shark bytes

This isn't so much a con report as a collection of random reactions, but I'll post it anyway. (If nothing else, if I post it now I won't wind up waiting until after Readercon, which would be pretty silly.)

I had a great time. This was my first 4th_st_fantasy, and I was strongly reminded of farthingparty; a small group, a single track of programming, and many of the same folks were there. St. Louis Park is no Montreal, but there was still good food nearby, and the con suite was well stocked.

A+++ would buy again. FSFC is now firmly part of my plans for the Boskone-Readercon Calendar Gap of 2010. I'll probably try harder to avoid connecting flights next year, though.

Space/Logistics/Facility/Food

Absolutely wonderful. The staff were really helpful and flexible, the rooms used for the consuite were right near programming (and the smoking consuite was just a few doors down), and everything was easy to get to. The challenges are admittedly less than those at a larger con (such as arisia, where the staff are similarly helpful but the Hyatt has severe physical issues at that scale) but they were exceedingly well handled.

I was particularly impressed by the way dietary restrictions were taken care of by the hotel staff, both at the restaurant and during Sunday brunch. Hotel liaison jenett deserves some real credit for this, including the wonderful brunch. (I'm lucky enough to not have any major dietary restrictions; that just meant I had all the wonderful options to choose from.) Little things done right included the hotel being able to give me a 1300 checkout instead of a 1200 so I could go to brunch without needing to deal with my bags and the banquet manager (really) coming out to where we were playing Dominion on Friday night to ask if we needed anything, and bringing us water.

Program

Somewhat writing-heavy, but in a good way even for my determinedly non-writing self. I enjoy listening to writers talk about how they write, possibly all the more because I have no reason to worry about how I'm doing it wrong just because I have a different approach.

I wasn't taking panel notes, and there are much better panel reports over on 4th_st_fantasy anyway. Go read them.

Travel
( travel griping within )

Pixar grants a 10-year-old's last wish.

(Via Consumerist.)

23. Bright Underground Spaces: The Railway Stations of Charles Holden, David Lawrence (hc)

Since it covers both architecture and transport, this was something I expected to be interesting. It was, though it suffers a bit (for me) in that most of the Holden stations are on parts of the Northern, Piccadilly, and Central lines that I've never actually been through so I don't have any mental images to compare them to.

His reworks of Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, though, are ones I am familiar with (and rather pleased by), and I will have to make a trip to 55 Broadway next time I get a chance. (Note for fellow type geeks: Eric Gill, designer of Gill Sans, also produced three of the eight "wind" sculptures on the building.)

I also want to get out to the Moscow Metro-inspired Gants Hill one of these years.

RR36. In Fury Born, David Weber (mmpb)

An expanded (by adding a prequel) version of one of his pre-Honor Harrington books (Path of the Fury). I'm sure nobody will be terribly surprised to hear that the protagonist is a butt-kicking woman. It's the kind of thing you'll like if you like that kind of thing.

RR37. Friday, Robert A. Heinlein (mmpb)

Speaking of butt-kicking women....

I picked this up again based on a half-remembered comment about how the California Confederacy (part of a balkanized North America) was overly besotted with democracy as the sovereign voice of the people. (Oh, and also willing to take rights away from an "invisible" minority who can "pass" as long as they shut up and "act normal". Any similarity to recent events is completely non-coincidental.)

I also found the description of Friday's extended "random reading/research" work to be reminiscent of the way I've been using Wikipanion Plus's queue mode (with auto download turned on) to stock up plenty of quick reading on my iPod touch.

(Hmm... it's been a few months since my original iPod touch as a PDA post; I should revisit that, and cover some of the apps I have loaded. I'll wait and see what Monday's WWDC brings before writing that post, though.)

I've probably forgotten something, since it's been a while since my last booklog post.

18. Rogue Bolo, Keith Laumer (mmpb)

Really two unlinked Bolo stories; the first is written in the same style as "Field Test" (short snippets from multiple points of view); the second a more traditional one. Neither was terribly interesting.

19. Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Groff Conklin, ed. (mmpb)

An old Conklin anthology, with several stories I haven't seen elsewhere.

20. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Leonard Mlodinow (ebook)

A pretty good overview of both randomness and the history of the study of randomness, with some great historical bits about the folks who developed the science (Thomas Bayes, various members of the Bernoulli family, Blaise Pascal, and so on). Fairly short. Recommended.

21. Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, Joseph Hallinan (hc)

This overlapped both in reading time and subject with The Drunkard's Walk, since one of the areas in which humans are prone to mistakes is estimating probabilities. The descriptions of some of the psychological experiments (like the "door test") are great. Recommended, especially if you liked Freakonomics.

22. Nation, Terry Pratchett (ebook)

A great non-Discworld book. The setup naturally brings the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to mind, and for me it was also hard not to think of Sir Terry's "embuggerance" while reading it.

Mau and Daphne are strong protagonists, the usual Pratchett "funny with deep philosophical underpinnings" is in full form, and like several other recent books it's both a good YA book and a just plain good book. Highly recommended.

RR33. The Cold Cash War, Robert Asprin (mmpb)

One of his older books, with none of the "Myth/Phule's" humor, this involves corporate conflict that becomes actual conflict (with electronic tagging instead of real bullets, at least most of the time). Some parts have aged really badly; salary offers that were pretty high in 1977 don't sound like too much in 2009. Not bad, but nothing special.

Thanks to emceeaich.

Nothing here yet, but I'm definitely interested in the idea of an LJ-alike that goes back to the original business model....

Law Dork, who (unlike me) is actually a lawyer, has a really good summary of the opinion written by the Iowa Supreme Court. If the 69-page opinion is TL;DR for you, I recommend reading his post for a quick overview of the key points in their argument.

The Elements of Style turns 50 years old this April. I used it as the subject of my college admission essay on "a book that changed your life"; it clearly worked, since I was accepted (and got the scholarship I was aiming for).

I can't condone theft from libraries, but this case might be the exception:

Strunk's "Elements of Style" probably would have vanished for good had not someone stolen one of the two copies in the Cornell library in 1957 and sent it to White.

Omit needless words. (If you can't, at least LJ-cut.)

Not much reading lately.

7. The Presidential Book of Lists, Ian Randal Strock (ebook)

This worked nicely as an ebook, since each list is fairly self-contained and short; quick snippets are no problem. Generally interesting, though it suffers from being written before January 20th and therefore has to include things like (in the list of youngest Presidents) "In order to join this list (and knock Cleveland off), the President who wins the election of 2008 will have to have been born after January 6, 1961. (Barack Obama is therefore now the fifth youngest President.)

RR22. Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves, Alan Dean Foster and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. (mmpb)

18 "funny" fantasy short stories, though including Avram Davidson's "And the Grasses Grow" stretches the definition a bit (as recognized in the editorial intro which says "Of course there are all kinds of smiles, and not all humor is light"). It's a heavy hitting lineup of authors, with Davidson joined by Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Robert Sheckley, and other big names, with a few lesser-known folks mixed in as well. Generally good, though not all the stories click with me; Ron Goulart's "Please Stand By" is my favorite of the set.

RR23. Trading in Danger, Elizabeth Moon (mmpb)

I'd planned on re-reading the "Vatta's War" books because mjlayman had started going through them last month and posted her review of this book. With her in the hospital with a stroke it's turned into a very bittersweet re-read. (Good thoughts and energy sent her way would be appreciated.)

5. The Vondish Ambassador, Lawrence Watt-Evans (e-book)

I have a soft spot for the Ethshar books, even though (or because) they tend to run to a formula of "clever young person winds up in a situation where their cleverness is useful, and then rewarded". In this case the CYP is not the titular ambassador but an itinerant dockworker who winds up being hired as his aide, and who then proceeds to be clever as necessary. Light and enjoyable.

All of the Ethshar books (except for the two that wound up at Tor[1]) are available from Fictionwise, which is great for me; they're just about perfect comfort re-read material, and this will fit right in to the rotation.

[1] (Insert obligatory rant about Holtzbrinck's handling of e-book editions here.)
( Rereads: Science Fictional Olympics, Heinlein, Wrede, Vinge, Scalzi )

I've been sick, so falling back on lots of comfort reading that is both short and familiar.

