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Calgary's annual gencon Con-Version had its 18th edition on the weekend of August 10-12, 2001, in beautiful downtown Cowtown. Well, it was downtown anyway; like every other large city in the world, its downtown core is generic skyscrapers and car parks.
While waiting for the Opening Ceremonies on Friday evening, I wandered into the Dealer Bourse to kill a bit of time and lighten my wallet by buying pulps. I got into a conversation with Cliff Samuels, a founder and a past just-about-everything of Con-Version, not to mention this year's Toastmaster. I asked him about rumors of a Calgary Worldcon or Westercon bid. He said that the ideas had been floated out into the ether, but while there was lots of enthusiasm, there was a lack of local volunteers who were both serious and competent, so the idea was left to float onward out to wherever it is that Pioneer 10 is nowadays.
The Opening Ceremonies were brisk and efficient as always. The Guests of Honour were invited to come forward and briefly mention what panels they would be on. Author GoH was David Drake, Science GoH was Dr. Bill Brooks, Media GoH was Dirk Benedict, Artist GoH was Jean-Pierre Normand, and Writers Workshop GoHs were Patrick and Honna Swenson. And from there to the first panel.
Robots In Space: This panel carried on the old debate of whether we should put our money into robot probes or International Tin Cans, pardon me, International Space Stations. Dr. Brooks, an associate of the Canadian Space Agency, said that robots are essential to lead the way for humans so the first explorers know what to expect. Entrepreneurs will wait for robot pathfinders to go first at government expense. Private industry will only take humans into space if the money is there, such as tourism (already done once by the Russians but as a government agency) and mining.
Another panelist, Blair Petterson, noted that remote probes needed intelligence to respond to unforeseen events. We cannot take direct control due to the long lag times for command responses, even at light speed, and even in our humble stellar system. Humans will always have the ability to deal with unforeseen events better than advanced robot probes. Someone said that it is better to sacrifice a robot's life than human lives, which brought up the Challenger and other space tragedies. The discussion then went into the details of the trouble and expense of maintaining human life in space, and the amount of work that goes into designing a spacesuit. Audience members remarked that excessive use of robots will make people lazy, at which point the panel veered off topic to discuss the influence of automation and television on us.
The Truth Is Out There: This was the conspiracy panel, which was also the last panel of Friday evening and therefore allowed to run longer. Advice to convention programme schedulers; this is not a one-hour panel, as it doesn't take much to get everybody heated up about their favorite conspiracies. This panel was dominated by Blair Petterson, whose day job is a barrister in Edmonton (200 km north of Calgary). As a consequence, he spends a lot of time in Court of Queen's Bench dealing with the aftermath of unsuccessful conspiracies. He said you never hear about the successful conspiracies. Conspiracies require complete trust among its members, a rare thing anywhere. What usually exposes most conspiracies is a disgruntled employee, ex-spouse, or jealous neighbor or friend.
SF novelist Leslie Gadallah was on the panel, and noted that the only way two people can be absolutely certain a secret is kept is if one of them is dead. Many paranoids confuse low-probability but actually occurring events (such as Lee Harvey Oswald's lucky shot) with conspiracy and refuse to accept that random events do happen. An audience member remarked that some conspiracy theorists are in it for fun, while someone else said it was just an advanced form of gossip. Gadallah said that many people would rather think their lives are a mess because of a conspiracy by government or multinationals instead of admitting personal responsibility.
A new motivation for believing in conspiracies that I hadn't heard before is that it is part of the innate human pattern recognition. Under this proposal by Petterson, conspiracy beliefs persist for the same reason that visual pattern recognition persists in humans. False alarms (is that a tiger over there ready to pounce on me?) are better than false complacency (naw, that's just a shadow, GROWL, CHOMP, CHOMP). Thus they persist in humans even though the evolutionary need for them may not be there anymore.
International Space Station: "Is it worth it?" was the question put to the panel. The consensus was that yes, it was worth doing, and yes, it is overpriced and serves no useful purpose. Dr. Brooks, said the best thing about it was that it has fostered international co-operation and provided valuable lessons on how people behave both on the ground and in space. Blair Petterson mentioned the Apollo/Soyuz rendevous as the predecessor to the ISS.
Canada's share of the ISS is 3%, mostly for the Canadarm 2 that is used to construct the space station. This is not enough for politicians to do any serious thinking about why Canuck astronauts are roaming around in low orbit. Brooks said the timidity of the space bureaucracy is not due to fear of another Challenger incident but rather accusations of wasted money by opposition parties. The demand for accountability in spending $100 million forces the creation of paper trails, so that if the matter erupts during Question Period in the House of Commons, then the CSA officials have themselves covered.
An audience member suggested that a lunar colony was more important than a tin can in orbit, to which Brooks responded that we should go to Mars before we return to the Moon. Someone remarked that zero-G space stations are evolutionary dead ends, since they will be of little help in designing long-term space habitats such as space arks or Mars ships. In the present day, they are poor experimental platforms due to vibrations and noise.
