Balticon 42, Hunt Valley, Maryland — Saturday, May 24th
The first program items today began at 10 a.m. So, we bundled out of bed early to get something to eat before going to the first panel. Paul had to find a post office and went on a coffee/hot chocolate search.
10 a.m.: On the use of dogs and ocean liners as literary devices in SF. Panelists: Connie Willis, Bill DeSmedt, and Joy Ward.
This was an interesting panel as they discussed the getting the reader involved and caring. It was pretty much agreed that killing the dog is not a good thing and neither is putting a child in jeopardy. The problem is that movies and some authors cheat and kill pets or put a child in danger only as a short cut to showing someone is evil or to get a quick setup rather than to work at the writing. You can kill a dog/cat/whatever but it should be because of the impact it will have on your characters and the stories, not to get an emotional reaction from your reader — the emotional reaction should come from the story. I’m probably not expressing it as clearly as they did in their discussion. If you do it, it has to be for a good “story” reason. There was a lot of talk of animals in SF and how they are used with loads of examples and discussions (sorry you weren’t here).
Talk then turned to the Titanic and its use as a literary device. Mention was made of The Onion‘s headline “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg“. The discussion meandered over many areas including how so much of the research material doesn’t actually deal with the sinking of the ship but as a metaphor for just about any problem you can imagine. It’s also useful because as a tragedy the ship was sailing along then smacks into an iceberg and there’s 2:20 minutes to realize that this is it and you’ve going down and, most likely, dying. So, there’s time to have the characters react and deal with what’s happening. The best movie was said to be A Night To Remember.
Next, we visited the Art Show. Lots of lovely pieces on display. John Jude Palencar is the Artist Guest of Honor and there were some wonderful works of his on display. Some is so creepy it gives me the shivers and some so sublimely beautiful that you could just stare at it for hours with a different feeling to the shivers.
We dropped by the Capclave table to chit chat. Capclave is the Washington DC area’s local convention. I covered last year’s convention in this blog. This year’s guests of honor will be James Morrow and Michael Dirda.
2 p.m.: Plagues as a theme. Panelists: Carl Cipra (moderator), Michael Flynn, Perrianne Lurie, and Connie Willis.
Connie Willis and Michael Flynn have both written books that had plagues at the center of the stories. Perrianne Lurie is an MD. Discussion again was wide ranging on various diseases past, present, and future. One of the interesting items was discussion of the 1918 flu epidemic in the US that killed thousands of people. What came up was how people of the correct age when asked remembered that this uncle, aunt, brother, sister, cousin, and so on died then but they just never talked about it. That, when a disaster is so catastrophic to family, people just seem to close it off and go on like it never happened. The audience then talked about similar reactions to 9/11. There’s a lot of literature out there that deals with plagues. Panelists believe that SF deals a lot with post-apocalyptic worlds and if it’s not a bomb it’s usually a plague. There’s still a lot of areas that can be explored but it is getting a bit overused now.
With nothing to do until a panel at 5 p.m., Paul and I went off to stalk a meal. Luckily there’s a fairly large complex of shops across the highway and many restaurants in varying price categories. This time we chose Panera — love their sandwiches.
5 p.m.: Blended genres: Panelists: Carl Cipra (moderator), Chris Lester, Connie Willis, J. Ardian Lee.
All the panelists agreed that genres are artificial designations that are set by publishers to help sales. That the important thing is to write the story you want to write and let an editor/publisher worry about marketing and putting it in a genre. What gets put on the spine is not something that the author has control over. However, there was some discussion and (to my mind) legitimate grumbling how when a traditional fiction (usually famous) author puts in an element of SF it’s touted as the best thing since sliced bread even though, in the SF field, it’s been done, years earlier, and usually better. And the current reviewers seldom, if ever, mention the similar or better works that have been done previously. They talked about how often people say they hate SF or Fantasy or whatever but that this book (whatever the author just wrote) is so good they don’t consider it SF or Fantasy or whatever. That this attitude on the part of readers doesn’t exactly work to break the SF/F/whatever genre ghetto. There was also some discussion of Readers (those who read just about anything good they find no matter what the genre designation) and Recreational Readers (those who seem to just read within a narrow definition of what is a worthy book determined by other people than themselves). Interesting and lots of food for thought in this panel.
Now we have a few hours until the Masquerade so thought I’d get this written up. This is the first year that I haven’t had to pick which of the three or four great panels to go to each hour. For some reason, even though there’s 10 rooms of programming in several tracks, I’m having a problem even finding one panel per time period that I want to see. At least this year, I’ll have plenty of time to visit the dealers’ room, the Art Show, and visit with friends. I wonder if I’m getting jaded or this is just one of those years when the programming doesn’t match my taste. It feels weird to be at loose ends like this during a con that has historically kept me running from panel to panel so I wouldn’t miss anything.
