“Financial Meltdowns in SFF” attempted to deal with the depiction of real economics in science fiction. Not a lot of books include functioning, or even dys-functioning, economies. Many authors view them as externalities: The Galaxy is in the middle of a great depression but no one says why. The topic of the session was more interesting than the execution, perhaps because so many are basically not clued into macroeconomics (and I include myself in that).

I was looking forward to “Building a Fantasy World”. The panel included two published authors (including Lackey, whose resume is truly impressive) and two professional editors. Getting the view from “inside the biz” was pretty cool. Alas, it also meant that the discussion focused on the marketability angles: What type of fantasy worlds offer the potential for lucrative sales of multiple novels? I am much more interested in the craft of building worlds: How much detail to work out ahead of time, how to adapt real examples without ripping off history, and so on. Truth be told, I found the focus on selling lots of copies to be a little crass.

Ironically, they kept referring back to Tolkein — whose books did not sell well during his lifetime but which have become truly foundational in large part (I would argue) because he had a theme in mind when he wrote them. He sold well because he built a fantastic world, rather than building that sort of world to sell well. I think the key to successful world building is to build a world in which you can tell a story (or hopefully many stories) — and that just didn’t seem to be central to the panel.

The editor at Baen Books made a distinction that I like but not fully. He offered up a choice between a Star Trek model (many standalone stories in a common framework) versus a Babylon 5 model (a grand story arc). Good insight but I think he got it wrong, because B5 was not a vast and overwhelming epic. It was many episodes which, taken together, moved a larger story along. You could ease into the series, rather than committing to a five-year journey at the outset. I haven’t really encountered that in the fantasy market, though the panelists and the audience offered examples.

I think book publishers shoot themselves in the foot by not being explicit about where a book falls in a series or that it’s a series at all — and I think they’re salting the fields by focusing so heavily on long, multivolume epics. I know that I read less than I used to, just because I hate wandering in partway and because almost everything on the shelves is a continuation of something from before.

I volunteered an hour or so and was a “stage ninja” for the Masquerade costume competition. (At least I didn’t have to change…) My oh-so-crucial job was “human handrail”: I had to help guide people down the steps at the end of the stage. I did alright — no one fell — but it wasn’t particularly engaging. I had wanted to volunteer, though, and it felt nice giving a little time back. After the competition, they had a “Trailer Park” wherein someone showed 8 or 9 previews of upcoming movies.

Following that, I slipped upstairs (after chatting with Annie for a little while) and caught the second half of Thief of Baghdad, a fairly standard Thousand and One Arabian Nights adventure flick. In fact, it bears a lot of resemblance to Aladin, even though Disney apparently maintains the fiction that the two are independent. Thief is actually quite good (even if the FX are dated) and the thief himself is surprisingly charming. (I usually despise cute kids.) It was a bit of a shock to see that the evil counselor is played by none other than Major Strasser — and indeed, by the end, “Major Strasser has been shot”.

Following Thief, I slipped over to “Bad Movies with Bob Eggleton”. We only watched one bad movie, but believe me, it was enough. Starcrash is an extremely poor Star Wars rip-off starring Caroline Munro (of James Bond fame), Christopher Plummer (I kid you not!) and the screen debut of David Hasslehoff. It’s exactly as good as it sounds… that is, horrible. The FX are cheesy, the acting execrable, the writing worse, and the plot virtually incomprehensible. Although I’m sure Bob Eggleton didn’t intend this, it did serve to remind us how little the “outside world” understands sci fi fandom or what makes a movie resonate.

After that assault on my frontal cortex, I decided to call it a night, ending up back in my room, writing this blog entry. Which is now done.

“Adult Filk Singing” was filk singing for adults (duh). In particular, these were songs and poems with a certain salacious aspect… although very little was worse than PG-13. I was again astounded about how open the filking community is. People have lifelong acquaintances and a deep oral history but were never above welcoming in new people. Indeed there was an unofficial moderator who would explain, sotto vocce, what some of the peculiar filk terms mean. As before, the performances were uneven and the writing a little spotty, but it was really fun and a very comfortable session.

“Those Terrible Middle Ages!” was an impassioned defense of, well, the Middle Ages. The panel leader clearly carries a chip on his shoulder about how down people are on the medieval world. Unfortunately, like many taking the side of the underdog, he felt compelled to enhance the stature of his special period by snarking about a different one — in this case, the Renaissance. About 35% of his comments were more “Look how silly those Renaissance guys were” rather “Look at what’s neat about the Middle Ages”.

Most disappointing: He raised the supposedly-widespread allegation that the Church didn’t recognize that “women have souls” until the 15th century. Bosh! He rattled off quite a number of medieval women who not only owned property but charted the course of nations — not to mention became abbesses and saints — and pointed out the absurdity of baptizing a soulless thing. What he didn’t do, alas, was provide any context or nuance to the claim. Since it’s so clearly crazy on its face, there is most likely an interesting root to the claim. It might tell us more about the people making the claim than about the medieval church, but it would be interesting. Sadly, he didn’t actually address that.

