home > SF > cons > Helicon 2: Eastercon 2002

The 53rd British Easter Science Fiction Convention
29 March--1 April 2002, Hotel de France, Jersey

GoHs: Brian Stableford, Harry Turtledove, (fan) Peter Weston.

This was my first trip to Jersey, and both the Hotel de France (including indoor trees and clouds, and alien table decorations) and the weather were splendid -- but the ferry trip was an exercise in sleep deprivation, in both directions. If there's another Jersey Eastercon, I'll be back, but I'll fly!

The theme of the con was "Alternative History" (AH)

Programme highlights

• Panel -- What is Fandom that Thou Art Mindful of it?
• Panel -- Easy Fusion -- here we go again
• Peter Weston -- GoH talk
• Panel -- Is Nit-Picking a Legitimate Critical Technique in SF?
• Panel -- Alternative History: Choosing a Point of Departure
• Panel -- Shifting the Paradigms: How Science Changes
• Panel -- Points of Departure: the Reformation
• Panel -- If We Knew Then What We Know Now: Futures that are Past it
• Panel -- Points of Departure: the American Civil War
• Alistair Reynolds -- George Hay Memorial Lecture -- Catching Starlight -- ESA's new advanced optical camera
• Panel -- Through Poverty to the Stars!
• Harry Turtledove -- GoH talk
• Gerry Webb -- Space Launches
• Panel -- Assumptions, McGuffins, and Dei ex Machina
• Panel -- Can a Subtle Story Survive a Big Budget?
• Panel -- If This Goes On: the inventing of political fiction
• Technobabble Quiz
• Panel -- Checking Universal Constants: build your own reality detector
• GoH -- Brian Stableford -- Moral Responsibility in a Heterocosmic Universe
• Panel -- Future History: Cut and Shut Sagas
• Panel -- The Consumers Guide to Superfluous Technology
• Panel -- Should Scientists Write Science Fiction?
• Masquerade
• Panel -- Bored Mindless in Utopia
• Panel -- Not the Clarke Award
• Panel -- If I Ruled the Universe

Panel -- What is Fandom that Thou Art Mindful of it?

Eve Harvey, John Harvey, Tobes, Mike Scott

• A way of making friends -- where you don't have to explain
• A mutual appreciation society
• Communication with other fans -- you can be a "fan" without liking SF, and an SF-lover without being a fan
• Rose fans talk about roses, dog fans about dogs, but SF fans don't talk about SF very much, especially when they've been in fandom for years -- old friends
• SF reading is essentially solitary -- don't need to meet fandom -- with other interest clubs, you essentially have to be part of a group
• Fans are less judgmental?
  • but what about the way we feel about media fans?
  • some SF fans came in via media fandom
  • media has made it a more acceptable hobby for women
    • growth in media fandom paralleled by growth in strong women characters in SF
    • many come through university fandom, and the university sex balance is shifting
      • so SF fandom is a branch of intellectualism?
      • well, it is explicitly a hobby about thinking about things

• Would a stamp con have a panel on "stamp fans, why do we need them?" -- are we basically insecure?
• How many people here admitted they were going to Jersey for an SF con? [most people had!]
  • most TV is SF nowadays

• What makes someone a fan?
  • just going to an SF con? -- It costs money, it is an effort to go
  • engaging with the fannish culture at the con?
    • Someone had £200 stolen at the Adelphi -- there was a whip-round and it was replaced -- fandom is a support group
  • coming to see the people, rather than go to the panels
    • implies it has to be at least your second convention
    • or you met after Internet newsgroup contact (in the past it was more fanzine / letter writing contact) -- it can be a terrible shock when you finally meet someone!

• Fandom is still incredibly macho
  • we talk about how late we stay up, and how drunk we get
  • can a group that includes Teddy be macho?
  • US and Australian fans don't tend to drink so much

• Brian Aldiss claims it is a tribal gathering
  • so is there a tribal chief? We don't have "leaders" in fandom. SMoFs?

• We couldn't have fandom without books/authors -- they define us
  • even if all SF publishing stopped tomorrow, Eastercons would go on for a least a few more years
  • cons don't revolve around authors
  • ZZ9 required the existence of Douglas Adams and HHGTTG to get started, but not any more
• Eastercons are a subgroup of fandom
  • there's a lot of overlap with other groups, like folk, re-enactment, ...

Panel -- Easy Fusion -- here we go again

Simon Bradshaw, John Bray, Steve Rothman, John Dallman

The original Cold Fusion story broke at Contrivance. 13 years on Science is prepared to publish articles on it again.

• the original debacle, March 1989
  • everyone wanted to believe Fleischmann & Pons, but suspected it was all bollocks
  • extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs
    • "this result hasn't been replicated by a university that hasn't got a major league football team"
  • what happened to F&P? -- they went off the Japan, the disappeared
    • Frank Close, Too Hot to Handle -- documents the events
    • In 1993 Utah still had a cold fusion centre
  • what if? -- imagine if it had worked, 13 years ago
    • small scale steam turbines
    • good small scale heat source -- but lots of neutrons
    • "if they were getting the reaction they claim, and the neutron flux they claim, then standing that close to the experiment, they'd be dead!"
    • would F&P be rich -- that's a different set of skills
    • big effect on global warming arguments and plans

• It was bad science, procedurally
  • lots of new science seems odd when first demonstrated
  • but this was science by press conference
  • "doing bad science can end you up in hot water, or, in the case of Fleischmann & Pons, rather tepid water"
• Irving Langmuir, Pathological Science (reprinted in Physics Today 42, pp36-48, Oct 1989):
  • he studied properties of bad science, such as N-rays, Rhine's ESP. More recent example: polywater
  • isolated several common features
    • scientists working outside primary area of expertise
    • results on the threshold of detection
    • difficulties with others reproducing the results (within weeks of the high temperature superconductor announcements, everybody was doing it, and finding new ways)
    • polarisation of the community, especially along national/ideological grounds (eg French homeopathy, Russian Lysenkoism)
  • F&P cold fusion matched a lot of Langmuir's criteria

• what about the latest cold fusion claims?
• R. P. Taleyarkhan et al., Evidence for Nuclear Emissions During Acoustic Cavitation, Science 295, 1868 (2002)
  • based on sonoluminescence
    • sound waves in water can cause bubbles in synch with the sound -- the bubbles contract, get hot, and can emit flashes of light
    • (one of the few known ways of converting sound to light)
    • can these bubbles get hot enough for fusion? -- yes, but at a predicted reaction rate of one neutron every few seconds
  • a new setup uses neutrons to initiate the bubbles, giving much hotter bubbles
  • using deuterated acetone as the liquid, and ordinary acetone as the control
  • there is a discrepancy of a factor of ten between the tritium and the number of neutron observed
  • the key authors are experts in sonar luminescence, not fusion

• is it possible to be expert in enough areas to get interesting cross-disciplinary results?
  • it's difficult to do a literature search if you don't even know the name of the effect -- reinventing the wheel is depressingly common
• another key problem indicator -- working in isolation and springing the results on the world
  • should discuss with other scientists first, using traditional networking
  • if you announce a result and it is later shown to be wrong, not a big problem provided you use the right procedure (eg the 6.00 month period planet around a pulsar)
  • problem is that today these things are financially too important

• easy cold fusion would make the small cold fusion bomb easy, too
  • so should you publish?
    • if you discover it, someone else will, too
    • if you publish, can make it easier to stop the supply of the necessary raw materials
    • the Australian scientists who inadvertently produced a super strain of mouse-pox -- which might have made a super smallpox possible -- decided to publish so that NIH etc could research it
• cold fusion is a bug in the aliens' VR cage around us!
  • Such bugs get fixed very quickly, which is why the effects can't be reproduced
  • (a sort of inverse of Sheldrake's "morphic resonance")
  • the universe is being subject to "continual process improvement"

• there is also bad theoretical science
  • contradicts observations (new theories explain all that the old ones do, and more)
  • accumulating get-out clauses (adding epicylces)

• [see also Characterization of quack theories ]

Panel -- Is Nit-Picking a Legitimate Critical Technique in SF?

Ian Watson, Justina Robson, Dave O'Neill, Chris Amies

In a genre based on extrapolation, to what extent does the artist have to "show the workings" in the margin?

• [Merriman-Webster: nit-picking, n: minute and usually unjustified criticism]
• [OED2: nit-picker: A pedantic critic; one who searches for and over-emphasizes trivial errors]

• Common in films and TV
  • Comets in Star Trek with trailing tails, instead of pointing away from the sun.
  • Jon Brunner suggested, unsuccessfully, to Space 1999 that he be their SF consultant -- as they obviously needed one -- watching laser beams coming towards you, ...
  • Space would be dull if it were silent
  • Armageddon has rocks flying around like leaves in a gale -- much more interesting than reality
    • Nit-picking this film is a compulsive addiction -- but if they weren't there it would be a dull story. [You mean, it isn't already?]
  • The Matrix, with people being batteries -- it's infuriating!

• IW -- six months before Sept 11 I had a short story "Hijack Holiday" in Interzone, about flying a passenger jet into the Eiffel Tower.

• Films and TV may need them, to be interesting, but books don't?
  • Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
    • a BSFA award story, with awful science
    • many of the problems could have been fixed without losing the story
    • it wasn't her interest, so why should she bother?
    • I didn't read it, because I knew in advance it would annoy me. It's a rehash of James Blish's A Case of Conscience.
  • not everybody can get everything right
  • are we imposing stronger requirements than are placed on mainstream novels?
  • a story set in the near future that becomes invalid, just becomes an AH!
  • all this research is bad -- just make it up!
• They are there because of the demands of the story, a need for drama, to supplement reality
  • that's lazy -- it's because the author can't be bothered to think of a valid reason for doing something
  • constraints of reality can result in better tension
• There's also character nit-picking -- they wouldn't do that.
• Then there are the italicised full stops.

• American authors set their stories in London and mess with the geography -- they think their readers won't notice.
• Reign of Fire, a film set in Norfolk, but filmed in Ireland, complete with mountain-dwelling dragons! [Norfolk is notoriously flat, and has no mountains. (Or dragons for that matter, but no-one is complaining about that....)]
• Inspector Morse teleports around Oxford -- but that doesn't bother me as much as the 75 murders a year! -- And what about the murder rate in Midsomer village?

• I don't mind if the plot isn't affected by it. But if they change the laws of physics to solve a problem...
• As long as it doesn't break my willing suspension of disbelief -- it's hard to get that back
• Water-worn caves in granite, abandoned farms not reverting to forest -- none of these bothered me until I learnt enough
  • is it just because we are specialists?

• IW -- you need a pompous but fictional page of thanks to your advisors -- either to make people accept the book, or so they can blame someone else for the mistakes!

• Some people do use the 1932 Britannica for their science research
• authors have a responsibility, as some people learn from reading
  • The Moral Duty of Authors
  • they should learn not to believe what they read in SF!
  • even SF authors put other authors' mistakes in their own books
  • you can't learn everything you need
  • I need some maths for a couple of paragraphs -- how much effort should I put into it?

• Analogy to software bugs:
  • "show stopper bugs" should be caught by the editor, who shouldn't even buy the book
  • that leaves the 1000s of small tedious bugs and infelicities -- they don't immediately kill the use of the software -- but they add up to making you stop reading the book
• You can lose confidence in the writer
  • It may not be an error -- you may have misunderstood the author's intent -- Geoffrey of Monmouth may have been writing a deeper story, of England's soul
• internal consistency is important -- don't change the rules
• Science changes rapidly -- Hawking announced micro black holes -- which led to a period of micro black hole stories -- then a little later he said they evaporated in 10^-35 seconds!
• All progress depends on the nit-pickers pointing out what is wrong

• Larry Niven -- Ringworld is unstable -- he corrected it in the next volume, with stabilising rockets (he also fixed the problem with the Earth rotating the wrong way!)
• Frank Herbert -- there are well-known problems in Dune

• Star Trek -- all the senior officers constantly beaming down into danger is worse than any physics error -- fixed to some degree in Next Generation
  • teaches us that "nice guys have the best adventures"?
• People in the future seem to get steadily dumber -- because natural selection has favoured the genes of Hollywood superstars?
• Red Dwarf is inconsistent -- but it's trying to make you laugh, so that's okay.
• Wargames is clearly written by people who know nothing about computers

• Agatha Christie once described the effects of a poison so accurately that a reader recognised the symptoms of someone's death, leading to someone being convicted of their murder

• If you tell absolute lies, will people try to achieve them? Is it a way to "bootstrap" ourselves? Life imitates Art. People consciously or unconsciously use such templates, but you probably can't manipulate it consciously and cynically
• Everything will be believed by somebody

• Nit-picking is a form of mutual grooming!
  • it shows that the thing is worthy of attention
  • IW -- even hostile reviews? -- a wonderful insight!
  • fanfic authors often send stories to each other to nitpick out the bugs
• "Nit-picking is something I do to justify to myself watching bad SF TV"

Panel -- Alternative History: Choosing a Point of Departure

Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Mary Branscombe, Harry Turtledove, Peter Garratt

• JCG -- I've used a turning point where Napoleon wins the Franco-Prussian war, yet set 40 years in our future -- so there are big changes.
• Also, one in 1915, where the US President brokers a deal between Berlin and London, so WWI reduces to the Third Balkan Conflict

• MB -- my favorite idea for a turning point is to do with harmonising the date of Easter -- English (Roman) christian church versus the Celtic christian church -- Synod of Whitby 664 AD -- going with the Celtic date instead would have weakened links with Rome -- maybe no crusades, so a different relationship between Europe and Arabia

• HT -- The change has to plausible, something interesting must spring from it, and (not quite so crucial) the audience must have some interest in it.
• in the US, books based on the American Civil War sell better than those based on Byzantine history!

