Boskone 42 (2005)
This was my second Boskone, and I realize after the fact that yes, it's possible to attend and enjoy a con at which you've never heard of, or actively dislike, the whole roster of advertised guests. Being a slow social creature, it's taken me about 2 years of (very intermittent) con-going, but I've come to that moment at which the social connection to people I see only at cons is the reason to go. (Which is not to say that I did not enjoy a number of panels, because I did. For some reason, I had great luck avoiding most of the Completely Miss The Topic And Get Bogged Down In Something Else Entirely panels.)


Friday

At Play in the Fields of Someone Else's Universe
Keith R.A. DeCandido, Geary Gravel, Ann Tonsor Zeddies
This was about 70% discussion of tie-in novels -- much hilarity of editorial cluelessness and recalcitrance -- and a gentle perspective on the grunt work of the field. Geary remarked on his instances of freedom (writing tie-in novels to a video game that hadn't been designed yet) and constraint (a 1000-word children's work completely rewritten by an editor). Keith was muppet-like in his flying long hair and enthusiasm, and he seems to love his tie-in work despite all of the contract-wrangling, licensure confusion, and hapless corporate contacts. All three authors eventually got into universes originated by an author (and Peter David's not-formally-proprietary Star Trek spinoffs), the challenge of finding a new thing in someone else's brainchild, and the feelings of ownership when someone else borrows one's shared-universe characters for further sharing.

UFO Culture and Mythology
Judith Berman, James Cambias, F. Brett Cox, Alex Irvine
To my surprise and delight, this panel moved immediately beyond the belief/unbelief in aliens and into the real of cultural significance. We galloped through the anxieties of technology, hysteria and group-hysteria, the satellite busy-ness of the modern night sky (and how that contrasts with just 30 years ago), and the changing cultural markers of abduction. Judith told an anthropology story about tries that plant yams, but also do yam-magic, to ensure a harvest; she suggested that modern western culture, having shed most avenues for the magical, is finding new, pseudo-scientific magics. (Best line of the night: in re nutter grape Koolaid mass suicides: "They forgot to plant the yams!") We concluded the hour discussing the alien abduction scenario, and how victimization and paranoia have come to the fore in UFO culture -- and the psychological comfort and self-defense of the conspiracy theory.

J. R. R. Tolkien, RPM
Greer Gilman, Mary Kay Kare, Jim Mann
RPM meaning how fast Johnny is spinning in his grave. It wasn't till 20 minutes into this panel that I realized I didn't really care what Tolkien thought of modern social and artistic practice of and within his universe. Being so much a man of a previous era, he can spin as fast as he likes over women appropriating power; racial equality; and other blind spots. The more worthwhile parts of the panel for me were the close-reading discussions of book vs. movie (e.g. did Peter Jackson really understand elves? Answer: not really). We talked over the layers of knowledge of such a historied fictional world, and how that world differs a lot depending on whether or not you've read the Silmarillion and all the other cash-in completist volumes of Christopher Tolkien. And Greer Gilman and Faye Ringel (in the audience) embarrassed each other with stories of teenaged antics like staging the trilogy with girls playing all the parts some decades ago, and scandalizing/horrifying each other with copies of the Lampoon parody Bored of the Rings.


Saturday

The Red Sox Won -- Are We Living in an Alternate History?
Stephen C. Fisher, Leigh Grossman, Walter H. Hunt
Sox fans being what we are, this panel was very much the first half of the title, and very little the last half. Abbreviated mention of controversies past, more invocations than debates, like a church meeting where people stand up to testify. I was expecting, instead, a discussion of how a major change in the world could affect one's writing: how does one absorb a paradigm-change and make it part of one's perspective? What if you're in the middle of a story and the world changes around it? But the World Series is too fresh and exciting, so I understand we couldn't move beyond its instance to talk about the type. I skipped out at the half-mark, and will follow up with a look at Leigh's Red Sox Fan Handbook, now updated to reflect our changed world.

Reading by Kelly Link
Kelly read from a short story called "Monster," due to be published in the third McSweeney's genre collection (no idea what the title will be; I suggest Zowie Fiction). This particular story involves snot-nosed children at camp, farts, mud, cross-dressing, and crimes committed upon marshmallows. Kelly warned us she would not be able to finish in the 1/2 hour allotted, but she did not warn us that she would stop right as the monster was coming up the hill at the boys, hands dripping bloodily. Thanks a lot, Kelly! (I should note that Jane Yolen, who was in attendance, dragged out of Kelly that one of her stories, as well as one by Tim Pratt, will be in the next Best American Short Stories collection.)

At this point I broke for the dealer's room and ended up chatting with David Hartwell (youngest child in arms) and Brett Cox, both entertaining book-nerds. Then I met up with oracne, kate_nepveu, and rilina for lunch. The latter, never having attended a con before, related some of the typical bad experiences (jerks in the audience, sidetracked panels) but seemed overall to be enjoying herself.