9 p.m. Masquerade: The Balticon masquerade is always worth taking the time to for. This year there were 32 entries (not all for competition). The young fan costumers were as usual a mixed bag of cute, sweet, and really interesting. The novice costumers certainly prove that they’ll be serious competitors in the near future. There were some outstanding costumes. My only complaint is that seated you can’t really see the costumes clearly below mid-chest level. This year, that problem was rectified by having live video of the contestants shown on a large screen next to the stage so you got a good look at the costumes clearer and sharper than you could see them from your seat. Someone said that they thought that they might be broadcasting the masquerade on the hotel system but no one could confirm that — if so, it would have greatly added to the comfort level to see them from your hotel room. On the other hand, it would not give the costumers the audience feedback that they so richly deserve for all their hard work and long hours in putting their costumes and presentation together. One of the memorable costumes was an assemble piece of Sleeping Beauty and they had the fairy godmothers changing the color of the gown as they prince and princess danced — it was amazing as it changed from pink to blue. Very clever bit of design and technical thinking on this one.
Hyperion here. Today I attended a fantastic (possibly in more ways than one) program item entitled “Hot Fusion”. Tom Ligon, who worked with Dr. Robert Bussard before his death last year, gave a presentation concerning the work being done in Inertial-Electrostatic-Fusion. The names being dropped are all reputable and famous, so there’s a good chance that everything presented is on the up and up, but I’m not a high energy physicist, nor do I play one on TV, so I pass on what was said without attempting to validate any of it for scientific muster.
Unfortunately the room was dark so I was unable to take notes, which would seem to be a very important thing when trying to describe advances in high-energy physics. I did take snap shots of the slides he put up so I do have some reference material, but please bare with me if you know anything about this and find that I’m less than totally accurate. For more details he recommends looking up his article, “The World’s Simplest Nuclear Reactor Revisited”, which was published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in the January/February 2008 issue. 
In the corner of the room was a small fusion reactor that was brought in for display purposes. According to Tom, if fed a supply of deuterium, the reactor would indeed result in nuclear fusion. Of course it would only be a “ping or two”, but it does prove that fusion should really be cheap and easy. He didn’t directly denigrate the official Tokomak Fusion project, but I’ve heard enough bad things from reputable scientists to know that most scientists have little hope that this will be any more than multi-billion dollar jobs program, never reaching break-even, never mind being commercially viable. What little I have heard of Inertial-Electrostatic Fusion over the last decade has sounded far more promising, and Tom gave an update on where the researchers in the field are. We were also treated to small snippets of history, which were kind to some, and rather damning to others. I think it’s best to leave those details vague.
The basic concept of IEF fusion is that instead of trying to heat up particles in order to make them fuse, it’s more efficient to set up looping electro-magnetic fields that force the electrons and deuterium (or protons and Boron) to make multiple high-speed passes at each other and let the laws of statistics force them to collide at high velocities if given a bit of time, which due to the old laws of the thermodynamics (which says that heat is basically just a function of the movement of molecules), sets up the same conditions as the more traditional fusion experiments, but in a much smaller space, with a lot less muss and fuss.
Researchers have been working for years to refine the confinement schemes to maximize particle flow and minimize particle loss due to accidental collisions between the particles and parts of the reactor. And apparently a few years ago, success was reached, although they destroyed the reactor by trying to push it beyond its limits. Now they’ve built a new and improved model, and seek full peer review before announcing anything prematurely.
What would this mean if it’s all true? According to Tom, one railroad car of boron-11 would generate enough electricity to power the United States for a year. A reactor the size of an office-desk, powered by a one-liter bottle of deuterium, could power an average city for a month. If, and I stress if, this is true, it would basically eliminate power from ever being an issue of supply and demand ever again. Tom hopes that a 100 Mega-Watt demonstration reactor could be on-line within 5 years.
And, since this is a science fiction convention, what would it mean for space travel? Dr. Bussard drew up plans for a single-stage, fully reusable, space plane which would be able to reach Low Earth Orbit (LEO) carrying 35 tons of cargo at a price of about $27/kg. Note that the current costs are anywhere between $4,000/kg – $10,000/kg. LEO to the moon was quoted as $24/kg, and LEO to Mars would be $232/kg. Of course these prices have to be taken with a grain of salt, but if even the order of magnitude is correct, it would open up the whole solar system to fast cheap travel.
Again, I don’t pretend to claim any of the above is actually true, but I have to admit that the people saying it aren’t considered nut cases or glory hounds, but actual reputable scientists. And an old geek like me can’t help feeling a bit of that old Buck Rodgers excitement at the thought that maybe, just maybe, I’ll live long enough get to stand on Mare Imbrium and watch the Earth rise after all. I’m not betting the family farm, but I’ll keep watching and hoping.