home > SF > cons > 2Kon: Eastercon 2000

The 51st British Easter Science Fiction Convention
21--24 April 2000, Central Hotel, Glasgow

GoHs: Guy Gavriel Kay, Katherine Kurtz, Deborah Turner Harris, John Salthouse.

The programme listing was again rather sparse, but again, the quality was high: mostly new items, hardly any items I had seen before, and well-run panels.

On the Friday, getting into an SFnal frame of mind, and not yet being attuned to the Glasgow accent, I through I heard someone in the street saying "Pikachu", when they were in fact selling ... the "Big Issue"!

I've been to Glasgow (home of blue police boxes that acknowledge the Tardis) and the Central Hotel with its marvellous staircase before -- for the smaller Albacons in '85 and '91, and for the '95 Worldcon, where it was only one of the many programme areas. It is probably straining the limits for an Eastercon: it could have done with a third large programme room, and with more catering (although it did have the breakfast queuing down to a fine art).

Overheard: "I'm trying to pull Amazon out of the red all by myself."

Programme highlights

• Panel -- What Research? I Write Fiction!
• TechnoBabble panel quiz
• Gary Stratmann -- Martial Arts in SF
• John Salthouse -- Son et Lumière
• Ian Sorenson and Reductio ad Absurdum -- "A Fistful of Hobbits" -- Lord of the Rings as a spaghetti western -- Sorenson-style. Great.
• Panel -- The Arthur C Clarke Awards
• Pilots, Planets and Plasmas -- the (near) future of aerospace
• Katherine Kurtz -- GoH interview
• They Think I Have News for You All Over -- quiz
• Masquerade
• Guy Gavriel Kay -- GoH talk
• Mark Simmons -- Behind the Scenes at Time Team
• Amanda Baker -- George Hay Memorial Lecture -- The Chemical Evolution of the Universe
• Panel -- Tolkien the Modernist
• David B. Wake -- Captain Tartan Saves the World -- Again! -- a video presentation of last year's epic masterpiece -- now with the video for sale!
• Workshop -- Technical Tall Tales
• Panel -- Let's Kill the Cute Kid

Panel -- What Research? I Write Fiction!

Guy Gavriel Kay, Scott MacMillan, Mark Simmons

Have you ever been jolted out of a good story because of some niggling bit of historical inaccuracy? This panel looks at the importance of doing your research so you can diverge with purpose.

