- This is where we stayed on Grand Cayman last week. Unless I misrecall, it was about $150 a night. Don’t forget that it was not air conditioned.
- For deep reading, print may be the way to go, for reasons we don’t yet understand. In looking back a year or so, I realize that I generally read fiction on my Transformer Prime, and nonfiction on paper. It wasn’t a conscious decision–and may simply be due to a reluctance of nonfiction publishers to issue ebooks–but it was probably the correct one.
- Here’s yet another reason why I’ve decided to let the Sun actually reach my skin.
- It’s starting to look like diet has little or no effect on cancer risk. This has been my suspicion for a long time. Obesity, yes. Diet itself, no. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Ohh, Ancel Key’s beautiful wickedness is all starting to unravel. Saturated fat has nothing to do with heart disease. This has also been a suspicion of mine for some time, along with the suspicion that eating fat will make you lose weight more quickly than simply going low-carb. It certainly worked that way for me. I now weigh only eight pounds more than I did when I was 24, and a good deal of that is probably muscle I put on via ten years of weight training. (Thanks to Trevor Tompkins for the link.)
- Interesting paper on why the Neanderthals died out. They didn’t necessarily die out becausethey were inferior. (Maybe they didn’t die out at all but are still here, pretending to be ugly Saps.) If I had to guess, I’d say their skulls got so big as to make childbirth problematic. But what were they doing with all that gray matter? (Thanks to Erik Hanson for the link.)
- I stumbled on a year-old article that pretty much captures my reaction to weather.com. I will add, however, that weather.com beats the living hell out of The Weather Channel.
- I’m still waiting for reports of cataclysmic pwnage on XP machines. The number “2000” comes to mind.
- Speaking of which, I still need XP because my HP S20 slide scanner has no driver that will run on Windows 7. Haven’t tried the VM trick yet, but ultimately that’s the way I’ll have to go.
- I knew there was a reason I only lived in Baltimore for 23 months.
travel
Odd Lots
Second Honeymoon, Part 1
Yesterday evening, while on layover at George Bush International Airport in Houston, I was in the men’s room wondering whythehell they always put mirrors over urinals, when it hit me: I am now a person of melanin.
Really. I haven’t had a tan like this in I don’t know how long. We’ve been to Hawaii several times in recent years, but I always hid under a metric tonne of sunblock and came back as pasty as I left. Not this time. Carol and I just returned from a long-delayed expedition to the same resort (or what remains of it) where we stayed on our honeymoon in early October 1976. 38 years had not been kind to the resort, much of which was destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The surviving beachfront cottages were sold for condos, and we rented one for the week.
We used sunblock sparingly. I actually sat out in the sun on our back deck in Colorado the week prior to the trip to get a little color. It was an experiment in mood management. This ugly frigid long winter had me in a bit of a funk, and I wanted to know if some vitamin D would improve my mood. I’m guessing that I got a serious load of vitamin D. Did it help my mood?
Well, my mood certainly improved. But between frolicking on a deserted beach with my transcendentally gorgeous forever girlfriend, flying kites together, drinking pina coladas at Rum Point, almost running into Baron Barracuda, and not doing much else of serious consequence for almost nine days (including not checking Facebook at all), well, I’m sure I don’t know.
The two photos above of Carol flying kites are at almost precisely the same physical location, just 38 years apart. Did 38 years matter? Sure. We know and love each other immeasurably better than we did on our honeymoon. I’ve traded some hair for muscles I didn’t have when I was 24, but Carol, well, she hasn’t had to trade in anything at all.
Tomorrow: more stories and photos of The Week Without Either Air Conditioning or Facebook.
It’s Turtles Most of the Way Down
I know how the turtle beat the hare: The turtle ate the hare, and the turtle’s nose crossed the finish line before his stomach did. The trick is staying away from the business end of the turtle. More on this in a moment.
As some insiders know, Carol and I just spent a week in Hawaii celebrating our 36th wedding anniversary. We chose the Sheraton Maui because it had almost everything we wanted: Good food, good beds, a good beach, colorful fish, rentable beach cabanas, and a 30-foot-high lava cliff from which addled teenagers were throwing themselves into the surging ocean every five or six seconds all day long. This allowed me the pleasure of congratulating myself on being a lot saner than I remembered being at that age. (Yes, my friend George Murphy and I built a pair of what amounted to wheeled surfboards and took them coasting through the Chicago sewer system in 1967. It was nuts. It was maybe a little dangerous. But it wasn’t frakking batshit.)
