Gary K. Wolfe opened his room at the Intercontinental late yesterday afternoon to hold a wake for Charles Brown. And while many moving and tearful things were said by his many friends, which I will leave unreported as I believe that for the most part what happens at a wake should remain at a wake, one comment Gary made stuck with me.

Once the room was filled, he stood on a ledge by the window (inside the glass, of course) to get our attention and begin the proceedings. Some began to shout “Jump! Jump!” … because, as we all know, those of us who gather at Worldcon once each year are three-year-olds at heart.

In response to this, Gary pointed at Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois, seated on the edge of the bed, and said:

“The science fiction editor says ‘Don’t jump.’ The horror editor says ‘Jump.’ That’s all you need to know about those genres.”

The more I think about it, the more I like it.

I’ve been too busy at Worldcon to spend much time keeping up here. Even my tweeting has been unusually limited for a con environment, since to avoid insane international roaming charges I’ve been dependent on free wifi, which I’ve only been able to access at the hotel and in the dealers room, and not while watching or participating on any of the panels.

But before throwing myself out into the maelstrom once more—I’ll be attempting to moderate Bob Silverberg, Nancy Kress, James Nelson-Lucas, and Bill Willingham on the 11:00 a.m. panel “What Makes a Good Story?”—I’d like to share one of the more joyous moments I’ve had so far.

I very much wanted to see David Kyle this weekend. He was one of the Futurians, and a co-founder of Gnome Press. Dave was at the first Worldcon, and even at what was supposed to have been the first SF con before the Worldcon, which I believe occurred in 1936 when a group of New York fans drove to meet with some Philadelphia fans in the back of a bar owned my somebody’s father. (Any fan historians out there, feel free to correct me!) A Worldcon isn’t a Worldcon until I catch up with Dave, and I never got a chance to do that last year at Denvention.

I spotted him between panels early yesterday afternoon, rushing along to get to his next panel, with no time to talk. But just seeing him, hale and hearty at 90, bursting with energy as he passed me by and promised we’d get together later, made me happy.

Later, though, I did get to sit with him and chat for half an hour. We talked until I had to meet some friends for dinner and he had to rest a bit before heading out for a night of partying. I would have liked to have hung out with him all night, talking of the old days and the days still to come. Dave’s one of those people I hope to be like when I grow up. If you see him this weekend, be sure to say hello!

Here’s where you’ll be able to find me next month in Montreal at Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention.

I don’t know which I’m looking forward to more—the programming or the smoked meat!

The Year in Novels
Thursday, August 6
2:00 p.m.-3:00 pm. (Room P-516D)
with Jo Walton, Kevin J. Maroney
Our panel of experts tell you about the must-reads of the year.

Scanning for Life
Thursday, August 6
3:30 p.m.-5:00 p.m. (Room P-518A)
with Janice Cullum Hodghead (moderator), Mark Olson, Sonya Taaffe
In the fifth edition of Anatomy of Wonder, Neil Barron said that the book would not cover SF poetry because it is “a relatively minor and very specialized field that, in my judgment, has never produced major works.” Is that fair? If not, what are the major canonical works?

How to Respond to a Critique of your Writing
Thursday, August 6
5:00 PM-6:00 p.m. (Room P-511A)
If you’ve never been in a critique setting it’s intimidating. Scott Edelman tells you how not to get “down” when your work is being put down. A veteran of workshops, rejections and Clarion, an editor and writer himself, Scott gives a talk to new writers about how to respond to criticism of their work. This talk is especially recommended for people contemplating a residence workshop or people scheduled for the small session workshops at Worldcon that begin on Friday.

SF in Comics
Thursday, August 6
7:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m. (Room P-522B)
I moderate Anne ANGE Guéro, Tom Stidman, and Claude Lalumière
A discussion of the long marriage of the genre and the medium, from Buck Rogers to Nexus—perhaps with an emphasis on the intersecting contributions of Ray Bradbury. (more…)

And as you can see, in this picture Bob forwarded to me last week, he has the nerve to laugh about it!

I don’t care if the guy is a Grand Master—isn’t it time he had his license revoked?

And just to show that my memory isn’t what it once was, I had thought this accident had taken place at a publisher party at the 2001 Philadelphia Worldcon, but Bob assures me that he had instead mowed me down a year later at a party held at San Jose’s Tech Museum of Innovation during the 2002 Worldcon.

My first Worldcon was 1974, so they’re all starting to blend together, folks.

John Picacio has alerted me to my brief appearance as part of a feature segment which appeared on NBC affiliate News9 last week.

Since I can’t seem to embed the video, if you want to see me (as well as John Picacio and John Hertz), click here—and then keep your fingers crossed.

And whatever you do, don’t blink!

I spoke too soon when I wrote that Denvention ended for me on Sunday night, because when I headed out Monday morning to grab some breakfast to bring back to the room, I ran into Joe from Chicago, whose last name I didn’t catch. I’d never met him before, and because we were now both without badges, I couldn’t tell at first whether he was, as they say in organized crime, “a friend of ours,” and so didn’t immediately say hello in passing as I would to a fellow fan. But once we sorted that all out, we had a nice talk about this con and Worldcons past, his first being ’82, if I’m remembering correctly, versus my ’74. And he was a subscriber to Science Fiction Age, so I’m forever in his debt.

