San Diego Comic Con:
where: San Diego, CA
next date: July 22-25, 2010.
how many attendees? 125,000, give or take — the event always sells out.
registration costs: $100, although the "preview night" on Wednesday is already sold out.
hotel costs: $300 and up per night... if you're lucky enough to get one. Plus food always seems to be ultra-pricey.
airport hub? Nope. Southwest Airlines flies there quite a bit.
celebrity stalking factor: Infinity. Peter Jackson and James Cameron geeked out about directing movies together this year. Sigourney Weaver mentored Zoe Saldana live on stage. You cannot touch the celebrities, but you will see the celebrities, off in the distance.
extracurricular activities: Costume ball. There was a Harry Potter dance thingy with The Remus Lupins this last year.



(Both Comic-Con pictures above, by ParkaBlogs.)

New York Comic Con:
where: New York, NY
next date: Oct. 8-10, 2010.
how many attendees? around 77,000.
registration costs: currently just $45.
hotel costs: $150-$200, according to this article. Plus of course NYC is the most expensive city in America.
airport hub? Yes
celebrity stalking factor: Medium high. A lot of TV stars and producers came to NYCC 2009, along with many comics pros. An October event will be early in the summer movie hype cycle, so it's unclear how many movie stars will show up.
extracurricular activities: Costumes, fan panels... can't find much else listed anywhere.

Fan Expo Canada
where: Toronto
next date: August 27-29, 2010.
how many attendees? 59,000
registration costs: CAN$49
hotel costs: CAN$135-CAN$189
airport hub? Yes.
celebrity stalking factor: Moderate. Leonard Nimoy, Linda Hamilton and Bruce Campbell were there this past time.
extracurricular activities: Since it includes Anime Expo and Gaming Expo along with Science Fiction Expo and Comic Book Expo, there's presumably a lot of gaming and anime acitvities. There are also "sketching duels" between artists, special effects workshops and, of course, masquerades.

Wondercon:
where: San Francisco, CA
next date: April 2-4, 2010.
how many attendees? around 34,000, up from 29,000 the year before.
registration costs: $30 in advance.
hotel costs: Orbitz says a hotel near Moscone Center will run you anywhere from $78 to $200 the weekend of Wondercon, although some of those hotels are in a sketchy neighborhood. And San Francisco is the fifth most expensive city in America, according to Forbes.
airport hub? Yes, for United Airlines.
celebrity stalking factor: Moderate to high. Moving to April should mean more summer movie promotion - and 2009 had way more movie stuff than 2008 did. The cast of Star Trek showed up en masse, with J.J. Abrams.
extracurricular activities: Pretty much just costumes and panels. I don't remember much else.

Wondercon photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid.

Dragon*Con:
where: Atlanta, GA
next date: Sept. 3-6, 2010.
how many attendees? around 35,000.
registration costs: currently just $60.
hotel costs: Bad news! Three of the four convention hotels are already sold out for 2010. The remaining one is $159 a night. Overflow hotels will run you $100 to $185.
airport hub? Yes, for Delta. And everyone flies there.
celebrity stalking factor: Medium high. Leonard Nimoy made the trek (sorry) in 2009. The good news is, a lot of your favorite writers and personalities are surprisingly accessible. A few years ago, I was in a tiny party with that guy from Farscape for like an hour.
extracurricular activities: This is where Dragon*Con shines. There's Dragon*Con TV in your hotel room, tons of costume stuff, BDSM demos, filking, writing workshops, charity auctions, autistic karaoke superhero performances, GWAR concerts (sometimes), a whole huge LARPing and RPG area, etc. Plus a humongous blood drive. You could have a great time at Dragon*Con and never even see a famous person.

Wizard World Chicago aka Chicago Comic-Con:
where: Chicago
next date: August 12-15, 2010.
how many attendees? 58,000 in 2006, although it's alllegedly declined since then.
registration costs: around $45.
hotel costs: Since the con takes place out by Chicago O'Hare in Rosemont, hotels are pretty easy. Orbitz says they'll run you $87 to $126 right now. Plus Chicago is the sixth most expensive city in America, according to Forbes.
airport hub? Yes. Everybody flies into Chicago non-stop.
celebrity stalking factor: Moderate. Some pretty well-known actors are showing up in 2010, including
Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols, Edward James Olmos, Michelle Rodriguez and Ray Park, plus some well-known comics pros. This con got the first look at The Dark Knight in 2007, and might get a sneak peek at the next Chicago-filmed Batman, if and when it happens.
extracurricular activities: Tons of gaming stuff.

Worldcon
where: Moves around
next date: Sept. 2-6, 2010.
how many attendees? 3,370 people in 2009, according to SFSite.
registration costs: $225.
hotel costs: According to this site, many nearby hotels are already sold out for those dates, and the remaining ones will cost between A$239 to A$275.
airport hub? Yes. Several airlines fly direct into Melbourne.
celebrity stalking factor: WorldCons 2008 and 2009 were jam-packed with some of your favorite authors, and tons of famous writers who were quite accessible. Fewer writers might make the voyage to Melbourne, but Reno in 2011 should be mobbed.
extracurricular activities: Filking, writing workshops, costume ball, artists exhibition.

