This was a fun and friendly discussion in the round of the works of Joss Whedon, led by three nominal panelists. At times it resembled a church meeting, with people recounting their conversion stories, telling how they came to discover the genius that is Joss. Most people had become devotees through watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although for a sizeable minority their introduction had been via Firefly. At one stage one of the panelists talked about the most recent time he had seen Buffy episodes - he was "conducting another induction into the cult". Many people had had the same conversion experience as I had: initial strong reluctance to watch a TV show that featured teenagers and vampires and someone with as daft a name as "Buffy", followed by sudden and deep commitment once we actually got to see some of the show.
One person claimed that she gave episodes of Buffy to her young son as a primer for what High School life was like!
Someone asserted that Buffy appeals to the subversive in all of us.
When the point was raised that one of the great things about Buffy was the season-long story arcs and the fact that the characters develop and change in response to the good and terrible things that happen to them (as opposed to the episodic shows where the episodes can be viewed in pretty much any order), one of the panelists asserted that the first show to try this was Hill Street Blues.
Most people were dismissive of the original Buffy movie, but it had a few supporters.
One of the panelists said that what appealed to him was that the "good" characters were frequently not good, such as the Scooby Gang's initial treatment of Faith, and Zander's ongoing treatment of and resentment of Spike.
Someone asked, if Joss is an atheist, why are all his shows about redemption? To which someone shouted in reply, "Because redemption has nothing to do with religion!"
Towards the end one of the panelists called for a discussion of things we didn't like about Joss's shows. My favourite answer came from an Irish woman in the audience, who said that the flash-backs showing how Angel became a vampire always appalled her by how spectacularly bad the Irish accents were. She also asserted that there is no-one that good-looking in Ireland.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand is the body that runs the Sir Julius Vogel awards given out at each year's national convention. This was the first time I've attended an AGM. A number of matters were discussed, including whether awards with more than one recipient should get more than one statue, whether finalists should get certificates, how to handle the situation when one author's nominated works dominate a particular awards category, and whether it would be a good idea to have a consistent URL, look, and even name for all the national cons.
I was particularly looking forward to this panel discussion, as I have long been curious as to why a lot of otherwise hard SF often has strong elements of religion and spirituality in it. I was expecting this to be the focus of the discussion. Instead the moderator opened proceedings by stating that we could all agree that religion and faith featured hardly at all in SF, and why should that be? No-one saw fit to challenge this assertion, so I'm not sure which way the audience was leaning on this idea.
The subject is so large, and the potential for hurt feelings so great, that I got the feeling that everybody was trying hard not to offend anybody, and so a discussion on these matters hardly took place: more like a collection of unchallenged assertions.
There were certainly lots of different positions expressed, from Sean Williams who described himself as a committed atheist who nevertheless often includes issues of faith in his books, through to a woman who professed to being a Christian, a scientist, and an SF fan all at once.
When the moderator asserted that characters without faith outnumber characters with strong faith in SF, someone asked "Isn't that inevitable given the agnostic nature of science?" This lead to a brief discussion on whether science and religion were compatible, with the moderator asserting that because the proto-scientists were often deeply religious, this proved that there was no conflict. Other unchallenged notions that came up included standard statements like "Religion and science are complementary - they just start with different authorities."
Other ideas that came out in the discussion:
It is rare for genuinely religious scientists to be portrayed in SF.
There are relatively few religious SF writers, but this may be because SF attracts mavericks and rule-breakers, who are therefore more likely to have problems with established religions.
When religions appear in SF they are often treated from a sociological point of view.
There are very few explorations of faith in SF, but lots of religions.
How hard would it be to build a believable world in which religion played no role in its past or present?
Religion is often portrayed in SF as primitive or simplistic, whereas in Fantasy gods and goddesses and demonstrably true religions abound.
The Battlestar Galactica reboot as a fight between polytheistic and monotheistic religions.
The assertion that there was no room for religion in Gene Roddenberry's original vision of the Star Trek utopian future, and that the later religious/spiritual elements were inserted by other producers after Roddenberry died.
How every species in Babylon 5 had religions, and how some of the arcs dealt with how these religions had dealt with the existence of other sentient species in the galaxy.
A scrappy panel, but interesting nonetheless.
Juliet read her story from the Foreign Country anthology, a neat story about a elderly woman at the end of her life trying to recapture the sense of wonder she felt as a kid at the local library - in a very literal way.
Jay read a couple of his short stories, including an intriguing one about a lonely discarded sentient gun. Everyone it knew was dead, and it pondered its own role in some of those deaths...
This presentation consisted of Simon and June - both key members of the NZ SF fan community - talking about books and movies created by Kiwis, and the particular problems faced by NZ authors. For example, the very small size of the NZ market, meaning that writers who want to make a living at it have to publish in overseas markets, particularly the American market, and this in turn leads to pressure to set stories in America and/or to have American characters. This also leads to a problem for readers: sometimes it's hard to get books by NZ writers in NZ, typically involving the very high postage costs of the online retailers.
The small audience consisted about half and half Kiwis and people visiting from overseas.
I discovered a lot of NZ SF authors I'd never heard of, and resolved to check some of them out. June described one author as being the "Dan Brown of NZ SF". I'm not sure how the author would feel about this comparison!
They also talked briefly about NZ movies and TV shows, in particular the current show This is Not My Life, which Simon described as a very NZ dystopia. This led to a comment from the floor that NZ SF was dark and dystopian in nature, and wondering at the strangeness of this when contrasted with the beautiful and relatively harmonious country we live in.
(For more pictures from these events, please see the end of the full gallery.)
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