4.1. "Damned If You Don't", Randall Garrett (free ebook derived from the Project Gutenberg version)

(Just a short story, so I don't want to count it as new read #5.)

I read this one, finally, through a concatenation of events. First, eReader 2.0 was released for iPhone OS, with my feature wishlist items included. After upgrading, I found that eReader/Fictionwise had reworked some of the ebooks with better metadata, so I wanted to re-download them; the easiest solution was to uninstall eReader, then reinstall and use "download entire bookshelf" to avoid duplication.

One of the books in my collection is The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, and I wanted to check to see if they'd fixed a typo. (There looks like a badly-done search and replace that's replaced "gu" with "Gu", probably while doing some editing of Fast Times at Fairmont High, but which results in things like "AuGust" appearing elsewhere. Not fixed but hardly a real issue.) I got to the intro to "Bookworm, Run!" and was reminded that I'd never tracked down the Garrett story that Vinge refers to.

After a quick Google search I spotted it on Manybooks.net...which eReader helpfully has a shortcut to, right in the app. Soon thereafter I had the story ready to read. This is so much better than the usual process: check ISFDB, see if it's in an anthology, find the anthology somewhere in the various library systems I have access to, request the book, wait a few days, pick up the book, read the story (in 10 minutes), then have to return the book. In this case, a lapsed copyright renewal made it free, but I'd certainly pay for this kind of stuff. (Fictionwise sells a fair number of short stories by various authors. This is a good thing.)

As for the story itself? I've always liked Randall Garrett's short fiction, and this is no exception, even if the "surprise" was muted by having already read "Bookworm, Run!" Still, it's so unbelievable. The very idea that removing huge amounts of value from one sector of the economy would cause a widespread financial crisis! Who'd believe that one?
( Rereads: Brust, Resnick, more Heinlein, George O. Smith )

John Siracusa's recent Ars Technica article on e-books gives me a convenient jumping-off point for some of my own experiences with (and random thoughts about) e-books.

I bought my first book from Peanut Press, as it then was, just over nine years ago. (2000-01-30, according to the bookshelf.) I bought my most recent ones from Fictionwise (who now own eReader, formerly Palm Digital Media, formerly Peanut Press) just a few minutes ago. I've generally stuck with the Peanut/Palm/eReader format, mostly because I like their reader software's better than other options (Mobipocket Reader on Palm OS or Stanza on the iPod). I've read them on everything from a Palm V (with a whole 2MB of memory and a zippy 16MHz processor) to an iPod touch, and even my oldest book is still usable on the newest hardware without needing anything more than a copy of the eReader software and the name/credit card used to lock the file. (Mobipocket's DRM requires you to reauthorize each file for each new device. Lame.)

Why do I read e-books on such a small screen? (The Palm V: 160x160 grayscale. The TX and iPod: 320x480 color.) Simply put, because it's always there. (I was amused by Siracusa's description of how he realized he'd switched, since the first advantage he lists is "I was more likely to have my Palm with me than a book. When I had an opportunity to read during the day, my Palm was there, and a paper book, had I been in the middle of one, would not have been." Yeah, that.) Sure, the Kindle has a bigger screen. Sure, a physical book never needs recharging. Neither of them is small enough to hang off of my belt, and the paper book is not guaranteed to be the one I've just decided I want to re-read; in fact, it's almost certainly not going to be.

I tend to read e-books as a supplement to (rather than a substitute for) paper books. (I own several books in mass-market and e-book, or even the three-fer of hardcover, mass-market, and e-book.) Because it's always handy, I can easily read a few pages while waiting for (or riding on) a bus or train, or in line at a store; I can read longer stretches over a meal or while relaxing on the futon. Because of the often interrupted nature of the read, this is particularly suited for re-reading certain types of books: episodic novels, short story or essay collections, or books I've previously read are all easier to "keep state" for in my head between times. Even so, I can and have read full novels first as e-books before even touching paper editions; I've also sometimes alternated between the two. (I read Victory Conditions, the final book in Elizabeth Moon's "Vatta's War" series, partially from the library hardcover and partially from the e-book; I'd usually read up to a chapter break to make the switch easier, but not always.)

