LoneStarCon 3, the 2013 Worldcon, has established its rates for Day Admissions — see details below. Sales will begin by postal mail and at various conventions beginning June 1, and online a couple weeks later.
Day Admissions give access to all aspects of the convention including programming, exhibits, and special events. This includes the featured Masquerade, scheduled for the evening of Saturday, August 31, and the prestigious Hugo Awards Ceremony, scheduled for the evening of Sunday, September 1.
Rates are listed in the full press release which follows the jump.
I’ve seen so many advertisements for a brand of bottled spring water which owes its purity to having percolated through underground mountain reservoirs since the last Ice Age that I couldn’t believe an announcement about scientists finding billion-year-old water came with the warning: “Don’t drink it.”
Microbes that have been isolated for tens of millions of years have been found in water with similar chemistry at even slightly deeper depths below the surface in a South African gold mine, using hydrogen gas as an energy source, the researchers noted.
Doubtless the stuff would have given Tyrannosaurus Rex the runs if he could have reached it.
The age of water is measured by an analysis of the xenon gas dissolved in it. Like many other elements, xenon comes in forms with different masses, known as isotopes. The water in the Ontario mine contained an unusually high level of lighter isotopes of xenon that are thought to have come from the Earth’s atmosphere at the time it became trapped.
(1) A friend of mine is a pediatrician, bilingual in Spanish. I was in his office one time when an emergency call came in from a Spanish-speaking father worried about a child’s fever. I knew enough vocabulary to comprehend that my friend was asking the parent to take the child’s temperature again – the figure of 110 degrees he was quoting couldn’t possibly be right because the child wouldn’t be alive – “Ciento diez es muerte” declared my friend.
(2) Lady Tsuz makes medieval chain mail with colorful anodyzed aluminum and a dollop of fannish humor:
I’m up for new challenges and ideas!! My current project is a red Star Trek shirt for a teddy bear. When I explained to my son what I was making, he picked up the bear, hugged it and said, “I’m sorry bear, it was nice knowing you!”
Instead, the moms pay $130 an hour to hire a disabled, “black-market” guide, who uses her position—sitting in a motorized scooter—to help entitled families gain special access to rides.
“On one hand, you can say she’s a great entrepreneur,” disability activist Kleo King, of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, told Yahoo! Shine. “On the other hand, she’s kind of pimping herself out. And it’s outrageous she would help people commit fraud.”
The 1% are belatedly discovering a strategy that the 99% have already been using for years. A local fan with a mobility disability collects a group of friends to visit Disneyland every Super Bowl Sunday – piggybacking on his access to the front of the line on a day that’s already the most lightly-attended of the year, enjoying the best of all possible (Disney)worlds.
(5) These three authors are probably at the bottom of Paul Krugman’s suggested reading for students of economics, but William Touponce considers them to have a lot to say about capitalism:
In Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys, William Touponce examines what these three modern masters of weird fiction reveal about modernity and the condition of being modern in their tales. In this study, Touponce confirms that these three authors conceived of storytelling as a kind of journey into the spectral. Furthermore, he explains how each of these writers identifies modernity with capitalism in various ways and shows a concern with surpassing the limits of realism, which they see as tied to the representation of bourgeois society.
(6) At the Slacktory they’ve intercut the 1949 instructional film You’re Driving 90 Horses with the four most frightening minutes of Steven Spielberg’s 1971 killer-truck TV movie Duel to create a faux educational video called Drive Deplorably with Steven Spielberg.
We had a couple of guys who hated to fly. One of them was named Connie Dierking, who had played at the University of Cincinnati. He hated to fly. Hated it. The pilot said, “Well, we’re going to fly, but we’re kind of flying in the teeth of this blizzard coming in, so for navigation, we’re going to follow the Mass Turnpike. We won’t be flying too high.” So Connie’s groaning, saying, “Oh my God.” It was very bumpy and Johnny Kerr, who was a jokester, he kept things light. He said, “Connie, what are you worried about? More people die in automobile accidents and crossing the street. Planes are very, very safe, the safest of all transportation. In fact, the other day, there was a train crash in France where 90 people died.” Connie said, “Really, what happened?” Johnny said, “Oh, a plane fell on the train.”
