Apollocon 2009: "SF: Then and Now"

Of all the panels I attended, this one was the best. Moderated by Bill Crider, the panel included Alexis Glynn Latner, Bennie Grezlik, Larry Friesen, and Lawrence Person.

Bill started off the discussion with an obvious question: where do we start? Does SF/F begin with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells or somewhere else? Lawrence chimed in with his take: SF started great with Verne and Wells, then proceeded to "suck" for a few years, then, gradually, started to get good again. Larry stepped and reminded everyone that Edgar Rice Burroughs used then-current science as the basis for the science in his Mars books. Sure, it's a little cheesy now but back then, it was current thought. Bill made a point that we know too much now. All the panelists and many audience members nodded their heads.

Bill then posed the question using Lawrence's term: Did SF really "suck" back in the days when Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Amazing Stories. Alexis said it was like comparing apples, oranges, and key limes. She mentioned Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud. Lawrence countered by saying that modern crud is so much better and more proficient than Golden Age crud.

A member of the audience asked the panel to discuss "science fiction" before Gernsbeck, that is how Wells, Verne, and Burroughs rose up to the prominence they have now. Lawrence stated that in those years, "science fiction" wasn't a genre as we know it now. They were just stories. Gernsbeck realized that there was a market for a magazine that features these kinds of stories. Thus, he created Amazing Stories.

In these days, many times authors wrote stories where the idea was the hero. Larry pointed out that authors would take a known situation, even if it was in space, and examine what would happen when an Idea intruded. This led, eventually, to sub-par stories, something John W. Campbell tried to rectify when he was editor Astounding Stories in the 1940s.

The next question was: Why should we care about the old stuff if so much of it is bad? Larry said that in 1970, when the New-Wave SF was being written, he didn't like it. A story, for him, has to be worth telling. He'd rather read an interesting story badly written than a story with a bad concept excellently written. For a good overview of pre-Golden Age SF, Lawrence suggest Isaac Asimov's Before the Golden Age, a time more or less from the mid-late 1930s through the 1950s. Among the name floated: Van Vogt, Heinlein, de Camp, Doc Smith, Robert E. Howard.

Bill made sure that everyone was on the same page with the term "SF." Was it science fiction or speculative fiction? Speculative, the panel agreed. Larry then asked posed a question and answered it: What is SF? It's a story about stuff you think could happen, not necessarily about stuff you know couldn't happen. That is, if you know that Mars doesn't have any living thing on it, that would be "fantasy" if you wrote about it now, but it wasn't when Burroughs wrote his stories.

The panel discussed the short fiction market back in the day as well as the various media available back then and now. Bill's next topic was space opera. We had it back then and we have it again now. Bennie, like Lawrence, said that the stuff we have now is so much better than it was back in earlier ages. Larry brought up John Campbell's guideline: treat the background as the background unless your reader need to know something. (Goes back to the world building ideas I've been writing about, including the Epic Fantasy panel.) Bill said that modern readers and writers are much more sophisticated nowadays. Larry misses the way certain authors like Burroughs composed sentences. He flags the first paragraph, which happens to be one sentence, of Warlord of Mars, Burroughs' third Barsoom book. Here is is.

In the shadows of the forest that flanks the crimson plain by the
side of the Lost Sea of Korus in the Valley Dor, beneath the hurtling
moons of Mars, speeding their meteoric way close above the bosom of
the dying planet, I crept stealthily along the trail of a shadowy
form that hugged the darker places with a persistency that proclaimed
the sinister nature of its errand.

The panel discussed a topic near and dear to Bill's heart: artwork. It, like the stories, is much more sophisticated. Weird Tales was mentioned as a good example of artwork that is both good and cheesy. Alexis mentioned that imagery we now get from the Hubble telescope or any of the Voyager missions. Talk about sense of wonder. Larry said you can't write like Burroughs anymore. Lawrence countered and said you can, you just have to change you science.

Speaking of change, a last point Bill made was to read the following authors: Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Jack Williamson, and Clifford Simak. You should read some early material and then some later material to discern how they changed their styles with the times.

The discussions went right up to the end of the hour. It was a highly informative panel and I learned quite a bit. Hope you did, too.

