My Boskone Schedule

The usual “This is the stuff that looks interesting to me” post, based on the preliminary online program. Subject to change if they move things around, or if I discover something I overlooked that sounds more interesting, or if I decide I’m hungry, and opt to blow off panels in favor of food.

This year’s program is lighter on panels, but includes both a signing and a reading. Which will be a very different experience than years past…

Friday 7pm Harbor 1: The Singularity: An Appraisal
Arguably the idea of the Singularity — a period where change happens so quickly that life afterwards is incomprehensible to people who lived before it — is one of the few entirely fresh ideas in SF in the last forty years. Perhaps it is time for an appraisal. Has the idea of the Singularity been a good thing for SF, providing fresh ideas and stimulating great writing or has the notion that the comprehensibility of the future has a sharp (and near-term) limit diminished possibilities? Has it been a good thing for *your* writing? How about the Singularity in reality — after twenty years does it look more or less plausible that it is lurking in our own real-world future? Discuss the interplay between the idea of the Singularity in SF and actual scientific research. Where are the really exotic ideas coming from?
Alastair Reynolds (m), Karl Schroeder, Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge

I’m not generally that excited by “the Rapture for nerds,” but if I were ever going to listen to somebody speak about it, Vinge would be the guy.

Friday 8pm Harbor 3: How is the Internet Changing What We Read?
With hundreds of genre releases every year, fans are constantly looking for what to read, and sometimes more importantly, what to avoid. How are blogs and discussion forums and yes, even advertising affecting your reading habits? Do the personal opinions and politics of an author cause you to buy their books or avoid them like the swine flu? Does internet popularity and word-of-mouth translate into actual sales?
Scott Andrews, Neil Clarke, Justine Graykin (m), James Patrick Kelly, Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Not that I have any experience with completely writing authors off on the basis of their online antics, or anything…

Friday 9pm Burroughs: The Place of Prediction in SF and Reality
Hugo Gernsback thought the purpose of SF was to educate. Others think the purpose of SF is to predict. What *is* the place of prediction in SF? Does it have any place at all, or is the occasional good prediction an accidental side- effect of writing stories? Can SF be about the future and *not* be making predictions? And let’s not limit ourselves to technology — if anything, SF may have a more distinguished history of predicting social changes. (Did the publication of 1984 actually help prevent that future?) Can foresight help us face the future? Finally, is SF better or worse in predicting the future than professional futurologists?
Charles Gannon, Glenn Grant (m), Andrew Zimmerman Jones, Karl Schroeder, Allen M. Steele

Friday 9pm Harbor 1: Great Books I Hate
OK, what are they — and why? It’s amazingly liberating to admit right out there in public that you hate That Great Novel, and you’re very like to find kindred souls. No one will be mocked or laughed at! We’ll be mostly concentrating on genre material, but if the mood really grabs you, toss in some of the more recognized classics of great literature (hey, you can always blame your 10th grade English teacher…..)
Paul Di Filippo (m), Gregory Feeley, Greer Gilman, Faye Ringel, Christopher Weuve

Friday 9pm Harbor 2: The Problem of Glorfindel – and Other Issues in Tolkien
Tolkien’s elves never re-used names (they were immortal, after all) yet a Glorfindel lived and died in the First Age of Middle-Earth and another was a character in Lord of the Rings six thousand years later — what happened? One of the joys of Tolkien’s world is that it is so well-realized that minor anomalies (which in a lesser writer would be assumed to be sloppiness) only make it seem more real, since the history of the real worls also abounds in puzzles. Enjoy a walk through Middle-Earth’s lesser-know byways. Who was Eldest: Treebeard or Tom Bombadil? What were orcs, actually, since Morgoth could not create anything new? Why are the wood-elves such jerks in The Hobbit? Whatever happend to Ungoliant? Arwen became mortal, but what happened to the sons of Elrond when he took ship for Valinor? Where did Sauron hide the One Ring when he was taken captive to Numinor? Let’s take the time to explore these and other intriguing curiosities of Middle Earth.
Mary Kay Kare, Kate Nepveu, Mark L. Olson (m), Tom Shippey

Spousal loyalty is at odds with the fact that I’m just not that into Tolkien any more.