One issue with different reader programs on the iPod is the scroll/page dilemma. eReader is very much a page-flip oriented program, and that's the paradigm I'm used to. (I also use the -c option to less.) Other programs like Stanza or Bookshelf can scroll in page increments, but it's still scrolling, and for memory management both of them need to "chunk" the book leading to either delays at chapter breaks (Stanza) or ugly seams at semi-random intervals (Bookshelf). Because eReader's doing the chunking by page, it's never an issue except for the first time I open a book (or change the font size/layout/etc) which will force the program to repaginate. Since it can do that faster than I can read, if I'm at the beginning of the book it's mostly unnoticeable; if I'm farther in, I just have to wait a bit for it to catch up. This was also the case on the Palm, but the faster processor on the iPod seems to help shorten the time. (I haven't done a side-by-side comparison or anything.)

I still need to get back to work on the toolchain I started work on that would convert non-DRMed Baen e-books from HTML to "PML" (originally Peanut Markup Language) and then stuff them into an eReader format PDB file.

Some wishlist items for the iPhone/iPod touch version of eReader:

More font choices. I bought both of the font packs for the Palm version, and I'd love to be able to use something other than Georgia (reasonable), Helvetica (not bad), or Marker Felt (WTF?) and have more size choices as well. Some of my gripe is with Apple; why didn't they put Gill Sans on there? Even so, having Verdana (which is on the iPod) as an additional option would be nice.

Smarter download behavior. Why doesn't it say "hey, you have a book by this title already, do you really want to download it again?" Even being smart enough to say "this seems to be a duplicate, keep or delete?" after the download would be useful, and easier to implement.

Metadata editing. The oldest e-books don't have the proper metadata fields, so they don't show the author's name; other books have mistakes (like "Evans, Lawrence Watt" instead of "Watt-Evans, Lawrence"). I might be able to fix the files if they're not DRMed, but many of them are. The app should at least let me override the file's own data.

Bigger targets for small links. Hitting the hotlink for one of Pratchett's footnotes is a frustrating exercise in fingerpoking. The Palm's stylus worked much better for this sort of thing. The app could have a minimum target area, or even just add a "follow link" button to the pop-up for "find in dictionary" etc if there's a hotlink within the selection.

Over the past few months, I've been using an iPod touch (2nd gen) as a replacement for my previous PDA, a Palm TX. It has been a generally positive transition, though there are things the TX can do that the iPod can't or that worked better on the TX.

I've been using it both long enough and intensely enough to get past the initial adjustment period; I've stopped trying to hit buttons that don't exist, and operations like "turning it on" (which is really just unlocking the screen) are now second nature.

I'd been using some kind of Palm OS PDA since the 1999-vintage Palm V (which replaced an HP 200LX). I ran through a series of Palm OS units until the TX, which is the last Palm OS PDA (and most likely the last PDA of any sort) that Palm will make. I never went for a Palm OS phone, because I don't like having everything tied in to one device (and often one network); the same thing has kept me away from the iPhone. (If they start selling unlocked ones in the US, I'll reconsider. No, third party unlocks don't count.)

( A comparison of various aspects of the TX and the iPod touch )
Conclusion: All in all, the iPod touch is a respectable PDA replacement for the Palm TX. There are still areas that could stand improvement (Calendar, and to a lesser extent Mail, are the big culprits) and the major missing feature of Bluetooth support, but those are outweighed by all kinds of other advantages. It also lets me leave the iPod classic at home (except for long trips), since I can use the iPod touch for day-to-day listening.

2008 brought a couple of new (or in one case, "new in English") boardgame releases which have become two of my favorite games.

These are Agricola and Battlestar Galactica. ("Wait, what? A nearly pure Euro and a licensed-property Ameritrash design?" Yes.)

I'll talk about Agricola later. For now, suffice it to say that it redeems the worker placement mechanic from my dislike of Caylus, and it's good enough that I'll play it in preference to Power Grid.

BSG, though? With the right group, I'll play that before I play Agricola. (Tonight at pandemonium_bks I played both, but BSG first.)

