Today we watched our last panels, at least the ones we could get into (many were full). With Worldcon coming to a close, we turned our attention to another exhibition just down the concourse: Beyond Van Gogh Glasgow. It was an astonishing display, conveying Van Gogh’s masterpieces in an immersive visual experience. Paintings set to motion, images flowing and melding with each other, set to lovely music (I know not what). We were invited to sit on soft benches, or on the floor with beanbag cushions, and soak it in, as long as we liked. I’m going to put a few stills here. I did take some video, which we were invited to do, but I haven’t had a chance to look at any of it yet. It was an extraordinary meditative experience.
I think this, or one like it, showed in Boston a while back, but we missed it. No longer.
Tomorrow we hope to see a bit more of Glasgow, before setting our course to the west, and home.
Yesterday’s highlights were some time spent with Gay and Joe (The Forever War)Haldeman, whom we had not seen in years. They are a delightful couple, and probably the best-traveled people we know, always jaunting around the world, visiting friends. We also had a beer and fine conversation with Stefan Rudnicki—co-owner of Skyboat Media, and also well traveled—who recently narrated six of my audiobooks. Though we worked closely together on the books, we had never actually met in person until this con. He’s a fount of knowledge about the audiobook business and a very generous guy. Stefan’s wife Gabrielle de Cuir, also a topnotch narrator and director, is a delightful lady as well. I hope to be working again with them soon.
Later we watched the Hugo Awards ceremony on my laptop, from the hotel room. The audio level was low, so I had to look at the results online today. Many of the works I voted for actually won! Possibly a first. Congratulations, Hugo winners and nominees!
Here a few visual highlights. First is the SEC (Scottish Exhibition Center), with the “Armadillo” theater center on the left, a delightfully idiosyncratic building on the outside, and bizarrely incomprehensible on the inside. On the right is the Ovo Hydro—or, as we called it, the Flying Saucer (it lights up green at night). That’s a sports center, apparently. That seemingly insignificant, triangular-roofed building between them is the main exhibition hall, where most of the con actually took place.
How about a Batmobile or two?
The SEC campus sits right next to the River Clyde, on the far banks of which sit BBC Scotland, an IMAX theater, and the Glasgow Science Center.
I thought I was going to get away without buying anything at the con except a t-shirt, but the art show mugged me and forced me to buy a print of a photo-art piece I particularly liked. Oops.
Worldcon has been a dizzying whirlwind, and I don’t just mean the wind-and-rain-swept tarmac between our hotel and the exhibition center! There’s been a lot going on, starting with a table talk and then a well-attended and -received panel called “Lost Wonders of Science Fiction.” The original title was “Dead-Ends of Science Fiction,” because it was about common tropes (psi, flying cars, personal spaceships, rugged individualists farmsteading the planets, etc.) that were once common but have largely fallen by the wayside. I hinted to the program committee that a more enticing title might be “Lost Wonders,” and they agreed. It was lots of fun, and many people came forward to accept Reefs of Time beer coasters from me at the end.
We put a good deal of energy into finding our way around a particularly incomprehensible building layout, thwarted by nearly nonexistent signage and the con’s decision not to print paper maps, instead telling us to use downloaded maps on our phones. (In fairness, the online maps undoubtedly provided by the exhibition center weren’t much help even when printed out.) Despite this, positive energy abounds, and everyone seems to be having a good time. I have worried in the past about the aging of the SF readership, but here there’s an excellent turnout of younger fans. At the same time, I’m noticing the absence of many of the older writers I used to see routinely at cons.
Interstellar the movie: When I saw it, I didn’t really notice that much of the score was organ music, played in fact on a great pipe organ in a church! I learned this when organist Roger Sayer—a bona-fide church organist, who helped compose and performed the music for the film—gave a presentation, an organ concert that featured some space-oriented classical pieces, plus a compressed version of the Interstellar score. I’m not ordinarily the biggest fan of organ music, but this was pretty amazing.
Speaking of amazing, I’ve just come from a wonderful concert by the Worldcon Philharmonic Orchestra, which sounds like maybe a fan orchestra, but actually was a genuine philharmonic drawing on musicians from a variety of Scottish symphony and session orchestras. It was all SF and fantasy-oriented pieces, ranging from “Tam O’Shanter” to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” to “Saturn” from The Planets to Star Trek and Star Wars medleys. It was fantastic!
