| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Now I have not used this pocket yet this convention. Something in it had gotten hot sort of spontaneously. Near as I can figure out the incriminating items were a piece of Jolly Rancher lemon candy and a 9-volt battery. I think the candy got warm and melted onto the battery, shorting it out. That got the candy even hotter. In any case the candy changed to the soft consistency of taffy. It is possible the candy was not really important and battery just leaked or something and spontaneously shorted out. But one does not expect to find a spare pocket getting hot. I may have narrowly averted a fire.
Anyway, I went to a couple panels of authors reading their stuff. James Alan Gardner has a nice clear prose style. On top of which for a while I was the only member of the audience. Eventually one more person joined us, but it must have been awfully demoralizing and he deserved a better audience. I was a little embarrassed because he knew Evelyn and me from the Internet and had perhaps read more of our stuff than we had of his. He had brought a copy of a published novel and since at the time there was one person in the audience, he autographed it to me and Evelyn.
The next reader was Brenda Clough. She has written six little known novels but I had heard an interview and knew something about her seventh novel, How Like a God. I also had heard her at both Boskone and Readercon. I generally know very little about current authors, but her I did. Clough started to read from her novel and I realized I knew what was going on but nobody else would because I knew the premise of her novel. I stopped her and told the audience the premise without knowing which what she was reading would not make sense. I think she was impressed that someone in the audience knew her novel well enough to explain it to the audience. I cannot always come off so erudite.
Conventioning through much of the rest of the day. Another strange event was being interviewed. I saw someone with a badge from Cardiff so I mentioned having visited there. It turns out he was looking for people who had visited Wales to be recorded for the radio. Thinking about it afterward I could have given him better answers had I known the questions in advance. they were the sort of thing of what did I like in Wales, what am I doing at the convention.
Well, the convention took up most of the rest day, what with the Hugo awards. We sat in front of John Flynn, a friend who is a professor at Towson University. We met because I wrote a survey article of all of the film adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera at the same time he was writing a book on the same subject.
Evelyn did not win, but came in second in her category. Afterward we went to the Hugo Losers party. I stayed for just a short time and left. I hit the con suite, then sat through a showing of the Hugo-winning episode of Babylon 5. Evelyn thought Independence Day would get the Hugo. I could not imagine any dramatic presentation beating the B5 TV series. I am willing to bet that B5 will win next year again, without knowing what its competition will be.
Back to the room afterward I heard that Lady Diana had been killed. She was a woman whose life was filled with monumental ironies. She was a pawn for a lot of different people who found her convenient. Her death appears to be the result of being chased by paparazzi will likely change the privacy laws throughout Europe.
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08/31/97--LoneStarCon II: Day 4:
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Denny's for breakfast.
Sunday is the last full day of the convention. There is the feeling that the convention is mostly over sadly, but it is still going full steam. The really downbeat day is Monday, the last of the convention.
Panels on the most important events of the millennium coming to an end. One on religion in SF. One on review magazines. I think Evelyn will be covering those. I went to Bill Higgins's wedding reception, including surprise guest Fred Pohl. Bill went to school with Dale Skran and since is working for Fermi National Laboratory. He also has a monthly column about science in some newspaper in Chicago, I think. He set up the science program for the last World Science Fiction Convention and it is by far the best program that has been at any science fiction convention. Not just the best science program, the best program in general, due to his efforts. Evelyn called this the convention at which Mark disappeared in the morning and was not seen until dinner.
At the reception I got into a discussion about film. The discussion was started out about why Hollywood does so badly by science fiction. This is a perennial panel question at science fiction conventions. Now I would ask if it is really true. Now to a large extent we are comparing apples and oranges. You have a long, long time in a novel to develop ideas in a story. You have a lot of words. In a film you have to a story in brief enough form that most of the audience will not need a bathroom break between the start and the finish. Most films really have the same amount of action as you would have in a 40-page story, a novelette in the Hugo award definitions. So to be fair, let's compare movies and novelettes. But that still is not fair. How many new novelettes are there each month? There are probably four or five monthly magazines that publish three or four new novelettes each month. Then there are original story anthologies. You know, books like Alternate Lawyers and Alternate Weather Conditions. It is hardly surprising that with so many novelettes being written and relatively few films being released to theaters. Of course, there are science fiction films that just go to cable or directly to cassette. But then there are a bunch of novelettes that don't get published either. With so many novelettes being published, you would expect a few of them to be better than the relatively few films we see. I would argue that if you level the playing field, you must compare films to novelettes, and then just count the last five or so of each you have seen. I would say compare the last five new science fiction films you have seen in a theater and the last five new novelettes. In my case, I have to say I am not really sure. Probably the written are a little better. But then writing a story you have one person at a word processor. Making a film is a much bigger production. Changes to the story are very expensive. Instead of ten minutes of composition time a new image may cost tens of thousands of dollars to create. Why isn't there a huge margin? Why aren't the novelettes A LOT better than the films? Hollywood is doing better than you would expect by comparison.
