Back to the Maui reminiscing. Friday morning once again we were up bright and early to get to Malaea Harbor by 7 am to catch the Four Winds II out to Molokini for a morning of beer and snorkeling. The weather was perfect, even a potentially bad omen when my hat blew off in the parking lot and was immediately run over didn't amount to anything. It took a good hour for the boat to make it out there, bouncing along, and by the time we got there I was ready to get in the water if only to alleviate a certain amount of wooziness. Bob had been up all night working, somehow having missed the idea of a vacation as a time when you don't work, but he did okay. He, Scott and I were the only ones snorkeling. Shelley didn't come for some reason, and Alexa was all suited up and ready to try it out until she got into the water. Instead they had a little raft you could float around on with a see through bottom, sort of a miniature glass-bottom boat, so she let Bob tow her around on that for ages and got a pretty good look at the fish that way. The fish were so used to having all these people around that they were all over the place. Even saw a small shark floating around the bottom, which surprised me for a second, but I looked around and no one else seemed worried, so I figured it must be ok. Jill stayed on the boat with Ashley, Mom and Shirley. You pay the same amount whether you snorkel or not, so for them it was just a rather expensive boat ride, and even hopped up on dramamine Mom couldn't dare move from her seat facing the shoreline the whole time we were anchored at Molokini, and of course couldn't eat anything either. She says in retrospect that's the one thing she wished she hadn't done. There was supposedly a glass bottom in the boat, but it wasn't very big, and if you're too sick to look down, it doesn't do much good anyway. Bob said he saw several people on the lower deck in worse shape then she was, though.



There were probably 12 to 15 boats of all sizes anchored on the near side of Molokini, ours was one of the larger ones, with a few hundred snorkelers and probably a decent amount of scuba divers, too, so yes it's a little on the crowded side, but there's enough reef to go around, and you can't spend hours just looking into the water, so it was fine. They had all the equipment you'd ever need (a number of people could barely swim but wanted to do it anyway), I made use of a floatation belt so I could just bob along the surface without having to worry about drowning, unlike at Black Rock two days before. Spent about 45 minutes in the water, came back and dried off for a while, then went back out for another half hour or so. In the meantime they were cooking up all manner of burgers and hot dogs, with cheap American beer to wash it down with. I was leery of my delicate landlubber stomach, but after the second trip into the water I figured there wasn't that much time left on the boat, so how bad could it get, and went ahead and had some of each. The trip back was pretty bouncy in parts (saw five sea turtles near the boat, too), but inexplicably the stomach was fine. We were back into port by noon or so.



We drove Scott down to the Nona Lani cottages where he and Shelley were staying so we could check out their place, more of a cabin, with no cable and no phone, right on the road overlooking the ocean. We met up with the Davises, and Mom and Jill gave the near-newlyweds some little trinkets as gifts. Seems like there must've been a couple of hours to kill in there somewhere, but I can't remember exactly what we did, until we had early dinner reservations (sort of a rehearsal dinner, sans rehearsal) at a restaurant just down the road. Once again we dining on the beach, the waiter apologized for the "hideous sunset" (in order for a sunset to be hideous I would think the sun would have to go nova or something), we consumed a huge meal with five bottles of wine, plus dessert, taking about three hours total. The girls went from cranky to hungry to droopy as the evening progressed, by the end we were all stuffed and glad to stand up for awhile. We got back to our hotel and crashed early in anticipation of the big day on Saturday.



The wedding was at 8:30 am, down past Kihei in Wailea at a little beach that was isolated enough from the main part of the beach that it was a popular "clothing optional" spot. I wore Dad's Hawaiian shirt, since I figured if he couldn't be there at least his shirt could. We were the first to arrive, and the Lemke's showed up shortly thereafter. You had to hike over some rocks and walk down the beach to get the designated spot, which is used quite often for weddings, apparently. The minister, photographer and video guy all showed up on time, even the bride and groom were there with time to spare. The ceremony was a little hard to hear, since the crashing waves tended to drown out the soft-spoken minister, Scott kept having to mop his forehead as the sun beat down on them, Ashley and Alexa played in the sand during the whole thing, and it was all over in a matter of minutes. We hung around for quite a while afterwards taking pictures and generally pissing off the people waiting to use that part of the beach. Saw one topless woman in the water from a distance, but that was about it. We all hiked back to the cars and drove back to Scott & Shelley's place, where we cracked open some wine and champagne and toasted the new couple. The Lemke's, Mom and Shirley and I went out for a late lunch at a Thai place down the road, then made the trek back to Kaanapali.