Star Wars Celebration
where: Moves around
next date: Summer 2010.
how many attendees? 34,000 or so people showed up to the 2005 event.
registration costs: $110 for a four-day pass, in 2005.
hotel costs: Hard to say. A few cities are bidding to be the location for this event, timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Empire Strikes Back — including Orlando, which has tons and tons of cheap hotels.
airport hub? Again, it depends which city gets the event.
celebrity stalking factor: A lot of Star Wars castmembers, including Carrie Fisher, tend to show up to these things.
extracurricular activities: Cool exhibits, tons of costumes, trivia contests, etc.

Fantastic Fest
where: Austin, TX
next date: Sept. 25- Sept. 30, 2010
how many attendees? N/A — I couldn't find this number anywhere.
registration costs: $285, or $170 for a "film pass" that doesn't guarantee you entrance to all events.
hotel costs: The official hotel of the con charges $135 per night.
airport hub? Nope.
celebrity stalking factor: Pretty high, especially if you love indy movies. Film-makers show up to promote their films, like Paranormal Activity and Zombieland this year around. Stars like Bill Murray also show up.
extracurricular activities: Boxing! Also, "Fantastic Feud" trivia contest pitting you against horror experts and "100 best kills," where you share your favorite gory moments.

Did we leave out a mega-con that deserves to be on this list? And what are your favorite cons you've gone to? Let us know!

I sat down with Buckell at WorldCon last week. First we talked about Arctic Rising, and where he is with it.

Buckell said:

It's a near-future cyberpunk ecothriller. I'm just working on the first third of it. It's the first of two books I'm doing for Tor, and both will be ecothrillers.

I'm trying to write something that's [politically] moderate ecological SF. I did something similar in short fiction in the last year, with my story in Metatropolis, and now I'm taking it into novel form. Some people called me a raging liberal for writing [that story]. But I want to piss off liberals and conservatives – all of their solutions are problematic. Dogma gets in the way of what need to be done about the environment.

There are already responses on the ground to what we're facing that are agnostic – in third world, for example, where people have already figured out ways to reduce your impact on the earth. It's criminal that it's hard for me to find a showerhead that doesn't have an on-off switch that's detachable. I grew up on a boat and all the showerheads were like that. Now I routinely use oodles of water because my showerhead doesn't turn off. Little things like that add up. In St. Thomas, people get water by catching rainwater on the roof.

I realized that there are not many people interested in engaging with this stuff. It's in the political background and in science magazines. But there's not as much engagement with it in science fiction as I've been hoping for. That's why I want to do a James Bondesque adventure with climate change. I love adventure. What I hate about polemical novels is two characters talking to each other.

I asked Buckell if he'd consider doing another franchise tie-in like he did with the Halo novel, and he said that he only did the Halo book because he truly loves Halo. There are few other franchises he feels that way about, but, he admitted, "If anybody was ever to ask me to do something Wolverine-related - good grief I'd do it in a heartbeat."

Instead of playing in other people's franchises, he's interested in creating his own. He said:

You become a mini-consortium if you can. Given how much fun I've had with Halo games, comics, and reading and writing Halo books, I'd love to do different media with my stuff. There's a possible chance of a graphic short story adaptation coming up for me. I would completely dig seeing cross media stuff happen with my work.

One of the most arresting aspects of Buckell's writing is his facility with fight scenes, which are incredibly hard to write well. I asked him what his secret is for planning and executing one of his trademark action-packed scenes. He said:

Fight scenes are all about the stakes. If you took a Jackie Chan movie and novelize it, it would be weird. In fiction, you have to figure out the consequences of the fight scene. What the stakes are, what led the characters there. You need to consider the emotional side of the fight to make it feel like it's a major problem the character has to overcome.

As an action-oriented, blow-things-up writer from the beginning, my juvenalia is filled with fight scenes, but I wasn't able to make them interesting until I figured out they exist in a larger context. The reader is reading it like "oh crap oh crap" and that's what provides the tension. Really effective fight scenes are no more than a paragraph – the important parts are the anticipation and fallout. The shorter you write, the faster it feels to the reader. A page-long fight is the equivalent of slow motion – you've brought the book to a standstill. You can do it stylistically in a John Woo flash, but if you want a balls-to-the-wall, ugly, brief human thing, you've got a paragraph to get to of the action, and then you need to get back into stakes.

When I write fight scenes, I spend time trying to draw out the environment [the characters] are in. Tim Powers taught me that characters need to interact with the physicality of the environment. A fight scene lets you block out the physical nature of something. They climb around in it, and that lets you describe the interior of an airship. You get to provide exposition as well as a fight scene or moments of drama. More effective to have a character back up and fall over a couch than to say "There's a room and a couch and then they fight."

I sat down with Datlow at WorldCon, where she won a Hugo last week for best editor of short fiction, and we talked shop.

io9: You do most of your work in genre fiction. How do you define horror, as opposed to science fiction or fantasy?

ED: I'm very broad in my definition of horror. There's a long tradition of science fiction horror like the story "Who Goes There," which became the movie The Thing, or The Fly. Then there's the continuum of which ranges from dark fantasy to horror. [Australian horror writer] Kaaron Warren says horror goes farther than dark fantasy. But what's that extra step that makes it horror? Horror is edgier. Dark fantasy feels mushier to me. Finding the difference - it's an instinct. And they overlap a lot. For years I thought the magazine Weird Tales was dark fantasy, not horror. But since Ann [VanderMeer] took over, the stories are edgier, more in the horror vein.