• PG -- the first short story I wrote was to do with 1830s rick-burnings -- protesting laborers burnt hay ricks, a hanging offence.
• One where England won the 100 Years War -- France dominated by England -- I Anglicised the spelling of various Paris placenames -- the editor corrected the "spelling mistakes"!

• Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall -- AH plus time travel, 6th century Rome ruled by the Goths -- time traveller has no idea how to make gunpowder, etc -- can't use 20th century tech -- changes history by introducing double entry book-keeping!
  • HT -- I bought LDF when 15 -- without it, I would not have got interested in history, would not have got same degree, or wife, or children -- AH on a "microhistorical scale" -- we all have stories like this
  • PG -- At 16 I started A-level English -- was introduced to "the canon" -- stopped reading SF for a while -- crashed a party -- asked a girl why she was standing behind the door -- "because then people take notice of me" -- she introduced me to SF readers -- I ended up reading Chris Priest's Inverted World with a hangover -- if I hadn't crashed that party I wouldn't a got back into SF, or know three quarters of the people I know today

• HT -- Guns of the South was an accident -- I didn't intend to write it. Judith Tarr was complaining about the cover art on one of her books -- said it was as anachronistic as "Robert E Lee with an Uzi" -- I wondered, who gives him the Uzi? -- time travelling South Africans? -- thence the book

• You make the change, then need to follow through the consequences -- do the same bands exist? -- are there different car manufacturers?
• A long way from the change, things can be almost unrecognisable
• If the breakpoint is far in the past -- how to tell the reader without breaking the narrative flow?
  • guide books -- faces on coins
  • someone studying history asking what would have happened it the 3rd Balkan Conflict had become a larger war
  • having a story asking what if set in an AH is powerful

• Sir Edward Creasey, 15 Decisive Battles of the World, 1851 -- good starting points
  • The Battle of Marathon, BC 490
  • Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse, BC 413
  • The Battle of Arbela, BC 331 -- Alexander's victory
  • The Battle of the Metaurus, BC 207 -- Hannibal's brother defeated while bringing him siege equipment
  • Victory of Arminius over the Roman Legions under Varus, AD 9 -- driving the Romans out of Germany
  • The Battle of Chalons, AD 451 -- defeat of Attila the Hun
  • The Battle of Tours, AD 732 -- defeat of Arabs by the Franks
  • The Battle of Hastings, 1066 -- the Norman conquest
  • Joan of Arc's Victory over the English at Orleans, 1429
  • The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588
  • The Battle of Blenheim, 1704
  • The Battle of Pultowa, 1709 -- Russian defeat of the Swedes
  • Victory of the Americans over Burgoyne at Saratoga, 1777
  • The Battle of Valmy, 1792 -- French Revolutionary Victory
  • The Battle of Waterloo, 1815 -- defeat of Napoleon

• Not only battles -- changes to do with technology are also interesting

• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt -- Black Death devastates Europe, leaving the future to the Arabs and the Chinese
• L Neil Smith -- The Crystal Empire: Moslems rule the world after a more extreme Black Death -- the North American Confederacy novels: hinge on a single word change: "the unanimous consent of the people"
• Robert Sobel, For Want of a Nail -- a college history text of an AH world where Burgoyne won at Saratoga, affecting the outcome of the American Revolution
• A German invasion of England -- with battles described in great detail -- was serialised in the Daily Sketch
  • In the UK there are a lot of stories of defeat of UK by Germany
  • there are lots of AH WWIIs
  • But are HT's WWII lizards plausible changes? -- they're no worse than time travelling South Africans! -- "I have no idea what's at Tau Ceti 2!"

• Do you have back histories of notes?
  • HT -- I carry it in my head, but I could write it down
  • JCG -- I have a notebook for each novel -- street plans, timelines -- it's a great excuse to buy old Victorian prints -- I've got a fantastic cookery book: you name an endangered species, it's in there!

• Irish famine -- drove Irish immigrants to the US -- was based on a single species of potato
• China goes to NA, instead of turning inwards
• Stirrup developed at a different time/place
• Romans with the Hindu-Arabic number system
• Freud never existed
• Religion doesn't happen, or happens very differently
  • Poul Anderson, "The House of Sorrows" -- monotheism never happened
• change natural boundaries, domesticatable species
  • HT -- "Down in the Bottomlands" -- the Mediterranean never filled up again, affecting world climate
• IBM had their PC project, but were working in parallel on project Eagle -- 68000/Unix
• Gibson and Sterling, The Difference Engine -- Babbage's engine worked -- needed a slight strengthening of brass so that the gears didn't wear
• Napoleon goes to college, has a wonderful time, and isn't derided as a Corsican buffoon
• Vladimir Lenin's elder brother was hanged by the Czarists -- so he had a grudge -- remove the grudge in a subtractive personality change -- Trotsky led the revolution?
• Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee -- another American Civil War change, resulting in backward agrarian North and industrial South -- but would it have been like that?
• Alexander the Great -- if his father Philip of Macedonia hadn't been assassinated -- very different relationship between Greeks and Persians
• Athenians didn't discover the silver mines at Laurion, or Themistocles didn't argue to use the money to build a fleet of triremes -- so the Persians conquer the Greeks

• What kinds of change wouldn't show up until a lot later?
  • Medicine takes a long time to filter through -- introduction of the bread mould poultice

Panel -- Shifting the Paradigms: How Science Changes

Julian Headlong, Judith Proctor, Roy Gray

• Examples of scientific paradigm shifts
  • chemiosmotic theory -- biochemistry in cells -- atomic level reaction descriptions give way to concentration gradients -- a more concrete paradigm
  • the geosyncline concept gives way to plate tectonics as an explanation of mountains -- mid-Atlantic ridge and the symmetric magnetism reversals -- Brazil/Africa coincidences in coastline shape and fossils
  • intellectual property rights -- copyright, patents, trademarks, brands, ...
    • the concept didn't exist a few hundred years ago -- it wasn't possible to find out if your book had been copied far away
    • part of the recent boom/bust because people overvalued IPR
    • technology is changing again -- easier to copy/counterfeit -- harder to protect -- need to change the business model -- a second paradigm shift?
    • with nanotechnology, virtually the only thing of value is IPR
    • intellectual fix, like copyleft -- make money from training / consultancy / manuals

• A genuine paradigm shift can occur only by the old believers dying
• A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still

• When a new theory starts to be popular, initially the experiments are still close to the old theory, then gradually move towards the new

• A paradigm shift must overcome an existing entrenched view
  • The earth the centre of the universe was a paradigm
  • Was the overthrow of communism a paradigm shift?
  • Is the idea of "paradigm shift" itself a paradigm shift? -- Kuhn overthrew Popper
  • Doctors listening to and learning from their patients who have researched their symptoms on the Web may well become a paradigm shift -- but many old doctors will have to die first!
    • I wouldn't rely on anything on the Internet
    • Shayler's book, etc -- I wouldn't ban it, I would bury it in lots of lies, variant copies, etc -- disinformation -- "the Web of lies"
    • Cases like Lorenzo's Oil -- where the parents find a cure to a rare disease -- become much more possible given the Internet
  • Darwin -- had massive social implications too
    • some places even tried to ban the teaching of evolution in schools
    • "of course, nothing like that would ever happen today" (heavy sarcasm)
    • did it affect the way we view primates?
    • fed into other paradigms -- evolutionary computer programs -- memetics -- social evolution
  • Clockwork mechanical Newtonian universe, music of the spheres, etc -- given way to more biological metaphors
  • Animal rights -- partly driven by evolution ideas, partly by mass extinctions -- not fully shifted
  • Punctuated equilibrium -- not a shift -- two schools fighting
  • Feminism -- fairly substantial change

• SF -- before 1950s, the problem story -- inventions, physics, engineering -- after 1960s, the social story -- character-based, biology
• Aliens are viewed differently -- initially monsters -- then exploring their cultures
• Better astronomy has removed aliens from the solar system
• Nanotechnology will have a big effect -- economic shift, from manufacturing to intangible services

• George Kelly -- Personal Construct Psychology -- ways of looking at the world -- looking at incomplete conflicting data needs a range of paradigms, not a rigid construct system -- multiple mental models
• Articles in New Scientist try to get in a reference to Star Trek
  • previous generation of scientists grew up with Heinlein -- and have built all that technology!
  • current scientists grew up with Star Trek -- so they want that science
  • a shift from the R.A.H school of science to the Gene Rodenberry school of science

Panel -- Points of Departure: the Reformation

Laura Turtledove, Vincent Docherty, Richard Stephenson, Peter Garratt

If the American Civil War is the twist of choice for USan AHs, then the Reformation is for ours. Would the continuation of the Roman Church here have meant the suppression of science?

• The Reformation was a rather arcane theological dispute
  • it started in Germany
  • 1517 -- Martin Luther's "95 theses"
  • 1536 -- Geneva -- Calvin's Puritanical Republic
  • the traditions affected North America -- there were some non-Puritans
  • The RC church, after 1000 years of entrenched power, were finally successfully challenged on parts of dogma they had already moved away from
    • Augustus: faith in JC -- Pelagius: good works sufficient -- Augustus won, but by the time of the Reformation, could get brownie points for contributing money to the church, buying indulgences, etc
    • Calvin believed in salvation by faith alone, and predestination
    • So the Reformation was a shift from a corrupt hierarchy that could nevertheless accommodate human frailty, to people who got their idea from the bible, not from authority

• The Reformation changed the control of money -- previously many wills made in favour of monasteries
• The RC church would have lost control eventually -- printing presses -- bibles in native tongues

• The church controlled by bringing scientific orthodoxy within itself
  • chose some parts of Greek/Roman science as orthodoxy, rejected others -- controlled ideas of how the universe worked
  • Islamic scholars were the link from antiquity through the Dark Ages to the medieval church
  • difficult to know how much is about power, and how much is about trying to reconcile observations with theology
  • the breakup helped bring in new scientific ideas
  • Keith Roberts, Pavanne -- Elizabeth I killed, Spanish win, RC church up to modern day, suppressing science

• Four main effects
  • royal supremacy over the church
  • dissolution of religious houses -- huge transfers of wealth
  • rejecting saint cults, relics, etc
  • bible in English

• The Lollards, a century earlier, 1380s--1410s, starting in England, were put down by force -- there were other attempts too -- so this was "the successful Reformation", where people lived to tell the tale
• 1558 -- Elizabeth returned England to Protestantism, but being a Catholic wasn't a capital offence (only denying the Trinity) -- this compromise meant the Reformation was peaceful and relatively tolerant (in England)

• 1633 -- Galileo recanted that the Earth went round the Sun, and that Jupiter had four moons
  • Berthold Brecht says Galileo recanted because he didn't regard it as an ultimate article of faith -- that's just the way it is, no matter what anyone says
  • 1600 -- Bruno did go to the stake
  • these incidents give the RC church a reputation for being anti-science
  • 1643 -- Toricelli discovered vacuum -- RC decided it couldn't exist, because a vacuum wouldn't have God in it
  • Newton's theories might have been acceptable

• The real world is there, and will eventually, inevitably be discovered
  • even if England had remained RC, its distance from Rome would have made it easier for discoveries to be made and not suppressed
  • Compare China -- huge, but relatively stable
    • movable type printing press had a big effect in Europe
    • China developed it earlier -- but their vastly bigger alphabet made it less practical
    • Koreans also had it, along with a simplified version of their alphabet for printing, but it didn't go anywhere

• European success partly dependent on ships that could reliably travel long distances
• Colonial period was very competitive -- rivalry between Catholics and Protestants -- might not have been so intense if all of Europe had remained under Rome
  • great voyages of discovery happened before the Reformation
  • geography of Europe encourages small states, hence competition

• In ancient times, a philosopher / craftsman divide -- the former was abstract -- the latter made the advances
  • science as the basis of advances is a much more modern idea
  • commerce was the catalyst that brought them together, and the RC world would not have been able to stop this
• Increasing education -- Jesuit Universities, focused on inquiry -- the education included ancient Greek masters, under the guise of religion
  • If Reformation had failed, would the Jesuits have become more Inquisitional, to suppress the burgeoning changes?
  • Dominicans were the core of the Inquisition -- Jesuits founded later, 1540, as part of counter-reformation -- partly to weed out the more unacceptable parts of Catholicism

• Nobles could gain money only by rent from land, or by war
  • a new class who lived by trade, not by rent -- these people sent their sons to university, to "improve" their families
• Why do we say the Reformation encouraged science, when most science came from Italy/France?
  • France was much less Catholic than it had been -- it held Reason in high regard
• At the same time -- the readmission of Jews into Europe
  • skills in finance etc helped to make use of the new capital
  • 1655 -- Cromwell readmitted the Jews to England
  • Hotel de France used to be a Jesuit college / meteorological study / naval academy
  • having an influx of any new people often has a good effect on new ideas

• Harry Turtledove, Ruled Britannia -- AH set 10 years after the success of the Spanish Armada -- English seething with resentment under their Spanish rulers -- Shakespeare as a revolutionary playwright
• S. M. Stirling, Draka novels -- Keith Roberts, Pavanne -- Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt -- all very well researched

• conclusion: scientific revolution was inevitable -- lack of Reformation may have delayed it 100 years, but no more -- what could have changed is who got there first

Panel -- If We Knew Then What We Know Now: Futures that are Past it

Simon Bradshaw, Alistair Reynolds, Judith Proctor, Peter Hamilton, Roy Gray

What is the value of SF that has been overtaken by events? Are the old books still readable, the old shows still watchable?

