{"id":1461,"date":"2010-07-15T06:43:51","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T14:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=1461"},"modified":"2010-07-15T06:43:51","modified_gmt":"2010-07-15T14:43:51","slug":"polaris-schedule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=1461","title":{"rendered":"Polaris Schedule"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve noticed the new &#8220;Coming Attractions&#8221; element on the sidebar (which only renders properly if you insert its code into the middle of the <em>calendar <\/em>elements, for some reason \u2014 some day I really gotta figure out this php stuff from scratch instead of just poking it to see what happens), you may have noticed that I&#8217;ll be appearing as one of the token literary types at Polaris this weekend.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not doing a whole lot there \u2014 Polaris is aimed more at fans of the visual  than the verbal \u2014 but I am up for a few panels and a reading.\u00a0 To wit:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Silicon vs. Meat<\/strong>: (Sat. 1pm) It&#8217;s a knock-down, drag-out, no-holds-barred battle between biological and artificial intelligence \u2014 which will prevail, and why? Panelists: Robert J. Sawyer, Peter Watts, David G. Stephenson.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Avatar: The Theory of Pandora: <\/strong>(Sat. 5pm) From floating mountain vista, to flora composing a planet wide neural network. What are the scientific truths, and theories behind this? What would lead a planet to evolve an ecosystem of neurologically interlinking flora and fauna? What would make mountains fly? What could Unobtanium be, and what uses does it have?\u00a0 Panelists: Peter Watts, Karl Schroeder<\/li>\n<li><strong>Bigger Guns Or Better Stories?<\/strong> (Sun. 3pm) Video games are becoming more about the story and less about the action. Richard Morgan is writing Crysis 2, and Peter Watts has been cited as an influence on Bioshock 2. What potential do video games have as a delivery platform for legitimate storytelling, as opposed to the shoot-everything-that-moves aesthetic that has historically dominated the field? Can video games be literature? Should they be? Panelists: Peter Watts, Karl Schroeder, Robert Herrera, Cliff Goldstein, Elizabeth Hirst.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Reading<\/strong> (Sun 5pm \u2014 actually it was slotted at 5:30pm, the last session of the whole con\u2014 but I noticed that the 5pm slot was empty so they agreed to move me up a half hour).\u00a0 I was originally tempted to read an excerpt from &#8220;The Island&#8221; here as a bit of promo leading up to Worldcon, but since that story&#8217;s already crapped out on two of its three noms I figured, fuck it.\u00a0 No point.\u00a0 Besides, I&#8217;ve got a brand new story that&#8217;s scheduled  to appear in Jon Strahan&#8217;s <em>Engineering Infinity<\/em>, never before read aloud to human ears (although your lips may have moved when you read the first-draft excerpt <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=1355\">here<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0 And it takes almost exactly thirty minutes to read from end to end.\u00a0 Normally you don&#8217;t want to go over 20, 25 minutes in a half-hour slot, but it&#8217;s not as though there&#8217;s going to be anyone using the room afterwards.\u00a0 Hell, if anyone cares enough about &#8220;Malak&#8221; to show up that late on a Sunday, they probably won&#8217;t mind hanging out for a extra five minutes to hear how it ends.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, those are my panel obligations.\u00a0 The rest of the time I&#8217;ll be on the road or in the bar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve noticed the new &#8220;Coming Attractions&#8221; element on the sidebar (which only renders properly if you insert its code into the middle of the calendar elements, for some reason \u2014 some day I really gotta figure out this php stuff from scratch instead of just poking it to see what happens), you may have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-road","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1461"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1465,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions\/1465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}