"The Mechanical Transcendental": SFRA con report, Day 3
Saturday is unremarkable, mostly; after being in the hotel complex all of Friday I have to get out and see KC some, so I take a bus downtown, to the City Market, which is a big farmer's market, with a few buskers and some country-folk (is there an Amish country near-by, or do you think other farmers adopt the look, perhaps for market-brand purposes?), and also home of the Arabia Steamboat Museum, which is closed, but which I can see a bit of through the glass walls. (Glass walls are big in KC.)
Back at the hotel, an unremarkable roundtable on the SFRA Review makes me realize that I don't read very much modern sf (though my paper was on a panel called "Modern SF", the irony of which is that one of my books was from 1969, which is close to modern, and the other was from 1912, which is on the other side of the Golden Age; but that's the way periodization goes -- the next paper I'm giving is on a panel for 19th century genres, and I'm presenting on a book from 1902, and a book from 2003). Then I got read some modern SF: Fred Pohl's wife read his current collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, and James Gunn read part of his new novel. I didn't buy a banquet ticket, so I went to the reception, where I got into a talk with the only people there with whom I would be tempted to speak French (they were a nice couple from Nice, and I seriously started sweating as soon as I tried to speak French; we made it work with both French and English, though I could tell they would prefer if I spoke English), and then there the godawful fetishism of the Heinlein gala itself. (I may not have said, the SFRA conference was attached to the Heinlein Centennial, and I can't count the number of times I swallowed rude retorts in response to people talking about how Verhoeven mangled Heinlein's great work.)
I mean, let's be clear: showing clips of Heinlein's wife reading his "This I Believe" speech was good; having a retired naval officer and friend of Heinlein giving toasts, fine; Spider Robinson singing a song from his posthumous collaboration with Heinlein, weird, but also fine; showing a 13 minute video about the reconditioning of a small brass cannon that Heinlein once owned and then showing it being fired not once, not twice, but FOUR times -- that's really just too much. I was surprised no one brought out a reliquary with some piece of Heinlein for us to venerate.
I washed the taste of that out of my mouth with some Jack and coke while talking to some of the people who were still awake, many of whom, smarter than I, ducked out of the gala early, or decided not to attend at all. (Although, to be fair, they did show a small video Arthur C. Clarke had taped just for this event, which was kind of interesting, though too close to some sort of Barthesian punctum to really be comfortable. It's like, here's a picture of a 90-year-old man; when he took the picture, he was alive; but is he still alive now? Or, if you prefer the science metaphors, it's like a star whose light goes on, though the star itself may no longer be there.)
Back at the hotel, an unremarkable roundtable on the SFRA Review makes me realize that I don't read very much modern sf (though my paper was on a panel called "Modern SF", the irony of which is that one of my books was from 1969, which is close to modern, and the other was from 1912, which is on the other side of the Golden Age; but that's the way periodization goes -- the next paper I'm giving is on a panel for 19th century genres, and I'm presenting on a book from 1902, and a book from 2003). Then I got read some modern SF: Fred Pohl's wife read his current collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, and James Gunn read part of his new novel. I didn't buy a banquet ticket, so I went to the reception, where I got into a talk with the only people there with whom I would be tempted to speak French (they were a nice couple from Nice, and I seriously started sweating as soon as I tried to speak French; we made it work with both French and English, though I could tell they would prefer if I spoke English), and then there the godawful fetishism of the Heinlein gala itself. (I may not have said, the SFRA conference was attached to the Heinlein Centennial, and I can't count the number of times I swallowed rude retorts in response to people talking about how Verhoeven mangled Heinlein's great work.)
I mean, let's be clear: showing clips of Heinlein's wife reading his "This I Believe" speech was good; having a retired naval officer and friend of Heinlein giving toasts, fine; Spider Robinson singing a song from his posthumous collaboration with Heinlein, weird, but also fine; showing a 13 minute video about the reconditioning of a small brass cannon that Heinlein once owned and then showing it being fired not once, not twice, but FOUR times -- that's really just too much. I was surprised no one brought out a reliquary with some piece of Heinlein for us to venerate.
I washed the taste of that out of my mouth with some Jack and coke while talking to some of the people who were still awake, many of whom, smarter than I, ducked out of the gala early, or decided not to attend at all. (Although, to be fair, they did show a small video Arthur C. Clarke had taped just for this event, which was kind of interesting, though too close to some sort of Barthesian punctum to really be comfortable. It's like, here's a picture of a 90-year-old man; when he took the picture, he was alive; but is he still alive now? Or, if you prefer the science metaphors, it's like a star whose light goes on, though the star itself may no longer be there.)