• SB -- computers get very dated -- Moore's Law is still in action after 35 years -- people did have computers getting more powerful, but not exponentially more so, and not that today's big expensive machine becomes tomorrow's cheap household toy

• AR -- a lot of old SF has a patina of datedness, a lack of complexity -- a book like Frank Herbert's Dune is strangely undated, because it is so far in the future we can think of ways to get there

• SB -- spaceships with oak panels -- why don't they make spaceships like that any more?
• The film Aliens, in the 80s the tech looked futuristic, in the 90s it looked contemporary, soon it will look dated
• JP -- the problem with Enterprise is that they need something that looks older than ST:ToS, but still looks futuristic

• PH -- Arthur C. Clarke has spacesuits you can smoke in -- and a British atomic powered space fleet, with vacuum tubes.
• Don't explain how something works -- put it in a box
• Robert Heinlein's Methusalah's Children has "parastatic technology" with no moving parts -- he didn't explain it so it works -- but he also had slide-rules

• SB -- Gadgets used to have mechanisms, and so you explained how they worked -- now we have black boxes and we don't know how they work -- that's an advantage for the SF writer

• The solar system has changed
  • Brian Aldiss' Farewell Fantastic Venus says goodbye to it
  • Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books are still read -- it's now fantasy [it's now Barsoom]
  • We don't have jungles on Venus, but now we have oceans on Europa

• Stanley G Weinbaum's series of short stories -- he didn't get it wrong, it's just that reality has failed to live up to expectations!
• 1984 hasn't dated, but it's obsolete
• If you write stories set in the near future, by the time you've sold them, they can be obsolete
• You just can't keep up with the progress of science
  • hard science dates worse than fantasy
  • most of Larry Niven's 1960s stuff stands up well on the science -- what's dated are the Californian social values!
• everyday stories of future folk, translated back for us
• The diaries of the Commander of the Space Station
  • they spend most of their time trying to debug the LAN, not patching up meteor holes
  • if we'd stayed on the moon, it wouldn't be like 1970s TV shows -- they'd be trying to get MS XP to stay up!

• Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky -- thousands of years in the future, while debugging code, find some system code based on the Unix timestamp -- have a profession of "programmer archaeologist"
• TCP/IP will still be valid a 1000 years from now!

• Forbidden Planet looks dated, but still works
• Robert Heinlein, The Door into Summer, 1957 -- set in the 1970s, jumps to 2000
  • a technical drawing machine is all levers and gears
  • there were lots of ideas that automation would be done by robots replacing people, rather than, eg, the way dishwashers work

• Some SF gets in wrong in the other direction -- especially with space exploration -- atomic rockets -- "it's all the fault of the Russians for collapsing" [but see the Space Launches talk]
• Mass transport is different
  • it's not all SSTs/Concorde -- we're still chugging around in 747s, with nothing better on the horizon
  • in the 1960s, people thought if it was technically possible, it would happen -- now we know it doesn't happen unless it makes economic sense, too
  • the green movement has been a huge force stopping the SST in the US
  • H. G. Wells is one of the earliest who predicted the backlash against technology
  • the dystopias are guilty of overenthusiastic extrapolation of a trend -- once things get very bad, other things change -- dystopias neglect the counter-trends

• Peter Hamilton, Watching Trees Grow -- a novella with a long-lived person trying to solve a murder, as forensic science gets steadily better -- will be able to solve it eventually -- set in an AH to get the long-lived protagonist starting today
• Can view dated books as "inadvertent AH" -- most are still eminently readable

• Mobiles phones
  • "40 years ago, I would keep getting lost, and I would think 'I wish there were mobile phones already'!"
  • yet few writers nowadays give there characters these -- too easy to get out of a corner
  • they should have killed the slasher movie of "running away from a slow moving man with a chain saw"
  • Star Trek got it right!
  • Robert Heinlein, Between Planets, 1951 -- a boy pulls out a mobile phone, but then says "I'm sorry Dad, I can't speak now, I'm in a crowd"!
    • often unanticipated social changes to technology
• If you need to know something in the future, it will be available, via the Internet
  • no-one realised the main use of computers/Internet would be pornography
  • although genealogy may just have overtaken it

• Isaac Asimov, "Trends" -- about a flight to the moon during a Puritanical backlash -- building the rocket in the back yard
  • the idea that governments would fund spaceflight was missed
  • it's only recently that private enterprise space travel is resurging
  • we live in a bizarre AH where space travel happened too early -- cf, Amundsen and Scott got to the South Pole in 1911/12, then no-one went back until 1956, when the tech had caught up (they flew in!)
• Isaac Asimov short story about a guy who couldn't get any work done, because of the constant interruptions of all his comms devices
• Greg Bear, Eon, 1985 -- written just before the end of the Cold War, it's structured around a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union -- but the whole thing is about alternate timelines anyway
  • terrorists aren't nearly as good as the SU as baddies in movies

• Fantasy writers get it better -- they look at what people want, not how it works!
• 1960s SF had an assumption of unlimited energy -- nothing needs to be charged up or plugged in

• PH -- I read Doc Smith's Lensman series in the early 70s -- there's a failed assassination attempt -- they lay the victim on the floor and ask the ladies to stand round him -- it took me ages to work out why!

• Arthur C. Clarke predicted that the Pill plus DNA fingerprinting would lead to a completely free love society -- human nature is not as flexible as some SF authors would like to think

• PH -- I 'm always conscious of looking at the effect of tech on social change -- at the moment we seem to be changed by technology not ideology -- in the UK the two main parties are fighting for the middle ground
• SB -- AH allows you to experiment with decoupling the effects of technology and social change -- eg Harry Turtledove's novels where WWI/WWII never happened -- you have a slightly Victorian technical culture with 1960s-ish sexual liberation
• PH -- one mistake we can make is assuming technology is available to all, rather than restricted to a social elite
• SB -- Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age -- everyone has access to replicators -- your social standard depends on the stuff you can replicate
• RG -- when new tech comes out, you need to sell as much as possible as soon as possible, because there will be something new next year -- don't take enough notice of this in SF

Panel -- Points of Departure: the American Civil War, 1861--1865

???, Peter Weston, Eddie Cochrane, Harry Turtledove, ???

This is the big turning point in American history -- if you don't count the Revolutionary war.

• The book Gone With the Wind is of a fascinating alien culture

• HT -- fascinating because one learns about it, in the US
  • Bruce Catton, various histories of the Civil War
  • Doing homework for Guns of the South got me into it
  • If I'm writing on the Byzantine period, I can be confident I know more about it than my readers -- for the Civil War, I really have to get it right -- there are lots of detailed people -- the upside is that your target audience has the background
• National Geographic has a Hundred Years since This-n-That series -- so in 1963 I read about Gettysburg
• I've been learning to call it "The War of Northern Aggression", having married a Southerner

• The whole war is a SFnal war
• Both sides are "us", not alien or foreign -- and there are photographs
• So many tantalising turning points
  • A different outcome would have had a big effect -- NA would have been a very different place, and later, so would the rest of the world
• Its the first "modern" war
  • lots of gadgets -- machine guns, submarines, aerial reconnaissance, rifled infantry, ironclads, ...
  • lots of parallels between last 2 years of Civil War, and WWI
    • first 2 years, still amateurs
    • by the end, both sides knew what they were doing with the new tech, and could have wiped the floor with anyone else

• Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee, 1953
  • very influential, but a bit of a fake -- very little about the AH, only the first few pages
  • turning point is Battle of Gettysburg, but Moore seems to know nothing about that battle!

• Winston Churchill, "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg", 1930 -- also written in a world where the South had won

• The Civil War, like WWII, offers a relatively clear moral choice about right and wrong
  • modern Southerners minimise how much it was about slavery
  • if you postulate a Southern victory -- what are they going to do with it in a world that despises what they do?
  • would Britain's dependence on the cotton trade led to them supporting the South?
    • opinion in Britain was split -- Britain abolished slavery in 1833 -- Lancashire mill workers protested against slavery
    • it would have required the North to do something stupid (eg, boarding a British ship...), so that Britain would joint against the North, rather than for the South
  • 1862 -- Battle of Antietam -- Union victory allowed Lincoln to issue the emancipation proclamation from a position of strength -- made it virtually certain the South would not get help from Britain or France
    • Lee's marching orders, discovered wrapped around some cigars -- a major turning point
    • validated because the handwriting was recognised -- the officers on both sides knew each other -- had all been to West Point
    • even with that advantage, McClelland only just won

• The South could have won its independence very easily, by not firing the first shot -- the North might have been happy to see the South go -- Lincoln could not have rallied support -- it would have been a de facto independence that would eventually be recognised -- Fort Sumter was a big mistake

• Grant was a modern soldier -- he wasn't just a butcher -- Vicksburg (1863) is still taught at US military academies

• the South could put an army in the field, or supply it, but not both
• the North built entire depots and railroads
• the South complained that the North's engineers carried tunnels with them!
• marvellous logistics -- both sides moved entire armies to Chattanooga (1863)

• Guns of the South gives the Confederates a victory after the time when they could not have won by normal means -- so that they could see that many of the attitudes for which they had seceded were not there

• Gettysburg (1863) is such an obvious turning point that you want to avoid it -- everyone knows it so well
• If Johnson hadn't got wounded, so that the South had to put Lee in charge
• Post Gettysburg, Meade should have attacked and pushed Lee into the Potomac
• That Braxtan Bragg won a battle (Chickamauga) is prima facie evidence of time travel!

• "the winners write history" -- disproved by the Civil War! -- all those memoirs of Southern generals -- except Lee, but there are volumes of his letters
  • Grant's memoirs are the best military memoirs since Ceaser's

• Even if the South had won, slavery wouldn't have lasted -- but there might have been something like South African apartheid.

• the generals were all incompetent because
  • they were using Napoleonic tactics for muskets, against longer range rifles -- they were still fighting the Mexican War -- but they had trench warfare by the end
  • the US had had a standing army of only 15,000 men -- no-one had commanded anything bigger than a regiment
  • many were political appointees

• If the North had won the war, but much faster, what would have been different?
  • it wouldn't have been so messy afterwards
  • North wanted vengeance for all their suffering -- the South had great bitterness
  • maybe there wouldn't have been such great polarisation -- which didn't really end until WWII -- up til then, real bitterness -- now, more nostalgic bitterness
  • not ended up so industrialised, no experience of fighting a modern war -- would it have affected participation in WWI?

• If Lincoln had died earlier, and Hamilton had become President, maybe he would have turned the South into a large restive "Northern Ireland", which the Germans would have tried to exploit in WWII

• muskets too so long to reload, and were so inaccurate, that if the North had used bows and arrows, it would have had a higher and more accurate rate of fire!
• Repeating rifles made a big difference in fire power
• Britain was selling rifles to both sides

Panel -- Through Poverty to the Stars! -- desperation at the root of progress

???, ???, Eddie Cochrane, Simon Bradshaw

Are low cunning and survival instincts more useful than deep pockets?

