Ketchup

Bless the gods, for once we didn’t have anything lined up (this was Sunday morning) until I opened my mouth the previous afternoon and suggested a meeting. It was a target of opportunity. That’s what WorldCon is all about, right? Everyone’s actually in the same place. Sitting down with these guys just made too much sense.

Diana and I were still able to sleep in until 9am, which is a wild luxury, after which I headed off to the dealer’s room for the rendezvous while she enjoyed a long shower (we’re on water rationing in California) and a slow cup of coffee with the newspaper. Some vacation! “Let me take you to exotic Denver, sweetheart, where I’ll run you around in circles for three days until, finally, you can have two quiet hours on Sunday.” Bwah HA ha ha ha ha!

The meeting went well, I thought, and I was glad for the chance to cross-pollinate my brain cells with these guys. We’ll see what comes of it.

Afterward, D and I met up again and cruised for more books and souvenirs. Naturally, we also ran into six more friends and colleagues for quick, energetic exchanges of what we’d been seeing and doing, plus a few fun photos, including this one of The Men In Black. You should definitely check out the high-octane vampire novel Staked by Jeremy F. Lewis, which I nominated for the Nebula, I thought it was so much fun, and also look for the short fiction of Eric James Stone. Who is wearing a t-shirt of Eric James Stone wearing a t-shirt of Eric James Stone wearing a t-shirt of Eric James Stone. I love that guy!

The continuing mayhem was capped by lunch with a small pack of writers and editors, away from the convention center, which was nice. I was feeling worn out. But it was time to return soon enough. Literally! I had a panel on The Physics of Time Travel with two wildly intelligent people, Todd Brun and David Friedman, at which I cast myself as the color commentator. If we’d been announcing a football game, they would have been the two who gave you the statistics and the play-by-play while I said things like “Wow, that guy is running really fast!” My education in quantum physics starts and stops with BACK TO THE FUTURE, whereas they actually knew what they were talking about when we got to subjects like string theory and the topography of the space-time continuum. Holy wow!

The panel went well enough. We had a huge audience, and I got to do my Terminator impersonation in my best, slow, ominous Arnold voice: “Come with me if you want to live.” Does it get any better than that?

Afterwards, Diana and I circulated a bit and ran into several more friends and pros, including Joe and Gay Haldeman, who have been absolutely great to me, enduring fan mail for years. I got his last two books autographed and noted “WorldCon 2008,” which really put the icing on the cake that was Denver.

Afterwards (yes, I keep saying “afterwards” but, man, the days just never stopped!) Diana and I staggered out into the sunlight and walked a couple miles up and down the pedestrian mall on 16^th street, stopping for a rice bowl in Tokyo Joe’s, and browsing in a few shops. Mmm, shopping. Well, actually, fingering postcards and Broncos beer mugs bores the tits off me, but Diana had been a real trouper for endless hours, so I tagged along without complaint.

Finally, we realized we could make a showing of HANCOCK at the downtown theater, which was too good to pass up. We would have preferred the new MUMMY, but it wasn’t playing again until too late, and we wanted to get back to the hotel and clean up and pack and go to bed — our flights home were too early Monday morning — and we almost never get to go to the movies anymore. Too busy!

Will Smith was awesome as usual, but the story suffered from a horrifically large number of gaps and inconsistencies, many of which would have been easy to fix. One of the major unanswered questions could have been addressed with a single line of dialogue, but instead the characters danced around the topic, as if the writer couldn’t think of a decent explanation. Shit, I thought of five just kicking back there in the dark with some salty popcorn and a Sprite. “Originally, we were created by the aliens of Neptune to be the guardians of all primates.” Or, alternatively, “Transdimensional cyborgs brought their biotech to ancient Earth and built us as a joke.” That’s all they had to tell us and the story would have gelled. Just say it, please. Give the audience something to hold onto.

At last, we made it back to the hotel. Packing was easy. Mostly it was just dirty laundry, except for the bazillion books we’d had autographed. My carry-on would include nearly a dozen novels, plus some goodies from NORAD.

Diana called up a room service salad and a sandwich again, which we picked at while watching more Olympics on that giant plasma screen from our giant white bed. The ife of kings! Then sleep.

Labels: panels, photos, pros, WorldCon report

# posted by Jeff Carlson @ 1:28 PM