{"id":1985,"date":"2011-04-13T09:34:32","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T17:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=1985"},"modified":"2011-04-18T10:31:15","modified_gmt":"2011-04-18T18:31:15","slug":"post-mortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=1985","title":{"rendered":"Post-Mortem"},"content":{"rendered":"

So. Ad Astra in retrospect. Pretty damn fine. (And no one was even capriciously banned from attendance, as far as I know.)<\/p>\n

I was loaded up with panels on Friday night, loaded up with panels on Sunday. Saturday was pretty much clear except for a reading in the morning and some kind of group autograph session in the afternoon that I blew off because seriously, when you’re one of thirty has-been GoH’s and Mercedes Lackey is in the room, nobody’s gonna be lining up for some guy with a box on his chest making weird slurpy noises. So instead I sat at the bar and whored peeks at my injured leg in exchange for sympathy beers, of which I got a lot; I paid for maybe two beers the whole damn weekend.<\/p>\n

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Glenn Grant, me, Kathryn Cramer, Christian Sauve. Photo by David Hartwell, I think.<\/p><\/div>\n


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Masterpiece Theatre. Photo by Jonathan Crowe.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

My reading was surprisingly-well attended, given that it was held first thing Saturday morning right off that little hallway where the restaurant stores its grease barrels and the staff meet to recreationally bang pots and pans together like a bunch of amphetamine-spiked preschoolers throwing a group tantrum. I was reading excerpts from Legion<\/em>, though, which has some fairly percussive bits, so maybe the ambience just contributed to the mood. Anyway, the audience seemed to give the overall experience a thumbs-up (and yes: I ended up having to read for the whole damn hour, although a guy I met in the bar the night before warmed up the crowd with a nifty little 300-word opening act).<\/p>\n

The panels I sat on all went pretty well \u2014 the moderators kept things reasonably on track, which isn’t always easy to do. If you forced me to pick a\u00a0 favorite, though, it would have to be “Hard Character SF”, if for no other reason than that Kathryn Cramer’s moderating technique involved handing out candies to panellists when they made a good point. It also delved into the whole you’re-no-more-autonomous-than-an-iPhone-app brand of neurophilosophy that I’m so fond of \u2014 and both Karl and Kathryn are sufficiently well-informed on the subject to challenge some of my more facile (if favorite) sound bites. I was, however, a bit disturbed to see this picture that Jonathan Crowe took afterward:<\/p>\n

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Karl Schroeder, Kathryn Cramer, Ent.<\/p><\/div>\n

I mean, I know I’m closest to the camera, and that’s going to make me look a little larger than the rest of the panel. Still. Seems to me that perspective should be a bit more linear<\/em>; if you draw a line from Karl’s head to Kathryn’s, then extend it further, the top of my own head should fall somewhere close to that. But next to Kathryn I’m fucking huge<\/em>.\u00a0 I could eat her head in two bites.\u00a0 Is that really what 199cm looks like? Because if so, you guys are all a bunch of goddamned hobbits.<\/p>\n

Then there was this Has-Been GoH thing nobody told me about; apparently they paired up former AA Guests-of-Honour throughout the weekend for hour-long slots. I did not find out about this until I saw my schedule on Friday, when I discovered that Julie Czerneda and I had been assigned to keep a room full of unruly fans in line for an hour. Neither of us had any idea what to do, so we kind of wung it.<\/p>\n

Julie began by introducing us and our respective works, while I channelled her words into an interpretive dance for the artsies in the crowd:<\/p>\n

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Dance of the Squid. And if you can't guess who took the photo by now, I can't help you.<\/p><\/div>\n

I don’t believe there are any actual pictures of the finale, which involved the triumphal slamming-down of a medical canister full of chunky leg-gore onto the table before us. It’s probably just as well.<\/p>\n

We asked each other questions. I discovered that Julie \u2014 one of a very small clique of Canadian authors with formal backgrounds in biology, and who specialize in biologically-plausible SF \u2014 has betrayed her roots and lowered herself to writing fantasy<\/em>. I, in turn, had to admit that I was collaborating with Caitlin Sweet on a children’s book called The Tale of Nellie the Nephron<\/em>, an old-fashioned fable which should find a ready market in both Harper’s Canada and the Republican US. (Nellie is a kidney cell who rebels against a life spent filtering urine and strikes out on her own \u2014 only to discover that not everyone is a stem cell, and it’s hard making your way in a world of neurons, striated muscles, and intestinal epithelia. Eventually she gets flushed out of the body entirely, makes a marginal living on the street processing urine for food, then gets ingested by a slug who’s carrying a metacercarial parasite with a mammalian definitive host. The parasite helps her hitch a ride back home where she gladly resumes her piss-filtering duties, having learned the most important lesson any child of the state can learn: Know Your Place.)<\/p>\n

Somehow we filled the hour. It actually worked a lot better than it had any right to.<\/p>\n

But beyond the panels, the people. There were the usual suspects, of course, the locals without whom no Ad Astra would be complete \u2014 but this thirtieth anniversary brought in rare birds from further afield. Derryl Murphy showed up from the western boons for his first ChiZine release, Napier’s Bones<\/em> (he described to me the premise of that book years and years ago, and a brilliant premise it is, and all I can say is it’s about fucking time). Elisabeth Vonarburg, Quebeckian literary goddess, and someone who turned from sceptic to friend over a dinner buffet when we first met in Montreal back in ’03: I was pleased to have breakfast with her on Saturday, and even more pleased to distract her into missing most of a panel she was supposed to be on during that time. Kathryn Cramer, who shared her own traumatic experiences with the Officer Friendlies of the police state in which she lives. Sandra Kasturi, who’s a regular at these things but who gets special mention anyway because she brought me big fat sausages of marzipan. Ellen Datlow, who confided her experiences with leg-based cellulitis (NF’s little brother). Terry Findlay, with whom I discussed the nuts and bolts of dragging my antique and broken website into the 21st Century. One ex, whom I encountered but briefly; another I managed to entirely avoid. (Those last two did not<\/em> buy me beers.)<\/p>\n

So overall, a terrific weekend even if the metabolic demands of leg regrowth did<\/em> cause me to crash on occasion. It was a delight to see you all (well, almost all). I can’t wait until 2012. (Assuming there is a 2012.)<\/p>\n

Next up: Much Ado About Chemical Morality, Source Code<\/em>, and the most unexpected Blindsight<\/em> cover art ever. Not necessarily in that order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So. Ad Astra in retrospect. Pretty damn fine. (And no one was even capriciously banned from attendance, as far as I know.) I was loaded up with panels on Friday night, loaded up with panels on Sunday. Saturday was pretty much clear except for a reading in the morning and some kind of group autograph […]<\/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-1985","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\/1985","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=1985"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2012,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions\/2012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}