Horror isn't only about ghosts or monsters. For example, paranormal romance seems the antithesis of horror. Once you have a sexy, fun vampire who is sweet, and you have a happy ending, it's not horror.

Often, science fiction and horror readers and writers won't look outside of their own field for new work. Look at the Stoker Awards [for horror fiction] – the members rarely look at the horror published in mainstream publications . I feel lucky that I get to read and publish stories that are not necessarily overtly horror in Best Horror of the Year. Still, people will ask, "How dare you put a "mainstream" story in there?" But if I can justify a powerful story as horror because it creates that sense of unease and/or dread, I'll use it.

Where do you find new horror writers for your anthologies?

I'm reading of every publication in and out of the field regularly for my Best of the Year. I read the magazines Black Static, Interzone, Crimewave, as well as crime collections and anthologies. I read Akashic Books' noir series. And of course I cover SF mags like F&SF, Asimov's and Analog, although I'll rarely find a horror story in the last. I'll read any anthologies or collection I can get my hands on. If I find a book mentioned in Publisher's Weekly and it looks like it will be dark, I'll track it down.

But sometimes I find stories just because people send their obscurely published stories to me. That's what happened with Miranda Siemienowicz. She sent me her stories and I took one, called "Dress Circle," for Best Horror of the Year 1. Most of the people in the first volume [covering 2008] are writers I don't know personally or professionally. When editing short fiction you always have to look for fresh blood. Most short story writers move on to novels - that's just a given. So you have to look to new writers for magazines and anthologies.

There has been a lot of talk in the science fiction and fantasy community lately about how many anthologies include only male authors. Do you ever worry about gender balance when you put together an anthology?

Not all that much, particularly not in horror because there are just more male horror writers than female and there always have been - this has been discussed to death in the horror field for decades. Because I read so widely for my year's best, I'm generally aware of who is writing what. In editing an original anthology, I specifically invite writers whose work is to my taste and might check out something that is recommended to me. I'm glad to see that more young female writers and writers of color are entering the fantastic field . I'd like to see more writing horror as well. But when it comes down to what I or any editor buys it's always going to be the story itself, not who wrote it.

By the same token, of course there's an old boy's - and for that matter, girl's - network in genre fiction and in any other literary endeavor. People are more willing to work with the writers whose work they already know and love. Right now, a large percentage of horror writers are still male and that's the percentage in my anthologies. But it's good to be aware of the balance. Interestingly, in the 1980s, women dominated the Nebula nominations in short fiction: Karen Joy Fowler, Nancy Kress, and Connie Willis were at the top of the field in visibility.

Where do you see the future of short stories going with more magazines moving online?

I spent ten years in the digital domain – I was publishing online stories for Omni [in the mid-1990s]. So I'm comfortable with that idea, but I just wish online fiction would start making money for people. I'd also like to start reading ebooks, but I don't currently have a reader.

Krugman came to Worldcon for two events: a conversation with his favorite living science-fiction author, Charles Stross (which we sadly missed because we were on an airplane) and a one-person talk about science fiction and economics. At the latter, he started out by saying Isaac Asimov's Foundation series inspired his decision to become an economist, since you couldn't actually study to become a psychohistorian. (He's said this many times before, and in fact, said it again in this past weekend's New York Times Book Review.)

But the most surprising part of Krugman's talk was his assertion that the world is actually changing less quickly than in the past. "The pace of change has actually, generation by generation, been slowing down," he claimed. "The world of today is not as different from the world of 1959 as the world of 1959 was from 1909."

So let's say that you travel 30 years into the future and find yourself in a shopping mall. You'll be astounded at the "great gizmos" that are for sale there, but you'll still be able to recognize it as a shopping mall, said Krugman. On the other hand, lots of trends are likely to come to a head over the next few decades, including climate change and peak oil, and they could result in a drastically different world.

Krugman just cleaned out his library and found he had four copies of tons of books published over the last couple decades, since he gets two advance review copies and two copies of the finished book. And he found himself tossing out duplicate copies of tons of futurist books that were depressingly off the mark about predicting the main concern of the 1990s or 2000s. (e.g. war with Japan.) So he's leery of trying to predict the future.

And of course, science fiction was ridiculously over-optimistic about the world of 2009, with talk of space colonization and undersea cities, and yet missed some huge changes which really have happened. "I remember reading something which had all these people flying around between planets, and using slide rules to calculate their next course," said Krugman.

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

Yesterday at science fiction convention WorldCon, a panel of editors discussed how they find and curate the stories that pack the shelves at your bookstore – or fill the pages of your favorite SF magazine. On the panel were Asimov's editor Sheila Williams, Pyr Books editor Lou Anders, celebrated anthology editor Ellen Datlow, and Analog editor Stanley Schmidt.

Williams and Schmidt, who work in the same building, talked a lot about how to maintain a story balance when you have to fill a magazine with new material month after month. Said Williams:

We publish mostly SF with some fantasy. And sometimes you discover that you have too many generation ship stories one month, or too many time travel stories – or too many stories about the close personal relationship between a boy and his father. Once I got two stories about what would have happened if Castro had gone into baseball instead of becoming a dictator. So of course we had to publish both. They went in very different directions. But you always try to maintain a balance of stories – even at the level of trying to have as many humorous stories as depressing ones.

