The angels have the Hugo

I always feel that even the worst-run con is much better than anything I could do, and Denvention was far from being the worst-run con, but I'll be honest and say I didn't have as much fun as I thought I might. That would be because there weren't as many of the usual faces as I generally see, I was pining for my lovely wife, and I wasn't on very many programme items. Okay, I could have raised more of a fuss about that last bit. I advertised my panel topic experience as sex and sexuality in Y/A fiction; getting published for the first time; military sf; political themes in sf; time travel and associated matters e.g. the grandfather paradox; and depictions of / relationship with religion. I'm sure I've done more than that but that's what I could remember. I also volunteered to moderate. And so they put me on panels about time travel and Christianity in science fiction (not moderating either), and gave me a reading. Then they cancelled the time travel one. (And no one came to the reading, which didn't hugely surprise me as I'm not exactly front page news over there.) So I felt under-used. I listed my publications when I volunteered; maybe I should have told them what they were about.

But the programme itself was good and wide-ranging, and everyone knew where, what and who was meant to be happening. Maybe it was a bit too wide ranging as I perceived quite a bit of duplication which I thought could have been tidied up. Why, for instance, were there panels on Science Fiction & Religion and Science Fiction & Christianity - and why were they scheduled at the same time, thus dividing the likely audience?

The nice thing about a con on this scale is that if your brain starts to hurt from too much intensive serious stuff, you can go to something a little further down the intellectual scale for relaxation. For instance, should I go to something on the pitfalls of on-demand publishing, or a panel discussion on who's the best Doctor? The latter proving to have Stephen Baxter in the audience, lurking hard to preserve his reputation as a hard science fiction author and only breaking cover to cast the sole vote for Patrick Troughton. (Possibly because he was the sole attendee who remembers Patrick Troughton.) The session on young adult fiction got me a good list of titles to look for, even if the presentation was deathly dull; rather than discussing what makes a good Y/A title, it just ran through the panellists four or five times nominating favourite titles, until they ran out.

The last event of the con was an enlightening talk by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith on writing as a business, which I enjoyed both for its content and for the fact that I finally got to meet Kris, who bought "Pages Out of Order" off me in the mid-nineties. "You must have been a baby when you were selling to me," she said. I told her I'm 43; "oh, in that case you age well."

I got to see Razor, which I wanted to see but probably wouldn't have spent money on; and of the ones I've seen or read, I really couldn't argue with the Hugo results.

The event that raised the most eyebrows was surely scheduling Guest of Honour Lois McMaster Bujold's reading from her next Miles novel - something similar to Jane Austen reading the first chapter of "P&P2: What Lizzie and Darcy Did Next" - in a room that was far too small. I counted 180 seats, and people were standing around the walls and in the aisle. I bet that the room across the way with 300 seats wasn't packed to capacity for its panel on the Wild Cards series, which was happening at the same time.

But this is quibbling and I heard few other complaints. Cudos for the team for bringing off the annual impossible task. Anyway, Farah Mendlesohn is organising next year's programme; she knows me and she knows my strengths. Even if the full range of familiar faces weren't there, a smaller range was, and I got to meet some new ones too; the fine folk of Christian Fandom, for a start. At Sunday morning's ecumenical service, the speaker did a quick vox pop to ask if we would like illustrations drawn from The Dark Knight or the Honor Harrington series. As there were people who still hadn't seen the former, he went for Harrington.

The Colorado Convention Centre Center is massive, with room for another convention going on at the same time with plenty of empty space between us.




Walking down one of the airport-huge empty corridors was almost eery, like finding yourself in an unused district of Diaspar. Oh, and there's a big blue bear looking in at the front window.


This was the rendezvous for the programme' s most inspired innovation - a daily walk around a couple of blocks, starting at the most unfanlike hour of 9 a.m. but still getting a good draw. Farah said she intends to use this idea for next year. Obviously this will only work in certain American cities; someone said that at LACon a couple of years ago, in pedestrian-averse Los Angeles, the nearest equivalent would have been everyone getting into their cars and doing a fannish cavalcade around the city.

Another inspired idea was the free Fan Hydration Device ...

... handed out to all participants, to combat Denver's combination of high altitude and low humidity.

In short and to sum up: not the best con I've been to, not the worst either, and definitely towards the better end of the spectrum.

Rocky mountain somewhere

I approve of Colorado, in general. It's full of light, the air is fresh and humidity is negligible. The water is straight off the mountains and a pleasure to drink. Historically, blacks got the vote in the 1870s and women in the 1890s - in fact, women were running for election even before they were allowed to do any electing. The governer at the start of WW2, one Ralph L. Carr, bucked the hysterical trend after Pearl Harbor and actively welcomed Japanese Americans into the state, at a time when other states were throwing them into internment camps. So I approve of Colorado.

I'm not really sure what I expected of Denver and so I'm not really sure if it came up with the goods. I was probably expecting something bigger, and I hadn't realised that by dint of high buildings and atmospheric haze it could hide one of the world's more spectacular mountain ranges right on its doorstep. My best view of the Rockies came from the shuttle bus on the way back to the airport, because the land around Denver is so flat. My second best view was from the top of the State Capitol.


From the air, Denver looks like it might be in the middle of some kind of game board. The land is divided into a grid of squares by the usual dead straight American roads, and within each square is a circular field - that being the easiest way to irrigate the ground from a central point. The circles are different colours, depending on what is being grown there, so the overall effect is of some vast and strange game of checkers.

Denver is famous for being the Mile High City (so I almost called this post "The Mile High Club" but then I grew up). The steps to the Capitol have a marker indicating that you are exactly one mile above sea level. Seen here with my foot, which because of forced perspective looks strangely dainty and definitely not size 11 ...

In fact, three of the steps have a claim to be the mile-high one as measuring techniques and instruments have been refined over the last century. But this is the most recent.

Most of Denver's commercial and social life seems to centre around the 16th Street Mall. This is, um, a mall, taking up most of 16th Street. It stretches for over a mile, free electric buses will carry you up and down it, and it's where most of the shops are. It's very clean and pleasant. In the evenings it's the place to promenade or sample the night life. There's a lot of live music and a safe, clubby atmosphere. You can dine out there cheaply and happily.


But it's a mall. The fun of exploring a new city is wandering around, poking into nooks and crannies, always finding something new around the corner. A mall has no corners, and by dint of its very existence it has sucked the life out of the rest of the city. Elsewhere, downtown Denver is mostly sterile office blocks and hotels.

I say mostly. There's doubtless much more that I didn't get to see. Even in the centre there's a couple of museums and other stuff that I didn't have time to see - and also the house of women's rights pioneer Margaret Brown, a.k.a. the Unsinkable Molly Brown, which was worth the trip on its own. What I would really have liked to do, with more time, was just get onto a tram and see what lies at the end of the line; or, even, better, rent a car and drive out to the mountains. But alas time did not permit.

There is also, of course, the convention centre, which really belongs in the next post.