The basic game design is a semi-cooperative, reminiscent of Shadows over Camelot with loyalty cards that mark you as either a "good guy" (human/loyal knight) or "bad guy" (Cylon/traitor), and there are hand cards with values from 1 to 5 in both games. However, that's about where the similarities end.

SoC's quests are pretty basic repeat-card plays, where you have to play 2 pair (Black Knight), a full house (Lancelot's Armor), a 1-5 straight (Saxon/Pict wars), or just a bunch of cards in a tug-of-war (Holy Grail/Excalibur). Very little is hidden, the quests themselves are fairly unthematic in their play, and there's often an incentive to lose a quest to end the game if you have enough of a lead to win without it.

With BSG, on the other hand, the theme is deeply embedded. The characters all have advantages and disadvantages based on their roles in the show; the bad things that will happen are based on events from the early part of the series (the miniseries, S1, and the early part of S2, I believe; I've actually only watched through S1 so far so no spoilers, please). There are two titles, President and Admiral, which can shift around through various events (elections, declarations of martial law, sending the current admiral to the Brig, one of them revealing themselves as a Cylon).

Each turn, after the player has taken their action(s), a crisis card is revealed and resolved. Some will involve a decision made by the current player, or the President, or the Admiral; others will just give the players a skill check, to pass or to fail. Some cards have both, where you have to decide whether to try for the skill check (which might be "gain a resource if you win, lose a lot if you fail") or the known quantity (often a certain loss, but less than a failed skill check result would cost).

[ETA: There are also Cylon attack crisis cards, which add some number of Cylon ships, some civilian ships that need defending, and (usually) a Viper or two to the space around Galactica. Cylon ships can shoot up civilians (usually costing population), Vipers (of which there are a limited number), or Galactica; there are also ships that land boarding parties if they get to the Viper launch spaces.]

The skill check is the central mechanic; most crisis cards involve one, and some actions (electing a new President, getting out of the Brig) require them as well. There are five types of cards (Leadership, Tactics, Piloting, Engineering, Politics) and each type has two different card abilities (a "weak" one on the 1 or 2 value cards and a "strong" one on the 3-5 cards). When played into a skill check, depending on the nature of the check, some colors will be positive; others will be negative. Piloting doesn't help you conserve water; political savvy won't rescue a downed pilot. The cards are played face down, along with two random cards to muddy the waters, then all are shuffled and totalled up. Did that 5 piloting come in from the Destiny Deck, or did Boomer toss it in instead of the Tactics card that would have helped?

The paranoia factor is increased at the halfway point, where an additional set of loyalty cards are dealt out. The Admiral was human before, or at least he thought he was; maybe he was just programmed to think that....

Unlike SoC, there will always be at least one (3-4 player) or two (5-6 player) Cylon cards dealt out by the end of the game. There are many ways for a hidden Cylon to screw things up, and when it finally becomes useful to reveal themselves they get an extra ability to cause damage on their way out the airlock (unless they were in the Brig at the time).

If any of the four resources (food, fuel, morale, population) reaches 0, the humans lose. If Galactica takes enough damage, the humans lose. If a boarding party manages to vent the air out of the ship, the humans lose. If they manage to jump enough times, they win.

Most of the games are close enough that the humans are within a turn or two of winning when they lose, or a turn or two of losing when they win...but it's not just randomness that causes it. (If it were, the game would be much faster and called "rock paper scissors" or "flip a coin".)

It's critical that you get good player interaction for this game; it's almost a very light RPG built into a boardgame. "He's a Cylon! Why else would we have failed that check?" "Why are you calling me a Cylon, you frakkin' toaster? You could have tossed in a bad card yourself."

BSG has already climbed well up the BoardGameGeek ranking charts; it's currently at 32 (Settlers of Catan is 38th; the top three are Agricola, Puerto Rico, and Power Grid).

1. Concorde (Frédéric Beniada, Michel Fraile) is a giant coffee table book (the sort that could be used as a coffee table); it's both heavy on the photos and just plain heavy.

