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 “宁为太平犬，莫作乱离人“ 

 According to Wikipedia, the Chinese saying, “better to live as a dog in an era of peace than a man in times of trouble”, is popularly known as the Chinese Curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

We humans have a remarkable talent for  making the unimaginable mundane.  Even in times of war,  in the midst of holocaust, we get up, put on our clothes, tie our shoelaces, dust and sweep, gossip and trade stories, as we are able. Sinner, or saint, we mostly fill our days with routine.

We (rarely) know that remarkable events are happening as they happen: Kennedy shot, Armstrong stepping onto the moon, 9/11. But mostly, it’s in reflection, in looking back, that we can sense that beneath the routine, the quotidian, there are changes taking place as profound and unstoppable as the tide. We camouflage them through filters of social and economic changes, but  it’s obvious to me that the tide, the really inexorable change, is fundamentally technological in nature. Consider the automobile, a machine, just a small wave. Then consider the social changes it unleashed or at least abetted, as it approached the  shores of humanity and grew into a tidal wave: the flight to suburbs and urban blight, the end of the extended family and the development of the atomic family…

It’s equally true today with our most recent waves of technology.  Could the Soviet empire have collapsed without smuggled media, VCRs, tape recorders, and such? Could there be an Arab Spring without cell phones, SMS? Could there be a Great Recession without computerized trading, internet banking, a Boombergian layer of numbers and data that, like the green numeric rain of the Matrix, both shows every detail of every transaction, and hides every transaction in plain sight, by the sheer complexity of it all?

I’ve been reading Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling, and came across a quote by one of his characters, Paul:

“We must prepare to take creative possession of the coming epoch. An epoch so poetically rich, so boundlessly victorious, so charged with meaning, that only those prepared to bathe in cataclysm will transcend the singularity. Someday, we will render powerless all hatred of the marvelous. The admirable thing about the fantastic is that the contained is becoming the container; the fantastic irresistibly infiltrates the quotidian.”

One  way or another, we will, we must, come face to face with the fact that there is nothing mundane about this age we live in. We didn’t ask for the cataclysm, but it’s here, around us, every day. As Billy Joel says, we didn’t start the fire. But we must walk through it.

 

A last Balticon-related post: Goeffrey Landis attended Balticon as the recipient of this year’s Robert A. Heinlein award.

Dr. Landis was around for the entire con, and I had the great pleasure of attending a few sessions he sat in on, as well as a kaffeeklatsch Monday morning as the convention was  winding down. Of the sessions, the one that really stood out for me was  ‘Don’t Forget the Can Opener’, an improvisational ‘what if’ session on what you’d prepare and pack to take along on a multigenerational starship. The panelists were all SF writers, and included, besides Geoffrey Landis, Ian Strock, Mellisa Scott, Amy Kaplan, and Mr. Landis’ wife Mary Turzillo. What made the session  fun was watching the panelists’ ideas spark ideas in the other panelists and the audience. I can see where writing collaborations start…

The kaffeeklatsch was a smaller and more informal affair, where Dr. Landis took questions with grace. I Most of the questions were science  rather than SF related, which is fair enough, since besides winning the Nebula, two Hugos, a Locus, and two Rhysling Awards for his poetry,  he’s also a NASA scientist with degrees in physics and electrical engineering, a PhD in solid state physics, and with patents and over 300 publications to his credit.  He’s worked on Mars missions (prompting Joe Haldeman to remark that Landis is the only SF writer to have actually been to Mars), solar energy, solar sail propulsion, and is currently working on technology to allow a vehicle to land, survive, and perform experiments on Venus.

Geoffrey Landis is the kind of hero Heinlein would admire: a scientist and an engineer, at home in theory and practice, widely read and expert in many fields, and also a poet and philosopher. RAH would certainly nod in approval at Dr. Landis’ selection. I’m glad to have been able to spend a few hours in his company.

It’s Sunday.  A week ago Balticon 48 was a ship under full sail. Now it’s over, and a week’s cooling allows for a bit of reflection.