• MS: archaeologists get phoned up and asked "what sort of nappy did Egyptian children wear in Akhenaton's time?"
• GGK: you need to be grounded in credibility, of character, science, setting, magic -- but research can be a seductive trap
  • you can confuse the research with the novel -- "undigested research"
  • having facts and details does not make the reader happier
  • you need unobtrusive fats that work their way in to the narrative without impeding the flow -- for example, Tom Wolfe's journalistic writing like The Right Stuff is great, but his novels are constantly arrested by lumps of research.
• SM: I'm a State Herald of Ireland, but I've never written about Heraldry, because it would be boring, for me.
  • My background is TV, which need to be visual, can't be held for too long with explanations.
  • For an episode of Outer Limits, I wanted a character to fire a pistol underwater. Can it be done? I took a gun into a swimming pool. The first bullet hit the side and damaged it -- the second I fired the length, and it went about 15ft.
  • Of Noel Coward: "How was your flight Mr Coward?" "Have you ever been on an aeroplane?" "Yes." "Did you go anywhere?" "Yes. "Well, it was rather like that!"
• GGK: There are libraries and academics to consult for straightforward historical research, but how do you research the relationship between Elves and Dwarfs?
  • Tolkien researched by inventing. It's important that there's more material background than what appears in the book, to instill reader confidence that "this narrator knows what they are talking about"
  • I don't need to tell you everything about how people travelled in antiquity. I need to tell you enough to give you that "I can be trusted" feeling
• SM: And you can't write enough background to be convincing without some research.
  • My wife, Katherine Kurtz, has written a book based in Dublin -- even though we've lived in Ireland for 15 years she spent 3 weeks walking around Dublin.
  • I can drive, but I couldn't write credibly about driving to Istambul, or driving a Formula One racing car.
• GGK: but you don't have to learn by doing, you can learn by reading
• SM: Read Das Boot to know everything about running a WWII U-boat. A great plot can be readable even if the characters are poor, but if the characters are good yet there is not plot ... well, just look at the winners of literary prizes, then try to read those books!
• GGK: the research can bring characters to life. For example, my learning about mosaic art in antiquity influenced the way a character developed -- fingers are always cut, from handling broken glass -- there was conflict between different techniques, which gave a chance for a plausible argument.
• GGK: The Internet has changed my research -- not for the details, but for finding the people I can ask
• MS: We did some research for Time Team on Mediaeval Christmases -- the food, plants, songs... Then in a briefing the producer says, "well, we've got this boar's head, and we've put up some holly, even though they didn't used to..." Sometimes I wonder why we bother.
• SM: I was the technical advisor on US mounted cavalry for the TV mini-series Centennial . I drilled 30 guys on how to ride and dismount properly. But the director said it was wrong, because that's not how John Wayne does it! The scene was edited out of the programme.
• MS: The Mummy is marketed in US schools as "authentic"! It's a curious mixture: there is perfect text written on the jars, but the wrong number of jars.
• GGK: There is a point of diminishing returns. A production of Pride and Prejudice, in a prestigious Toronto theatre, discovered what women wore at that period, but deliberately didn't use it, because they wanted to make an historical piece that pleased the audience. But they were apologetic about it -- which a TV programme never would be.
• SM: they should have researched actor's costumes of the time -- that would have been more appropriate.
• MS: to check the authenticity of the costumes -- look at the feet. I saw 300 Frenchmen in armour, all wearing Doc Martens!
• SM: Shoe makers often make shoes too small, because they just have an order for 300 pairs, and they can cut back on the materials used and make more profit -- and then the actors end up wearing Doc Martens.
• SM: In Braveheart, the decision was "the Scottish guys gotta be in those dress things, else no-one will know they're Scots". Kilts were not worn at the time, the armies would have looked identical -- which would have been just too confusing for any audience.
• GGK: sometimes modern sensibilities would be too distracted by historical accuracy -- like the missing or black teeth in beautiful women. It's a trap to show the real dirt and grit, because the characters themselves would have noticed nothing unusual.
• SM: movies capitalise on the viewers' inbuilt visual images, and use these for shortcuts or deliberate shocks.
• SM: Sometimes you just have to make stuff up. If you want some difficult research: try researching the RUC -- the only police force in the world with an unlisted phone number, and whose PR office won't talk to you.
• MS: In a combat scene, you can't use a real sword, even though weight and balance are important, because of the dangers. And if you had an accurate portrayal of a mediaeval battle, the audience would walk out after three minutes, sickened by the bloodshed.
• MS: When we see something inaccurate, we are angry because our suspension of disbelief is ruined. Everyone raves about The Engines of God, but it has bad archaeology: when they are trying to rescue the machine that has important writing on it, why don't they just photograph it?! Different things throw different people.

Related material from previous cons:

• Intuition's I Just Make It Up, for different panelists views on research
• Conspiracy's A Tower in Beleriand, for GGK's view on publishing everything that Tolkien wrote.

TechnoBabble panel game

Can the panellists tell the difference between science fiction, science, and b******s?

a rerun of the Reconvene game, with some new questions.

• "Danger, Kim Stanley. Danger!"
• "My [Bugs] scripts got rejected on the grounds that it was too far-fetched."
• "It's a quote from the longest running SF TV show." "What, Sky at Night?"