Schmidt said he wants to see more stories with good science in them. He said:

Science is underutilized and not emphasized enough. I really wish I saw more stories with cutting edge science as well as a great story with good characters. He said: Science is underutilized and not emphasized enough. I really wish I saw more stories with cutting edge science as well as a great story with good characters. A good science fiction story should contain an element of speculative science, but it must be made plausible. Star Wars is not science fiction – it's a Western in space. But here's something that may surprise you. Flowers For Algernon is a perfect example of science fiction because you can't have a story without the experiment.

A publisher of novels as well as short stories, Anders said he's willing to take more risks with short stories:

As long as readers like 70 percent of the stories in an anthology, that's great. So you can take more risks with a short story in an anthology. But novels – those have to keep me in a job. So I'm less likely to take risks on that kind of material. I also don't think that what makes good science fiction is the science per se. It's the healthy skeptical attitude science fiction fosters that's important. The post-enlightenment attitude.

Datlow, who has edited countless anthologies including the annual Best Horror of the Year and Poe, said that she aims to create anthologies that "corrupt your mind with new things." She added:

I like to mix genres, like when I edited the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. But it really brought out all these politics around science fiction versus fantasy. People took me to task.

Currently Datlow is working on an anthology of cat stories, and said that's been one of the hardest projects for her to find the right balance of stories for. "There are a lot of really bad, cutsey cat stories out there," she said with a sigh. "And not a lot of good ones. I've got 70 percent of the stories for this anthology, and still need more." (So if you have a great, non-cutsey cat story, Datlow may be editing the perfect anthology for you to submit work to.)

Her comment sparked a lot of agreement among the other panelists, who all admitted that they have often been in the position of trying to find great stories. They are constantly hungry for new writers and new stories to fill the pages of their publications.

We went to a Worldcon panel called "The Singularity: Are We Getting Any Closer?" featuring Farthing author Jo Walton and Julian Comstock/Spin author Robert Charles Wilson. They talked a lot about the pitfalls and plausibility of the Singularity, the idea that a drastic change in technology will result in a world we can barely visualize, full of sentient machines and vastly improved longevity, among other things.

Many people seem to think the Singularity is inevitable, noted Walton, but the panel was aimed at questioning whether we're any closer to it now than when Vernor Vinge pioneered it in his 1986 novel Marooned In Realtime.

For her part, Walton argues the Singularity is an interesting concept for science-fiction storytelling, but "it isn't going to happen. It's a completely mistaken concept [and] we've made no real progress towards it." The idea is based on a false extrapolation, similar to saying that since we could go 30 MPH 100 years ago, and 400 MPH 50 years ago, now we should be traveling at the speed of light.

And because people believe the Singularity is inevitable, some argue that you can't write about the future at all — since we can't imagine life after the Singularity, it's almost impossible to write about. Walton worries that this idea is the "turd in the punchbowl" of future-set science fiction.

Adds Walton: "To be fair, Vinge has written some excellent fiction within that constraint [of assuming the Singularity happens in 20 years], in the same way people write sonnets — but a sonnet is not the only poem you would want to write."

Wilson pointed out that if the Singularity really is coming, then it's inevitable — so there's no need for people to be cheerleaders for it. He compared it to "telepathy or dianetics," science-fictional ideas which some people adopted "with religious fervor." A core question in science fiction is "where is our technology going, and what can we do with it," noted Wilson. "The Singularity is just one answer."

Panelist Christopher Carson pointed out that the science fiction section in bookstores lately consists of nothing but "transhuman science fiction or urban fantasy." People tend to see the Singularity coming partly because devices are becoming more complicated — but that's often an example of "feature creep," like the fact that your cellphone now has a host of functions you don't understand and didn't ask for. That's not really a sign of progress, because those extra functions were designed by some marketing person somewhere, he pointed out.

The Singularity is notoriously hard to define, but people often say that you could bring Socrates forward in time and take him to Worldcon, and he would understand what it was about, more or less. But you couldn't take a goldfish to Worldcon and have it understand what was going on. A present-day human, visiting a post-Singularity world, would be more like that goldfish than Socrates.

But Walton says this is a loaded example, because Socrates is an extraordinary example. A "random Greek person" from Socrates' era might have a much harder time understanding Worldcon.

"The question I sometimes ask myself is, How would the Singularity work in Darfur?" says Wilson.

And there was lots of talk about the potential downsides of getting the Internet in your head, complete with phishing, spam, malware and bad memes. Says Walton, the first 100,000 people who get the Internet in their heads, without any terrible, life-ending mishaps, will have a really hard time upgrading later on. "Imagine an outdated computer in your head."

Speaking to us at WorldCon science fiction convention in Montreal, Sawyer explained why the show (featuring John Cho, pictured here in a publicity shot for FlashForward) changes his novel in one significant way. The characters get a glimpse only six months into the future, rather than the two decades they get in the novel. Sawyer says executive producers David Goyer and Brannon Braga chose to do that for a few reasons:

One rationale is pure economics: you don't have to make the future world. But it's also about audience. For example, here's the difference between Battlestar Galactica and Lost. Lost gets 10 million viewers and Battlestar Galactica rarely tops 1 million, even if Battlestar Galactica is arguably a better show. And that's because as soon as audience sees robots and aliens, it dries up. They tune into other channels. Not showing the future on FastForward allows the audience to build.