The most surprising moment came when I walked past a panel in the art show, looking at some lovely cover paintings for Aliette de Bodard’s books. I asked the man standing there if he was the artist, Maurizio Manzieri. He said yes, and then he looked at my name badge and exclaimed, “You’re Jeffrey A. Carver!” I laughed and asked if my name was familiar to him. “Of course!” he said. “I painted the cover to La stella che cambiò [the Italian edition of From a Changeling Star]!” I gaped in astonishment. That was back in 1990, and I’m not sure I ever knew who the cover artist was. But he remembered it at once! At that moment, my daughter walked up, and she snapped this picture of us. Edit: Well it turns out (see comments section below) that Maurizio didn’t paint that cover, after all. But he did recognize my name when he saw it, and thought he’d painted something for me. That’s almost as good.
Low key day today, after sleeping in following our expedition yesterday. We strolled through the throngs walking the city. Here’s the Edinburgh Castle, which overlooks the city. We never got up there for a tour of the inside, so I guess we’ll have to come back.
We also discovered that the tall monument I posted a picture of a couple of days ago is not actually to Saint Andrew, but to a scoundrel who, two and a quarter centuries ago, worked to prolong the African slave trade. (!! See my correction.)
One notable fact of our visit in Scotland so far has been the remarkable number of really pleasant and helpful people we’ve met, some of them local and some visitors like ourselves. Basically, everyone has been helpful or cheerful to talk to. We had our final dinner here at Abbotsford Pub on Rose Street, where we found ourselves chatting with a very nice couple from Kennebunk, Maine.
Tomorrow our daughter Jayce flies in to join us, and we leave for Glasgow and Worldcon!
That’s Edinboro not Edinburg as the Delta pilot called it. We’re here, and it’s beautiful! We came within a whisker of having to cancel the trip because of a painful blood clot in my leg, but I got cleared by the docs at the last minute, and here we are. So far, we’ve seen the National (Art) Gallery, which had some excellent Impressionist work, as well as halls and halls of older paintings. We arrived, coincidentally, during Fringe Festival, which features a lot of shows by stand-up comics. Lots of enthusiasm in the streets for that. We might or might not get to one, because between my gimpy leg and dragging around a POC (portable O2 concentrator), activities that involve close quarters and sitting a lot are iffy. Still, there’s plenty to see.
Here’s a tall statue at St. Andrew’s Square. Edit: It is not Saint Andrew, as we had guessed. It is a monument to a Henry Dundas, first viscount Melville (1742-1811), who as Secretary of State for War in 1996, was instrumental in delaying the abolition of the British Atlantic slave trade, resulting in the enslavement of half a million Africans.
Later, me, in our basement hotel/apt suite with my new favorite beer, Wingman session IPA from Scotland’s Brewdog Brewery.
Magical. Almost supernatural, and yet Nature at its most astounding. In an instant, the world was turned inside out. The blazing corona around the darkened sun took my breath away. (And this was viewing through a thin layer of cloud. I can only imagine if the sky had been clear.) Just before totality, the horizon glowed with a 360-degree sunset. The air turned cold. Transcendent might not be too strong a word for the feeling when the sun winked out and the corona appeared.
This was my first-ever experience of a total eclipse. (Once, in the 70s, I was on the wrong side of a half-mile band of ocean separating me from the view of totality. Sorry, man, what a bummer.) It made totally worthwhile getting up at 3 a.m. to drive—ahead of the rush of thousands of others from Massachusetts—to Burlington, Vermont to watch the event. We arrived plenty early and found parking. We had the Mothership, and our dog McDuff, and we relaxed in comfort while we waited. Well, aside from shortness of sleep. But you can sleep when you’re dead, man.
The closest I have come to this in the past was our viewing in person of the launch of space shuttle Atlantis, in 2010, along with a group of fellow SF authors. In that event, the most memorable single element was the nova-like blaze of fire under the tail of the spaceship. That, like this, could not be conveyed by a photograph, much less my amateur video. In this case, I couldn’t even get a picture that registered what we were seeing at all.
Here’s a NASA photo from Dallas, TX, that did a better job (NASA/Keegan Barber):
When I watched the shuttle launch, I was in spine-tingling awe of the power of human striving against the bonds of the Earth. In this case, I was in transcendent awe of the majesty of our life-giving sun and our moon, and the stupendous coincidence or design of our Earth/Moon/Sun system boasting the perfect geometry of lunar size and distance such that the moon precisely covers the disk of the sun. What magnificent art is that astonishing corona, if art it is. Either way, it is breathtaking. And humbling.