• A large proportion of a desired result can be achieved with lower tech
• Early days of English/Portuguese ship explorations were expensive -- nowadays can pick up a relatively cheap 2nd hand ship and sail around the world

• Space flight is difficult to do on the cheap -- need to get into orbit
• Recent revolution of smaller, cheaper satellites -- £100,000s rather than millions
• These tend to rely on being "ballast" on larger launches

• Russians built a Soyuz assembly line -- minimise cost rather than weight
• They launch from Kazakhstan, which is not costal -- falling boosters -- local cottage industry of salvaging boosters and sawing them up for the high grade titanium -- the local crime syndicates have the rocket recycling business sewn up

• Vicious circle -- want good performance -- so shave off weight -- need to use higher tech -- so costs more -- so want even better performance
• Could go the other way, put up with lower performance, at much lower cost
• But there's a vested interested in the higher performance
• Russians need frequent launches, because their satellites last ~ 3 years, rather than the 7-10 years in the west -- so an inferior product results in better infrastructure!

• Britain has the 4th largest economy in the world. How come we can't afford a space programme, but India can?
  • Britain collaborates with US, with ESA
  • India, other smaller states and poorer countries, perceive the need for a space programme, but don't want to be dependent on anyone else
  • Who else will be in space in the next 20 years? Pakistan? S Korea? Brazil?
• China is very close to being the 3rd country to launch its own astronauts into space
  • probably next year
  • may help to spur the US again
• Japan has launchers for comms satellites
  • want to sell launches to others -- but for once, have not managed to copy and do it cheaper
  • limited by agreements with squid fishers union to a 2 month/year launch window

• If we can do it cheaper, could we have done it sooner?

• Lots of things kept going wrong with Mir -- the Russians coped with it all
  • Bryan Burrough, Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir, 1998
    • ignore the tendency to cast goodies and baddies
    • culture clash -- NASA: contingency plans for everything -- good for 2 week missions when only so much can go wrong
    • Russia: have enough tools to fix anything -- works for longer missions where you need flexibility
  • Snowflake

• Huge incentive to recycle/repair in space -- it costs more to launch a spare than its weight in platinum
• Colin Kapp's Unorthodox Engineers stories -- cheaper to send people to think/fix than specialist kit -- "Scrapheap Challenge ahead of its time"

• Remember the difference between bill of parts cost and development cost
• By the end of Apollo, the incremental cost was relatively low
• Was cancelled after all the expense, before the returns
• Carl Sagan (no fan of the manned space programme) complained it was like selling all your household possessions to buy a Rolls Royce, then refusing to use it because of the cost of the petrol.

• It has become less acceptable to lose astronauts than it was to lose test pilots.
• Catastrophic failure on the launch pad can destroy infrastructure, too

• Old tech lasts -- it's well understood -- people know how to build/repair/maintain it
• cf DC7s still used in 3rd world countries

• It's not in the US's interest to have a lot of other independent launch capabilities that can be mistaken for ICBMs -- it you can put a tone in space, you can put it anywhere on Earth

• Comic book Ministry of Space -- The Brits get the German rocket scientists after WWII -- "love the artwork, hate the rocket designs!"
• Such a pity Britain never had a space programme -- we could have had such fun with it!

• Atomic powered rockets
  • a lot of thinking has been done
  • "but you wouldn't want to be anywhere near it!"
  • there are two ways of building one
  • one is scary, dangerous and spectacular
  • the other (Project Orion) is very scary, incredibly dangerous, and really spectacular!
    • Orion would work, if you really have to get a million tons into space, but otherwise no-one is that stupid
    • some suggest the reaction plate in the Orion should be water-cooled -- "atom punk tech"

• Entrepreneurs in space?
  • rich enough, just buy someone else's space programme
  • new approach -- need to start small, and will take a long time
• Space tourism?
  • If you have $20M and are fit, the Russians will take you to the ISS for a week
    • the Russian craft has three seats: one pilot, one rotating crew member -- and one spare!
    • the Americans are hopping mad -- their space programme is incredibly socialistic
    • if enough people do this, the Russians may build a bigger craft with more seats -- the cost might come down to ~ $5M
  • old market research -- price people are willing to pay
    • handful willing to pay $10M -- and we're seeing this now
    • 100s willing to pay $1M
    • 10,000s willing to pay $50,000 -- same price as a 5* round the world cruise
  • there are plenty of rich, bored Americans out there!

• Some private enterprise people have found others willing to give them a desert to play in and permission to launch/fire -- unfortunately these others are people like Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gadaffi!

• Roving mobile phones destroyed the 1990s launch business
• Mobile phones seemed to need lots of satellites -- but the market for phone calls in remote places never took off -- if enough people want it for it to be worthwhile serving, its cheaper to build land based infrastructure
• Iridium spent $3bn, and had 10,000 subscribers -- went bust and the demand for launch capability evaporated -- overtaken by cheaper tech

• Starting from 500mph, 30,000 ft, need only half as big a rocket -- launch from an aircraft -- but there's not enough market for small satellites -- current market is for larger satellite launches
• It's annoyingly difficult to get into space -- it would be no trouble at all from Mars!
• Where's that colliding asteroid when you need it!

Gerry Webb -- Space Launches

[This was originally planned to be a home movie show of various launches -- but Gerry had forgotten to bring the films! So instead he gave a deeply fascinating impromptu account of his involvement in the current Russian space programme -- this is where the future of the commercial space programme is at!]

• Ten stages in the conquest of space
  1. theoretical proof of possibility
  2. artificial Earth satellite
  3. manned flight
  4. landing on the moon
  5. commercial manned flight
  6. permanent self-sustaining manned presence
  7. economic growth from use of extra-terrestrial resources and energy
  8. completed extra-terrestrial human reproductive cycle (from conception, birth, maturity, to giving birth)
  9. permanent colonisation of solar bodies
  10. declaration of independence of colonies from Earth
• The first five have been achieved -- four by the Russians
  • Russians have had the first commercial manned flight -- Tito paid $20M

• Russians have a family of truly reusable launchers
• Advantages of Russian launching systems:
  • a systems approach to launcher, launch complex and operations design
  • long production runs planned from the start
  • continuous and large (in the past) investment in engine design and development -- efficient engines lower mass-fraction of launcher
  • no fuss approach -- railway transport, non-exotic fuels
  • standardised non-mission-specific launchers -- allows rapid turn-round, last minute changes of payload, etc
  • very experienced launch crews
  • ex-missile launchers have very good all-weather capabilities
  • convenience and cost saving of using a horizontal orientation build, integrate and test

• Heuristic: cost of satellite = cost of launch
  • if the satellite costs more, it's worth going for a more expensive, more reliable launcher
  • if the launch costs dominate, it's not worth launching
  • but today, Russian launches are cheaper than the payloads
• Cost of the fuel, LOX/kerosene, is not that expensive, probably ~ $100,000s

Panel -- Assumptions, McGuffins, and Dei ex Machina

Justina Robson, Peter Hamilton, Chris Amies

Is it worse to have your hero come up with just the right gadget out of thin air, or to have him briefed on every bit of equipment he will need, in the order in which he will use it?

• PH -- one of the worst examples is You Only Live Twice -- Bond jumps off a fishing boat, goes into Blofeld's lair, pulls out some suction pads and walks down the wall -- how did he know he'd need them?
  • I have in the past been accused of using a Deus ex Machina [laughter]
  • I disapprove of them, and try to avoid at all costs
  • put the hints in early enough

• CA -- "you should have been listening" -- the clues are there -- only feel cheated if there's something you couldn't possibly have known about, like an unknown twin brother

• It's difficult to back your protagonist into a corner when they can just pull out a mobile phone
• I hate clumsy infodumpers who explain how things work -- you should just have "it came on and started working"
• Plot coupons are just there to show off characters' skills etc -- they usually don't advance the plot at all -- very glamorous orienteering!
• McGuffin -- Hitchcock's term -- the thing that moves the plot
  • the characters care about the McGuffin, the audience cares about the characters
  • you do need some sort of story engine
  • The Maltese Falcon does get the story going

• Plot coupons, McGuffins, Infodumping, Deus ex Machina -- all these are names for tropes used incompetently
  • a quest can be done excellently, or it can be collecting plot coupons -- need to be organic in the story -- to be a quest, there needs to be self-discovery and growth

• The audience knowing more than the characters can be used to create suspense -- "don't open the door!"
• Vanilla Sky is well shot, but makes no sense -- the last 2 minutes were "this is what has really been happening" -- there's not enough information in the film -- so you feel cheated when this happens
• Unreliable narrators -- need to be skilled to pull this off -- requires audience pre-knowledge of how to read it

• Need some sort of infodump if building a new world
  • cf -- "four paragraphs of description is erotic, four pages is pornographic" -- well four pages of infodump is boring -- especially if it includes graphs!
  • need to blend the info with the narrative
• We no longer have to explain things like "teleporters", etc
  • not all readers have a SFnal background -- but can assume Star Trek!
  • SF has permeated culture enough that most people are aware of things like teleporters -- unless you are doing something radical with them, they can be just background, unremarkable
  • Zardoz -- has no infodumps -- never know what it's about!
• It's an authorial decision on how much you intend to challenge your readers

• Can infodump subtly -- have an outside character exploring the world
• A.A. Attanasio, Radix -- the best and the worst of the genre -- hugely imaginative -- at the back is a 15 page glossary of made-up terms -- cannot keep up with this
  • better to use new words in context, to teach the reader what they mean -- a glossary is the worst -- a kind of mechanical infodump
• Terry Pratchett -- you cannot fault his footnotes, but they would not work in a more serious setting
• Are infodumps needed to convince the reader?
  • no -- you use a black box -- describe what it does, not how it does it -- if you open the box, you will get it wrong, and you will get letters!
• Everyone in the future will need infodumps, because of the fragmentation of culture
  • so its use today in fiction is merely a literary device to project the reader into that future!

• Maps -- infodump or necessity?
  • glancing at a map has got to be easier than reading long descriptions of isthmuses, etc -- very useful shortcut
  • at least you know the author has one!
  • timelines are SF's equivalent of Fantasy's maps

• The Deus ex Machina was good enough for the Greeks, and beyond -- what's wrong with it now?
  • sophistication? the coincidences in Oedipus Rex don't make it unsophisticated
  • It depends on the register -- the spontaneous human combustion in Dickens' Edwin Drood is completely against the rules up to that point
  • H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds -- the Victorians were smugly confident of their tech -- so it was deliberately set up to be the common cold that defeated the Martians

• Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas -- relentless infodumpers -- pay their audience the compliment of thinking they want to know this stuff
• Hugo used Deus ex Machina -- it indicates a world view
• Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum -- infodumps pages long
• It is patronising to assume readers don't have a long enough attention span
  • depends how well it is done -- you can have four pages of interesting information, so well written that the reader won't even notice it's an infodump
• "Infodump" means it's done clumsily -- otherwise the whole Council of Elrond is infodump!
• It is important for the author to know more than the reader -- but you don't need to tell the reader everything

• Cultural issue? European SF has lots of interesting infodumping
  • interesting infodump is better than uninteresting plot
• Character dumping -- endless pages of what characters feel
• Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars trilogy -- many couldn't read it, many thought it was brilliant
• Anita Blake -- there's a lot about the clothing -- it goes on and on

• Infodumpiing, especially on TV, often consists of telling characters what they already know, just to inform the viewer
• Infodumping is "telling, not showing"

Panel -- Can a Subtle Story Survive a Big Budget?

Brian Stableford, Ian Watson, Kim Campbell, Liz Counihan, Peter Garratt

• in the LotR movie, did anyone expect to see Tom Bombadil?
• The Harry Potter movie -- the events are there, but the plot flow and significance of those events are lost

• BS -- this panel is based on a philosophical misconception -- the idea that a book can be filmed!
  • it's based on the idea that both book and film are a record of a set of events
  • but stories are stories, they rely on narrative/pictorial devices, and the two have no common ground
  • movies are surface -- pictures -- we consume by watching
  • stories are in code, with narrative techniques -- an account of what people are thinking, feeling, planning, hypothesising -- all internal -- so we know theses characters far more intimately than we can ever know someone in real life, or in a movie
  • film makers are relentless plagiarists -- they have no imagination -- but they do know how to frame images
  • there is no common ground between movies and books

• IW -- this explains why dolphins don't like movies -- they take in and give out in one modality, sound -- we take in pictures and give out sounds
• The text is not all -- the resonances that arise within us are a large part
• We should suspend disbelief for books and movies

• BS -- never ever suspend disbelief!

• IW -- I got totally involved in the Harry Potter, and so walked out after 15 minutes

• LC -- the difference between a good and not-so-good translation, is that the director has the courage to leave the text and do something different. Both Dead Zone and The Shining had vast differences book to file, and worked in the different art form.

