Readercon panel report

POLITICAL BELIEFS AND FICTION! Wonderful topic. Karen Joy Fowler, Paolo Bacigalupi, David Edelman, John Kessel, James Morrow, Lucius Shepard. Aside from the luminary names on the panel, it was a stimulating discussion. Fowler was slightly apologetic about the lack of political content in THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB, and said that she feels part of the book's success (having come out post-9/11) was because of that lack. Paolo mentioned his story "Small Offerings", one of the stories in FUTURESHOCKS that I particularly liked, which is about genetic disasters caused by pollution. John Kessel mentioned his story "A Clean Escape", which was written as a critique of the Reagan administration, and has been adapted for TV (ABC, 8/4/07) to take on the Bush administration with almost no changes.(I wish they had all read my own story, from FAST FORWARD, "Absalom's Mother", my anti-draft piece.)Audience question: can a novel succeed both as a political statement and a work of art? Answer of the panel: it must.Morrow's question: why are we not out in the streets protesting the rape of our constitution? My personal answer (kept private) is that I have been, of course, for all the good it may or may not have done.Morrow again: Great irony in what is essentially a theocratic administration, the Bush White House, trying and hoping to establish a secular government in Iraq.This was a hot panel, and I loved it.THE MEGAVERSE, THE LANDSCAPE, AND THE ANTHROPIC AND HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLES. Carl Frederick, physicist.Whew. This was so dense and full of information that a good half of it just went over my head. I did learn, though, what the megaverse and those other words are, inasmuch as I was capable of understanding it. I loved hearing a physicist call string theory "lunatic", and I liked getting a handle on the idea of "pocket universes", which has to do with Gooth's (sp?) idea that different cosmological constants will exist in different universes inside the megaverse. The cosmological constant, as I understand it, is identified with the energy fluctuation int he vacuum. Without it, we won't have a universe. The anthropic principle (the idea that the universe is the very best it can possibly be, an idea propounded by creationists) says that the tiniest change in the cosmological constant would cause our universe to fail, and us not to exist. The extrapolation, by creationists, would be that the universe was created with us, human beings, in mind. Very controversial idea. It was also interesting to hear Dr. Frederick give the ages of the great physicists of the day, because it is evidently no longer the case that they're all very young.PROMISCUOUS THEORY OF STORY STRUCTURE: John Clute, John Crowley, James Morrow, and Erik Van.I couldn't possibly summarize. You had to be there!