Apollocon 2009: Astronaut Stanley G. Love

Without a doubt, the coolest thing I did at Apollocon 2009 was watch the presentation by Astronaut Stanley G. Love. (here's the official NASA bio; here's some cool photos of Love in training)

He brought an 18-minute video which he narrated and told us interesting stories and details. The video images were amazing, things we earth-bound humans never get to see. Perhaps the coolest shot was of the International Space Station after the Shuttle Atlantis left. There was the ISS, floating majestically above the Earth, a shining example of human ingenuity. Absolutely gorgeous.

Other facts we all learned from the video and the Q&A session:

• The orange suits weight 80 lb.
• As soon as the fuel tank is jettisoned, the astronauts start working. That is, they are barely in orbit.
• The entire first day or orbit is devoted to an examination of the heat shields. A camera is put on Atlantis' arm and they take video of the bottle of the shuttle.
• A normal airplane, when landing, comes in on a 3-degree angle. The shuttle lands at a 20-degree angle. (Yikes!)
• When the shuttle lands, without engines don't forget, it is traveling at 345 MPH.
• Love went on two spacewalks. The suit is 350 lb (on earth). He said that trying to close one's hand in the spacewalk suit is about the same as trying to squeeze a tennis ball. Numerous times, in training mainly, his body got a little bruised and bloody from being in the suit.
• The shuttle orbits the Earth every 90 minutes at a rate of approximately 55 minutes of light and 35 minutes of darkness. You have no dawn or twilight. One second it's dark, the next it's noontime bright. (That was my question, BTW.)
  
• The movie "Apollo 13" got the science right.
• He knew, within the first frame of "Independence Day" that they got the science all wrong.
  

One of the audience members asked about claustrophobia. Love told us about one of the tests NASA conducts. They strap electrical stuff to your body to monitor your heart rate, etc. Then, they zip you up in a three-foot canvas 'ball'. This ball has a fan for fresh air so you don't necessarily get too hot. They put you in a room, turn off the lights, *and don't tell you* how long they'll keep you there. He said the NASA scientists know within minutes who's a good candidate and who isn't.

Another question came about nausea in space. About one to two hours after lift-off, you begin to have 'stomach awareness,' a nice euphemistic way of saying nausea. The nausea, to one degree or another, usually lasts one to two days. Most astronauts who just get in space are directed to keep Earth-like visual cues. That is, the floor is 'down' and the ceiling is 'up.' After days and weeks in space, you're brain adjusts and you can eat, sleep, rest anywhere in the 3D space inside the ISS.

After the Q&A, Love signed photos and made himself available for additional questions. I got one for my son who was duly impressed that his dad met a real, live astronaut. A NASA rep brought with her scale models of the Ares class of rocket, the ones that'll replace the shuttle. These rockets are massive, almost twice as high as the shuttle and the Saturn V rocket that took our astronauts to the moon forty years ago.

I don't know about y'all but I just eat up all this space exploration stuff. NASA, its history and all that it accomplished, is utterly fascinating. After seeing the Ares rocket models, I'm really looking forward to humans returning to the moon. I just want to see it.

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Apollocon 2009: "Does Fantasy Have to be Epic?"

I was interested in this sessions mainly because I'm interested in where the short SF/F books went. The panelists included Martha Wells (moderator), Lillian Stewart Carl, Dee Beetem, Gail Dayton, and A. Lee Martinez.

Lillian, who is up for a Hugo later this summer, started the process with the obvious: epics and multi-book stories are publisher driven. Back in the day, Robert E. Howard wrote many stories about Conan but they were all stand-alones. All fantasy lives in the shadow of J. R. R. Tolkien. He wrote a multi-book epic with grand sweep (forget that the book is really one large book) and he set the bar and the mold. However, Tolkien was an exception. He wrote The Lord of the Rings without the market in mind. Indeed, there was not a market at all.

Dee brought up a good point: writers spend a lot of time building a world. Once built, it better pay off dividends. Lee stated that series is what people want. While he didn't come out and say it, I think series characters, like our TV series and late-night talk show hosts, are essentially comfort food. We want to return to that galaxy far, far away or read the latest Harry Bosch novel time and again.