• PG -- film making did not originate with books -- it started with silent movies -- some think sound has ruined movies
• Writing for film/TV -- it's a different grammar, a grammar of images
• Books can be used to inspire films
• Few novels can be read aloud in 2 or even 4 hours -- some things can be shown faster, but cutting is inevitable -- TV series have the advantage of length
• See the film first!

• BS -- I heard A. N. Wilson a few days after he'd lost his faith (apparently caused by his writing a biography of Christ)
  • he said Jesus wasn't a thinker because he'd never read any novels -- the kind of inner life we lead today is due to reading novels
  • I wasn't convinced, but it's an interesting argument
  • for the last 150 years, trying to educate ourselves about our inner lives -- it's been mostly fiction -- either honest fiction, or dishonest fiction like biographies and histories -- there are strange people who insist in reading only biographies, because they are real!
  • we are moving to a post-literate society where people will try to get ideas for life from movies -- these don't give you a lot of information about how to think, feel, plan, etc -- just advice on how to pose, and how to hit people!

• KC -- so, before the novel, where did we get our guides for living?

• BS -- religion -- an inner life created out of dogma -- the Seven Deadly Sins
• Books allow you to challenge these ideas

• Some media fans write fanfic, creating an inner life for the characters
• (to BS) -- do you feel when you construct your inner life, there's a place for compassion and humility? [laughter]

• Whose books did Socrates read to construct his inner life?
  • BS -- Socrates had to engage in critical dialogue to attack these questions -- much better than panels where people mouth empty platitudes

• Books allow us to be different from each other, less in common, less of a community -- is that better?
  • BS -- books allow us to be individuals
  • IW -- some people read books only to find similarities
  • BS -- yes, this explains the existence of a lot of books -- but some people do read to find different approaches, different solutions
    • escapism -- people who deplore it think it is an escape from something -- but it is actually an escape to something

• PG -- what about people who read a lot, but no fiction?
• BS -- they are reading fiction, they just like to pretend they are not!
• IW -- biography, history, sociology, yes -- what about chemistry textbooks?
• BS -- there are some books that have more fact than others, but they all have some fantasy, even if their sums are right! -- it is important to read factual stuff to understand how the world works -- but for constructing our inner lives, read fantasy

• BS -- most texts are blatant lies, no-one can live like that -- but they have a certain candour -- once you've read the text, that's all there is -- when you read Madame Bovary, you know everything there is to know about her, because all there is about her is on the page -- you can never know real people entirely, there's always something more
• IW -- what about translations?
• BS -- translation itself is partly creative, partly representation -- the translations are not the same, but still have a reality
• IW -- it's because he went to a Roman Catholic school! -- he sees the text as creed!
• BS -- it could be worse, I could have been educated by RC: the movie!
• IW -- The creed cannot be questioned
• BS -- the text must be questioned!
• KC - aha! Jesuits!

• The one thing we do know for certain is that Madame Bovary did not exist
• But the character does

• BS -- the film is all there is, too -- but it's a different "is"
• IW -- but with directors' cuts, DVDs, the film isn't all there is!

• What about films like The Man Who Wasn't There, which has the viewpoint character's voicover to signal what's going on inside his head?
• BS -- an interesting cinematographic technique -- but not as much subtlety as text

• BS -- if you are an historian, you should be pedantic, and get as close to the truth as possible. Novelists should do the same thing.

• IW -- Flaubert was trying to create a style -- yet you chose Madame Bovary as an example of a character -- why choose her as the archetypical literary character? -- Flaubert designs a style, and out of this emerges our construct of someone we believe to be a real character

• If we use different parts of our brains to read books and to watch films, what about radio adaptations?
• 18th century novelists -- people don't speak "realistically" -- modern novels characters speak more "realistically"
• You get fictional films "based on a true story" -- this is less common in books

Panel -- If This Goes On: the inventing of political fiction

Paul Cray, Bridget Wilkinson, David O'Neill, Cheryl Morgan, Mike Cobley

One criticism of future SF is its failure of imagination in coming up with new models for societies

• We have a wider selection in current SF than we've had for a while
  • Ken MacLeod, Iain M. Banks, Peter Hamilton, Lois McMaster Bujold, David Weber, ...
• (Why is it at Eastercons we have so many panels that say "SF is crap because ..."?)
• Swift's Gulliver's Travels, More's Utopia, etc get labelled as SF -- it is the genre of alternative political societies -- you won't find it in any other genre -- historical fiction occasionally tries to look at alternatives
• Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series -- good science but awful politics

• There were lots of attempts at different societies in the 1960s -- like Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed
• This faded in the 1980s
• But there was a resurgence in the 1990s

• American SF has the "default libertarian future"
• There's no longer a debate about what kind of society we want
• In the past the anti-capitalists could say they were Marxists/Maoists -- now all they can say is "we want to replace it with something nicer"

• Olaf Stapleton, Last and FirstMen -- opened up some people's way of thinking
• Before 1990, SF was the only was people in the SU could discuss alternatives
• SF is one of the few places the debate is held, if in a somewhat immature manner

• Star Trek is nominally a society with no money -- but it's still a traditional hierarchial society
  • TV SF is a sort of lowest common denominator
  • there was some attempt in B5, getting different species to cooperate
  • Survivors -- 99% of the population wiped out by a plague -- the survivors trying to set up new societies -- mostly feudal
  • Blake's 7 -- rebellion against a restrictive Federation
  • The Prisoner
  • Wilfred Greatorex's 1990 -- shown in 1970s -- dictatorial Britain

• Books have more space to look at the ideas

• Politics as process
  • Kim Stanley Robinson's endless meetings
• Politics as ideology
  • B5, where we were conned into believing it was overthrowing a fascist dictatorship -- but replacing it with a president-for-life -- conned into thinking it was good because it was replacing something so bad

• There are some interesting societies portrayed by Joanna Russ, Suzie McKee Charnas, Sherri Tepper (but sadly she has recently gone completely off the rails)

• Micropolitics
  • Kim Stanley Robinson very good at describing boring meetings -- local government style
  • Ken MacLeod -- like student political meetings in the bar -- let's take a set of current political beliefs and set a society in it

• Many are aware of the utopian tradition, but think it has run out of steam -- so we get dystopias
• Poul Anderson -- 100s of organised nations, some occupying the same territory -- nationality entirely voluntary, and changeable
• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age -- can choose your nation

• Ken MacLeod's very heavily Balkanised Britain -- London is about 50 different countries
• Star Trek is a single monolithic fascist democracy
• Is there a middle ground?
  • SF is bad at middle ground -- good at throwing up ideas
  • middle grounds are boring -- a hellish dystopia makes more interesting reading
  • exploring extremes may make it more possible to choose which middle ground you want

• Le Guin, The Dispossessed -- shows both societies with good and bad points
• Adam Roberts, Salt -- same sort of thing, but two utterly repulsive societies with no redeeming points

• Iain M. Banks, Culture novels -- explores moneyless society -- but all the stories are about where it clashes with the outside -- because the interior is a utopia and therefore boring?
• Peter Hamilton, Night's Dawn trilogy -- lots of different political systems -- usually per planet
  • even if you set up a whole planet with a single society -- give them a couple of generations and they'll have just as many different systems

• Some social systems are constrained by limited resources -- power, water, food, air (in space), land -- if there is any shortage, there will be people at the bottom of the pile for that resource -- competition for resources gives economics gives politics
• There are advantages to having an underclass, no matter how rich the society (so no matter how rich that underclass) -- it is in the interest of the people in charge to have an underclass, to keep the majority in their place through fear of losing that place

• What kind of society would you want to live in?
  • one that handles change well
  • New Mars -- all power to David Reid!
  • either the upper Paleolithic, or now -- evidence that in the Late Stone Age (not the mesolithic) that people lived a long time
  • a nanotech society, like The Culture
    • there's a concern that unanticipated consequences of abundance could lead to Orwellian monitoring, or bioterrorism, or ...
    • absolute freedom might require absolute dictatorship
  • does nobody else want to be a Brave New World Beta?
    • we already are!
  • Joanna Russ's Whileaway
  • if this panel had been in the US, half the audience would have said Starship Troopers!
  • Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky -- has great societies, that collapse in a generation
  • John Barnes, Thousand Cultures universe -- loads of societies that, faced with change, collapse

• It's a matter of taste -- many people would like to live in University for ever
• Utopias are boring and homogeneous
  • you can find a small utopia in hell, and find hell in utopia

Panel -- Checking Universal Constants: build your own reality detector

Simon Bradshaw, Michael Spiller, John Bray, John Dallman

What do you need to determine the rules of physics in whatever reality you find yourself in?

• JD -- an impression of what happens if the laws of the universe are significantly different: [falls over]

• Different kinds of differences
  • mathematical constants -- values of , e, 2, ... -- very difficult to see how these could change
  • physical constants, G, µ₀, ₀, ...
  • lower level constants -- the easiest to see changing

• If you moved to a universe of antimatter, and you were changed to antimatter -- only noticeable with a large amount of equipment

• Is the sun shining? Has it been doing so for some considerable period of time? If yes, then the strong/weak forces are fairly close to what we have here
• A. E. van Vogt, The Storm novella -- lifeboat landed on a strange planet in the LMC -- planet appears to have no adaptation to seasons -- "it's been summer for 10,000 years" -- so on a planet with a 10,000 years long "year", so a long way from the star, but it is an ordinary apparent brightness star -- that's enough to provide location because there's only one star in the LMC bright enough
• Stephen Baxter, Raft -- much higher gravity, so very small planets (~ 1 mile across), and strong tides

• Being wrong by exactly a factor of 2 probably means you are on to something interesting --
• Starlight is deflected by the sun, visible during a total eclipse
  • GR predicts twice the deflection as Newtonian gravity

• Cold fusion is a bug in the enforcement of reality -- does the fix introduce new bugs? -- accommodations for special relativity became necessary after the radioactivity bug fixes!
• Stephen Baxter -- alien VR -- the aliens are desperately upgrading their computers every time our science advances enough so that we can nearly see the pixels
• deja vu -- rerunning the test suite

• What if atoms were a lot bigger? how big until we would notice? -- Brownian motion on a macroscopic scale
• What if QM were much lumpier? The human eye can almost see individual photons -- with image intensifiers everything looks grainy and mushy, because individual photons are being amplified -- that's what the world would look like
  • so could we discover wave/particle duality by closing one eye?
  • Pot Black would be more interesting!

• What if we saw what was really there, rather than it being massively processed by the brain?

• I remember seeing a simulation of magnetic fields, using an adaptive grid -- there was fringing artefacts near the edges -- there's evidence that gravity above a Bose-Einstein condensate is reduced -- maybe it's due to a bug in the aliens' simulation software which thinks the condensate is a single particle, and so the reduction is an artefact of the simulation?

• Dave Langford, The Space Eater -- the most unpleasant FTL drive you will ever see -- 1.6cm wormholes, mince and regerate -- and it caused ~10% of the starts to go nova!
• George Gamow -- Mr Tompkins stories, with different c and h

• What if the constants changed quickly -- a flickering value of c?
  • there goes causality!
  • Bob Shaw, Warren Peace (sequel to Who Goes Here?) -- c changes by 30% on timescales of a second -- no electronics

• Speed of light -- the measurements have been steadily dropping -- the new ones outside the error bars of the previous ones
  • evidence for a change in value?
  • or that physicists are wildly optimistic about the size of their errors
• Physicists usually propose changing values of the fundamental constants in order to hold on to their pet theories when challenged by pesky observations
• Fred Hoyle's explanation of continental drift, without the drift -- G is decreasing, the Earth is expanding, so the continents cracked up (as had Hoyle!)
• If you plot the published results for the charge on the electron, it has also been dropping
  • it's a VR fixup -- put in an interim holding value, and fix it up later -- REAL*2, REAL*4, REAL*8, ...
• A metre is easy to measure -- an easy transition of caesium -- but who gets to count all those wavelengths? [actually, it's the second that is defined using the caesium transition, the definition of the metre uses a helium-neon laser and the value of c]
• There are some really large numbers, and some really small numbers -- and we live somewhere in the middle
• The Steve Jackson Games website has a page that produces items from the warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones
  • one item is a meter with a scale labelled from 2 to 4 -- when you switch it on, the needle flips to 3.14, and stays there
• We know G to about 5 DP, and the mass of the Earth to about 5 DP, but the product much better
• Gravity is very weak. Frank Close, in the 1993 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures demonstrated this by abseiling down from the roof of the Royal Institution -- he stopped half way down, and pointed out the the gravity from the 8000 mile big plane below was being beaten by the electromagnetic forces in a 1cm diameter nylon rope
• We measure the orbits of asteroids using radar -- the earth-crossing minor planet Toutatis (named for Asterix the Gaul's god of sky-falling fear!) -- we know the position of its centre of gravity to better than 1cm.
• Scott Adams of Dilbert fame describes a crackpot theory of gravity -- there is no such thing as gravity, only interia -- the Earth is expanding at 9.8m/s/s -- this explains why things fall, but it doesn't explain things like the mutual gravitation between, say, a pen and a mountain [or tides, or ...]

