Great seeing you at the con. Thanks for the panel descriptions--very interesting. A few specific thoughts:
1) I probably should have attended the First Contact panel, since one of the short stories I'm (slowly) working on is a first contact story. And in fact the closed-fist versus open-hand approach figures in the plot.
2) I need to read Omega and Chindi both. I've read a bunch of McDevitt, and he's one of my favorite authors, but I haven't gotten to those yet. His Infinity Beach is another good treatment of first contact.
3) I'd have liked to make the Cities and SF panel, but it was against filk concerts I had to attend. (Not good for the chair of a filk con to skip a concert by his GOHs...) As for megalopolises and other cities, Asimov is the typical example (notably Caves of Steel). Stross had some nicely-described cities/constructs in Saturn's Children4) Somebody last year suggested the vibrations may be from Big Dig traffic passing by and/or under the hotel. Since most of that area is probably fill or alluvial soils, I can
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I was thinking about Caves of Steel, although it didn't come up in the discussion.
Yeah, now that you mention the Big Dig, I remember that when I used to live a couple hundred yards from the Northeast Corridor main line, it got so I rarely noticed the Acelas and such like as they zoomed on past, but when a slow freight rumbled by in the middle of the night, the whole house would shake.
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1) I probably should have attended the First Contact panel, since one of the short stories I'm (slowly) working on is a first contact story. And in fact the closed-fist versus open-hand approach figures in the plot.
2) I need to read Omega and Chindi both. I've read a bunch of McDevitt, and he's one of my favorite authors, but I haven't gotten to those yet. His Infinity Beach is another good treatment of first contact.
3) I'd have liked to make the Cities and SF panel, but it was against filk concerts I had to attend. (Not good for the chair of a filk con to skip a concert by his GOHs...) As for megalopolises and other cities, Asimov is the typical example (notably Caves of Steel). Stross had some nicely-described cities/constructs in Saturn's Children4) Somebody last year suggested the vibrations may be from Big Dig traffic passing by and/or under the hotel. Since most of that area is probably fill or alluvial soils, I can ( ... )
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Yeah, now that you mention the Big Dig, I remember that when I used to live a couple hundred yards from the Northeast Corridor main line, it got so I rarely noticed the Acelas and such like as they zoomed on past, but when a slow freight rumbled by in the middle of the night, the whole house would shake.
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