Coincidentally, after a sojourn through Neiman Marcus to get to my ATM (all hail skyways! It was really cold out), I ran into dxmachina, who was waiting in line for an autograph. We ended up sitting down someplace and talking about the history of baseball for an hour, which, you would think that's atypical for a SF con, but I expect it's actually not. (Among the con suite "library" of magazines, there were tabloids, crosswords, kids' stuff, and a baseball fantasy league guide.) Thence to some of the Higgins Armory demonstrations: swords through history and Vikings. The swords one was neat, contrasting different eras and the variations in tactics. Longswords had one purpose; rapier-and-dagger another; and the third set was Civil War era sabers, complete with charts to show the abbreviated lessons you'd use to teach a lot of soldiers how not to stab themselves in the foot in 7 quick lessons! After that was Vikings and Anglo Saxon gear, done with an irritating excess of reference to Tolkien, but with a reassuring awareness of how much data is speculation, compared to the sword people (who left behind tactics manuals). The eight-foot-tall spear had a bent tip, because Vikings do not know how to navigate escalators.

DX and I looked for theodosia, but ended up hitting the Pour House for cheeseburgers by ourselves. We dissected Babylon-5 thoroughly and pranced our way through several other SF TV shows. And then, of course, ran into Theo on our way back, as she was heading out with another group! We did drive-by hellos, and rattled off whom else we'd seen that we might want to run into. (I never did see Eric Van. Hi, Eric! Congratulations!)

Then to Oracne's reading, and since nothing else was scheduled after that, a bunch of us sat around talking -- representation, minority voices, how sex scenes work, goofy gossip. We broke at last around 10pm, and Rilina and I headed out to the T, chatting about the industry in which both of our jobs take place. I realized as I got home that I had, in fact, not attended a single debate-type panel after noon, and didn't mind.

Sunday

KaffeeKlatsch
Geary Gravel, Rosemary Kirstein, Ann Tonsor Zeddies
A good, wide-ranging breakfast chat with three writers and active con-goers. We filled out a table of seven, and talked about the con experience, the indoctrination process, communication (Geary's other hat is as a sign language interpreter) both human and dodecapodal (Ann described previous books she'd written, about sapient alien pheromone-emitting octopi), and many other topics. Ann's new work Blood and Roses is coming out in November; and Rosemary avowed that she is indeed working on Steerswoman book Number Five, and it is still planned on being a seven-book series, and when she says plan she really means plan. By coincidence, it turns out that Rosemary lives in the town where I grew up; we discussed renovations of the library that used to be my second home.

SF on the Edge
F. Brett Cox, Gregory Feeley, Alex Irvine, Kelly Link
The highlight of this panel was orzelc bringing up the edgy aspects of fan fiction, notably "Tor editors slash," inducing heart attack symptoms in Brett. This was a nicely coherent-but-freewheeling panel, dipping into trends in fiction topics, trends in style, and new modes for story/interaction/play (Alex described his experiences with online, distributed-structure fictional worlds, like that viral-marketing game about a nonexistent scientist for the movie A. I.) Greg used Updike and Ann Tyler as referents to the generational aspects of shocking-new changes in SF culture; he also pointed out that interactivity has been going on since Dungeons & Dragons. Much talk about how science, and the integration of science into everyday culture, has changed both how SF is received and what people want to talk about in SF. Kelly expressed worry that the regression of science-teaching in schools may bode ill for SF; although the panelists lauded her efforts as a small press owner, she worried about the economics of publishing and the aversion towards risk. And, in the middle there, we did talk about fanfic, although entertainingly enough, the fact of reader-response activity was not the edgy part; it was the crossing of boundaries like real people fic and incest that were edgy.

New Mysteries of Ancient Exploration
Judith Berman, Elaine Isaak, Paul Levinson, Victoria McManus
Cavort among the Clovis people! Skid along ice sheets to cross an ocean! Poke into global genetics patterns! We talked over the paradigms of speculation about ancient civilizations, how they have and will change, how technology helps (or possibly hinders) paradigm-change, and all of the wild theories for various peoples, their movement, and the presumption of their unchanging state. Just enough science to make me feel smartastic, without ever losing me. A very relaxing interlude.

The Latest in Short SF
Kathryn Cramer, Gavin Grant, David G. Hartwell, Kelly Link
Furious scribbling and wild misspelling as the panelists rattled off names, titles, and venues for short stories. Kelly and Gavin do one collection (with Ellen Datlow) and David and Kathryn do others; so for proper spelling I will eventually have recourse. From this and the "Edge" panel I got lots of suggestions for further reading, in lots of subgenres. (For some reason, Australian fiction magazines seem to have been the hot source this year.) Sorrowful conclusions that I will have to find a way to read scifi.com somehow, and preferably not through my 56K at home, because hidden somewhere in the excessive graphics and wingdings lies a trove of good fiction. (Mentioned more than once was Christopher Rowe's "The Voluntary State,"which bent so many minds I was surprised not to see panelists with cricks in their necks.)

And that was the con that was. Good show. More talk about the books I acquired, and if I'm really ambitious a bibliography of recommendations I heard, later.