Just The Caffeine Talking

PhilCon 2020 Goes Virtual

This year's PhilCon — the venerable Philadelphia-era science fiction con now in its 84th year — is going to be all-online. On the plus side that means no New Jersey traffic and mall food; on the minus side it means no spontaneous conversations in the hotel lobby, no room parties, and no basic human contact. But a virtual convention is better than none at all. 

Still, as in past years I will be participating, from my office in Massachusetts. Here's my schedule:

 

Friday November 20, 5:30 p.m.: Online Gaming: Not Just for Pandemics

Michael Ryan (moderator), Robert Hranek, James L. Cambias, Debby Lieven

The four of us will be discussing how the ongoing epidemic has affected how people play games -- will we go back to tabletops and rec rooms again, or is online gaming the future?

 

8:30 p.m.: From the Iron Bank to CHOAM: Business in Fiction

James L. Cambias (moderating), Anthony Dobranski, Elektra Hammond, Tom Doyle, Ian Randal Strock

A panel about the role of business and economics in fantastic fiction. How does a world's economy affect the stories one can tell? What does fiction get right and wrong?

 

Saturday November 20, 5:30 p.m.: The Oceans of Space

James L. Cambias, Tom Purdom, Kelli Fitzpatrick

I think I'm moderating this one. The three of us will discuss famous maritime science fiction, and how new discoveries in and beyond the Solar System may influence future ocean stories.

 

Sunday November 21, 1:00 p.m.: The Search for the Philosophers' Stone

Robert Hranek (moderator), Anastasia Klimchynskaya, James Prego, James L. Cambias, Elizabeth Crowens

We'll look at the history of alchemy, how discoveries in chemistry and physics changed our understanding of how matter works, and look at some other concepts which have shifted over time.

 

4:00 p.m.: Reading

I'll give con goers a glimpse into my forthcoming novel The Godel Operation, and the amazing far-future setting The Billion Worlds.

Twenty Years!

Today marks a significant anniversary. Twenty years ago, on October 31, 2000, the first crew launched to the International Space Station. Station crews are called "Expeditions," so Expedition 1 began on that date. We're currently on Expedition 64, with three in the pipeline and many more planned. The Expeditions overlap, so that the new crew arrives and can get acclimated before the old crew leaves. More recently, people have switched between Expeditions while aboard, to remain behind when the rest of their team goes home.

What all this means is that for twenty years now, there have been at least three humans living off Earth at all times. It's a small colony, and it's not self-sufficient, but one must crawl before learning to walk.

I called it a significant anniversary, but in time I hope "20 years in space" becomes an insignificant anniversary, as the human presence beyond Earth passes 50 years, a century, two centuries . . . 

There will come a time when it is a matter of historical curiosity that there was ever a time when humans did not live off Earth. The date may someday be as obscure as the anniversary of the first time a human walked out of Beringia into North America, or when the first humans crossed the Suez isthmus to discover a whole planet beyond Africa. So let's honor the occasion in the fond hope that it will someday be forgotten.

The First CYBER WorldCon!

This year's World Science Fiction Convention was to have taken place in New Zealand, but since that country is entirely sealed off from the outside world, the convention has gone entirely on-line. It's a CYBER WorldCon! See the link here.

Despite obstacles the show will go on! I'm participating in several events, without leaving my house in Massachusetts. Here's my schedule (all times are in US Eastern Daylight Time):

Wednesday, July 29, 5:00 p.m.: Kaffeeklatsch

An hour-long informal hangout with me and nine other fans. Grab a drink and join us! (I probably will be having something stronger than coffee.)

Wednesday, July 29, 7:00 p.m.: Staying Closer to Home: Science Fiction in the Solar System

A panel featuring Daniel Abraham, Jeffrey Carver, myself, G. David Nordley, and Ian McDonald; focusing on the future of science fiction set within the Solar System rather than among the stars, and how our rapidly changing understanding of the Sun's other planets is affecting that.

Thursday, July 30, 5:00 p.m.: COVID-19: A Great Filter?