Sawyer is a creative consultant and what he calls an "unofficial science consultant" on the ABC series. "I've been very impressed by how well-informed David [Goyer] is about science, and how important it is to him," Sawyer said. I asked whether the show would revolve around an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, the way the novel does, and he was mum on that point. But he did offer a hint: "They needed a science consultant for the show, so that tells you something about what's going to happen."

Mainly, though, Sawyer is happy with the writing on the show. He enthused:

I've seen most of the pilot and it's fabulous - it has the look of a motion picture. I don't expect the episode I write to be on the Hugo Awards ballot; I expect the pilot [written by Goyer and Braga] to be on the ballot.

Storytelling:

We felt as though there was a pervasive theme of storytelling and storytellers, and the power of creation, throughout Gaiman's work, especially after touching base with Gaiman mega-fan Rob Clough. So we asked Gaiman why he thought that element comes up again and again for him.

Gaiman says he tries to do something different with every book he writes — he wants the rabbit to be popping out of a new and different hole each time. When faced with a choice between doing a book that's comfortable and safe, and which all of his fans are clamoring for, versus a different book that he has no idea how to write and has nobody waiting for it, he'll always choose the latter. But in spite of this diverse body of work, he feels like after 25 years, he can look back at what he's done and "the themes start piling up." The power of storytelling is definitely one of them, and so is "themes of doorways and transitions," and also his books often seem to feature a kiss that signals the beginning of the third act.

As to why Gaiman's books include the theme of storytelling so often? "I don't know, because I make them. I don't know that writers have origin stories, and I wouldn't believe any writer who said that he did or she did... So why do I write about storytelling? Why was Sandman such a great huge monumental story about the nature of stories?" He says he thinks stories are important and the imagination is important, but those are things he's saying after the fact, not while he's writing a new story.

On the other hand, Gaiman says that everything that exists is here because someone dreamed it up — we sit on chairs because someone imagined them. And he went to the first officially sanctioned science fiction conference in China, and asked why the Chinese government was sponsoring imaginative fiction after so many years of disapproving of it.

It was because the Chinese had noticed that they were incredibly good at making things, but that other people seemed to be inventing the things that they were making, and they had come out to the U.S., and they had gone around Google and Apple and Microsoft, and one of the very few things that the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft had in common was they were science fiction and fantasy fans from way back.

And because they were science fiction fans, they believed the world could be different tomorrow, instead of just being the same thing day after day.

Comics hitting the mainstream:

Somebody else asked Gaiman how he felt about graphic novels being on the Hugo ballot, and he basically said it's about time. When The Dark Knight Returns came out some 23 years ago, the Hugo Ballot included it — but in the non-fiction category, giving the impression the Hugo voters believed Batman was real. Watchmen got on the Hugo ballot, but only in some special made-up category.

Gaiman sees three factors bringing comics into the mainstream:

• The formerly rigid distinction between high and low culture is eroding. Gaiman did his first college appearance in 1992, at a St. Louis college, where the Art Dept. invited him and the English Dept. boycotted the event because Gaiman wrote for comics. But some of the English students sneaked in, and they're professors now. And people like Michael Chabon have come of age loving comics and being excited to be part of that world.
• We're living in a science-fictional age. Just imagine explaining an ipod touch to someone in the 1950s.
• Hollywood special effects have improved to the point where comic-book storylines can play out credibly on screen, and that means comic-book stories have infiltrated the mainstream to a much greater extent.

Movie adaptations of his books:

Someone asked Gaiman if he writes his books differently now, hoping to gear them for movie adaptation, and he said that he just wants the books to be the best things they can be. He's pleased that many people loved the film of Coraline, but he doesn't see it as the perfected form of the book — the book is separate.

And if you wrote a novel aiming to make it easy to adapt into a movie, it would be a disaster, says Gaiman:

I don't know if you've ever done the thing of reading a novelization of a film, before you see the film, but they're always very very odd. As reading experiences, they're always very unsatisfying, because they have all the beats of the film, and they don't work in the way a novel works. They're things that come from the pre-DVD era [where a book version was the only way you could revisit the film]. If you do that [i.e., write a novel so it will make a good movie] you come up with a very broken-backed story.

He also said that for years, execs from major studios would call him up about making a movie of his novel Anansi Boys, and say "We love this book. Can the characters be white?" Gaiman would reply no, because the book was about the children of the African spider god and the characters in the book are all African American. And the execs would reply, "Black people don't like fantasy." And when Gaiman would accuse them of being racist, they would backpedal and say "No, no, we're just being practical."

Working with Marvel and DC

Gaiman says he doesn't have "a lot of patience left" with the two big comics publishers. "They're sweet people and I love working with them but dealing with them is often a lot like being nibbled to death by ducks." It does sound like he's having fun working on the Metamorpho comics for DC's Wednesday Comics, and he's being super careful to make it look like a comic from 1965-1966, even down to a periodic table of the elements that appears in one upcoming issue, which only shows the elements known as of 1966, and Lawrencium would have the letters "LW" instead of the more recent "LR."

