This year's Worldcon was kind of an odd duck, where a number of initial logistical problems didn't detract from a generally positive overall convention. If anything can be said of this edition, is was that it didn't seem to have a personal stamp, the website leading up to the con was pretty generic, the newsletter was generally businesslike and not very informative. Somewhere along the line the pocket program became totally invalidated by last-minute changes, mostly to the program participants, rendering it basically useless, but they adapted to that quickly. The souvenir program book wasn't available until Friday, but since they thought it was going to be Sunday that was an improvement. And Progress Report 6, which contained the quickie form plus all sorts of info on GST and other stuff that it would be useful to have before the convention, arrived in my mailbox at home while I was in Toronto.



Toronto itself is kind of a one-horse town for a major city, but Beth managed to find plenty to do with the kids for four days, from Casa Loma in the city to the Toronto Zoo and even Marineland, which is down by Niagara Falls. We all went to the Royal Ontario Museum on Friday night when it's free to check out the dinosaurs and the bat cave. The museum is in the middle of a major expansion, so a lot of stuff wasn't on display, but there was plenty for the amount of time we were there, including all the important stuff. We also all went together to the CN Tower, which cost a whopping US$50 for a family of four, hardly a good value for your entertainment dollar since once you get to the observation deck all there is to look at is Toronto. The kids liked the glass floor, though.



Here's a rundown of all the panels I attended:



Thursday



The John W Campbell Award, with George RR Martin, Gardner Dozois, Spider Robinson, Harry Harrison



Harry Harrison pointed out that he was a judge or founder of a different Campbell award, but the concom failed to let that stand in the way of having him on this panel. There was some discussion of the merits of the award to a person’s career (Robinson, who was the only actual winner, thought it helped), and some amusing banter about how most of the people that won, at least initially, wrote the kind of stories that Campbell would have rejected.



The John Campbell Award winners, 30 years later, with Cory Doctorow, Harry Harrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Kristine Smith



A second hour followed with some recent Campbell winners, plus Harrison again, who excused himself after reiterating that he was unaware of anyone else who has two awards named after him (surely there must be one, but I can’t think of any, either). Again, the consensus was that putting the words “Campbell Award Winner” on the front of your latest book was a good thing, even if people didn’t know what it was for. A number of past winners have still faded into obscurity (including a couple on the panel).



Chesley Awards, a Retrospective



A bit disappointing, as one would think a retrospective would include slides of previous winners, given the word “retrospective” in the title plus the fact that the discussion took place in the room with the slide projector. But it was not to be, each editor of the new retrospective book merely droned on about how wonderful all the other editors were. I left after 20 minutes and went to the dealers room.



Writing the Extraordinary Realistically, with Connie Willis, Nancy Kress



Connie Willis as usual had the most to say, talking about how the recent movie “Seabiscuit” would never succeed as a work of fiction because it hinges upon an unlikely coincidence as its central premise, and you can’t get away with that when you make the story up. Kress said if your premise hinges on coincidence, it needs to happen as backstory. Also featured some annoying girl named Melinda something who was kinda cute but had never had a story published and yet was full of advice.



Conversation with George and Howard, with George R R Martin and Howard Waldrop



Late Thursday night there was this discussion between these two long-time friends, which I went to after peeking in the room where Spider Robinson was singing and hearing about 30 seconds worth. Some of what was discussed about Martin was regurgitated from the program book, but since it didn’t arrive until the next day, it was a new story to everyone. There’s an interesting contrast between the two as Martin is now hugely successful where Waldrop continues to write quirky, niche stories that are generally not published by the major magazines, and no novels, which leads me to believe that the hand-to-mouth existence he describes from the ‘70’s probably hasn’t changed that much today.



Friday



Remembering Isaac Asimov, with Hal Clement, Sheila Williams, Fred Pohl



I hadn’t seen Sheila Williams before and she told a good story about meeting Asimov for the first time as a teenager, and being invited to sit next to him at a banquet. Everyone of course talked about how wonderful Asimov was, they touched briefly on his fear of heights that precluded him from traveling by plane or approaching the windows of his penthouse New York apartment. Wililams told about how prolific Asimov could be, such that he could write a story to fill a gap in an upcoming issue, and even at the end of his life was still submitting stories and articles.