The text content is fairly good, though for folks who've already read other books on Concorde there's little new in it. (There's also not too much of the text; maybe the equivalent of a handful of Neal Stephenson infodumps, if you don't count the photo captions.) Since the book's a translation from the French, it focuses more on the French contributions to the aircraft's design, construction, and operation than English-language books on the subject often do. (It still doesn't go in the direction of Donald Pevsner's speculation about Concorde's retirement, which I find rather believable.)

The photos are plentiful, large, and very impressive. This isn't necessarily a book to own, but if you're interested in Concorde and have it available in your local library system it's worth reading.

Rereads (which I'll keep in a separate numbering sequence):
RR1: The Phoenix Guards, Steven Brust (mmpb)
First in the Khaavren Romance series, set in the same world as the Vlad Taltos books. I suspect a large proportion, possibly even a majority, of my flist already reads Brust.

RR2: Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson (eReader)
The mere existence of this book (even without considering the Baroque Cycle) is one of the best arguments for e-books I've seen. Big huge tree-killer that you almost need a wheelbarrow to move around, or a set of bits that fit inside your 115g iPod touch? The words are the same....

Upcoming: You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger and Why Does Popcorn Cost So Much at the Movies?

I periodically decide that I should post more often. Usually this lasts for a week or so, and then fades off as I run out of ideas on what to post about. Since I don't have a cat, I can't even fall back on catblogging, or taping bacon to the cat, or whatever. (Pun intended.)

Maybe if I try for periodic posts on one or more topics, I can keep up some momentum.
( obligatory poll inside )

Looks like there might be more people in line right now than voted at all in this precinct in the unopposed special election for state Senate in 2007. Impressive.

ETA 1029: Voted, at the office now. Took about 20 minutes, but the lines were quite a bit shorter when we left than they were when we arrived.

When you see this, post in your own journal with your favorite quote from The Princess Bride. Preferably not "As you wish" or the Inigo Montoya speech. (via sweetmmeblue)

Man in Black: "Why are you smiling?"
Inigo: "I know something you don't know."
Man in Black: "And what is that?"
Inigo: "I am not left-handed."

I think TPB is possibly the most quotable movie ever, in that almost every single speaking part has at least one memorable quote. (I'm not sure the mother has any really quotable lines, but she's the only exception I can think of.)

From an LA Times article about the aftermath of the DHL/Airborne Express merger:

"And that's the problem in our nation's capital. It's not just the Bush administration, and it's not just the Democratic Congress. It's that everyone in Washington says whatever it takes to get elected or to score the political point of the day," said McCain, who has served 26 years in Congress.

Mighty fine words coming from the guy whose campaign manager got $185,000 to lobby for the deal on behalf of DHL.

For whatever reason, it felt like Friday was the most programming-heavy day of the con; this made me very happy I'd taken the day off so I could get to more of it, but threw off my general feeling of the pace of a three[1]-day convention. (It also made me sad that folks who couldn't take Friday off were missing such a significant chunk of the con. The programming during Arisia's extension into Monday didn't seem like nearly as big a loss for those who couldn't be there.) The upshot of all of this is that Saturday, normally the day with the most going on programming-wise at a three-day con, got me to one panel and one event. (OTOH, lots of good hallway/lobby conversations ensued.)

Saturday started with a serendipitous breakfast meeting with enegim, D. (WINOLJ), Bob Devney, Michael Devney, and SFRevu's Ernest Lilley. That got the day off to a nice start with the informal Buffet Panel. (Among the topics: this discussion of McCain's citizenship status; there's an argument, that will probably never see a court, that he was caught in a corner case of citizenship law at the time of his birth and retroactively naturalized by a 1937 statute.)

1100: "Why Don’t We Do it in the Reformation?: Underutilized Historical Eras in Spec Fic"

I didn't take nearly as many notes for this one as I did for Friday's If Free Electronic Texts Are Good Promotion, What’s Piracy?, but did take some. Having finally had time to read through (most of) the comments on sartorias's Bittercon post on the topic (176 at last count[2]), I have to agree that the online discussion was more generally fruitful than the panel. (The topic may just lend itself better to a medium that encourages multiple discussion threads and more time available to think about responses.)

