According to the workshop's home page, This Is Not A Game author Williams and Dogs author Kress assume you already know the basics of writing, and how to tie your shoes and stuff:

Taos Toolbox will be a "graduate" workshop designed to bring your science fiction and fantasy writing to the next level. If you've sold a few stories and then stalled out, or if you've been to Clarion or Odyssey and want to re-connect with the workshop community, this is the workshop for you!

This is not a workshop for beginners. We won't teach you correct manuscript format or what an adverb is and why you shouldn't use one, because we'll assume that you already know. We want to concentrate on giving talented, burgeoning writers the information necessary to become professionals within the science fiction and fantasy field.

Though short fiction will be enthusiastically received, there will be an emphasis at Taos Toolbox on the craft of the novel, with attention given to such vital topics as plotting, pacing, and selling full-length works.

Assuming they've solved the whole "Taos Hum" problem (probably caused by aliens rubbing their legs together), it sounds like a pretty great program for aspiring novelists. More details, and application materials, at the link. [Taos ToolBox]

Probably the biggest surprise was Best Novel winner, Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, which defeated Neal Stephenson'sAnathem, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Charles Stross' Saturn's Children and John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale. Nancy Kress also professed to be surprised that her novella "The Edrmann Nexus" won the Best Novella award, but nobody else seemed that startled. The most moving speech of the night was probably David Anthony Durham, who won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. He talked about how he had achieved some success as a literary writer, but felt that he needed to be true to science fiction, since the genre had gotten him through some hard times and had made him want to be a writer in the first place.

Here's the official list of winners, from the Hugo site, and our gallery (including Neil Gaiman licking his Hugo rocket!) is below:

Best Novel: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Best Novella: "The Erdmann Nexus", Nancy Kress (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008)
Best Novelette: "Shoggoths in Bloom", Elizabeth Bear (Asimov's Mar 2008)
Best Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
Best Related Book: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, John Scalzi (Subterranean Press)
Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, Written by Kaja & Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: WALL-E Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter, story; Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon, screenplay; Andrew Stanton, director (Pixar/Walt Disney)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon, & Zack Whedon, & Jed Whedon, & Maurissa Tancharoen, writers; Joss Whedon, director (Mutant Enemy)
Best Editor Short Form: Ellen Datlow
Best Editor Long Form: David G. Hartwell
Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
Best Semiprozine: Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal
Best Fan Writer: Cheryl Morgan
Best Fanzine: Electric Velocipede edited by John Klima
Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu
And the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (presented by Dell Magazines): David Anthony Durham

It's a cliche to say "The Golden Age of science fiction is 14." When you're young and wide-eyed, all the universe's brilliance seems overwhelmingly new and awesome. Stories of exploration and conquest of the universe are fresh and thrilling, and the space hero's exploits feel like a proxy for your own process of finding your place in the world. It's the most awesome thing in the world, and you can keep experiencing that kind of excitement over and over again throughtout your life - I still watch the original Star Trek on DVD and get a little thrill of excitement (mixed with nostalgia) again.

But "sense of wonder," to me, is another way of talking about a child's awe at the amazing bounty of creation. And I can't help but wonder, when I hear people pining for "sense of wonder," if they're really just wishing for the return of childhood innocence. The phrase "sense of wonder," itself, evokes a sense of wide-eyed awe, a childlike amazement.

And over time, "My god, it's full of stars!" becomes "Hey, it's still full of stars!" And eventually, "Oh yeah, those stars? Still full of them." And finally "Stars. Full of. Yup."

As Peter Smith put it in the St. Petersburg Times back in 1986:

Science fiction fans call it the Sense Of Wonder. It's the feeling/knowledge that you're seeing something new, or something old in a new way. In many ways, the Sense Of Wonder can reaffirm your place in the universe, filling you with joyous, guileless awe.

A couple of years ago, in SF Crowsnest, Mark R. Leeper complained that the annual World Science Fiction Convention wasn't meeting his needs any more:

For some reason I feel the Worldcons of the 70s seemed to have more verve. Somehow Worldcons seem more staid and less energetic as there are fewer young and active attendees...
In fact, most of the authors who are currently writing do not seem to have such a strong following proportionally among the younger fans. Their prose is heavier and lacking in "sense of wonder." It appeals more to serious older readers. But fewer young people are going to Worldcons.

