LoneStarCon 3 membership sale!

Just a quick heads-up on a LoneStarCon 3 media announcement I just sent out today. A good deal if you've got a geeky significant other you need to find a stocking stuffer for!

LoneStarCon 3 offers limited time membership special

November 19, 2012

SAN ANTONIO, Texas – LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention, has announced a special two-week membership sale running Nov. 19-Dec. 2.

Attending memberships will be available for the reduced rate of $170 until midnight, Dec. 2. In addition to full access to the convention, attending memberships entitle the holder to make nominations for the Hugo Awards, receive pre-convention publications and advance information featured guests, exhibits and special events such as the LoneStarCon 3 International Film Festival.

"The committee saw this as an opportunity to say 'Thank you' to the fan communities who've given LoneStarCon 3 so much encouragement and support," said Laura Domitz, convention co-chair. "Think of it as getting a jump on the end-of-year holiday spirit."

Regular convention membership rates are scheduled to increase Dec. 31.

LoneStarCon 3 will be held Aug. 29-Sept. 2, 2013, at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas. The Mariott Rivercenter and Mariott Riverwalk will serve as the host hotels. This marks the first time since 1997 that the Alamo City has hosted a Worldcon, when LoneStarCon 2 drew thousands to the downtown convention center.

The guests of honor list for LoneStarCon 3 includes Ellen Datlow, James Gunn, Norman Spinrad and Willie Siros, with Paul Cornell serving as toastmaster and featuring special guests Leslie Fish and Joe R. Lansdale. Artist guest of honor Darrell K. Sweet tragically passed away Dec. 5, 2011.

MEMBERSHIPS

Attending membership rates for LoneStarCon 3 are normally $180 for adults, $110 for young adult (17-21 years old), $75 for children (16 and under) and $480 for family memberships. The listed membership rates are good through December 31, 2012. The sale only lowers the rate for adult attending memberships ($170) and family memberships ($460).

LoneStarCon 3 is also offering a military discount rate of $110, which is not subject to future increases.

ABOUT THE WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION

Founded in 1939, the World Science Fiction Convention is one of the largest international gatherings of authors, artists, editors, publishers and fans of science fiction and fantasy entertainment. The annual Hugo Awards, the leading award for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy, are voted on by Worldcon membership and presented during the convention.

LoneStarCon 3 is sponsored by ALAMO, Inc., (Alamo Literary Arts Maintenance Organization), a 501(c)3 organization. For more information about LoneStarCon 3, memberships or hotel information, visit www.LoneStarCon3.org.

Meanwhile, in an undisclosed secret location beneath Democracy Plaza

[Pic: Our secret cyborg overlord pictured watching the returns in the man cave of his Wyoming Eagle's Nest, while "interviews" using enhanced interrogation techniques are livestreamed to the iPad in his lap. Picture from Mary Cheney's Instagram feed, via Bruce Sterling.]

I spent last night watching screens on which other people were watching screens.

This was the first US presidential election I have watched without a television in my home. When I moved last year, I realized I had not watched television at home in more than a year, and decided it was finally time to live without it. So now I get my news from the web, the radio, and my anachronistic daily delivery of the print newspaper.

When there are breaking news events of the sort that make me want to see live video from major networks, I am limited to what I can get over the Web. So last night we watched the returns with a late model laptop, an 1990s-style software salesman's projector purchased at the CompUSA going out of business sale, a 1960s Da-Lite movie screen purchased on EBay, and a high wattage analog English stereo system best suited for blasting old vinyl. It's a bit of work to set up, and that's a good thing.

Watching the network returns on the Net provided a glimpse of the big three broadcasting networks trying to figure out how to evolve their journalistic business models to keep up with contemporary media. How do they attract the eyeballs and ears and minds of people like me, for whom a television connected to broadcast or cable networks is as anachronistic as a land line telephone? And how do they make money from it once they do that?

All three networks provided livestreamed online election coverage without commercials.

CBS was the only one of the big three that provided the full broadcast content online, complete with Scott Pelley as the post-Cronkite voice of calm authority and Bob Schieffer commenting live from the middle of the twentieth century. During the broadcast commercial breaks, the CBS Net stream switched over to CBS Radio's live coverage. Using voice content to fill downtime during a network stream (or other time-consuming computer process) is a great idea.

NBC online reported with deadpan self-parody "Live from Democracy Plaza" with Brian Williams anchoring and David Gregory and Savannah Guthrie at the table with him. But except when it was time for the gnomes to put another color sheet over the giant map of the states embedded in the ice rink (!), the online coverage was a clone cast provided by the NBC News Teen Titans, most of whom seemed like they were unsuccessfully trying to channel the news anchors they had grown up watching. There was no discussion in either stream of the irony in the fact that "Democracy Plaza" is the courtyard of a corporate office park, the true name of which is that of the Gilded Age robber barons that built it.

