ArmadilloCon is produced by FACT: Fandom Association of Central Texas. "The Fandom Association of Central Texas, Inc. is a Texas non-profit educational organization dedicated to the promotion of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction, and the appreciation of science.."
In Bruce Sterling's Schizmatrix, within the vast but thin human realm of our solar system there is a spaceship which is also recognized as an independent nation. I find FACT to be a lot like that. This is the link to the FACT Organization Chart, Board of Directors, Corporate Officers, and Convention Committee. Not bad for a club with fewer than 50 members. I was elected to the Board last year but my best service is just showing my appreciation for their Writers Workshop and Flash Fiction contest and advertising in the show guide.
 |
Entrance of the Fans into the Dealers Room
Saturday morning. |
Plot Bunnies Ate My Brain
Every year at the free literature table, I found cute notepads and other writerly chachkas from Rhonda Eudaly. "Plot Bunnies Ate My Brain." On her blog, she wrote:
I badly quote an previous Poli-Sci professor my mom worked for and I took a couple of classes with. He said (ish), to be a “professional” writer you had to either 1. be paid or 2. get 200 rejections, whichever comes first.
Pretty sure I’ve gotten both of those things. And yet, with my publishing gap (much like employment gaps), it feels like I’ve been reset to zero. I have stories out. Got 3 rejections last week alone – maybe four? There’s a rejection that’s unclear because I realized I had 2 stories with the same market (oops – still getting back on that bicycle) and the rejection didn’t specify WHICH (or BOTH) were rejected. I’m erring on the side of…both.
[...]It sounds an awful lot a “partly cloudy” day, where you see more clouds than sun, but the sun is still dominant.
Persephone Station and Loki's RingLast year (ArmadilloCon 46), I served on a panel with Stina Leicht (pronounced ungermanically as "Light"). Stina did most of the talking as we argued the future of generative AI while two other panelists tried to get a word in. At ArmadilloCon 41, Stina moderated “The Perfect Heist: Crime in the 23rd Century” wherein David Afrarishad, Rob Rogers, Michael Bracken, Rebecca Roanhorse and I robbed a space station. I was the wheelman. We got away with it.
This year, I sat in on one of her readings. I bought Loki's Ring a couple of years ago. So, I had some context. Stina said that she likes a "Star Trek" style universe where people's basic needs are met and the bad guys are libertarians. I think that Stina has a libertarian streak of her own and that she is exactly the kind of person who would be miserable in the socialist utopia of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed.
When Space Tries to Kill You
Again this year, I attended "Space Tries to Kill You" chaired by NASA trainer Bill Frank with support from Beth Anderson, William Ledbetter, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, and Paige Ewing. Bill Frank read off scenarios, rotating the first responders around the table.
One time, I was with some Army guys watching Women's Field Hockey,
and one guy said, "It's amazing that this sport is not more popular."
The first challenge was one we had before: You are cleaning an air filter when the fire alarm goes off. What do you do? The standard answer is always: Warn; Gather; Work. Report the problem to everyone immediately. Get everyone into the safest place(s). Address the problem from known (or creative) response scenarios. In this case, the panelists were ahead of the curve. Whatever you did to the air filter, stop doing that. They also discussed the importance of oxygen to you and to the fire. And so on... The answer is that you probably tripped the fire alarm when you released a cloud of dust cleaning the filters.
Beth Anderson admitted that she was a panelist because the scheduler, Marshall Mareska, said that she would like it. Beth writes horror fiction and does read scifi. I thought that she did well, being an insightful and original thinker who knows tons of basic science. Bill Ledbetter had a career in aerospace before that was eclipsed by writing science fiction. Jayme Lynn Blashke was the convention Toastmaster this year. Scifi is just one thing that he does and it does not rank up there with "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" (https://www.jaymeblaschke.com/).
I corralled Paige E. Ewing after the session and we chatted for about 20 minutes. She got into this aspect of the business by designing a self-contained greenhouse and proposing it to NASA which thanked her with an award in 2013. See https://paigeewing.com/ for the fantasy and romance novelist, Paige E. Ewing. Find "Marvin's Lunchbox" on YouTube and find out how to grow edible algae on Mars here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oialhSOzCzQ
Problem 2: You have to drive from Austin to Denver and your choices are a Tesla RoboTaxi in which you have no control whatsoever and a used Dodge with steering and all that but a bad transmission. The analogy is the difference between the Tesla Dragon and the Boeing CST-100 Starliner.
Problem 3: You are on the International Space Station and a piece of space junk cuts into your shell. You have five hours of air. What do you do?
Problem 3B: You are on the Boeing Starliner and a piece of space junk cuts your shell and you have five hours of air.
Problem 5: It is the middle of the night and you have to go to the bathroom but it is noisy and will wake everyone else up.
The last problem was that you are being tracked by an anti-satellite missile launched from the ground.
All in all, the panelists did well and Bill Frank had to disappoint them only a couple of times.
THE VAN SHOW from the Austin Public Library
ArmadilloCon 50
We have two tables of free handouts - see the Plot Bunnies above - and I placed handouts calling attention to the fact that ArmadilloCon 50 is in 2029 and suggesting that at the next FACT Board Meeting we should form a committee to plan for that.
My write-ups on this blog can only have delivered some of the many flavors, aspects, angles, views, and feelings of ArmadilloCon. The experience is necessarily individual. It is a surprisingly small con: Paid attendance 220; 100 invited guests; 25 dealers. (Also 33 no-show registered attendees including five panelist no-shows.) Dealer tables pay for most of this with registration only adding to the cash flow. The con also sells t-shirts, this year designed by Artist Guest of Honor Sara Felix.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.