So we got ourselves a cabana, and we set up on the beach to do some serious lolling. I stuffed my cranky, 8-year-old Kodak V530 digital camera into what amounted to a fortified ziplock bag, parked my prescription snorkel mask on my broad and heavily sunblocked forehead, and followed Carol into the water. Taking pictures of fish with this rig is tricky because you can’t easily see what the camera’s LCD is showing, and fish don’t sit still. I snapped a lot of pictures of water where fish had been swimming a second or two ago. When I did get the fish in the frame, it was generally the wrong end of the fish.
After an hour or so of snapping empty water and colorful fish butts, there was some excitement among nearby beachgoers. People were staring into the water and pointing at something big and dark. I ducked underwater, and saw the biggest damned turtle south of Gamera steaming right at us. Carol and I dodged to one side, but turtles are better in water than we are, and by the time we got out of its way there was maybe three feet between us. The turtle was big enough to be clearly visible on my LCD display. I snapped some reasonable shots (reasonable for four feet of surf-churned water) the best of which is above. All I can figure is that we were between the turtle and an algae wad with his name on it. The turtle got to the algae wad, and Carol and I didn’t get eaten in the bargain.
Ok, I watched too many Japanese monster movies on Channel 7 when I was 12. Guilty. At least I wasn’t jumping off thirty-foot lava cliffs.
The turtle, as it happened, was a regular visitor to the beach, and we saw others cruising the nearby waters just about every time we looked under the surface. We saw them swimming around from our hotel room window more than once. It was the great unexpected pleasure of the trip.
More on this and other things tomorrow.
Worldcon Wrapup
It was a relief to step off the plane in Colorado Springs and grab a chestful of thin, dry air. I’ve lived in dry climates since early 1987, and I’ve lost my taste for late-summer Chicago mugginess. The toughest part of Chicon 7, which concluded on Monday, was going back and forth across the Chicago River between the Hyatt and the Sheraton and wondering if I were walking above the river or wading through it. The con went very well, considering my aversion to crowds. I got to see a lot of people I don’t see very much, granted that I missed a few. I heard some readings and workshopped a couple of stories with my friends from the 2011 Taos Toolbox workshop. And the Hugos, which I haven’t seen in person since (I think) 1986. John Scalzi was easily the best Hugos toastmaster I’ve seen since I began attending worldcons in 1974. He was funny, he was terse, he was great at improv, and he held the awards for the winners as they spoke their thank-yous into the mic. (There was nowhere else to put them.) He’s losing his hair and doesn’t shave his head–he certainly gets private points from me for that.
I was not aware of it at the time, obviously, but a misguided attempt at automated copyright protection killed the stream that Chicon was sending out to people who couldn’t be at the con. This was idiotic on so many levels–the video clips being “protected” had been given to the con by the studios specifically to be shown at the awards–and reminds us that robots should not be enforcers. Never.
The very idea of copyright, on which artists in many areas depend, is being weakened in the public mind by crap like this. If something eventually kills copyright, it won’t be the pirates.
I had a marvelous interview with the fiction editor at a major press, at which he agreed to read the manuscript for Ten Gentle Opportunities. Better than that, he took notes on my experience and my background (I brought both The Cunning Blood and one of my computer books) and suggested that what he might like even more from me than a humorous fantasy mashup was a good ripping hard SF action adventure.
I wondered for a moment: Gosh, could I do that? (Only a moment. A short moment. Ok, no moment at all.) I had intended to pursue my first Drumlins novel The Everything Machine after TGO was on its way. Now, I’m not so sure. The Molten Flesh is less far along, but it may get promoted to the top of the queue. We’ll see.
I did spend a fair bit of time with my sister and her girls down in the dealers room. (She and Bill publish and sell filk CDs as Dodeka Records.) As usual, I did a little shopping, emphasis on little. (We didn’t drive, so whatever I bought had to be packed home on what I call a “sewer-pipe jet.”) But I found something wonderful, as Dave Bowman notably said in 2010.
Across the aisle from Dodeka Records was Apogee Prime, a publisher specializing in aerospace books in several categories. They had a new book that, at 12″ X 14.5″, was mighty big for my creaky old suitcase, but I bought it anyway: 2001: The Lost Science. What we’ve got here are original photos, sketches, and literal blueprints of the technologies presented by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Much of the material was thought to be lost, and when the sequel 2010 was filmed in the early 1980s, a lot of it had to be re-created from scratch, often by having artists watch the original movie fifty times with sketchpads in their laps.
