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PhilCon 2004 is less than 2 weeks away; if you live on the East Coast of the U.S., this one would be worth a visit! A lot of like-minded SciFi Fans will be there, and some great Author/Artist Guests.

Chick Corea has built a great new album, with a world class group of musicians, based on a SciFi story by an old cult religion person. His music just keeps getting better and better.

Read Super 8, the new story from Terry Bisson, online at the SciFi channel web site. And for the Politically Impaired, you can be brought up to speed by reading this Interview/Inquisition.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I made it to GalaxyCon II today. This is a Fan-run Con (the best kind), and featured a lot of great guests, including someone from about every Universe Whedon has created. If you are anywhere near Washington,D.C., I urge you to get there Sunday, before it is over!
The Guests include Gigi Edgley of Farscape, Richard Hatch of Battlestar Galactica, Robia Lamorte of Buffy, Mark Lutz of Angel, and Jewel Staite of Firefly. And that was just the actors! Click the MORE button for my review of the Con.

The crowd is small, which makes this the most intimate Con I have ever been to. You can actually talk to the Guests as people, rather than see them from across a crowded room; and they can actually be themselves and have fun, rather than being in a business environment. A win-win, except for the chance of not having another Con of this level for financial reasons (because the Guests cannot afford the out-of-pocket, or the Con itself depleted their piggybank for the next decade to make it happen). So please join us, and support your local Con!

Every one of the actors who made this event are people who have found it in themselves to become characters near and dear to my heart. Sometimes it was because who they were meshed with the characters they played, and sometimes because they were just that good at becoming those characters. But in all cases, they took a role in a story and made it their own, to the point where we believed in them. I don’t have any higher praise I could offer them, except maybe to say they showed their personal side at this event, and it was even more worth knowing!

Still reading? OK, the specifics, from my point of view… The core of the gathering for me was the Whedon team, from all its incarnations. They had 3 folks representing for them, and they had obviously all spent time together doing it. Watching them interact, both on and off stage, was a hoot. Gigi may have been the lone Farscape rep, but she had enough energy and intelligence to more than make up for the missing members. Richard Hatch displayed both a knowledge and an understanding of SciFi and the business of Movie/TV production as a whole, and was teaching the details to anyone with the ears to hear. All of them added up to an amazing day, one which I am honored to be part of!

Harry Turtledove has done it again! If you love literature; if you enjoy ParaTime stories; If Shakespeare wrote the words that inspired you; if History is you favorite place to hang out; if Language and it’s evolution is what you want more of; if you have ever been concerned with Intellectual Property Rights; if nothing excites you more than a complex story with characters you can believe in; then you need to Read This Book!!
The book being Harry Turtledove’s RULED BRITANNIA, and to my mind it may be his best book yet. If you answered YES to at least one of the above questions, this one will not disappoint!

Happy Halloween, everyone, or Blessed All Saint’s Eve, as you prefer. There is nothing more enjoyable than putting on a costume that let’s you transform yourself, if only for that one night. Along with that comes the right to be scared for the fun of it without getting grief from your friends and coworkers. And what better to be scared by, than a good invasion of the earth story? One of the best is being remade, H.G.Wells classic, War of the Worlds and is even getting it’s own exhibit in the Science Fiction Museum, as told in this story from CreativeMac.
BTW, the above WOTWorlds link will let you read Wells’s original 1898 book online. If you would rather listen to Orson Wells’s 1938 Radio Broadcast version, go to WOW. If you want to learn the details of how and why this caused the panic it did, be sure to read the Museum of Hoax’s story on the subject. For a well written amature version, check out Jeff’s Interpretation. If you want to play many of the WOTW Games available, visit Drake’s Games.

Just a few random links to Cons you might find worth a visit. I recently mentioned GalaxyCon, which I will be attending. The big ones are the WorldCons; the next 2 are Interaction in Glasgow, and LAConIV in the City of Lost Angels. One of the more fun ones is the DilloCon in Austin; and let’s not forget to read up on a Mundane’s visit to a con, recounted in Geeks Gone Wild, about another great con in St. Louis. And if you really want to get wild, you might check out the many Cons of FurNation, a group even less subtle than most. Enjoy!