see also: rasfw technobabble thread

Martial Arts in SF

Gary Stratmann and Linda Stratmann

• Putting an actor in a mask is useful -- the audience can't tell them from the stuntman
• The Phantom Menace light sabre duel took a lot of training, and looks spectacular. It's kung fu style stickwork. It was better than the earlier films, because the light sabres didn't shatter during the fight, and were heavy enough that the actors could really lay in with them.
• Xena/Hercules -- most of the crew are kung fu experts -- they are very good at what they do, very good at making the stars look good, and they can die well. They can run three steps up a wall -- then fall off, because gravity cheats! We can expect to see our heroes running up walls for years to come.
• "kung fu" just means "very good, master".
• Most SF uses is Chinese fighting plus Japanese mythology ("not as clumsy as a blaster" -- especially one in the hands of an Imperial Stormtrooper!) because it looks alien to USans.
• The Klingon bat'leth is definitely designed for people who drink a lot then go out for a fight. It's quarterstaff style.
• Real martial arts is very quick. It has to be slowed down for the screen (except for the sword duel at the beginning of The Seven Samurai [Akira Kurosawa, 1954], and Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter [Hammer, 1974] has a sword duel lasting about a second).
• Screen fighting attacks the weapon, not the person -- lots of twiddling around.
• In Babylon 5
  • The Minbari/Ranger fighting pole is just a staff
  • The Centauri use a Roman short sword as a duelling weapon -- but the Romans used shields!
• No amount of spiritual teaching will save you if the other guy shoots you from 500 paces.
• Dr Who has Venusian karate -- Jon Pertwee was taught aikido by the stuntmen, but he had a bad back in reality. Real martial arts involves a lot of being dumped on your ass, being hit, being kicked -- often all at once.
• It's cheaper to use martial arts, because there are no blaster FX, no burnt clothing. But Hawk the Slayer [1980] managed to have no fake blood at all!
• The Matrix -- starts as kung fu and ends as Hollywood. Trained the actors for three months to fight.
• Very few alien martial arts are embedded in the culture. If you are continually fighting wars, new tech replaces old. So in the West, few martial arts survive -- no-one is sure how people really fought with quarterstaffs (though there are a limited number of ways to hit someone with a stick). In the East, they had more time on their hands to develop the arts -- and were not allowed the high tech swords.
• The policeman's truncheon -- not a very good weapon, but it has some tradition. Now being replaced by a sidearm baton, itself derived from a Japanese weapon derived from a pipe.
• Epee fencing is closer to a practical fighting technique -- can hit opponent anywhere. Foil fencing has a much more limited target.
• Military swords and bayonets survive, because you can always run out of ammunition.
• A tradition of duelling usually becomes a tradition of non-lethal fighting, otherwise you run out of officers, or whoever, very quickly.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- uses kick boxing -- Sarah Michelle Gellar had done it before -- it looks very good on film, because it's slower than punching -- it's easier to choreograph fights.
• Anime makes guns a martial arts -- especially two pistols.
• All the posing is actually waiting for the other guy to do something -- like blink.
• The fencing scene in The Princess Bride is tremendous fun -- traditional swashbuckling spoof style, done extremely well -- but it's not realistic fighting. The Mask of Zorro is extremely good "Hollywood sword fighting". The Oliver Reed version of The Three Musketeers has a lot of hitting people with furniture -- making use of what's available.
• The police use horses as weapons, to control crowds. (But horse don't do well on marbles.)
• Jackie Chan is an extremely good acrobat. He doesn't fight, rather "plays" with his opponents -- such as grabbing the hand of one, then hitting another with it.

John Salthouse -- Son et Lumière

"exothermic chemistry" demonstrations ... or, "Things that go bang. Loudly"

This is such a popular event that, due to the limited size of the main programme room, it needed two sittings!

• from casual beginnings,
• via an ether fire,
• things are lit,
• things go bang (in the presence of an alert fire extinguisher operator),
• things fizzle out,
• explosions fall on the floor,
• things burn red,
• and things burn white

Liquid oxygen is such a dangerous chemical they won't supply it to pyromaniacs like me. So I have to make my own.

As previously seen at Albacon '91

Panel -- The Arthur C Clarke Awards

A panel of past judges discuss this year's shortlist, and decide their choice of winner.