An hour later, when I left the hotel to head over to Zaidy’s, a deli which served pastrami highly recommended by Bob Silverberg, so that we wouldn’t have to suffer airport food for lunch, there were friends Sandy and Risa Stewart, waiting for the shuttle to take them to the airport. Even though I’d bumped into them several times each day of the con, I hadn’t known we were in the same hotel.

I couldn’t chat long, because I needed time to get over to Zaidy’s and back with the pastrami for Irene and a bissel brisket for me in time to make our own way to the airport. As I walked, I saw a cornerstone labeled Writer Square, which I soon discovered was a sign for a shopping complex.

(more…)

After grabbing a bagel and some orange juice in the Green Room, I headed off to Daniel Abraham’s 10:00 a.m. reading. He performed “The Curandero and the Swede: A Tale from the 1,001 American Nights,” straight from the galleys he had been sent to proof for its upcoming appearance in F&SF. I was impressed when I’d heard him read “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” (for which he was a Hugo nominee this weekend) at the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, but this tale was several levels advanced from that, and left me a little stunned by its perfection. It was a masterful and moving story, and I look forward to seeing it in print to better judge how much of my reaction was to the performance and how much was to the page. His subtitle promised us another 1,000 stories, and he did share some of the others he intends to tell about these characters. I wish him the stamina to pull it off.

I had intended to the attend the “Arthur C. Clarke: In Memorium” panel at 11:30 a.m., but decided that I’d had too much death this weekend, what with my participation on the Williamson and Budrys panels. Though I’d only be in the audience of this one, I decided that it would be too much. I’m afraid that as I keep going to cons, there’ll be more and more panels like this, dedicated to people I’d long known and/or long read. I don’t know that I’ll be up to them all.

So instead, to pass the time until I was supposed to meet my lunch mates at 12:45 p.m., I wandered the dealers room for the last time, and signed a case of copies of Postscripts #15. I also bumped into Oz Whiston, who’d recently made her first sale to Analog, and we caught up on what we’d been doing since we first and last met at Balticon earlier this year. (more…)

Irene and I started the day with breakfast at the 16th Street Einstein’s Bagels, after which she headed to the Dealers Room while I went off to check the Green Room for the rest of the members of my 10:00 a.m. panel. I didn’t find any of them there, but I did find Pat Cadigan, who was loudly proclaiming to the rest of her table that “The 21st Century can kiss my ass!”

“The 21st Century can kiss your ass?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You can quote me on that.”

So that’s what I’m doing.

The two panels I participated in Saturday left me feeling melancholy. My first panel of the day was “A Tribute to Jack Williamson,” which also featured Connie Willis, David Hartwell, and Melinda Snodgrass. A couple of hours later, I took part in “Wonders of 1958: Algis Budrys’ Who?,” which while focused more on the book than the man, did turn into a memorial of sorts. That latter panel also contained John Hertz and G. David Nordley. These two panels, while celebratory, and while they contained many happy, warm, funny, and uplifting memories, left me feeling somber. (more…)

After leaving the Hyatt bar, John Kessel, Sheila Williams, and I wandered over to 16th Street for lunch and ended up at the Appaloosa Grill, where I ate bison for the third time this trip. Before the meal began, John and I
cracked open our laptops, and we attempted to transfer a multi-gigabyte video I had made of him performing in one of Jim Kelly’s plays at Readercon.

We failed miserably.

No matter what we did, the computers wouldn’t talk to each other. (Never send a Humanist to do an Analog writer’s job.) What we needed, we decided, was a Stross, or someone like him. So we shut down our computers and stopped torturing poor Sheila with our ineptness.

After an hour or so of chatting about short stories, internet flame wars, and the trials of international submissions, John and I headed back to the convention center in search of a Hard SF writer who could solve our problem. Along the way, we bumped into Stephen Baxter heading the opposite direction on California Street. Surely he would be able to link up our laptops! Alas, he knew better than to even try.

His solution? Find Stross. (more…)

I had a 7:30 a.m. breakfast with Bob Silverberg at the Hyatt Friday, which turned out to be the second of three breakfasts he was to eat that morning. How he keeps his boyish figure I have no idea, considering that at our breakfast alone he gobbled a huge open-faced bagel with a great schmears of cream cheese and mounds of smoked salmon. (Well, actually, Bob never gobbles, as he’s far too dignified for that … but you get the idea.)

As we were finishing up our meal, Gardner Dozois passed by to tell us that he saw Fred Pohl having breakfast alone (not many of us were up that early after Thursday night’s partying), and so we joined him, along with Susan Casper, and we all kibitzed for another hour. Who needs a convention when you can sit at a table like that?

I could have spent the day there having a ball chatting and doing my best to absorb the assembled wisdom of the ages, but I had to leave for my 10:00 panel, “SF Magazine Publication and Market Share.” Bradford Lyau moderated me, Sheila Williams and Stanley Schmidt on the proposed mandate of “How many people are still reading short fiction in monthly magazines? Is the market growing or contracting? What influence do anthologies and web-publications have on market share?” I’m not sure whether we fully addressed the topic—I know that we were all trying to remain as upbeat as possible—but the following issues came up. (more…)