The phrase “science fiction convention” conjures in many people’s minds images of strange people in strange costumes doing strange things.
Well, last Sunday at Westercon, a major North American science fiction convention held this year in Calgary, I saw a blue-skinned woman, a green-skinned Medusa (complete with snaky hair), and (most frightening of all) a group of cheerleading orcs, complete with pom-poms.
But I also took part in, or attended, panel discussions on various aspects of science, writing and publishing. The heart of a science fiction convention lies in the panels, which run (four or five concurrently) morning to evening every day (in this case, over four days). They all have some connection to science fiction–but since, by definition, the worlds of science fiction and fantasy include everything that has ever happened, everything that has never happened but can be imagined to have happened, and everything that hasn’t happened yet but may happen in the future, that can be anything at all.
Westercon’s guests of honor included well-known authors S.M. Stirling and Dave Duncan, publisher Tom Doherty and editor David G. Hartwell, both from Tor Books, the top science fiction and fantasy publisher in New York. There was also a science guest of honor, the world-famous paleontologist Phil Currie, soon to be leaving the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller for a position at the University of Alberta.
I only made it to one of his panels, due to my own commitments, but I had spies in his other panels. He reported on some of the amazing discoveries made about dinosaurs in recent years, such as the astonishing find of preserved soft tissue in a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil and the many recent discoveries of feathered dinosaurs. The latter, of course, is just one bit of evidence strengthening the long-mooted link between dinosaurs and birds. It may well be that we can safely say, now, when asked, “Where did the dinosaurs go?” that “You ate one for Thanksgiving.”
I was personally on two science panels, as well as some focused more on writing (and teaching) science fiction. “The Year in Science” was on overview of science news the panelists had noticed over the last year. We discussed the ongoing discoveries of extrasolar planets and the prospect for discovering truly Earth-like planets around other stars in the near future; the discovery of complex organic compounds in interstellar clouds, which raises the possibility that the precursors of life arrived on Earth (and possibly other planets) via comet; and, of course, the discovery that Mars once had water. Our growing understanding of brain activity was another major focus of discussion.
In “The Future of Energy” we discussed future energy sources–and how we get there from here. The general consensus seemed to be that there are technologies, existing and emerging, that hold promise of helping us meet our energy needs in a more environmentally friendly fashion, but that the real challenge is political: finding ways for society to make the transition.
It’s unlikely, we agreed, that the future will belong to a single source of energy: rather, we’ll see a mixture of things such as wind, solar, ethanol, nuclear and more. Individual homes may become net producers of energy, rather than consumers, through new technologies such as the infrared solar cells that may be made possible by recent discoveries at the University of Toronto (which I wrote a column about).
My other panels included “Group Dynamics in Speculative Fiction,” all about how the heroes and heroines in science fiction and fantasy relate to the people around them and “Blasters and Battlestars,” a discussion of “space opera.” (The term follows from calling a Western a “horse opera”, and was originally derogatory; however, it has been reclaimed–at least somewhat–and and I and my fellow panelists–David G. Hartwell and his wife, fellow editor Kathryn Cramer, who are working on an anthology of space opera–stood up for well-written far-future space adventure fiction as good stuff.
I think my favorite event, though, as always, was Writers at the Improv, in which teams of writers (I was teamed with Canadian SF writer Robert J. Sawyer) construct a story from sentences that have to include words provided by the audience. It’s not great fiction, but it’s great fun.
It was a fun four days, and invigorating to me as both a science writer and a science fiction writer.
And the fact that my four-year-old daughter won a certificate in the costume competition for “best use of pink” is just gravy.