Extraterrestrial Cataclysms: Dr. William Serjeant (University of Saskatchewan) started off his presentation on this subject by saying that people use the term 'mass extinction' loosely. He applies it only to where a great diversity of taxonomic groups become extinct, not localized extinctions. The first real mass extinction was at the end of the Permian age about 250 megayears ago, when 97% of all life forms became extinct from an unknown cause, probably not an impact. Serjeant concentrated on the more famous Cretaceous extinction. He pointed out that most of the dinosaur groups faded out at various times before the termination of the Cretaceous 65 megayears ago, and a few persisted briefly into the following Palaeocene period. The Cretaceous extinction was not an abrupt termination but an inconclusive ending.
The Future Of Monsters: Panelist William Serjeant, whom we last saw speaking as a professor of geology in the Extraterrestrial Cataclysms panel, changed hats and identities, and spoke at this panel under his pen name of Anthony Swithin, with which he writes his fantasy novels. The question put to the panel was "What makes a scary monster?" Swithin said words suggest horror better than pictures because the former allow a reader to visualize his own worst fears, whereas a picture loses impact. Paula Johanson (Tesseracts editor) agreed, saying that wet, messy scenes cannot be as monstrous as what is not seen but only implied.
Robyn Herrington (short story writer whose day job is an editor at the University of Calgary) said the most frightening monsters are those roaming typical suburbs that we can relate to, the stereotypical "But he was a quiet man!" interview that neighbors give to the news media after the serial killer is arrested. Monsters in some fantastical background such as a pseudo-medieval place or another planet are competing with the background, which distracts the reader from the monster. An audience member mentioned that frightening monsters are those which act with intelligence, not just blindly roaring about but cold and calculating and out to get you. Rebecca Bradley (fantasy novelist) said monsters of the future will be tiny things like viruses or nanotechnology, such as an airborne Ebola-type virus with a long latency period.
New Planets: Con-Version always has a strong turnout for science panels, and this presentation by local astronomer Roland Dechesne was no exception. He presented a colorful slide show on the 80 or so extra-solar planets currently known. Random motion of gas clouds in a galaxy will always have some angular momentum, and the cloud will therefore eventually flatten into a disk. The cloud diameter is greater than our solar system in most nebula. Planets are hard for astronomers to separate from the disk of the parent star; spectral methods are most commonly used to do this. Only Jupiter-class or greater planets are found, since the technology does not yet exist to identify smaller planets. The searches are emphasizing Sun-type or red dwarf stars, as there is not much point in checking pulsars or obviously unstable systems. Astronomers are not just looking for planets per se, but planets nearby that may have life. Gas giants could have life on their satellites.
Conventions Past, Present, And Future: This panel started off with a discussion about the ideal type of chairman. A dictator who runs the show efficiently makes for a well-remembered convention by the general membership, as much as he may be detested by the tiny clique of SMOFs and BOFs who think they are true fandom. The genial chairman who gets on well with everyone but can't or won't hold the committee chairmen responsible is the one who produces disasters.
It was asked from the audience if there is any future for conventions in this Internet age. The answer was a resounding yes, on the premise that SF conventions are the only place where geeks can socialize on equitable terms. Other benefits of conventions are a place for editors and publishers to gather for deal making, and as a place for awards such as Hugos and Auroras.
The most disquieting moment of Con-Version came when a neo arrived for this panel a bit late and the panelists had to not only explain basic terms to him such as 'Worldcon', but also explain that most conventions emphasize literary SF. This neo was used to the idea that an SF convention was something you paid admission to and sat back to watch bit-part actors do a question-and-answer session. It was frightening to have to explain the concept of volunteerism to him, a typical 'fan' not of the future but of the present.
Gigantologies: "Why do book series go on forever?" asked moderator Tony King at the start of this panel. He then mimicked a televangelist, pointing at panelists David Drake, Dave Duncan, and Ann Marston, and shouted "Do these sinners repent?" The answer, as it turned out, was 'No' from all of them, all three of whom have SF novel series. Duncan said that endless serials are a time-honored tradition thousands of years old. Ancient bards didn't recite entire epic poems in one sitting, but told such favorites as The Iliad and The Odyssey in installments. Conversely, many epic poems were stretched out from their shorter, original versions because the audience wanted more.
Drake said he found it was better for him to write non-series stories in between installments of his series, for otherwise the labor dragged on him. Some authors want to stop a series but faced with a $3 million contract for more of the same they can't refuse. He said he sets up his own series so that he is comfortable with himself artistically if he goes on longer than intended. Marston said it is difficult for writers to break loose, while Drake said to the contrary that a successful author shouldn't force a publisher to take a non-series if it leads to bad feelings.
The consensus of the panel was that gigantologies exist because they sell, no matter that a few fans might complain.
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