Like any good con, Balticon was a hoot. From reading the random tee-shirt broadside, to conversations struck up in hallways or in meeting rooms before or after sessions, to wandering the dealer room, to taking a chance on that off-the-wall session whose title drew you in, to meeting old friends and making new ones, it’s fun. But for many of those attending, the authors, publishers, agents, artists and other toilers in the vineyards of SF/Fantasy,  it’s also, in Jame’s Knapp’s words, a business trip, and even casual fans can see a bit of hustle. It’s not in your face- one of the neat things about SF/fantasy is that the pros are fans, too.  But for many of the attendees it’s business.

There’s another current as well.  The news is full of the  Amazon / Hachette drama, the second salvo  in a battle whose opening round was last year’s DOJ price fixing settlement against Apple and the big five publishers. Digital technology and the internet have changed publishing drastically: ebooks, print on demand, web magazines, cheap and accessible audio and video production,  and secondary effects of these like the elimination of  the backlist and the resurgence of small publishers. Somewhere beneath the surface, in deeper waters,  the leviathans of  publishing- Hachette, ­HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster- are stirring, trying to adapt to the new model,  circled by Amazon. And the changes keep coming.

Many of the pros at Balticon represent what’s called new media, and even for those whose medium is print, the proportion of small publisher and self-published work is fairly high. Balticon’s agenda and content have, for some time, been set squarely in this direction. At Balticon, even those who work with the big five publishers rub shoulders with this newness.

One of SF’s roles is to show us alternative futures. I suspect there’s no better place than Balticon see some of future of publishing.

 

Balticon 48’s  come and gone. The dealer booths are gone, the panel rooms are returning to more sedate Hunt Valley Marriott uses, and really interesting looking people in memorable tee shirts or even more memorable costumes are no longer walking the halls… or at least not in such  numbers.

I’m not as avid a SF conventioneer as some, but I’ve been to a few cons here and there, and, over the decades, to more than a few Balticons. I was there last year, although not the year before. I plan to attend next year as well. From what I’ve seen, I think Balticon is different than many cons, to which I can only add, ‘vive la differènce.’

SF conventions fall into broad categories: ‘media’ conventions, focused on television and movies, which are often ‘fan cons’ for media celebrities, , comic conventions, special interest cons, focusing on a topical theme such  costuming or music (filk), and literary cons, with a focus on the literary side of SF, books and authors. Balticon is a literary convention.

But the SF world isn’t that simple, and the literary world isn’t either these days. Technology has ripped a huge hole in traditional book publishing. Consider distribution- Amazon for instance (Amazon’s currently involved in a dispute with publisher Hachette over how to split the profit margins on ebook versions of Hachette books, a battle of titans (Hachette is owned by giant French media group Lagardère.)  Consider how self-publishing and print on demand have changed author/publisher relationships and contracts, or what print on demand has done to small press and academic publishers (hint: it’s wonderful), or what ebooks and print on demand have done to restore the backlist (authors’ older books, which in recent decades were falling out of print rapidly, but which, thanks to digital printing, have rebounded enormously.)  Consider ‘new media’ – blogging, podcasting, and social media. Consider advertising- it’s common these days to see books advertised with their own video trailers, shown on author and publisher sites and on YouTube, and the nature of book promotion, and in particular author self-promotion, has changed dramatically.

What makes Balticon unique is it’s depth: it has programming to cover this evolving gamut of changes. Hundreds of panelists participated this year. If you are a reader, and not aware of these changes, you should be. The internet has been called a great equalizer in many domains- education, news gathering and dissemination, for example. It’s clear that it’s equally true in the publishing / literary domain.  Balticon is a great place to catch up on what’s really happening in SF.  There’s also has a wide range of events in media, gaming, hard science, and costuming (one of not just Balticon’s but SF’s great costumers, Marty Gear, passed away this year, but his legacy is alive and strong at Balticon.)

Balticon, first held in 1967, was 48 years young this year.  The best is yet to come. Here’s hoping to see you there next year.