We had an hour or two of downtime before leaving for the Luau, which was just down the road in Lahaina. The Old Lahaina Luau served as the wedding reception, not just for us but for quite a few people. The buffet was a pretty good spread, once again we could see the sunset, the Mai Tai's just kept on coming. Mom finally got to try a Chi Chi, which she remembered Dad ordering in Hawaii, but wasn't that impressed with it. There was some entertainment before dinner, and the big show started just after dinner, featuring different styles of Hawaiin dance through the ages, but no juggling torches or anything. Actually ate less there than I did the night before, but it was a good chance to sample poi, kalua pork, and the ahi sushi, among a number of other things.



Sunday we were up early again so Mom and I could take a guided tour of the Road to Hana. The Lemkes met up with Scott and Shelley and went to the Aquarium. Shirley just hung out by the pool. We rode in the front of the bus (really just a van for 15 or so) so Mom didn't have any motion problems. The driver was a native 50-ish guy named Wes who started off claiming it was his first day on the job, but soon proved to have done this trip a million times and knew tons of stuff. Scott had taken the Davises through the whole trip in the jeep before we'd arrived, and he was underwhelmed by the whole thing, the first person I'd heard say that. But as the driver you wouldn't get to do much sightseeing while in the car, and without the guided tour, or at least the audio tour, then you'd be hardpressed to find half of the interesting things along the way. By the time you get past Hana and there's a long bumpy stretch through the desert, you'd just as soon someone else were driving and take a nap anyway, so the guided tour worked out the best for us I think. This way if you happen to drive by some people by the side of the road with a truck and a ladder up in a tree, you could ask "what are those people doing?", and there was Wes would respond "picking avacados". He told us more than you'd ever want to know about Hawaiian culture, history, safety issues, surfing, native plants and animals, I felt like I should be taking notes. The rest of the group consisted of one honeymoon-type couple and a bunch of old folks, but everyone was very satisfied with the tour by the time it was over, even if a couple weren't sure about his driving style at the beginning. It was an all day trip, though, we weren't back at the hotel until close to 6 pm. Although we didn't want to go too far afield for dinner, we went back to Whaler's Village, where everything was still open til 11 even though it was Sunday, and had dinner at a different place with the whole Kaanapali crowd, as by this time the newlyweds were off to Kawai for the last few days for a real honeymoon (i.e. one with no relatives).



Monday was my day off, since Mom and Shirley were out the door at 4:15 am to be whisked to the airport to spend the day in Oahu as part of another guided tour. Went for a run with Bob on the early side, then met up with them for breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Had a big breakfast so I could just skip lunch, and walked down the road and across the street to some different shops and finished up my souvenir shopping. Came back to the room and hung out for a while, did some laundry, read my book, after happy hour started I went down to the pool and read some more with Mai Tai in hand. The Lemke's did some touring of their own, found a nature museum in the area of the airport, and went a little ways down the road to Hana themselves. They made it back to the hotel by dinner time, so we went back to the hotel restaurant again for dinner. Mom and Shirley didn't get back until close to 9 pm, and had a great time, but needless to say were a little droopy.



Tuesday it was time to go home, and although my flight wasn't until almost 1pm were at the airport by 11am, since there wasn't time to do much of anything else at the hotel before checkout. We scouted out the location of a couple of malls in Wailuku that were near the airport, since Mom and Shirley had a couple more hours to kill after dropping me off. Since I arrived early at the airport, it only took about five minutes to check the bag. I ended up sitting at the gate in the plane for two hours while they tried to fix some warning light that wouldn't go out. By the time it was all set, my connection in LA was doomed, but they said they'd figure it out, and they did, routing me through Chicago with very little time to spare and arriving in Providence only a half hour or so later than I was supposed to be originally. Miraculously, even my bag made the connection, so I was home by 12pm, fully 19 hours after leaving the hotel, and with half a day to recover before rejoining the real world again.

The Maui pictures are up and they're depressing to look at, because it reminds me that a scant week ago I was basking in the sunshine at least once in a while with no greater concern than where to go for dinner that evening. I've been telling people that Maui is a dangerous place, because the longer you're there the less you want to leave. But you can only spend that kind of money for so long, so if you really did live there you'd have to adapt to living in a shack well away from the water and paying seven dollars for a box of cereal (and running the risk of getting tired of pineapples). There must be something negative about living on Maui, otherwise everyone would be doing it. The economic aspect is definitely a consideration unless you're already a professional surfer dude or beach bum.



