Due to my New York trip Saturday, my only appearance at Capclave this year was Friday night, so I tried to squeeze in as much as I could. Lunch with Resa Nelson, who included the con as part of her three-week tour in support of her new novel The Dragonslayer’s Sword, dinner with the newest member of the Analog mafia, Oz Drummond, who kindly took pity on me, after which we were joined by Traci Castleberry, and Andy Duncan (the last of whom is pictured with me below), plus two panels.

I was joined on my 5:00 p.m. panel, “Eureka: The New TV Season,” by Perianne Lurie, Resa Nelson, and Davey Beauchamp, who acted as the moderator. I’d brought along a stack of the Fall Preview issue of SCI FI magazine to hand out to the audience so that we could all be on the same page. Most of us were not impressed by what we’d seen of the new shows this season and were disappointed by many of the returning shows. I talked up True Blood, my favorite of the new batch. Perianne and Davey discussed how much better the BBC version of The Eleventh Hour was than the Americanized version the rest of us got to see. Opinions on the latest season of Heroes differed, and when I said that I felt the creators had amazingly figured out a way to make Mohinder even more annoying than before, most seemed to agree. There was a lot of love expressed for Pushing Daisies, though it’s such a delicate show that we all trembled for its future. Most of us wished that last season’s Journeyman was still with us. A lively panel.

My 8:00 p.m. panel, “Science Fiction’s Generation Gap,” featured Kathryn Cramer, Catherine Asaro, Jim Freund, and moderator George Scithers. It was also lively, perhaps too much so, because we touched on so many topics that we might not have spent as much time as we should have covering the subject on which the audience really wanted to hear us pontificate—how to close that gap. I apologize for that. But regardless of how far afield we wandered, I was pleased that for once, thanks to Elizabeth Bear’s recent provocative post and the accompanying brouhaha, that we were at least treading some new ground. I’ve seen panels on SF’s generation gap for decades, and they’ve always taken as their focus how sad it was that new readers were not aware of the older, seminal writers, but this time we were able to ponder a reversal of that thesis—that is, whether older readers and writers were aware of the new writers.

Andy Duncan made an interesting point from the audience. He discussed his Clarion class (of 1989, I think; correct me if I’m wrong, Andy), and how instructor Nancy Kress was horrified that no one had read Neuromancer. During one meal, 14 members of his class sat and tried to figure out whether there truly was a canon, and there were only two pieces of fiction which all of them had read. They’d all read at least one volume (but not all) of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, and they’d all read parts of Tolkein, either The Hobbit or The Fellowship of the Ring. But beyond that, there was no overlap for this group of beginning writers who considered themselves well-read. Next time I’m together with a small group, I think I’ll try that experiment, to see not which books we all agree are important, but which books we’ve all actually read. It will be interesting to learn whether there’s anything that everyone at the table will have experienced.

Before, between, and after the panels, I chatted with David Louis Edelman (who I think I’m now going to start referring to as “that one”), James and Kathy Morrow, Michael Dirda, Christopher Cevasco, Tom Doyle, Mike Walsh, Karen and Charlie Newton, Daniel Korn, Lawrence M. Schoen, Dennis Danvers, Patrick Darby, and many others. Then there was those I saw from a distance but never got to spend time with.

I was enjoying myself, but as much as I would have liked to schmooze way into the night, I knew I had to wake early Saturday to catch my train to New York, so I left far earlier than I would have liked. Capclave is always fun, and I’ll try to be there for more of it next year. But this weekend, honoring a mentor had to come first.