Baptism of Fire

[ffutures]

Panic is arriving at a Worldcon, looking at the list of programme items you're on - and finding that you're supposed to be moderating the first of them in a little over an hour, and that one of the other participants is Harry Turtledove. Entirely my own fault, since I did have advance warning that I was moderator - I just forgot since it was a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately I did get a chance to sit down with the other participants first, but I still lost the plot a couple of times - luckily the other participants were pretty good and made up for me, and we managed to make a reasonably good case against writing fantasy with a medieval setting.

Later met rozk and attempted to get food in the carvery, only to be told that a restaurant that at that point had fourteen empty tables (and we counted them) couldn't do a table for two because they were fully booked, despite the fact that it was already past the time they claimed they were booked for. Roz will probably have more things to say about this at some point - I simply have no intention of giving the Moat House restaurants, bar, etc. any of my money for the rest of the con. After that spent an hour or so talking to people and taking a look through the programme to see what other items interested me, and marking in the panels I'm on. At the moment my schedule looks like this:

Friday 11.00 AM - Game Design; You've Read It, Could You Play It
Turning books etc into games - hopefully I can be reasonably coherent on this

Saturday 12.00 AM - Making a Good End Of it: Buffy and Angel
Could the last seasons of these shows have ended differently - if so how, and did Joss make the right decisions? Fun, especially since I'm going in with the theory that Buffy should have stayed dead at the end of Season 5...

Saturday 2.30 PM - Edwardian SF
Me talking for half an hour on alternatives to Wells etc.

Saturday 7.00 PM - Game design: Realism versus playability
I'm moderating this one too - the premise seems to be that complexity is necessarily more realistic than simplicity, and I don't personally believe this, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes - not too sure how the other panelists think on this, so it ought to be interesting.

Sunday 5.00 PM - Getting a Game from Idea to Market Place
Problems, market forces, etc.

And so (via a reasonably good kebab shop) back to my room and Livejournal. Will now try to get an early night, since I didn't last night.

Comments

[houses7177.livejournal.com]

I am fascinated by your assertion that fantasy shouldn't be medievil- since I happen to agree. Or agree to the point where I don't think all fantasy has to be medievil, which is alas, the common plot device.

I wholeheartedly support your conjecture that Buffy should have stayed dead. What came after was, for the most part, dreadful dribbling claptrap.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think it would have been a much better show if Buffy had stayed dead, and they had to cope with the fact that Faith was now the only slayer. Other options of course - for example, they could have made Dawn the next slayer!

I'm tempted to write an AU S6 taking off from this:

* Faith in constant trouble with her parole officer
* Willow still hooked on magic due to her unsuccesful attempt to resurrect Buffy
* No nerds, some other supernatural threat (such as a demonic resurrected super-strong Buffy...)
* Possibly a Faith / Willow / Tara triangle as the main problem apart from the nerds, on the assumption that the F/B conflict was actually caused by Faith's attraction to Buffy.

Good thing I'll probaby never write it...

[houses7177.livejournal.com]

Well, I think it sounds interesting- and not nearly so contrived as what they actually did do.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Tend to agree. My strongest complaint with S6 was that Buffy didn't stay dead for more than 42 minutes.

They could at least have done a very interesting 6-8 episode arc examining how the scoobies were coping without Buffy. And having the Buffybot around to fulfill SMGs contractual obligations.

Joss missed the opportunity to do some very interesting stuff there. But, clearly the Buffybot would not have been the centre of attention. Which, probably made the scheme impossible to do.

I liked the Buffybot. Felt terribly sorry for her in the end.

[bisi.livejournal.com]

hello
Popped in looking for more Subcontractor - (really enjoying it)
That con sounds interesting: "complexity is necessarily more realistic than simplicity, and I don't personally believe this, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes" will you report on that?
Alternatives to Wells? Real ones?

Would you mind if I friend you? I'm always more comfortable asking people.
Cheers

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Friend away - but I'm VERY behind on friending people back, may not happen soon.

[learnedhand-dj.livejournal.com]

You didn't say what the topic of the first panel was, but I presume it was something about alternative settings for fantasy fiction. Did you have an opportunity to talk to Mr. Turtledove, outside of the panel's topic? I've enjoyed a lot of his alternate history fiction, but I'm beginning to worry that he's spreading himself a bit too thin, and that all of his work is suffering as a result. I swear, the man must crank out 4-5 novels a year, never mind the editing work he does. I'd be curious to hear if he mentioned anything about his workload, or why he has so many different projects going on simultaneously.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Not really - he's incredibly busy, of course, so he was whisked away to another panel pretty damn quickly.