The talk progressed to writing style. Lillian said that readers will be tolerant of bad writing if the story is good. (Kind of like Nora Roberts' first rule of writing I mentioned in the "Raiders of the Lost Maguffin" write-up)

Lee finds himself bored with the same old worlds. That's why he writes stand-alones and builds the world up every time. At this, Martha brought up another obvious point: readers nowadays are so sophisticated and they have so many genre tropes ingrained in our Reader DNA that a writer doesn't necessarily have to world-build the way they used to (like Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example). Again, Robert E. Howard was mentioned. He wrote what he knew. Sure, he used a different name for a four-legged animal you ride but its really a horse. All the panelists said they disliked wacky names for the sense of being wacky. I agree with them. Some of the names Alan Dean Foster used in his early books were a bunch of consonants. Lee said it best: we writers put too much pressure on ourselves to world build. It's not all that necessary to have the entire global structure in place before you write a story. You can world build with what's around the character and, as Martha said, you can fill in some gaps in the next book. Gail concluded about world building that you can explain as you go.

A funny aside: all the panelists, when they discussed Epic Fantasy, would take their hands and make an arc with one hand, almost like a rainbow. That morphed into visual code for "epic fantasy." It became the funny joke of the hour and Lee ran with it, visually describing other books with shorter arcs, choppy arcs, or none at all.

In summary, I think the panelists came to the same conclusion: sure, there is a market for massive, epic fantasy stories with tons of world building. But that's not the end-all, be-all in fantasy literature. There's more out there that's good.

Apollocon 2009: "Raiders of the Lost Maguffin"

The Lost Maguffin session, Friday night at 8pm, was the first one I attended. The panelists were Rosemary Clement-Moore (M), Tim Frayser, Joe McKinney, Gail Dayton. Here's the write-up that enticed me in the room: "Adventure novels sweep us up and take us away. Our panelists talk about the way adventure novels work in spec fic and why we love them."

The audience totaled about 20 people including A. Lee Martinez, an author an panelist of other topics. Rosemary, the moderator, had with her a sheet with guidelines and questions to help the panelists and audience members discuss various topics within the subject. The most obvious question is about the appeal of adventure fiction. Why is it important. Tim answered with an obvious statement: adventure fiction is a character study. In an adventure story, certain traits of a person's character will be revealed through the trials of the story. Most of the panelists agreed.

Next, we discussed Joseph Campbell's Myth arc and whether or not the "Thing" being sought ought to be physical or metaphysical. Gail agreed that the Thing can be either, especially in light of the character-based definition of the previous question. Joe McKinney, a homicide detective in San Antonio, reminded everyone that the ring in the Lord of the Rings was something to be destroyed, not obtained.

From this lofty discussion, the panel quickly started discussing science and plausibility in adventure fiction. Unfortunately, a certain archaeologist with a bullwhip didn't fare well. For most, the Atomic Bomb/Fridge scene in Indy 4 was so bad as to make the film unwatchable. For others, it was the aliens and the flying spaceship. Rosemary did say, however, that since the film was supposed to be about the 1950s and all the stuff we were fixated on, aliens and invasion was actually okay with her. Others brought up the tricorders in Star Trek as examples of things that use spurious science.

The gradual consensus was summed up in Nora Roberts single rule of writing: Don't Bore the Reader. If a writer sets up a world with certain rules, even if they have questionable scientific merit, a reader is more than willing to go along As Long As The Story Is Good.

In all, the session was fun and informative. It helped me sort out my current WIP (the steampunk thing; see here and here for sample sentences) and has put me on a new course for the project.

Apollocon 2009: Introduction

Well, I've finished my first full day here at Apollocon. It's being held up at the Doubletree near Intercontinental Airport, a fair drive for me (about 50 minutes or so). I have a main goal for this convention: to attend the writer's workshop and receive some feedback on my new WIP, a steampunk mystery thing. (I'm not really sure what it's all going to be yet.)

Also, I hope to make some contacts and just enjoy the con.

Here is a list of the panels I plan on attending (some I already did).

• Raiders of the Lost Maguffin
• Does Fantasy Have to be Epic?
• Special guest: Astronaut Stanley G. Love
• Anachrohnism Mash-up: Steampunk, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica
• Then and Now -- How SF has Changed (moderated by Bill Crider)
• Batman Turns 70

I'll provide write-ups on all the panels as well as the results of the writing workshop here at SF Safari.

Enjoy.