Boskone 42 report

Happy President's Day!

Spent the weekend at what by my count is my twelfth Boskone, the local sf convention that was very handy when it was in Framingham and now marginally less so now that it has relocated to downtown Boston. What I discovered during the Worldcon last fall was that I don't really need to drive into the city every day, and the money saved by not having to pay $20+ to park can be better spent on books. So, even though it's a bit colder than it was during the Worldcon, I schlepped from the green line every day, and that seemed to work just fine. It's not like you go back to your car in the parking garage during the day anyway.

This year's guest of honor was Orson Scott Card, whom I've only seen on a panel or two at one of the recent Worldcons (Philly, I think). He's a good guest of honor in that he's got plenty of opinions about everything, but unlike other pontificating sf authors like Bear or Brin, I get the impression his opinions center more around deconstruction than saying anything positive. In fact, he's downright controversial as apparently he's published a few screeds against homosexuality over the years (being a card-carrying Mormon) that seem to have caused some fans and pros alike to boycott the convention. Some of it can be attributed to post-Worldcon fatigue, too, I suppose, but more than the average share of pros were awol given that there were no weather problems this year.

In spite of that, most of the panels I attended managed to do quite well with who was available. I skipped Card's goh speech to hear George RR Martin do a reading, as did plenty of other people. GRRM continues to give Boston a slot in his calendar every year, so I got to hear him reading another excerpt from possibly the most anticipated sf book since The Last Dangerous Visions, the next volume in his "Song of Ice and Fire", now three years late and counting (and hopefully not to suffer the same fate as TLDV). The reading was short enough that he could field a number of questions afterwards, and he admitted to having trouble with this book because of a combination of the pressure involved (given the level of anticipation he's created) along with some retrenchment as he's writing due to finding more to say about certain events than he thought he would. When the book ever comes out, it will be enormous, and enough time has elapsed since I read the first trilogy that I'd have to go back and read at least the last one again.

The science guest of honor was Alastair Reynolds, which was a real thrill as I've read literally all his books (just finishing up Absolution Gap as we speak) and I don't think he's been to an American convention before. This saved me the trouble of having to haul one of his "mammal-crushers" all the way to Glasgow. He did a couple of slide shows as well as a reading and participated in a few panels, and I caught most of those and he was very engaging and seemed like a nice guy, even keeping his cool when a rabid filker started shrieking at the end of Reynolds' slide show because he was running overtime and eating into the next event in the room. That was one of the nice things about the layout when Boskone was still in Framingham that they could segregate the filkers from the rest of the humanity.

Boskone has adopted kind of a minimalist approach the last couple of years, I'm not sure how much of it is by design. I know they did away with the "green room" concept for pros, thinking they'll hang out in the con suite more, which doesn't seem to be the case. They also seem this year to have done away with notifying panelists when their time is almost up, causing panels to go right up to the hour, and then the next panel starting 5 or 10 minutes after the hour. The dealers room was a bit of a letdown, also, no British books, no Glen Cook, the book dealers that were there did primarily new stuff and collectible stuff, and they seemed to have less space, but tbere wasn't necessarily more of anything else, just less space in general. I figured I would find at least a couple of BSFA nominees there but didn't see any, so I barely bought anything. Reminded me of the one Lunacon that I went to way back when.

As I said, the panels I sat in on were mostly worth hearing, I think there's some tiredness to some of the topics, but maybe I just need to make different selections. I tend to avoid the writing-oriented "how-to" panels as they tend to offer either obvious or conflicting information, and seem to be geared towards people who shouldn't be writing in the first place. Although not really a how-to panel, the one with GRRM and Wen Spencer and a couple of others about the nature of trilogies as a standard of fantasy did tend to stray into that topic occasionally, with Martin saying people shouldn't write novels first, they should make their name with short stories (with Spencer as someone who started with novels) and Spencer saying that one chapter does not equal one scene (with Martin saying that in his books, one chapter does tend to equal one scene). The fallback history of sf panels are only as good as their panelists, and unless you have somebody who was there like Hartwell or Silverberg or Pohl, you end up with people regurgitating stuff second hand that may or may not be completely accurate.

Still, well worth the tired rear-end and looking forward to Readercon after a year off last year. Still hoping to do Glasgow in August, but right now plane tickets are $800, so unless they drop by about 50%, we'll be finding something else to do at that end of the summer.