In attendance were

• Ron Clarke
• David Bofinger
• Ian Woolf
• John August
• Graham Stone
• Ted Scribner
• Brian Walls
• Wayne Turner

Basenji Press' campaign to produce bookmarks for Aussiecon III continues apace. Subjects now include "Australian SF Writers", "Women SF Writers" (is this discriminatory against species employing asexual reproduction?) and "The Hugo Winners".

Nick Stathopolous' has painted a portrait that made the Archibald Prize's Salon des Refuse (sp?). These are basically Archibald also-rans.

Someone is doing Star Wars IV: A New Hope in ASCII animation. They are up to the "these aren't the droids you're looking for" scene.

Someone has challenged John August to demonstrate equivalence between Ritzian theory and special relativity for a simple two-body collision.

Someone in a bookstore told someone about a story with dreaming babies in it (not to be confused with dancing babies). Analogies were made with a James Gunn story and with somebody's Cybernetic Brains.

Metal Storm continues to be a hot topic of discussion. Scientific American is in on the act, recruiting a physicist named "Adam Drobot" to talk about it, which is very close to a damned fine (if rather heavy-handed) science fiction name. He says the amazing thing is that the inventor didn't kill himself testing it.

For some time there have been rumblings from the membership that the news phase was taking too long. Some members had to leave before the actual topic of the meeting got to be discussed. As an experiment to alleviate this, an experiment was tried with having the topic first.

• J. R. R. Tolkien;
• C. S. Lewis; and
• Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger).

Also, have any science fiction works included synthetic languages, and actually described the languages? Candidates included:

• Klingon from Star Trek;
• the phonetic languages in Russell Hogan's Ridley Walker (sp?);
• and in Iain Banks' Feersum Injuns;
• various languages from Tolkien's Middle Earth books; and
• the Murgu language from Harry Harrison's Eden series.

Has anyone had a setting where the dominant language of the human race was a natural language other than English?

• L. Sprague de Camp's Krishna (The (something) of Z(something)) series (Portuguese).
• John Wyndham's The Outward Urge, where Brazil is dominant in space?

Linguistic Science Fiction included:

• Orson Scott Card's use of ansibles to prevent linguistic fracture.
• An Asimov story with a contemporary human brought forward to a galactic empire?
• Gordon Dickson's Way of the Pilgrim, where a human manages to learn a baby version of the language of the alien humanoid species which has conquered Earth.
• Harry Harrison's East of Eden, where the primate sophonts (not, contrary to popular misinterpretation, including by the cover artist, humans) have trouble with the sapient dinosaur languages, because they can't do all the body gestures and colour changes.
• The same idea occurs in Stephen Lee's (sp?) Dinosaur Planet series.
• Leo Frankowski's Conrad's Quest for Rubber, where pidgin Polish is taught to the local primitives as a technical language.
• An Alan Dean Foster story with an aggressive alien race whose language includes large body contortions (speeches are given holding onto something equivalent to a vaulting horse).
• Samuel Delaney's Babel-17, where a human woman is programmed by an alien species, and starts speaking in an unknown language with structural similarities to computer languages.
• Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, where a metalanguage was created in Sumeria that allowed direct programming of humans. An argument developed as to how similar human brains were to each other at low level.
• H. Beam Piper's Omnilingual, where the laws of the physical sciences act as a Rosetta Stone for all languages.
• Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, where hyperintelligent prisoners create their own language for conspiracy, which sounds like insane babblings to reduce suspicion.
• The same idea appears in Carl Sagan's Contact.
• Joe Haldeman's !angled Web [sic, the ! is an inhaled click as in Bantu] includes a conversation between two professional linguists one-upping each other by changing the language of the conversation every line (and never repeating).
• Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren, maybe? Some people think it did, but memories are vague.
• Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao, where a society is remodelled by creating languages that encourage thought in particular patterns.
• George Orwell's 1984 ("newspeak").
• Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, where the revolutionaries create a new language to support their new form of (non-)government.
• Larry Niven's Ringworld Engineers, where slower than light interstellar empires (both Kzinti and Machine People) use iconic scripts to make them robustly comprehensible under language drift.
• E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, where the lens allows its user to understand any language or code.
• Robert A. Heinlein's Revolt in 2100 has linguistics in propaganda.
• Various writers' (Harry Harrison, Grant Naylor) use of Esperanto.
• Noam Chomsky is believed to have written some SF which includes linguistics.
• Bruce Sterling's Literature of the Untranslatable, literature which acts like a computer virus.
• The King in Yellow and The Necronomicon, from almost SF-like stories.
• L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, and other works, including one (The Silver Sword) that he locked up in a safe because it was too dangerous.
• Monte Python's joke used against the Germans in the first world war?
• Robert Anton Wilson's Mask of the Illuminati?
• Elizabethan magician Dr. John Dee's "Enochian" (i.e. angelic) language.
• The Babel Fish in Douglas Adams The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

A factual interlude. Apparently all Creole languages have the same grammatical structure. A Creole is the language children grow up speaking when their parents speak a pidgin. A pidgin is the language people learn by osmosis as adults. Anyway, this suggests all humans have a linguistic structure hardwired in, though they don't have to use this structure and languages tend to evolve away from it.

An argument about whether all languages other than English will become extinct, and if so when.

A bacterium has been found which is three-quarters of a millimetre across. It processes sulfur compounds, and comes from Namibia.

Satellites may be vulnerable to the coming sunspot maximum, which is expected to be unusually bad.

The mesosphere, between 50 and 90 km up, has been cooling by a degree a year for the past thirty years. This is ten times as fast as expected by any model of global warming (as the heat gets trapped in the troposphere, the mesosphere cools down) and is frankly terrifying.

Some good moon bases have been spotted near the south pole (of the moon, obviously), close to Shackleton crater. They are nice because:

• they have nearly continuous sunlight to run solar cells;
• they have a constant temperature (it's easier to engineer for "bloody cold" than "sometimes bloody cold, sometimes bloody hot"); and
• there might be ice for water.

Homo Sapiens seems to have interbred with Homo Neanderthalensis (so it should be Home Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis?). The evidence is a hybrid child's skeleton near Lisbon (there was a lot of overlap between the types in Iberia). The four-year old child lived about 24500 years ago.

NASA's pilotless rocket plane, the X-34, is due to fly soon. It's hoped it will reach Mach 8. It's designed to be completely reusable and have a 24 hour period between landing and taking off.

A new species Australopithecus Garhi, a possible ancestor of humans, has been found in Ethiopia. It's yet another member of the great hominid radiation about 2.5 million years ago.

Boeing has completed testing of the tactical high energy laser, to be mounted on CH-47 helicopters or V-22 tilt-rotors.

Scientists want to surgically implant stem cells in brains to repair brain damage. They use cells from pig embryos and claim to have the cleanest piggery in the world.

The United States is bitterly defending its smallpox stocks.