Random other stuff: Gaiman also says he loves "plotting by place," treating places in his novels like characters and seeing how characters interact with different locations. And he says he wrote Stardust and Neverwhere right after he moved to the U.S. and he was homesick for Britain — so he found himself creating a fictional version of London and the English countryside respectively. And then he did American Gods, in which he came to terms with living in the U.S., and tried to understand the place.

With the start of WorldCon coming this Thursday, we're ramping up to cover our second con in a few weeks. And io9 will be hosting a party with the awesome Cecilia Tan of Circlet Press on Friday night, in a yet-to-be-identified room.

Anticipation 2009 has been putting out tons of info — including a draft list of guests. And in addition to guest of honor Neil Gaiman, Nobel-winning economist Paul "I was right" Krugman will be there, giving a talk about his love of Asimov and holding a conversation with Charles Stross, whose Merchant Princes novels Krugman has waxed admiringly about before.

There's also info about the whopping ten awards that will be given out at this year's Con. The Hugo Awards are always given out at WorldCon, whose members vote on them, but this year you also get to see Cory Doctorow accept his Prometheus award as a libertarian hero for Little Brother, and you get to find out who's Canada's outstanding science fiction author, thanks to the Aurora Awards. And the artist-focused Chesley Awards. Not only that, but there's something called the Golden Duck Award, which sounds rude but is actually for children's SF lit.

Curious to see if the libertarians will play nice with Krugman? You can find out, without making a major commitment.

You can try out WorldCon with a "taster" membership and see if you can handle it in a realtime situation. You can show up and pay 75-95 Canadian dollars for a day membership, then wander around and drink in the sights. Go to a few panels, see if you can get Elizabeth Bear's autograph. Then if you decide that WorldCon isn't for you, you can go back and get refunded all but $20 of your day membership (or $10 for a child's membership).

We'll see you in Montreal! WorldCon "I, Robot" image by Changa Lion on Flickr.

Publisher set to ignite: Pyr Books
With authors like critically-acclaimed Ian "Brasyl" McDonald on board, and more cool books on the way, Pyr is becoming the scifi indie publisher to watch. Attendees of WorldCon clearly thought so too. The Pyr party was packed with celebs and fans alike, and not just because of the tasty mojitos.

Authors set to conquer: David Marusek and Paolo Bacigalupi
Marusek's first novel, Counting Heads, won critical acclaim inside the world of scifi and beyond. The sequel, Mind Over Ship, is coming out in January — but reviewers are already reading galleys and getting excited over this tale about the construction of generation ships on a future Earth where the middle class has disappeared. Meanwhile, Bacigalupi has already won a ton of fans for his short fiction collection Pump Six — but now we're amped for his first novel, a YA adventure that involves ultra-fast sailboats in a peak oil world, plus pirates of the Arctic!

The editor every writer wants: Liz Gorinsky of Tor
She organized a roller derby outing at WorldCon, she edited Jeff VanderMeer's excellent novella Shriek, and she has impeccable taste in writing. We're waiting to see if Gorinsky is going to discover the next Ursula Le Guin.

Writer on the verge: Mary Robinette Kowal
Winner of the Campbell Award for best new writer, Kowal has over a dozen acclaimed short stories under her belt. She may be a successful professional puppeteer, but we'd like to see her pulling the strings on a novel or two as well.

Comeback kid: Amy Thomson
Author of the amazing novels Virtual Girl and The Color of Distance, Thomson is poised to grab the attention of new readers with her recently-finished novel Nomad. Blending hard scifi with a medieval setting that feels almost like fantasy, the novel takes place among people on a planet whose culture resembles that of ancient Mongolia. Thomson spent time in Mongolia to do research, and promises a tale that involves a lot of awesome horse-riding action. With people riveted by the movie Mongol in theaters (not to mention all the horsey enthusiasm generated by Seabiscuit), this could be the novel that puts Thomson back on the map.

Here are the winners, as listed on the official Hugo website:

* Best Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins; Fourth Estate)
* Best Novella: “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis (Asimov’s Dec. 2007; Subterranean Press)
* Best Novelette: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang (Subterranean Press; F&SF Sept. 2007)
* Best Short Story: “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s June 2007)
* Best Related Book: Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher (Oxford University Press)
* Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Stardust Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman Illustrated by Charles Vess Directed by Matthew Vaughn (Paramount Pictures)
* Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who “Blink” Written by Steven Moffat Directed by Hettie Macdonald (BBC)
* Best Editor, Long Form: David G. Hartwell
* Best Editor, Short Form: Gordon Van Gelder
* Best Professional Artist: Stephan Martiniere
* Best Semiprozine: Locus
* Best Fanzine: File 770
* Best Fan Writer: John Scalzi
* Best Fan Artist: Brad Foster

The winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Mary Robinette Kowal

Kowal and Scalzi should also have won for most glamorous self-presentations — Kowal's golden gown matched her winner's tiara perfectly, and Scalzi dressed like a secret agent and did action poses with his award.

The only controversial win, at least in my mind, was Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union for best novel. Certainly it's a brilliant novel, and is undoubtedly a work of SF-ish alternate history, but it felt a little wrong to me that the award went to somebody who writes mainstream literary fiction that merely borrows a few tropes from SF. Chabon was too busy to attend the awards, but he did write a sweet and genuine acceptance speech which was read with ironic gravity by venerable fantasy author (and Chabon influence) George R. R. Martin.

