Eastercon 2012
Once again it's the season of chocolate rabbits and goodwill to all zombies, so back to the Radisson non-Euclidean hotel, which remains as confusing as ever. This year I avoided the fourth floor entirely, on the grounds that no space should be not internally path-connected, but still fell under the spell of needing to go downstairs from the main area to reach my upstairs room. Though I did like the signs for the room at the world's end, nigh to the woods perilous (well, a crèche), which didn't mention it by name and just said "Seriously, keep going".
Friday
Geoengineering was cancelled so I went to the death of the internet, in case it doesn't come out on YouTube soon. Much nice geekery about how security forces really use the internet, both in terms of relying on people not having easily available tools to avoid being monitored, and also in looking at patterns of communication rather than searching on keywords. So social networking is awesomely useful, in showing the contact patterns directly and incriminating whole conspiracies. Or groups of friends as we used to call them.
I also like the secret industry that makes a market in "zero day vulnerabilities", meaning bugs in inexplicably popular software like Windows, that allow remote control of microphones and webcams etc., which people find and sell to governments instead of reporting so they can be fixed. In nature such bugs would be rare, but it belatedly occurs to me that when I was working on such system software it would have been cheaper for Bad People to pay me to quietly insert suitable bugs than for them to find naturally occurring ones. A missed opportunity :-(
Then on to Is Europe winning the space race?, which somewhat depends on how you define a space race these days, when there's no finish line and most things are done collaboratively. One theme that emerged is that NASA keeps dropping out of joint projects after other people have done their bits, as their congress/senate like to cut things when it's too late. So NASA has been downgraded to the status of unreliable partner, not for technical reasons but because they can't keep their government under control. I'm not sure if it's the same principle as with blaming owners for their naughty children and dogs.
And a similar if more distant next one, with the Cassini mission to Saturn, and particularly to its ever increasing number of moons, which are very varied and contain some with prospects of life. Which in the technical language of xenobiology would be Way Cool. I particularly like the way it's being investigated magnetically, in the sense that Earth life depends on magnetic protection and there's probably the same requirement elsewhere. Also a neat ethical/careful touch in the plan to terminate the probe when it runs out of fuel by crashing it into Saturn, as letting it hit a possibly life-bearing moon with its atomic power plant could be considered inappropriate.
Then an unusual interpretation of markets and corporations as alien invaders who have taken over the world, and who we should resist with the sort of heroic guerilla action the Earthlings always mount against Bad Things from Space. Not to be confused with terrorism of course. It echoes tax treatment of companies as "non natural persons", in that they act as if they have consciousness and goals, but their motivation in many legal systems is required to be only maximising their profits. Which in a natural human we might call megalomania, meaning they should be put into therapy or prison to protect society from them. Odd that instead we've given them control of the planet.
And on to Plot Holes, which form a big topic in many genres, though not of course in the experience of the authors on the panel. It does seem something people don't care enough about, in that so many popular films consist of nothing but holes, yet are judged good or bad by their special effects instead. It's probably just me who grizzles about it, apart from that book on continuity errors in Star Trek. (It's a big book.)
After tea there is What is I?, on consciousness, self awareness and all that good stuff that use to be more mysterious before we studied it. Unfortunately there was a lot of that anti-science preserving-eternal-mysteries-by-not-noticing-the-known-answers that I don't like. But fortunately it annoyed one of the audience enough that she told the panel off for it, and then joined them and took over, as the one who actually works in the field and knows the science behind it. So it ended up going well, with focus on the anatomical reality rather than the philosophical and religious musings that lead nowhere.
And on a meta session note, this was the first example I saw of the suggestion in the gender parity panel that women be drafted from the audience when they know more about a subject than its panel do. Its success does rather support the theory that the shortage of women on panels isn't because they don't know anything or don't have anything to say.
Then on to sex and fantasy on television, with much attention on Game of Thrones having benefited from being subscription only, so it's allowed to include what the audience want to see, whereas public television is restricted by the public to show only what they don't want to see. Yes, that didn't make sense to me either, but seems to be the American Way. Notable for some grizzling, from a man, that there are too many naked men on television, meaning any at all, and a significant division among the female audience on whether they want to see such things explicitly. No problem the other way around of course.
And just before it became too late and sleepy for anything sensible, there was Older Women in Dr Who. Of whom there were always rather more than is normal for the media, including some major ones in the modern era. Still no female Doctor though, which feels increasingly odd a generation after Thatcher and Janeway. Not to mention Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Saturday
Up at crack of is it light yet for sufficiently advanced magic, generally a compare and contrast of magic and technology. Nicely framed as technology is for the many and magic for the few, with some counter examples that don't really work. E.g. if everyone can fly under their own special power that's not so much a magical culture as a flock of birds.
