Boskone 45 Schedule

Kate and I will be attending Boskone agains next week, and the preliminary program has been posted. Kate’s posted her thoughts on what looks interesting, and mine are below the fold:

Friday 7pm Otis: The Rise of Modern Science

What happened in the Middle Ages which led to the rise of modern science? Why did it happen first in Europe and not elsewhere? How did science grow if the Middle Ages were really an “age of faith” without reason?

Guy Consolmagno, John Farrell, Michael F. Flynn

Could be interesting, if we’re there. We may be visiting family that evening.

Friday 8pm Consuite: Death to Peeps Fun Fest

In David Weber’s Honor Harrington universe, the Peeps are a cunning, tyrannical enemy. Here, the Peeps are cute, marshmallow foodietoys. Either way, they’ve got as much chance as Bambi playing bumpercars with a Manty superdreadnought. Unleash your inner mad scientist as we research ways to reverse-engineer the Peeps’ assembly instructions. Flutter a flock into Somebody Else’s Blender, design a tragic Peeps diorama, nosh on Peep kabobs, write an ode to a Peep’s gruesome end, or do something unspeakable to a Peep Cthulhu. Prizes and fun for all ages. We supply the Peeps; you supply the fiendish imagination. Remember, in the Con Suite, no one can hear you cheep. (Note: please don’t think us evil. We have nothing but goo intentions…)

Ought to be entertaining, and we’ll probably catch at least some of it.

Friday 8pm Otis: Hidden Biases in SF

Why aren’t there more blacks or Asians, Jews or Catholics or Muslims or Buddhists in even our most richly imagined futures?

Tobias Buckell, Gregory Feeley, Gregory Frost (m), Daniel Kimmel, Pamela Sargent

My immediate reaction isn’t as negative as Kate’s, but I would approach this with trepidation. And anyway, it’s competing with:

Friday 8pm Revere: Applied SF: Using SF in the Real World

When he’s not writing science fiction, Karl Schroeder is a consulting futurist for government and industry. Sounds interesting? Sounds like a perfect job? Hear all about it!

Karl Schroeder

I suspect Schroeder wins out, here. How many people have had a novel commissioned by the Canadian military, after all?

Saturday 10am Revere: Tunguska at 100

On June 30, 1908, an exploding asteroid leveled 2000 square kilometers of Siberian forest, producing a fireball from the sky which knocked pine trees over like matchsticks near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Russia. Such an explosion today over more populated areas could lay waste an entire city. What was it? (Do we know, yet?) What are some of the older theories, and why were they discredited? How likely is a repeat? How common are events like this? Are there any other historical records? Would we expect there to be?

Guy Consolmagno, Jeff Hecht (m), Chad Orzel

Why would you be anywhere else?

Saturday 11am Hancock: Genre Poaching

The fanzine Ansible found an interesting term proposed at a recent Modern Language Association con. “Genre poaching,” as practiced by writers such as Jonathan Lethem and Cormac McCarthy, would comprise “works that have been shelved, reviewed, and studied in the realm of literary fiction but whose authors use tropes, themes, and ideas explicitly drawn from genres such as science fiction, detective fiction, romance novels, TV, and superhero comics.” Drawls the MLA, “Is such co-optation destined to be condescending, reactionary, or nostalgic; or is it potentially generative of new literary forms and approaches? … What do the authors have to say about the reprobate status of the forms they’re drawing from?” Good questions.

Don D’Ammassa, Gregory Feeley, Steven Popkes

Saturday 11am Otis: Character Assassination for Fun and Profit

The death of a major character often proves upsetting for involved readers. How does it feel to the writer? What genre works have killed off their own most memorably? Does it always help the story? Which writers have a special gift for this dark art?

James D. Macdonald, Joshua B. Palmatier, Allen Steele (m), Charles Stross

Saturday 11am Revere: The Ethics of Madness and Other Challenges

In “The Ethics of Madness,” Larry Niven wrote of the sfnal moral dilemma that becomes possible when forms of madness are curable (or inducible) at will: If an easily curable madman does harm, whose fault is it? Many of the technologies written about in SF have the potential to create other new moral dilemmas. If the mind can be radically modified, when does cosmetic alteration become essential suicide? If the body can be radically modified, what happens to sexual mores? Even plausible near-future advances in biotech blur the line between animal and human — how do we prevent people from becoming objects, to be manipulated and even destroyed at will?

Thomas A. Easton (m), Robert I. Katz, Rosemary Kirstein, Amy Thomson

Saturday 11am Webster: The Space Race at 50

With the anniversary of the launch of Explorer 1, the Space Race is 50 years (and two weeks) old. Why was progress so fast in the early years and so much slower since? Is it just money? Or is it simply that getting into space is hard?

Jordin T. Kare

The 11:00 block is just loaded with possible options. Most could be entertaining, a couple could go horribly, horribly wrong. I’m probably leaning toward Jordin’s talk, to get the perspective of an actual rocket scientist. Or I might go to lunch then.

