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August 08, 2006
Life : Gearing up for WorldCon
WorldCon (the world Science Fiction Convention) is in two weeks and I am getting ready to attend. The official program is not yet available (so I don't know yet what tough decisions I will need to make between seminars which have been scheduled at the same time); but the preliminary list of seminars has been posted and here is that subset which caught my attention. BTW – the best seminar title IMHO is "Everything I Needed to Know About Quantum Physics I Learned From the Three Stooges" which is apparently a serious explanation of Quantum Mechanics illustrated with clips from Three Stooges movies. Go figure.
Writing:
Assistant Editors: Glorified Gophers or Finders of Hidden Gems?
The Author/Editor Relationship
Character Vs. Plot
Clichés of the Future
Creating Languages
Culture Building 101.
A Day in the Life of an Editor
Different Types of Writing? The Novel, Novella, Short Story, etc.
Distribution: How SF Gets to You
Editing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Escaping the Slushpile
Furgonomics (designing a world and the stuff in it with non-humans in mind)
Getting Started Writing SF -- Part I & Part II.
Good Endings?
How to Kill off a Character.
It Crawled out of the Slush Pile.
Mistakes New Writers Make
Promoting Your Book & Yourself
Publishing Science Fiction
Revise, Revise, Revise!
The Secret of My Success.
Small Press Publishing
Time in the Novel: the Stapledon/ Woolf Correspondence
Writing Military SF
Writing Non-human Characters
Writing While Holding down a Day Job
You Are Responsible for Your Own Career.
SciFi
Aliens Beyond Probability (aliens that were too alien)
Dune Again Kevin J. Anderson talks about continuing the Dune series
Fantasy Doesn't Have to Be about Kings and Wizards, Well, does it?
Favorite Fallacies of Science Fiction
Future Trends in Science Fiction
Great First Lines
Overlooked Books & Overrated Novels
Look at past Futures (What did the science fiction of the '30s - '60s say about today?)
Military Tactics in Science Fiction
No, Really, That Makes Sense (a "stump the panel" event where they need to come up with explanations for things raised by the audience from fiction)
Page 119 (Can you really tell if a book is good by randomly opening it and reading a page or two?)
Religion in SF Books & Movies
Science Fiction of the '30s & '40s, '50s & '60s, and '70s & '80s (3 seminars)
from Smallville to Secret Identity (how the superman myth has been constantly reinvented)
Style Vs. Substance (Is science fiction becoming too concerned about literary style at the expense of storytelling?)
The Sound of Thomas Jefferson Spinning in His Grave (Why do the descendants of rebels love reading about kings and wizards?)
The Worst Ideas in Fantasy or Science Fiction
TV
Battlestar Galactica ( with Executive Producer Ron D. Moore and others.)
Crafting Buffy
Lost & How to Get There
Running TV Shows
SF TV as Western
The Surface of an Invasion is at the Threshold
What Is it about Buffy ? (why are people still talking about this show?)
What's next from the Sci Fi Channel
Star Trek: from Concept to Editor in 14 Days
Real World
Buffy the Masters Thesis (about the growing acceptance of "TV Studies" as an academic discipline)
Craig Newmark on Craigslist.
The Future We Didn't Expect (what did SciFi get wrong?)
Is the Scientific Method the Death of God?
Mistakes Future Historians Will Make about Our Time (If we were to read a story written in the 23rd Century but set in our time, what might we find wrong with it?)
Robocop Vs. Real Cop: Future Law Enforcement (Criminologists and others discuss what changes they're already seeing in their work and what they expect for the future)
Real Aliens (what might we expect real aliens to be like)
Secrets of Area 51 (Based on declassified government documents, personal interviews and extensive fieldwork, aerospace historian Peter W. Merlin reveals the secrets of Area 51. )
Nanotechnology: the Future or a Dying Fad?
Okay, You've Got the Moon. What're You Gonna Do with It?
Unexpected Heroes of the Future (what people from today will be revered in 100 years)
Unintended Consequences (how much do you trust science?)
What If Superheroes Were Real?
People
Being Anne McCaffrey.
Harlan Ellison Tells Us.
An Hour with Frederik Pohl.
Jerry Pournelle: Inventing the Future.
J. Michael Straczynski On...
The catch of course is that there are only 28 schedule slots in the program, and I already have 70 seminars I want to attend, so even if these were optimally scheduled for me I'd end up missing two-thirds of them. Sometimes you are lucky and two seminars you are interested in are across the hall from each other and you can time share between them; or you discover your first choice seminar has a bad panel and you quickly run to your second choice. But my observation from my last two WorldCons is that I probably miss about half of what I would have liked to have seen.
In addition, the seminars run straight from 10AM to 7PM every day with no break - there are no scheduled slots to go find a lunch - and then the evening programs usually run from 8PM-11PM. The bottom line is that WorldCons are endurance events. You try to grab as much as you can without killing yourself in the process.
Posted by Steven at August 8, 2006 06:52 PM
