get Mum too tired to enjoy herself.)
First, before we did Worldcon, Lizzie O’Connell and Lea Day, bless ’em, organized transport to get Mum into her new hotel and also to chauffeur her up to the booksignings in Tarzana and Northridge as my Prius, while roomy, can’t seat four and and a wheelchair (and Mum needed a wheelchair). The signings went well.
Wednesday, the first day of Worldcon was also a day when we had a National Public Radio interview which was cool. After that, we sped back to Anaheim in time for my autograph session. I was surprised by the length of the line and figured that Mum would have a line easily five times longer.
We had a lovely dinner with the nice people of Del Rey at the Whitehouse.
Thursday, I had a panel early in the morning with Robert Silverberg and several others about creating believable aliens. I’m pretty sure the audience had to be composed mostly of aliens as the panel started at 10 a.m. — and no real science fiction fan is awake at that time of day!
At noon I read the then-current opening of “Dragon’s Heart” and got a lot of good feedback (not that anyone said anything but I could tell just by the way people laughed or squirmed what was working and what wasn’t).
Then at 4 p.m. I was on a panel with Naomi Novik (“His Majesty’s Dragon”/”Termeraire”) called “The Theory of Dragons”. I’d met Naomi at Comic-Con in July and she is marvelous. When I asked Naomi if Temeraire had been optioned for film, she smiled and said, “I can’t talk about that,” and I said, “That’s an answer by itself.” And, as we now know, it has been optioned by Peter Jackson (way to go, Naomi!).
Right after that I was on another panel at 5.30 p.m., “Collaborating: The care and feeding of your partner.” I, of course, wisely hold the opinion that anything the senior writer says goes — of course, when the senior writer is also your mother, you stand the very good chance of getting whacked upside the head if you ignore this sagacious rule 🙂
Friday I had only one panel, “Faster than light or slower than molasses”. I think I upset one physicist in the audience by affirming that the current view of physics is probably broken and we’re heading toward a major shake-up and discovery — just as Einstein stood the established physics on its ear with his theory of special and general relativity.
I managed to see the Masquerade with my daughter and her mother who was commuting from Woodland Hills, poor soul (she had a dog she couldn’t kennel, so she had to commute). That was a lot of fun, after which we went back to the Hilton for the parties. I’d been invited to the Tor party, so off we went.
We were also happy to meet up with Steve Saffel, famous to our daughter as “Face-hugger Steve” as he was the one who demonstrated to us that young babies just love to have their faces twiddled (sort of like the face-hugger in Alien). Steve and Dana invited Ceara to do Disneyland with them on Sunday and we made arrangements for that.
I had a good chat with Eric Flint who co-wrote “Crown of Slaves” with David Weber and was really glad to get to know him as we hadn’t spoken before and he’ll be Guest of Honor at this year’s Loscon.
Probably the most contentious panel was my first on Saturday, “Harry Potter goes forth” where we discussed our ideas (predictions) about what might happen in the final Harry Potter book. Several people got rather bent out of shape defending their favorite beliefs but overall we had a lot of fun and the panel could have easily gone on for another hour.
My next panel was “The singularity: What is it and why should you care?” I was happy to be on a panel with Cory Doctorow whom I’ve met on and off for over a decade. Cory is a very nice and interesting person. I think, however, that I punched one of his buttons when I spoke briefly about copyright (“Information wants to be free, art wants to be fed.”) Not long after his heated response, he whispered an apology. As for the singularity — that’s the idea that at some point we will be able to develop a true AI, establish methods of uploading minds, and completely overturn our way of existence. We’ve had singularities before, the Industrial Revolution was one, so was the explosive growth of the Internet (really, the invention of the worldwide web).
Late Sunday night my daughter decided that she was desperate to get someone to read her writing and we were lucky enough to bump into David Gray and Aimee Maistre. David kindly read Ceara’s stuff while Aimee and I caught up, as we hadn’t spoken in a long while.
Sunday I had a marvelous panel at 11.30 called “Page 119” where we read page 119 of a famous book and challenged the audience to guess the author and title. Some people managed amazing accuracy.
Then I met up with Mum for a quick bite which turned into a much longer foray as we acquired numerous fan friends. Somewhere along there I realized that it was time to pick up Ceara at Disneyland and so, escorted by the famous “other” Gigi Johnson (not my sister, the now Georgeanne “Gigi” Kennedy and prior Gigi Johnson), I walked over, quite surprised to find out how close the Hilton was to Disneyland. On the tram to the ticket center, I discovered that the people sitting in front of us were more con-goers and even more surprised to discover that one of them was the moderator for my last panel — which I’d missed. I apologized profusely (I must have been a great shade of red) but he assured me that Jerry Pournelle managed to keep the audience captivated on his own in the “Holding back the tide” panel. I’m sorry I missed it, it would have been a lot of fun. I can only say that I had just totally spaced.
I managed to tour the Dealers’ Room once and picked up a nice woodcut puzzle from FanTanimals for the daughters of some friends of mine.
All in all, I thought it was a marvelous World Convention even though Mum and I were often just “ships in the night.”