The high visibility of alt-hist in the genre as a whole seemed to weight the discussion somewhat toward that are. The general consensus seemed to be that there was too much WW II and too much American Civil War, with everything else underused to a greater or lesser extent.

Farah Mendlesohn (fjm) asked why the Spanish Civil War gets no love, especially since changing that would be one way to get a very different, or nonexistent, WW II.

Carolyn Ives Gilman (see? I'm not confusing Glenn Grant, Gavin Grant, Greer Gilman, and Carolyn Ives Gilman this year!) said that she thought wars were overused because war results in a much more stripped-down view of society (as depicted in fiction). James Cambias said that he didn't think that was as true for historical fiction as for AH.

Mendlesohn suggested (Readercon 20 Guest of Honor) Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love as a "travelogue with a tourist of 19th Century England". Walter H. Hunt asked her if it was "like de Tocqueville"; her response: "at times, very much like that."

John Crowley mentioned Paul Parks's (?) four book "Roumania" series, but wondered if you had to know the real European background to appreciate them. Hunt said "if you don't, then what? Is that why nobody writes in these settings?" [ckd: see also Cambias's comment, later]

Gilman noted that there are fads and fashions among professional historians, also. Some eras and/or areas become more popular than others.

Mendlesohn recommended James Morrow's The Last Witchfinder, then suggested that the problem with many eras in Britain was "boring kings" and that there wasn't enough historical fiction set in Birmingham [ckd: or possibly even anywhere but London, really].

She then mentioned the earlier US civil rights era (running from the 1890s through the 1920s and 1940s) as being underused [ckd: I'd say it's also very very underappreciated in general]. I think there was some discussion at that point of some reasons it's less well known, mostly that those pushing for it tended to be socialists (or at least seen as such/associating with such) and therefore significantly de-emphasized in history class. Hunt said that John Dos Passos's USA covers this era. [ckd: also probably worth reading as a stylistic influence on writers from Brunner to Haldeman. I should read it....]

Hunt then made some comment about the naval portions of the French and Indian War being "all different" (from something), which I didn't note down any details of, but obviously thought interesting enough to note at the time. Anyone who does remember and could refresh my memory would be appreciated.

James Cambias noted that fiction set in a particular setting tends to attract more fiction in the same setting. [ckd: This of course leads to the problem of an author doing "research" by reading fiction and therefore getting it wrong.]

There was some audience discussion/questions, including such various bits as a mention of the blast furnace being invented in monasteries, but lost when Henry VIII destroyed them; Slavic history (Mendlesohn asked how many people know when the US invaded Russia, and was happy to see so many hands go up); and a question about "why not more English Civil War fiction?" Mendlesohn's reply to the last was that there was plenty of it in the UK, much of which still takes sides.

Ekaterina Sedia made a point that's similar to one made in the Bittercon discussion: "There are no unused eras, just overused time/place/people combinations."

Cambias closed out with a possibly telling point: using an obscure period means that you have to do a lot of research work for the few people who do know/care, but that for the majority of readers it's likely to be just as new to them as a completely fictional background.

My congoing day then wandered off into various trips through the Book Shop, hallway conversations, a dinner run, James Cambias's card game Bone Wars, the Kirk Poland Bad Prose competition, more Bone Wars, and then some sleep.

[1] As already mentioned, I didn't go to the con Thursday evening, so my experience was of a three-day con with an early Friday start.

[2] The second sentence of sartorias's post starts with "I don't know how much interest this one will raise--"; I think we have the answer, and the answer is "a whole heck of a lot".

I guess the folks in the Google offices in London haven't worked on this too much yet.

The Greenwich foot tunnel is completely unknown to it; the Google Maps directions send you for a 2.5 hour, 7.2 mile walk that goes through the Rotherhithe Tunnel, instead.

Crossing farther downstream, one would probably use the Woolwich Ferry when operating, or the Woolwich Foot Tunnel just to its east. Naturally, Google Maps sends you back to our old pal the Rotherhithe tunnel...12 miles, for a 4 hour walk!

Further upstream, it does know about the Millennium Bridge (as well as the pedestrian walkway down Peter's Hill), but doesn't use the Golden Jubilee Bridges (aka the New Hungerford Footbridges).