Meeting of the Sydney Futurian Society: 21st January 2000.

Attendance was down, we assume because of Y2K compliance problems in some of our members. In attendance were

• Ted Scribner
• Ian Woolf
• John August
• Peter Eisler
• John August
• Wayne Turner
• Ron Clarke
• David Bofinger
• Gary Dalrymple
• Kevin Dillon

Gary Dalrymple passed around photographs of possible venues for his FreeCon. One idea is to have it a bit before ChiCon 2000, so that people have a chance to plan joint trips.

Ted Scribner explained how to get "more science fiction than you have any idea what to do with": subscribe to the EidoList. Apparently there is the usual range from excellent to drivel.

On the 5th of February everything is happening.

• An American female astronaut is appearing at the Powerhouse museum.
• The Australian Sceptics are meeting on the subject of why we all fell for the cries of doom concerning the Y2K bug.
• There's a Dr Who convention.

A TV series on at the moment is Space Station One: a British show about Europeans in a realistic space station trying to prevent each other blowing it up. The purpose of the space station was unclear, but it was suggested it might be a tax dodge or the twenty-first century equivalent of an internet stock. Perhaps it was supposed to be blown up for the insurance. Keyboards vice GUIs suggest the date is 1980s at the latest.

Ian Woolf explained how to write press releases for generalists: keep them down to a hundred words and remember they aren't very bright. This was explained to him by a generalist, so he feels he can publish without offence.

Ted Scribner passed around a photograph of the Futurian meeting when the Americans invaded us. A copy is to be mailed to Merv Binns (sp?), apparently the only Melbourne fan with whom we are on speaking terms at the moment.

A group of Melbourne fans plans a NatCon, followed by a bid for another Melbourne WorldCon. The Futurians loyally compared this unfavourably with Gary's proposal.

Edwina Harvey proposes a Relaxacon (i.e. a science fiction convention without much of a program, just for socialising) somewhere between Port Stephens and Nowra.

An eccentric American tycoon, who made his billions buying and selling pieces of telecommunications companies, has set up the "Golden Apple Transport Company" to sell tours to Mir. He's already given the Russians about twenty million dollars to keep it going, he plans to charge forty million dollars for the first trip, dropping to more reasonable (but still eight-figure) sums later.

Graham Stone has a web page which will be linked from this page in due course, when we have Graham's permission.

Ian Woolf found Bruce Gillespie's guest of honour speech from AussieCon III on the web. This is the speech reviewed (well, abused) in my report on the con.

John August described a magazine called Technology 2000, with articles on

• Why nuclear rockets are spiffy; and
• How gravity might work differently at long range than at short range, thus proving that John is right to believe that general relativity is rubbish.

Gary Dalrymple trumped this by talking about the mystical convergence of rays five-hundred to a thousand light years from the Earth. Apparently at this point gravitational lensing from the sun creates a very large natural telescope, which could be used for optical or radio astronomy.

John August has been listed on an American web page of "cranks and crackpots". Ian Woolf has been listed on an American web page belonging to a crank and crackpot.

David Bofinger brought a sheaf of SF-related technology and science news.

• Someone has found a growth factor that regrows central nervous systems, but Ian Woolf says this isn't new.
• The next United States Navy warship (DD-21, the "land attack destroyer") will be electrically powered, improving its chances of having a laser cannon on board. The only problem now is producing a corrosion-resistant extension cord of sufficient length.
• A company in the US called ViroPharma has been making anti-viral drugs on the basis of knowing the structure of the virus. Their best candidate is in testing, and is (partially) effective against a very wide family of viruses, including that responsible for the common cold. Their closest competitor is using a protease inhibitor, much like the latest AIDS drugs. Drug performance was measured by use of tissues.
• The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC in Spanish) is a very high-tech guerilla group. Guerillas carry laptops to help them identify kidnappable people from their social security numbers. One member interviewed had been a guerilla for fourteen years, and a systems administrator for eight. The document concerned FARC's Y2K compliancy report.
• James Bond's "shaken, not stirred" preference, widely attacked for bruising the gin in a martini, may be healthy. It seems bruised gin contains antioxidants.
• A black hole has been discovered just 1600 light years from Earth. By black hole standards that's practically on our doorstep.
• A Tokyo lab is growing frog kidneys, ears and eyes, presumably as a preliminary to large fire-breathing reptiles. Kidneys were transplanted into other frogs, which lived for some time, presumably before being crushed, burnt and devoured by the giant reptiles.

Peter Eisler warned members interested in role-playing that the next convention coming up is Necronomicon, at the Newtown High School of the Performing Arts.

The Lugarno "Southern" Science Fiction group seems to have died. (I hesitate to write this, as I've had to rebut reports of the death of the Futurians more than once, so if anyone out there from the Lugarno group wants to do the Monty Python thing then cry out.) Several Futurians felt very guilty that they'd never made it down to Lugarno as they'd always said they would.

Peter Eisler has found a paperback book by Philip E. High, called Those Savage Futurians. "Earth was their playground."

This was the day of the red moon. Actually, the moon was kind of orange, but everyone was pretty impressed regardless. We guess this has something to do with the total eclipse in North America.