In other words, writers who appeal mostly to older science fiction readers are less likely to focus on "sense of wonder" and more likely to deal with knotty political or social issues.

And then there's Ted Chiang, interviewed in Locus in 2002:

Everyone refers to science fiction's ability to evoke a sense of wonder. That is definitely a goal of mine, because I remember the sense of wonder I experienced when I read science fiction when I was younger. I would like to be able to evoke that in other people.

Whenever people talk about "sense of wonder," it seems like they default to talking about childhood. And there's a certain nostalgia for that time, and a desire to recapture it or hold onto it somehow. It's no accident that Arthur C. Clarke, the dean of "sense of wonder" writing, has written on his tombstone, "Here lies Arthur C. Clarke. He never grew up and never stopped growing."

But here's the thing: growing up is important. We can't hold onto our innocence forever. Not that you can't stop and admire the awesomeness of the universe, of course — that never really goes away. (I do love me some space porn.) But I often think people who talk about "sense of wonder" are clamoring for more than just an appreciation of how cool space is, how amazing huge machines can be. They want that awareness of scale — the realization of how small we are and how big the universe is — to dominate, maybe even to drive the narrative. And in turn, that sense of bigness can obscure, or prevent, an awareness of how messy and complicated human beings are, and how likely we are to make a mess.

I started thinking about this last fall, when I read a blog post by Nancy Kress, talking about Somalian pirates holding an oil tanker hostage, and how it reminded her of a science fiction story she'd read when she was 15. At age 15, that story of someone capturing a spaceship felt awe-inspiring and awesome. But now, seeing something similar in real life, it just wasn't quite the same. She wrote:

Now that Somalian pirates have actually stolen a huge oil tanker, holding 25 people hostage and using organized crime as the transfer point for millions of dollars in ransom, my visceral response is not "awe." Outrage, disgust, fear are closer. The Somalian pirates' motive is greed, and the SF story hi-jackers' was (I think) patriotic freedom. However, it's the lack of "awe" that interests me at the moment.

Maybe the world has gotten too grubby and jaded for "awe." Or I have. At any rate, a "sense of wonder" is no longer what I look for in fiction, including SF. I don't want to be dazzled by things I never thought of before, even though often that seems to be what SF values. I want to be emotionally moved, involved at a visceral level with the characters and the situation, not with novelty or landscapes or gadgets or derring-do. Take, for instance, Elizabeth Bear's Hugo-winning story "Tide Line." I loved this story for the portrait of the dying sentient war machine who passes on its heritage to a child. Whatever devastated the Earth and sent it back to the Stone Age is barely mentioned. I'm sure that war was awesome, but it was probably also boring — UNTIL it's brought down to the level of personal suffering.

So — not a sense of wonder. A sense of vulnerable humanity. Which, now that I think about it, that space-ship piracy story probably lacked — or else I would remember something, anything, about at least one character?

Thing is, there are things you cannot see if you're too busy looking at everything with a "sense of wonder." And those things are often the stuff most worth talking about. I like science fiction that's gritty but hopeful, and politically realistic but still idealistic at its core. And it's hard to write science fiction that deals with complicated human problems, and stark political realities, when we're constantly pausing to admire our own ingenuity.

It's also hard not to look at the soon-to-be-uninhabitable cesspit our world is becoming, without asking "Did 'sense of wonder' help to fuck up the ice caps?" Since a big part of "sense of wonder" is not just "space is awesome" but also, "we can build huge awesome machines!"

It also feels a bit ooky: As Leeper points out, all indications are that the die-hard science-fiction readership is graying. A generation who grew up with Heinlein and Clarke is clinging to the genre as it ages, and younger readers aren't coming along in enough numbers to replace it. There's something a bit unsettling about older people asking to be talked to like teenagers.

So it's no accident that some of the most "sense of wonder-y" fiction I've read lately squares the circle, by featuring characters who are both ageless and impossibly old. I was thinking about this a lot after I read House Of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. All of the major characters in Suns are six million years old, partly thanks to life-extending technology and partly thanks to traveling in stasis at relativistic speeds. (Subjectively, they're still ancient, but they haven't experienced millions of years' consciousness.) And these quasi-immortal beings, who've watched civilizations rise and fall, constantly remind each other that they're still amazed by the richness of the universe. That's why they keep traveling, after almost the whole history of the human race: because they keep seeing new wonders and being amazed.

