ArmadilloCon 21, held Sept 10-12 in Austin, hosted guests like Neil Gaiman, Wayne Barlowe, Sean Stewart, and the Fan Guest of Honor Hal Clement.

We arrived on Saturday, around noon, and promptly hit panels and the dealers room. Dee made a killing in the Ursa Major Brown Bag auction. The panels included the Fate Of Humanity, Why Wasn’t This Book Edited, The Prime Directive in SF, Big vs. Small Conventions, Theme Anthologies, Sympathy for the Devil, and more. This con had multi-track programming – almost too much programming to take in. No matter what, you were going to miss something good.

One thing I didn’t miss was Hal Clement’s talk on "How to make Scientific mistakes and get away with it?" Hal Clement is more than a proponent of science; he makes Data look like a Liberal Arts major. Clement started with telling us how he got into SF: from the Buck Rogers comic strip in 1930. He then graduated into the fannish game of the era: spot any scientific mistakes in a story, and write nasty letters to be printed in the magazine. Later in life he concentrated on figuring out how really the incidents and science in Star Trek had to work. All this in a t-shirt with the slogan "Pay attention, there may be a quiz later." (He spent 40 years as a high school chemistry teacher – why didn’t I ever get teachers like him?)

Amongst the science lesson were great comments, hastily scribbled in my notebook:

• A major SF sin is that most stars have planets. In the pulp heyday of SF, most writers used familiar stars and put planets around them. Most of the familiar stars aren’t suitable for planets – Betelgeuse is a supergiant that may have already gone nova
• In Buck Rogers, planets were used as other stages for folks in shirtsleeves, something that editors wouldn’t buy today (not that he wants to know of editors who buy these stories today)
• Just what did the snakes live on in the pit in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Didn’t the Salt Vampires in Star Trek eat themselves out of resources? Human beings are the only beings that create an open environment.
• An ancient civilization’s trap is taken care of by the first guy that falls into it – they don’t generally reset (this relates to the cat technique in D&D – just carry lots of cats to trigger the traps)
• The problem with invisibility is that then you can’t see
• Do your best to eliminate the impossible, and the truth lies in one of 3 categories:
• Things you didn’t remove
• Things you removed by mistake
• Things you haven’t thought of yet

From the Literary Writing vs Commercial Writing panel:

• Science Fiction writers/fans and media fans/writers are like cousins who hate each other, but still part of the family. That makes cons Thanksgiving!
• One Star Wars author says that writing Star Wars fiction is like flipping hamburgers… and it reads like it too!

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