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[Editor's Note: This material originally appeared in FOSFAX, 1998. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.]
Copyright 1998 Taras Wolansky
Bucconeer, the 56th Worldcon, was held August 5th through the 9th, 1998, at the Baltimore Convention Center and nearby hotels, in Baltimore, Maryland. "Honored Guests": C.J. Cherryh, writer; Milton A. Rothman, fan; Stanley Schmidt, (Analog Magazine) editor; Michael Whelan, artist; Babylon 5 producer J. Michael Straczynski, special guest; Toastmaster, the urbane Charles Sheffield.
The convention center is right in the middle of Baltimore’s harbor district, with interesting tourist traps on all sides. Not that I saw many of them until after the convention; I was too busy!
Indeed, I look through the pocket program with mixed feelings, because I missed so many interesting convention panels and events as well. Several cohorts of friends and acquaintances were at the convention, and they pleasantly took up a good deal of my time.
Physicists say that faster-than-light travel would create paradoxes, like effects appearing to precede their causes. Quite appropriately, then, the panel on “Faster-than-Light: Only in SF?”, Wednesday afternoon, preceded the convention’s opening ceremonies. And, in spite of that, the whole of the extremely well-qualified panel actually showed up. (Let me apologize in advance for mangling the panelists’ physics.)
John G. Kramer, Professor of Physics, Analog magazine “Alternate View” columnist, and science fiction novelist, noted that nature appears to dislike FTL, so you’ve got to be tricky to get around it.
Catherine Asaro, the moderator and another physics prof with several SF novels to her credit, joked that “some people say my doctorate [thesis] was my first science fiction!” (Laughter.) She got interested in “breakthrough propulsion” partly because of her students, who complained, “‘We don’t like this, that you can’t go faster than the speed of light!’” And in fact, working out mathematically sound methods of FTL for her science fiction led to a 1996 paper in the American Journal of Physics.
Eric Kotani, the SF-writing alter ego of NASA astrophysicist and prof Yoji Kondo, a specialist in propulsion systems, pointed out that with a modest continuous acceleration it’s just a few years, ship time, to anywhere in the universe. True, millions of years may have passed at home, he deadpanned, but consider the social security benefits you will have accrued. (Laughter.)
Richard Stoddard, another NASA guy, said moving matter faster than the speed of light is still exclusively the domain of science fiction; but, he averred, Bell’s Inequality tells us it is possible to transmit information faster than the speed of light. He gave a list of cases where nature is playing fast and loose with the lightspeed barrier: Cerenkov radiation, Maxwell’s back wave (a curious effect that seems to imply transmission at 2.5 lights), quantum entangled particles, quantum tunneling. (However, there is some argument about whether information is really being transmitted.)
On the subject of tunneling, Cramer added that the time it takes for a photon to tunnel from A to B is independent of the thickness of the barrier between A and B (but fewer photons get through). Cramer said he has urged the experimenter to thicken the barrier sufficiently so that the “FTL” effect can no longer be explained away by redefining what one means by velocity. And if photons can tunnel faster than the speed of light, added Asaro, then so can particles.
FTL is “forbidden by whom?” was Kotani’s rhetorical question. We make the Universe work for us: what Einstein really said is that you can’t accelerate to and beyond the speed of light. Several physics papers have been published on “warp drives”, for example.
Asaro distinguished the possible from the feasible; a possible but not feasible FTL drive, for example, would be one that requires the total energy production of the Universe. However, as we begin to approach the kind of energies needed to create black holes and warp drives, we will discover our theories are approximations.
Asaro also thinks the argument that FTL would involve violations of causality is a “red herring ... Mathematically, it’s possible; so it’s that it offends us philosophically.” “It doesn’t offend me!” said Kotani. (Laughter.) Which is not to say the math lets you do anything you want. “The equations ... do allow you to go back in time,” said Asaro, but “they do not allow you to change the past.” This is because all reference frames must be consistent.
An audience member asked about Miguel Alcubierre’s Star Trek-inspired paper on warp drives. Cramer said Alcubierre had found a solution to the Einstein equations that describes an object with “flat” space in the middle, with a sort of “big crunch” in front and a sort of “big bang” behind, “so space is contracting and disappearing in front of the object and appearing and mushrooming behind the object; and so you can make it go as fast as you want” without worrying about the speed of light, or any relativistic effects. Asaro worried that this would require a lot of energy. “No, no,” denied Cramer warmly. “As a matter of fact the interesting thing about it,” he said, “is that the amount of energy required to produce it is negative.” (Much laughter, as the scientifically hip audience got the joke.