ABC News had a complete alternate network for its online coverage: ABCNews.Com • Yahoo! News. Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopolous only appeared after the election had been called for Obama, and the commercials had stopped pending the victory speech. There was no clear indication that you were getting an alternate version of ABC News. The set had all the same signifiers, the people were dressed the same, and the content architecture was essentially identical. But you quickly figured out this was ABC News with the interns in charge. ABC is using its online channel as a farm league to develop its new talent, and to provide a place to use old talent that no longer cuts it in prime time. The anchor desk was filled with three thirtysomething newcomers (anchor Dan Harris, Political Director Amy Walter, and Yahoo! News analyst Olivier Knox) and old timers Jeff Greenfield and Walter Shapiro.

And of course there was C-SPAN online at the ready with all the unprocessed political content you could eat.

A few observations from an evening devouring this content produced by a mass media driving with fog lights toward a new information architecture that has not yet been designed:

- The Net has a way of stripping the cultivated institutional authority away from the bid media networks, whether it's the evening news anchors struggling to keep our attention on them amidst the surrounding social media feeds, or the tendency towards amateur night fourth wall violations—as when ABC's Dan Harris cut off a colleague to proclaim "We can now tell you who won Kansas," unfurled the check box graphic, then cut himself off with "wait, we have to wait five seconds before we can show you that," and a moment later explained "sorry, the voice in my earpiece was telling me what to do."

- You can now watch network news coverage in which the anchor cuts to the reporter in the field and says "Holly, how are things going out there in the Internet?" [actual quote]

- The big networks still build their coverage on the platform of telegenic anchors and commentators, and they mostly provide no more than stock ticker-quality supplemental information in their banners. Last night we were constantly supplementing the net coverage with more detailed information available through other Web sources—just as the anchors were doing on-screen with their own laptops. When the networks use their resources to serve as clearinghouses of unprocessed information, curate the information at more intermediate stages of filtering, and use the video content and live subjective analysis as garnish, they will be closer to providing the unlimited information that 21st century news consumers really want.

- ABC and NBC both included periodic compilations of video commentary soundbites from social media users. The synthesis of that democratic cacophony into a chorus feels like the future of news—a video version of a Twitter feed (or the way the networks give you their version of a Twitter feed that matters).

- The emergence of alternate online versions of the major network news platforms has radical potential. Someday soon more innovative producers, anchors and analysts will realize the opportunity to reinvent mass media news on one of those platforms during some major event, and Dan Rather's ghost will be on a frequency you can no longer tune, Kenneth.

- What the network news personalities do on live television is a lot harder than it looks, and you can see it on the intern versions. This was especially apparent on ABC News.COM • Yahoo! News, in which it was clear all five people on camera were viciously competing to outperform each other, creating a stress lab in which the youngsters all flubbed badly—losing trains of thought mid-sentence, rambling into dead air nonsequiturs, defaulting to the pseudo-authoritative misdirection of big vocabulary (as when Olivier Knox concluded a stumbling comment by characterizing his view as "not Panglossian," eliciting the gleeful competitive ridicule of elder Jeff Greenfield).

- The business of television journalism remains fiercely competitive even as its relevance diminishes, with the on-air behavior characterized by an astonishing amount of troglodytic nonverbal gender domination cues. Just ask ABC News Political Director Amy Walter, whose first ninety minutes looked like the makings of a cathode ray hostile work environment that prevented her from projecting her normal confidence and insight until late in the night. Broadcast journalism is still dominated by preening dudes who are scared of (or at least fiercely competitive with) strong women. ((See, e.g., Ann Curry.))

- The information architecture of TV network election coverage is based on invented drama to keep you from turning the channel before the commercial, fueled by a sucker's adoration of democratic myths. In time, manufactured suspense will be replaced with parallel information streams that you can hop between. It's already happening in small doses.

- When election night broadcasts cut to unscripted speeches by candidates to their supporters live in a room, one is reminded of the potential power of pre-televisual political rhetoric. Can network culture provide a new oratorical forum unmediated by broadcaster yapping and editing?

- Does NBC really think they will inspire my confidence in our electoral system by showing me a roomful of volunteer geezers in portable chairs opening and sorting green envelopes?

- Did Nancy Pelosi really say "We're all for TEAM USA"?!

- Do you think @katiecouric writes her own Tweets?

- Who writes the music for television news themes? Why do the rites of republican democracy merit more venerable melodic loops than the fearcasts of war and disaster?