• The shortlist for Best Novel is:
  • Stephen Baxter -- Time
  • Bruce Sterling -- Distraction
  • Kathleen Ann Goonan -- The Bones of Time
  • Neal Stephenson -- Cryptonomicon
  • Justina Robson -- Silver Screen
  • Vernor Vinge -- A Deepness in the Sky
• First -- how can we ditch some? By weight? Let's just read the light ones!
• Neal Stephenson
  • Let's get rid of Cryptonomicon, because it's not SF
  • But Clute has it as one of his top five SF of the millennium!
  • The best bits are the WWII bits -- which aren't SF
  • And being set in the future does not make a book SF
  • Let's move on to something else and come back to Cryptonomicon later
• Gernsback said SF should be 5% science and 95% romance
• Stephen Baxter
  • Trilogies:
    • The rumours why Red Mars didn't win was because it was the first in a trilogy, so you couldn't tell yet if it was any good (and the other two parts were rejected because they were also parts of a trilogy)
    • And Time: Manifold 1 is also the first of a trilogy
    • The Sparrow won -- yet it has a sequel -- but it does stand alone, whereas Red Mars does not
  • Stephen Baxter one day has to let his characters stay dead -- he has a real resurrection complex.
  • We are agreed -- Time has gone
• Vernor Vinge
  • Let's get rid of the Vinge.
  • It wasn't as bad as I was expecting
  • A Fire Upon the Deep was great -- this one is stretched too thinly.
  • I could hear John Wayne lecturing as in True Grit.
  • I'm astounded it was nominated for the Prometheus Libertarian Award -- despite the fact it's the best argument for Worldwide Military Government since Heinlein's Starship Troopers!
  • The Vinge is gone.
• Bruce Sterling
  • I'll put the boot into Distraction then. It's like one of those 1960s narrative history books, with little boxed asides about the characters. Three pages of not very good info dumping at a time. Off scene events.
  • He's got some good ideas, great dialogue, but he doesn't know what he's trying to say, there's no plot. Everything is set up to be inevitable, rather than plausible.
  • It made me laugh out loud in places, but at the end I hurled it lightly against the wall. The satire on American society was brilliant, but I got tired of it after a while.
  • With a lot of this shortlist, I get deja vu. Distraction made me think of Stephen Bury's Interface -- but that other was a lot sharper.
  • The Governor of Louisiana character was a bit unsubtle -- it was just Huey Long dropped in.
  • It didn't finish in a satisfactory way, no proper closure. Sterling is much better at the short story or novella length. The beginning as a novella would have been much better.
  • So the Sterling is out.
• Kathleen Ann Goonan
  • Goonan can't write, can she? She writes a chase scene and makes it sound dull and leaden.
  • I liked it. It had a plot, a beginning, middle and end. It's set in Hawaii, which makes it fun. But it's too long.
  • It shows a misunderstanding of American political history...
  • ... and of the effect of diet on growth
  • The ending is resolved by magic. He does some maths in his head, then steps through a portal -- it's a magic spell! He should have used the maths to build a portal, or find out where the portal was. Very Anne McCaffrey.
  • My big problem is I remember nothing about it. I lost the thread while reading it, and now it's all vanished. Not memorable enough for the ACC award?
  • I enjoyed it, and it reminded me of Connie Willis -- focussed rather more on the characters than the events -- curiously detached.
  • Of all the books this is the one with the best characters -- they are real people.
  • It rested on strings of coincidences -- very little logic structuring it. But because the characters worked, I was interested, and didn't mind the coincidences.
  • It's not a winner
• Justina Robson
  • I loved bits of Silver Screen. This is the only one who can write.
  • It's very British -- unlike the other British author, Stephen Baxter, who's trying to be an American writer. Actually, it's very Leeds. Like those other British authors -- Jeff Noon, Ken MacLeod, Simon Ings -- they all have a sense of place, of culture. Parts reminded me of a redeveloped Docklands -- very vivid images.
  • I really enjoyed it, but I don't think it's that great -- the plot is so simple, I can't describe it without giving it away. It's a who/whydunnit -- although at the end we know who but not why -- a rereading might make the why clearer.
  • It makes me want to read her next book.
  • There are lots of really great parts, but the integration isn't done all that well.
  • It doesn't have a "happy ever after" -- a character is traumatised and stays traumatised.
  • The characters work really well -- you believe in them. The bulemia is handled well -- the sufferer can control it but it's not going away -- the character is only "in control", not some laid-back perfect heroine.
  • I think it's flawed, but it is so great in places, and you want to jump up and down and say "read this". Unlike all the others. It's not overwritten -- just a single narrative with a couple of flashbacks. I think it's a winner. The problems are with integrating the pieces, not with the necessity of those pieces -- it all belongs in there. Modern 400 page novels are often two 200 page novels that the author seems to have dropped and shuffled the pages together.
• Neal Stephenson
  • Cryptonomicon is physically difficult to read, it's so heavy! And so complicated: I was having to keep notes!
  • I got really bored with it -- even though I was really looking forward to it. I kept putting it down. I only got about half way through, then I finished off by skipping the modern bits.
    • So you missed the five pages on how to eat cereal?
    • And the riff on the cultural study of beers was great!
    • I've just heard an academic paper on the iMac advert just like that!
    There are some good bits
• Lots of these have a theme of cryptography -- and of alienated children
• I think Cryptonomicon will win, and it's the wrong winner. If it wins, it will be a scandal -- but the ACC award is no stranger to scandal!
• The BSFA shortlist [Eugene Byrne ThigMOO, Justina Robson Silver Screen, Mary Doria Russell Children of God, Simon Ings Headlong, Ken MacLeod The Sky Road] is much better than this one.
• Silver Screen is the best on this list. If you wave Cryptonomicon around as best SF (if you can wave it around!) people will look at you strangely -- the best bits are the historical bits.
• Let's vote: Cryptonomicon -- zero. Silver Screen -- all
• How many of the audience have read either? [about 4 had read one, another 4 the other]
• Silver Screen is good old fashioned SF with modern techy things, chases, and a plot. And characters!
• The ACC award panel is supposed to read each entry a second time (after it is shortlisted) -- and base the award on second impressions. (Sometimes on reading a book a second time, we wonder why we shortlisted it.) Will anyone be able to read Cryptonomicon a second time?
• So, we've got a hypothetical winner -- but then we were wrong last year! Whether it wins or not, Silver Screen is something we would recommend.

