Panelists: Lara Morgan, Paul Poulton, Sam Scheiner, K. J. Taylor.
This was a very interesting discussion about an important subject. A summary of the issue might be: given that the primary job of a movie is to entertain, how obliged should movie makers be to get historical details right?
The panel seemed to be of a mind on the issue. Everyone is aware that movies are not documentaries, and that some changes from historical fact are inevitable - such as the compression of time.
However everyone had examples of historical inaccuracies that annoyed them greatly, such as U571 which had American rather than British soldiers capturing an Enigma machine, The Patriot which had the wrong side winning the Battle of the Courthouse.
Someone pointed out that even Shakespeare takes liberties with his history: for example Richard III did not have a club foot nor a hunched back, to which someone replied that Shakespeare's historical plays were largely a political justification for the Tudor reign.
Some questions posed but never really answered included: Is it ok to change the details of minor historical figures while staying true to the major? Does historical distance matter? (As in, is it ok to be less accurate the further we are from the events?) If something is just not known (such as what really happened in the cockpit of flight UA93), is it ok for the film-makers to make something up? What to do about the problem that if a myth is repeated often enough it becomes history?
Sometimes movie-makers have an agenda, but more often than not their inaccuracies stem from the fact that history is full of uninteresting characters and long periods of time in which not much happens.
Examples of very accurate historical films offered included Downfall and Das Boot. The panel also pointed out the existence of a class of move that has a completely fictitious story, but which gets the historical minutiae correct. Examples included Master and Commander, Last of the Mohicans, and Titanic.
Someone described the King of Persia as presented in 300 as "looking like something out of a Lady Gaga video".
King Arthur and Robin Hood were raised as examples of stories which, while perhaps based around a kernel of truth, had long since passed into legend, and that this legend was now far more important than the reality.
Someone raised the really important point that even if a movie is accurate to the sources, how can we tell if the sources are accurate? History is not reality. There are no unbiased accounts. Does that leave the storyteller free to chose whose version of history gets told?
The panel agreed that the movie producers pretty much see history as a handy place to find stories to tell, and that hopefully films prompt people to look up the real history of an event.
This was a fun, funny, friendly and relaxed chat between two old-timers of the SF world. With an audience.
Robinson recounted that Silverberg had once rejected one of his stories by saying, "No-one wants to hang out with these kinds of people" - referring to the characters.
Robinson said that choosing to be a writer was condemning yourself to life in a minimum security prison, and that you'd have more fun joining the French bureaucracy.
Somehow the issue of writing in the nude came up, along with the associated problems with chairs of various designs.
Silverberg said that he'd had a very 21st Century experience at the con, with someone asking him to sign his Kindle.
They both seem to have a strong interest in archaeological hoaxes, and the conversation soon turned to the Kensington runestone, which they both accept as a hoax. They said that it became very important to Swedish immigrant communities in the US that the Vikings discovered America, and thus the Kensington runestone got created. Robinson made the interesting comment that with all these hoaxes some kind of SF impulse was going on.
They talked about the furor created by the discovery of a 9,000 year old Caucasoid skeleton in the US, claiming that some Native Americans wanted it destroyed because it threatened their version of history. They agreed that it would be a sin not to study such a fascinating item.
At one stage Robinson described Silverberg as banging out stories at an inhuman speed, to which Silverberg replied, "Let's just say 'at improbable speed' instead."
In the middle of something else Silverberg suddenly said, "The computer - that was a good idea." Robinson recounted the joy he felt the very first time he hit the backspace key on a computer keyboard - AND THE CHARACTER WENT AWAY! Silverberg went on to say that when using a typewriter he used to have to stop writing by early afternoon because of the headaches. But when he switched to using a computer, he realized that the headaches weren't caused by the intensity of his thinking after all, but rather by the racket the typewriter made.
Towards the end they started discussing environmental issues, with Silverberg teasing Robinson by asking how he could reconcile care for the planet with his status as the leading Mars terraforming proponent. Robinson replied that he sees his environmental activism as enlightened self-interest, that he wants to save the planet because that's where us humans live, and thus the two aren't exclusive at all.
Speaker: Jim Benford.
This was a terrific talk by a physicist about SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. He covered two main ideas: conclusions that can be drawn from the signal failure of SETI to find any alien signal despite 50 years of looking, and a complete rethink on what we should be doing to try and find alien civilizations out there.
He started off by asking whether SETI can be considered a science. In other words, does it have falsifiable hypotheses? He concluded that it does, and that the fifty years of silence has falsified each of several hypotheses that he proposed, except for one: the hypothesis that life is common in the galaxy, but that technological civilizations are rare.