The book draws on the personal collection of Frederick I. Ordway III, who is a real rocket scientist and former colleague of Werner Von Braun, and worked on the Explorer 1 project. Kubrick hired Ordway to help him predict, as reasonably and realistically as possible, what space science would be like in the year 2001. This book is a good overview of his predictions, at least those that made it into the 1968 film. Satellites, space stations, nuclear propulsion systems–these were the aches that a certain class of nerdy 16-year-olds were feeling in 1968. For a good many reasons, only some of which I’ve discussed here, 2001 has long been and will likely remain my favorite film of all time. I remember those aches, and wear them proudly, as they are the aches of boys who dare to dream.
This is a coffee table book, but one that you may actually read cover-to-cover. (I’m not quite done but will be soon. There have been times when I’ve had to take a deep breath and set it down.) Softcover. $49. Very highly recommended.
Peace Through Superior Flier-Power
Worldcon, Day 3. I spent a goodly chunk of today helping Gretchen and Bill at their tables down in the dealer room. Part of this involved distracting Julie (my younger niece, age 4) who was bored and making Gretchen a little nuts. Her sister Katie is old enough to go to the kid programming room by herself; Julie still needs an adult escort, and will accept no substitutes for Mommy. Mommy, alas, had a table to run.
We did our best. I showed Julie how to make a paper airplane from a sheet of green construction paper and two paperclips that had been hanging out in the bottom of my briefcase. We got us a decent airplane together, and I tried hard to persuade her that aviation is more finesse than brute strength. She had a tendency to want to wind up and throw the plane with all her might; after a few demos she seemed to pick up on the fact that a little thrust in a straight line will work better than a roundhouse discus hurl. The plane flew, Julie was delighted, and Mommy got some much-needed peace.
All in the greater cause of growing up. My older cousin Diane taught me to make paper airplanes as well as other things, like pumping a swing. I was older than four, too. My catalog of Uncle Jeff Tricks is both deep and broad, but most require a little more physical maturity than either Katie or Julie have just yet.
I did notice with considerable pleasure that Katie was building things out of mainstream Lego (not MegaBlox) in the kid programming room. There is a Lego hoard in a corner of my workshop, awaiting the proper time. That time is coming soon.
Again, much of a good con is conversation, and I had quite a bit of that. I even spoke briefly with Harry Turtledove at his signing for Every Inch a King. I stood in awe of Steve Jackson’s creation called “Steampunk Chaos,” which is a sort of huge Rube Goldberg marble-track thingamajigger with a steampunk flavor that Steve has been assembling now for several years. He evidently builds a core machine and then invites bystanders to dig into his boxes full of loose parts and extend it. Most of the extenders were young teen boys, and by all accounts they were having a marvelous time. I took photos but none really captures the geeky bronze (painted) awesomeness of it all.
The crowds at Worldcon this year seem a little thin, both to me and to others that I spoke to this afternoon. Rumor has it that the organizer of DragonCon explicitly pledged to drive the SF Worldcon into the sea by siphoning off younger congoers, and he may well be succeeding. The response, of course, would be to hold Worldcon a little earlier, prompting at least some people to attend Worldcon first and exhaust their resources before DragonCon. That may or may not work, but the graying of Worldcon was painfully obvious, and it would be well worth a try.
More visiting tomorrow, maybe a little more shopping, and a long-awaited chance to pitch Ten Gentle Opportunities to a major publisher. Stay tuned.
Worn Out in the Big City
Just got downtown here in Chicago for the World Science Fiction Convention, Chicon 7. I have a nice room on an upper floor of a good hotel, and pointedly not at the Hyatt, the main convention location. That was deliberate. I like peace and quiet, especially when I try to sleep, and I’ve been to enough Worldcons to know that I’m peculiar in that regard.
Ok, sure, I’m peculiar in a lot of other regards too. But for the next couple of days, that’s the big one.
Crowds have always made me uneasy. This was true even 35-odd years ago when I worked downtown just a few blocks south of here. I was in and out of office buildings all day, fixing Xerox machines, so I was down there on the sidewalks flowing with the trudging masses more than most people do on any given day. After that there was the ride home on the El, packed like bits in a Zip file. I didn’t find it exhilarating. I found it exhausting. I never knew just how exhausting until I bought a very Cleaver-ish white house in a tidy, quiet Rochester NY picket-fence suburb. Carol and I could sit on our patio on temperate days and have supper without hearing anything but birds, lawnmowers, and the occasional truck on Monroe Avenue. Our biggest challenge was keeping Mr. Byte from raiding the strawberry patch when we weren’t looking.