(8) This demo of DARPA’s Pet-Proto robot left me with a strong feeling I’d seen it all before. Seems to me it moves like a slow-mo version of the Remote Control Television that scampers through scenes in Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs.
So you want to build the Enterprise. Don’t we all! Well good news: according to some quick, messy, napkin math, it’s possible. Kind of. The bad news? It’s going to be stupid expensive. But not unfathomably so! Start scrounging up your space-pennies.
On the fact that Joyland, his new book, isn’t a horror novel:
“I’ve been typed as a horror writer … but I never saw myself that way. I just saw myself as a novelist. With Joyland, I wanted to try my hand at the whodunit format.”
On his daily writing regimen:
“I wrote 1,500 words this morning. Five pages a day, that’s usually what I get through.”
On why he and his two novelist sons show their work to his wife, Tabitha:
“She’ll say, ‘Here, you’ve done this before. This sucks. This is dumb.’ There’s no soft landing with Tabby, and that’s fine. [My sons] both dedicated their first novels to her, so it means a lot.”
[This post is part of a series about the Starship Century Symposium held May 21-22, 2013.]
Neal Stephenson
The words “THINKING BIG” covered the screen at the beginning of Neal Stephenson’s segment, where he was joined on stage by four scientists and engineers.
Lately Stephenson has been active in the Hieroglyph, a collaboration with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, working to make it a place where authors and scientists Think Big.
Stephenson told the audience he had made a soapbox speech at a conference about the decline of the space program, then pivoted to the gulf oil spill as a way of indicating the real issue isn’t about space launch. It’s our inability as a society to do big things, to execute big plans. The theory of the Hieroglyph is that good science fiction can help change that. Sf supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place, presented in a way that makes sense to a scientist or engineer, and around which they can organize their work. The ideal subject matter is an innovation that a young, modern-day engineer can make substantial progress on during his or her career.
Stephenson’s contribution is The Tall Tower. Inspired by Geoffrey Landis’ papers on the subject, Stephenson began wondering how tall we could build a structure using mundane materials – things available now, because if you have to develop special new materials then people push you off into the future, saying go play in the sandbox and come back in 15 years.
Stephenson discussed the question with Dr. Keith Hjelmstad, a professor of structural engineering at Arizona State University, and learned it might be possible to build a very large structure using high-grade steel.
Hjelmstad proceeded to take up the story about how the two now envision a 20km tall steel tower able to cope with cold temperatures and 480 mph jetstream winds.
Hjelmstad says what interested him in the project was the need to design from first principles — like back in the days before lawyers dominated the conversation. Lots of geometry of structure. A base covering 11 square miles. Using 430 million tons of steel, a significant portion of the world’s production.
Jenny Hu and Daniel MacDonald followed with a media presentation, “Accessible Tower Model,” exploring the structural requirements of such a tower. One of the recurring challenges is that solutions to recognized engineering problems end up adding weight to the tower. One CAD display footed to 985 million tons of steel and a budget of nearly a trillion dollars
The final presenter, Kevin Finke of the Furlong/Fortnight Bureau, presented the fascinating challenge of wind forces — the drag equation.
The density of the air falls off with altitude, but the velocity of the wind increases with altitude. In the worst case, winds will be greater than 300 mph in the jetstream.
He has considered various solutions. One is mounting airfoils and essentially flying The Tower through the wind. Alternatively, they might counter the drag with the thrust of attached jet engines. Adhering to the vision of using off-the-shelf technology, he calculated that would require about 22,300 of the most powerful jet engines made. Alternatively, Finke looked at the specifications for Pratt & Whitney F-1 engine used by the Saturn V — he would still need 700 of those.
Finke assured listeners they are serious about building the Tall Tower. In any case it is a great thought experiment that allows people to practice visualizing huge projects that will be the necessary forerunners of a starship. If actually built, the tower might facilitate the launching of spacecraft. However, in Stephenson’s story “Atmosphæra Incognita” for Starship Century (click to read an excerpt), by the time the tower is finished it is being used for technologies as yet unimagined or undeveloped when the project was first conceived.
Gregory Benford closed the presentation on a light note saying the Clarke Center is trying to get people to think big again because too many have become limited to ideas the size of their phone.
