Fogcon

[james_davis_nicoll]

The 2011 FOGcon will be held March 11-13 at the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway Hotel in San Francisco. Honored Guests include Pat Murphy and Jeff VanderMeer; Ann VanderMeer, editorial Honored Guest; and the late Fritz Leiber, posthumous Honored Guest. This year’s theme is The City in SF/F.

A shiny quatloo to any attendee who mentions Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities.

I'd love to read reports on this. I can't attend FOGcon myself, if only because it's on the wrong side of the border, but it sounds interesting.

Comments

[alyxyn.livejournal.com]

A posthumous guest? How do they do that, have someone bring Lieber's ashes to the Con, or what?

Colour me gobsmacked.

[caper-est.livejournal.com]

Well, he did now and then do dark fantasy. Or was it, after all, fantasy?

Oo-er, oo-er...

[alyxyn.livejournal.com]

[eyes caper_est with dark suspicion]

Well, at least I have a 3,000 or so mile head start if he turns out to be hungry.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Given that you can actually take a walking tour of all the places mentioned in Our Lady of Sorrows, and that the mystic graffiti mentioned in the book existed before Leiber started writing it, I'd say his work is straight reportage. A lot like Lovecraft, in fact, for anyone who has ever spent time in New England.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

The Ghost of Honour is quite a widely-observed convention at conventions in these days. Paul Cornell is currently agitating for its inverse, a sort of foetus-of-honour at WorldCon, where they will celebrate a future luminary not yet born. I have not entirely got my head around how that will work...

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

oooooOooOOoooOoooo.

This sounds like something I need to crash.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i do not know you, so i do not know if you're serious or not. but please don't. please buy a membership. this is the first year of this convention, and they need the (financial) support.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I don't think he was using "crash" in that sense.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Aw, don't fret. Let's just get them here, then we can have our specially trained teams of crack Shakedown Ninjas shake 'em down. Plus anyone found in the hotel without a badge can be impressed as Personal Renfield to Mr. Leiber. (Or Ms. Murphy! We're not antivitalists here.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I'll have that quatloo from you, James. I am now determined (and I'm on a panel about London, so opportunity is mine, bwahaha...).

About that quatloo...

[cshalizi.livejournal.com]

A shiny quatloo to any attendee who mentions Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities.

Please don't. The journal in question has a silly embargo policy which keeps me from even pointing you to a preprint, but let's just say you shouldn't believe everything you read in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA), especially when you read theoretical physicists trying to do empirical data analysis. I say this as an former theoretical physicist who now teaches data analysis for a living.

Re: About that quatloo...

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I had no trouble accessing a PDF.

Possibly my institution's IP addresses are blessed, or something, but I don't think so.

(Or are you speaking of a different paper?)

Re: About that quatloo...

[cshalizi.livejournal.com]

I mean that I've written a paper re-analyzing that data (the sets I could get hold of, anyway), and reached, well, rather different conclusions than they did. And my paper is under review at a journal which doesn't allow preprints.

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

So you can't cross the border?

Are you at liberty to say why?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's more that since the US officially takes the position that non-Americans are subhumans without human rights, I don't care to roll the dice to see if the particular border guard I end up dealing with is an ok person or a power-mad troglodyte with a pistol and tazer just for personal amusement. There are things that will get me to visit the US but cons are not on the list.

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

I actually use the same border crossing that Peter Watts used and don't have any problems even when I say I am going to a science fiction convention.

It is security theatre though since there are ways of talking and reacting that make things easier for me.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

In something not wholly unlike fairness, I hear they're treating American citizens the same way. There is a reason I haven't flown in the last ten years.