Denver Westercon 2018 Guest Speaker

Chain reaction. Because of my story in Once Upon a Future Time, I was a guest speaker at the Denver Westercon.

Here’s the semi-short version. My good friend Jason Looney had to have knee surgery. Jason has a friend named Tim Slater who teaches astronomy at the University of Wyoming and is also in charge of scheduling science lectures for Westercon. Tim was planning on having Jason as a speaker, but because of the surgery, Jason had to decline. So he recommended me.

I ended up being on a panel about religion and science with three other people, including Connie Willis’ husband Courtney Willis. He teaches physics at the University of Northern Colorado. There wasn’t much progress as far as gaining any solid philosophical footing, but everyone was very cordial.

I also got to deliver two lectures. Tim encouraged me to present “Future Tense: How to Turn Fairy Tales into Science Fiction.” This was mostly about how creativity is essentially rearranging unoriginal material in an original way.

I bounced another idea off Tim and he let me present a second lecture. It was called “How Science is Killing Fiction.” It was about how technology is gradually undermining our creativity and how this might ultimately drain us of any truly innovative science fiction. I mostly built it around a quote from Scott Adams, the cartoonist who drew Dilbert: “I’m afraid the holodeck will be society’s last invention.”

There were about 20 or 30 people in each audience and we got along great. I ended up selling four or five copies of my book Paper Bullets.