Then on to how pseudo do you like your medieval?, with a consensus as with the previous session on not using fantasy to cheat in various deus ex machinary ways. Also pickiness such as Mr Martin insisting his dragons are genuine tetrapods rather than having both forelimbs and wings, which would be unrealistic. And no-one likes an unrealistic dragon. Though he declined to be Tolkien and has produced a language with only the seven words he needed at the time. Perhaps his books would take a long time to write if he had to produce all the backing material too.
And so to the pivotal self-referential panel on gender parity in panels, with much before and after internet and real life discussion I'll elide here. Generally a good thing, encouraging the forward looking field of SF fandom into the idea of equality that was big in the 60s, with some unfortunate ironies and a large hiccup in the awards ceremony that evening. Which I witnessed only on other people's twitter 'phones, but even that way was clearly an unfolding sexist/racist/unfunny disaster of epic proportions.
Executive summary: it's good that people are trying, but It's Complicated.
Then back to simpler times, with the big lecture on regime change in 1066, where we learn that Bishop Odo has the best PR in the Bayeux Tapestry partly from being William's brother, but mainly because he paid for it to be made. And that the Normans were seen as sissies because they took prisoners, while the Saxons didn't, but that was mainly because the Normans had castles to put them in pending ransom negotiations, and the Saxons didn't. The speaker was fluent and patient, rather than just pushing his book on the subject, though he did mention he had anticipated questions on the eleventh century rather than the fourteenth, which so many of the audience asked about instead. No-one expects the Chaucerian inquisition.
And another peak of fun with unsolvable problems in mathematics, mainly squaring the circle this year, still with the chap from Warwick who did similar talks in previous years. Apart from doing things with polynomials that would make your hair curl, this one included the first explanation of transcendental numbers I ever understood, and much comedy about people at the more eccentric end of the continuum carrying on providing solutions to these problems even after they were proved insoluble. Possibly I would have done better, at Warwick, if maths had been taught with a more recreational approach then.
Then just before tea time, how the war on terror has affected modern writing. Which seems largely in the old ambiguity between freedom fighters and terrorists shifting firmly to the terrorist side. We've come a long way since Luke Skywalker and Blake's Seven were clearly the good guys, using violence to try to overthrow their governments because of fundamental ideological differences.
And on to world building, which is indeed a lot simpler now than in Tolkien's day, with pre-fabs put up in a matter of years rather than decades. As Mr Martin put it elsewhere, readers sometimes expect a book to show the tip of an iceberg, but if you write like that you're doing it wrong - it's much quicker to just produce a raft with some ice on it. Though there's some counter argument from the gaming side, that if you're not going to completely railroad the action into a linear narrative you do need a lot of background for the action to spill out into. In any case it's best to avoid one author's unfortunate experience of having characters trying to outrun the sunset mounted on their "megatheria", forgetting he'd earlier defined those beasties as giant sloths.
Then combining the convention's two themes into the women of Westeros, showing that just about all of them are someone's favourites and someone else's pet noires. With an interesting audience comment from Pogodragon, noting people liked the more modern/independent characters better than the traditional/princess ones, but that may be because they're more like fantasy characters. Which gets into that dodgy area where the downtrodden heroine spends twenty years as a scullery maid and suddenly invents feminism, to become mistress of the weyr. Danger, Ms. McCaffrey!
And for good night calming down there's Fusion - easy or hard? The tradition has always been that practical fusion power is fifty years in the future, and will remain that way forever, but this seems to be breaking down a bit now. Not least because of the billionaire geeks coming out of dot com bubbles and the like, able to put money into wacky ideas without the drawback of gigantic organisations and government support.
The hoopiest lines are probably around magnetic containment machines, which started small and almost working but unstable, and have now grown to weigh 20,000 tons, still almost working, apart from the fifty eight types of instability they are trying to manage, while more types appear with each fix. But there is talk of making the machine from plasma rather than metal, and bringing it into existence by blowing it as a big smoke ring, or possibly two smoke rings that combine to form it in a way that would make Gandalf blink. Sometimes I remember why I moved on from speculative fiction to real science, it's much weirder.
Sunday
Appropriately/naughtily scheduled against the Easter morning service comes the biology of the zombie apocalypse, featuring panel members who've worked closely with dead and rotting people and things for many years. And watched all the films, which seems more of an ordeal. Not much on the neurology of brain-free walking and talking, but good to see people taking it seriously when working out how to cause an undead plague with suitable parasites, like the one that takes over ants at night and makes them climb tall grass, mumbling about "brains".
