Norwescon Day 2 (Friday)
First day of getting up early -- at 5.45, almost 2 hours earlier than normal. It always gets me down to the hotel too early, but I'd rather do that and sit around reading for awhile than to fight for parking. And parking was worse this year than it's been before -- when I showed up Friday morning (and Saturday), they already had signs out saying the parking lot was full. I knew it wasn't, so I took a ticket anyway and got a spot, but it's clear they expected it to fill quickly. (It's not as bad as it has been in the past, if only because there's a new Wally Park across the street that wasn't there before, but it's more expensive and less convenient than the hotel parking lot).
Boy, I obsess about parking, don't I?
I was on 3 panels on Friday: Interstellar Fiction without FTL, Worldbuilding 101, and Civilian Tech in the Military. Earliest was at 1pm, so that was a good thing.
Interstellar Fiction without FTL was a good panel, although not a great one. I shared the panel with three other people, but I'm not going to name them -- it was a pleasure to work with two of them, but the third, well, not so much. That person had a tendency to hog the mike, so to speak. Even worse, half the time he wasn't quite on topic. (And I wasn't the only one to feel that way -- one of the guys in the audience said such to me afterward). If I was a better moderator, I could probably have reined it it better, but alas, I'm only a moderate moderator. Okay, so the whole thing annoys me a little bit, at least partly because he made a point of correcting me when I introduced the panel. I said something to the effect of "you may know that Einstein's Special Relativity prevents us from going faster than light..." Vague, perhaps, but still more or less correct. Except that this panelist said something like "most people think that, but it's really..." And what's worse? He was wrong. The consequences of Special Relativity (which says basically that light travels at the same speed regardless of the frame of reference) imply that anything that has mass at a rest cannot reach the speed of light. Unfortunately, since I'm not as comfortable with arguing a point like that, I let it pass. Okay, part of it's that it wasn't pertinent to the panel, but still... And I'm annoyed that I didn't handle things better. Ah, well.
The next panel I was on was Worldbuilding 101, and it was everything that the others were not. Great panelists, lots of fun, a certain amount of snarkiness. From my point of view (not least of which that I wasn't moderating it), it was marvelous. The original moderator, Pat MacEwen, wasn't there, so Carol Berg took her place, and I shared the rest of the panel with Jenna Pitman and Corey Lee. Couldn't have been in better company and I had a huge amount of fun.
The last panel I was in was Civilian Tech in the Military, which was basically about civilian technology being used in military applications. I was on it, mostly because of my military history background, but frankly, I didn't contribute much. The only people who could were really people who were either in the military (like Bart Kemper, who's a mechanical engineer who's also a combat engineer), or worked closely with military applications (David Shoemaker, who worked on military software). Me? Not so much. Felt really out of place and was quite happy to have it over and done.
That sort of makes it sound like the day didn't go well -- those two panels weren't all that great (especially the latter one), but the good panel was REALLY good and more than made up for it. And I went to a number of fun panels that others were on, chatted with a few people, met a few others, and generally had a pretty good time.