Vegetables ... in Space!
Started: 2024-08-23 21:37:34
Submitted: 2024-08-23 23:52:50
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Day two at Worldcon in Glasgow: panels and art and dealers and an organ concert and autographs and ramen and a nerd disco
My alarm woke me at 08:00 British summer time on the morning of Friday, the 9th of August, my first full day in Glasgow for Worldcon. Whatever I did to my sleep schedule seemed to work to align my body clock to my new time zone.
I found my hotel's breakfast, then headed for the suburban Argyle Line heading two stops west to the SEC. On the train platform were a large number of people who looked like they were also going to Worldcon; many were already wearing their convention badges. (I kept mine in my bag until I was actually on site, though there was likely little doubt that I was also heading to the convention.) We got off the train at Exhibition Centre and walked up the stairs and through the pedestrian bridge to the campus, arriving in time for the first panels at 10:00.
The first panel I attended was "Vegetables in Space", discussing the challenges of feeding people in a self-contained environment. (The panel wisely ignored questions about whether long-distance space travel was even possible to focus on the headline.) This panel was mostly populated with people with science backgrounds in biology, and engineering skills to build closed ecosystems. The panel started out discussing their favorite vegetables, and how to build a small farming ecosystem. The best quote from the panel was "vegetables are a social construct." One panelist wanted to feed everyone algae forever, on the theory that it's the most the most efficient nutrient source, though not necessarily the best tasting one.
After the panel I headed back to the SEC and discovered that the SEC had started checking bags at every entrance, which slowed down circulation between the SEC and the adjacent Crown Plaza hotel where some of the meeting rooms were located. I didn't see any panels for the next slot that looked especially interesting so I looked through the exhibition halls, where I found a series of Hugo Award trophies on display, including the archive copy of this year's award, displayed in a glass case that looked neat and allowed inspection from every side but made it difficult to photograph the award.
I saw Alasdair Stuart at the signing tables and stopped by to say hi, because I listen to PseudoPod regularly so I hear his disembodied voice in my earbuds discussing (and occasionally narrating) short horror fiction. I didn't have any of his work to sign, nor an autograph book for the convention; though given that I listen mostly on my iPhone there's an argument that I could have gotten that signed. He had a couple of copies of his collection The PseudoPod Tapes: Volume 2, which he offered to sell me a copy for £5 (or free, if I didn't have any UK money; but I had cash after all) so I bought a copy.
(It now occurs to me that I still have most of my old iPods in a drawer in my closet, so I could bring them along to get signed by people whose work I've listened to on these devices. It further occurs to me that I could have inquired of my colleagues while I was working at Apple to determine if any of them worked on these old iPods. I also want to state for the record that I will sign any consumer electronics device that I've worked on, which includes certain M1 and M2 MacBook Pros.)
I looked through the adjacent dealer's hall and art show, and wondered if any of the art would look good in my house. (I don't really have a surplus of extra wall space for art without displacing anything, though I wouldn't mind more art in my life.) I didn't find anything that I wanted to figure out how to take home with me on a plane across the Atlantic Ocean, but I did appreciate my trip through the art show, including seeing larger prints of covers I recognized, and a large variety of vaguely-scifi-adjacent art.
The dealer's hall had multiple tables for specific small presses (many of which I didn't actually recognize), plus a Waterstone's table. I looked for books by authors I wanted to get signed. I have shelves full of books by authors I enjoy who were signing at the convention, but I didn't want to carry entire shelves worth of books across the Atlantic Ocean in my suitcase. Instead I decided to focus on authors I haven't met, and bring one book each to sign. But I left home without our trade paperback copy of the Hugo Award-nominated* Some Desperate Glory (Calvin found it in his room after I left), so I found and bought the Illumicrate edition of Some Desperate Glory. This looked like it started with the UK hardcover edition by Orbit, with extra sparkle on the dust jacket, plus art on the flyleaf and the edge of the pages. Overall it was beautiful, a perfect souvenir of the convention.
[* When I bought the book, the Hugo Award winners hadn't yet been announced; it was two days later when Some Desperate Glory won best novel, making the book that much more important to me.]
I cleared out my afternoon schedule to make room for the ninety-minute performance by Interstellar organist Roger Sayer in hall 2.
The performance began with "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and three movements of The Planets Suite, then shifted to a conversation with Roger Sayer and questions from the audience. "I'm sure you know," he said, "the pipes behind me aren't real." He played on a church-sized electric organ in the middle of the stage in front of a backdrop of huge pipes. He talked about arranging and recording the music for the movie Interstellar, and further arranging the whole multi-track studio recording to something he could play live with two hands on stage. Then he returned to the organ to play thirty minutes of music from the movie, covering the entire score. The whole thing was amazing, and I walked out of the hall with the haunting theme running through my head.
I headed to the autographs to wait for Martha Wells, representing one of the authors on my shelves whom I haven't met. I brought one Murderbot novella, Artificial Condition, out of the full set I have at home (though I'm not actually sure where my copy of All Systems Red is, maybe it's also in Calvin's room somewhere). By the time I arrived in the autograph line, fifteen minutes before the beginning of the hour-long autograph session, the queue had already overflowed the end of the rope and been split to line up against the back wall. I briefly held the hand-written "End of Martha Wells queue" sign before handing it off to the next person in line behind me.
Waiting in line gave me a chance to study the roof truss spanning the convention hall. The structure of the truss, and the way it was painted and lit by floodlights, made me think it belonged in Aliens, and that it was perfect for a sci-fi convention.
Convention volunteers patrolled the line to make sure no one mistook the end of the rope line for the end of the actual line, and also to amuse us while waiting in line. I got a badge banner that read "I am queue", and a volunteer asked "very important survey questions" like "what is your favorite color".
Once the authors arrived at the autograph area and began signing, the line moved quickly. I brought post-it notes with me spelling "Gem & Ted" to get the books personalized on behalf of Kiesa an I. When I reached the front of the line I told Martha Wells that I really enjoyed Murderbot and she signed the book (and I explained that Kiesa couldn't make it to the convention but I was still getting the book signed to her and she made an appropriate utterance of regret) and I was on my way, ahead of the rest of the line which had now turned the corner around the side of the convention hall and was obscuring the fan meetup tables and well on its way towards the food trucks on the other end of the hall.
The last panel I attended was "Big Smart Objects: Sentient starships in SF Fiction". This panel proposed that we really just want "magical space ponies" to ride around the universe on, and also posited that "On the other hand, huge space battles are just a lot of fun!"
I left the convention and rode the train back to Glasgow Central. I dropped my bag in my hotel room and went to eat supper at Maki & Ramen. As I was wrapping up my meal I briefly forgot that I was in the UK and I had to flag down the server to explicitly ask for the check, but I got lucky that the restaurant was tiny and I could see the entire dining area and the sushi bar from where I was sitting so it wasn't hard to get their attention.
I caught the train back to the convention centre and found John Scalzi's dance party ("The Dance Party at the End of the Universe") in the Crown Plaza. I missed the formative part of my youth where I would have learned to dance in a dance party, but I did appreciate the opportunity to join a bunch of people who were almost as awkward as I was dancing to loud music curated by a sci-fi author. Somewhere in front of me (visible in the picture below as a glowing pale green exclamation point) was someone dressed up as an NPC apparently (from what I read on social media, I didn't actually talk to them myself) offering side quests.
I left the dance party in time to catch the last train back to Glasgow Central, but it turned out that the train was canceled (I believe ScotRail was in the midst of a low-grade labor dispute that they were trying to resolve by hiring more staff, slowly) so I walked the mile-and-a-half back to my hotel to retire for the night.
