![[Worldcon souvenir book]](../../books/covers/w/15310.jpg "Worldcon souvenir book")
The 82th World Science Fiction Convention
8-12 August 2024, Glasgow
GoHs: Chris Baker, Claire Brialey, Mark Plummer, Ken MacLeod, Nnedi Okorafor, Terri Windling.
My first event at the Worldcon was a talk by Sam Scheiner called All of Biology in 60 Minutes or Less. He outlined his 10 general principles of biology, and implications for your SF stories [I think there might be some wiggle room in some of these, especially once there is sufficiently advanced technology]:
Point 1-3, cover the definition of life; points 4-7 cover its complexity; points 8-10 cover its dynamics. An overall "theory of biology" needs to include all of these, with overlapping sub-theories of genetics, evolution, ecology, organisms, and cells. He has a book! Foundations of Biology is available for download. Or, for more technical details (behind a paywall), see Towards a conceptual framework for biology
After all that intellectual depth, it was off to somewhat gentler panels. In Policing the High Frontier I learned that the US police force came from company town security, whereas the UK came from urban civil government, hence their somewhat different ethoses. In places with limited resources (space stations, colonies) putting people in jail doesn't make much sense, particularly if they are essential personnel; restorative justice may be more important than punishment.
Blood is Thicker than Water: Found Family in SFF explained that a found family is less likely to fracture or be toxic, as it is easier to walk away. Another advantage is that found families tend not to have known you as a child, so there is less baggage from those days. The difference between a team and a family is when you are important as a person, as you, not just for your role.
Going Viral -- Pandemics in Fact and Fiction started out by noting that there is no fiction based on the "Spanish flu" pandemic, no-one remembers it, despite the fact it killed more (~50M) than died in WWI (~20M). After that introduction, the discussion turned, understandably, to Covid. "Everyone has PTSD from Covid", in particular, doctors in the NHS, many of whom have moved away to less patient-centric roles, with lots of burnout in other support roles too. Europe was incredulous that US states are allowed to refuse to cooperate with the CDC (and that Florida does refuse). Covid is not over, but governments haven't learned any lessons from it, and are reducing funding. One panellist confessed to "survivor guilt" over lockdown: they were fine, they had just bought a new house, had lots of room, could work online, and could have food deliveries: once, eggs were substituted with quail eggs, and they found themselves thinking "well, I suppose, if that's all they have…"
Next was Fight the Power: Systems as Villains in SFF. Systems may make people into villains as bureaucracies end up supporting themselves. System may allow villain to exist who couldn't have existed without the support of the system. Systems hurt some, but not all, of the people in them. Sometimes all you can do is survive within the system.
We finished off the first day with More Fiction than Science. The panel shot fish in a bucket; that is, they critiqued the science in a variety of SF films.
We started the second day with a panel on Vegetables in Space. The idea was to long-haul spaceflight, which will need growing some of the food supplies in transit. Helen Pennington waxed lyrical about the advantages of cyanobacteria paste; Thomas Bjelkeman insisted "I'm not going on her ship!" On disposing of all organic waste, including deceased crew: hot compost mulching.
Terri Windling's Guest of Honour Interview was interesting, but I would have preferred more of her, and less of the interviewer.
After that, I went to Alan Kennedy's presentation on Are You Smarter than a Monkey? He started off with a list of questions to prove much of what we think we know isn't correct: some of it was interesting, some of it was just trick questions: eg, "What are the colours of a rainbow? No, your're wrong. It's a continuum." some of it was interesting trick questions (a question that appeared to be about continua, but where the amount of material specified was about one atom). He then talked about some interesting concepts in science, such as needing to distinguish processes from things, needing to understand quantities and statistics, and needing to check the sources of your data. He ended with some anecdotes about the need for science and learning from history: the dangers of arsenic dyes, and of lead in petrol, both known to be toxic well before they were used.
The next event I went to was also a science lecture: Quantum In Space! Big Adventures for Small Satellites, about quantum communications.
Ken MacLeod's Guest of Honour Interview yielded many interesting factlets about his life. Despite his strong Western Isles accent, he lived there only for the first 10 years of his life. He was encouraged to write by Iain Banks. His political views were influenced by Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and some of Spinoza's easier writings.
The next panel discussed Big Smart Objects: Sentient starships in SF Fiction. These can encompass both organic and inorganic ships, as long as the ships are (treated as) people.
We finished the day with a panel on How Humans Would Really Behave if They were Abducted by Aliens. There is a protocol for testing unknown (alien!) food: touch it, wait 2hrs; touch to your lips, wait 2hrs; put it in your mouth, remove it, wait 2hrs; eventually, swallow a bit. An even better protocol is to watch someone else do this! When the panel was asked which of the five Fs they would do -- flee, fight, freeze, fawn, fornicate -- all agreed they would "fawn". (There don't seem to be any synonyms for "talk" that start with F, but that's what I (would hope I) would do.)