The real fun began after the Hugos, when all the most elite non-winners headed to a local hotel for the "Hugo Losers Party," with a tightly-guarded guest list (several sources revealed to io9 that losers can bring as many dates as they want, thus resulting in a party packed with venerable writers and cute people they met in the elevators on the way up to the party). A few floors below the Loser's Party was a bash thrown by SF imprints Ace and Roc, also packed to the gills with SF fiction's biggest stars. Check out our party gallery, and see which luminaries you recognize.

At the end of the evening, everyone retreated to the Hyatt Regency bar, where the losers continued to drink their sorrows away and I had a chance to babble fannishly to Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell about how he'd written one of my favorite episodes of the new show.

Hugo Awards [via official Hugos site]

NORAD stands for North American Aerospace Defense Command, and its primary task during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s was to detect any airborne (or spaceborne) threat over the U.S. or Canada. A joint operation between the two nations, NORAD's walls are peppered with images of the US and Canadian flags flying side-by-side. NORAD's most spectacular and mythical feature is that the 5-acre facility is actually a tiny city, complete with enough food, water, and fuel to protect essential personnel after nuclear attack. When the site is "buttoned up," its blast doors closed and locked, it becomes one of the most hardened command centers in the world.

Or so we thought. That was the first myth to be busted when we arrived at NORAD and Lt. Lally gave us an introductory presentation about the facility. It turns out that it only ever had enough "button up" supplies to house essential personnel for 30 days (correction: Maj. Thomas Veale has written to say that 30 days is the minimum, but the maximum amount of time is "classified"). So there went all our images of a City of Ember style situation, with a generational city existing for hundreds of years underground while the Earth slowly decontaminates and the atomic mutants kill each other for tins of spam.

Plus, NORAD is no longer really all that hardened. Smart nukes mean that any hits on the U.S. would be precise and direct. "A direct hit would turn this into Cheyenne Valley," joked Lally. This is one of the many reasons why most of NORAD's essential functions have been relocated to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs to the north. Today NORAD is like the Battlestar Galactica, a once-great military facility built to withstand threats of the past and slowly morphing into a museum. Still, like the Galactica, NORAD still has plenty of muscle.

Beyond the blast doors, we entered a high-ceilinged cavern, its walls dotted with rusting bolts driven deeply into the rock to maintain structural integrity. Water seeping through thousands of layers of the Cheyenne Mountain oozed down the walls. At the cavern's far end, a white steel box with an unassuming doorway marked the entrance to NORAD city proper. Once swarming with personnel, the place is now a kind of ghost town. Only a few hundred people work here at any given time.

Immediately, we saw the weirdest part of NORAD: The entire city is built on springs. Housed in a series of boxy steel buildings, some three stories high, the facility has to withstand the shaking of bomb blasts. A huge crawl space beneath the city is packed with giant 1000-pound springs that form the foundation for the entire facility. It was the first place all of us thought we'd want to hide if we were sneaking in. There are crawl spaces between each building, too, and a wily intruder could snake underneath the town, squirm around those springs, and inch up the side of the cement-encapsualted command center at its heart to gain access.

The city's interior had been designed by the Navy, and you could tell. It felt like being on a large submarine, with cramped metal corridors, exposed pipe, and a mess hall that smelled of frying donuts. As we approached the legendary command center in building 2, we were met with a reminder that NORAD is still alive and kicking. Apparently a general had called for a classified meeting in the command center, and so all we'd be allowed to do was gaze hungrily at its boxy body through some windows in the third floor.

The command center, where generals would coordinate with the president to deal with a space or air attack, is housed in a 60-foot capsule of smoothed concrete. From inside it, you can see the domed ceiling though windows in the top. From where we stood outside, we could see just the edges of that dome stretching over the straight-edged roof of the center, streaked with the water that continuously seeps out of every wall in the NORAD facility.

Instead of of the command center, we saw the snack shop and bought t-shirts. Lally told us the number of people the facility could support was still classified, though he did let slip that you had to have a "mission essential" badge to be on the safe side of the blast doors. "They won't let any mouth-breathers who aren't productive stay inside," he joked.

Perhaps the best part of our tour came next. We descended into the basement, to see the generator and cooling facilities that keep the entire NORAD facility running. "Without power, it's just a cave," read a sign stenciled into a door in the dim cavern packed with pipes and mysterious, locked rooms. We walked through a maze of caves where raw outcroppings of rock looked ready to crush the ubiquitous white steel boxes of control rooms and fat, blue pipes. Because the facility had been designed by Navy, all the pipes were marked in the colors that would be used to identify air, water, and fuel pipes on a navy ship. A riot of blue, red, and green pipes sprouted from every wall. Now the generators and other equipment are run by government contractors rather than military personnel.

The floor was pitted with holes where water from the ceiling had been leaking continuously for fifty years, and after squeezing between two huge tanks we came upon a sight straight out of a Dune novel. It was a long, underground reservoir of pure mountain water, completely black beneath a low rock ceiling. Enough light touched its surface to illuminate a single duck floating on its surface. For an instant, that duck gave me my first sense of claustrophobia. What was it doing here, 2000 feet beneath a mountain, breathing piped-in air and living in the deepest, most confined part of the facility?

