Report From The BSFA Meeting

[coalescent]

That was fun. Some highlights:

- Dan (above centre) heckling the audience as much as the audience heckled him.

- The cheerfulness with which Liz (above right) called Dan a wronghead.

- Andrew: "Complaining Accelerando is about people who are still a bit like us is like complaining that post-nuclear-holocaust stories aren't about piles of dust."

- Martin (above left)'s opinion of the shortlist: there's always a lower place.

- Dan and Abigail discussing Jane Austen (Graham: "Ginger, get the popcorn.")

- General agreement on the brilliance of Air.

- The many many books I came home with, including the beautiful Polder.

Can we do it again sometime?

Comments

[andrewducker]

I totally agree about Accelerando - you need to keep the eople who are no longer like us off-camera, or at least not allow them too much screen-time, or they end up sounding just like us. What are the creatures down in the hot depths thinking about? Not for us to know.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Sure. But Dan's point was that it's a bit disingenuous to praise Accelerando, as many people do, for its depiction of life during and after singularity, since the really radical stuff happens off-screen.

[andrewducker]

But it's about people living through the singularity, which makes the singularity part of the background.

Admittedly, I would have liked to see what was happening to people on Earth during the period that our intrepid heroes were away, but I'm not sure how well that would have worked.