The day started with a maths talk by Mason Porter on Topological Data Analysis. The idea is to used advanced mathematics to study the "shape" of data sets. There are fast algorithms to calculate some of these measures. If a result persists, it is probably real; if it is there for only a short time, it's probably noise. This is applied mathematics, and is not one size fits all: measures need to be chosen to respect the particular domain of application. You need good data, which can take time to collect. It has been applied in, for example, neuroscience, epidemiology, and gerrymandering.
Next, a panal on The Many Legs of SF: Creepy Crawlies in Space. There is both a phobia of and fascination with insects and spiders. They already seem alien: they are eusocial, they swarm, they metamorphose, they use pheromones to communicate. They also don't seem to be individuals, each life is of no/little value: you can massacre millions and still be the good guys! Insects are a normal part of diet in many parts of the world: crunchy fried termites are like fried prawns. We are spooked by small scuttling bugs; large alien "bugs" might be spooked by us: we have flesh on the outside, we produce a new generation but don't then die, we breathe and eat through the same orifice, gross.
William Bains gave the George Hay lecture on Life Extension in SF and Reality. He researches living loinger, and takes his own advice. He takes multivitamins, and does something else he can't tell us about, possibly because it's not entirely legal. Calorie restriction also seems to work.
The next panel had interesting thoughts on Monster Theory. The etymology of the word "monster" is from the Latin "to warn". Humans are the real monsters. We invent monsters because the real human monsters are too much, we can process the stories without causing real world problems. The lesson is not that dragons exist, it's that we can beat them. Monsters reflect our fears: previously nuclear monsters and communist panic; today it's rogue AI monsters.
Nothing, Nowhere, Never Again was Reductio Ad Absurdum's traditional Glasgow Worldcon production, including the traditional groan-worthy jokes, fluffed lines, minimal sets, clever allusions.
We finished the day with the panel Locked in Space, about generation ships and smaller crews. Generation ships have appeared in Star Trek, so can be treated as common knowledge. A ship is a society in the small: it acts as an amplifier. Alistair Reynolds said that his Nostalgia for Infinity spaceship in Revelation Space is Ghormenghast as a spaceship. TV spaceship corridors are so sterile; why are there no decorations, why is there no art? [Or at least Health and Safety posters!]
Sunday started with a panel on Urban Fantasy Settings. For series, the only rule is to have internal consistency with your previous choices: no retconning, unless that is a deliberate choice with a reason in the plot. Then the game is to find creative solutions to problems caused by the rules imposed: yes, she's a werewolf, but she still has to pay the mortgage. In a closed world, there's a "masquerade", not every one knows about the fantasy side; in an open world, everyone knows. A real setting, and its history, can drive a lot: there can be a call and response between the protagonist and the city. But don't have too many details: there is more chance people will call you out on discrepancies. Different characters will see a different city, or see the city differently. The location becomes a character, because it affects and influences the course of the story, which would be a different story in a different place. Audiobooks pronounce name places incorrectly! "If I put a place I travel to in a book, it's tax deductible!" Cites have always been places of migration, initially rural to urban; the are melting pots. homogeneity would be odd. Immigrants would bring their own magic with them.
Next was panel called All the World's Books Depend on the Beancounter: Economics in SFF. In Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, the first 600pp is on the economics of early 1600s Europe and the value of gold coins. In Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant, she destroys a nation by introducing a new financial instrument. Feist's Rise of a Merchant Prince is so wrong about everything! Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning is great; it's quite dense. Stark Holden's Ten Low is about living on the edge. On moving Pern to a game world, you realise the economics makes no sense. There is no such thing as a post scarcity world with humans: we will manufacture scarcity. Time is scarce, attention is scarce. We are currently partly post scarcity compared to the past, our scale has moved: Where is my yacht? Where is my Mars colony? Star Trek is post scarcity, but still has elites. Society needs to organise itself: who is making decisions. Money has a diminishing marginal utility: the more you have, the less use is having any more is; some billionaires do not see this, and desire to keep accumulating. As a corollary, if asked if you will spilt money with your worst enemy, you should only do so if they are richer that you! David Graeber's Debt is a goldmine; it's absolutely rigorous, I disagree with a lot, but it's well worth reading: Neptune's Brood is a debt-based economy. Many works get logistics wrong: huge armies with no support people. War is expensive: Hilary Mantel has Henry VIII upset about being too poor to go to war. Clothing was expensive, both in material and labour: a men's formal dress suit in mid 1800s cost about same as mid range car today. If anything is illegal to own, there will be a covert currency.
