Boskone in Brief

Kate and I spent the weekend in Boston for the science fiction convention Boskone, which we've been going to every year for the past several years. I'm not going to do a detailed recap of everything that was said on every panel that I went to, mostly because I don't keep notes. Also, that would probably drive away all the readers who weren't actually there.

The highlight of the con was probably in the socializing, anyway-- dinner at Legal Test Kitchen with Debra Doyle and James Macdonald and Yoon Ha Lee, hanging out outside the con suite with Jordin and Mary Kay Kare, hanging out in the hotel bar with Scalzi and Tobias Buckell and Joe Hill and Karl Schroeder, and a whole bunch of other people. As Kate notes, Scalzi is sort of the grit in the convention oyster-- park him in the bar area, and interesting conversations accrete around him.

A few quick comments/ anecdotes from various panels I went to. I'll probably write a bit more about the stuff I was on, but these are some things that stood out in the panels I went to:

At the panel on cool worlds in SF, Karl Schroeder (author of the recently-booklogged Sun of Suns mentioned having lunch with Vernor Vinge, who said "I've been doing some calculations about your world," and breaking into a cold sweat, because he hadn't done calculations before writing it.

Vinge apparently continued with "It appears to work, to first order, but we'll need to run some simulations to really be sure..."

At the "What Can't You Read?" panel, Fred Lerner mentioned an R.A. Lafferty story in which somebody asks "What's the superlative of 'So what?,'" which is a wonderful concept. Later, Debra Doyle suggested that the superlative of "So what?" is "Who gives a shit?"

At the "Gooey Center of Hard SF," there was a lot of discussion of how "Hard SF" is mostly about male writers talking tough about engineering. Patrick Nielsen Hayden noted that the dirty secret of SF demographics is that there's a lot of overlap between the audience for SF and the people who buy the worst sort of woo-woo pseudo-science books-- The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and that sort of thing. I can easily believe it.

Patrick also provided another great Vernor Vinge name-check, noting in discussing the diversity of opinion in "Hard SF" that the difference between Orson Scott Card and Vernor Vinge is that "One of these people believes in the imminent transformation of human beings into godlike entities, and the other is Vernor Vinge."

And that's probably about enough of that. It was a fun weekend, though I didn't get nearly enough sleep, which will undoubtedly affect my performance in the classroom. Today's a Lab Day, though, so no more blogging for now.