Michael C. Goodwin's Blog, page 18

The Last Science Fiction Convention

I attended my last science fiction convention over the 4th of July weekend, 2019. It was one that I worked on as a committee member and tried to bring a great con-going experience to the fans in the tradition of the old SF cons. But the old traditional conventions are slowly dying, kept alive by an ever shrinking group of aging SF fans. The old conventions used to be about writers and artists of science fiction and fantasy. Starting in the 30’s and 40’s these conventions centered around a writer or two and other people interested in costuming, comics, singing, SF and Fantasy art, crafts and self-published fanzines and other self written materials.

What began the decline of these old-style conventions was the eventual rise of movie and TV fandoms. In the 60’s there was a number of ground-breaking TV series, most notably Star Trek, which electrified fans around the world. Trek was first rolled into traditional conventions and then began to break out of them with their own focused stand-alone Trek extravaganzas. One forgets the impact that Trek had in the mid-70’s, this was the first of the mega-media fandoms and paved the way for the next big thing. There were many memorable movies of that era but none so impactful as Star Wars. Building on the experiences of earlier Trek fandom many Star Wars fans build up an impressive mega-fandom of its own and both continue to this day, stronger then ever.

The latest generation of SF fans are now more interested in meeting media actors and actresses then book writers and artists. While SF book sales are still quite impressive, it is nowhere close to the amount of money spent on SF movies and streaming TV. The so-called comic cons around the country have learned to monetize fandom with appearances of the latest TV and movie personalities. Indeed, the experience seeking younger fans are now much more interested in paying large amounts to spend a few seconds with their favorite star and getting a photo with them. I suppose that this is a natural evolution of the conventions, but I still prefer the thrill of meeting a SF writer whose works I have read over the years and who has worked extensively in the genre, then an actor who has no interest in SF and only sees it as a job and money earner.

(Below, my photo of Robert A. Heinlein, ca 1977, a ground-breaking SF author active during the 50’s and 60’s. I had several chances to meet and talk with this great writer at science fiction conventions.)

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Reflections on Change

Change is difficult for people, I get that completely. The older I get, the less flexible I have become and am now, more resistant to change in my own life then ever before. So I understand that it is going to become very difficult for people to adjust to a climate that will definitely become more variable, but it will not be impossible. Humans have always been able to adjust to almost anything, we have populated the world from the coldest arctic lands to the hottest deserts, we are adaptable, flexible and resistant. Despite my rantings over the last few years, I am here to state, that the human race will not die out from climate change and civilization as we know it, will not collapse. And I am sure that most advocates for action against global warming are not saying we are going to all die either, we just may not like any of the consequences.

Our grand experiment in warming the planet with massive amounts of CO2 will bring changes whether we like it or not. Most of those changes we can cope with, I guarantee that. Humans are endlessly inventive, and though a lot of people show a great deal of distrust for education, science and technology, through them, we will figure out ways to overcome many problems that lay in our future. In our modern technological world we are better able to handle changes now then anytime in the past 6,000 years, since we settled down to more agrarian societies. Things that brought down entire nations as little as 300 years ago; famine, plagues, environmental disaster and natural disasters such as earthquake, volcanoes and hurricanes can be overcome, and despite our many ideological differences, we will always help each other out in times of great need.

The worrying thing about our changing climate is that we will need to act at some point. We can actually do something about adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, but will we? Things will get hotter, and colder. Many places will get drier, and others wetter. Crop yields will become less reliable, and the spread of diseases less predictable. The world’s oceans will slowly rise, and storms will become stronger and more dangerous. We can cope, we can adjust. But there will be some point where we will be forced to change, a lot, whether we like it or not. We don’t have to go that far, but we could, it will not be the end of the world, just a world that is not quite as friendly and forgiving as it once was.

(During the so-called little ice age, (a period of global cooling, approximately between AD 1300 and 1850), many societies coped admirably by invention and adjustment.)

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A Day Off

I have been doing a lot of writing recently on an old, partially finished novel in a series that I started back in 2008. After working on it for the last three weeks, I thought I would take a day off and do some other things, like write a blog or two. I also did a little research on a couple of things that I have wondered about recently and found out some very peculiar information along the way.

While looking at a map of Canada, I could see that there are a number of very large islands north of the arctic circle that are in total, close to the size of Greenland. Is the ice cover and glaciers there melting as rapidly as the ice cap in Greenland? The answer was yes, and there is a lot of extra melt water being added to the worlds oceans from these islands.

The year 536-37 AD was a very bad one for Europe and the Mediterranean because of a volcanic eruption in Iceland that led to crop failures and famine due to a heavy volcanic fog which lasted for 18 months.

