Monthly Archives: August 2010

Blog

ConGlomeration: crowdsourcing the sf convention

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Well, would you look at that. After a good few years of folk kvetching and moaning into their ale about how the internet is killing off small-to-medium sized sf/f conventions, someone’s finally decided to take the bull by the horns and make the web work for conventions. Jay Garmon, head honcho of Louisville’s ConGlomeration, has teamed up with the stalwarts over at SF Signal and turned over the programming of next year’s ConGlom to the intermatubes:

After five years as a staffer at my local convention, Louisville’s own ConGlomeration, I’ve stepped up as programming co-chair on the organizing committee. But I come at this after 10 years as an online content producer and old-school social media Kool-Aid-drinker. I believe, as Doc Searls taught us, that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. I believe that with many eyes, all bugs are shallow. I believe in black swans, tipping points, and the wisdom of crowds. And, above all, I’m looking for a few brave first followers.

I want the Internet – and especially the readership of SF Signal – to program ConGlomeration 2011.

[…]

ConGlomeration may be housed in Louisville, KY, but so far as I’m concerned, it belongs to all of sci-fi fandom – starting with everyone reading this SF Signal post. Conventions have always been labors of love, made possible by dozens or even hundreds of fans cooperating to create a shared, communal product. I see no reason why that collaboration has to be limited to people within arm’s reach. This is your con, too, and we want you to help create it.

Garmon sounds very idealistic and optimistic, and there’s a more than reasonable chance that his plan might falter for lack of enthusiam (though I sincerely hope it doesn’t). But what’s excellent about this for me (as someone who ain’t gonna be dropping by Louisville any time soon, sadly) is to see someone trying to bridge ‘trad’ fandom and web fandom without taking anything from either. Garmon’s far from being the first to do so (Cheryl Morgan is about as tireless a worker in both wings of fandom as anyone could ask for, for instance), but this is a big bold move, and I wish him the best of luck with it.

So go pitch in some suggestions, why don’t you? If you’ve never been to a convention, and you’re local enough, this might be an ideal first opportunity to get the full experience – cons at their best aren’t passive events like a movie screening, but fully participatory. Get involved, give something back to the genre you love… and you’ll get a lot more in return. Go on.

[ The caveat here is that I’m not sure the web actually is killing live-action fandom – though I only have limited experience of the con scene on this side of the pond, and none Stateside. Changing it, certainly… reinventing and streamlining it, perhaps… but killing it? Given how quick we are to say that sf itself is dying (which has been a common refrain since long before I was even born, by all accounts), I suspect rumours of the death of conventions have been greatly exaggerated… and maybe even exacerbated by the legendary conservatism and resistance to change that – very ironically – has always been a part of core fandom. Go figure. And after you’ve figured, go get involved. It’s fun. You’ll enjoy it. 🙂 ]

Fiction

NEW FICTION: OR WE WILL ALL HANG SEPARATELY by Nancy Jane Moore

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This month’s fiction from Nancy Jane Moore takes us back to a post-collapse America, but this isn’t your average post-apocalyptic story. “Or We Will Hang Separately” brings together a bunch of favourite Futurismic themes – post-capitalist lifestyles, changes in climate (environmental, political and social), and resilient communities – and dares to dream that the end of an era doesn’t have to be the end of the line, that our technology can rebuild as well as destroy. Quiet, powerful and optimistic, this is where determined people work together to transcend a difficult future. Enjoy!

Or We Will All Hang Separately

By Nancy Jane Moore

Marty Shendo knew both the truck and the roads best, so she drove. Ooljee Yzaguirre rode shotgun – literally: She kept a rifle in her lap. Tomas Perez sat in the back, his gun also in easy reach. Within most communities – or at least the ones Ooljee knew – no one went armed. Traveling between them, everyone did.

The dust blowing in the open windows made it difficult to talk. Both Marty and Ooljee had covered their mouths and noses with kerchiefs, like old fashioned bandits, and Tomas had pulled his cap down over his face to block the worst of it. It was too hot to close the windows.

Ooljee stared out at the parched southern New Mexico landscape. Even before the extended droughts brought on by climate change, this had been harsh country to live in. Now, though, most people had given up trying to make a living out here. Even goats, who can survive on land incompatible with any other domesticated animal, need water.