[Distraction won the ACC award]

Katherine Kurtz -- GoH interview

• Author website at www.deryni.net
• Codex due to be published soon -- the author saw my notebooks on the characters
• British publishers didn't push the series, so it went out of print. Currently available only as US imports
• I love writing stories involving the Templars. As an historian, that Holy Blood and Holy Grail stuff really annoys me.
• I've fallen in love with Dublin. I had a lovely excuse for poking around odd corners of the city -- I was doing research! It's a Gargoyle story. The rot set in in Georgian times when they stopped putting gargoyles on buildings.
• How did you feel when Gwynedd became the name of a real county?
  • If I was doing it over, I probably wouldn't use a real historical name. When I first visited Wales, after writing the first book, it was lovely, but it didn't speak to me in an emotional way. But when I crossed the border into Scotland, I felt I had come home.
• "deryni" is from the same root word as "druid" and "oak", from the Welsh. It's pronounced der-rin-ee, but deh-rin-ee is an okay second pronunciation.
• Part of the fun of writing a saga series, as an historian, is getting intrigued by the historical flow. I personally am not intrigued by prehistory, or the Continent, and prefer to stay in these Isles. My next book about Joan of Arc meant I had to learn more French history than I really wanted to know.

Masquerade

• Teddy the MC
• Reduction Unit Award -- The Doctor Who Radio Show -- Karen Furlong (aged 8 months) as Sgt Benton [don't ask], assisted by Sabine as Corporal Furlong
• Primal Scream Award -- Michelle Rosenblum (10) as a trainee Dr Who assistant (complete with well-rehearsed scream!)
• Living in a Negative Entropy World
• The Matrix -- the presentation had an hilarious "green screen" segment
• Best Presentation Award -- Ed Buckley as Con Man
• A Guard of the Keep
• Best Workmanship Award -- Will Adams as Lara Croft
• Honorable Mention for Makeup -- (a brooding) Angel and Doyle (deceased)
• A not-so-happy clown
• Honorable Mention for Presentation -- Heather McKeegan as the Succubus
• A Warrior
• Aliens Stole My Handbag present The Blue Rinse Brigade
• Best in Show -- The Wacky Racers

Guy Gavriel Kay -- GoH talk

GGK had suggested, because his talk was rather serious Work In Progress, that it should start with a dancing Klingon. So, much to his bemusement -- it did!

• I have a passionate belief in the importance and potential of fantasy literature. Even in the SF community, some regard fantasy as trivial and unimportant.
• Fantasy is usually seen as escapism -- and that's normally a criticism. But all good storytelling is escapism -- it draws you from your own life into the lives of the characters in the book.
• There is a place for entertainment and light fiction. It's hard to read meaningful literature in 15 minute segments, which is all many people have. Fantasy, or any genre, can fulfil this need for light fiction. But because many or most works are of a certain kind, it is a mistake to say the genre is of that kind.
• The best fantasy can come closer to mirroring the human story than just about anything else. The myths, the legends, tap into us directly.
• Fantasy is not just about myth, but about history, about the past. What can fantasy do, what traps can it avoid, that historical fiction cannot?
  • Fantasy allows universalising of the story. It is removed from a specific time or place. It detaches the story from a narrow context. So it can be seen to apply more to the reader's life and world than something that happened say 800 years ago in Spain.
  • At the Hague Worldcon a Polish SF editor said he expected to lose about half his readers and writers, because the writers would no longer have to write disguised stories to get past the censors. The fact that these writers were using SF/fantasy in this way shows that it isn't "just" escapism. It can do things like: demonstrate the dangers when internal hatred blind people to external dangers; how totalitarians control by erasing history and culture -- these are tropes -- if the story is set in an invented world it can be made more relevant, because the reader cannot say "this is just about Cromwell in Ireland" or whatever.
  • There is the moral ambiguity of historical fiction. Consider Oliver Stone's film JFK -- real footage is seamless spliced in with the fiction -- what is real cannot be separated from what is made up. [The same criticism that I made about the documentary-style Walking With Dinosaurs.] Ought there be limits to what writers of historical novels can do to real people? Can we hide behind the fact that it is fiction? What we get is only the author's fantasy on the inner life of a real person. But with fantasy: I invent a man based on, but not identical to, El Cid, and so declare I don't know how the real man thought. Even though clearly drawn from history, we are acknowledging the guesswork, the invention, the fantasy, of the work. It's an honorable way of approaching history.