As my friends know, I am not shy and retiring in the least. I’ve given many speeches and seminars to large-ish audiences, including one that must have been close to a thousand people. I even did standup comedy once, though I did have some help and a very workable crowd.
I’ve never been stepped on at a soccer riot, nor squeezed in front of a stage at a rock concert. I can only conclude that a preference for quiet living is genetic. I wonder if it’s maybe yet another survival-selected holdover from my cave-dwelling ancestors, who knew in their guts that when too many Neanderthals hung out in the same place, skulls got bashed and the hunting got thin.
So in a few minutes I’ll throw this thing in the room safe and thread my way down into the pandemonium that is a Worldcon. I have people to see that I don’t see very often, books to buy (and sign; I’ll be at the ISFiC Press table at some point) and a meeting with an editor who has expressed interest in Ten Gentle Opportunities. As always it will be a cortisol thrill-ride, and tonight I will gladly vanish back up here and leave the all-night partying to those better adapted than I.
More as it happens.
Safe Home…For Now
Quick update while I’m still conscious: We rolled back into Colorado Springs at about 4 PM. We took the back roads home: I-76 down from I-80 in Nebraska as far as Brush, and then Colorado 71 south to Limon, where we caught US 24 west to the city. I didn’t want to encounter traffic or possible closures coming down from Denver along I-25. It worked well, though we didn’t come at the mountains from the north and thus did not see most of where the fire’s still a very serious problem. Our firefighters have done a heroic job keeping the blaze away from densely populated areas, especially in the ancient and almost entirely wooden town of Manitou Springs.
In taking Colorado 71 south we drove through the range of the now-but-just-barely extinguished Last Chance Fire, and were boggled by blackened grassland that stretched out as far as the eye could see, 45,000 acres in all. We had thought to stop at the legendary ice cream shop at the crossroads (as we had hoped to our last time through Last Chance) but as best we can tell it perished, along with ten other structures nearby.
We got Jimi Henton back to her own house now that the danger appears to have passed in her area and turned (mostly) north. We can see some smoke from here but no flames. Again, we’re now fourteen miles or so from the front lines, and for the time being in no danger. The weather broke shortly before we got here: Temps fell to the more seasonal mid-80s, it clouded up, and in some places even rained a little. Please, Sir, can we have some more?
Anyway. To bed, glad the fire isn’t breathing down out necks but still fretting for others and hoping this sore throat isn’t a harbinger of worse tomorrow. I may be coming down with an eye infection, too. Sorrows come not as single spies, but in battalions, yup. Or, to put a more modern spin on it, when was the last time you heard the singular form of “droves”?
You Can’t Go Home Again
We’re back and I’m ok; you can stop worrying about me now. (Nonetheless, many thanks for all the concerned emails.) We flew to Chicago to house-sit for Carol’s sister for a week or so, and most of what I did there was read books and visit family and a few old friends. My arm no longer hurts…much, and that only when I put significant weight or torque on it. I’m going to strength training tomorrow, a session I suspect will be interesting.
In the meantime, I passed through my old neighborhood on the way to visit my kindergarten friend Art, and cruised down the street where I grew up, to see the house I lived in until I was 23. I was halfway down the block when it hit me: This is all wrong. I stopped where I knew my old house had been, and looked at something that was no longer my old house. In fact, it looked a lot like Dorothy’s tornado had dropped somebody else’s house on top of the house of my birth and somehow got the alignment right.
Let me show you the house shortly after its completion in 1949:
It was a fairly common design, by the well-known Chicago developer Maclennan, and there were lots of them in our neighborhood. The original floor plan was just 900 square feet, with only two bedrooms and one bath. When my sister came along in 1956 my parents put a floor under the cathedral ceiling and made a third bedroom out of it, with a new dormer for a half bath upstairs. Shortly after that, they put a good-sized family room off the back side of the house that ran the full width of the structure. The family room included a brick fireplace with its own chimney. It was a little tight (especially by today’s standards) but I finished the basement in knotty pine when I was 15 and after establishing my desk and workbench there spent a great deal of my time downstairs.
My mother lived there for 47 years, and when we sold the house in 1996 I figured that somebody would put some work into it. Whew. Was I right or what? It looks like they literally shaved off the second story and the family room completely, or possibly gutted the place down to the brick walls and started over. (I’m guessing my knotty pine walls in the basement did not make the cut either.) The house as it is today looks a little topheavy, but the lot is only 35 feet wide, and it takes some creativity to maximize the useful space buildable on that little land.
