Another con has come and gone. My wife Leah Cutter and I had a pretty good time. We both had readings and signings. Leah was also on a panel, and I gave a talk on "Space-Based Astronomy" that featured the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, FUSE, WMAP, the James Webb Space Telescope, and others. My powerpoint presentation slides can be found on my astronomy website. The talk was well attended, as usual, and the embedded movies were really spectacular.
Nina and Ron Else of "Who Else! Books" in Denver carried copies of our books and were great as usual (and Leah sold more copies than I did, as usual as well). I especially enjoyed talking with old friends and new friends both: Maggie Bonham, Wil McCarthy, Carol Berg, Ed Bryant, Gary Raham, Elizabeth Moon, Sarah and Dan Hoyt, Carrie Vaughn, Dan Abraham, Alan Lickiss, Aaron Larson, Jim van Pelt, Connie and Coutney Willis, and Ruben Gamboa (who I discovered I knew in another life a dozen years ago in Austin, TX as part of the "slugtribe"). I'm sure I've missed a few people I had good conversations with at one point or another -- my faulty memory!
The art show was pretty good. I had some interest in a Bob Eggleton original titled "Star Dragons" (duh!) but somone else bought it at the $600 quick sale price and I got to stop my angst about it. I still thought about an original Eggleton pencil sketch of the cover of David Gerrold's book Blood and Fire, which I have on my "to read" stack, but didn't. I'll get an original Eggleton someday! My favorite of his was a big Godzilla original that was $2500, and I didn't have that kind of loot to spend.
Every signing I had I was sat next to someone whose book(s) interested me enough to buy them, so I probably lost more money than I made for the couple of hours I sat there. Maggie Bonham had a story in "Four Bubbas of the Apocolypse", which I just had to buy (I'm currently editing an anthology with Jay Lake called "44 Clowns: 11 stories of the Four Clowns of the Apocolyspe" (link fixed!) for Scoripius Digital). Gary Raham wrote a book called "Teaching Science with Science Fiction" which is a topic I'm becoming more interested in. I'll do a post sometime about my plans to start a hard science fiction workshop (FAST FORWARD) and assemble an anthology to support introductory astronomy (DIAMONDS IN THE SKY).
Posted by Mike at October 26, 2004 9:53 PM