• What other writer today comes close to what you are trying to do?
  • The trend is in the other direction -- towards "faction" -- that real lives of real people are fair game. This has been defended as "We have to allow authors to write what they want, otherwise we wouldn't have had Richard III" -- a brilliant piece of character assassination that stood undisputed for 300 years. I think we will see moves against faction, against the idea that we are entitled to be there.
• Some fiction has appendices, separating the real stuff from the fictional. Would you consider doing appendices for Tigana?
  • I'm happier providing bibliographies to the source materials I use. I don't like to make explicit what should be under the surface -- you can lay too much stress on correspondences. It's like dismantling a poem -- you can unpack a five word Dylan Thomas phrase into a paragraph -- but then you no longer have the packed condensed form. The unbundling can lose subliminal elements. Concordances and Companions make sense for readers who are passionate about a work. But some of the scholarly work grown up around Tolkien can make us lose the vitality of the original work. (And one of the most uneasy feelings a writer can have is when reading what a scholar says about their work!)
• What is your take on magic? You seem to be using less of it.
  • It's one of the tools at the disposal of a writer. Like FTL drives in SF may or may not be used in any given book. The significance of the magic is determined by the story. Fantasy is not defined by magic. If magic is what draws you to fantasy, then you will be wanting to read those kind of books, but it's not what defines the genre. I didn't use magic in my "El Cid" book, because I wanted to make it hard for people to ignore the point I was making [about how the rich Renaissance culture was destroyed, and people could no longer communicate across religious divides]. My next one is Byzantian -- and magic fits Byzantium!
• So how do you define the fantasy genre?
  • There is a problem with categorisation. We are a remorselessly categorising species -- we keep trying to squeeze square pegs into round holes. The energy poured into categorising the work is misplaced -- it ought to be going into "is it any good?" Publishers need to put books into sections -- it's customer convenience, that's all.
• Which of your books would you like to see made into a movie?
  • Commercially -- I say take any, take all!
  • Artistically -- how many of the books you've passionately loved have been turned into a film you passionately loved? Add to that a book of your own that you passionately love! Also, you would have to telescope a 500 page book into a 100 page script. That only works if you don't feel too much for the book -- which is easier if the book isn't very good. It must have some small part that sets the writer's or director's imagination alive, but with the rest not needing to be treated particularly reverently.

Mark Simmons -- Behind the Scenes at C4's Time Team

"Tony, we love you, but you've only got 24 hours to dig the earth ..."

This proved so popular that the original item, held in the third, small, programme room, was repeated in a larger room.

• The budget for each Time Team episode is about £1M -- there are 22 archaeologists, and about 140 production crew -- very few of whom appear before the camera.
• The set-up starts about a year beforehand, with investigation of about 30 preliminary sites, whittled down to 12, then 8 are filmed. This episode was filmed in September, but we got the go in June.
• There's lots of research, and it's a proper excavation. But it's never clear exactly when it will be filmed.
• Student diggers are paid £75/week.
• The council painted the skips specially, to look nice.
• To get permission to dig trenches in people's gardens -- we pay them!
• There is a script -- what trenches are to be opened when. The producer decides when and where, based on advice given by the archaeologists. It has to look good. The script says what's going to be in the trenches -- there's constant rewriting and re-editing when stuff isn't found.
• There are also "cameos" -- padding for when nothing is discovered outside.
• Time Team is now desperate for skeletons -- because Meet the Ancestors had proved so popular.
• Time Team is a very good PR tool for getting people interested in archeology, and very good for local archeological teams.
• Developers now think that a dig takes three days! But then we say, yes, if you spend £1M!
• TV requires compromises. Some shows filmed were never show, because nothing interesting happened. But the sites are chosen carefully so that they will find interesting stuff. So very little prehistory. And chose sites with very little stratigraphy, to allow quick trenching.
• These are real excavations -- they are doing real archaeology -- and the film crew put the spin on it after.

Amanda Baker -- The Chemical Evolution of the Universe

The inaugural Science Fiction Foundation George Hay Memorial Lecture

Astrophysicist and fan Amanda Baker gave an overview of the process of nucleosynthesis whereby stars have made all the elements in the universe (except for the primordial hydrogen, helium, and some lithium). Then, in a section requiring rather more concentration from the audience, she described some of her own recent research. A great start to this new lecture series.