No hard feelings, though forgive me for thinking that it just looks funny. The most striking change was the removal of both chimneys, which made me sigh because my first ham radio antenna was 30′ of #22 wire strung from one chimney to the other. I worked 34 states from that house (on a hacked-up Knight T-60) and saw eight planets from the front lawn. It was, let’s say, formative.
Much more to talk about. I’ll try and catch up in coming days. I have a new desktop machine here, having scragged the old one by touching it before grounding myself. When you see a quarter-inch spark jump from your finger to a USB port, you know that nothing good is about to happen. I have a sketch for a steampunk discharge station coming together, with a 5″ bronze gear and a VR-75 gas regulator tube for visual effects. Touch your quadcore before touching the discharge station, and it’s back to your Babbage barn, bunky!
Dash Nails It. Twice.
(Photo above courtesy Dr. Kathy Jordan.) We got back from Denver Monday night with a folder full of ribbons and, in the kennel in the back seat, a new Bichon Frise champion: Ch. Jimi’s Faster Than Light, better known to most of you as Dash. I also came back with a miserable headcold, so if this (rather late) entry is thin gruel, it’s because my head still feels like very thick gruel.
We’ve gone to the annual Rocky Mountain Cluster Dog Show now for several years. It’s the largest AKC event in the mountain west, and consists of four separate dog shows on four consecutive days. This makes it worthwhile for people to travel a fair distance to get there, since for each breed there are four chances to win. With more dogs entered, there are also more chances for the coveted “major win,” two of which are necessary for a dog to achieve championship. At smaller shows you can collect conformation points toward championship, but without those two major wins, that last step can’t happen. (Dog show rules are complex, and I can’t do them justice in a single blog entry.)
It’s a big show, and in fact dwarfs the Bichon Frise National Specialty, which we call Bichonicon and attend when it isn’t too far. This year the lousy economy reduced attendance from a typical 3,000 dogs to about 2,500–which is still a lot of dogs.
We already have a champ in the house: Aero became a champion in 2010. We’ve been working on Dash and Jack since then. Dash has been racking up points fairly regularly since we began showing him as a puppy. In fact, he’s been “singled out” now for some time, which means that he had more than the required fifteen conformation points, but lacked a second major win to become a champion.
The Rocky Mountain Cluster doesn’t always present an opportunity for Bichon Frise majors (which depends on the number of breed dogs entered) but this year it did, for both males and females. The Rocky Mountain Bichon Frise Club was there in force, with a bichon enclave roped off down in the lower-level cattle pens at the National Western Complex, near the junction of I-25 and I-70.
Carol had been working on Dash’s coat for some time, having studied under long-time bichon groomers including Jimi Henton here in the Springs, and Lorrie Carlton of Belle Creek Bichons in Plymouth, Michigan. Dash certainly looked about as good as he ever has, and on Friday morning mostly needed fluffing up. Carol did a very good groom job on Jack as well, but Jack has special problems unrelated to his coat, which is superb. Jack is shy, and has a hard time keeping his tail up and over his back (as required by the breed standard) when in the midst of dog show pandemonium. We’re working on that, and in fact have made great progress since he came to us in 2009, but when he’s in the ring his tail drops.
Carol and I both “handle;” that is, we both usher a dog around the show ring. She typically handles Dash, and I typically handle Jack. On Friday the judge in our ring was the formidable Edd Bivin, an intense and cerebral dog expert who has been an AKC judge since 1961, and regularly chairs the Best In Show panel and provides commentary on the televised Eukanuba National Championship dog shows. (No pressure!) Dash, now two and a half, still has more than a touch of puppy in him, and did not behave as well as we had hoped. Nonetheless, when all the male bichons had marched around the ring for the final review, Edd Bivin pointed at him for the #1 position. Dash had beaten all (male) comers, and nailed his second major. He was a champ.
Dash didn’t win Best of Breed that day, an honor taken by Lindsay Van Keuren’s bitch Barbie. (Remember that “bitch” is a technical term in the dog realm, and simply means “female.”) Several people who watched him suggested that when he matures a little more (and stops squirming like a sixth grader) he will be unstoppable. Carol is considering going on with him to compete for the title of AKC Grand Champion, which is a much tougher climb.
