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!
Yes, we’re going! Allysen and I have never been to Scotland and have always wanted to go. Our chance is upon us. This year’s SF Worldcon is in Glasgow, Aug. 8-12. We’re flying into Edinburgh, where we’ll spend about a week seeing what we can see. (And I’m sure there’s a lot.) Then we’ll hop a train to Glasgow and join our tribe at worldcon! We’re excited!
I am currently scheduled to be on one panel, one table conversation (formerly called kaffeeklatches), and an autograph session. Details to follow when things are finalized.
In what has sadly become a pattern, problems have arisen in the Hugo Awards balloting, this time from someone or someones trying to game the system by submitting ballots from “not natural” people, using obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics. The statement from the Hugo administrator explains the situation. (Sigh.)
Here we are, in beautiful New Zealand for worldcon! Except, of course, we’re not really, because coronavirus. We’re sitting in our dining room in front of our computers. Virtually, though, we are here! Havin’ a good time—especially when we can navigate the befuddlingly complicated login procedure to get where we’re going. (The price, I guess of running a con on multiple virtual platforms.) We’re learning a new app: Discord. We’re also learning to radically convert time-zones. New Zealand time is 16 hours ahead of us, which means that most of the time, they’re already in tomorrow, while we’re still in today.
Today (my time) was the second day of programming, and I have already been on two of the three panels that I’m participating in, via Zoom. The first was “Staying Closer to Home: Science Fiction in the Solar System,” which I know a little bit about. Just enough to get me into trouble. It was a good panel! The second was “Writers on Writing: The Plot’s the Thing,” which was about, um, plot and character and motivation and story structure, and all that good stuff. It, too, was a good panel! I’ve got one more—on Saturday, America-time—called “Ghosts in the Ships: Sentient Ships in SF and Fantasy.” I hope that one will be good, too. And I’d better do a little research on the subject before showtime.
Wish you could all be here in New Zealand with us! (If you’re sitting at home on your computer, you’re already halfway there.)
This year’s World SF Convention is being held in San Jose, CA in a couple of weeks, and I’m sorry to say I will not be there. It’s an economic decision, not a political one. However, I was also part of the large number of people who got left off of programming this year. It’s a simple calculus: Can I afford to spend a couple of grand attending a convention that could otherwise be fun and interesting, but will net me no opportunity to build and connect with my audience? Not this year.
Side note: Having been to worldcons where I was turned away from programming, I can say that it’s a lousy feeling. In contrast, last year in Helsinki I got to do some great programming, and I came away feeling that I had contributed to the success of the con, and was appreciated, as well.
You may have read about the programming brouhaha this year, where many new writers and minority groups of various sorts felt overlooked by the program committee. I’m not close enough to the action to have any meaningful insight, except to say that, first, they are not the only ones to have felt overlooked. Second, I think any good programming effort has to find a way to make a place for both the young and the old, the bestselling and the newbie, the well-known and the little-known, all with the same degree of welcome. Many conventions do that successfully; I hope this year’s worldcon, with its hurried regrouping, manages as well. I’m sure it’s no easy task.
I’m not staying away in protest so much as disappointment. It just didn’t work out for me this year. Next year it’s in Dublin, and the year after in New Zealand! Here’s hoping!
Every worldcon I’ve been to in recent years has had its own oddities. In Spokane, it was four days of breathing smoke from wildfires on the US/Canadian border. In London, it was staying an hour from the con on a cramped sailboat that had been misleadingly billed on Airbnb as a houseboat. Also, there was Wardrobe Malfunction Day, when my belt broke and I walked around the convention center holding my pants up with both hands.
In Helsinki, it was peeing in the convention center restrooms. The urinals looked perfectly normal, but there was nothing to warn you that they flushed automatically both before and after use. So you would step up to the fixture and before you could even reach to do what you had come to do—floosh!—the thing would flush energetically in your face. (It didn’t spray literally in your face, but it felt as though it was about to.) Granted, it fit with the image of Scandinavian cleanliness, but it was certainly disconcerting.
Startling, too, was the high-speed hand-dryer mounted next to one sink, so close that when you stepped up to wash your hands, you got an instant blast of hot air on your left shoulder.
Perhaps weirdest were the urinals in one restaurant, which apparently had been installed by a very tall Viking plumber—because they were mounted too high on the wall for a person of mere modest height like me to use. I briefly contemplated ballistic trajectories of peeing upward and outward and hoping for the best, but I finally opted to choose other means. I’m sure the janitorial staff thanked me.
We now return you to our regular non-weird programming.
Worldcon ended on Sunday, and as a way of saying farewell, I thought I would post this picture of the welcome sign.
I had a Kaffeeklatch on Sunday that was well attended, and included attendees of various ages from countries all over the world. They had come to drink coffee and ask me questions, so that meant I did a lot of talking. They all seemed to enjoy it, and I know I did. One local fan (I think he said he was Finnish, but it all blurs) did a little video interview with me afterward. I suppose that might end up on youtube someday.
And here’s a picture of one of the highlights for me in terms of programming I watched from the audience. It’s NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren giving a presentation on space medicine based on his experiences on the International Space Station.
Dr. Lindgren is a wonderfully entertaining speaker, and a gracious ambassador for the space program, based on a brief chat we had in the corridor. He’s also a science fiction fan. (At the Spokane worldcon, he presented one of the Hugo awards via Skype from the space station.)
Here’s a picture of him zipped up in his zero-g sleeping bag. Cozy!
Thursday through Saturday were good days for me at Worldcon.
But first, congratulations to all the winners of the Hugo and associated rewards! You can see the full list on tor.com. Women once again dominated in the trophy winning, which might have made some people unhappy, but I thought it was great. It’s about time some of our fantastic female writers got their due. And I’m also glad to see lots of young fans, from many nations, of all and sundry genders.
The convention ran into problems with serious overcrowding, because attendance wildly exceeded expectations. Tons of people registered at the last minute, or showed up without preregistering or hoping for day passes, which they had to stop selling. Combined with this, the local authorities strictly enforced the fire laws, so that no standing room was permitted in any of the rooms. The result was crazy long lines, lots of folk not getting into panels they wanted to see, and plenty of hair pulling. The con committee rallied, worked with the convention center, and got some of the more popular events moved to larger rooms, and even added additional panels at the last minute. It was a tough recovery, but I think they did a good job under difficult circumstances.
My own panels over the last few days included one on keeping yourself motivated in writing, a topic that drew plenty of interest. Friday we were on for writing space opera and writing collaboratively, and both were well attended and fun discussions. I was moderating both, so I was revved up keeping things moving.
Today I had two big panels that I was not moderating, one on the future of physics, and one on world building. Both were a lot of fun. Here’s a sort of blurry picture of the world building panel, with (from left to right) Jon Oliver, Alex Acks, me, and George R.R. Martin. The audience for this one was huge, as you might expect. It was a lively and interesting discussion, I thought.
There were lots of camera flashes, so if anyone out there has a clearer picture and would like to send it my way, please do!