During WWII, German technological prowess was not all it was cracked up to be. They over-engineered nearly everything, making it very difficult to produce the quantity of weapons they needed for a successful continuation of the war. Only a quarter of their army was ever completely mechanized, the rest had to rely on horse power for most of the war.

The Black Death, which perhaps killed a third or more of the population of Europe, likely started with climate variations in Central Asia that disrupted the population of gerbils there. Also that rats were not the likely distributor of the plague in Europe, but humans fleeing the outbreak were. Black rats, which got the infected fleas from gerbils, most certainly did get the whole thing started.

Early homo sapiens were able to out-compete the three of four other homo variants of the time because of their ability to speak and communicate with their fellows and thus form a group collective of new ideas, survival strategies and cooperative behaviors.

So that was my day. Who says that an old dog can’t learn new things.

(The Black Death (Bubonic Plague), that ravaged Europe from 1346 to 1353 was only the first of many other, though lesser waves of the plague over the next 400 years.)

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Living in a Science Fiction Future

When I was very young and growing up in the fifties, that fairly new invention, the TV, kept showing me a number of possible futures. Super highways, jet planes, spaceships to the moon, visual communications to any spot on the planet, luxury and automation, on demand entertainment, and robots and computers were all predicted to make our lives to come, a paradise. Now well grown up and much to my very great surprise, that science fiction future has pretty much come true as predicted, (though I am still waiting for that flying car thingie). We are living in the future.

But what about the other side to that science fiction future? Overpopulation, pollution, ecosystem degradation, war, famine and climate change can and will give us the sort of future unimaginable on a scale undreamt by any writer or film maker, and yes, we have to take the bad with the good. Since the mid-nineteen century we have powered our world by burning fossil fuels and this is what has given us all of the modern marvels that we are currently enjoying. But all of that coal and oil, along with its locked up carbon dioxide, over many millions of years, has now been released back into our planet’s atmosphere in a very short period of time to great effect.

So do we have to give up our hard-won science fiction future? The industrial revolution of the early-1800s was opposed by many people; those who had to endure substandard working conditions in the new factories and crowded, disease-ridden cities where people congregated, displaced by the switch from an agrarian to a industrial based economy. What is going to happen when we switch to non-polluting forms of power to drive our future? We have already seen wide-spread opposition to giving up fossil fuels, from the extremely wealthy to the dirt-poor. It has only been 200 years since we went down this road, we have finally accepted those enormous changes in our lives and are mostly content with things now. If it will take another 200 years to adjust again to different ways of powering our lives, then it will defiantly be too late to save us. Once again we may have to suffer through a hellish, draconian period of time before we can enjoy a better future. So will we want to? I don’t think that we have any choice.

(Unlimited power, unlimited pollution, the industrial revolution in England drove the rest of the world to compete on a vast scale with unintended consequences.)

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Water

I was half watching a travel show the other night about the Netherlands and I perked up a bit when it was mentioned that a third of the country was below sea level, and in some places, almost 20 feet. It occurred to me that if anyone should be concerned about climate change and sea level rise, it should be the Dutch. So how do they feel about that in their country? A quick search brought back some interesting results. In the Netherlands, climate change is not considered a hoax or fake news, it is a deadly serious thing that they are busy planning on how to deal with over the rest of this century.

If nothing is done about limiting the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere in the next decade, then the world will continue to warm up at an even faster rate then it is now. Greenland and the Antarctic will keep dumping more meltwater into the oceans and its rise will accelerate. By the end of the century there could be a 1 to 2 meter increase in sea level. Now 1 to 2 meters does not sound like much, but convert that into feet. One meter equals 3.28 feet, two meters, six and a half feet, as much as a tall person. In the next century that rise could increase another 5 meters, 16 and a half feet, more then 20 feet total. I really do not see even the Dutch being able to build a 451 kilometer, (280 miles) 20-foot tall seawall the entire length of their coastline. (This is actually a conservative estimate, some think that there could be a 15 meter rise in sea level by 2300, and that is nearly 50 feet).

So what is the plan? It turns out that there are not a lot of options right now and in the future there may be only one thing to do. It is called a controlled withdrawal. The four major cities, (and seaports), on the Dutch coast, the Hague, Utrecht, Rotterdam and Amsterdam will eventually be overwhelmed and the people will have to be moved to higher ground. A tongue-in-cheek proposal is to learn German as a second language. You can only manage so much water before it just washes you away. Perhaps the cities and the land have at least until the end of the century, but in historical terms that is not really a whole lot of time.