• I want to change e, the base of natural logarithms
  • it occurs in the rocket equation -- if we could change it enough, we could get to the moon more cheaply
  • but won't the chemical reaction rates also change?
  • hmmm -- I never thought of that

• Changing physics is easy, changing maths is hard, changing arithmetic is weird
• What happens if you overturn Gödel's theorem?
  • Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought galaxy -- information theory / complexity theory changes
  • you get vast numbers of Travelling Salesmen turning up at your door!

• You can't change Sod's Law -- it's even more fundamental than the 2nd law of thermodynamics
  • 1970s story where Maxwell's demons went on strike
  • a study that toast nudged off a table has time for a half tun -- for a large range of values of the physical constants -- it's a deep result
  • tie buttered toast to the back of a cat, and drop it -- an antigravity device

Brian Stableford -- GoH talk -- Moral Responsibility in a Heterocosmic Universe

• I teach a module on creativity -- which has forced me to think about the process

• There's an analogy between literature and modern cosmology
  • I love the imagery, especially Linde's inflationary bubble universes (see Greg Egan's Diaspora, and Stephen Baxter's Manifold)
  • there's a similar expanding multiverse structure in the world of texts, budding off new texts
  • Expansion: short stories -> fixups -> trilogies -> 12 volume series
  • Anthropic Principle, became stronger and stronger, until it ended up at Tipler's Omega Point
    • in the multiverse of texts, the Anthropic Principle holds in an ultra-strong form, because texts are designed to support the characters within them!
    • this secondary creation is called the "heterocosmos" in the jargon of aesthetics

• Some interesting parallels between creation theories and literary creativity
  • Greeks -- ex nihilo
    • that there was nothing, then something, was disliked
    • they preferred creation as reorganisation, order from chaos
    • Epicurean model start with perfect regularity, then imperfections appear -- disorder from perfect order
  • early Christians apparently endorsed the "order from chaos" view, but by about 5th century, ex nihilo became the approved view
• Literary creativity has a curious parallel
  • Coleridge's account of Kubla Khan -- from a laudanum dream -- it appears out of nowhere -- write it down feverishly, until interrupted -- an "inspirational" account
  • Edgar Allen Poe's account of The Raven -- lots of decisions about length, subject matter, ... -- a Pick 'n' Mix" narrowing down of possibilities -- "chipped away at the block" -- just rearranging things
  • they were both lying through their teeth!
    • evidence the Coleridge was exaggerating for rhetorical effect
    • Poe was just joking -- it was a satire
  • literary theory is divided between these extremes
    • "lower buckets into well of inspiration" versus "how to" manuals
  • there's not as much in the Epicurian model
    • Alfred Jarry, Berthold Brecht -- alienation -- destruction/shock to make audience rethink
    • John Dewey, Aesthetics -- demands both -- bringing harmony from chaos, then breaking apart -- ongoing process of order and disorder -- dialectical relationship

• Authors have to come to creation as little gods -- and we have to decide what kinds of gods we are going to be
  • power, but also responsibility
  • Christian tradition of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence

• Exhilaration of omnipotence -- all you have to do is write it!
  • throughout history, most authors have refused to exercise this power, and made the text slavishly imitative -- moral cowardice!
  • I like to exercise this power -- in the worlds of my texts, even God is only a character
  • responsibility
    • what happens should make sense
    • it's sloppy creation to have inconsistencies
    • not just plausible (you can tell readers anything and they'll believe it!) but you have to know it makes sense
    • if it doesn't stand up to rigorous criticism, it is a failed universe -- a dark empty bubble in the Linde multiverse
    • so you must be omnipotent properly

• Omniscience is even more difficult
  • nobody in your story is going to know more than you do
  • some advice books advise you to "write what you know" -- a real writer has responsibility to know more
  • you'll never know everything, but that does not relieve the responsibility to know as much as you can -- laziness is bad practice -- sticking to what you know, and even worse, repeating yourself, is falling down on the job

• Omnibenevolence is the hardest of all
  • there's a theory that this isn't difficult in fiction
    • "the good ended happily, the bad unhappily -- that's what fiction means" (Wilde?)
    • based on a recognition that the real world is not like this
    • throughout history, there is a denial of reality, the idea that the moral account is balanced
    • in literature, this is poetic justice
  • this is a simple-minded notion of omnibenevolence
    • readers like happy endings
    • fiction is being used as a consolatory device
    • you can develop a reputation as a realist, not by being slavishly realistic, but by having unhappy endings
  • we expect Romeo and Juliet to end happily, and because it doesn't, we get the feeling of tragedy
    • some have argued that it does have a happy ending
    • the greater good is served, the feud ends
    • the needs of the greater society above the more trivial needs of individuals
  • such ideas make it difficult to know what counts as a happy ending
    • the duty of the literary artist is not to recreate the audience's expectation of a happy ending, but to challenge them to wonder if that really is a happy ending
    • the question: how should Man live?
  • a lot of fiction privileges the status quo
    • detective fiction -- the device (a murder) -- a restoration (murderer is caught)
    • there is a "normalising" story arc -- "getting back to normal"
  • SF is by definition about change
    • the present will turn into something else -- what kind of future should we be aiming for?
    • normative subgenre -- the scientist creates a monster -- it (and the scientist) must be killed to restore order
    • we have a moral responsibility to avoid this Frankenstein syndrome -- otherwise we are saying that everything new is bad and must be destroyed -- promoting technophobia
    • similarly with tales of alien invaders -- are we cultivating xenophobia?
  • so the responsibility of the SF writer to be omnibenevolent cannot be discharged by conventional notions
    • actually, this applies to all other writers, too
    • it is a king of "lazy omnibenevolence" -- and is ridiculous if trying to say something meaningful about the human condition, which is capable of improvement
  • omnibenevolence is a matter of original thinking -- what progress consists of, how it might be fostered, how we might serve and transcend ideas of poetic justice

• I have no punchline. I realise this is unsatisfactory as a means of closure. But I hope I have not left you with a feeling of normalisation.

• Does the author have a responsibility to the characters, as well as to the readers?
  • part of the omnipotence responsibility -- their behaviour must make sense (so it can't be too realistic!)
  • but there is a danger of treating them as real people -- there are no people in Shakespeare, only narrative devices
  • it's hard to bear that the people in fiction that you love, even more than real people, don't exist
  • also, the author's responsibility to the reader, and the reader's notion of that responsibility, don't coincide -- the author should be working to improve the reader
  • the author also has a responsibility to the creative process itself, to do it as well as possible
• If you regard the universe as a text, does that exonerate the evil?
  • yes -- fiction is much more readable with villains in it!
  • but I worry about the notion of villains -- an inherent scapegoating strategy -- I try not to do that
  • also, what we mistake for people in the real world are only narrative devices constructed by us and their surroundings -- however, the extent to which we can reconstruct ourselves does run into problems of brute reality
• The real world has evolution, change, progress. Is there an analogue in literature?
  • there is such a thing as evolution, even progress, in literature -- texts produce new texts, and the context for other texts
  • there is also some regression to simplicity, parasitism
  • (Lamarckian evolution has difficulty explaining parasites)
• How would you refute the proposition that you are a narrative device?
  • I'm convinced that I am, and am continually trying to improve it -- I have certainly undergone change

Panel -- Future History: Cut and Shut Sagas

Liz Counihan, Mike Cobley, Kim Campbell, Alistair Reynolds, Mike Scott Rohan

Why do some authors feel the need to make a common future history for all their stories?

• For a Future History, the stories must take place at different times, otherwise it's just a consistent world
  • you need stories set at other point in the timeline, not just references to them
  • Heinlein -- Larry Niven's Known Space
  • it's a meta work of art
• An intentional setting for a series of stories -- Asimov, David Brin -- as opposed to those imposed later -- Larry Niven, Poul Anderson
  • Asimov later glued together disparate histories that didn't fit -- Robots and Foundation -- his fans wanted it
  • Niven jokily includes his magic stories early in his timeline
  • It's a problem if you make the rules up as you go -- get inconsistencies or problems caused by developments in other stories
  • Anderson glued his Polesotechnic League (expanding ebullient capitalists) onto the front of Flandry (old decaying Empire) -- that Empire hardly has time to decay!
• When fans ask questions, you tend to make up answers. If they say "why not join series?" you might feel it's a good idea
• Future Histories tend to self destruct after a while -- too much background, too many assumptions
• "Future Histories" can encompass Parallel Histories, and Past Histories -- Randall Garrett's Lord D'Arcy
  • histories set in the past (what a strange concept!) have the same kind of limitations/constraints
• Alan Dean Foster, Commonwealth worlds
  • a common background, framework that allows enough flexibility to write a wide range of stories
  • a playground, links between stories, but not an evolutionary history
• Asimov, Pebble in the Sky -- had to ask, why no robots? -- needed to fixup elsewhere
• A Future History means you have to design your world, tech, aliens only once
  • great labour-saving device, for writers, readers, and publishers!
  • can be great fun for the reader to spot subtle links
• H. G. Wells has a series of stories that lead up to some of the event in The Time Machine -- but they aren't as good -- The Time Machine has a good shock effect -- the others feel more watered down
• Robert Lynn Asprin, The Bug Wars -- reptiles versus insects -- great book -- future space opera with no humans on the scene
• Banks' Culture novels -- the world already exists in our past -- humanity joins as a junior partner
• Julian May -- the Pliocene stories are great -- the Galactic Milieu is a fully worked out future, but not so good -- an anticlimax
• John W Campbell -- required humans to triumph
  • James Schmitz gets his aliens from human stock
  • Asimov didn't have any aliens, as a way of not having humans triumphing over aliens
    • the human-only galaxy is looking more plausible
• Anne McCaffrey -- Crystal Singer and Shell Ships series are in the same universe, but separate stories. The Pegasus series is glued on to the front of the Rowan series
• There's something a little anal/anoraky about Future Histories
• Heinlein, The Number of the Beast -- "let's wrap all my books, and everyone else's, in one"
• Gene Wolfe -- everything is an offshoot of his original stories
• An author tens to come up with similar ideas -- so there may be a subconscious connection anyway
• most fans know the books much better than the author does
• Honor Harrington -- is that a Future History? -- no, only one character -- it's a future biography
• Similarly, Bujold's Vorkosigan series isn't a Future History yet
• Keith Laumer's Bolo stories -- others have written stories about Bolos, its become series fixup into a dubious Future History
• Star Trek is inconsistent about the year in which it is set
• Olaf Stapleton has the most tremendous Future History
• Can use a Future History to show how things "progress" over a series of stories
• Can breed ideas, by inserting things from one story into another, to disturb it
• Almost all of Cherryh's stories are in the same universe, but she doesn't make a point of it
• Cordwainer Smith
• Ursula K Le Guin
• One SF author put a different FTL drive in every story, so that they couldn't be a Future History
• Andre Norton -- a lot of similarities, but few explicit links
• John Varley, Eight Worlds stories -- explicitly says he isn't trying to be consistent
• There are lots of "Lost Earth" Future Histories -- no links with today, but still internally consistent -- putting Earth in really seems to screw up certain classes of space opera
• Ken MacLeod, Fall Revolution series -- inconsistencies, but deliberately so
• Lots of assumptions that one planet = one country = one culture, which seems unlikely
  • isn't modern communications leading to homogenisation?
• Us has lots of "get away from the government" stories
• Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination -- you can be anywhere you like -- ultimate freedom
• Future History is written by the winners!
• History is written by the writers
• Each new generation of historians has to find something new to write

Panel -- The Consumers Guide to Superfluous Technology

Pat Murphy, Peter A???, John Bray, Ben Jeapes, Charlie Stross

A strange title for a panel about ePublishing

• We use Microsoft Reader, because it's the closest to the book-reading experience -- and readily available
• PDF -- format for printing, not for reading on the screen
• You can carry many books -- it's an insidious experience, especially whit an reading application that allows an immersive experience
• can do hyperlinking
• We're not trying to replace books, just provide a different kind of book

• We need to get software developers and publishers together, to understand the needs of each other, and the needs of the reader
• In particular, as a reader, I want the same freedom as I have with paper. As a writer, I want to be paid when I'm read