They were there at the beginning of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and helped bring the arts to sf cons…
Bjo introduced art shows to science fiction conventions, and put on some of the earliest costume shows, which evolved into today’s masquerades. She and John were key players in Star Trek fandom, helping keep the original series on the air when it was first under threat of cancellation. They have been active in fandom ever since.
It was just in the last issue of his fanzine Askance that John Purcell wrote, “Personally, I’m in no hurry to become a grandfather, but I know it will happen someday.”
Well, today was that day!
John and Valerie Purcell’s daughter Josie gave birth to Brian Charles James Blevins at 5:21 p.m. on May 26, making them grandparents for the first time. Congratulations.
[This post is part of a series about the Starship Century Symposium held May 21-22, 2013.]
Robert Zubrin is President of Pioneer Astronautics and the founder and President of the Mars Society, and was responsible for developing the Mars Direct mission plan.
With the zeal of a prophet, Zubrin made fiercely anti-Malthusian arguments that the goal of building a starship in the coming century is attainable.
What are the requirements for a starship? He postulates a 1000-ton ship that travels at 10% light speed. What resources will society need for the mission? Zubrin said that to keep the cost from exceeding Apollo levels in proportion to society’s wealth, humanity will need a gross global domestic product (GDP) of 1000 times greater than existed in 1968, or 200 times greater than exists today.
To achieve a 200-times increase over today’s GDP, we will need a population of 54 billion. We will need energy of 2500 terawatts by the year 2200.
Pounding away at the opposite conclusions reached in Paul Ehrlich’s famous book The Population Bomb, Zubrin said, “If humans destroyed more than they made, the earth would be barren already. The real resource is human creativity.” Every mouth comes with a pair of hands and a brain. If we accept Malthusian advice, and act to reduce the world’s population, we will impoverish the future by denying it the contributions the missing people could have made.
For one thing, the more people, the larger the market, the easier to justify investments. For another, technological progress is cumulative.
Zubrin’s historical graph showed that GDP/per capita has increased with total global population over the years. This is because productivity depends upon technology, which is the cumulative result of human effort. For example, he pointed to the jump in worldwide wealth in the 1500s, something he credited to the development of sailing ships which unified the world and allowed inventions to be disseminated more rapidly than ever before.
Humanity’s escape from poverty depends upon energy use – GDP/per capita is a function of carbon use. Rising levels of energy consumption have correlated directly with rising living standards. Zubrin does not consider that this has been accomplished at the cost of a climate catastrophe. “The weather is about the same as when I was a boy,” he said dismissively.
In the future our energy resources will be (1) The sum of known and unknown Terrestrial fossil fuels, plus (2) local planetary He3.
He speculated that a winged transatmospheric vehicle that can use a gas giant’s atmosphere for propellant, heating it in a nuclear reactor to produce thrust (Nuclear Indigenous Fueled Thermal rockets) could be used to transport He3 from the planet to an orbiting tanker, which would deliver it to Earth orbit.
This would provide fuel for fusion reactors. A fusion configuration could theoretically yield exhaust velocities of 5% the speed of light. The thrust level would be too low for in-system travel, but would make possible voyages to a nearby star with trip times of less than a century.
Zubrin is counting on human wanderlust as the motive for colonizing the nearby planets, and in time the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. “Why go? Why stay? Why live on a planet whose laws and social possibilities were defined by generations long dead, when you can be a pioneer and help shape a new world according to reason as you see it?” The need to create is fundamental. “Once outward move begins, it will not stop,” Zubrin promised, “We can make it to the stars provided we remain free.”
A question session followed which might have veered onto unpacking the speaker’s data and endlessly processing his analysis, except that Zubrin, with a verbal flourish, used the first question to point to the fuller support in his book Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (2011) – a bit of verbal judo that gained applause from the many authors in the audience. Remember: Always Be Closing…
American Supernatural Tales covers two centuries of weird and frightening American short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen King.
The collection, which first appeared in 2007, is projected as part of a six-volume series of the best in classic horror curated by Guillermo del Toro.
Included here are some of del Toro’s favorites, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ray Russell’s short story “Sardonicus,” considered by Stephen King to be “perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written,” to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and stories by Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Ted Klein, and Robert E. Howard.
The series is due in September. The other titles are:
The Raven
Tales and Poems
Edgar Allan Poe, Guillermo del Toro