- Who picks the color coding of the political parties? Apparently it was in the 2000 elections that the common coding switched to cool blue for the left Dems and radical red for the right Repubs. I think the semiotic power of those codings is much more significant than we realize, and reflects a big shift in which party is positioned as the change agent.

- Why do I know the names of several of Mitt Romney's children, and how can I make myself forget?

- Watching the chorus of party representatives commenting across all media, it seems that 21st century political parties are like corporations where everyone works in the PR department, and is elected to their corporate office by their customers.

- Is the non-election of Mitt Romney a sign that we have put the last nail in the coffin of the Zeitgeist of the 80s?

- When can we abandon the pretense and just conduct all of our elections as viewer-decided reality TV shows ending in statistical ties resolved through prolonged litigation?

- (Howard Beale, where are you when we need you?)

- Why is Dick Cheney still smiling?

Biblion: Frankenstein

I am remiss. I've had a new publication available for months yet inexplicably failed to tell anyone about it. My apologies. This is a little different from anything else I've done in the past, so perhaps I can be forgiven for the oversight.

I have a paper, or essay, if you prefer, available now on the New York Public Library's Biblion website. The paper, co-written with Donald Olson, Marilynn Olson, Russell Doescher, Ava Pope and Kelly Schnarr (whew! That's quite a mouthful, innit?) is titled "Frankenstein's Moon" and reexamines some of the work done in pinpointing the time frame when Mary Shelley began work on her famous novel as well as validating her version of events (which have been questioned by various historians over the years).

The paper is part of a much larger celebration of Shelley and her literary creation, titled FRANKENSTEIN: The Afterlife of Shelley and Frankenstein. Here's a brief description from the site itself:

What makes a monster? What is it like living on the margins of society? Is technology inherently good or bad? These questions guided Mary Shelley 200 years ago as she wrote her classic novel Frankenstein — they remain just as relevant today. The second edition of Biblion explores the connections between Shelley’s time and our own, showing how the classics resonate throughout society and the breadth of NYPL’s offerings.

I'm very pleased to participate in my own small way, and encourage everyone to take a look. The site is well worth a look if you're a fan of Frankenstein and have an hour or six to spend going through all the fascinating features on display.

Of gorillas and gasbags

So, Armadillocon has came and went, and everybody else in the whole of creation has posted their thoughts and comments about the convention except me. Par for the course, I'd say. I've got a larger wrap-up coming, but I'd like to focus for the moment on Friday night's "Gorilla of the Gasbags" story challenge panel. As I mentioned last week, Joe Lansdale threw out a challenge a year ago to write a story centered around the cover of an exceptionally rare issue of Zeppelin Stories. We had one year to write them, and present the finished product at the panel in question.

Quite a few folks turned out with stories, myself included. "Prince Koindrindra Lives" is a direct sequel to my story "Prince Koindrindra Escapes," which appeared in Cross Plain Universe back in 2006. Except, since I'm not a particularly fast writer, and I'd only completed the first draft of my Chicken Ranch book the week before, I didn't get mine completed. Specifically, I wrote about 11 pages of what will probably be a 30-page tale once all is said and done. Everybody else finished theirs. Or at least claimed to. I'm not going to accuse anyone of bending the truth a bit, but those folks who hung me out to dry know who they are.

Bill Crider lapped the field by writing two stories on the topic. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a popular touchstone, and Mark Finn got in a jab at L. Sprague de Camp. Chris Brown wowed everyone with the revelation that his grandfather actually worked in a German Zeppelin factory, and had a trove of artifacts and souvenirs from those days. Chris also went against the grain by writing a borderline-pornographic innuendo-laden story based on the secondary "Balloon Juice" title from the pulp cover. It was, I must admit, magnificent.

I ended up reading several pages of Neal Barrett, Jr.'s story, as he couldn't make the panel (it's a corker!) as well as a little more than half a page of mine. I got lots of compliments afterward about my reading, but I found it a tad troubling that some folks hadn't realized I'd done two separate readings (Neal's and my stories both had strong 1930s German elements to them). To clear up any further confusion, here is what I read (it might help to know that Koindrindra is a 30-foot-tall ape who has just skydived along with 100 or so paratroopers into Castle Neuschwanstein):

Koindrindra had barely taken two steps toward the keep when the giant doors exploded open, propellering through the courtyard to embed themselves in the Palas wall. The very force knocked Koindrindra back. He stared at the keep, not believing his eyes.

Through the smoke-filled doorway, backlit by a hundred work lights, rumbled a massive... something. Mounted on a twenty-foot armored tank chassis, a sectioned cylindrical torso rose with a black Iron Cross emblazoned across the chest. One either side of the armored cylinder extended two jointed, hydraulic arms. One ended in a vice-like clamp, the other in a still-smoking gun barrel. Mounted atop the torso, more than thirty feet high, sat what could only be described as a head, ape-like in design.