• Print on Demand is the whole book or nothing -- and still has to go via a publisher
• Still very expensive per unit -- The Leakey Establishment, 240 pages, has a unit cost of £3.55
• Associated cost of keeping the file on the printer server
• Unit costs for short runs are the same, but there's less admin overhead

• An example of a bad eBook publisher -- Peanut Press, acquired by Palm
  • I will not buy another eBook from them
  • their cover price is the same as for hard copy, but eText is far less durable than a paper book, as the OS will become obsolete soon -- if you buy an eBook, you are buying the use of it for only a few years -- a lot of information committed to electronic form will be lost
  • also, their digital rights management system used a decryption key comprised of name + credit card number -- but credit card numbers are not permanent -- hideous hole in usability

• An example of a good eBook publisher -- Baen
  • there's no encryption -- you set up an account -- download unencrypted eTexts in a variety of formats -- rich text, Palm Pilot, HTML, MS Reader -- open formats
  • they don't treat their customers like criminals -- software vendors in the 1980s discovered that the more you treat your customers like criminals, the less they buy from you
  • you can even print a copy -- it will probably cost more on a laser printer than to buy the pb
  • you can buy a monthly bundle for the price of ~ 2pb or ~ 1hb -- so it's cheaper in eText form, but Baen are probably making as much profit as with hard copy -- no printing, no shipping -- and writers get double royalties
  • books in print get remaindered -- after a couple of years, remaindered books go into the Baen Free Library -- they are often the first volumes of series

• There are many pirate eBooks out there, but they are pirated from scanned hard copy, not from existing eBooks, because these are so easy to obtain
• Project Gutenberg is devoted to scanning out-of-copyright authors
• Those pirating by scanning should better be devoting their efforts to this
• The bulk of pirated copies are either from the top 100, or endlessly recycled old stuff

• We allow our authors to put back in stuff their hard-copy editors cut out
  • a "director's cut" version
  • big authors don't get edited enough as it is -- will eBooks make this worse?
  • we go to a lot of trouble to edit, even when reprinting already edited works
  • there are many ePublishers who don't know what they are doing -- some of them will print anything

• The worst ePublishers are some university presses -- who publish under the most ridiculous licencing clauses, charging ridiculous amounts -- eg a $3000/yr licence with restrictions on the number of readers
• MIT have upset the entire publishing industry by saying they are putting all their educational works on line, free, within 5 years
• O'Reilly -- Safari scheme -- standing subscription to access books over the Web
• OUP are putting the OED and other works on line, by subscription -- but it's expensive
• There is a tradeoff -- the more you charge, the more incentive there is to go elsewhere, or to circumvent -- many ePublishers haven't yet worked this out

• Publishers pay terrible royalties -- especially now they have cut their print, inventory costs -- but there are still some overheads -- distributors still demand 50%
• We don't yet have the right business model

Panel -- Should Scientists Write Science Fiction?

Charlie Stross, Alistair Reynolds, Simon Bradshaw, Ben Jeapes

Does being a scientist make you a better SF writer? Or a worse one?

• No-one asks "should gardeners write SF" -- why are scientists picked on?
• Being a scientist doesn't mean you have great writing skills!
  • often an inverse relation between academic qualifications and the ability to write a simple sentence
• You don't need to be a scientist to write hard SF
• Hopefully there is a reduced class of the worst howlers (like the rotating space ship with the highest gravity at the hub!)
• When writing about the process of science itself -- as it's nothing like it's portrayed in the media, it couldn't be written by anyone other than a scientist -- Gregory Benford, Timescape -- Paul McAuley, The Secret of Life
• Practicing scientists versus science buffs, familiar with science at one remove
• Can get insights into the messy world of science from elsewhere -- Perdido Street Station has a good portrayal of a scientist (despite being "steam punkish"), but China Miéville is an anthropologist/sociologist
• The culture of science has a lot of confusion, disagreements, politics, and sheer hard work
• When the process is depicted well, it's good for educating the public who do not appreciate how science works
• The way it really works is not conducive to interesting stories -- it needs the boring bits taken out
• Is there any media SF that portrays scientists well?
  • Quatermass? -- a certain kind of British scientist
  • Doomwatch
  • Contact -- reasonably accurate portrayal in the first half
  • The Dish -- conveyed the day-to-day feel of being in an observatory
• The Two Cultures is not a problem just in science -- also true in computing, with technology aware software types versus management
• Some scientists publish their stranger ideas as SF
  • Fred Hoyle -- especially Steady State ideas
  • Paul Davies turned some ideas about ball lightening and anti-mater into a poor novel
• Dr Who Cybermen were invented by a couple of cyberneticists
  • what was there to invent?
• Daleks were travel machines to carry mutant beings in a world with no stairs -- and lots of blocked sinks?
• Greg Bear, Moving Mars -- a plausible science process
  • to write convincingly, just need to do the research
  • can get an awful lot out of Asimov's Guide to Science
• Should SF writers have sociological, people skills?
  • the stereotype of scientists not having social skills comes from not knowing ay scientists! -- scientists are people too
• Some writers confuse engineers with scientists -- whereas in reality the media confuse mechanics/technicians with engineers
• A lot of scientists have a snooty attitude to SF -- "I don't read that stuff, I read Flaubert!" -- but many are closet SF readers
• People who read SF don't care whether it's by scientists or not -- they want good stories
• BBC no longer have a dedicated science correspondent -- they just use whoever is available
• Being a scientist helps you make it up convincingly?
• Is there a danger of being too close to the area that makes you more likely to be overtaken by events?
  • Larry Niven, "The Coldest Place", Dec 1964 -- before it was published, the rotation period of Mercury was measured by radar [actually not until April 1965, by Pettengill and Dyce]
  • don't be overspecific -- say "display", not "screen", etc
  • the author who avidly scans Nature or New Scientist is more prone to this
  • any cold fusion novels? -- can be a little bit of AH, a world where it had worked
• Okay when writing in their own field -- problems come when they feel they are as well qualified in other fields, like politics, history, ...
• John Clute wrote that scientists write about libertarian societies, because the want to reduce everything to its simplest parts -- no scientist works in a vacuum -- it's probably impossible to be a research scientist in a libertarian society
• Greg Egan -- makes no bones about his hatred of certain attitudes, like NewAge religion, etc -- but doesn't fall into over-reductionist solutions
  • his web site has applets illustrating the mathematical principles underlying his novels
  • the quantum football was especially fun
  • Damien Broderick -- "I've warned Greg Egan he may be boxing himself into an n-dimensional hypercorner"
  • he's becoming less prepared to bend the rules
  • Diaspora -- I had sensawunda coming out of every orifice
  • he's the most reclusive SF writer -- maybe he is a polis?
• John W Campbell -- required hard SF in his stories, but couldn't distinguish pseudoscience -- Dean Drive, ESP, ... -- "barking mad"
• Scientism -- belief in science -- but no idea of testing, changing, etc

Masquerade

• "Princess and the Dragon"
• Best Workmanship -- "Cybob" -- Sabine and Karen Furlong
• Snape and Potter
• "Succubus" -- Heather McKiggan-Fee
• Best Novice -- "J. Alfred Cthulhu" -- Arthur Chappell
• Best Presentation -- "Chaos Fairy" -- Jaine Weddell
• Amazon Car Cleaners
• Best Airline -- "Fantasy Airline" -- Heather Petty
• Best in Show -- "Cthulhu-puss" -- James Steel, Cal, Marcul Streets
• Easter Egg Orrery

Panel-- Bored Mindless in Utopia

Brian Stableford, Martin Easterbrook???, Mike Scott Rohan

Utopias simply aren't as much fun as dystopias. I s there a utopia we should be striving towards?

• BS -- it all depends what you mean by "utopia" -- Thomas More's Utopia was a satire, a joke, a funny book
• There's a problem with representing things going well and getting better
• In narrative, drama, threats and problems are more exciting -- happiness is saved for endings (and maybe not even then)
• But it's nice to write about progress
• I exploit the alternative narrative of comedy -- set in pretty pleasant futures, I enliven it by importing an element of absurdist comedy
• If all SF is about horrible threats to the world, it might result in a kind of future-phobia

• MSR -- Plato's utopia was serious
• BS -- no, The Republic is a joke, it's sarcastic
• MSR -- no, I think he thought the philosopher-king was a good idea

• Last century, there were two utopias on offer -- dictatorship of the proletariat, and the American Dream
• SF first took an idealistic look, then had to step back when it was clear they weren't working
• ditto the genetic/eugenic utopia
• Utopias have been present to us -- SF has tested them and found them wanting

• Plato's Republic was a blueprint for building a real utopia -- Plato wanted to write SF, but it hadn't been invented -- he needed an individual in it -- But, if you have an individual in a perfect society that could get along just as well without them, what use are they?

• BS -- I'm an Epicurean, so Plato and Aristotle look a bit dodgy to me
• But Plato was trying for laws for a good society -- he was taking seriously the question "how should men live?" -- how should we organise society?
• Utopian writers are addressing sensible questions, provided we don't take the verdicts too seriously
• Gabriel de Foigny, The Southern Land, Known, 1676 -- is equality really possible in a society with two sexes? -- probably not, given biological differences
• I'm worried that, when tested in literature, utopias are almost always found wanting -- moral cowardice?
• I was asked to review a book where everyone is immortal, in VR heaven, and the "heroes" try the whole book to die, and to make sure that everyone else dies "properly" -- it's the antithesis of everything I believe in!

• MSR -- it's difficult to make a utopia that caters to everyone -- do you have safety valves for the dissenters? -- do you manipulate expectations?
• Chesterton -- utopias are concerned with how your share is delivered, but not how it is determined -- "The weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motorcar or balloon."

• BS -- Nietzsche has that moral standards are neither true not false, but moral systems can be judged to be life-enhancing of life-denying
• Progress is possible -- in order to make society better, we may have to make ourselves better, too

• Plato was on the side of reason
• But who determines what is better?
• You make the best compromise you can -- liberal democracy -- it's better than totalitarianism
• But Germany in the 1930s was fed up with liberal democracy -- nothing could get done
• It's very difficult to write eloquently in favour of it -- how could you replace Worf (a pagan thug) with an equally charismatic liberal democrat?

• Well's The Shape of Things to Come -- looks disturbingly like an argument for dictatorship
• Smith's Lensmen, Schmitz, etc-- idealistic Secret Police?

• BS -- if writers in the past have made mistakes, the solution is to learn from them, and try to do it better -- the other is moral cowardice

• The problem with a liberal democracy is that you have to be liberal even with people you despise!
• BS -- the central tenet of liberal democracy -- people are free to do what they want, provided they don't infringe others' freedoms -- which results in compromises

• The problem is that utopias are shown as an end point, an "infinite good number" -- which can be used to justify dreadful things

• Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge -- one of the Free Californias is arguable a utopia -- despite the dreadful things that happen to the hero
• BS -- Anatole France, The White Stone, 1905 -- a utopia, but people are still as miserable as sin
• BS -- Huxley, Brave New World -- it's a comedy, a joke, honest!
  • The Savage wants the freedom to be unhappy
  • still need some crime in a utopia -- Marx on the productivity of criminals and what they do for society (it is a bit sarcastic!)

• MSR -- given how many concessions you have to make, can it still be called a utopia?
• the thing most wrong with a stable state is that it is stable
• BS -- even without talking a about an "ideal" state, like heaven, we can still say "things can et better"
• The "Fountain of Youth" is a modern utopia -- not "finished", not ideal, but doing a lot better than ours is

• BS -- I'm worried about the current attitudes to biotech -- it holds out promise for disease cures, longer life
  • there's a lot of sour grapes about longer life
  • "I don't want to live an extra 20 years, I'd get bored"
  • well -- it's not compulsory!
• But it is compulsory -- there's no euthanasia at the moment
• BS -- everyone in this room could commit suicide if they wanted to -- some people leave it too long, until they need help -- even in utopia there will be difficult problems, no-win situations -- you have to try to do the best you can

• MSR -- biotech is an immense power -- it needs to be thought about carefully
• BS -- and a good place to argue about it is SF -- some people do believe that some technology can offer advantages -- progress is possible

• There's an "anti-S"F genre -- Michael Crichton -- X-Files, etc

• Muriel Jaeger, The Question Mark, 1926 -- if we were able to perfect the social ideas, what would people do with their freedom?
  • does it include the freedom to be silly?

• What about a multi-topia, with lots of choices?
• Mack Reynolds, The Towers of Utopia
• Delany, Triton -- "ambiguous heterotopia"
• It needs to be large enough, vast enough, to accommodate a vast range of opportunities
  • how could we set up society to achieve this?

