I dreamt this morning that I was the Toastmaster at a Nebula Awards banquet, a task which I already did once in real life, back in 2000, so I’m not sure why I was doing it again. I spent time greeting friends, though the only ones I can remember now that I’m awake are Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. But I didn’t spend too much time schmoozing, because I was mostly interested in finalizing my patter, focusing primarily on roasting Robert Silverberg, since I needed to introduce him for some reason. Not sure what award would bring him to the stage, though, as he was made a SFWA Grand Master years ago.

When we all moved into the banquet room, instead of many tables of eight or ten people each, as occurs in real life, there was instead a single table stretching from the podium across the room.

My research for my talking about Bob consisted mostly of tracking down the most embarrassing early writing of his I could find, so I could read awful quotes and comment on them, basically showing that if someone that bad could get so good, there was hope for all of us.

As for the rest of my duties that night, such as introducing award presenters, I was going to let my iPhone take care of them. To show how science fictional the world had become, I was going to use apps to do the introducing for me. I’d found one into which you could enter a person’s name, and it would search online and generate an introduction, including not only relevant information, but jokes about them as well. And from time to time, I planned on using an excuse generator, versions of which actually seem to exist in real life, to offer reasons for me not having bothered to draft anything in that particular case.

What can I say? In the dream, it somehow seemed as if it would be entertaining.

I woke as I took to the podium to begin.

And speaking of iPhones, this entry has been written on one, as my PowerBook crashed and burned Sunday, the geniuses at the Apple Store declared on Monday that all I now had was a very shiny paperweight, and I’ve been laptopless ever since!