Panel -- Tolkien the Modernist

During a recent 'net discussion, Patrick Nielsen Hayden suggested Tolkien was a modernist writer. The panel discuss.

• Tolkien has obviously learned narrative modes from Beowulf, etc, but he is doing something that's not early mediaeval saga. He's obviously learned from Mallory, but he's not doing mediaeval romance. He has used modes from a huge range from Homer and the Bible onwards -- but is doing something his own.
• He went through the Great War, which colours all his work.
• A young child asked of LotR "when did this happen?" It's a mythical deep time where species that existed then are now extinct, but are the foundation of our world. This couldn't have been without the idea that the world is a lot older than 4004 BC. They are creation myths in very deep time indeed.
• He gives the impression that he believes he is writing about the real world, about reality. (So he's definitely not post-modernist, relating to other texts or to itself.)
• He's not fundamentally a modernist because
  • of the WWI impact. The first writings, in The Silmarillion, were while he was recovering from trench fever. They are of "a time where there was more green and less noise". For him the war, and all that followed, were negative. The underlying impulse of LotR is nostalgia, what is lost, what has been taken away. This is the antithesis of the modernist view.
  • of the psychology and characterisation. Tolkien's psychology is pre-Freudian. One of the defining traits of modern writing, the contemporary approach, is to tell why characters do what they do, based on the unconscious, etc.
  • he is far too interested in storytelling! Post WWI the world has been shattered and cannot be made coherent; modernist art reflects this fragmentary view. Tolkien was trying to write a really long story and see if he could keep his readers engaged.
• Tolkien's Catholicism: there's something very modern in the idea of a devout Catholic creating a pantheon of underlying deities.
• Tolkien's characters are not mediaeval, not all "types". Some are types rather than individuals, but all the central characters do have a degree of self questioning that is unusual, even for a 19th century novel. Self doubt is not mediaeval, for the most part. Also, the characters do not know what they are taking part in.
• Some of the characters are very modern.
  • It's long been said that Frodo/Gollum are two halves of one character, Gollum as the subconscious. And Frodo is always struggling with his relationship with the ring.
  • Boromir is not entirely bad
• He's post-WWI, but not post-WWII. Eliot's The Wasteland looks like a coherent technocratic manifesto compared to what came after WWII.
• Jane Austen was an acute observer of human behaviour. So you don't need to be a Freudian to observe characters. But Freud introduced elements beyond our understanding, beyond ourselves.
• All the characters act in their own self, but are also at times aware of being part of a greater pattern. But without the Freudian baggage.
• There is the absence of subtlety in the female characters; and it is a modern notion that a complex legitimacy be given to female characters. (Jane Austen is noteworthy because of her significant female characters.) Tolkien is here consistent with the tradition that precedes him.

• Frodo's struggle to resist the temptation to do evil is autonomous.
  • Tolkien turns the entire epic on one personal solitary decision -- a modern idea.
  • And Frodo fails!
• Eowyn -- in what way is her character not developed?
  • Tolkien uses the model of the Amazon who fights and adopts male attire -- becoming an honorary man. That model was available in the literature. Eowyn started out as a variant of that, but self-awareness made her a real person.
• I see Tolkien as Miltonic, not Modern -- Christian free will.
  • It's all about the little person dealing with events on the largest possible scales, and being the essential pivotal point. Georgian versus modern -- nostalgic. It's a reaction to a machine society, being a cog in a machine -- an antidote, where the smallest of individuals can play a role and even define what happens in the world. What Sam/Frodo do, what Eowyn does, completely alters the course of events -- compare this with the idea of a soldier in the trenches.

• Tolkien's ending, even with its great deal of sadness, is a lot "happier" and forward looking than most modernists.
• Tolkien is constructing an origin of Man that is divine, not Darwinian.
• Newton: "If I have seen further than most, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants". Do we see the world as a progression to today, or as one where the true giants are in the past? It's the battle of Ancients and Moderns. Moderns: we are the culmination, better than the predecessors -- progress. Ancients: things were wiser and better then. And the essence of Tolkien is things were better then. The First Age was the glorious age; in the fallen Third Age we do the best we can do.
• LotR has an exceptionally sophisticated narrative technique. The cross cutting narrative, the interpenetration of characters. This is a very modern technique.
• There's a lot of class politics. A mourning for the old upper classes, a re-creation of the middle classes. But in the Shire there is the notion of power coming up from underneath, no "ruler" (Sam becomes mayor). Tolkien said "touching you cap to the squire may be bad for the squire, but it's good for you".

