A healthy membership was drawn. We presume this was by the lure of James Shellins' reading of his non-science-fiction non-novel Active, Passive, Neutral. Present were:
Brian Walls talked about the Writers' Festival, which lead to a discussion of non-science-fiction writer (I think all possible parsings of that noun string are correct) Martin Cruz Smith. David Bofinger remarked that Smith does characters better if they are from a culture different from his own (e.g. Russians better than Americans). Brian explained that Smith was aware of the tendency and thought of it as being longsighted. It seems there should be science fiction applications here: perhaps Smith should be encouraged to write an SF novel to see whether his aliens are more lifelike yet.
Pitch Black is a new SF film, made in Coober Pedy. The monsters look a bit like the crutches-walking pterosaurs on Walking With Dinosaurs. Apparently it's not bad. Battlefield Earth, on the other hand, has been universally panned.
An SF radio show from a pair of people in Ryde: Wednesday, 7 P.M., 88.5 MHz. Ted remarked they were secretive, because he'd been listening for weeks and still didn't know their names.
John went to SwanCon, and found it “a lot more fun” than AussieCon III, mostly because it was smaller and hence more interactive. A program entry like “X and Y are on this panel, what more do we need to say?”, though, was less than useful to those out of the loop. Connie Willis said that a good way to learn to write was to attend a university that was still willing to teach the classics. Jack Hermann's clause in the constitution, prohibiting constitutional changes that increased its word length, was abolished in a victory of rationality over dubious principle.
David Bofinger, who has been writing offensive things in John Foyster's e-zine, has found himself forced to defend a differing recollection of Bruce Gillespie's speech from the transcript on the web. He asked for confirmation of his beliefs from the meeting. The meeting duly reported a memory of the speech inconsistent with either his or the official versions.
Carbon tax people are arguing about whether nuclear reactors should qualify as "clean" power.
Gerard t'Hooft has promulgated a constitution for an asteroid named after him.
The Hugo nominations are out. You are exhorted to purchase or download them, read, and vote.
Occasional Futurian Emma Coen has got her Doctor of Philosophy thesis back with requests for typographical corrections only.
Some interesting statements by Jim Shellins:
I applied my usual test: read page 116 and assume that it's representative of the writing quality of the book as a whole. This differs from the page 1 test, which, as I see it, seeks to estimate the quality of the writing at its peak. In any case, the result was a tentative positive, so I suppose I'll put the book on my list.
I welcome feedback at David.Bofinger@dsto.defenceSpamProofing.gov.au (delete the spamproofing).