I ducked out about 3/4 of the way through the hour-long session, when it turned into a lecture from my Aristotelean Studium course from college twenty years ago. I already know the outlines of medieval thought on form and nature. I’d hoped for a better explication of the culture and politics, but it wasn’t overall a bad session.

Leaving this, I caught the last half of a 1940s Superman cartoon, which was amusing. I can’t imagine watching more than one or two at a time but it was fun.

I wanted to volunteer an hour or so (it’s a con thing) but the volunteers table is apparently more mobile than would be expected. I was told it was in several contradictory places. Perhaps it’s reciproexclusive and can be found only where it is not…

I’m actually quite a bit early, as registration doesn’t even start until 5 PM tomorrow afternoon. In principle this means I could have probably skipped being here tonight and just come up tomorrow, and from a fiscal perspective I probably should have. But I hate travel and like having the time to recoup. Also I keep telling myself I will use this time to read and to write and generally attend to the personal activities I’ve been neglecting so far this year. We’ll see.

Friday is a somewhat light day, as is Sunday, but Saturday is chock full of things and in fact (as usual) I have far too many things to attend that all occur at the same time. I’ll probably end up just going to whatever is closest to where I am at the time-changes.

The first panel I intended to attend was “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”, a documentary on the failed vision of futurists from the 1930s through 1960s. Due to the weird layout and unpredictable spacetime anomalies that have caused the Lunarians to christen this hotel the “Escher Hilton”, I arrived at the room far in advance of the panel. Indeed, I arrived at the start of “Not 2B Toyed With”, a 12-minute movie that the moderator assured us was absolutely hilarious. She had to assure us, because she couldn’t show us, because in the rush to pack for the con, she’d left the DVD at home. But she was appropriately contrite and, at the suggest of a snarky audience member (me), proceeded to illustrate by sock puppets, stopping only when, well, she ran out of socks and hands to put them on.

As it turned out, “Not 2B Toyed With” – even though it never actually showed – was a better presentation than “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”. The latter, it developed, was a 1999 documentary financed by Disney and shown on Showtime exactly once. The moderators liked to call it “the documentary Disney won’t let you see” (since the studio hasn’t released it at all) but there isn’t anything spectacular about it. Instead it was a bunch of self-involved baby boomers narcissisizing about their impressions of the vision of futurists. It had a lot of cuts to semi-celebrities pontificating, like you find in those “I Love the 80s” shows on VH-1. It was a true waste of my 90 minutes.

I spent some time in the game room, watching some people play “Ninja Burger”, a Munchin-esque game from Steve Jackson Games. It looked pretty fun, actually, and funny and clever as you’d expect from SJG. I also played a round of BANG!, a spaghetti Western shoot-em-up card game. It’s one of those games with hidden objectives – no one knows who the outlaws or deputies are – that had a complicated but manageable cardplay system. I was “The Apache Kid” and the renegade, and I did well for two rounds, until I was accidentally blown up by the very same dynamite I’d put into play. *Sigh* It’s from Mayfair Games, and I think I’ll try to find it online when I get home.

I dropped back to my room to get some dinner (the restaurant was closed by now – a costly mistake on my part) and then went to “Sex Done Right”, a panel on writing about, well, sex. And though it’s easy enough to dive for the gutter, it was actually a semi-serious writers’ craft panel. It had a certain self-involvement among the panel members, though, that quickly killed my interest in their thoughts on writing. I check out as soon as one said, in all seriousness, “But then the werecat morphed and I had to think, will he rip through her? She couldn’t morph, of course, since she was a vampire….” That told me I’d wandered into a particular corner of fanspace, one that holds no attraction for me (and, to be snobbish, one that seems to draw poor talent).

I was also reintroduced to that universal con character, Annoying Guy One Seat Over. There was a nebbish first-time con goer sitting next to me who was too enthusiastic, too eager, and too clueless to be tolerated. Many panels seem to develop such a guy – who has to comment on everything, who is clueless about his cluelessness, and who overrates his own intelligence/humor/relevance. The major ecological function of Annoying Guy One Seat Over is to spread humility – to remind us that we too can be annoying, overbearing, etc. Many a time in a panel I sit back and ask myself, “Is that really a valid point? Or am I devolving into Annoying Guy One Seat Over?” It’s a useful check.

It took longer to get here from NJ than I had expected — nearly four hours door-to-door. Some of that was just waiting for trains, of course; and some of it was being whisked around Rye, NY by a cab driver who, it turns out, didn’t actually know where the Hilton Rye Town is. At least this time there wasn’t a sudden blizzard.

It leaves me with the question of what to do until the con starts. Since I dragged this laptop all the way up here, some of the time will hopefully be spent writing (and more than just blog posts).