A panel featuring Valentin Ivanov, Vylar Kaftan, Ion Newcombe, and myself. We'll discuss whether pandemics like the current Coronavirus outbreak might explain why we don't see any sign of technological civilizations elsewhere in the Galaxy.

Thursday, July 30, 6:00 p.m.: Reading

I'll be doing a 20-minute reading of "Calando," a new short story of mine from the original anthology Retellings of the Inland Seas.

Friday, July 31, 6:00 p.m.: The Ascent of Wonder: What Makes Hard SF

Panel starring Kenn Bates, myself, Mark English, Harun Siljak, and Deborah Munro. We'll focus on how important it is to get the science right, what rules can we break, and who does it well?

Friday, July 31, 11:00 p.m.: RPG Design (And What to Do Next)

Join Michael Sands, Morgan Davie, Brandon O'Brien, myself, and Stephen Dedman for a discussion of how to design role-playing games and how to get them published.

Hamiltonian Musings

A couple of weeks ago the Crack Team launched an expedition to the distant isle of Manhattan. We toured the museum ship Intrepid, saw an exhibit of clockwork automata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ate some fancy food, and saw a matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous hip-hop musical Hamilton.

Quick summary: it's good. Just like the soundtrack album.

And that's not just damning with faint praise. It is a great musical experience. But the staging of the show was overwhelmed by the songs. It's not a grand spectacle. The dancing is skillful but with a fairly small stage the performers mostly have to strike poses on a rotating floor section because there isn't room to move.

To me it would be as great an experience if the performers were just standing on stage in evening dress in front of the orchestra, with the chorus on risers in the back. And I find myself wondering, why not? A purely static musical performance can be profoundly moving. 

I have heard that a film version is in the works, and I hope the director isn't content to plant a camera in front of the stage. The music would work just as well against a realistic period background. The dancers could really cut loose. Freed from the theater stage, the spectacle of the show could finally match the music.

I was very impressed by the cleverness of the lyrics and the structure of the piece. At some point Mr. Miranda must have sat down with a notepad and jotted down all the words and phrases he could think of connected with a pistol duel, and then tried to build songs around them. I suspect his hard drive contains discarded drafts of a number about "fire," perhaps one about "paces," or "triggers," or "the ground."

I was also impressed by a bit of casting: all the performers who play Hamilton's friends in the first act are his adversaries in the second, which heightens the depiction of a man becoming more and more isolated as his ambition cuts him off from everyone around him. The exception is the man who plays John Laurens and Phillip Hamilton; in both acts he's the Guy Who Dies. I do wonder if in some earlier draft Laurens had a spotlight number in the first half to match Phillip's in the second.

(No doubt there will be a book or three written about this show which might confirm or explode my speculations. Until then, I'm free to guess.)

Jim says check it out.

Arisia 2020 Report, Day 3

Sunday was my final day at the con. Most conventions are three-day affairs: show up Friday afternoon, do stuff Friday night and Saturday, maybe a few things Sunday morning, then head home after lunch. Not Arisia. Taking advantage of the MLK Day weekend, it stretches into Monday. That means Sunday is a busy full day rather than the tag end. 

I started my day moderating a panel on "Ringworld at 50," celebrating half a century since the publication of Larry Niven's landmark novel Ringworld. Opinions of the book among the five panelists varied, but we all agreed it's one of the most influential books of that era — not to mention a turning point in Mr. Niven's own career.

Slight pause after that, while I busied myself getting checked out of the hotel and finding a place to stash my stuff. Arisia may be a four-day convention, but I had prior commitments on the 20th and so couldn't stay to the end. 

I did manage to sit in on a couple of panels. The first was on book to film adaptations, and how one's impression of a work is affected by which version one experiences first. There are some cases where the film is actually better than the novel — my personal example is Carl Sagan's book Contact, which is full of plot holes the movie version avoids.

Another very useful panel was about crowdfunding and tabletop games. I may be dipping a toe into the Kickstarter world with an upcoming roleplaying game project, so it was all very informative. Watch this space for more information!

At 5:30 I participated in the panel "Writers React to Bad Writing," which might well have been called "Writers Forget Their Homework." We were all supposed to bring examples of bad prose to pick apart, but a minority of the panelists actually accomplished that simple task. I had selected a passage from Dan Brown's thriller Inferno, but cleverly left my copy at home so I had to reconstruct it from memory.

