Still assembling the rest of my Worldcon notes. Some of which are on the backs of business cards, flyers, etc. (I took my slash panel notes on the map page of my program, because I ran out of paper.) I did want to put this forward, as a general observation:

I consider myself more a SF reader than a fantasy reader, which is to say that the scheduled authors I was looking to see were Connie Willis, Lois McMaster Bujold, Rosemary Kirstein, and Louise Marley. (Of course, they're the tiny minority of whom I saw, and when I write The Story of the con, for me it will be a story of the people mostly my own age, experimenting in the smaller cornices of the field.) But the panels I attended were almost all fantasy-oriented. I wondered why this is for a long period, and then looking at the program I realized that there was a relatively clear fantasy programming track, and a relatively clear Hard SF track (by which I mean, military adventure and panels about the future of real science), but no clear track of middle-of-the-road, anthropological, curious, thinky, topical, emotional SF. Maybe it's just hard to come up with panels on that topic.

I did attend one panel called "The Alien as...?", but although the panel included a romance writer, the discussion tended to go in the direction led by the panelist who was a biologist, who kept coming back to "speculate from reality" every time Kirsten talked about wanting to use aliens as mirrors for otherness. I gather there were other panels on a similar topic, that might have come out better and more my flavor of approach.

So my panelgoing tended to lurch a bit: I tried the panel on utopias and dystopias, but after William Tenn described his life of anti-fascism (15 minutes, and then he had to leave), it became a forum for anti-republiacn ranting. Which (a) boring and (b) not the topic. So I left.

One could describe the panel on the undead as sort of "middle-of-the-road", as the panelists all got quickly into the metaphors and reasons behind their use of mythic, fantasy and (in Willis's and Larry Niven's cases) SF devices. Though that wasn't what I was expecting from the panel description, so it was a pleasant surprise.

Both the "Do Women Write Differently?" and the "Lyrical Language" panels seemed to tend toward fantasy works for discussion purposes. (I had read some, but by no means all, of the works described). Maybe it is just that all of the panelists, who in these two cases were all women, are secretly on my friendslist.