Reading from A Feast for Crows, with George RR Martin



GRRM read from his forthcoming (someday) fourth book in the Ice and Fire series, a chapter about Jon Snow. Martin says “My characters take 20 pages to clear their throats”. Listening to a reading, you definitely get the sense of the glacial pace at which the story unfolds, and something of an understanding of why the book is over a year late with no end in sight. Apparently after abandoning his original idea of four books, he settled on two trilogies, with a five-year gap in between, but after finishing the third book decided there were two many interesting things going on to just skip ahead five years in the action, and as a result sounds like he is bogged down in all the palace intrigue and machinations that were going on in Storm of Swords. He would offer no hint as to when it will be finished.



1953: The Year of the First Hugo, with David Kyle, Robert Silverberg



Didn’t get many chances to hear Silverberg talk this time, and he tends to be at his most entertaining when looking back at sf history, since he’s been there for most of it. They went over the circumstances of the winners of the first Hugos (for which there was no voting), what Worldcons were like back then, and how cheaply the first Hugos were made.



Reading from Callahan’s Con, with Spider Robinson



Robinson’s readings are always fun, and he apologized for leaving out a few puns which he said would just not work orally but had to be seen to be understood. He read the first chapter of his just-published book, which I think (and he mentioned this at a later panel), shows that, for all intents and purposes, he’s really a fantasy writer, given the various characteristics of the inhabitants of Callahan’s (talking dogs, invisible girls, etc.). His books read like an oral history, so they come across very well in readings, and this was no exception.



But for the Dinosaur Killer, with Harry Harrison, Robert Sawyer



Also featured a paleontologist or somesuch from one of the Toronto museums, who didn’t seem to get the idea of sf, in that people would ask him to extrapolate on various aspects of the dinosaurs if they hadn’t died out or whatever, and he tended to answer them with “That would be highly speculative.” Sawyer and Harrison have both written a number of stories about dinosaurs and tried to keep things interesting, but with only limited success.



Saturday



Meet the John W Campbell Award Finalists, with Charles Coleman Finley, Karin Lowachee, Wen Spencer, Ken Wharton, David Levine



This was one of the more interesting panels for me, as this was the first time I could put a face to the five nominees and get a concise background in what they’ve written that made them nominated in the first place. Finley of course was the prominent sf author here with his Hugo nominee. Lowachee was in for a single novel only, but it was good enough for a nomination. Levine and Finley have published only short fiction, Wharton (who is a physicist) several Analog stories and one novel that seems to have disappeared already. Spencer, the eventual winner, was the only hard fantasy writer nominated, although some of Finley’s stories qualify as fantasy. Some were young, some were middle-aged, it was interesting to hear how they all came to writing sf, what they did to break into the field, and win or lose what they planned to do next.



50th Anniversary of Ace Books, with Ginjer Buchanan



Caught some of this presentation of what’s coming from Ace books, it all sounds very interesting but unfortunately you can only read a few of them. Unlike the later show by Tor, this one involved holding up book jackets and passing them around the room. There were some galleys to give away, though.



Research 101, with Connie Willis, Terry Pratchett, Sheila Williams, William Dietz



I’ve been to panels on this topic before, but since Pratchett and Willis are so darn entertaining I was willing to go through it again. There was much discussion about how to distill the 6000 books on a particular subject one will find referenced on the internet into the couple that you actually have time to read, but Pratchett I thought made the best suggestion in that he typically bypasses that type of research in favor of speaking directly to people who are already experts on a subject, which he finds much less time-consuming. The annoying Melinda girl was on this panel too, again with plenty of opinions and no published work to show for it.



Guest of Honor Speech, with George R R Martin



This was not your garden variety GoH speech, as Martin went into his ancestry, childhood and formative years in excruciating detail, saving future biographers tons of effort in the process. Martin would seem to have been embued with many of the trappings of the counterculture prevalent at the time, but his working class upbringing in Bayonne New Jersey gave him a fairly standard middleclass upbringing, which he managed to overcome anyway and start off on the road to sf superstardom with relative ease. And he’s a fellow Northwestern alum, to boot.



Heinlein, Lost, Strayed, Misplaced and Found Again, with Spider Robinson and a bunch of Heinlein Society types



Apparently, if you listen to these guys, Heinlein was one of the great writers of the 20th century and the fact that the lost manuscript of his forgotten first novel has been uncovered is comparable to uncovering the Dead Sea Scrolls. Robinson is appropriately less enthused, I think, as the book they’re about to publish, called “For Us, the Living”, is not really a novel at all but a fictionalized look at a number of ideas Heinlein was chewing on in 1939 that became the foundation of his entire output. I’m sure it will be interesting for Heinlein buffs, but much like his "Number of the Beast", I predict it will be largely dismissed by the vast majority of normal people who read it.