We’ll see on that. As for the rest of the show, Dash squirmed his way out of winning on Saturday and Sunday, but again pulled down a major win on Monday, under veteran AKC judge Carl Gomes. So he now has three major wins and 23 points. Since he needs only two majors and fifteen points to be a champion, he has a comfortable margin. Jack looked great but just couldn’t keep his tail up, and will need some additional training. We all came home dog-tired and covered with dog hair, not to mention this peculiar brown dust that churns up in the cattle pens. (You can guess where that comes from, keeping in mind that these are not dog pens…)
By the next morning I had come down with a whomping headcold, which is still with me as I write. Doesn’t matter. Dash got his championship. The whole Pack got some chicken liver. Carol shared a couple of malted milk balls with me and then ordered me to bed. Dog shows are hard work, and a hairy business. Still, we had more fun than we’ve had in a good long while.
MileHi Con 43
Just got back last night from MileHi Con 43, held at the Denver Tech Center Hyatt. I haven’t been to a lot of cons lately, and my congoing skills are definitely rusty. One of these skills is new to me: Remember that your phone contains a camera. Duhh. My V530 camera jammed with the lens open so I didn’t get any photos, but I’ve requested some from friends and will post a few here as time allows.
What was a little surprising is how much a con in 2011 feels like a con in 1981. The big difference comes down to one word: smartphones. Nobody spends any time searching for friends at cons these days because everybody always knows where everybody else is, and if somebody wanders outside a general understanding of their whereabouts, well, it’s one tap and they’re back within earshot.
Costuming has also changed, though this may be old news. However well-done, the costumes were basically hall costumes rather than elaborate and fragile stage-show assemblages that you could barely move in, much less sit down. The con organized a zombie crawl around the 16th Street Mall on Saturday afternoon, and it got into the Sunday Denver Post. The Post also did a good job snapping most of the better costumes, and you can see them in a slide show on the newspaper’s site. I had never heard of absinthe fairies, but boy, there were a lot of them around. (And, later, “wingfic.” Yes, there is a subsubsubsubgenre called wingfic. It’s about characters who have wings. Beyond that, anything goes.)
I hung a lot with close friends Jim Strickland and his wife Marcia Bednarczyk, as well as Taos Toolbox colleague Sean Eret. Jim and I both did panels, and we shared a late-night author reading slot at 10PM on Friday. The reading was interesting for a peculiar reason: I did not get an email that the other five panelists apparently did, reminding everybody (but me) that the reading had been slotted late to allow for sex and violence. I was fourth of five in order to read. In quick succession we heard some bishonen fiction (there’s a descriptive Japanese word for the genre that I can’t find right now but sounds like “yowee”) and some heavy-duty mayhem (including a gripping section of Jim’s novel-in-progress, Brass and Steel: Inferno) plus a sex scene with Dr. Moreau’s squid-woman. Then it was my turn. “And now for something completely different,” I said, and began: “STORMY vs. the Tornadoes…”
They loved it. Comic relief exists for a reason.
Speaking of which: I had chosen STORMY because I was on a panel about writing SF humor the next day. The panel was great: We dissected the machineries of humor, and delivered quite a bit of it ourselves. (I sang a little of my 1976 filk from “West Side Story,” “I’m a Trekkie,” if you can picture that.) I was a little surprised that out of an audience of forty or fifty, only two people had ever heard of The Witches of Karres, which I was using as an example of that rarest of things, SF whimsy. Another person asked me to spell “Laumer.” Egad. I guess I’ve been away a long time.
My other panel was about robots, and once we got past some problems with definitions (Robots, to me, are “AIs in a can,” not cyborgs) we did some good things. Again, I was puzzled that so few people were familiar with AMEE, which I consider the scariest robot in film history. I was delighted to be sitting on the panel beside longtime SF writer Cynthia Felice, whom I had read years back but never met. She is gracious, interesting, and, well, tall. (She also grew up in Chicago and now lives in Colorado Springs, which I did not know.) At the end of the panel, the moderator took a quick audience poll, and we discovered that (within this microcosm, at least) Marvin the Paranoid Android is our favorite robot.
I hugely enjoyed it, and with Carol away in Chicago and all of the Pack except for QBit vacationing at Jimi Henton’s, I hope to use some found energy to make progress on Ten Gentle Opportunities over the next few days. I talked to people at the con who write four novels a year. I started work on Ten Gentle Opportunities in 1984, and it’s based on an (unpublished) novelette I originally wrote in 1981. Gotta pick up the pace a little, whew.
