Report on LTUE 31

So I’ve  been back now from Life, the Universe, and Everything 31 for about 3 weeks, and I know that all my many fans out there are literally dying to know how everything went. Or, well, figuratively dying. Because I really do know the difference between “literally” and “figuratively.” Honest!

Short answer: It was great! Longer answer: It was great, though also a bit disconcerting. More on that below.

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My presentations went well enough. On the panel about food and feasting in fiction (which I had pouted my way onto after seeing the panel title in the program), I think I was the only person with a primarily sf&f connection. There were an awful lot of directions the panel could have gone. Between the contributions of the different panelists, we wound up going a short distance down all of them. Which perhaps was less interesting than a bona fide presentation about food from a food expert would have been, but not a bad event.

I had lost my notes (but not, fortunately, my handouts) for my presentation on classic sf&f you should be reading. Which probably was for the best. Sadly, there wasn’t anyone in the audience who had read more sf&f than I had. One posted blog comment about my panel liked my handouts but disliked the fact that I went down through the list rather than focusing more narrowly. I agree that it could have been more interesting. Actually, in my view this is the ideal topic for doing as a panel, with each panelist presenting a list of 10-20 neglected classics and maybe 10-20 books that everyone MUST have read in order to be knowledgeable in the field, compiled beforehand and available as handouts. Hm. Maybe that’s an idea for a future year.

Steve Walker’s presentation on Tolkien was excellent. I hadn’t had prior communication the week before the symposium and so was quite nervous, but he showed up in good time about 20 minutes prior to the starting time for the presentation.

The panel on Mormon perspectives in Tolkien was, in my opinion, fantastic: one of the best things I attended all during the symposium. Given that one of my reasons for going out this year was to make sure this panel happened (and that I was on it), I was quite pleased about that. It was also one of the more explicitly Mormon events on the schedule, though there’s still a clearly Mormon element to the symposium.

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It was surprising how many people showed up: almost 1300 total, I think the statistics went. Several hundred of them were students, but most were not — making a change from when I was more deeply involved in the symposium, but one that I think had already occurred, even before the last few years off-campus. Indeed, the strong presence of non-students is, perhaps, one good reason for not having LTUE on the main BYU campus. It was also great to see my son helping to run such an event, though the symposium as a whole has gotten to the point where no one person can really oversee everything, or anything near. It’s a very *healthy* event.

The event looked more like a standard convention than I expected. Partly, that was due to the venue: for the first time this year, LTUE was not on a college campus, but rather at the Provo Marriott. Partly it was the assortment of attenders. And partly, I think, it was the prevalence of authors on panels where I would have liked to see more academics.

I also would have liked to see more create your own world presentations by established academics. But that’s a longstanding soapbox of mine. I’ve volunteered to create a set of guidelines on how to recruit academics for create your own presentations.

I have other thoughts too about the symposium, which I’m hoping to write up in greater length, possibly on the AML blog. Like how it seems to me that there’s a disconnect now between the community that’s being served by the symposium and the group that actually puts it on. I’d like to see the Mormon sf&f community take on a somewhat more corporate existence, rather than relying on the eroding structures of the past.

But that’s for another day. Meanwhile, I got to go. It was fun. I had a good time with family, met friends I haven’t seen for a dozen years or more, and had a bunch of good conversations. I’m glad I went.