Reynolds gets to have it both ways, sort of — he writes about characters who are physically youthful and full of amazement, but they're also jaded and ancient. They're a good stand-in for the reader, who has probably read thousands of similar novels before, but is still looking for the next new thing.

The ageless, disconnected protagonist has become a bit of a trope of the new batch of space opera, as Alan DeNiro explained in his Rain Taxi review of The New Space Opera Volume 1:

In many of these stories, Earth-like physiology has mutated to a point of no return; virtual realities give way to virtual bodies and vice-versa. The anthology has a general inhuman pallor-to put it another way, humanity has been emulsified against the backdrop of far-flung space-but all too often, the fiction suffers because of the unexplored consequences of this stance. Like the protagonist in Greg Egan's "Glory," who is a molecular payload shot across space, many of the characters are, in essence, simulacra. People (if they can be called that) have to have their sharp edges smoothed over in order to survive in the recesses of the vacuum. And yet, how does a writer balance the needs of narrative when characters' motivations are, at best, flat? ("Always so sad, Debra: it's not good for the brain, you should take a break," a brutal assassin is told in the first story in the anthology, the inauspicious "Saving Tiamaat" by Gwyneth Jones). Of course, this impulse is spectacularly "retro," hearkening back to the origins of space opera in the early 20th century. As a lurid offshoot of the larger tree of adventure fiction, characterization was fast and loose, but it was a subgenre that was inquisitive as to its own metaphysics. In the current day, however, the metaphysics seem to come from the minutes of a transhumanist conference.

What's more disappointing is that in almost no cases is this disassociation from emotion made part of the story (something, ironically, that literary realist stories are often decried for in some genre circles); as an unexamined baseline, the affectless life forms plod through adventures whose outcomes appear meaningless against the larger backdrop of thousands of worlds, hundreds of civilizations. As Ian Macdonald's meandering narration in "Verthandi's Ring" tells the reader, "war was just another game to entities hundreds of thousands of years old, for whom death was a sleep and a forgetting." Again, this galactic void could be part of the observable texture of the narrative, picking up on how the enclosed space of a story-much like the sealed hull of an interstellar spaceship-can only contain so much prose.

Is it possible that the only way we can keep "sense of wonder" alive for the veteran reader is by turning to posthuman protagonists, who have seen it all before — except for the latest wonder? In other words, by clinging to "sense of wonder" so hard, do we end up jettisoning everything else, even the humanity of our protagonists? Even the foibles and emotional complexities that make people, well, wonderful?

Panspermia is the term for the most scientifically plausible version of this concept, but it isn't necessarily what science fiction usually presents. The panspermia hypothesis holds that the building blocks of life are not found exclusively on planetary bodies but are instead found scattered throughout the cosmos, and it is these spaceborne particles that are at least partly responsible for life on Earth. There's a little circumstantial evidence for the theory (although far, far more to support the reliable old "Life comes from Earth" hypothesis), and there is something undeniably fascinating about the subtext – the aliens are already here, and we are they. But science fiction barely ever depicts the actual theory of panspermia, mostly because it's just a physical process that takes billions of years to play out and is pretty boring unless you're willing to get really mystical.

What science fiction more properly deals with is exogenesis, which simply states that humanity or its genetic ancestors didn't always live on Earth. That generally means one of two things – either an ancient alien race introduced life to a previously dead Earth (sometimes as part of a larger directed panspermia project) or a bunch of humans from some other civilization colonized Earth, a fact that somehow slipped the minds of their descendants (you know…us). Plenty of science fiction deals with both, including two of the big science fictions works currently in the news. (The occasional spoiler may lie ahead.)

Outlander
One of the most satisfying little details of everybody's favorite Vikings vs. aliens epic is its answer to why Jim Caviezel's character, the alien Kainan, looks exactly like the Norsemen and how he can possibly speak their language.Outlander solves both of these problems by revealing Earth is an "abandoned seed colony" of Kainan's spacefaring civilization. Unfortunately, the whole notion that Earth was colonized by an interstellar race really opens up a far bigger plot hole than the one it was meant to fill. After all, Kainan's people would have had to have "seeded" Earth eons ago. If they could pull off planetary engineering on that sort of scale way back then, you'd think they wouldn't have so much trouble with a bunch of bioluminescent dragons. In the end, it's probably best not to think too much about the logistics of the whole abandoned seed colony concept. Because, ultimately, the very inclusion of the idea in the first place is, like so much of Outlander, awesome.