The mad Fritz could not win against Koindrindra on the field of battle, so they'd build a mechanical abomination to do it for them.

Panzer Affe!

Amazingly, every single story fragment read came off as solid, quality literature. Don Webb actually recited his from memory, as he'd forgotten his manuscript. Amazing. This really needs to be anthology, as the stories ranged widely in tone and theme. I'd certainly buy it.

Lost Trails

From the pulp magazine ADVENTURE, November 1945, a little bit of mid-twentieth century paper-based network culture:

LOST TRAILS

NOTE: We offer this department to readers who wish to get in touch again with friends or acquaintances separated by years or chance. Give your own name and full address. Please notify ADVENTURE immediately should you establish contact with the person you are seeking. Space permitting, each inquiry addressed to Lost Trails will be run in three consecutive issues. Requests by and for women are declined, as not considered effective in a magazine published for men. ADVENTURE will also decline any notice that may not seem a sincere effort to recover an old friendship or for any other reason in the judgment of the editorial staff. No charge is made for publication of notices.

>>>

I would like to hear from Albert "Shorty" Armstrong, and "Butsy" Butterfield, who were members of the 13th U.S. Infantry Band in 1924 at Fort Warren, Mass. Also Philip Smith, Jr., who lived on Gainsborough St., Boston, in 1941. I have recently been discharged from the Army Air Force and would like to hear from some of the old buddies of the old days. John J. Delaney, 227 Broadway, Cambridge, Mass., 39.

Alex "Scotty" Mackie, age 34, weight 125, height 5' 3", blue eyes, dark brown hair, missing since 1939. Last heard from in Cleveland, Ohio. Anyone knowing of his recent whereabouts please communicate with his brother, Robert Mackie, 3774 Highland Road, Cleveland, 11, Ohio.

Captain Rudolph Petersen, who used to write sea stories, formerly lived at Locust Street, 133 Street, Bronx, New York City, N.Y. Last heard from 1940. Anyone knowing his present address please communicate with Norman Gilmartin, c/o General Delivery, Brooklyn General Postoffice, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Anyone knowing the whereabouts of John S. Peebles, Jr., please write J.S. Peebles, White Cloud, Michigan, RFD No. 2. His parents have considered him dead but have lately heard that he is still alive and they have been unable to obtain his address.

Bill Arenz, who left Jacksonville, Ill., in 1940: I am married to your daughter, and would like to meet or hear from you. E.D. Meany, 407 Highland Ave., Palisade Park, N.J.

Burial at Sea (today's in-flight movie)

The 1:35 scale cathode ray simulation of Ernest Borgnine packs himself into a yellow wetsuit, channeling Jacques Cousteau. Sealab has been knocked loose from its moorings. Ernest Borgnine is riding in a futuristic submersible made from the remains of plastic models of German tanks. The Neptune floats in a fishtank embedded into the airplane seatback. Ernest Borgnine exits through the airlock, floating free with the giant burbling bubbles. Inside the submersible, minor world historical figure Ben Gazzara wears a red Mr. Rogers cardigan. Yvette Mimieux, an imaginary marine biologist, watches over his shoulder. The view through the porthole is a television screen of a made-for-TV movie. Ernest Borgnine is beautiful floating in yellow rubber, as a tropical fish grown in the back room of a Toronto pet store tries to eat him, or kiss him, it's hard to tell.

((RIP Ermes Effron Borgnino, who lives on as a semiotic ghost lurking in the mediasphere))

Transiting Venus

Sometimes, when faced with a once-in-a-lifetime event, you don't let anything so mundane as blistering Texas heat, a cloudy sky or a tragically cracked telescope mirror get in the way. There are other, better photos of the transit of Venus across the face of the sun out there, but not so many from New Braunfels and not so many taken under circumstances as trying.

The silhouette of Venus is the circle in the upper right quadrant of the sun. Quite a few sunspots are also visible, as is a region of brighter, white detail near the south pole. All things considered, this white light image of the sun (taken using Baader solar film filters--never look directly at the sun without specialized filters!) was able to capture quite a bit of fine detail, brought out with a little bit of coaxing via Photoshop. Someday I hope to own a dedicated hydrogen-alpha solar scope, but considering the fact that I don't have a reasonably useful straightforward telescope at the moment (I masked the damaged section to use the undamaged section of mirror for these images) that "someday" is probably quite a distance in the future.

Still, even though my shots of the transit of Venus are not what I'd hoped for, years from now when my eyesight's failing and I'm not able to look through a telescope, I'll cherish these photos all the more.