The panel on Robots in Western and Non-Western SF Traditions highlighted some interesting cultural contrasts. Robots in Western culture are about slavery, forced labour, and slave uprisings. The word "robot" is from the Czech word for "worker", introduced by Karel Capek 100 years ago. [Here's my 2020 essay on RUR, focussed on SFnal world-building.] In Japan, however, manga (and later anime) like Astro Boy was used to talk about civil rights for all, including robots, which leads to very different kinds of stories. A Japanese peace conference banner: "we must make a future that would not make Astro Boy cry". People are very good at anthropomorhising anything (hello, Pixar Luxo Jr!), including robots: Some military robots were made headless so tha the human soldiers would not empathise, but the soldiers put heads on them, rescued them, etc. New robot stories are moving from "protect the status quo against change" to "can we be/become good enough for this big new thing". Bio life needs to be capable of violence, because evolution is violent; synthetic life does not needing to be violenct in this way; can it ever understand human violence?
Has Science Ruined Science Fiction? was the question put to the next panel. Only post-WWII has everyone been getting a science education: before that you could make up anything. SF has to work out the technical consequences of science and engineering, and also sociological implications, which are harder to predict: the street finds its own use for things. Ours is not the first time of rapid sciientific and technological progress: Frankenstein and the industrial revolution, later a person could grow up with horses, then see cars, WWII, and a man on moon. Nanomedicine will have a big impact, but is not talked about because of backlash against mRNA vaccines. There is a need to educate the public so they won't be scared. We can use SF for this, to inform, to warn, to have conversations. Reporters and politicians want absolutes, not qualified statements. Joanna Russ argued that SF is only genre that is theoretically open, because new science gives new ideas to work off; every other genre stagnates, becomes decadent. Truth is stranger than (science) fiction: there are exoplanets nothing like our fiction. You can present frightening ideas in fiction, but don't give enough details to create them!
We finished off the day with a talk by Nicholas Jackson on The Mathematics of Games, including peg solitaire, Nim, Go, and Sprouts.
The final day of the Worldcon started with us attending a panel on AI and the End Times: Do Androids Dream of Killing Us All? The idea they want to kill us all is just projection! We're building things that superficially look like us, but there's nothing going on behind the eyes. Why would an AI want to live? That's a biologically evolved drive. Why would it want to do anything? Why would it care, about anything? An AI will have read all our books. AI trying to do good are more frightening. Many of our written utopias have much lower populations; would an AI try to achieve this? Hybrids of humans and AI together, a form of augmented humans, but you no longer own your body: your AI is bricked when the owning company dissolves. Even the personal phone is a form of augmentation. AI might control the growth of your artificial neural matter, getting you the knowledge faster, learning to be you.
Next was a paenl discussing Strong Female Leads Who Don't Kick Ass. You don't need your strong female characters to be warriors. The kick-ass fighter as a shorthand for feminism is a cop out. Kick-ass characters have to be attractive to male readers to be acceptable. The original Red Sonja template, where she was not not just a prize for the man, broke ground, and was worth doing at the time. Then we get dragon riders, wo are not fighters but do have some power.
The panel on Garage-Level Gene Manipulation had lots of helpful and scary advice. Think of medicine for children: having straight teeth is related to class, what your parents could access when you were a teenager. How will genetic enhancement affect social inequality? Even with socialised medicine, with a basic level for all, then pay for extra if you can, creates further divisions. This is not specific to genetic manipulation, it's just income inequality. A cheap car today has more safety features than a luxury car of the past: maybe expensive treatments may become routine. The price of DNA sequencing has plummeted: a 10k insect genome costs $50k. Getting gene therapy to permanently fix a problem may become cheaper than maintenance of the condition, eg depression. So there may be pressure to fix you, to change you. We've always genetically modified things, think of dogs, wheat; it's just more precise now. We can edit genes, but we don't know the genotype to phenotype map, so we don't know what changes to make. Very many genes are involved in nearly every trait, and it's hard to target some places: Biology is hard and complicated. Informed consent is hard to define: how you present information can affect the choice. Eugenics started with best of intentions, but who defines what is better, and who chooses what to do to whom. It may become just fashion statement: clothes were once very expensive, but are now just personality expression
We finished off the day, and the con, with a great talk by Jesper Stage on Economics of Generation Starships. For a generation ship, we would need: a socety without economic growth; replication of many life-supporting processes; near-perfect recycling and waste management; to rethink pollution fundamentally; to do all this on a limited energy budget. A tough challenge, som aspects of which have been anticipated in SF, some which have not.
So, another con ends. Next: off to tour Scotland for a few days.