Battlestar Galactica
In both the original and new versions of the series, humans originally came from Kobol, the legendary planet of the gods, and Earth is just the fabled lost colony. The new series is busy dealing with Earth, so it's entirely possible a couple "What the frak?" moments still lie ahead that will reveal humanity actually did come from Earth. The original series, however, left no doubt that Kobol was where we all came from, as the no-budget god-awfulness that is Galactica 1980 established contact between the Galactica and contemporary Earth. Flying motorcycle chases ensued.

Star Trek
The Next Generation episode "The Chase" sought to acknowledge and explain the genetic improbability of a galaxy full of nothing but humanoid aliens with rubber foreheads. The solution – ancient aliens who, upon finding themselves all alone in the galaxy, seeded various planets with their genetic codes – is surprisingly deft, and actually turns a three-decade failure of imaginations and budgets into something almost elegaic. As one would expect, Picard takes this existence-altering revelation in his usual stride, while the Cardassians look a bit grumpy.

Stargate
Honestly, between all the genetic engineering, forced relocations of ancient humans, and universe-altering civil wars between godlike aliens it all gets a bit difficult to keep track of which species actually came from where. In short, a bunch of plague-decimated demigods maybe used this thing called the Dakara superweapon millions of year ago to shoot their genetic information throughout the Milky Way, which maybe had something to do with humanity's evolution. Or maybe not.

Babylon 5
Since we might as well finish off the sweep of nineties science fiction, the Centauri initially tried to dismiss Earth as one of their lost colonies. Sure, this probably wasn't true, but how else are you going to haze the new interstellar species?

Isaac Asimov
Most aliens seem to create life on Earth for slightly more practical (well, relatively speaking) reasons than the Star Trek aliens' "monument to our existence." Asimov imagined Earth as an eons-old alien experiment not once but twice – in "Jokester", the aliens did it to explore the concept of humor, while in "Breeds there a Man…?" the aliens are engaged in a more vague exercise in genetics. There’s also "Death Sentence", where an anthropologist for the Galactic Federation discovers that a previous civilization created a planet of robots as part of a larger psychological experiment. Realizing the Federation will surely have to destroy the planet as a potential threat, he decides to take his dire warning to one of the robots' biggest cities: New York.

Wildstorm Comics
The Kherubim people sent their genetic seed throughout the universe in a bid to conquer the universe without their genetic descendants even knowing it, which they then followed up by actually conquering much of the universe.

Ringworld, by Larry Niven
It turns out we're all part of a larger plan by the Pak race to create a galaxy full of ultra-lethal, ultra-intelligent superhumans. Apparently, the plan failed because there wasn't enough of the right kind of fruit.

Mission to Mars
In this Brian de Palma stinker, a bunch of Martians that didn't flee their dying planet shot the neighboring Earth – then a barren chunk of rock – full of the building blocks of life because…um, because they wanted to take Gary Sinise on a tour of the universe? (And that was probably the least nonsensical part of that movie.)

Salvage Rites, by Eric Brown
One of the very few times when a race made from directed panspermia confronts their creators, this short story finds a group of Benedictine monks in a cathedral-shaped starship seeking out what is, for all intents and purposes, God.

South Park
In easily the most awesome use of the concept, the anniversary episode “Canceled” revealed Earth for what it really is – one giant reality show. At least in South Park, someone is actually bothering to watch.

Starliner, by David Drake
In this 1992 novel, the narrator explains that no one bats an eyelid at botanists cross-breeding plants from different worlds because panspermia is "no longer a hypothesis but simple observation." Not the most earth-shattering application of panspermia, but still.

Ej-es by Nancy Kress
A rather less mundane spin on that same idea, as members of an interstellar marine corps realize a deadly plague on one planet threatens all the intelligent species in the universe – because panspermia makes them all genetically related.