At the end, the panelists gave us some useful web addresses. John Cramer’s “Alternate View” columns may be found at www.npl.washington.edu/av. Catherine Asaro may be found at www.sff.net/people/asaro, with links to “breakthrough physics” sites. And Richard Stoddard recommends www.hq.nasa.gov.
What is particularly interesting to me about this panel is that if, instead of physicists, it had been a panel of SF-writing Eng. Lit. graduates, they would all have blithely asserted that faster-than-light travel is impossible. And that, therefore, science fiction is really no more than an odd kind of fantasy.
Thursday afternoon, eofan Milton A. Rothman gave his Guest of Honor speech, entitled “I tried to get out of science fiction, but science fiction wouldn’t get out of me”. Rothman participated in what is often described as the first science fiction convention of all time, in 1936, which really consisted of a group of New York fans dropping in on some Philadelphia fans. Once the nine young men had decided to call it a convention, the New York fans courteously nominated Rothman to be chairman; the convention facility was his living room, after all. Of the nine people present, said Rothman, five are now gone: Donald Wollheim, John Michel, Will Sykora, John Baltadonis, and Oswald Train.
To those in the audience who had never heard of him, and might wonder why he was Fan Guest of Honor at a Worldcon, Rothman explained that for twenty years after his stellar beginning as first convention chairman he was one of the most active fans in the country, founding the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society (which puts on the annual Philcon to this day) and running or helping run various conventions.
In the service during the war, he recalled briefly stopping over at the Rome airport, exactly 53 years ago today, when the Hiroshima bombing was announced. To him it meant that the war was over, and he would not be sent to participate in the invasion of Japan. Most of the people who second-guess the decision to A-bomb Japan, today, were not around then and don’t understand how the troops felt about it, he said firmly. When he returned to his barracks in Paris, he found that he was the only one who understood what it meant; not so much because of the couple of physics courses he had taken up to that time, but because science fiction had been dealing with atomic energy since H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free in 1914.
After the war, he pursued parallel lives, studying physics on the G.I. Bill, and chairing the first and second Philadelphia Worldcons, in 1947 and 1953. He recalled his amazement when the 1947 Worldcon reached the astonishing attendance total of 200; which rose in 1953 to 350, counting six-month-old Tony Rothman. (Who was in the audience, along with his sister.)
In 1953 Rothman’s physics career suffered a hitch when he was refused a job at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a “security risk”. (Lieutenant Commander L. Sprague de Camp testified for him at his security hearing.) It was guilt by association; several members of the early cohort of SF fans to which Rothman had belonged had joined or at least flirted with the Communist Party. However, Rothman’s particular problem was a long forgotten letter, now somehow in FBI hands, which he had written to a fellow fan, Chandler Davis. Chan Davis had suggested that Rothman join the Communist Party; Rothman had refused; but evidently, from the FBI’s viewpoint, his refusal was “not indignant enough!”
Rothman said he had gone into the affair in some detail because there has been controversy in science fiction circles as to whether Chan Davis had himself turned over his files, including the letter, to the FBI to obtain better treatment. “I think this is not true,” said Rothman. At a Boston convention a couple of years ago Rothman and Davis had had a long talk about the matter. Chan Davis’ explanation is that his father, a well-known Communist, could have been under surveillance: the FBI might have gotten the letter out of the garbage.
If Chan Davis, fiercely independent and anti-government, had grown up today instead of in the 1930s, Rothman speculated, he might have been a libertarian or a right-wing radical. In any case, in 1954 Davis pled the First Amendment, instead of the Fifth, when questioned about his membership in the Communist Party. After many legal battles, he served six months in jail in 1960 (presumably because the courts rejected his First Amendment grounds for refusing to answer questions). Fascinated by all this Cold War stuff, I later proposed that the Freedom of Information Act be used to extract fan history from government archives.
In any event, Rothman thinks being diverted from Oak Ridge was all to the good. Instead, he worked on hydrogen fusion, and eventually became Professor of Physics at Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey). He continued to publish the occasional science fiction story, but discovered he was better at writing non-fiction.
In recent years, Rothman has taken up the cudgels against pseudo-science, “practicing philosophy without a license” in A Physicist’s Guide to Skepticism (Prometheus Books). Actually, these battles had started in the days of legendary Analog editor and intellectual gadfly John W. Campbell, he said, when Campbell, who could believe “ten impossible things before breakfast”, promoted such wonders as the Dean Drive, the Hieronymous Machine, and L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics (which later mutated into Scientology). Quoting people who knew Hubbard in the 1940s, he said: “One of the great epiphanies of this century was when Hubbard realized he could make more money starting a religion than writing science fiction!”
