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Tonight was Patricia Rogers’ legendary biannual Halloween Party, complete with Victorian coffins, mummies, body parts, bubbling flasks, sinister laboratory instruments, brains in bell jars, a tilting, electronically charged autopsy table, and a whole lot of science fiction and fantasy writers and fans dressed up as monsters, mad scientists, and figments of the demonic imagination. (I feel deeply privileged to have a friend with “polish coffin” on her to-do list.) Tomorrow morning, a few hours...