Saturday 12noon Commonwealth A: The Appeal of the Lawless Elite

Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden has said, “Much of the genre works by appealing to our wish that the world’s extra-legal violence be under the control of the kind of smart people we admire. The Second Foundation and the X-Men — and, for that matter, the Scooby Gang and the Laundry — are all, to some extent, basically the Ku Klux Klan, except that the extrajudicial violence they carry out is (we’re assured) merited and just.” Discuss.

Alexander Jablokov, Beth Meacham (m), Paul Park, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Karl Schroeder

This could be great fun. It might also be a carnival of pain, but I’m familiar enough with Patrick, Beth Meacham, and Karl Schroeder that I have hope.

The other option is:

Saturday 12noon Quincy: Quantum Randomness

Eric M. Van

But all I really know about him is that he’s a Red Sox fan, which is a big strike against…

Or there’s:

Saturday 1pm Commonwealth A: Bringing Elfland to Poughkeepsie

LeGuin criticized mixing the modern with the high fantastic, yet Tolkien pointed out that our own green Earth is a character in ancient legends and is where the fantastic plays out. So what’s wrong with mixing the high fantastic and the mundane? Discuss what works and what doesn’t. Why?

S. C. Butler (m), Paul Park, Wen Spencer, Jane Yolen

But this could also be really annoying.

Saturday 2pm Hancock: Who’d’a Thunk It? Unexpected Uses of Technology

Numerous technologies wind up getting used for quite different purposes than their originators expected. Consider dynamite, bubble wrap, speed trap radar, screensavers, the Internet’s massive if not main use as a conduit for pornography, and laser pointer cat toys. What other example suggest themselves? Does this phenomenon make basic research more desirable, or less? Is it ever discussed in SF? Consider some of the great SFnal inventions (the hyperdrive, AIs, cyperspace, anti-gravity, boosterspice, positronic robots, personal force fields). Can you extrapolate some unexpected uses for them?

Tobias Buckell, Chad Orzel, Karl Schroeder (m), Charles Stross

I’m looking forward to this one. It’s a topic that sounds like fun, and I was the moderator on a panel with Karl and Toby a few years ago, and they were great. You should’ve even think of being anywhere else.

Saturday 3pm Hancock: God’s Mechanics: How Techies Make Sense of Religion

Details TBD

Guy Consolmagno

Guy Consolmagno, for the few people who have read this far but haven’t encountered him before, is a Jesuit brother and the offical Vatican astronomer. This has the potential to be really fascinating, but a lot will depend on that “TBD.” The divine is in the details…

Saturday 3pm Otis: The Glamor of Elfland

Elves are glamorous. They’re tall, cooler than people, dress well, have great taste in music, and are all-round athletes, as well as being immortals with magical powers. And they’re in tune with nature, too. But are they really? Most elvish societies are intensely hierarchical with a few ueberelfen at the top and many more peons at the bottom. And there’s no way for a peon to work his way up, since the master race is genetic. Tolkien’s Elves were fairly benign, but the elves in many of the derivative fantasies that followed on don’t look all that different from what we could imagine finding in a world a thousand years after a Nazi victory: the horrors at the start are long forgotten, but now there is a master race. Unfair? Discuss.

Judith Berman, Amy Thomson (m), Lawrence Watt-Evans, Jane Yolen

I don’t quite know what to make of this…

Saturday 4pm Otis: Urban Legends of Science, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fandom

The essence of an urban legend is a story or “Just So” tale that is untrue, but so attractive that it gets repeated, and spreads. Candidates from our folkways might include Archimedes in that bathtub, the evil baron’s first night with the bride in innumerable medievalish fantasies, the FBI’s questioning John Campbell about leaking the A-bomb, the SWAT team at Disclave, the Galilleo myth, or Dave Kyle and seating. What are some of our other tales too tall to be true? What’s their basis, if any? What do they tell us about us?

Michael F. Flynn, Jordin T. Kare, James D. Macdonald (m), Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Get your “Footnote Needed” signs ready…

Saturday 4pm Stone: It’s All Downhill from Tolkien

Resolved: That High Fantasy reached its peak with Tolkien and it’s all been downhill since.
Just what has happened to the state of the art of high fantasy since Tolkien to contradict that assertion? Or is 98% of the post-Tolkien fantasy literature just a re-use of parts of his storyline with a few things changed?

Ginjer Buchanan, Stephen C. Fisher, Mary Kay Kare (m), Farah Mendlesohn

Even odds I would end up wanting to throw something at the panel…

Saturday 5pm Hancock: If You Liked X, You’re Gonna Love Y

Sometimes good books are alike in interesting or unexpected ways. Our neighborhood bookshop is exploiting this phenomenon to display older novels next to particularly popular new ones. Let’s do the same for worthy works of SF, fantasy, and horror &mash; and speculate on the mysterious affinities we may find between very different works of art.