Later Thursday afternoon, the pocket program promised a panel on “Libertarian SF ... Supporters and opponents engage in a spirited discussion.” “‘Spirited discussion?’” said moderator Jack Speer wonderingly, as the panel got started. “Now, how did they know that?”
The panelists were: SF writer and super-fan Alexis Gilliland, who likes to hang out with libertarians because of the good arguments; novelist Matt Ruff, whose Sewer, Gas and Electric is in some ways a parody of Ayn Rand’s individualist classic, Atlas Shrugged; SF writing scientist Arlan Andrew, who organized the North Carolina Libertarian Party and was its 1996 gubernatorial candidate.
Gilliland dominated the discussion (at least as reflected in my notes). Ayn Rand said she hated libertarianism even more than she did outright leftists like Jane Fonda, Gilliland asserted. (Rand was very possessive about what she considered her doctrines -- many of which were not really original with her -- and objected to anyone who developed them in directions she didn’t approve.) Not that Rand’s attitude toward science fiction was much more positive, Gilliland continued. Asked about SF, she replied that she had read some in the 1940s, but didn’t like it. (It might be interesting to learn exactly what she read.)
Gilliland criticized what he described as libertarians’ Manichean view of government opposed to the market; in his view the two are “inextricably mixed”. (In reality, markets -- “black” markets, for example -- can operate altogether outside the protection and regulation of government. Not that this is necessarily an ideal state of affairs!)
At precisely 4:23 PM -- the rest of the audience (including arch-anarchocapitalist Sam Konkin) marched in! Up to that time they had been running their own spontaneously organized panel, sans official panelists, in the larger room where the panel had originally been scheduled. As, obviously, nothing else had been scheduled in that room, I have no idea why the con committee had moved the panel in the first place. (Must be a conspiracy!)
The balance between literary quality and ideological purity, in libertarian SF like the anthology, Free Space, had been a topic of discussion. An audience member asked if there are any stories in which a libertarian society doesn’t work out. Gilliland said that his The End of the Empire concerns a libertarian dystopia. (He might also have mentioned Larry Niven’s “Cloak of Anarchy”.)
Sometimes there is a tendency to identify libertarianism with its radical forms, anarchism or anarchocapitalism. Matt Ruff proposed a more moderate definition: libertarianism is small, limited government, “details to be determined -- through lots of ceaseless argument!”
As token libertarian on the panel, Arlan Andrews did only a so-so job of showing the flag. For example, when Speer asked what libertarianism had to say to the Great Depression, Andrews had no answer. I now regret I did not make a greater effort to jump in, and point out that libertarian economist Murray Rothbard had written a whole book about the Depression. (As I recall he faults the government for permitting the money supply it had inflated earlier to fall by half, while simultaneously trying to hold wage rates up. The natural result, by the law of supply and demand, was extremely high unemployment.)
Saturday afternoon, it was time for Analog magazine editor Stanley Schmidt’s Guest of Honor address. “Remember Analog? It looks like this!” he said, holding up a copy of the magazine.
Often questioned as to why he has continued as Analog editor for so many years -- since 1978! -- he gave his “short answer”: “I do science fiction because it’s so much fun!” His love affair with the magazine goes back to when it was still called Astounding, and his father gave him a bound volume.
In his wide-ranging talk to an audience well-supplied with aspiring writers, Schmidt touched on the problems of “mid-list” writers in today’s market. You have “two or three chances to write a best-seller -- and then you’re out, or writing media tie-ins,” he said.
A woman in the audience asked about using science fiction for science education. In fact, why not science notes to the stories in Analog, I challenged the slightly nonplussed Schmidt, as the audience chuckled. Schmidt: No space -- but on the web page ... Me: No space for a paragraph at the end? But Schmidt said that esthetically he prefers to hide the science.
When Schmidt asked us, “Remember Analog?”, near the beginning of the talk, it had reminded me of a conversation I had just overheard. A moderately well-known Analog writer (I won’t give his name) wondered at Asimov’s magazine’s monopoly of awards. For example, the night before, Bill Johnson’s “We Will Drink a Fish Together” had won the Hugo for best short story; the Analog writer felt this was really a typical Analog story, a pastoral with aliens of the kind Clifford Simak used to write, yet it had appeared in Asimov’s.
(At Albacon a few months later, I may have learned part of the reason. It seems, even though Analog has always had a substantially larger circulation that Asimov’s -- which should make an Analog story more valuable than an Asimov’s story -- nonetheless the company that publishes both pays the same word rate for both. Thus, it would make sense for a writer to give Asimov’s the first look at every story, making that magazine’s award-winning habit a self-fulfilling prophecy. Analog needs to be separated from Asimov’s, so it can start outbidding it for stories.)
