MileHiCon Schedule

I will be at MileHiCon at the end of this week, and I have my schedule now:

Saturday at 11:00AM in Grand Mesa 8c: Researching Fiction (my favorite thing) How do you do research for fiction? What are good places too look? How much is too much?

Saturday at Noon in Mesa Verde C: Reading with Stant Litore. If I have the right guy, he's writing zombie horror, so it could get pretty ugly. :) (I might not have the right guy. Ask me some time about the exquisite corpse reading I was in once. The dangers of searching the interwebs.) I'm not sure what I'm going to read yet, but I may polish up one of my unpublished short stories from the Brass and Steel universe. Probably not the 7500 word one.

Saturday at 2:00pm in Wind River B: Future of Biology and Medicine. Where are we now, what do we see becoming science fact, limitations of genetic research, new medical tech.

The rest of the time I'll be wandering around like all the other fans. :)

-JRS

Architecture

Yeah, City of Glass is about a city, so I have to learn at least a passing familiarity with the architecture of the time. Burnham I can deal with. Sullivan I can at least understand. I think it likely that Frank Lloyd Wright, in my world, was fatally stepped on by a cow before he could produce any significant work. Wright's Prairie Style is /awful/ - and in the real world, ubiquitous. All the faceless, soul-less brick-facade buildings that so typified 1970s Cheyenne, Wyoming were clear examples of it. Unimaginative, boring, unadorned, without any sense of style. And flat roofs, in the midwest and west? Insanity.

-JRS

MileHiCon 2011

As always, I will be at MileHiCon this year, and this year, I'll be joined by fellow author,co-author, and friend Jeff Duntemann, which should be fun.

My appearances in panels and such are as follows:

Friday, Mesa Verde B, 10:00pm: Can't Stop the Prose: Late Night Readings/Discussion. My guess is that this will be exactly what it sounds like - readings and discussion about them. Jeff's scheduled to be in this one, so expect readings from our double novel, /Drumlin Circus/ and /On Gossamer Wings/.

Saturday, Mesa Verde A, 4:00pm: Fan fiction. Does fan fiction still carry the stigma it used to for both fans and publishers, or has that changed? This ought to be interesting. My nano group in Colorado Springs had quite a few fan fiction writers, so it's a topic I've heard about, but not really dug into. Rest assured, I'll be digging between now and then.

Sunday, Wind River A, 10:00am: To FTL or not to FTL? A discussion of
relativity, fantasy vs. known science and other factors involved in that
venerable SF standby, faster than light travel. I've given this topic quite a lot of thought, especially lately since neutrinos may have been caught violating the speed limit. It's one of those tropes that's been around forever, and it's time we go after it with the dissecting tray, pins, and scalpel.

Sunday, Mesa Verde B, 1:00pm: Programming the Future. Where are computers headed and what will it mean for our future? A look at AI and other, more imminent, possibilities. Okay, I'm on a panel about computers and the future. No worries, right? Let me rephrase. I'm on a panel about computers and the future with Vernor Vinge. One of cyberpunk's founding fathers. Still, it's a subject I've given a lot of thought to in the process of writing my first two novels, and if memory serves, the only work I've done since I went pro that /doesn't/ have a machine intelligence in it someplace is /On Gossamer Wings/. And even that one's debatable. Should be fun.

See y'all there.

-JRS

Reading at Who Else! Books on Aug. 13 @3:00pm!

Reading! Jeff Duntemann and I will be joining mystery writer Mark Stevens for readings at Who Else! Books. Jeff and I will be reading from our respective short novels in Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings, and Mark will be reading from his novel Buried By the Roan. For Jeff and me, this will be the first reading we've done since the premier at AnomalyCon (it's been a busy summer for both of us) and it will be great to get back in the saddle. Who Else! books has a number of copies of Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings on hand, for those who wish to buy a hardcopy.

If you've never been to Who Else! books, it's a wonderful place, part of the Broadway Book Mall, and Ron and Nina Else have been staunch supporters of my previous work, and they are deeply and passionately involved in science fiction in the Denver area. Also really, really nice folks. Who Else! Books is in the Broadway Book Mall, at 200 S. Broadway, Denver, Colorado, 80209.