Ellen Asher, Kathryn Cramer, Don D’Ammassa, Faye Ringel (m), Peter Weston

Recommendations are good.

Saturday 5pm Otis: Even Jove Nods

Discussing later works by masters such as Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, writer Darrell Schweitzer said, “Alas, Jove nods and our gods fail … The author who is setting the world on fire at 30 just isn’t the same person at 75. Either he goes on to write something different or … he turns out continually weaker pastiches of his younger self.” What are some other egregious examples? Where did they go wrong? Which is worse: writing the same old stuff, or trying for something new in perhaps a minor key? Once a writer stumbles, can he or she ever recover?

Farah Mendlesohn, Teresa Nielsen Hayden (m), George Zebrowski

Schweitzer is too kind…

Saturday 5pm Stone: The Year in Physics and Astronomy

Physics basically covers three subjects: matter, energy, and what goes on between them. How exciting can that be, really? More and more all the time, as it turns out. Plus we keep watching the skies — and every year it pays off with fascinating new astronomical developments.

Guy Consolmagno, Ctein, Jeff Hecht, Mark L. Olson (m)

Likely to be much more astronomy than physics. It was that kind of year.

Saturday 10pm Hancock: Nominating for the Hugos: Written

The Hugo nomination deadline is only two weeks away! Join us to talk about what we liked from 2007 in the written categories.

Claire Anderson, Vince Docherty, Jim Mann, Mark L. Olson

Why is this at such a bad time?

Sunday 10am Stone: Quantum Teleportation

When physicists talk about “Quantum Teleportation,” just how close are they to making a Star Trek transporter? This talk will cover the basics of what quantum teleportation is, what it isn’t, how it works, and how to explain it to your dog.

Chad Orzel

Featuring the first dramatic reading from Chapter 8 of the book. Unless I totally chicken out and can’t do the dog voice. I can guarantee cute dog pictures, though. Don’t be anywhere else.

Sunday 12noon Commonwealth AB: Working in the Shadows: Influences

It’s said that only a few thousand people bought the Velvet Underground’s first album — but every one of them started a band. What creative people in our genres have had similar influence on our panelists? On the field as a whole? Do influences from outside the genre count? How about bad influences? Can one be influenced without imitating? As leaders in their fields, how do our panelists try to influence others?

Bruce Coville, Steve Miller (m), Dean Morrissey, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, David Weber

Sunday 12noon Commonwealth C: How Not to Get Published

We often talk about how to get published: This time talk about how not to get published. What are some of the don’ts? Discuss both the absurd “what could they have been thinking???” sorts of errors and also the subtle mistakes a newbie can make.

Ginjer Buchanan, Daniel P. Dern (m), Paul Melko, Eleanor Wood

Sunday 12noon Otis: Religion in YA

C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, and Madeline L’Engle included religion in their most famous works. “Harry Potter” is seen by some as anti-Christian. Is religion important to include in YA, or important to avoid? Is religion in YA tempered by or encouraged by the latest trends in popular culture or adult fiction? Are there YA works which explore non-Christian religious themes?

Jeffrey A. Carver, Debra Doyle, Esther Friesner, Tamora Pierce (m)

Sunday 12noon Webster: Whom You Should Be Reading — Young Turks Division

They aren’t household names — at least not yet. But we promise that writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherynne M. Valente, Daniel Abraham, and Joe Hill are already producing pretty stellar stuff in SF, fantasy, or horror. Bring your own hot candidates for future fame as well. We’ll (briefly) describe each writer’s work, and suggest which story you might like to start with.

Gregory Feeley, David G. Hartwell (m), Fred Lerner, Farah Mendlesohn

A whole bunch of maybes. Or, possibly, lunch.

Sunday 1pm Commonwealth AB: Why Don’t We Believe in UFO’s?

Is it true that SF readers are less likely than the general public to believe in the existence of UFOs, drive-by probes by Gray aliens, etc.? Is it that we’re more scientifically informed, or just less open-minded than we think? Is there any good evidence for these phenomena generally? Why is this stuff not likely to be true? What evidence would it take to convince us?

F. Brett Cox, Jennifer Dunne

The first answer is “no,” and it falls apart from there…

Sunday 1pm Commonwealth C: Don’t Stand So Close to Me: Problems in Writing Near-Future SF

The attractions are obvious. Yet the pitfalls become ever more perilous, including the black hole of the Singularity and the temptation to simply slam present-day politics. Is a near-future utopia even possible anymore? Let’s talk, with reference to outstanding examples such as Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End and Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Tamarisk Hunter.”

Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly (m), Charles Stross

Maybe. I didn’t care for the only Bacigalupi I’ve read, though.

Sunday 1:30pm Hale: Reading

Howard Waldrop

An absolute master of the quirky short story.

And that’s about it for my first pass through the schedule. I’ll probably notice stuff I forgot when I get it in a grid layout.