Eastercon Doings
This year the hotel was more topologically conventional than last year, compact and simply-connected, though with the first and second floors curiously only three feet apart vertically. It was also far too cold (except in the too hot bits), to the extent that I got Cold Illness that could only be cured by putting my jumper back on, though I've now made a full thermal recovery basking on my home rock again.
Friday
The Poincaré Conjecture, which is basically that something which looks like a sphere is one, for sufficiently complicated definitions of "looks like" and "is". It was given by a lad I thought was 12, but turned out to be a maths lecturer from Warwick, meaning he's isomorphic to the people who taught me this stuff there, and knows some of the people who literally did, though of course they're over a hundred years old now. My grasp of algebraic topology at that time was very slight, as I'd just discovered history, programming, games, beer and women and was slightly distracted, but it made sense this time around.
Recreating history, and the idea that alternative history is the "fan fiction" of historians, though it turns out not to be because Proper Historians hate it for not being true, which is ironic considering that Proper History gets revised faster than it originally happened. We learned that one of the zanier alternate histories was invented by a typing error in which the student claimed Britain was invaded in 1066 by Mormons, presumably from the Church of Earlier Day Saints.
Bad Biology, the stuff of so much science fiction, but too easy a target to be interesting - it's hard to find any examples of good biology in anything popular, though the experts commented that most of what lives at the bottom of the deep oceans would be rejected from SF as ridiculous.
Classics that aren't, in which the panel tried to consign well-loved books they hate to Room 101, flawed by it being impossible to get any consensus from the audience on things the fan base (i.e. the audience) believe to be good but which are actually bad. The main wickedness was trying to bin Starship Troopers just for being a fascist textbook, despite its endless application to modern project management (I made a career out of using it that way). And then they went for the Lensman Series - good grief - how can anyone burn their own childhood?
Saturday
Alternate Socialist Britain, good to find out what was going on in the 80s (there was a miners' strike which threatened to overthrow the state) as I was busy (programming in a basement) and mostly missed it, despite my mother's view that I'm logically a miner through coming from a mining community (back when people lived in communities). The V for Vendetta author was in it, though sceptical that his story was plausible as the British (meaning English) don't like dictatorships or overthrowing governments. What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!
Yorkshire Airships, history of the airship industry based at Howden, which for a while (in typical Yorkshire fashion) had some of the biggest sheds in the world, and built things like the R101 in them. Some of the less successful examples were the airship that took two years to build and then couldn't lift its own weight, so was reworked for another year but was then caught by a gust of wind on leaving the shed and broke in half (after which it was put in another shed and not talked about again), and the one with a smoking room built into it, adding so much steel and asbestos to the weight that the unfortunate thing crashed into the ground on its first flight.
Small Satellites, made in Surrey and being used for most of the things that big expensive ones used to do. This was another nostalgic session as I worked with satellite pictures long ago, but annoying to see the progress they've made since. Where I used to spend days mosaicing two images together, the images are now 100 times bigger, so the whole of Britain fits in to one frame - where's the fun in that? At the other extreme, resolution on the tactical satellites is down to 1.8 metres, rather than the 30-80 of my day, and they can be operated from a van which is itself visible in their images. But most ironic, considering I spent years helping my Special Pal Jill with a doomed PhD on archaeological uses of satellite images, is that they've now Really Done It - used ground penetrating radar to find the Lost City of Ubar from orbit. Ah, that I should live to see such pixels.
Rising Damp, floods, sea level change, climate change, catastrophe, all the best bits of geology but while-you-wait. Interesting difference in approach between British and American disaster fiction: Americans usually avoid the disaster for a relatively happy ending, while British authors prefer to actually have the end of the world, which is curious considering how those nations deal with real disasters. Steve Baxter was on the panel as he wrote "Flood", possibly his only novel that isn't resolved by omnipotent sentience lurking at Timelike Infinity and reworking the universe to be Just Right.
Never trust a book with a dragon on its cover, much talk of the ponification of dragons, and the wider taming of the monstrous with My Little Vampire, the appalling genre of paranormal romance, and the way the Ferengi and even the Borg went the same way as the Klingons, from Dread Horror to cute date material in less than ten years. The Campaign for Real Dragons seems OK with dragons on covers as long as they're Proper Dragons that are more likely to eat the protagonist than take her for a nice ride and a chat before tea and firestone elevenses.
Sunday
Music as universal communication, all the panel started by saying it's nonsense, except one who agreed it's nonsense but felt obliged to argue it's not to make the discussion more interesting. Sigh. Mainly good for tangents such as the Sol-Ray-Sol language which has only 8 phonemes and can be whistled as each syllable is a musical note. Slight drawbacks are that the words are very long indeed and it can't be used or understood without perfect pitch, but that shouldn't be a problem for aliens. If they have ears. Final consensus was that music can't be used universally to communicate amongst humans, so unlikely to work with giant jellyfish from Antares.