Aside from FTL, another science fiction idea that the Eng. Lit. graduates dismiss as fantasy -- with better reason -- is teleportation. Yet here, too, recent work in physics is inching it -- in the form of “Quantum Teleportation” -- into the domain of hard science. The panelists were: SF-writing physics prof John G. Cramer (who did most of the talking); buckyball (C60) researcher Sabrina Chase; and urbane SF-writing scientist Charles Sheffield, who has done research in general relativity and gravitation. (Again, let me apologize in advance for garbling their physics.)
Cramer said the idea of quantum teleportation was introduced in Physical Review Letters in 1993. It involves quantum nonlocality, what Einstein rather dismissively called “spooky action at a distance”. Take two particles whose quantum states are “entangled”. Measure one of them, collapsing the wave function and, no matter how far away the other particle is, its wave function simultaneously collapses.
So far, only a single photon has been teleported (i.e., its quantum state duplicated). However, any one of us can be considered, in principle, a complicated set of quantum states, said Cramer. Imagine, then, an entangled pair of “blank” human beings -- whatever that means -- instead of a pair of particles. Combine the transportee with one of the “blanks” and take a “few” measurements.
The Star Trek kind of teleportation was also considered. Just how astronomical would the amount of information have to be, to permit exact reconstitution of a human being from raw materials? And just how precise would the duplication be: “Would you trust your body to Windows (tm)?” Chase asked, tongue in cheek.
From the floor, I reminded the panel that this problem was foreseen by Golden Age SF writer A.E. Van Vogt. In Mission to the Stars (The Mixed Men), the inaccuracy of early teleportation devices results in the appearance of a new subrace of humans, the Dellians. But there is no real reason to desire precise teleportation of the human body, I continued. (“If you’re going to transmit me, why don’t you give me 20-20 vision!”) Instead, approximate the body and copy just the brain exactly.
At one point Chase chuckled over Einstein’s opposition to quantum theory. Einstein had famously said, “God does not play dice.” To which Niels Bohr replied, “Albert, stop telling God what to do!”
Sunday afternoon, at the very tail end of the convention, I attended “Colonizing Space”, with a panel of hard-SF writers: Robert J. Sawyer, Elizabeth Moon, and Joe Haldeman (who has written several novels on the subject), with SF-writing space scientist Geoffrey Landis moderating.
Landis began by asking the panelists, why: why colonize space, given the high cost. “You shouldn’t keep all your eggs in one basket,” warned Sawyer. Lifeboat Earth may spring a leak, one of these days. Haldeman quoted legendary Russian space science pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: “Earth is a lovely cradle -- but you can’t stay in the cradle forever.” Landis himself clinched the argument: “because space is way cool!”
With the entire panel in agreement, said Moon puckishly, it’s decided: we will colonize space. Playing devil’s advocate, Haldeman put on a hat, to represent the proverbial ignoramus in the street. Instead of space, we should spend money on more urgent concerns, said Hat-Haldeman, concerns like “better TV”. Landis: “Thank you, Senator!”
Landis’ second big question: Why didn’t space colonization happen; that is, happen in the big way so many of us had expected? With the Cold War won, the U.S. no longer needed to prove who is Number One, said Sawyer (suffering, I would surmise, from the typical Canadian inferiority complex). You can’t convince people there’s money in it, said cynical (and hatless) Haldeman. But Landis slightly disagreed with the premise of his own question: there is progress behind the scenes, he said, in the technology itself, and in the private sphere.
The third big question, of course, is how do we get space colonization moving. An audience member asked “Senator” Haldeman if the political case for space might be improved if L5 were made a Congressional district! (Laughter.) Hatless again, Haldeman thought we might need a (John F.) “Kennedyesque” leader. (Possibly he meant a leader like JFK was thought to be, rather than what we now know he really was.) I suggested that there would have been a hundred moon landings by now, if the sponsors had been permitted to claim a bit of the moon when every time they landed on it.
If no one is legally permitted to make claims on the Moon, said another audience member, then maybe what we need is a little grand theft! “Maybe we need ‘The Man Who Stole the Moon’”, nodded Landis, parodying the famous Heinlein title. What we really need, though, Landis added later, is a good enemy, like Iraqis in space.
An audience member gave us the phone number (1-800-FIRSTUSA) for the X-Prize credit card. It funds both a prize for private space vehicles, and a sweepstakes for a trip into space. The first prize is a trip on the second flight, joked Haldeman; the second prize, a trip on the first flight!