Friday 9pm Harbor 3: The Way the Future Was (Joint item with Caprikone)
SF is usually set in an imagined future, but, usually, the future we imagine says more about the present than anything else: the 40s saw titanic space battles, the 50s saw Armageddon or, at least, endless conflict with the the Communists. The 70s saw a stagnant, gray, overpopulated future, while the 80s and 90s imagined a future of transcendence, either in space on in the Net. Talk about the changing views of the future, and stories which epitomized one view or another, or one age or another. What do we see today? What does it say about us?
Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross

I’m not quite sure what “Joint item with Caprikone” means. I’m not sure the videoconferencing technology is really there yet.

Saturday 11am Burroughs: Books Authors Must Read
What books (fiction or non-fiction) do you think an author must read? Why? How will these help aspiring authors improve their work?
John R. Douglas, Rose Fox, Jack M. Haringa, Daniel Hatch (m), Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Might be a little too process-oriented to end up being interesting, but I almost always like book recommendation panels.

Saturday 1pm Autographs: Autographing
Lev Grossman , Chad Orzel, Melinda Snodgrass

I really hope that somebody in the Dealer’s Room has copies of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog available. The most likely person to have them, Larry Smith, does not have contact information listed on the Boskone site, and is Google-proof, or else I would’ve emailed to suggest it.

Saturday 2pm Harbor 1: The City and Science Fiction
From the planet-spanning urbs of Trantor or Coruscant to the steamfunkier precincts of New Crobuzon to the vastly vertical Spearpoint of Alastair Reynolds’ forthcoming Terminal World — what’s your favorite skiffy megalopolis? Would you move there tomorrow? Would it actually work as a technological/societal/economic artifact? In an advanced, post-scarcity society, would people even want to pig-pile together? What will cities be like in the future? (And what would you prefer them to be?)
S. C. Butler, Alexander Jablokov (m), James Patrick Kelly, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Steven H Silver

Saturday 2pm Harbor 3: Generation Issues in SF
Are there any? If so, what? And (if so), should (can?) the community (the literature/fandom/conventions) do something about them?
Paul Di Filippo (m), Glenn Grant, Fred Lerner, Feorag NicBhride, Priscilla Olson

Has a high probability of decaying into complaints about all these kids these days and their disrespect for people’s carefully maintained lawns.

Saturday 3pm Carlton: The Fermi Failure
The great physicist Enrico Fermi asked “Where are the aliens? Why didn’t they get here long ago?” This is a huge puzzle since the universe is so old that it is difficult to understand why they have not already visited Earth or at least made their presence known out in space. This is the Fermi Paradox. Have we made any progress untangling it?
Charles Gannon, Geoffrey A. Landis, Mark L. Olson (m), Ian Tregillis

Geoff Landis is one of the most reliably entertaining people at the con.

Saturday 4pm Burroughs: The Creatures We Don’t See
Why is it always cats? Well, maybe cats, dragons, and an occasional talking horse. Where are the meerkats? Flamingoes? Beetles (after all, they’re the most diverse group of critters on the planet — give ’em a break!)? What animals are missing from the genre? Should we care?
Ellen Asher, Elaine Isaak, Vandana Singh, Mary A. Turzillo (m)

Saturday 4pm Carlton: Energy Beaming and Space Elevators
A talk about the adventures of the speaker with lasers, LaserMotive, and Otis the Climber. Otis used customized solar cells to convert laser power to electricity and drive a small motor — enabling it to climb a 3300 foot cable in 4 minutes. This feat, accomplished on November 4, 2009 won a $900,000 prize from NASA. This spring, Laser Motive will try to make a similar climb in less than 5 minutes. After that, the sky is quite literally the limit…
Jordin T. Kare

Saturday 5pm Harbor 1: The Year in Astronomy and Physics

So what happened in astronomy and physics in 2009? Old mysteries solved? New mysteries found? (Seen any Higgs bosons lately?) Join us for the annual panel on the wonders of our universe!

Sunday 9:30am Griffin: Reading
Chad Orzel

It’s early for a con, I know, but I promise it will be worth your while…

Sunday 10am Harbor 1: Science Talk: In Fact, the Future Really Does Need Us!
Can we engineer our own indispensability? Our Hal Clement Science Speaker will consider several scenarios. They don’t all look like “Life After People”.
Vernor Vinge

I’m not quite sure what this means, but I’m inclined to give Vinge some slack.

Sunday 11am Harbor 2: Bad Science on TV
Give examples. Lots and lots of terrible examples, please!?
Andrew Zimmerman Jones (m), Jordin T. Kare, Chad Orzel

Fish. Barrel. BLAM!