Quantum craziness, some of which made sense, which means I misunderstood it, probably distracted by the lovely Dr Emma in the shortest skirt I've ever seen on a cosmologist. The impossibility of measuring something without affecting it seemed plausible when the something is a something as your measurer inevitably hits it, but is odd when extended to nothing, as it should be possible to measure a vacuum's vacuity without affecting it as it's not there. But apparently not, hence quantum froth as things come and go in vacuo in a way that would be quite unbelievable if it wasn't measurable (assuming it's not just the measurement affecting it that makes it true).
Insidious, the play, exotic fiction on memetic engineering in a Whorfian Heresy pushed so far that the memes become self-aware and use humans as the transport layer in the same way that genes do. Beth was very good in it.
A brief history of the universe, surprisingly well attended for 11pm until you realise the speaker is Dr Emma again and she may have more than one appeal for a certain SF fan demographic. Like a well designed book franchise, most of the action happens in the first pico-second, so there's plenty of room to add more sequels in the remaining zillion years which are rather quiet in the current model. As with so much of physics, the entertainment is in surprises such as the rate of expansion of the universe increasing in an impossible way, and in the hysterical solutions proposed, such as dark energy being stuff with negative pressure which can only be detected by its causing the otherwise inexplicable effects it was made up to explain. Session was followed by going outside to look at stars, arranged by someone under the impression that cosmologists are optical astronomers, rather than dangerous fantasists who never go out.
Monday
How to plot a novel, delightful presentation by Tim Powers, who I always admired for referring to Anubis the great jackal-headed god of upper and lower Egypt as "Dog face". He has a system for producing plots that works for people who have neither imagination nor memory, and which doubles as a brilliant displacement activity as it includes hundreds of index cards and wall charts that you can colour in in endless detail. It's like producing an overly baroque revision timetable instead of ever doing any revision. And he let slip the splendid plot of finding your dog has part of a picture tattooed under its fur, and that other dogs spread around the country have the rest of the jigsaw on them - what could be a better story than that?
Beginner's time travel, completely packed to the extent that my shoulder got squash injuries, and coincidentally another one presented by the wonderful Dr Emma, though in jeans this time. The film clips would have been better with sound, and the Tardis wardrobe looked home-made (not like a proper Dr Who prop at all), but I got why relativity is symmetrical for the first time, and why the Lorentz transformation tau contains the squares of velocity and light speed - it's from Pythagoras Theorem - delightful to find the work of a mad ancient Greek magician embedded at the core of 20th century physics. If only science fiction was as implausible as science.
Friday
The Poincaré Conjecture, which is basically that something which looks like a sphere is one, for sufficiently complicated definitions of "looks like" and "is". It was given by a lad I thought was 12, but turned out to be a maths lecturer from Warwick, meaning he's isomorphic to the people who taught me this stuff there, and knows some of the people who literally did, though of course they're over a hundred years old now. My grasp of algebraic topology at that time was very slight, as I'd just discovered history, programming, games, beer and women and was slightly distracted, but it made sense this time around.
Recreating history, and the idea that alternative history is the "fan fiction" of historians, though it turns out not to be because Proper Historians hate it for not being true, which is ironic considering that Proper History gets revised faster than it originally happened. We learned that one of the zanier alternate histories was invented by a typing error in which the student claimed Britain was invaded in 1066 by Mormons, presumably from the Church of Earlier Day Saints.
Bad Biology, the stuff of so much science fiction, but too easy a target to be interesting - it's hard to find any examples of good biology in anything popular, though the experts commented that most of what lives at the bottom of the deep oceans would be rejected from SF as ridiculous.
Classics that aren't, in which the panel tried to consign well-loved books they hate to Room 101, flawed by it being impossible to get any consensus from the audience on things the fan base (i.e. the audience) believe to be good but which are actually bad. The main wickedness was trying to bin Starship Troopers just for being a fascist textbook, despite its endless application to modern project management (I made a career out of using it that way). And then they went for the Lensman Series - good grief - how can anyone burn their own childhood?
Saturday
Alternate Socialist Britain, good to find out what was going on in the 80s (there was a miners' strike which threatened to overthrow the state) as I was busy (programming in a basement) and mostly missed it, despite my mother's view that I'm logically a miner through coming from a mining community (back when people lived in communities). The V for Vendetta author was in it, though sceptical that his story was plausible as the British (meaning English) don't like dictatorships or overthrowing governments. What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!
Yorkshire Airships, history of the airship industry based at Howden, which for a while (in typical Yorkshire fashion) had some of the biggest sheds in the world, and built things like the R101 in them. Some of the less successful examples were the airship that took two years to build and then couldn't lift its own weight, so was reworked for another year but was then caught by a gust of wind on leaving the shed and broke in half (after which it was put in another shed and not talked about again), and the one with a smoking room built into it, adding so much steel and asbestos to the weight that the unfortunate thing crashed into the ground on its first flight.