Actually the last novelettes I read were Hugo nominees. I would expect them to be really good. They weren't. How come written science fiction is not better?
Next was a panel on pseudo-science and one on how to tell lies with statistics.
For dinner we went to Taco Cabana. This is a fast food pace but we wanted to go to the masquerade early. The masquerade was OK, only the last costume being very impressive. Usually the masquerades are more impressive if they are in Europe. I had heard Dale, Jo, Bill, and his wife make plans to go to the IMAX showing in the Rivercenter (a building that includes a mall and one of the convention hotels) at ten. I had figured that meant 10 PM after the masquerade and I thought we could surprise them by showing up also. It turned out they were making plans for another day. Luckily we ran into Dale and Jo just by coincidence and discovered they were not going toward the theater. So with that error under my belt we decided to call it a day and to go to bed early-ish. We went back to the room to read and to go to bed about 11 PM.
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09/01/97--LoneStarCon II: Day 5:
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Last day of the convention. Let's see, what did I go to? There was a panel on the future of the book. Will the book remain on paper or will it be digitized? Will other media replace the book? It was kind of dull in the first half and picked up in the second half. There was one person in the audience who thought that the book was going to lose dominance. Most of the panel and assumed it would be a long time before some other form replaced the book. I made the comment that I really would prefer to read an Agatha Christie in a medium where I could search for a person's name, etc. I showed off my palmtop with Vertical Reader and said I had read whole novels off the palmtop. Panelist thought that words on paper have been around for a long time and would remain the dominant form for language for a long time. I think those who remember the past are condemned to be misled by it. That is the half that Santayana forgot. History repeats, but never in the same way. Most observations of history repeating are made well after the fact and not when it is happening. There is a science to knowing history and an art to picking out which historical analogies are true and which are false. Luck plays a part also.
Other panels included Quantum Strangeness and a very entertaining talk by Michael Flynn on the abuse
of statistics. Kate also enjoyed that latter talk. But I am not sure she got the point of listening very carefully to what statistics say. Public Radio was talking about problems in the DC school systems and they gave the shock statistic that 40% of the students were performing below the national average. Actually that sounds bad until you give it some thought and then it might be quite good.
The group wanted to see Kull the Conqueror at the local theater so we went at the appropriate time this time. Actually we gathered at the theater at 5:15 PM for a 5:30 PM show. We would have thought that was enough time, but it very nearly was not. The ticket line moved very slowly because they had people signing up for their Movie Watchers Club that involved getting a credit card approved and the typing of a large volume of statistical data. The line moved very slowly. And then the person taking tickets was also serving and preparing refreshments. They would take a few tickets, then someone would come along wanting a drink and the whole line to get in would wait while she made the drink. We do it more intelligently in New Jersey.
Capsule: King Kull comes to the screen as Rafaella Di Laurentiis continues her father's series of Robert E. Howard adaptations. Badly damaged by a horrible musical score and unmemorable villains and a bit too much sex, the film is still manages to be an acceptable adolescent adventure. Rating: high 0 (-4 to +4) 5 (0 to 10)
New York Critics: 2 positive, 4 negative, 0 mixed
Last year we had the film THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD tell us about the personality of Robert E. Howard who from rural Texas spun yarns of barbarians fighting sorcerers. His chief character was Conan but some of his stories were about King Kull and took place in an earlier never-was. Kevin Sorbo, who plays TV's Hercules-with-pants stars as the title barbarian. The chief problem with this film is that it tells its story without worrying too much what its audience is. The plot is a little lightweight for an adult audience and has a little too much sex-play for a children's film.
Kull (Kevin Sorbo) is a barbarian fighter come to join an army in a country with an old and unbalanced king. The king has several sons fighting for the throne. In a fit of anger the old king kills some of his sons and Kull fights the king to stop him. Mortally wounded, the old king names the angry barbarian newcomer as his successor. |
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