Workshop -- Technical Tall Tales

• John Clark, Ignition, 1971. Many tales of liquid rocket propellant manufacture. Fluorine is a good oxidiser, but needs to be cooled. Chloro-tri-flouride is liquid at room temperature -- and the closest candidate for what Aliens have in their blood -- it reacts explosively with water, asbestos, sand, ...
• The experimental rocket DC-X vented hydrogen which pooled underneath it a blew up. Harry Stine in Halfway to Anywhere has a picture of where it landed -- four scorched circles corresponding to the rocket motors. I'm sure this picture will end up doing the UFO rounds...
• JET (Joint European Torus) -- we were experimenting with moving the plasma -- by switching the magnets on and off. But JET's power takes a significant proportion of the UK grid -- we hit a resonant frequence -- fortunately we only did this for two seconds, not the 10 seconds we had planned. We got an emergency phone call from the CEGB -- we had nearly burnt out the bearings on a third of the generating capacity of the UK!
• The 0800 telephone number crash from a few months ago -- the system got saturated, one system fell over, and it cascaded. Concentrators fold 2000 lines into 100, because not all lines are in constant use. There are careful statistical models of how people talk -- which doesn't cover modems and 'net access! The concentrators are close to falling over. We are patching in s/w to at least handle 999 calls.
• Lots of cable cutting stories, including a ditch digger in Silicon Valley that cut 4 cables carrying 11000 lines, that each had to be reconnected by hand.
• Mars Climate Orbiter used "lithobreaking" -- it's like aerobreaking, but it uses the ground instead of the atmosphere!
• During WWII the RAF "cut and shut" two captured damaged Stukas -- without noticing they had different wingspans, they used one wing from each. A German PoW brought in to diagnose the problem fell over laughing.
• We were selling our aircraft to Israel. Our competitors were selling theirs to Egypt. We got to test out in real combat!
• The kangaroo story...
• lots of other more minor disasters...

see also the Evolution panel Tall Technical Tales

Panel -- Let's Kill the Cute Kid

A look at why children on the bridge are a nuisance, and why cuteness in space is a waste of such.

• The original Buck Rogers had a kid!
• Kids are added to make it interesting -- to give the 14 year old part of the audience someone to relate to. Nothing is cooler (for a kid) than watching an adult adventure with a kid they can relate to. Now you are adults, the cute kids annoy you because they are having the adventures you never had!
• But none of us liked the cute kids even then -- although we were all getting beaten up as nerds, they were even more sickening than us!
• It's not the kids we object to -- it's the cuteness -- they're like Brady Bunch kids! (Europeans don't get the it's a spoof.)
• I think the idea of kids going off and doing dangerous things is a good role model. (Laughter) I mean, today they are too overprotected.
• I hate it because it's saying "let's make the show more popular by spreading the demographic". Let's instead try to get more of the demographic that doesn't want the cute kid.
• But some kids shows -- like Girl from Tomorrow -- which have a large cast of kids, work brilliantly. The trouble is with the token cute kid. It also works when the kid isn't cute -- like in Terminator 2.
• Kids parts are written very shallowly -- because generally child actors have a very limited range, so they have to be given simple tasks.
• Are they being put in because "SF is for kids"?
• The kid in American Gothic wasn't cute. So it can be done. Why aren't more like this?
• The Mystic Knights of Tir Na nOg was invented purely to sell toys. We were selling toys months before the show even aired. There were 104 crappy episodes, live action was cheaper than animation.
• Kids have three purposes: to be menace; to create menace; to be thrown to the wolves (and are interchangeable with women!)
• We keep seeing the cute kids in SF, but not in other genres.
• Lost in Space the movie wasn't the TV series. The TV series reflected the pop culture of the time. The film pointed out that Matt le Blanc should stay with Friends.
• Lennier and Vir are cute because the are naive. Wesley et al are cute because they are cute.
• Wesley Crusher is an example of how bad the effects of PC can be. He's a PC role model for kids. He only drank milk, he only said "gosh", he wouldn't say "shit" if he had a mouthful.
• The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, etc, are aimed at adults. The are all after he watershed, hence small audiences, hence small budgets. Movies have £70M FX budgets -- and we demand this standard of TV now.
• Why did ST:NG need Wesley when TOS didn't need a cute kid?
• Okay, maybe you need a kid for the audience -- by why can't it be better? True Lies was ruined by the cute kid.
• So ... we now understand the reason for having the cute kid -- but we still want to kill him! (Or maybe just kill the producer?)