Sunday 12noon Burroughs: Legal Systems in Worldbuilding
A common criticism of mediocre science fiction and fantasy is that it assumes wildly different worlds in which people behave exactly the way your neighbors do in Kansas. Many SFF authors assume systems of rules or authority that are only superficially different from models in our own human past or present. Yet, real laws typically change to meet economic, social, religious and technical developements , and differences in human (or non-human) behavior are the most wonder and terrible of all. Think outside of the legal box, and consider the possibilities.
Leah Cypess, Glenn Grant, Kate Nepveu, Ken Schneyer (m)

Sunday 12noon Carlton: Matters Japanese
Anime……Manga…..Sushi!? What is it about some artifacts of Japanese culture that has insinuated itself into the western world. Participants will explore their favorite parts of these exotic invaders, and discuss how, perhaps, they are influencing both the science fiction/fantasy/horror field and American pop culture (and somehow they’ll do all of this in just one hour….wow!)
Feorag NicBhride, Timothy P. Szczesuil (m), Rene Walling

Sunday 12noon Harbor 2: Dark Universe
Why does great space opera seldom look on the sunny side?
Mark L. Olson, Alastair Reynolds, Lawrence M. Schoen, Allen M. Steele, Peter Weston (m)

Sunday 12noon Lewis: The Proliferation of Weirdboiled Novels
While China Mieville might call this genre “noird,” he’s not the only one to notice a recent proliferation of noir/crime fiction gone weird. Think of Jedidiah Berry’s The Manual of Detection (think noir and Borges), Brian Evenson’s Last Days (think noir and Grand Guignol), China Mieville’s The City and The City (think noir, and well, Mieville), national book award winner Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move (serialized noir), Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (think noir, and well, Pynchon), Jeff Vandermeer’s Finch (think noir and Ambergris) and from Small Beer Press, Vincent McCaffrey’s Hound. Why now? Is it an example of publishers trying to capitalize on a built-in market of mystery readers? In this instance, we choose a more optimistic outlook. Is it a sign that writers and readers aren’t satisfied with fiction always conforming to genre expectations? That more writers and readers want to mix and mash and muddy it all up?

John R. Douglas (m), Toni L. P. Kelner, Michael Swanwick, Paul G. Tremblay

Spousal loyalty vs. Japanophilia vs. Space Opera vs. Hardboiled– why is there always one hour with all the good stuff in it?

I will probably end up punting, and go get lunch, especially since:

Sunday 1pm Harbor 1: Time Travel in Science and Science Fiction
It’s over a century since H. G. Wells wrote *The Time Machine* and the concept of time travel is today widespread in SF, the popular culture, and even has a degree of scientific respectability. What does physics know about time travel? What does SF write about? Some SF treats the past and the future both as fixed and time travelers as spectators who cannot change what is, while other SF imagines a mutable past where the actions of travelers to the past can change the very future they came from. What can we say about the real world? Does what we know about the physics of time permit good stories to be written?
Andrew Zimmerman Jones, Chad Orzel (m), Ken Schneyer, Ian Tregillis, Vernor Vinge

Somehow, it hadn’t dawned on me that I’m supposed to be moderating this until just now. Fortunately, I just recently finished From Eternity to Here, which has a nice chapter on time travel…

Sunday 2pm Carlton: Mission to the Sun
From Bradbury’s “Golden Apples of the Sun” to Brin’s “Sundiver” to last year’s “Sunshine”, science fiction has sent many probes into the sun. Now, NASA is designing a mission to do exactly that: to dive into the outer corona of the sun in order to learn more about how our star works. How do you keep cool when the outside of the spacecraft is glowing white hot? How do you actually sent a mission into the very atmosphere of a star?
Geoffrey A. Landis

See previous comment about Geoff Landis.

Sunday 2pm Lewis: Pathologies of Fannish Culture
As a fan noted provocatively in one LiveJournal thread: “SF fans are more prone to infection with bad ideas than the average person…They’re encouraged to consider possibilities that are way off the path of social functionality, and to have the engineer’s affection for simple all-encompassing systems. There’s a rich vein of crackpottery at the core of the genre…” Let’s see how long it takes our discussion to prove this!
Mary Kay Kare, Laurie Mann (m), Kate Nepveu, Joe Siclari, Rene Walling

Spousal loyalty vs. I’ve been on this panel before, to close things out…