Meeting of the Sydney Futurian Society: 14th April 2000.

A powerful religious movement was celeberating a holiday called "Easter". Apparently this movement believes in a rabbit that lays eggs (a monotreme?) and extorts money from its adherents by sending them packets of buns with a threatening symbol baked into the top. It's also a Christian holiday, but a brief inspection of the raffle prizes at one member's work suggested this aspect is not currently emphasised.

We are uncertain how many of our members observe these rituals. To avoid alienating them, the meeting was brought forward a week from our usual schedule. Even this propitiation was not felt sufficient by some, and membership was below the usual level:

• John August;
• David Bofinger;
• Kevin Dillon;
• Gary Dalrymple;
• Peter Eisler;
• Gina Sartore;
• Ted Scribner;
• Wayne Turner.

Ian Woolf, guardian of the sacred magnetic tape in its casette of power, didn't show. (In fact, he had a pretty good excuse, since he was undergoing treatment to redress some deficiencies in his digestive tract.) Without Ian the remainder of the group demonstrated about as much initiative as a colony of oysters, so no attempt was made to make a record of the meeting. By the time anyone thought to scribble anything down most of the news was one with the quantum foam.

David Bofinger's AussieCon III report has been drawing favourable comment.

• Bruce Gillespie, editor of The Metaphysical Review fanzine and Fan Guest of Honour at AussieCon III sent a message via Ted Scribner. He wasn't entirely happy with the the way it pilloried his speech (and fair enough) but was generous enough to praise elements of it.
• John Foyster, also editor of a mail fanzine and a presenter at AussieCon III, was another of David's targets. He corrected a few of David's misapprehensions, but was generally positive and echoed it via his mail zine as the most detailed Australian convention report he'd yet seen. By this stage David was feeling rather embarrassed, and guilty about his pettiness.
• Gregory Benford, Writer Guest of Honour at AussieCon III and not one of David's targets, sent mail in praise. David, ego inflated by the endorsement of a Great Name, was restored to his usual vituperative self.

FreeCon 00 is tomorrow. There was great argument about minor details of preparation.

David Bofinger reported a rumour that the next Star Trek series will be Birth of the Federation, set between First Contact and the old series. Rejected concepts included Starfleet Academy (aka Star Trek 90210) and Special Forces.

• There wasn't time to discuss it; and
• There was nothing to say.

• Perpetual Motion Machines and Free Energy:
• William Tenn's The Big Bounce, involving a ball with a coefficient of restitution greater than unity. It cools down with every bounce, so it preserves energy but destroys entropy ... which is sort of something for nothing.
• Robert Heinlein's Waldo, the eponymous character (this phrase is my new pretentious way to avoid writing "Waldo" twice in a row and thus triggering my spell checker) makes a gadget that works a bit like the broadcast power receivers, but doesn't need broadcast power (is that clear?).
• Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Ancient Earth has spacecraft tapping Planck fluctuations.
• An Historical Apparent Perpetual Motion Machine:
• A chronometer that used the daily oscillation in air pressure to keep itself wound up.
• Matter Duplication:
• Whoever it is' Gizmo story (A is for Anything?).
• A Damon Knight(?) story (The Man in the Tree?) about a circus giant artist who can bring things in from parallel universes.
• A story about a tree that duplicates its enemies to get them to fight, and is found by some enterprising crooks who go into the counterfeiting business.
• Concepts:
• Any story in which some piece of knowledge has no origin but is passed through time travel back to its historical creator. e.g. Robert Heinlein's All You Zombies or Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates.
• Philosophy:
• ex nihilo nihil fit
• Finance:
• A story in which a small-time swindler is selling his non-existent rights to pieces of the Earth for cash.
• Mottos:
• TANSTAAFL, expanding to "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" in Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
• General Letouts:
• Arthur C. Clarke's "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
• Real Science:
• The theory that the universe has zero energy, zero angular momentum, zero quantum numbers and is, in fact, a quantum fluctuation.
• Real-Life Experiences:
• "So I stopped using Internet Explorer and deleted its temporary files ... but they come back again. So what's making them? Far as I can tell, nothing ..."
• Futurian Meetings:
• We were assured we had nothing to say when we started this conversation.
• Utopias: (should this be Utopiae?)
• Thomas More's Utopia?
• Iain Banks' Culture series
• Ursula K. LeGuin's The Disposessed
• Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot?
• Looting Aladdin's Cave:
• Pohl's Gateway
• John Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline
• Can I Have My Nothing Back?:
• Somedody's The Laxian Key, in which a post-collapse world is covered in piles of basic food, made by machines they do not know how to deactivate.
• Slightly Dubious:
• Daniel Keyes Moran's The Armageddon Rap, where entropy runs backwards in one character's vicinity.
• Very Dubious:
• David Gerrold's Star Trek episode Trouble With Tribbles. Tribbles are "born pregnant" but do need food.
• Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in which a character makes an energy source based on the electrostatic potential of the atmosphere.
• That guy who set up an antenna on his farm just outside the TV transmission site and sucked enough power from the air to keep his dairy cows warm.
• Described But Not Understood:
• A Phillip K. Dick story about gumballs that a computer wants to nuke.
• The ain soph aur, a region outside the top of the tree in the Qabala of which it can only be said it is "not no thing".
• Ill-Described For Security Reasons:
• An unpublished Larry Niven story from the Draco Tavern setting.

Next week ... oops. Guess we should have chosen a topic for next week. Don't think we did.

I welcome feedback at David.Bofinger@dsto.defenceSpamProofing.gov.au (delete the spamproofing).