Then he presented conclusions he had reached about interstellar beaconing systems. What he did was to turn the SETI issue on its head and pose the question: if we wanted to set up an interstellar beacon system to attract the attention of civilizations out there, what would we build? He claimed that the answers lie in the physics of the situation. Building a beacon system effective across interstellar distances with current technology would be a multi-billion dollar societal investment. To get the most bang for the buck, you would have two classes of beacon: 1) an attractor beacon that sends out very powerful but very short bursts that carry no information beyond "here I am", and 2) an information-carrying beacon operating at much lower power and at a frequency that is a simple multiple of the attractor beacon's frequency. So we should be doing whole-sky surveys looking for transient flashes, with a secondary system for monitoring the locations of any transients detected. He talked about the case of the famous Wow! signal - a very powerful flash detected once in the 50s and never seen again. There is no visible object in the patch of sky from which the signal came. He said that we should have examined that patch of sky intensively for weaker signals - but in fact we've only looked for a total of 17 hours.
Further, to get the best range out of your transmitters, there is a sweet spot in the graph of frequency vs aperture that gives you the greatest power in the far field for the smallest cost. Any extraterrestrial civilization out there when cranking the numbers should calculate the same sweet spot. However, our current SETI search techniques would not find a beacon system broadcasting in this sweet spot.
He called for an extra 100 radio telescopes to be built on top of the proposed 3000 which will form the Square Kilometer Array to search for beaconing systems built according to his calculations.
He considered very briefly the issue of whether or not we should deliberately broadcast our existence to the galaxy. He concluded that fears of interstellar invasions or infections are not realistic fears. The only concern would be the cultural stresses that might accompany the knowledge that we are not alone.
Shaun Tan took us through a slide show of his artworks - starting with a "long-necked dinosaur" he drew on his second day at school! As a kid his pictures were always of dragons or spaceships. "I clearly had an early interest in genre subjects," he deadpanned.
His father was a draughtsman, and so when he started drawing spaceships they looked like "house plans wrapped around spaceships".
He initially saw himself as a writer, but when at 16 he started sending out stories, he found the editors were more interested in the drawings he did as accompaniments to his stories. His first illustration was published at age 16.
He said that he enjoys the challenge of summarizing the content of a story to the reader in a single picture. He said that he tries to draw visual questions to entice the reader into reading the story.
He talked about his strange university days, where he studied art academically by day and painted covers for Fantasy books by night.
After spending lots of time producing illustrations for writers' stories, he moved on to creating pictures with no pre-existing narratives. Sometimes these then act as inspirations for stories that others write.
He loves designing made-up written languages which look like they should be real.
He likes his imagined worlds to look as real as possible, so he does lots of test sketches of real places.
Speaker: Louise Hitchcock.
I was surprised but delighted to find this talk in the programme, as it has no obvious connection with SF&F. It was a presentation by an archaeologist of the results of the fieldwork her and her team have done at a Philistine site called Tell es-Safi in Israel.
She started out by describing what a "Tell" is - an earthen hill that represents layer after layer of human habitation, with each new town built on the ruins of the last. Her team is working in layers of this particular Tell that correspond to the 10th and 9th centuries BCE, uncovering evidence of the daily lives of the Philistines who lived there.
She said that her team is working within a consortium in a relatively new way of doing archaeology. For example other members of the consortium have set up a field laboratory near her dig with microscopes and spectrographs, so that she can get analyses of her finds much more quickly than has been possible up to now.
She has found evidence of sophisticated metalwork and artistic pot decorations, as well as advanced technologies such as "hydraulic cement" - cement that sets under water. Her team has also uncovered evidence of communal feasting, and ritual activity such as the deliberate burying of the disarticulated bones of baby goats.
She connected her work to SF&F by bracketing her talk: at the beginning she described what she did as "dirtpunk", and at the end she concluded that while the Bible would have you believe that the Philistines were the Klingons of the ancient world, her work has convinced her that they were more like Vulcans: cultured and sophisticated.
This was a fascinating talk, and a welcome change in pace from the rest of the con.
This was a very ritzy party put on by the imprint Voyager to celebrate fifteen years of existence. I was lucky enough to get invited because Voyager is one of my friend Helen Lowe's publishers. The room was decorated with balloons in the corporate colours, and a series of book covers were projected onto a large screen. We were addressed by various people in the organization about their plans to become a major world-wide force in the SF&F field. George R. R. Martin gave a brief speech in which he recalled the launch party fifteen years ago. He said that it was held on a tethered barge, and he wondered at the symbolism of holding a launch party on a ship that went nowhere.
My favourite moment of the party came when we were chatting with Charlie Stross. He was telling us about his idea for a bomb-pumped neutrino laser powered by a supernova! It was cool to think that this outrageous idea might turn up in one of his books one day.
More pictures of this event are available here.
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