• A chaotic utopia -- utopia, but continually changing
• BS -- Dewey's aesthetics -- order is constantly being made form chaos, and breaking up again
• Things have come together, and have come apart -- but things have got better, and can get better still

• What if we dose Brian with the appropriate drugs to make him happy?
  • BS -- Huxley's Brave New World -- James Gunn, The Joy Makers -- hedonistic philosophy
  • ME -- the idea that we are not on drugs anyway is wrong -- not just artificial drugs, but the biological stuff in our bloodstream
  • BS -- experiments going on all the time -- especially drug utopias -- but even those looking for psychotopia like some variety - but there are important questions to be addressed - Greg Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful" is one of the best in this area

Panel -- Not the Clarke Award

Claire Briarley, Cheryl Morgan, Tanya Brown, Farah Mendlesohn, Charlie Stross, Caroline Mullen

A discussion of the shortlist for this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award

• The shortlist for the Clarke Award is
  • Gwyneth Jones -- Bold As Love
  • Peter Hamilton -- Fallen Dragon
  • Justina Robson -- Mappa Mundi
  • Jon Courtenay Grimwood -- Pashazade
  • Connie Willis -- Passage
  • Paul McAuley -- The Secret of Life
• What can we throw out?

• Fallen Dragon
  • Gets girl, loses girl, joins army, regrets it, uses time machine to go back and get girl again -- but he's still 40, she's still 17
  • I couldn't work out what kind of story it was
  • Has good aliens
  • It's an unabashed gosh-wow 1950s space opera -- but this is not the 1950s
  • It isn't very well written
  • There's a good short novel trying to get out -- why can't he cut?
  • He can -- it's scary -- he does!
  • It's gone

• Passage
  • It's interesting, big concerns, but ultimately doesn't deliver for something this length
  • That's Willis -- listen to her Con speeches -- she has lots of amusing digressions
  • All the baddies have silly names
  • Large hospital, size of a small city, near death experience -- hospital becomes a metaphor for the brain
  • The book is raging against the American desire for comfort
    • Willis is saying, no, you die -- offers realism rather than comfort
  • Nothing excuses the appalling slush in the novel!
    • one of the reasons for the romantic conversations is that she is setting you up for a "happy" ending
  • A clunky writer with wonderful ideas
  • I didn't like the ambiguous ending
    • we never get beyond "this is what we think is happening" -- there's no conclusion
  • Six people have read it, with subtly different dissatisfactions
  • I'd recommend it to people to read
  • It would not surprise me if it was the winner
  • I would not be dissatisfied with it as the winner
  • But it's off

• Mappa Mundi
  • I don't want this off -- it's effective in what it's doing, and it's better than Bold as Love
  • I've lived in both places featured in MM and BaL -- and MM does localism much better
  • I had problems with the York bit -- it read as if written by a manic visiting alien
    • that's what living in York is like!
  • Medical nanites reprograming the brain, messing with the memes -- explores various things going wrong
    • protagonist wants to use the tech to make us better -- baddies do not
  • Some of the subplots don't work
  • The X-Files resonances aren't intentional -- JR isn't an X-Files watcher
  • Some of the almost supernatural outcomes (like walking through walls) fit uneasily -- they break the rules of the set-up
  • Don't get close enough to some of the bureaucratic infighting, compared with some other very detailed descriptions
  • Narrative structure -- opens with snapshots of significant characters having seminal experiences -- we only find out later where these fit in -- I didn't like them -- they were beautiful, but they distracted me
  • The plot does not support the ambitions -- often the plot just "happens"
  • Silver Screen had some astonishingly descriptive writing -- there's nothing here that good
  • I didn't not enjoy it, but it didn't engage me the way Silver Screen did -- I can't imagine re-reading it
  • FD, Passage, MM are all long books and dragged in places -- they could all be better if shortened
  • It's off

• If this was the real Clarke Panel, we would probably have parked Mappa Mundi, and Passage, and come back to them later. But we don't have as much time here.

• Bold as Love
  • I disagree! It should stay
  • I enjoyed reading it -- a countercultural revolution in England -- takes devolution further -- probably set 2030ish -- focuses on music and festivals -- lots of interesting ideas -- but we don't see much of the revolution, or representatives of the real political scene -- don't see the blood, violence, nasty bits -- when I finished it, I realised the structure reminded me of a romantic or soft porn novel, where you stop every X pages for a snog or a sex scene, except here it's a rock concert! -- that starts to grate after a bit
  • I found it fascinating -- I loved the characterisation -- except the protagonist, who I wanted to slap -- there are lots of insinuations that some things are changes, but left in the background -- intriguing
  • Should it even be in the shortlist, as it's not SF -- Gwyneth Jones says its's not SF
    • that doesn't matter -- it's never stopped the Clarke judges
  • I get very annoyed with people who write a very long book, then publish just the first half -- BaL just stops -- this is an entire novel full of setup -- it's not the first book of a trilogy, it's a third of a book
  • We know from her other series that taking anything she says in her first book is a bad idea
  • I'm incredibly irritated by the cult of personality -- setting up rock musicians as the new Lords of Whatever -- puh-leese! And that pretentious rock-chick, you're not the only one who wanted to slap her!
    • it's important they are rock stars -- it shows people who do not engage with conventional politics, engaging with them
  • I found it a very unfeminist book -- there are few women, and they all dislike each other -- it fails the "Dykes to Watch Out For" test, can two women have a conversation not about a man?
  • I didn't find it credible as a possible future -- it's the first third of an ambitions attempt to recast the Arthurian legend
  • It's off, but it wouldn't surprise me if it won

• I want both Pashazade and The Secret of Life to win!
  • They are very different books
  • They both pass the "Dykes to Watch Out For" test
  • JCG has not read Effinger's When Gravity Fails
    • he has reinvented it, done a better job, in a more interesting direction
  • SoL echoes back to a McAuley of 20 years ago, but much better
  • Both are character driven
  • Pashazade -- I believe utterly in the characters -- I think he's running a movie in his mind's eye -- it's full of James Bond action scenes, even a product placement!
  • I though Pashazade was very disappointing compared to redRobe -- it has lots of gadgets, and a 9-year-old computer whiz kid -- and only a little bit of its Arabic background
    • this is deliberate -- it's the first of a trilogy, and he's leading his new readers into the background gently
  • He improved book by book -- it's much better written than redRobe, but redRobe is more gripping
  • It's not a failure to be intense -- it's meant to be light
    • there are serious concerns embedded in there
    • a lot of it is about the appalling way we treat children, in an Ian Fleming novel -- but it works -- avoids sentimentality
  • It's the only book on this list engaging with the world outside the US/West
    • also, when the Americans appear, they are subtly different from USans in our world
    • he's reinvented the genre of AH

• The Secret of Life
  • The heroine goes through the "Paul McAuley guided tour of counter-cultures" -- as in Eternal Light
  • The best depiction of working scientists since Benford's Timescape
    • Passage is about two scientists scrabbling at a single problem
    • SoL is about the whole career -- conferences, environment, politics, other people -- and gets inside the heads of the people
  • it is the sort of book that makes me, an Arts graduate, want to be a scientist
    • it makes me want to do the science
    • the characterisation is compelling -- the plot is fascinating
  • There are some McAuley books I love, and some I find unreadable -- I adored this book!
  • It could have done with being a smidgen longer -- the only one on the list we can say that about!
    • the ending is a bit sudden
    • it's real science -- you have to take the discovery back to the lab and study it properly -- there's an aftermath
    • I was enjoying it so much I wanted it to carry on
  • The character of Mariella
    • Passage -- standard trope of a busy career woman whose friends have to arrange her love life
    • Mariella has a life
    • Fallen Dragon has the most cliched statements about sexual relations
    • this shows us someone negotiating their sexual and emotional life
    • her life ties her into different networks -- she is a connector
    • it's nice that she doesn't turn into a major hero -- the main work is a whole team effort -- very realistic
    • with Natalie in Mappa Mundi, there's no sense of team work -- it's a highly implausible team

• We need to come up with a winner -- let's take a vote
  • The Clarke committee is aware that there is a tendency to default towards hard SF -- but there is no requirement to do so
  • 1 vote for Pashazade, 2 for The Secret of Life, one for Mappa Mundi, one fence-sitter
• Novels like Pashazade come along every year -- The Secret of Life is rarer than that
• In the real award, this would involve opening up the the vote again, however we have The Secret of Life as our winner
• Given our usual accuracy, I guess that the Clarke judges will go for Fallen Dragon, as it's the only one we all agree shouldn't win!

[Bold as Love won the ACC award]

Panel -- If I Ruled the Universe

Mike Allum, Chris O'Shea, Vince Docherty, Sue Mason, SMS

Four diverse creatures try to persuade the audience to vote them in as new Ruler Of The Universe

• Chris O'Shea
  • I'm the only one who's a real person, not a fictional character
  • I can control the lighting, and the sound, in the room! [tech failed to oblige quite on cue...]
  • I have a mind like a steel trap -- it has dead animals in it

• Sue Mason -- The Mother of All Things
  • If you don't vote for me, I'll smack botties!
  • If you do, I still will, but you might enjoy it!

• Mike Allum -- aka Grey Clanger, spokesbeing for Small Clanger
  • My clients noticed Earth after some NASA probes went astray to their home
  • They have investigated and decided to take over
  • The internal combustion engine will be replaced by clockwork
  • They like St Hellier -- London, Slough and Reading have to go, though

• SMS -- or rather, Galactic Princess Barbie^(TM) [with much fluttering of eyelashes]
  • I exist in many places and times, and have more outfits than you
  • Everyone should be happy, and have their own shopping mall
  • My representative on Earth is Britney Spears
  • My green policy: green doesn't go with anything!
  • Action Man will be supplying the galactic defence system
  • Every open area will have a My Little Pony
  • There will be many more unicorns
  • Mattel-Time-Warner-AOL are doing a series of Barbie World Domination presentation packs with McDonalds

• How are you proposing to handle the voting in Florida?
  • Small Clanger will work with Mr Gates to win a landslide
  • Barbie: Florida is a perky place, I've a disco there, and a swimming pool, and ...

• What is your position on, or in, whipped cream?
  • MoAT: I am an equal opportunity goddess -- I'm capable of lusting after anyone in whipped cream
  • Barbie: who is sponsoring the whipped cream?
  • Small Clanger want's to know it it is good with Blue String Pudding
    • Blue String Pudding with whipped cream is Cordon Bleu!

• Will London be destroyed by the Iron Chicken?
  • We were thinking of replacing it with Lego

• What is your view on tribbles?
  • MoAT : toasted, roasted, or in whipped cream?
  • CO'S: tribbles make wonderful ball-pools for bondage clubs
  • Barbie: tribbles are perky, they're fun, they're furry -- but they are dull -- they have only 3 colours -- we will have a tribble makeover -- there will be rainbow tribbles, party tribbles, there will be jingly tribbles, with tunes downloadable from the Web site of Mattel-Time-Warner-AOL

• You are fishing for votes. How do you intend to regulate fishing?
  • MoAT: I'm in favour of chasing naked young men with animals on their heads
  • CO'S: you hunt them for 45 minutes, then they turn round and hunt you for 45 minutes
  • Barbie: I have an excellent hunting outfit, and a stud farm -- but I don't like foxes -- hunting can be more fun in a mall -- there's no mud -- mud doesn't go with anything -- shopping is better -- hunt for that fake fox fur coat -- available from Mattel-Time-Warner-AOL
  • Small Clanger would replace fox hunting with politician hunting and baiting

• Barbie is your second name isn't it? Isn't you first name Klaus?
  • No, Barbie is my first name, and my second name is TM

• Would you make pink compulsory?
  • Barbie: No -- pink is good -- but I also have an exciting white outfit -- we need to be visible against the pink Mall-World
  • MoAT: some pink things are wonderful, especially when you smack them
  • CO'S: I have no particular position on pink
  • A vote for Clanger is a vote for Pink!

• What Art would you sponsor, and why?
  • For Clangers, music is everything -- a vote for Clanger is a vote for the penny whistle -- and it's a clean form of transport!
  • CO's: the Magical Arts -- they can produce anything
  • MoAT: the Tantric Arts
  • Barbie: I have a sensitive side -- I love the Arts -- Me and Claude Van Damme have a lot in common -- Art is okay -- the more expensive the better -- Damien Hurst is good, his bank balance is great

• Vince: Can we have your final statements
  • Small Clanger: whistles (367K .wav) [it took some effort to record this whistle]
  • CO'S: we've got a small knitted creature -- Mother Nature is far too busy to run things -- and a brain dead piece of plastic -- vote for me!
  • MoAT: Remember -- mummy really loves you!
  • Barbie: look at these people -- doesn't it just say "makeover"?
• Vince: Audience, let's vote
  • Small Clanger: 43
  • Chris O'Shea: 8
  • Mother of All Things: 28
  • Galactic Princess Barbie: 30 [including one vote from Chris, screaming "you all deserve her!"]