Doctor Who
The classic "City of Death" features a more accidental case of aliens creating life on Earth. In the midst of all the ridiculously complex art forgery, random acts of violence, Monty Python cameos, and endless location shots that prove the thing really was shot in Paris, writer Douglas Adams somehow squeezes in the origin of all life on Earth. As it turns out, an exploding Jaggaroth ship kickstarted the whole "life" thing. That was nice of them.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Speaking of Douglas Adams, his most famous work envisions the noblest version of the alien-built Earth. Indeed, the emphasis here is on "built", as Earth is not a planet at all but instead a ten million year old computer program supervised by hyper-dimensional mice designed to determine the question to life, the universe, and everything. Of course, as is so often the case, this wondrous philosophical pursuit was interrupted by a bunch of hairdressers, TV producers, and telephone sanitizers from the planet Golgafrincham, who obliviously managed to replace the native humans and almost wreck the entire program. All of which rather neatly leads us back to wandering, forgetful colonists.

The Hainish Cycle, by Ursula K. Le Guin
In ancient times, colonizers from the planet Hain came to Earth and, for a time, coexisted with its native hominids. Whether the settlers ultimately killed the native Earthlings or simply bred them out of existence is anybody's guess, but the Hainish now consider modern humans their descendants.

Women of the Prehistoric Planet
This MST3K entry builds a whole parable of post-War American-Japanese relations around two rival alien races, time dilation, and giant iguanas, with plenty of sixties-era chauvinism left to go around. After a whole lot of silliness (as that previous sentence probably suggested) the marooned lovers Tang and Linda settle down on the titular prehistoric planet, which they decide to call…well, I think you can guess, but it rhymes with "Mirth."

Earthsearch
The classic BBC radio series had one of the best twists on this idea, as the four teenaged survivors of the massive starship Challenger search for Earth-like planets to colonize. It's slowly revealed that the planet they call Earth has some rather unrecognizable geography, but that the Earth-like planet they finally do discover, with its saltwater oceans covering two-thirds of the planet, sounds very familiar.

The Twilight Zone
But stories don't get much more familiar than the 1963 episode "Probe 7, Over and Out." Astronaut Adam Cook finds himself stranded on a faraway planet just as nuclear war is breaking out back home. He encounters Eve Norda, an alien who cannot understand his language. The pair ultimately agrees to start a new life together on the planet that Eve keeps calling "Irth." Judging by their first names, I’m guessing they'll do just fine.

You shouldn't even bother trying to predict the future of technological progress, argues The Space Merchants author Frederick Pohl:

No sensible science-fiction writer tries to predict anything. Neither do the smartest futurologists. What those people do is try to imagine every important thing that may happen (so as to do in the present things which may encourage the good ones and forestall the bad) and that's what SF writers do in their daily toil.

Chiming in Nancy Kress (Dogs) says it's foolish to try to predict the course of technology more than about 15-20 years out.

Ringworld author Larry Niven is more sanguine, laying down a couple of iron-clad rules for writers seeking to predict a future technology:
1) Think about basic human goals that will never go away, like immortality or instant travel. Then think about how someone could make them happen.
2) You can't invent the car without also inventing traffic jams and gas shortages.

The whole article is worth checking out, if only to see Halting State author Charles Stross say, "Donald Rumsfeld was right." [CIO]

The book leads off with Kress' story "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls," which was originally published via scifi podcast Escape Pod. The tale of a single mother coping with what happens when her small town, Clifford Falls, gets several nano-fabricators sparked a great deal of controversy online, in part because nobody could figure out if Kress was for or against nanotech. And that's part of what appeals about this tale: Kress shows the dark side of being liberated from the need to work, showing us people in Clifford Falls who quit their awful factory jobs and spend all day getting drunk on nano-whiskey or primping in their nano-fashions. Her heroine refuses to use the nano-fabricators, preferring to farm and sew her own clothes as a way of not giving up on work. One of the strongest stories in the book, this tale exhibits Kress' allure as a writer: she manages to explore hard science while also looking at its social consequences among ordinary people rather than scientists or elite space explorers.