Small Satellites, made in Surrey and being used for most of the things that big expensive ones used to do. This was another nostalgic session as I worked with satellite pictures long ago, but annoying to see the progress they've made since. Where I used to spend days mosaicing two images together, the images are now 100 times bigger, so the whole of Britain fits in to one frame - where's the fun in that? At the other extreme, resolution on the tactical satellites is down to 1.8 metres, rather than the 30-80 of my day, and they can be operated from a van which is itself visible in their images. But most ironic, considering I spent years helping my Special Pal Jill with a doomed PhD on archaeological uses of satellite images, is that they've now Really Done It - used ground penetrating radar to find the Lost City of Ubar from orbit. Ah, that I should live to see such pixels.
Rising Damp, floods, sea level change, climate change, catastrophe, all the best bits of geology but while-you-wait. Interesting difference in approach between British and American disaster fiction: Americans usually avoid the disaster for a relatively happy ending, while British authors prefer to actually have the end of the world, which is curious considering how those nations deal with real disasters. Steve Baxter was on the panel as he wrote "Flood", possibly his only novel that isn't resolved by omnipotent sentience lurking at Timelike Infinity and reworking the universe to be Just Right.
Never trust a book with a dragon on its cover, much talk of the ponification of dragons, and the wider taming of the monstrous with My Little Vampire, the appalling genre of paranormal romance, and the way the Ferengi and even the Borg went the same way as the Klingons, from Dread Horror to cute date material in less than ten years. The Campaign for Real Dragons seems OK with dragons on covers as long as they're Proper Dragons that are more likely to eat the protagonist than take her for a nice ride and a chat before tea and firestone elevenses.
Sunday
Music as universal communication, all the panel started by saying it's nonsense, except one who agreed it's nonsense but felt obliged to argue it's not to make the discussion more interesting. Sigh. Mainly good for tangents such as the Sol-Ray-Sol language which has only 8 phonemes and can be whistled as each syllable is a musical note. Slight drawbacks are that the words are very long indeed and it can't be used or understood without perfect pitch, but that shouldn't be a problem for aliens. If they have ears. Final consensus was that music can't be used universally to communicate amongst humans, so unlikely to work with giant jellyfish from Antares.
Quantum craziness, some of which made sense, which means I misunderstood it, probably distracted by the lovely Dr Emma in the shortest skirt I've ever seen on a cosmologist. The impossibility of measuring something without affecting it seemed plausible when the something is a something as your measurer inevitably hits it, but is odd when extended to nothing, as it should be possible to measure a vacuum's vacuity without affecting it as it's not there. But apparently not, hence quantum froth as things come and go in vacuo in a way that would be quite unbelievable if it wasn't measurable (assuming it's not just the measurement affecting it that makes it true).
Insidious, the play, exotic fiction on memetic engineering in a Whorfian Heresy pushed so far that the memes become self-aware and use humans as the transport layer in the same way that genes do. Beth was very good in it.
A brief history of the universe, surprisingly well attended for 11pm until you realise the speaker is Dr Emma again and she may have more than one appeal for a certain SF fan demographic. Like a well designed book franchise, most of the action happens in the first pico-second, so there's plenty of room to add more sequels in the remaining zillion years which are rather quiet in the current model. As with so much of physics, the entertainment is in surprises such as the rate of expansion of the universe increasing in an impossible way, and in the hysterical solutions proposed, such as dark energy being stuff with negative pressure which can only be detected by its causing the otherwise inexplicable effects it was made up to explain. Session was followed by going outside to look at stars, arranged by someone under the impression that cosmologists are optical astronomers, rather than dangerous fantasists who never go out.
Monday
How to plot a novel, delightful presentation by Tim Powers, who I always admired for referring to Anubis the great jackal-headed god of upper and lower Egypt as "Dog face". He has a system for producing plots that works for people who have neither imagination nor memory, and which doubles as a brilliant displacement activity as it includes hundreds of index cards and wall charts that you can colour in in endless detail. It's like producing an overly baroque revision timetable instead of ever doing any revision. And he let slip the splendid plot of finding your dog has part of a picture tattooed under its fur, and that other dogs spread around the country have the rest of the jigsaw on them - what could be a better story than that?
Beginner's time travel, completely packed to the extent that my shoulder got squash injuries, and coincidentally another one presented by the wonderful Dr Emma, though in jeans this time. The film clips would have been better with sound, and the Tardis wardrobe looked home-made (not like a proper Dr Who prop at all), but I got why relativity is symmetrical for the first time, and why the Lorentz transformation tau contains the squares of velocity and light speed - it's from Pythagoras Theorem - delightful to find the work of a mad ancient Greek magician embedded at the core of 20th century physics. If only science fiction was as implausible as science.