Hugo Awards



The Hugo Awards are always frought with excitement for me, because the people I vote for almost never win, and this year was no exception. The organizers of the awards wisely chose not to try too hard on the multimedia presentation which has encumbered several other recent editions, and just stuck with the standard slides. The Hugo award itself looked very nice, not too garish, which is good. Spider Robinson emceed, and after his opening monologue said virtually nothing else of interest the entire evening, which was too bad. Landis won for his two-page short story, Swanwick was not present to accept his award for novelette, Gaiman made a return appearance to pick up the novella award (and reminded everyone of what he said when he won last year), and Sawyer was gushing when he finally won Best Novel in a breathtaking display of how much the Hugos are a popularity contest. I don’t begrudge Landis and Swanwick winning their categories, but I think Coraline was overrated and that China Mieville was robbed, or should I say “Robbed”.



Sunday



China Mieville and Kim Stanley Robinson in Conversation



Or a couple of white Marxist guys sitting around talking about stuff. Mieville, who I guess is a bit older than you would think given his brief time on the scene, is full of opinions about writing and what interests him and what doesn’t, and used the word “texture” several times in describing working things into a story, which I thought was an interesting way of putting it. Robinson gave some background in how Years of Rice and Salt developed and what set him to writing it to begin with, but some of the things he talks about wanting to see or do in fiction don’t seem to have manifested themselves in the book (and he admits that maybe his reach exceeded his grasp in this case). I could listen to these two guys all day.



A Multi-User Shared Hallucination (Wild Cards), with George RR Martin, Howard Waldrop



Saw some of this panel, which would’ve been more interesting if I’d actually read any of the anthologies they were talking about. Mostly Martin and Waldrop trading more barbs, Waldrop only wrote the initial story, set well in the past, which the other contributors then played off of to bring the setting up to the present. I’d be interested in reading the first collection, although it sounds like it’s either wait until it’s back in print or go hunting on eBay.



What’s New at Tor, with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, David Hartwell



There’s so much new at Tor that it takes 90 minutes to go through it all, and I just saw the last 15 or 20. They covered what’s coming in their new YA and “teen” lines, which I hope will have enough marketing clout to succeed where others have failed. Tons of other stuff coming out, way too much to read, but most of it sounds real cool.



Quantum Dots and Programmable Matter, with Wil McCarthy



The one science panel I attended, based on McCarthy’s recent article in Analog, in which he discusses the mechanics of “programmable matter”, the ability to change the makeup of atoms to make them into whatever you want. As a practical application, he was offering the idea of a truly smart house, where you could plug anything into anywhere and the walls would create the virtual wiring to make it work. Still some technical hurdles to overcome, obviously, but some neat ideas.



Hollywood: Beauty and the Beast, with George RR Martin



Martin showed an episode of his tv show Beauty and the Beast, and talked quite about the history of the show, how he ended up associated with it and how it met its demise. An interesting view of how Hollywood works, the episode itself didn’t seem that original plotwise. Martin said in retrospect his biggest mistake was to kill off the "Beauty" character when Linda Hamilton left the show and then have the Beast brooding over it for several episodes, which got very depressing and turned people off.



The Future of Time Travel, with Fred Pohl, Ken Wharton



Some discussion of the various theories of time travel and their practical application in sf. Wharton described the two main types of time travel, which he named after the Terminator movies. The T1 theory says that you can’t change the past, such that if you try you end up causing what you were trying to prevent, and the T2 theory says that you can change the past, like in Day of the Daleks. Pohl didn't have too much else to contribute, but was very entertaining.



Guest of Honor Interview, with George RR Martin, Gardner Dozois



Dozois has missed his calling as a talk show host, and had many humorous anecdotes to share with Martin on various subjects. He also passed along questions he had solicited from other attendees, saving for last the question “Do you dress to the left or the right?”, to which Martin could only respond “I don’t even know what that means.” Martin talked about a number of topics, some ground he had covered before, he was certainly a very accessible guest of honor and never seemed to get tired of telling stories from his past fan days, including when he started the Hugo Losers club. He talked about playing strip poker or something with a bunch of fans a long time ago, and that Jack Chalker was the winner, to which Dozois replied "Well, then I think you were all winners there".