A similarly strong story is "Computer Virus," about a woman trapped inside her computer-secured fortress by an invading A.I. who wants to escape being killed by the government agency that made him. While our hero figures out an ingenious way to use her skills with proteomics to fight the A.I., she also struggles with a sense that her biology skills are inferior to those of her dead husband. And in "Savior," we follow several generations of mostly-humble Minnesota families as they struggle to understand why a strange alien craft landed on a patch of farmland and never moved or transmitted any information to Earth for over two centuries.

Kress has a way of making the vast reaches of the galaxy and the tiniest nanomachines seem familiar and comprehensible — while also making the Earth itself into a creepy alternate world. At times her depressed single mothers, dysfunctional siblings, and cruelly condescending male authority figures feel like figures out of a Dorothy Allison novel. Until they grow new bodies in nano-vats, or blast themselves into the heart of a black hole. Or destroy an entire solar system by merging with a universe-spanning synthetic intelligence that's slowly being tortured to death by a similar intelligence from another universe. At her best, Nancy Kress evokes the surreal unhappiness of Katherine Dunn's mutant-family novel Geek Love.

But many of the stories in this volume, such as "Shiva in Shadow," suffer from a kind of overly-ambitious metaphorical symmetry in which science becomes a fancy symbol for human psychology. In that story, three characters studying anomalous gravitational artifacts at the center of the galaxy find their own relationships haunted by (you guessed it) anomalous, unseen forces that cause them to get sucked slowly into a swirling pit of hellish destruction — just like a black hole. "The Most Famous Little Girl in the World" has the same problem. A girl who is abducted by aliens becomes (wait for it) alienated from her little cousin, and the story tracks the two women for their whole lives as their alienation from each other too-perfectly reflects the humans' growing relationship with the aliens who once abducted the girl.

Despite these moments when Kress bashes the reader over the head with simple allegories, the collection is generally strong and worth a read. I was especially impressed with Kress' ability to quickly invoke posthuman worlds with just a few deft paragraphs, and bring us deeply into the emotional lives of her sometimes quite alien characters. And her heaping doses of bio-geekery, usually based in extrapolations from today's state-of-the-art science, give these stories a grounding in realism that a lot of great science fiction lacks.

Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories [Amazon]

NOVELLA: "Fountain of Age", Nancy Kress (Asimov's Jul 2007)
Kress' latest collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls, is about to hit the bookstores. I'm excited to read it, and will be reviewing it here!

NOVELETTE: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", Ted Chiang (F&SF Sep 2007; Subterranean Press)

SHORT STORY: "Always", Karen Joy Fowler (Asimov's Apr/May 2007)
Fowler's latest novel, Wit's End, just came out this month.

SCRIPT: Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro
This tale of a girl, a fairy kingdom, and a nation full of fascists was one of the best fantasy movies I've ever seen. Del Toro is directing Hellboy 2, and two forthcoming movies based on The Hobbit. His monsters are more sympathetic and nuanced than most human characters.

ANDRE NORTON AWARD: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (Scholastic)
Apparently Rowling has ever won a Nebula before. About time.

My favorite multiverse Marxist, Michael Moorcock, was presented the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. I hope that means he gets to wear a cloak or something. Or maybe shiny shoes? Nothing says "grand master" like shiny shoes.

(Thanks for the reminder, Saadiq!)

Nebula Winners [Locus Online]

Over on her blog, she writes:

A friend sent me the URL for an amazing YouTube video in which over 200 people simultaneously freeze in place for five minutes at Grand Central Station (only in New York!) What's fascinating about this is the reactions of all the passers-by. They smile; they cell-phone their friends; they wait interestedly around to see what will happen next. One guy says it's probably a "protest" of some kind. A Grand Central employee, unable to drive his work cart through a frozen group, calls his supervisor to ask what he should do. But nobody is alarmed.

This is when I realized that I must think differently from all these others. Had I seen this sudden mass freezing, the first thing that would have come to mind was a virus of some kind, possibly genetically engineered, that causes a vastly speeded-up Parkinson's-like syndrome, locking muscles in place. I would have called 911, afraid that lung muscles would be next and all these people would stop breathing. I would have wondered if it were contagious.

(1)I need to stop thinking like an SF writer in normal life. (2)I have no appreciation for performance art. (3)I trust that when people do something, it's for straight-forward reasons of their own and not because they're deliberately trying to mess with my mind. (4)I should never live in New York.