Of course, it was just a decoy, a joke of a marker put there to orient anyone who was doing work in the reservoir. It sat perfectly still, staring at the dark area where the cavern sank down to meet the water, reminding me that nothing but artificial life could live down here. Or life artificially preserved.

As we left, we passed through another blast door and into mile-long escape tunnels that plunged deep into the mountain, lit only by a line of light in the ceiling. Like the rest of the facility, they seemed ghostly without anyone in them. Even the smoking area, located weirdly across the tunnel from one of the main air vents, was entirely abandoned. We waited for a bus to take us out from underground, smelling diesel on the air and imagining the end of the world.

So what did the other visitors think?

Pyr publisher Lou Anders was excited by pretty much everything. "So this is what the Batcave would really be like!" he exclaimed when we walked beneath the high, damp ceilings into the reservoir area. "It would be all wet and covered in crap." He also noted that the engine room looked like "a Doctor Who set." When we left, he mourned, "I'm sad that they can't live in there forever, in that realistic Batcave."

Others thought it was instant inspiration for fiction. Jeff "Plague War" Carlson enthused, "It was completely phenomenal, and pretty much made for action scenes with Bruce Willis. Especially the space underneath the buildings full of springs. Of course, you'd need even deeper caves underneath the ones we saw. A vast catacombs."

Robert "Rollback" Sawyer said, "It was great fodder. I was disappointed that we didn't get to the control center, but that means I'll always see it the way it was in WarGames. It was [also] surprisingly steampunky."

David "Mirrored Heavens" Williams commented, "I liked the plumbing. If you're going to be monitoring World War III, you also have to go to the bathroom. I liked those escape tunnels too."

Paolo "Pump Six" Bacigalupi added, "The world runs on springs. That's what I learned at NORAD. I would definitely want to be the person with 'mission essential' badge, as opposed to the mouth breather who gets kicked out."

"Into the nuclear wasteland," joked Sawyer.

Bacigalupi had done a little sociological research, too: "I wrote down all the magazines they had for sale in their shop: Playboy, Field and Stream, Runner's World, Cosmo."

Erin Cashier describes the castle we visited after NORAD, where Blake "Spellwright" Charlton mused:

The fiction was more important than the function — when you lock down, you only last for 30 days! So it was all about making it seem like we had this facility during the Cold War but it wasn't really that big of a deal.

Kevin J. Anderson, author of several Star Wars and Dune novels, said he was intrigued by NORAD as a symbol:

I'm fascinated by what it signifies about our mindset from fifty years ago. It was a time when you had to have big, powerful responses to a single monolithic enemy. So you could build a big facility like that. We don't have those monolitic enemies anymore. NORAD wasn't designed to fight an opponent like a terrorist — it designed against a rational villain.

David "Counting Heads" Marusek quietly noticed a lot of telling details. For example, the facility is largely run by government contractors now, and he figured out that the main contractor is an Alaskan company called Aleut, which he speculated (based on its name) is probably run by Natives. There's a certain irony in the idea of a Native-run company taking charge of operating one of the most iconic U.S. military installations. That in itself could form the basis of a short story or novel. Marusek also commented on the "tremendous naval influence" over NORAD's design. "There was a real ship feel to it."

NORAD, a ship city slowly drifting to sleep underground, is perhaps one of the most enduring legacies of the Cold War. Hewn out of the rock in a frenzy of space age paranoia, it's a technological marvel whose value was always more symbolic than strategic. But that's what makes it such a pure product of the U.S.: Here, we have faith symbols can offer as much tactical advantage in war as functioning technologies can. But symbols, like technologies, will obsolesce. And that's what's happening to NORAD, bit by bit.

Top image via US Navy; image of our group in front of the blast doors via NORAD; image (below) of NORAD being built in the late 1950s via NORAD.

• The first official (American, anyhow) "World Science Fiction Convention" (now known as Worldcon) was held in 1939, and followed by conventions in Chicago and Denver in the following years. check out the photo above of some fans posing at Coney Island during that first convention, on the top row on the far left is Ray Bradbury.
• The first British convention in 1937 attracted 20 fans, including Eric Frank Russell and Arthur C. Clarke.
• The WorldCon conventions were suspended after 1941 due to World War II, but resumed in 1946.
• WonderCon was started by John Barrett in the San Francisco Bay area in 1987, but has since been adopted and is now part of the Comic-Con International family of Cons. Sort of like the Shazam family.
• Comic-Con itself began in San Diego as the Golden State Comic Book Convention in 1970, and attracted around 500 fans. Last year the Con (now the San Diego Comic-Con or just Comic-Con) had over 125,000 visitors.
• There are now regional cons including everything from Eurocon to DeepSouthCon to Westercon.
• There are even specific cons that cover one range of subjects, like BotCon (Transformers), Costume-Con (costumes, duh), and FilkOntario (filk music, folks music with a scifi/fantasy twist).
• That's not even mentioning all of the cons for specific shows and movies that have sprung up, like Star Trek, Farscape, Star Wars, and plenty of others. In fact, the movie GalaxyQuest is completely con-centric.
• Our favorite title? The Wrath of Con in North Florida. Either that or the Comic Book Guy's Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con. It's a toss up.