I now understand why people say once you’ve seen a total eclipse, you want to keep on seeking them out. Even after surviving the two-hundred-mile traffic jam returning home (oh, for a flying car!). The next one on U.S. soil won’t be for twenty years, so maybe I have some international travel to look forward to! Zounds!
Ironically, this event was visible from my hometown of Huron, Ohio. If I’d been in the house I grew up in, I could have stepped out into the backyard. Same for my mom, God rest her soul, who grew up on a farm in Wooster, Ohio. Sometimes the spacetime continuum is in need of a little tweaking.
Crash. That’s what we did upon arriving home in Arlington this week. Despite our best efforts to get everything wrapped up, cleaned up, and tied up ahead of time this year, we were still up until 3 a.m. the night before our flight home, getting things squared away. But we got a ton done on the place, and left it in better shape than it’s been in many years. Here’s a shot of the ponds, partially filled with rocks.
Arriving home, we pretty much crashed and burned. Allysen got started on rabies shots, because of the dog bite, and I got started on an antibiotic because of a persistent ear infection. Even our daughter got to go to the docs for a toe infection. So for the last few days, a great deal of time has been spent with us apparently lifeless in front of the TV, staring unblinking at the flickering screen, empty pizza cartons strewn about the place. We are hoping someone will come along and water us and bring us back to life, like a house plant that’s been ignored for too many weeks.
We’ll leave you with this idyllic seashore memory, from Rincón.
I love the smell of burning mosquitos in the morning. The zap racket is the greatest invention since the wheel! The snap of a mosquito being electrocuted is the best.
Yeah, we have a lot of mosquitos here on the hill, but we’re doing our best to reduce their numbers.
Oddities are always fun, and we found a few in Rincón. On the way into town, we passed these humongous gears in a field by the side of the road. We don’t know what they are, or what they’re from. They seem to have been placed there as a sculpture. A truck parked nearby had the word “crane” on it, and that got us wondering if these were taken from some old, enormous crane. The big one was probably 15-20 feet high. Edit: I later learned that these were left over from now-defunct sugar cane operations.
The second was botanical. It was a tree right next to our hotel balcony. It had a very odd trunk, splitting into multiple, curving sections just above the ground. Rather alien-plantish, actually. The thick, smooth branches appeared to be bare when we arrived, and also when we headed out for dinner. When we got back, it was stunningly transformed—filled with beautiful magenta-pink flowers, with very fine filaments. The next morning, most of the flowers were on the ground. The second evening, the scene was repeated.
An internet search revealed it to be a Pseudobombax ellipticum, also called a shaving brush tree, or a Dr. Seuss tree. Proof that nature has a sense of humor?
Rincón is a charming seaside town on the west end of Puerto Rico. It’s known for its surfing and gorgeous beaches. Allysen had always wanted to see it, so we visited for a couple of days to celebrate her birthday. The beaches lived up to their reputation. The character of the town was a lot like parts of Cape Cod, but warmer. Lots of seaside hotels and eateries. Here are some pix from our stay.
This is Dome Beach, named for the dome of a decommissioned nuclear reactor, visible in the trees. It’s a favorite surfing location; we watched some surfers enjoying the swells, including one fellow zooming on a surfboard with a hydrofoil under it, which levitated the board above the waves.
At the same location is the beautiful Punta Higueras Lighthouse, surrounded by a park.
Our hotel, Rincón of the Seas, was right on a long, lovely beach, perfect for walks. It also had a pool featuring a swim-up bar, which was fun. (I ordered a daiquiri, which was totally forgettable, but the ambience was enjoyable.)
Rincón attracts a lot of English-speakers; in fact, we chatted with folks from Texas, South Carolina, and Utah. We also had brunch with a childhood friend of Allysen’s, at a delightful café called the English Rose, which we reached by driving a narrow, winding road with truly alarming roller-coaster ups and downs. At one point, while approaching a crest, I croaked—with feeling and total sincerity—“I really hope there’s a road on the far side of this incline.” I could well imagine pitching off into space, and that would have been that.
And finally, while waiting for dinner at another restaurant, we got into selfie mode. Here’s what we looked like.