• Precognition by Brief Trips Forward
  • Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun
  • Beyond the Time Barrier, almost a precognitive story in itself. Written in 1959, it has something that sounds a lot like a hole in the ozone layer.
  • Todd Thrumberry's Who's Cribbing?
• Precognition by Brief Trips Sideways
  • Chronoplane Wars
  • James P. Hogan's Paths to Otherwhen and Twice Upon a Time
• Precognition by Permanent Trips Backwards
  • Seven Days

    But what happens to the earlier Frank Parker?

    My theory is that future sphere and future Frank are exchanged with the past sphere and past Frank, and split off a new timeline. That explains why the sphere is depleting its fuel, and why we only have one Frank at any time (well, most of the time).

    This theory suggests that a bemused Frank gets plucked from his life before the catastrophe into a future where something horrible has happened, and he's too late to fix it ... unless he backsteps again ... which of course he will, creating a series of backsteps and a series of timelines.

    This needs Greg Egan to do it properly, but it seems unlikely the scriptwriters have thought this through. And by coincidence we always follow the timeline of the single-jumping Frank, so we'll never know for sure.

  • A story about a man in a bar who didn't think it was worth it for just eighteen minutes
  • Straczinski's Babylon Five (spoiler deleted)
  • Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South.
• Messages From Your Future Self
  • William Gunn's Crisis
  • A story by Philip K. Dick, where the central character has a collection of gadgets that all turn out to be useful.
  • J. Michael Straczinski's Babylon Five, for reasons that would be a spoiler to reveal.
  • The Red Dwarf episode Future Echoes
• Messages From Future Others
  • Early Edition
  • An unidentified story (Diary Entries?) where the government is manipulating and perverting a universal precognitive system.
  • Somebody's Who Needs Insurance?
  • James Blish' Beep
  • Gregory Benford's Timescape
• Unexplained Artefacts From the Future
  • Greg Bear's Eon
  • Michale Crichton's Sphere
• Self-fulfilling Prophecies
  • An appointment in Samara, an Arabic story that has spawned an expression. An "appointment in Samara" is something that happens to you only because you try to prevent it.
  • Orac's prediction of the destruction of Liberator in Terry Nation's Blake's Seven
• Repeated Experience
  • Groundhog Day
  • The "Prophets" in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
  • Run Lola Run
• Prediction by Sheer Intuitive Cleverness
  • Alfred Bester's The Deceivers
  • Colin Kapp's The Patterns of Chaos?
  • Gordon Dickson's Tactics of Mistake (in a narrow field)
  • A recent Baen Books publication, in which making predictions on the net and being scored on them is the planet's main hobby.
• Prediction by Superior Science
  • Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
  • Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man
  • One of Fred Saberhagen's early Berserker stories
  • Fred Saberhagen's Mask of the Sun
  • The Red Dwarf episode Cassandra
• Prediction by Psychics or Other Weirdos
  • Frank Herbert's Dune (alien psychics on drugs)
  • The Matrix (psychics in software)
  • An episode of Space 1999 (Old Hag: "your destiny is to sit there doing nothing and die pointlessly")
  • Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man (a different character from above)
  • Phillip K. Dick's Ubik (precognition irritates psychics)
  • Whatshisname's The Amtrak Wars ("First stop Petersham, then Lewisham, Summer Hill, ..." OK, I'm making that up, but if it's about trains it must be something like that, right?)
  • J. Michael Straczinski's Babylon Five (Centauri women)
  • Doc Manhattan in The Watchmen
• Assertion and Validation After the Fact by Time Travel
  • Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
• Stories So Good They Couldn't Be Spoilt By Telling Us Anything About Them
  • Tomorrow Calling (we are hoping to show this at the next meeting)
• Stories Of Which The Secretary is Ignorant, Therefore Unclassifiable
  • Lex (something like Orac?)
  • Beyond the Time Barrier (something to do with time travel?)
  • A. E. van Vogt's Film From the Future (something to do with retromessaging?)
  • Keith Laumer's No Space Boots in Fairyland (something to do with boots?)
  • Mike Resnick's Prophet (something to do with Kenya?)
  • Steve Perry and Reeves? (I'm not even guessing)

It was suggested that The Book of G'Quon, studied by G'Kar in Babylon Five, qualified as a prediction. Leaving aside the issue of whether it clearly stated the Shadows would be coming back, some objected that it didn't qualify because the prediction wasn't achieved in an interesting way. Carried to extremes, a character saying "I'm on the train dear, be home in fifteen minutes" into his mobile phone could be considered a prediction. The secretary did his best to enforce and/or fake a consensus that such predictions did not qualify. This spawned a new category of stories.

• Stories Where the Ordinary Kind of Prediction Is Severely Restricted
  • A Jack Vance story in his Phantasms and Magic collection, where causality goes on the blink and the surviving civilised humans are terrorised by insane humans who understand the new laws of the universe intuitively.
  • A story where the viewpoint character is an actuary. Humans stop dying in accidents, then die at a much greater rate than before.

Next week: Secret Societies and Mystery Cults in Science Fiction.

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