In a study, it was estimated that 634 million people from 224 coastal countries live at less then 30 feet above sea level. This is a jaw-dropping figure and an unimaginable thing to consider. Moving a lot more then a half-billion people away from the seashore will not be easy or cheap. Can we stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere? Wind and solar power? Electric cars? Life-vests?

(Below, a wikipedia photo showing the level of the land and the water in many parts of the Netherlands.)

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Hate

I have admired the recent activities of a young girl trying to alert the world and world leaders to the dangers of ignoring climate change. The amount of hate generated by people opposing her is a strong indication of the fear that is rising among the members of the economic system that depends on the use of fossil fuels to generate huge profits for them and their supporters. It is not clear to me why someone would endanger themselves for mere money. But, I guess if you think that you have enough money, you can buy your way out of anything.

Frankly, it is a hopeless mission for this young girl. As long as 5,000 years ago there were the same types of people who didn’t care what happened to the environment as long as profits are being generated. Edo from Uruk wouldn’t listen to anyone who told him that continued heavy irrigation of his wheat fields would eventually deposit too much salt and ruin the soil. He was happily reaping huge profits from the wheat needed to feed the growing populations in ancient Sumeria. Irrigation was a great invention, but who could guess that it would destroy that civilization over time.

If you think about it, the only way you are ever going to effect change is to offer an equally profitable alternative to fossil fuel. This will be a hard sell, sunlight, wind and water just don’t create the opportunity to generate massive amounts of money, and really, who cares where the electricity comes from as long as it comes from someplace. And if it is getting hotter, we are going to need a lot more electricity just to keep the air conditioners running. It’s a perfect trap, and we are falling into it just like the people of ancient Sumeria who needed more food for their growing population. It’s really no wonder we hate anyone who tells us that we are going to get burned if we don’t pay attention to our own stupidity.

Below, A British expedition photo of Uruk of Sumeria, the fabled first city in history.

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Lantern Festival

Our first day in Nagasaki ended in what I think was one of the most interesting lighting displays that I have ever seen. The Nagasaki Lantern Festival was started by Chinese residents of Nagasaki to celebrate the Chinese New Year. As I said in the last blog, the city was a very cosmopolitan trading port and all kinds of cultures have mixed there. The people of Nagasaki have adopted this festival and it now attracts visitors from all over Japan. We were fortunate enough to be in the city near the end of the 15-day celebration.

In the Chinese new year zodiac, we were there at the start of the year of the Boar, which was Rob’s birth year and many displays center on the animals representing the zodiac. Some of the showpieces are more then two stories tall and cover many aspects of Chinese mythology with a bit of Japanese mixed in for the fun of it. There was a large friendly crowd and on a pleasant cool evening it was great fun walking up and down streets and visiting all of the displays. One of the places we walked to is the Meganebashi (Spectacles Bridge), a stone bridge spanning a small river in downtown Nagasaki. The bridge, which gets its name from its resemblance to a pair of spectacles when reflected in the water, is a popular attraction and is designated as an important cultural site. The bridge was built in 1634 by a Chinese monk. It was all an auspicious start to our next two weeks we were to spend in Japan.

(My photographs of the festival and Spectacles Bridge along with a portrait of the three of us taken by a kind passerby.)

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Nagasaki

In 2006, our son Rob went to Japan to study at a university in Hiroshima for three months as part of his masters degree research. Later he went back to Japan and Nagasaki for nearly a year at a university there. During his spring break in February – March of 2007, we decided join him and take a tour around the country for a couple of weeks. Since we were not part of a group or any kind of organized travel, we made our arrangements and bravely set out on our own. We flew from Salt Lake to San Francisco and then to Tokyo. From there we flew to Fukuoka. Nagasaki is not a large city with regular airline flights so we had to find the railroad station in Fukuoka and take a train. Needless to say, the whole trip it took a while. But Rob was waiting for us when we arrived and we had a joyful reunion.

Nagasaki had much foreign interaction from historic times with Portuguese and Spanish explorers and was an early missionary and Catholic enclave. The city grew as an important trading center and later as a shipbuilding and industrial center. This made it a major target during WWII for bombing by the U.S. and then a target for the atomic bomb on August 9, 1945. We visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum the day after we arrived and the adjacent National Peace Memorial. The museum exhibits artifacts and photographs showing life in Nagasaki before the bomb and the terrible destruction after, it also has an eye-opening exhibit hall showing the history of nuclear arms development around the world.

