Vacation, Day 6
Oct. 4th, 2015 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowThursday, August 20... I'm having a little trouble figuring out my notes. I marked a number of events that I wanted to attend, but did not, and I can't remember what-all I did instead. So, just a few highlights instead of a full recap.
1) I went to the Dealers Room again, and this time I bought some stuff - eight books. Some were things I had read, but had lost or never owned: LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Balmer and Wylie's When Worlds Collide, Silverberg's Hawksbill Station, MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon; others were classics I'd never gotten to: LeGuin again (The Word for World Is Forest), Wilhelm (Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang), White (Mistress Masham's Repose); and one was a Jack Vance (The Blue World) I'd never even heard of - but you know what you're getting, when you get a Vance. I'll probably give brief reviews, or at least commentaries, on them once I finish them all. I was to make one more shopping trip, on Saturday.
2) Music! There were a lot of half-hour filk concerts; some were local talent, others were big names on tour. On Thursday I went to two of them, by local Kathleen Sloan and by Roberta Rogow, whom I'd seen at Archon in - was it 2006? Sloan's performance included: "They're Made out of Meat" (based on a story by Terry Bisson; an alien exploration team, invisibly investigating the possibility of life and intelligence in this star system, make a startling discovery: they're made out of meat! After much discussion, the aliens decide no one back home will believe it, so they purge the records and leave.); "Do You Wanna Build an Iron Man" (a Frozen pastiche, of course, doing homage to the Marvel Cinematic Universe); and "Take It Back" ("it" being singing and dancing, to be taken back from the pros and returned to everybody). The first was hilarious, as the science officer tries to explain how these peculiar beings think, communicate, and reproduce; the second was cute; and the third put me in mind of a talk Sally Childs-Helton gave, also at Archon, on the peculiar position of music in modern society. Music is ours, dammit! (Sara Bareilles hits the same sort of theme in "Brave", which is one reason I love that song.) Rogow's performance included "It's a Strange World" (a song about ex-planet Pluto, to the obvious tune); a song about Schindler's famous list, and one about working women in space; and "Fact and Fiction", ttto "Both Sides Now" - "It's science fiction we recall, we don't know ### at all". All delightful, of course.
3) I spent a little time at the Business Meeting, watching the parliamentary duel between supporters and opponents of the E Pluribus Hugo amendment; I voted in support a couple of times. (EPH was eventually approved on Sunday, after I'd left; it needs to be passed again at next year's Worldcon, in Kansas City, to take effect. If it works as intended, Hugo voting from 2017 on will be somewhat more resistant to slate voting, such as marred the ballot this year.)
4) Panels. Let's see, I went to one panel on "Steampunk and Colonialism". I enjoy steampunk; I have several of James Blaylock's books, which helped kick off that movement, and I'm a loyal reader of Girl Genius online. I do recognize the problematic ties of steampunk to a glamorized Victorian era, with all the ugly overseas stuff sanitized out of existence. The panelists discussed, among other things, steampunk based in non-European milieus; I believe one of them was writing, or had written, an Asante-based steampunk story, which sounded very interesting, but I didn't get the title. One panelist mentioned Marx's discussion of the consequences of free movement of capital together with constrained movement of labor - something which is apropos today, let alone in the Victorian era! I also attended a panel on the prospect of pandemics in the future; there was considerable denigration of the depiction of pandemics in SF - too-swift devastation, the inverse relation between virulence and transmissibility, immunity, institutional response, and so on. Most of the focus was on flu and flu derivatives; I think there was a little discussion of the appearance and spread of multi-resistant diseases like MRSA. There was also a panel on medieval science and technology that I really wanted to attend, but the room was far too small for the demand. (This happened several times, especially in the science-related events - poor planning on the organizers' part, say I.)
5) I also went to a reading by Connie Willis of her next novel, about a sort of artificial telepathy which people could sign up for; the young adult narrator signs up, and, naturally (this is Willis, after all) hilarity ensues. Now, Connie Willis is a delightful person, and she's written some absolutely brilliant novels and short works, but :wince: she really doesn't have the hang of reading aloud. She wasn't monotone, exactly, but there wasn't enough variability in her voice to bring the excerpt to life. It does sound like a fun read, though.
6) Late in the day, Filthy Pierre led a campfire-style sing-along; the "campfire" was constructed of colored strips of crepe paper attached to a fan, positioned to blow upward. It was kind of fun, but too many of the songs were to tunes I wasn't familiar with and couldn't learn fast enough. I did finally hear "Banned from Argo"....
