handslive | Belated WorldCon [sat, 30 aug]

Saturday morning I headed off for the Morning Sing, but there was no one in the room designated in the schedule. After waiting for 10 minutes, I decided I could belatedly hit the Morning Poetry Exercises: Sestina instead. I've written sestina's before and, personally, I think they're fun. The approach we were shown was a little looser than what I was taught in that it allowed some word substitution for things that sounded the same or meant the same. Anyway, it was fun.

purplejavatroll and I went to Using the Folklore of Canada in Fiction panel which was extremely well run by Guy Gavriel Kay. He's a good speaker, as I already knew, and he asks hard questions. He was also excellent at engaging all the panelists and controlling the discussion.

Then we went for lunch and wandered around the dealers area for a bit. And drooled over some things and debated the actual value of signed first editions when we don't think of ourselves as collectors.

After that, purplecthulhu and I headed off to Research 101, which had both Connie Willis and Terry Pratchett. These two together are a scream. Terry evangelized about reading anything that took your fancy and talking to interesting people, which Connie referred to as "goofing off instead of writing" and also fully endorsed. A common thread between this panel and the one on Canadian Folklore was to not rely on just references, even academic texts, for information about cultures or how things are done. If possible, talk to people who've done what or where you want to describe as it's the only way to get those little tidbits that make things seem authentic.

Next, I went to Death of Person vs. Death of Personality. Okay, a few interesting things about the panelists, who I didn't know at all. The moderator was a long time fan (and later won the Big Heart award at the Hugos) who has done a lot of reading of SF over many years. He's seen a lot of concepts come and go in the SF community. There was an entertaining, but rather extremist, guy who I believe is a long time Extropian and also a serious shit disturber. Finally, there was some relatively new writer who's written some fiction that touches on the topic.

This is all good and it looks like a straight SF foray into the topic. The initial bit of sidetracking involves our two younger panel members (the extropian and the writer) not realizing that some of their ideas are not new and have been written about in various forms many decades ago (as pointed out by the moderator). But there's barely enough common ground between them to get a good discussion going. There's some wacko nonsense about copies versus multiple originals that doesn't get properly discussed and then things are seriously messed up because it turns out the audience is about split between people who were expecting a straight SF panel and people who've had out-of-body experiences. And things went downhill from there, which was very entertaining but not too interesting if you see what I mean.

I decided the Guy Kay reading was going to be too packed and went to the Science Fiction Poetry Association meeting instead. (I'm thinking of joining since their newsletter also includes poetry.) The guy running the panel, Scott Green, was the other team member on our Junkyard Poetry team. This was basically an informal little talk about the association and Scott's experiences publishing poetry. This segued nicely into the Marketing Poetry section which included Scott and another panelist, Herb Kauderer. They have different backgrounds since Herb is an academic with a formal background in poetry and a professional writer while Scott is a professional writer with no formal background (who I think also does some editing). Anyway, it was an interesting panel with many anecdotes and some good advice about submitting material.

pjt and I went to World Building because Guy Kay was going to be on that panel as well. That one was fun also and reinforced my initial impression of Guy as someone who can really run a panel.

After this, there was really nothing in the offing, so we went for supper and then to the Hugos. Spider Robinson is an excellent and entertaining speaker (much better than as a writer, I think). George R. R. Martin is hilarious (and deserves a Hugo, ahem) and, although I have yet to read any of the Hugo nominees for Best Novel, I still think that China Miéville and Kim Stanley Robinson were most likely robbed. But that's what happens when you have two excellent novels on the ballot and the votes get divided. Sadly, I think a lot of people might have gone away thinking the awards show was all about Robert Sawyer (he seemed to be up front a lot, anyway) and I'm personally not that blown away.

Some asides about panelists. By the end of the day, it was clear that (a) there were often schedule conflicts for panelists resulting from poor communication between the committees handling the different tracks and (b) some people who should have been on panels were not on the right panels or, sometimes, on any panels at all. You know it's bad when the panelists indicate from the outset that they don't know why they're on a given panel.

It was a fun day, though, and rather poetry filled. Honestly, I didn't go thinking about just the poetry panels. No, really.