Sunday morning had me awakening late, and so the first panel I ended up at was Far Future: Where Fantasy Meets SF, but unfortunately was moderated by some chap who loved the sound of his voice so much that discussion which would actually have been interesting was stopped in its tracks. To wit,

The moderator, when the point of discussion wasn't going his way, pulled out a gold medal and said

"I'm a philosopher, and here's my medal to prove it," and proceeded to say what he wanted.

The others on the panel stared at him and one said, "do you always carry that on you?"

"No," he said, "it was on the table in front of me."

Everyone laughed.

Later on, when a panellist was discussing something on a mathematical bent, he lifted a bare hand and said, "and here's my PhD in Mathematics."

At that point, it was no longer funny. He had opened positing they were going to discuss five reasons for Clarke's Law was bunk. Never mind that it wasn't ever actually a law, brought up by another panellist who said it was a good quip. While the mod was wanking on I hooked up to the net to see if I could actually find a copy of Clarke's 1962 piece, "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", so I could contribute and maybe needle him a bit, but unfortunately it was nowhere to be found.

Most were of the opinion that it was a good explanation of how older cultures will look at what's available in the future, and SF books are about tech which hasn't been discovered yet, possibilities. For example, some of what was predicted way back when haven't come up yet, and some things which have been developed hadn't been in anyone's wildest dreams.

Alastair Reynolds did bring up Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun as a good way of showing SF as fantasy: you think it's fantasy at first, and then realise that it's SF by about book four. I've never quite made it through the series, and so. Dana brought up Pern as another, which I always thought of as originally fantastical SF, and then became more fantasy than anything else by the end.

The Case for the Female Doctor had just about everyone person at the con in it: standing room only by the time people had finished coming in. Paul Cornell was certainly good value, and everyone except for the moderator was of the opinion it would be a good idea, and was about time.

It seemed that by the end, consensus was that an older woman as Doctor would be the thing, very possibly Joanna Lumley, with a female companion so that we could have a good, strong SF series with female leads passing the Bechdel test on a regular basis.

There were suggestions for other actors who could play the doctor, and names flew. Amanda Tapping was put forward, and when the panellists were informed that she wasn't British, but Canadian, Cornell said,

"We have to draw the line somewhere!"

Everyone laughed.

After that I trotted on down to Has Hollywood Sucked the Vampire Dry? aka the other Twilight panel. There are a lot of vampires in cinema on a regular basis, but it seemed that everyone kept coming back to the sparkly Edward concept.

Catherynne M. Valente was a panellist here--as she was on the previous--and said that in her research, she'd found that there was no real consistent origins for vampires, and it has changed a lot down the ages. They could go in sunlight in Bram Stoker's Dracula, for example, although it weakened them and they then became human.

So no, it hasn't; Meyer's sparkly vampires are another reinterpretation of them, and mention was made of The Opposite of Life, by Narelle Harris, which danamaree has since bought and read: in that, you only need blood to feel alive, but it's not necessary for actual survival.

This is the way the World Ends: post apocalyptic YA spec fic was the last one of the day I went to, and there were some interesting ideas being bandied around. One panellist asked,

"Is post-apocalyptic fiction recent to the event, or far enough away you have no idea what happened?"

Brozek replied, "unless you have them a sleeper and they come to things AFTER it happened and recall what it was like before, it's dystopic. Once you have rebuilt society it's not post-apocyptic. Post-apocalyptic is in the transition."

According to my notes this made me think a fair bit (laptop for taking notes: the awesome!) Post-apocalyptic in the future is dystopic only because when don't know any different, I wrote, because it's simply their world to them. Unless we're looking at it with the reader's eye.

Obernewtyn was mentioned as far post-apocalyptic, and with an established society. Is it post-apocalyptic, or dystopic? Someone else brought up Sheryl Jordan's Rocco as a place where the world is now shown as better. (This reminded me of Jordan's other works I loved as a late teen.) Z for Zachariah is apparently disturbing to young girls because of the undercurrent of sexuality to it, which I picked up on when I read it and was happy it didn't go that rather sick way.

The panel ended on a note about YA, and how very young readers have post-apoc books with a more positive and upbeat angle, than the older ones, which are still a little upbeat still, but nearly always so much. I can only imagine how different they'd be than the ones presented to adults, which are frequently very dark!


It was then time to meet up with a fellow panellist for The Future of Gender and Sexuality, and one of the things I said right away to my copanellist was that we must not, under any circumstances, discuss transgender issues or posit anything about it, for no matter what we said we would get it wrong and have shit heaped on our head.

Well, what little we did say was wrong anyway, according the the transgendered president of ... something? ... sitting in the front row.

There were only two of us, and so when Kirstyn McDermott, sitting in the audience, said something, I asked her to come up, thank goodness: I couldn't do all the talking on my own, and Cristina's reading in English was fairly limited. Later on the lady in the front row who was so upset with me came up and told me that McDermott spoke a lot of sense, with the fairly heavy implication I was a ninny. Oops.

The panel ended up discussing modern situations more than anything else, with occasional posits about how it might be in the future.

I was reminded of the surrendered wife phenomenon shortly before the whole thing ended, the name of the movement given back to me by a member of the audience. I must say, the people in the chairs were all very good, and I was happy--very happy!--that someone else knew of and had read Melissa Scott, whose work has all sorts of gender and sexuality issues done really well. How she's disappeared off everyone's radar I don't know, but it's an unfortunate thing I hope is fixed when an ebook publisher takes her backlog of work on.

Cristina and I spent an hour talking before the panel itself, and she had all this academic history and theory about postgenderism and parthogenesis (which I managed to scramble a few book examples up of) and a bunch of other literary devices. Lucky I keep a journal, is all I can say: about six years ago I was reading lots in this area and wrote notes and reviews and theories, so I picked my own youthful brain.

We skipped the Hugo Awards in favour of sleep. And room parties, later on in the evening. At the party someone had the results and read them aloud to us, so we got them in almost realtime anyway.