During the empty slot between that panel and my final event I taped an interview for Tyromag TV, which will probably appear in a few weeks. I don't think I picked my nose on camera.

I wound up my participation in convention programming by moderating the panel on "Hacking D&D," in which five panelists suggested rules tweaks or entire game mechanics from other games which can be ported into the most popular roleplaying system. In most cases they can probably be used in just about any game system without much tweaking. At least a couple of the examples are things I plan to use in games from now on.

With that done I could drop my name card into a recycling bin and join some other CSFWites at the ongoing "House of Toast" party. I had kind of assumed "Toast" was a euphemism, or maybe an acronym for something, but no, it was a party with about half a dozen toasters working full time popping out bread, and tables of exotic stuff to spread on them. We crunched down our toast and left the con. I got a lift to where my car was parked, and drove through a cold night back home.

 

A secret order of wizards rules the world, and one man has vowed to destroy them. The Initiate arrives in just two weeks!

Arisia 2020 Report, Day 2

Saturday the 18th was a light-duty day for me, which meant I got to enjoy the con as a member rather than as one of the dancing monkeys. 

Still fighting off my cold, I slept in on Saturday morning, starting my day by having brunch with my CSFW colleague Alexander Jablokow at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Many things of great import were discussed, though I can't quite recall any of them at the moment.

In early afternoon I sat in on a Meetup for gamemasters, discussing techniques, best practices, and resources. I had hoped to find some other gamers from western Massachusetts, but no luck. 

After that I took a turn about the dealer room and the Art Show. The quality of the artwork on display at Arisia is the highest I've seen at any convention since the Worldcon I attended in the summer of 2018.

In the late afternoon I watched a fascinating talk by David Shaw about the future of food. Unlike most studies of this topic, which focus on production, he concentrated on how new technologies and methods are affecting the art of cooking. Nor was this just theory: the talk was illustrated by slides of amazing dishes he himself had prepared. 

Following that I met with author Walter Hunt, chiefly in order to gush about his new novel Harmony in Light, and hear super-secret details of the upcoming sequel. 

After a rest to recharge my batteries, I put on my dancing-monkey costume and led a meetup for writers at 10:00 p.m. They were a great bunch, and I hope to see some of the works-in-progress they talked about during the session. 

And then off to bed and out like a snuffed candle.

 

A secret order of wizards rules the world. One man has vowed to destroy them. The Initiate by James L. Cambias is coming to a bookstore near you February 4. 

Arisia 2020 Report, Day 1

I drove out to Boston on a sunny but cold January afternoon, left the car at the disintegrating Alewife garage, and rode the T to the good old Westin Waterfront hotel.

Various delays en route and long lines at the hotel meant I barely had time to get my room, get my Arisia badge, and get my Participant Packet before it was time for my first event. But despite the crowds the hotel and convention staff were very efficient, so I was able to slide into the Independence room with a few minutes to spare.

"Stories From the Cities" was the title for a session of three readings by Andrea Hairston, W.B.J. Williams, and myself. Dr. Hairston read a couple of rousing chapters from her upcoming fantasy novel, Mr. Williams shared part of an urban fantasy work-in-progress, and I read an excerpt from (of course) The Initiate. All three seemed well-received by the half-dozen attendees — not a bad crowd for the very first time slot at 5:30 on Friday afternoon.

Immediately after that, conveniently in the same room, we had the panel on "Not With My Intellectual Property, You Don't." The panel included Diane Martin, Kristin Janz, Emperor Joey 1, Mark Painter, and myself. It became a very lively and thoughtful round-table discussion, touching on the effect of corporate ownership on works of art, the role of pastiche, fan fiction, and reimaginings; and kindred topics.

Then I hustled all the way across the hotel for a very fun panel about the Bone Wars between Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. With a peerless panel of experts including Mark Amidon, Ken Gale, and Jeff Hecht, we filled the hour with fun paleontology history. The four of us dovetailed nicely in our knowledge areas, so we had excellent "chemistry" and energy.