Earlier, Landis had spoken of “space elevators” -- towers 2,000 miles high built of exotic materials -- as, in the long run, a promising method of getting into space very cheaply. An audience member expressed concern that, someday, the hotels would be at the bottom, and the con suite and parties at the top.
Given the medical history of long-term astronauts and cosmonauts, especially as to loss of bone mass, an audience member worried about the health effects of microgravity (“zero” G). Moon thought that the natural variability of the human race would turn up a subpopulation more tolerant of microgravity. (Who needs bones anyway, wisecracked Landis.) Haldeman thought genetic engineering might be necessary. But Landis reminded us that we can always use centrifugal force to simulate terrestrial gravity.
Would you like to live in a submarine, asked a nay-sayer
from the audience. That’s what living in space would really be like! Haldeman and Sawyer would certainly like to visit at least, they agreed. Moon said she would go in a flash; she takes this so seriously that she discussed the possibility with her fiancé before they married! Rising to Moon’s challenge, Haldeman agreed that he would go, too, so long as it was not “the same tin can for 30 years.”
For lack of time, I was intending to pass over the art show in silence; but some of the pieces simply cry out for notice.
The deceptively normal-looking Lisa Snellings, already the creator of a macabre merry-go-round and Ferris wheel inhabited by ghouls and monsters, has overcome formidable technical challenges to add a sinister, black-metaled roller coaster to the set. Filling a table-top, “Short Trip to October” features a carload of strange beings in constant circulation (though, after running for the whole length of the convention, when I got there it was beginning to jam now and then).
A technical feat of an entirely different kind is represented by Judy York’s “Jackaroo”, a woman’s portrait for the cover of a historical novel that is a jaw-dropping piece of photorealism. If you’ve got money to burn and want a portrait painted, you might want to consider this artist.
A witty take on a very familiar topic is Charles Keegan’s “Teenage Angst”: an adolescent Tarzan perched on a branch, at odds with his community -- community of apes (chimpanzees), that is, seen below.
Even more deliciously odd is Lee Moyer’s “The Tweet”, a portrait of that notorious canary, Tweety Bird, modeled after Edvard Munch’s “The Shriek”; Sylvester the Cat lurks in the background.
Emerging from the escalators with a bunch of people, I was handed a flyer: "Erotic SF Party ... Meet Cecelia Tan". I said to my companion, "Congratulations: you just met Cecelia Tan." Circlet Press is perhaps a one-person (or one-dominatrix) operation!
I normally don’t go to movie screenings at conventions, as for the most part “sci-fi” movies are easily available elsewhere. However, Thursday evening I did see a movie that is rather hard to find, a movie that is not even science fiction. The Whole Wide World (1996) is based upon Novalyne Price’s memoir of her ill-fated romance with Robert E. Howard, creator of “Conan the Barbarian”, in early 1930s Texas. Price is played by the radiant Renee Zellweger (the pocket program misspells her name) of Jerry Maguire; Howard, by Vincent D’Onofrio of Ed Wood and Men in Black.
Much of Friday I spent watching a marathon showing of the Japanese animation series, Neon Genesis Evangelion. The individual episodes are intriguing, promising to go somewhere interesting and unusual both in terms of story and character development. In the end, however, this promise is not fulfilled; and I was glad to have sated my curiosity at so little expense to my pocket.
Also Friday was the official FOSFAX dinner, at the Wharf Rat, just across the street from the convention center. This was a real FOSFAX Worldcon dinner, moderated by Tim Lane himself, not one of the rump affairs Marty Wooster and I put on when Lane doesn’t show up. (As everyone knows, the only reason anyone bothers to contribute to FOSFAX is to get into the FOSFAX dinner.) Happily, we all got in with a minimal wait; unhappily we were spread out over several small tables. But I had little to complain of, having ended up at the “grown-ups table” with Donald Kingsbury, Patrick McGuire, and Martin Morse Wooster, scholars and gentlemen all.
Wandering in the direction of the dealers’ room and art show, early Saturday afternoon, I was distracted by the sight of a Babylon 5 blooper reel, playing to a huge audience in the big auditorium. It was hilarious, though obscenity-laced. I’m not sure how I would feel about it, if I were a parent escorting small children.
The souvenir book was up to standard, but no more: brief appreciations of the guests of honor; lists of previous Worldcons and Hugo Award winners; the World Science Fiction Society’s bylaws. The convention newsletter, on the other hand, was full of information and interesting tidbits.
Statistical Note: According to Toastmaster Charles Sheffield at the Closing Ceremonies, the convention’s “warm body count” was about 5500. North American Worldcon attendance seems to be stagnating at around that level.--Taras Wolansky
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