Talking the same language

I just had a conversation with Jamie Scott about conventions and the Emergency Hologram Eastercon, where I suggested that when the proposed Eastercon failed, the Interesting Times Gang stepped in. He replied, "Well, yes."

I was gobsmacked; "You got that reference?" says I. He replied that Excession had been his favourite book for a long time.

I don't hold with a lot of aspects of SF fandom, but good grief it's good to be able to throw out a reference like that and be immediately understood.

Hubris

I got roped into the programme for Satellite 1 last weekend. It's my own fault, I volunteered. What I actually volunteered was to do a science spot about small spacecraft since Sputnik, which is somewhat of a specialist subject since it was the topic of my (first, ha! still smug) masters thesis. That didn't happen.

Turns out that my presentation didn't fit the programme, but I had indelibly marked myself as 'willing victim/mug'. I got put on a programme item about SF in the next 50 years. Now I knew that the initial idea was totally wrong and missed the point of SF, because it was all about media, and will we be watching SF in the future on holodecks and the like. No, if in 50 years we have holodecks, we will be watching Corrie and Eastenders on them, sitting in our bar stools in the Old Vic or the Rovers'.

What SF will be doing in the next 50 years in terms of stories and themes and who will be writing it, no matter what the medium is, is a much more interesting question, and one that, I'm happy to say, got added to the panel definition. And muggins got put on the panel along with Ken MacLeod and autopope. That's what I get for being mouthy.

It was an interesting panel, though. Ken started by waving over at Charlie and saying, "there's the future of SF," but then going on to put out an idea that SF is the literature of an industrialised society. Charlie livened things up by pointing out that the biggest SF audience is in China at the moment, and I weighed in with my ideas that SF didn't just have to be about technology but also about how people react in different circumstances, including ones that have never applied or are brought on by new technology. It went around in discussion of new sources of SF, new ideas, the place and future of genre books and tie-ins, why China is producing SF and India isn't yet, new media and guerrilla SF filmmaking, and the role of SF in inspiring people to build the ideas that writers find and popularise.

I'd be interested to see if the con tech recorded the panel, and to see a transcript of it. I'm told by tanngrisnr that I added to the panel, which is all I could ask for, sitting between two such SF luminaries. I have to say it was one of the most fraught hours that I have gone through recently.