I paid a visit to the Art Show, hobnobbed with the convention's Guest of Honor, Cadwell Turnbull, and then . . . I went to bed. I'd been fighting a cold all afternoon, and didn't really think it would be wise to spread viruses around the hotel and just make myself sicker in the process.

Con Impressions: a big crowd, lots of young people. Fewer hall costumes than I recall from past years, but the brutally cold day might have something to do with that. Convention management ran extremely smoothly. The 75-minutes time slots with 15-minute breaks in between gave everybody time to get around and the panelists could spend a full hour in discussion. I think I prefer the longer time slots.

 

A secret order of wizards rule the world. One man has vowed to destroy them. The Initiate arrives February 4, 2020!

Arisia 2020 — The Initiation Begins

This year's Arisia convention will be back at the Boston Westin Waterfront, January 17-20. I'll be there Friday the 17th through Sunday the 19th, and it's going to be a busy weekend.

Friday 5:30 p.m.: "Stories From the Cities" — A joint reading with myself, Andrea Hairston and W.B.J. Williams. All three stories are connected with cities; my own will be an excerpt from my upcoming book The Initiate.

Friday 7:00 p.m.: "Not With My Intellectual Property, You Don't" — A panel discussion about the legality, morality, and practicality of writing continuations of other people's fiction. (I'll be moderating.)

Friday 8:30 p.m.: "Cope vs. Marsh — The Bone Wars" — Pretty much what it says on the tin: a panel discussion about how the personal rivalry between two 19th-century scientists transformed paleontology. (I'll be moderating and plugging the hell out of my card game.)

Saturday, 10:00 p.m.: "Late Night Writers Cafe" — A meetup for writers and those learning the craft. I'll be one of the two co-hosts.

Sunday, 10:00 a.m.: "Fifty Years After Ringworld" — Larry Niven's novel Ringworld is one of the field's enduring classics. What makes it so great? (I'll be moderating this one as well.)

Sunday, 5:30 p.m.: "Writers React to Bad Writing" — A panel of writers will bring in examples of bad writing in published work, and explain what makes them so bad.

Sunday, 8:30 p.m.: "The Hacker's Guide to D&D" — Ways to tinker with the mechanics of everyone's favorite roleplaying game in order to make it easier or more fun. (I will, inevitably, be moderating.)

 

The tyranny of the sorcerers must end! The Initiate arrives in bookstores February 4, from Baen Books.

Philcon 2019!

This weekend I'll be attending the venerable PhilCon convention, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. That's near enough to Philadelphia that you can still get scrapple for breakfast, so I guess it qualifies. Here's my schedule. Stop by and say hi!

Fri 6:00 PM in Executive Suite 623: READINGS — PAUL LEVINSON, APRIL GREY, JAMES CAMBIAS

    I'll be reading a chapter from my forthcoming novel The Initiate.

Fri 7:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Promenade: AUTOGRAPHS — PAUL LEVINSON, APRIL GREY, JAMES CAMBIAS

Fri 8:00 PM in Plaza II: CREATING IDIOMS FOR FANTASY WORLDS

    [Robert C. Roman (mod), Alex Shvartsman, D.L. Carter, James Cambias, Ann Zeddies]

    What do you have your characters call a French braid in a world where France doesn't exist? How do you fill the descriptive lacunae created when you want to avoid language that's anacosmistic?

Fri 11:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Three: EYE OF ARGON INTERACTIVE

    [Mark Singer (mod), Keith DeCandido, B. Lana Guggenheim, Michael Ventrella, James L. Cambias]

    Yes, I'm going back for another struggle to keep from cracking up as I read from the charmingly inept Conan knockoff The Eye of Argon. Pray for me.

Sat 11:00 AM in Plaza II: WRITING FOR ALIENS — FAMILY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES

    [Sally Wiener Grotta (mod), Tom Purdom, Ann Zeddies, Chris Kreuter, James Cambias]

    What if a species had no concept of marriage, or placed no value on raising one's own offspring? How would you write a culture that valued other relationships over ones that are viewed as the most important to humans without them coming across as cold and uncaring?

