Worldcon Dispatch #4

[annathepiper]

Originally written 9/3/07 9:34pm, transcribed 9/11/07 9:12pm

Fell behind on updating my journal for the trip, partly because we've been so busy--and partly because I've come down with a cold. :P Stupid cold. I've been drinking as much vitamin water as I could stand, and burning through multiple packets of Halls.

But in the meantime, we've gotten a lot of stuff done and a lot of things looked at. Here's a brief rundown:

Friday the 31st: I got Esther Friesner's autograph, which was quite cool. :) Told her I had several of her older novels, and she mentioned she has new stuff coming out, so yay! I haven't bought a new Friesner novel in a while; I'll look forward to finding these!

Went to a reading by naominovik, which turned out to be from her forthcoming fourth book of the Temeraire series--very cool. :) Some of it was from the preview I'd read before, but some was new to me, and it definitely spiked my interest in picking that book up.

Later I came in on the end of a Q&A panel Novik was doing, and the main highlight of that was her mentioning that she'll be rearranging the publication schedule for the Temeraire novels so she can play with other books in between the Temeraire books. She said she has the Temeraire novels planned out through Book 7, and that she'll end the series when the Napoleonic Wars end--though she doesn't know when that'll be yet.

I got a chance to get her autograph, too. ^_^ And I thanked her for her wonderful books and journal posts; she asked if I was on LJ, and I told her yeah, I'm annathepiper. She recognized my ID. Woot!

The big con highlight of the evening was a showing of "World Enough and Time"--the latest episode of Star Trek: New Voyages, a fan-produced series that continues the Enterprise adventures from the original series. This little effort has distinguished itself by getting Walter Koenig on to play Chekov--and now they've gotten George Takei to play Sulu! Takei and the dude in charge of the overall series ETA 9/17/07 7:11pm writer/director Marc Zicree were on hand to present the episode, which was pretty solid overall. They came up with a good time travel plot to explain Sulu being 30 years older, and even wrote in a daughter for him. She was well played, even if she was a bit Mary-Sueish (all the main cast loved her, she was smart and insightful, yadda yadda). And it was just weird to see the dude playing Kirk hitting on Sulu's daughter. Hee.

More tomorrow!

Comments

[seattlesparks.livejournal.com]

The Queen (Esther Friesner) hangs out on the SFF.net discussion groups, if you ever wander over there; I have never met her in person, but she seems very nice from all her postings.

(The 'Queen' title is because she is the Queen that the SFWA Musketeers are loyal to. The Musketeers are a group of SF/fantasy authors, led by Elizabeth Moon, who are all also fencers; they have characters/roles in the Musketeers and travel among cons occasionally putting on fencing demonstrations.)

[solarbird]

It isn't a time travel plot tho'. (We just had this discussion IRL so I'm going to shorthand it.) I mean, aside from the technical aspect of "no time travel per se'" - I don't want to get into details because spoilery as all fuck - Star Trek has a long, long history of the "time plot" resolving by all the events being effectively undone. (This happened in TOS as often as not, but got even worse in TNG. Seriously WTF worse in TNG.) So I just want to note that this isn't one of those, because those are lame, and suck. And this didn't. It was a little fanscriptish in that some of the scenes they were so happy to be able to keep because they didn't face network standard time limits kind of really needed to go, and the Mary Sue-ishness is absolutely true as well, but otherwise? Yeah, nicely done. And, frankly, it's kinda neat to see something you could take seriously as a Sulu episode.

Kinda cool to see Grace Lee Whitney back as Commander Rand, too.

[annathepiper]

Cool beans. :) I don't have time to take on another set of forums, but if I did, I'd totally go check out the SFF.net ones. Thanks for the tip!

[(Anonymous)]

The "dude in charge of the overall series" was NOT at World Con. It was introduced by the writer/director of the episode, Marc Scott Zicree. James Cawley, Senior Executive Producer/James Kirk was screening the episode in NY at the time of this years WorldCon.

[annathepiper]

Duly noted and thank you for the correction. :)