home > SF > cons > Eastcon '90

42nd British National Science Fiction Convention
13-16 April 1990, Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool

GoHs: Iain M. Banks , Nigel Kneale (unable to attend due to work commitments), Ken Campbell, (artist) SMS, (fan) Anne Page

My first con at the Adelphi Hotel, a truly magnificent building (But very difficult to find in a car travelling Liverpool's one-way system --- we took three tries just to find the Mersey Tunnel).

Also, my first, and serendipitous, discovery of filk (we caught the end of a filk concert before Bob Shaw's "A Bit of BoSh".)

Programme highlights

• Julian Baum : Paper, Fish Tanks and Exploding Galaxies
• Panel: Fly Me to the Moon : Panelists tried to sell their favorite SF holiday timeshares. Baradûr got few takers.
• Anne Page : GoH interview, including 'Black Plastic Fandom'.
• Dave Langford : Fun and Senseless Violence
• Iain M. Banks : GoH talk. How he climbed up the outside of the Metropole at Conspiracy , the Brighton Worldcon.
• Panel: Batteries Not Included --- Hard SF
• Jack Cohen : Genes Don't Make People or Aliens
• Dave Lermit : Nanotechnology
• Bob Shaw : A Bit of BoSh --- not a Serious Scientific Talk: he was saving that for the Amsterdam Worldcon
• Panel: Up the Walls of the World --- Book collecting for the Seriously Short of Room

Julian Baum: Paper, Fish Tanks and Exploding Galaxies

How to get very impressive SF effects photographs using what can only be described as crude techniques:

• Although perspective is difficult to draw , it is easy to photograph : just draw it flat and photograph it at an angle.
• Fairly crude models look better in photographs, due to 'softening'. And there is no reason not to airbrush detail in afterwards: it's just a picture.
• Overexposure is a useful technique, especially for 'planets'. Just paint a bit of card blue/green/orange, photograph it at an angle (to give perspective and colour gradation) very overexposed, to give a very convincing planetary effect.
• Line file (just black and white, no shades of grey) is great for getting good, sharp silhouettes to be used in further exposures.

Dave Langford: Fun and Senseless Violence

An inimitable Dave Langford review of SF from the point of view of genocide --- multiple genocide, ordinary genocide, accidental genocide --- plus how and why various weapons of megadestruction can't work.

The sound of one Waldo clapping.

For example: A spaceship is powered by two laser beams: "The one at the back heats up the air, just like a jet. The one at the front clears the air out of the way. To turn round, you must leave the one at the front on, whilst simultaneously not turning off the one at the back."

[This talk can now be found in The Silence of the Langford ]

Panel: Batteries Not Included --- Hard SF

• It's harder to write 'correct SF': we know more physics than we used to, so we spot the flaws.
• Don't explain! If the future people you are identifying with don't think something is a problem, then you won't think it's a problem.
• 'Hard' SF means good science, even if it is one of the 'softer' sciences like biology, linguistics, etc. There is currently a move towards the latter.
• The scientific investigations of a generation tend to match the science fiction of their youth. They read about it, now they want to study it. Which is why science fiction becomes science fact.

Jack Cohen : Genes Don't Make People or Aliens

• On genes
  • If one person is an albino, and another not, there will be a difference in their genes --- you say that there is a gene that expresses the difference --- but genes are an abstraction .
  • Moreover, it is not just the individual's DNA. The mother 's genotype (if your genes are the 'tape', she provides the 'tape recorder' hardware) and her phenotype (whether she is pretty, whether she smokes, etc) and other effects are also important. If you think it is just DNA, you don't worry about giving the mother thalidomide --- the genes are there okay, aren't they?
  • For example: a knitting pattern pre scribes a jumper (it does not de scribe it). But, to make a jumper, you also need environmental things: wool, needles, someone who knows how to knit.
• Recommended reading: Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information .
• On theories
  • Look at a photograph of sunbeams diverging from a cloud. Isn't that evidence for the sun being a few miles up? But you never thought it was, because that isn't in your model. So: even wrong theories can have strong evidence to support them.
  • There is no one-to-one correspondence between 'cause' and 'effect', and believing there is can be dangerous.
  • On a SF note: you can't have aliens made from bits of known animals (head of a lion, body of a horse, ...) because there is not a gene for the head, another for the body, etc.
• Anecdote: On his way to the Con, Jack Cohen met and Animal Liberationist on the train. He'd freed mink:

  JC : How could you be so cruel? Leaving them out to starve to death, to be infected by parasites, to die in agony?
  AL : But I gave them their freedom !
  JC : You can't, they don't understand freedom. I could give you your freedom by stripping you naked and leaving you on top of one of the Pennines in midwinter. It would be the same.
  
  

• The idea that there is a 'Nature' looking after everything, that there is a 'grand pattern ' into which everything fits, is dangerous . Actually, 90% of mammals and birds die, in agony, before they can breed. (He is trying to persuade the BBC to let him make a programme of what nature is really like.)

Dave Lermit: Nanotechnology

• Minature silicon machines
• Silicon has three times the strength of steel, and doesn't corrode
• The mechanical switching speeds of these things are fast.
• 'Quantum wires', made of gold, with a radius of 300 atoms, have already been made. They do not obey Ohm's law.
• Biological machines, at subcellular sizes
• They need to be programmed, and programmed correctly!
• To make anything , from waste products, you need
  • a computer
  • a disassembler, to take things to bits, and tell the computer what their structure was
  • an assembler, instructed by the computer, to make things
  For example: an 'enclosed' toilet that makes loo rolls from the waste elimination.
• To replicate a living organism, is a single 'snapshot' sufficient, or are vectors needed, and if so, to how many derivatives?

Panel: "Up the Walls of the World" --- Book collecting for the Seriously Short of Room

I attended this to get some hints: we had just decided to build an extension, because we were running out of space in the house for our 7000 books ... However, it was a series of anecdotes.

• One participant explained that he had attended a similar session a couple of years ago, which had solved his problem then , but he now had it again! There isn't a permanent solution...
• Someone erected a complete set of shelves in a double garage, to hold 60,000 books. They had just finished, tripped, knocked over one set of shelves, which dominoed. It took them two hours to get out of the garage.
• A Californian explained he just used bricks and planks. "Isn't that a bit unstable?" he was asked. "I've never had a problem, except in the earthquake..." Applause!
  (This was soon after the large '89 Californian earthquake.)