She wondered what they would find up at Los Alamos — the enclave of scientists they were hoping for or just another group of people trying to survive in a world in which few things worked any more. Or maybe bandits, or, even worse, nothing at all. It was a long way to travel if it turned out to be nothing, especially in a jerry-rigged solar-powered truck that hit its high of 25 miles per hour only on downhill stretches.

“Please don’t let it be for nothing,” Ooljee thought. It might have been a prayer, if she’d known of any gods to pray to. Continue reading NEW FICTION: OR WE WILL ALL HANG SEPARATELY by Nancy Jane Moore →

Blog

Wearable computing: the state of the art

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Martin Magnusson got bored of waiting for the cyberpunk future we were promised in the mid-eighties, so he decided to build his own wearable cyberdeck rig. The version pictured [ganked from this Wired article] is a little crude, perhaps (I quite like the did-it-myself workbench aesthetic of exposed cables, personally, though it’d be a nightmare in a combat situation)), but he’s also managed to scrunch the bulk of it down into a little CD-case-shoulder-bag number for the more style-conscious geek-about-town.

Martin Magnusson's wearable computer

In case you’re wondering about battery life (which was my first question), Magnusson reckons he gets three hours of juice from four AA batteries, which is better than I’d have expected, though still not too awesome. Time to look at harvesting waste energy from the body, Mister Magnusson? 🙂

Blog

Elon Musk dreams of Martian retirement condos

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The Astronomer Royal may think manned spaceflight is a pipedream, but Elon Musk – the fantastically-moniker’d founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors, as well as private space company SpaceX – begs to differ. In fact, he seems to be taking Stephen Hawking’s eggs-in-the-basket metaphor to heart, and wants save the human species from the existential threats that come from living on the surface of a planet with a history of having large space rocks smash into it.

Wearing my cynic’s hat for a moment, I suspect Musk’s stated desire to move to Mars when he retires is at least as much about giving good soundbite as it is a genuine statement of intent — all the highest-flying entrepreneurs have a bit of the P T Barnum about them, after all. But with SpaceX he’s at least putting his money where his mouth is, and this Guardian pen-portrait paints him as being quite removed from the flamboyant Ben Gunn stereotype of spaceflight boosterism; apparently, SpaceX isn’t about making Musk another fortune.

…he is risking his fortune to start a company in a field most people said could not support a project like SpaceX. Again and again, he returns to the themes that keep him going. He sees what SpaceX is doing as part of humanity’s destiny. “I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring even if it is vicarious. When the US landed on the moon it was for all humanity. We count that as a human achievement. Anyone who could get near a TV got near a TV. If there was one TV in an African village and you had to walk 50 miles to get there, you’d do it,” he says.

And through it all is the desire to colonise Mars. Musk insists that his most powerful Falcon 9 rockets could already launch missions to Mars if assembled in Earth’s orbit. He wants SpaceX to help humanity spread into space, just like the first European explorers setting out for the New World. “One of the long-term goals of SpaceX is, ultimately, to get the price of transporting people and product to Mars to be low enough and with a high enough reliability that if somebody wanted to sell all their belongings and move to a new planet and forge a new civilisation they could do so.”

There’s something about the way he candidly admits to a long-term mission that everyone else in the business considers impossible (or impractical, or just plain laughable) that makes me want to believe he’s telling the truth. It’s a tough time for dreamers right now — hell, it’s a tough time for everyone — but perhaps adversity will be the heat in the forge.

That said, the analogy to the European colonisation of the New World is an uneasy one; even if there are no natives on Mars to exploit or extinguish (that we know of, at any rate), the earliest transAtlantic colonists had a rough old time of it, and they were sustained by the promise of bounteous resources rather than bijou retirement villas. Life beyond the gravity well won’t be a picnic until long after we’ve managed to get ourselves there… and Charlie Stross has a pretty solid set of arguments that suggest the analogy of space colonisation to the Westward expansion in the US is equally (if not more) flawed.

Even so… if you’re reading, Mister Musk, I’d like to put a small downpayment on a condo sited on the lower slopes of Olympus Mons; sea views a bonus.

Oh yeah, and you should totally hire Jason Stoddard as your head of PR. I’m not even kidding about that bit, either.