Boskone was over a whole week ago, so the odds of me remembering anything about it are slim to none right now, but I did take some notes this time, so we'll see if that helps. All in all a pretty good con, one would've hoped Baxter would elevate the amount of hard sf writers present, but didn't seem to have much of an impact. The lack of Hal Clement was very noticeable, too.



Friday



Memorable Scenes, with Paul Levinson and others



Not much to choose from early on, and the first panel isn't until 6 pm. This one tried to get the participants to discuss particularly memorable scenes from books and what made them so. The conversation kept drifting towards movies, which have the added visual impact and are more likely to have been experienced by multiple panelists. Levinson called it "First love syndrome", in that whichever medium you experience a story in first tends to be your favorite. Some scenes were cited as memorable because of a personal connection someone had with them. As part of the general straying towards movies, there was some talk about Hitchcock's idea of "surprise vs suspense", although that applies to books too, that the playing along of the viewer/reader with something that's about to happen can be a better payoff than just hitting them with a sudden shock or whizbang event out of the blue. That begs the question of does horror then have an inherent superiority towards suspense over other genres (Levinson didn't think so, but it's hard to refute). The re-surprise factor also comes into play, is there a maximum number of times you can experience a memorable scene before it loses its impact? One of the textbook examples from sf is Hari Seldon's appearance in Foundation and Empire , and how his image starts going on about something completely different when people are expecting him to offer advice on how to defeat the Mule. That was definitely a memorable scene for me when I first read that in high school, going back to it again several years ago when it was a retro Hugo nominee I was surprised at how brief that scene really is, and how much the image of it had been built up in my mind over the years, such that by knowing it was coming it diminished its impact the second time around. Not too many other examples from sf books were offered (the collapse of the space elevator in Green Mars was another, and the precis mentioned Swanwick's Bones of the Earth, which I don't think really qualifies).



Theory of Reviewing, with Tom Easton, David Hartwell, Dan Kimmel



I only caught part of this one, since most of the theories of reviewing should be fairly obvious and not that interesting to people who aren't reviewers. Hartwell said that very soon he planned to take about six months to ponder why mediocre fantasy sells so well (Clute has already answered that with his notion of "commodity fantasy"). The part of the conversation I heard dealt with reviewing as a public service, i.e. "I saw this movie so you don't have to". In print, reviewers like Easton tend to just ignore the books they don't like and spend their columns propping up books that need more attention rather than less. Some books made for difficult reviewing, Hartwell citing Malzberg's "Beyond Apollo" which he recognizes as an important, well-written book which he hated when it came out and 30 years later still can't recommend. Kimmel talked about rottentomatoes.com, and how the idea of mass reviewing of the same movie allows for a greater breadth of information for someone looking to whether a particular film suits their individual taste (he stands in the vast minority of people who didn't like the Lord of the Rings movies, for instance). We ended up standing in the same line at the Movenpick Saturday night and talked for a few minutes about that.



Hal Clement Memorial, with Michael Burstein, Tony Lewis and others



This was the first Boskone without Hal Clement since 1965. Many anecdotes and homilies were shared, particularly by Lewis, who'd known him forever and had worked with him when NESFA published his collected works. Hal never had an agent, and didn't seem that interested in how much money he made from his books, but what money he did make was earmarked for sf purposes and used to attend an enormous number of conventions all over the US. No one ever had a bad thing to say about him ever, even Harlan Ellison. Several members of a long-standing writers group he headed were in attendance. He used a pen name when he first started writing because at the time he was getting his masters at Harvard and didn't want his professors to treat him differently because he wrote sf. Burstein said when he interviewed him last year in Readercon, Hal told him he could remember the cover of the first SF magazine he ever read. Burstein said, "That's amazing" and Hal replied "Yes, and it was the September issue" or something like that. Someone called him the "Soul of fandom", which may be stretching things a bit but it was definitely cool to have such a venerable grandmaster be so ubiquitous and so accessible at the local conventions, and I always enjoyed his slide shows with his grubby handmade charts on graph paper and his static amateurish paintings illustrating the topic. There was a cadre of people at conventions who made it their business to look after him during the weekend and make sure he was eating and what have you as he tended to overschedule himself to cram as much into the convention as possible. If ever there was a deadlock on best novel at the retro Hugos, it'll be this year with Mission of Gravity.



What does post-modernism have to do with SF? with David Hartwell, James Patrick Kelly, Greg Feeley



Also with many good observations from Judith Berman in the audience, as panelists seem to be floundering on a good definition of post-modernism (or "Pomo") and some audience members just couldn't get it. Hartwell said there was a very heated discussion on this topic at the Baltimore Worldcon involving John Kessel and somebody else, but tempers didn't really flare here. The consensus, if there was one, was that post-modernism was defined as a non-reactionary movement (as opposed to modernism like Joyce, Conrad, Woolf et al who consciously rejected previous styles), with an attitude that is more questioning and less judgmental. Hartwell said Gibson would be the perfect sf post-modernist candidate, but his books have too much plot. Berman seemed to be saying that postmodernism in literature was different than postmodernism in architecture, which deals more with re-assimilating ideas from the past in a modern context. Larry McCaffrey was mentioned several times and mostly dismissed, although I wished they would've touched on his idea of post-postmodernism or "avant pop" as he called it at Readercon several years ago, which seems to be more relevant to sf. I would tend to put writers like Ellison or Cordwainer Smith at least partially in the postmodernist camp, and there seems to be a good debate going on as to where the "britpunks" fall in, with Hartwell heaping scorn on Mieville's Locus article about the "new weird".