And that was Day 6 of my vacation.
1) I went to the Dealers Room again, and this time I bought some stuff - eight books. Some were things I had read, but had lost or never owned: LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Balmer and Wylie's When Worlds Collide, Silverberg's Hawksbill Station, MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon; others were classics I'd never gotten to: LeGuin again (The Word for World Is Forest), Wilhelm (Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang), White (Mistress Masham's Repose); and one was a Jack Vance (The Blue World) I'd never even heard of - but you know what you're getting, when you get a Vance. I'll probably give brief reviews, or at least commentaries, on them once I finish them all. I was to make one more shopping trip, on Saturday.
2) Music! There were a lot of half-hour filk concerts; some were local talent, others were big names on tour. On Thursday I went to two of them, by local Kathleen Sloan and by Roberta Rogow, whom I'd seen at Archon in - was it 2006? Sloan's performance included: "They're Made out of Meat" (based on a story by Terry Bisson; an alien exploration team, invisibly investigating the possibility of life and intelligence in this star system, make a startling discovery: they're made out of meat! After much discussion, the aliens decide no one back home will believe it, so they purge the records and leave.); "Do You Wanna Build an Iron Man" (a Frozen pastiche, of course, doing homage to the Marvel Cinematic Universe); and "Take It Back" ("it" being singing and dancing, to be taken back from the pros and returned to everybody). The first was hilarious, as the science officer tries to explain how these peculiar beings think, communicate, and reproduce; the second was cute; and the third put me in mind of a talk Sally Childs-Helton gave, also at Archon, on the peculiar position of music in modern society. Music is ours, dammit! (Sara Bareilles hits the same sort of theme in "Brave", which is one reason I love that song.) Rogow's performance included "It's a Strange World" (a song about ex-planet Pluto, to the obvious tune); a song about Schindler's famous list, and one about working women in space; and "Fact and Fiction", ttto "Both Sides Now" - "It's science fiction we recall, we don't know ### at all". All delightful, of course.
3) I spent a little time at the Business Meeting, watching the parliamentary duel between supporters and opponents of the E Pluribus Hugo amendment; I voted in support a couple of times. (EPH was eventually approved on Sunday, after I'd left; it needs to be passed again at next year's Worldcon, in Kansas City, to take effect. If it works as intended, Hugo voting from 2017 on will be somewhat more resistant to slate voting, such as marred the ballot this year.)
4) Panels. Let's see, I went to one panel on "Steampunk and Colonialism". I enjoy steampunk; I have several of James Blaylock's books, which helped kick off that movement, and I'm a loyal reader of Girl Genius online. I do recognize the problematic ties of steampunk to a glamorized Victorian era, with all the ugly overseas stuff sanitized out of existence. The panelists discussed, among other things, steampunk based in non-European milieus; I believe one of them was writing, or had written, an Asante-based steampunk story, which sounded very interesting, but I didn't get the title. One panelist mentioned Marx's discussion of the consequences of free movement of capital together with constrained movement of labor - something which is apropos today, let alone in the Victorian era! I also attended a panel on the prospect of pandemics in the future; there was considerable denigration of the depiction of pandemics in SF - too-swift devastation, the inverse relation between virulence and transmissibility, immunity, institutional response, and so on. Most of the focus was on flu and flu derivatives; I think there was a little discussion of the appearance and spread of multi-resistant diseases like MRSA. There was also a panel on medieval science and technology that I really wanted to attend, but the room was far too small for the demand. (This happened several times, especially in the science-related events - poor planning on the organizers' part, say I.)
5) I also went to a reading by Connie Willis of her next novel, about a sort of artificial telepathy which people could sign up for; the young adult narrator signs up, and, naturally (this is Willis, after all) hilarity ensues. Now, Connie Willis is a delightful person, and she's written some absolutely brilliant novels and short works, but :wince: she really doesn't have the hang of reading aloud. She wasn't monotone, exactly, but there wasn't enough variability in her voice to bring the excerpt to life. It does sound like a fun read, though.
6) Late in the day, Filthy Pierre led a campfire-style sing-along; the "campfire" was constructed of colored strips of crepe paper attached to a fan, positioned to blow upward. It was kind of fun, but too many of the songs were to tunes I wasn't familiar with and couldn't learn fast enough. I did finally hear "Banned from Argo"....
And that was Day 6 of my vacation.