I arrived in Maui after driving in the pouring rain and the dark to Providence, spending a couple of hours flying to Chicago, meeting up with the Lemkes who then accompanied me the rest of the way via LAX, without any delays or lengthy layovers at any point, taking maybe 15 hours to do the whole trip. Scott and Shelley were there to greet us when we got off the plane and pass out leis to everyone, the first of several that all ended up in the fridge, but wilted anyway. People who live in Hawaii must need a separate fridge just for all the leis. S&S, as Jill calls them, whisked me off to the hotel in their rented jeep, the Aston Kaanapali Shores, while Bob & Jill got their own rental car. Mom and her friend Shirley were waiting out front when we got there. The Lemkes didn't arrive for quite a while later, then took a while to check in, so they were useless for dinner what with two jetlagged kids to contend with, so the rest of us all went out to eat at some place called "Fish and Game" just up the street, then got kona flavored ice cream or shave ice at the ice cream place / internet cafe next door. Got to meet Shelley's mother Bev and brother Mark, who had already been in town for a couple of days and seemed to be doing just fine. It was a long day, but no one was complaining.



Wednesday morning was the opportunity to kind of settle in and get our bearings without doing anything too strenuous. It was no problem getting up early since there was a six hour time difference, so I went for a five mile run along Lower Honapillilalailiala (sp?) Drive. Spent some time at the beach near the hotel in the morning and got to try out the snorkeling gear, and there was actually something of a reef and fish to look at right there. We all went down to Whaler's Village to a place called Hula Grill for lunch and looked around at the classy shops a little bit, then went back for round two of snorkeling practice, walking down the beach a ways to Black Rock near the Sheraton for another go. The surf was a little stronger here and I wasn't comfortable enough with the snorkeling yet to be able to concentrate on just that and not avoiding drowning. But it was enough practice that the trip to Molokini on Friday was well-spent. Came back to the hotel and I think ended up having dinner there, as there were all these coupons to use up.



Thursday we got up bright and early to find our way over to Haiku, home of the Haleakala Bike Company, where they would do a trip that would take you to the top of the volcano, then back down a little ways and leave you on your own to go the rest of the way. In retrospect this was definitely the way to go, as the guided tours we passed were puttering down the mountain at about 10mph, and we got plenty of scenery on the way up and at the top. Bob was taking phone calls from work as we went up the mountain, but turned the cellphone off for the ride down. Bev, Shelley, and Scott took the trip with Bob and I, and Shelley's brother, who had his own bike and helmet, rode up the mountain and met us just after we started on the way down, then rode down with us. I had brought my own helmet but they wanted us to wear the litigation-free cyclocross-type helmets as though we would be going down the mountain offroad, which was totally unnecessary, but it did keep your ears warm. Most of the guided tours were in bright yellow radiation suits, I guess so that you'd be easy to find if you went off the edge, but the Bike store let us borrow regular columbia-type jackets and backpacks. It was a long drive up, and we were entertained by the van driver "Tim", who was a 50-ish transplant from California by way of the Alaska pipeline who, like most people in Maui, had about four jobs and plenty of opinions, entertaining us with stupid questions he'd been asked on previous trips, such as "How long does it take to swim all the way under the island?", which were so stupid they had to be true. The views from the top of Haleakala were spectacular, we had good visibility all the way up, and it wasn't even that chilly at the summit at 10,000 feet. It only took about an hour and a half to make it all the way down, and it was a blast. It's too bad you can't use the whole road, but since we didn't start at the very top the number of switchbacks wasn't that great and they weren't that steep. There were even a few uphills once we got on the road back to Haiku. We were back at the bike shop by 12:30. Bob and I stopped at Taco Bell for a late lunch on the way back. We hung out at the pool with Jill and the girls the rest of the afternoon. Scott was coming up to babysit for Jill and Bob so they could go out to dinner alone, so Mom and Shirley and I went to Lahaina, looking for a restaurant that was listed in Frommers but ended up having changed hands and cuisines, so we landed across the street at Moose McGillycuddy's, then did some shopping afterwards at Hilo Hatties.

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".

Back from Maui and it was a great time, but in deference to the fact that it's September 11 I'll refrain from expounding on it until later. Just about have the Toronto Worldcon notes finished, so I'll probably do those first before I forget everything.

Just back from Worldcon, and now it's off to Maui for Scott's wedding. Toronto was fun, not the greatest Worldcon ever, but still pretty good, got a good recharging of the sf batteries whilst I was there, such that after three and a half days I kinda wished I could've stuck around for a few panels today. But the 10-hour slog back to Boston couldn't wait, since I've got to get up in less than five hours to haul my tired tuchis down to Providence to catch a 7:30 flight. The Lemke's will be on the same plane from Chicago to LAX to Maui, so that should make the time go by faster. I'll try to write down the Worldcon details that I can while I'm gone, so I can upload it after I get back (unless there's suddenly time for a cyber cafe on the road to Hana or something). Be there, aloha.