This past weekend was Windycon, and I had a blast.
I’ve been going to Windycon every year for the past four and always had a great time. This year was the first time I signed up to be on panels, and it definitely made for a different — and even better — experience.
After work on Friday, I did my best to put the recent election out of mind and headed over to the con to catch a few panels (ones I wasn’t on). I sat in on my buddy Brendan Detzner‘s reading and got to hear some excerpts from his new novella, The Hidden Lands, followed non-sequitur by a Q&A session with Eric Flint.
Saturday was my first panel, “We Live in the Future.” I wasn’t scheduled to moderate this one, but got suckered into it anyway. Despite being unprepared for that role, not to mention the fact that this was my first time as a panelist ever, and notwithstanding a slight digression into the pharmaceuticals market, I think it went pretty well. We discussed many emerging technologies, like ectogenesis (what Lois McMaster Bujold calls “uterine replicators”), lab grown meat (what LMB calls “vat meat”), and self-driving cars, as well as post-scarcity economics and the how we may be seeing the leading edge of the jobless future, widespread technological unemployment as human tasks are increasingly automated and performed by machines. We barely got to touch on augmented reality or AI, but I guess fifty minutes just isn’t enough time to fill with all the ways our modern world looks like science-fiction.
Sunday morning I was scheduled to give a reading, and much as I’d expected given the timing, no one showed up. I did get to meet author guest of honor Adam Selzer, who was reading right after me. Using the wonders of technology, Adam live-streamed both our readings to Facebook, so we’d have a bit of an audience. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to track down the video of me reading just yet. If I do, I might post a link, depending on how cringe-worthy my presentation is.
Sunday afternoon I moderated my second panel, “Where Did That Word Come From?” I’d been expecting to moderate this one, so I was a bit more prepared, and I think it went pretty well. Everyone involved seemed to enjoy the discussion and I think each person in the room, myself included, learned at least one thing we hadn’t known when we walked in. I’m no etymologist by any stretch, but I was personally delighted to inform a gathering of twenty-odd people about the root components of the term cyberpunk: cyber, short for cybernetic, from the Ancient Greek kubernetikos, meaning “good at steering” or “good pilot;” and punk, originating in some past century (19th?) as a slang term for a prostitute. So, a cyberpunk is a prostitute who’s a good pilot. Awesome.
Allergies were kicking my but all week and didn’t let up for Windycon, so I was mighty weary and didn’t stick around into the wee hours schmoozing with fellow writers — in fact, I barely got to say more than a brief hello to friends passed in the hallway — but nonetheless I think it was a weekend well spent.