The nearby Peace Park has a number of memorials surrounding a broad plaza with ruins of walls from buildings that once existed there. The main peace statue is 33 feet tall and at the other end of the plaza is the fountain of peace with sprays that resemble the wings of a dove. Scattered around the park are monuments from a number of countries around the world. As with Hiroshima, it is a place of sobering reflection on the horrors of war and was well worth the visit.

(Top left, my photographs of the peace statue and a small shrine nearby, Bottom left, a marker showing the hypocenter of the atomic explosion and one of the many other peace monuments.)

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Things We Took From Fathers House

I understand completely where my parents were coming from. I didn’t, of course, when I was young, but when I grew up and gained an understanding of life, history and providing for your own family, I got it. They grew up during the great depression, if you read any accounts of the time, it was not very pleasant. They learned to keep things, repair and refurbish, reuse and pass on to others. Rely on family, relatives and friends and to look out for one another. We got that when we were growing up, we certainly were not as poor as when they were children, but it didn’t seem like we were terribly rich either, but it didn’t matter at all, we had a lot of family around us and we never really lacked for anything.

If anything broke around the house, my father would fix it, not go out and buy another, but fix it and keep using it. Later in life, this started to annoy my mother more and more, they had money now and she wanted newer things to use instead of the old stuff. Still they seemed to keep everything. After their deaths, we went through the house to sort it all out and clean it up, it was a near impossible task. We found every watch my mother had owned in her life, every telephone they had used, old cameras, suitcases, clothing, shoes and photographs, lots of photographs. My father was worse, we lived on a small farm and he had a lot of farm equipment and kept most of it in fairly good working order. But he kept machine parts of every kind. He was the man the neighbors brought over their things to get repaired, so naturally he needed spare parts, he had a lot. One half of the basement was a workshop full of stuff, later he built a good sized shop out back and it became full as well. He really did love tinkering and repairing and building things, he was never happier then when he was working at repairing stuff.

Naturally we took home the things that were of interest or meant something to each of us growing up. Furniture and appliances, no, but small things, unusual things, bits and pieces and such. A box found in the attic with an astonishing amount of material from my high school days, all kept by mom after I left home to go to college and then work. Books that I had given my father and now took back. His WWII Navy dog tags, a few gadgets that he had made for fun. Some Christmas ornaments, a couple of paintings that I did for them long ago, my baby shoes, kept lovingly by my mother, a wooden puzzle dad made. It wasn’t much, surprising little for me having lived there for 18 years, but enough to keep the memories alive.

(We acquire a lot of things over the years and it is difficult to have to put them away after a lifetime of use. It was surprisingly painful to sell and throw away my parents things, it wasn’t just old junk, it was stuff that they had used to help live their lives and raise us.)

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The Failed Campaign

I recently spent nearly two years of my life, (and there is really not that much time left in my life to waste), working on a science fiction convention committee to create graphics for, and to promote and advertise said convention. Why would I do this thing? Especially since I did not get paid a single penny for all of my work, (and I value my time greatly).

The convention was a larger name, traditional convention, and it was less then 20 miles from where I live, I figured that I could make a difference with my work on it. I did make a difference, but not nearly as much as I thought I might. The challenge was clearly attractive to me; with all of my life’s experience in the graphic arts, could I successfully conduct an advertising campaign and create an artistic graphic image for a major event? I decided to find out.

Even with more then 40 years of working in publications and art, I found that I was not prepared for all the the changes that have occurred in people’s tastes and perceptions, I simply have not kept up with the times. It was a sad realization and an almost fatal one. While my work clearly appealed to older convention goers, I simply could not engage with younger ones. Most importantly, I also let the people in charge make decisions that I thought were not contributing to a clear message of what the convention was. I tried to function within their framework, and should not have done that, especially when I knew it would not succeed. I kept trying to work on the idea of a client, artist relationship. This was not a traditional advertising job, I was not being paid to follow directions. In the end there was simply not enough hours in the day to do what I needed to do. I had almost no help and I could not devote enough energy to the parts that required the most attention at the necessary times.

If it all sounds somewhat vague, it was. Advertising campaigns are odd beasts, difficult to find the proper points to focus on. I have been too long out of it, times have changed, things I could have never imagined 40 years ago have confused the stage; social media, web sites, blogs, podcasts, influencers, email, and the lack of the traditional media outlets that I was more familiar with, all crippled me. It is a little more then sad to realize that you are really over the hill. Everything looked great, artistically, but in the end, that doesn’t sell enough memberships for warm bodies to attend.

(From the start to the finish, I created over 3,000 files of material at 21 gigabytes for the convention, it still wasn’t enough.)

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