Then 20 years of CGI, which has come a long way since the Pixar baby lamp, but not quite phased out all the people yet, or at least their heads against a green background. In principle I'd quite like the film industry to synthesise proper actors like Richard Burton rather than constantly seeking out new kids, but I see that's a slippery slope to virtual reality where nothing new is needed at all. Which might be Bad for a society that isn't entirely old curmudgeons like me.
And on to the big George Martin interview, overlapping earlier ones he's done on YouTube if you're curious, but basically a charming and somewhat mischievous fellow who reads fiction for the detail that makes it immersive, and writes in the same way. He's not keen on the Readers Digest version of Game of Thrones.
Then scientists in the media, including both scientists and media, though all had missed last week's news that all dinosaurs lived in water. Which had been reported in that silly system of "balance", which means wrong things get as much exposure as right things, as if the real world worked in the same way as politics. Someone should set Brian Cox on the obviously ridiculous stuff, though what seems to happen more often is that real scientists won't engage it even to counter it, as that would associate them with stuff bad for their careers and reputations. Tricky.
Followed by the snappily titled: you got your robot elf sex in my SF. About romance in the wider traditional meaning than Mills and Boon, with everyone in favour of it, while noting the widespread lack of it. Possibly the name needs changing as it's too late to reclaim real romance from the popular version now.
Then the search for exoplanets, which continues to surge along with so many examples they've spawned the field of "star system architecture", including many types different to ours, such as hot gas giants in the habitable zone, where they could have nice moons. Spectrography gives details of the planets' atmospheres, such as the carbon worlds that might contain shiny diamond geology, but more likely sooty black ponds under very grey skies. All of which makes the Drake formula for alien civilisations look better than it used to, and fuels expectations of identifying Earth-type worlds in the near future. It's only really bad for writing astronomy textbooks, which go out of date in hours.
And the recurring session on tall technical tales, mostly involving unwise things to do with large amounts of sodium and water, but a few with cyanide or rockets for extra fun. Which offers an explanation for the lack of technologically advanced alien civilisations in contact with us - scientists evolve out of the gene pool because they have dangerous toys and a good sense of adventure.
Then worldships, which are very large multi-generation starships going very slowly, so they could settle the galaxy from here in about a billion years. The technical bits had been worked out for some time, and estimated to be feasible within several centuries as we get a Solar System economy working, so this talk focussed instead on the motivation. The solution proposed is wanting to spawn separate cultures of like-minded people, with the speaker's own choice being English speaking, Cricket playing, beer drinking, with a taste for pretty girl, and rejecting anyone who likes football or Top Gear. Which is interestingly idiosyncratic for a modern audience, though does seem to fail a bit for most people, who like different combinations of cultural elements. Still, if a community is going to be shot off into space forever, it doesn't really matter to anyone else what they think.
Monday
The day begins with story arcs, or the lack of them in American television particularly, because of the system of cancelling new shows before they have time to get started. Maybe Kickstart is the answer, as it's hard to imagine random internet crowds being as bad at business as that. Pogodragon produced the best definition of a story arc, being that actions have permanent consequences, which is elegantly the same problem that open-ended games have, in that actions need not to have permanent consequences or the game universe will eventually run out of steam. Other views include realism, that life comes in arcs, and the soap opera connection, that people don't become addicted to stories where nothing matters. So much.
And on to the data deluge and the end of science, the problem that science produces an awful lot of data, much of which has to be stored not only for current use but for future reanalysis, or for court cases about fraud. It's already reaching the point where what can be looked at is limited by what results can be stored, rather than how good the looker machine is, and there are examples like the box that's going to make the same amount of daily data as the current volume of internet traffic. Though it won't be almost all spam. Also interesting points on archives, that we have Egyptian papyri that can still be read, and 80s floppy discs that can't. Some data is literally printed out on paper as the ultimate backup, but that doesn't scale up as you need more Amazonias each day.
Then Star Trek, is it life as we know it? Mostly not, in terms of how much worse it's become over time, and some fans would prefer to let it die quietly than keep coming back as endless zombie reincarnations. But there were also alternative formats suggested to freshen it up, such as comedy Trek, or a time war done less badly than in Enterprise, allowing the vast store of previous continuity problems to be mined again. At least no-one mentioned that Trek slash has always been the biggest part of the genre anyway.
And finally (not counting the dead dog parties), Death, where is thy sting? Which echoed the story arc points about consequences, so easily lost in the comic and television formats that regularly kill off characters and just bring them back again. It may have been clever when Gandalf reappeared in a change of clothes and beard, but every week is too often.
And more finally, the best of the missed, at least by titles, I'd have liked to go to hippies in space, and possibly knit your own dalek. Before one knits you.