Sat 2:00 PM in Plaza II: OBSOLETE SCIENCE

    [Earl Bennett (mod), Michael Swanwick, James L. Cambias, James Beall, B. Lana Guggenheim, Russell J. Handelman]

    Remember when spaceships went whizzing through the ether? Remember the hollow earth? What obsolete scientific ideas shaped SF, and which ones still persist in it?

Sat 5:00 PM in Plaza III: HOW TO SERVE OUR NEW ROBOT OVERLORDS

    [Simone Zelitch (mod), David Walton, Dr. Valerie Mikles, Bruce Dykes, James L. Cambias]

    What it says on the tin.

Sat 7:00 PM in Plaza II: THE EVOLUTION OF MARS

    [Darrell Schweitzer (mod), John Ashmead, Tom Purdom, James Cambias, Earl Bennett]

    How have depictions of Mars changed in SF from the imaginings of Burroughs and Bradbury to the Mars we know now from studying its surface?

Sat 8:00 PM in Plaza III: GREAT SCIENCE FICTION MCGUFFINS

    [Mary Spila (mod), Joe Siclari, Richard Stout, Christopher Hinz, James L. Cambias]

    Alfred Hitchcock defined the McGuffin as the 'object' everyone in the story is looking for. This can be anything from a secret formula to a magic amulet to a living being. Which have been the genre's most interesting ones?

Vacation in Prague: Day 7

Over the past forty years of travel I've learned that one should always build in one or two unscheduled days when planning a trip. That way, if something's closed, or it's pouring rain, or someone gets a kidney stone, you have a little cushion so there's still time for all the things you wanted to do. And if there are no problems, then you've got a bonus day to spend as you wish.

Saturday the 20th was our bonus day.

In the morning Diane and I went out to a Farmers' Market, which was a bit disappointing. The food on display was lovely and impeccably clean, but all of it was obviously grown far from Bohemia, and it was all packaged for immediate consumption. No ingredients. I have no doubt that there is an actual farmers' market in Prague (probably several), but I expect it's out in the periphery someplace, easier for farm trucks to reach but probably much less scenic.

We did get some fruit for breakfast and took it back to the flat, along with some croissants from a bakery we passed along the way. After eating and showering the three of us set out a couple of hours later with two vague goals: find a thumb drive for Diane to use at the biology conference which was the whole reason we came to Prague, and possibly look in at the cinema museum.

Our course took us southeast, toward Wenceslaus Square (which is really a boulevard) and the more modern, trendy part of Prague. En route we stopped for lunch at a restaurant/pub called "Lokal" which has apparently been serving up the same hearty grub and beer since the 1920s (to judge by the decor). It has the "beloved and unchanging local institution" feel of a classic diner or a Southern cafeteria. Dumplings were had.

We gave up on the cinema museum, after determining that none of us was really enthusiastic about the plan. After that we just sort of wandered, looking for a thumb drive. In the U.S., one can find them for sale at most office-supply shops, department stores, and supermarkets, but apparently the Czechs only sell them at dedicated electronics stores. I don't know if there's not as much demand, or whether Czech computer users are more devoted to "cloud storage." It's not the sort of question one can ask easily.

We did see some lovely interwar department store buildings, with glass roofs and Art Deco sculptures. It appears that independence and the triumph of Modernism don't seem to have put a damper on Czech architects' love of putting statues on buildings, it just made the results more streamlined.

With a drive in hand we navigated homeward by dead reckoning, stopping along the way to get the gloppiest Prague treat: Trdelniks filled with ice cream. Trdelniks are a kind of cake or brioche wrapped around a cylinder and cooked over an open fire. I've found a couple of Web sites angrily asserting that they're not a traditional Czech dish but rather some rank imposture from Slovakia. Anyway, they're pretty good plain, and when filled with soft-serve they're . . . pretty messy. Imagine a giant ice-cream cone with a big hole in the bottom ineffectually plugged by a small cookie.

And that's about it for our trip. We spent the evening packing and getting checked in for our flight home. Robert and I handed all our spare Kroners to Diane to use during the week-long biology conference, and the next morning he and I got a cab to the airport. Sixteen hours later we were home.

Next Time: Impressions and Reflections.