Worldcon Miscellany

The “Philosophy of Science” panel I moderated was surprisingly well-attended, and got some decent discussion going. Kate took notes, at least for a while, and I’ll post a link if she writes it up on LiveJournal.

The “Knights who Say Fuck” panel was in a very remote room that was much too small to contain a panel with Guy Gavriel Kay, David Anthony Durham, and Patrick Rothfuss on it. Well, ok, it contained them just fine, but there wasn’t really room for the hundred-odd people who showed up to see them.

I was one of about a dozen people who went to thie “Cross-Genre Hard SF” panel, probably because it got moved, and the time change was not well advertised. It was worth it, though, just because the panel was mostly dominated by Karl Shroeder and Peter Watts trying to come up with slightly silly ways to describe other genres of literature as “Hard SF.” Watts made a good effort at explaining The Lord of the Rings as science fiction (It’s all really about the world, and the stuff with plot and characters is an incidental side effect of working out the consequences of the languages), and Schroeder offered the idea that mystery is the only genre that really reflects science, as it’s the only place you see a fully worked-out investigation.

My own contribution was to suggest that you don’t see cross-genre hard science fiction because “hard science fiction” is a subgenre defined not in terms of some element of the story, but by eliminating other works from the category. The whole point of the label “hard science fiction” is to be able to point to other works and declare that they are not hard enough to count.

Our evening plan to go out, just me and Kate, and have dinner in a nice restaurant was completely undone by some sort of stomach affliction. Kate spent the evening sick to her stomach, which I devoutly hope was the result of something she ate, rather than some communicable disease. She’s a little wobbly this morning, but feeling at least somewhat better.

And now I see that I have wasted enough time typing this that the hotel breakfast buffet will be open, so I am off to get food, and then face the day.