Author Archives: Alison

Con-Version 2003

The visitor to Calgary, at lest the one coming into the D-gates, is greeted by the ? I decided to dub it a femidactyl, or maybe a chickidactyl ? swooping out of the ? uhh ? fluorescent lights. Perhaps it was to honor the discovery of feathered dinosaurs, and the long sweeping metal columns linking it to its outriders of bat and eagle was an artistic impression of a taxonomic tree.

Calgary was hot and smoky with the drift from forest and grassfires; I wilted and was not nearly as social as I had wished to be, so saw little of Friday except the registration line-up. Saturday am I had a 10 am reading (is there ever a good time for a reading) with Lynda, where I read from “Suspended Lives”, a short story just published in Julie Czerneda?s Space Inc. anthology. If you’re at Worldcon, there will be a lanch party. Tell Julie I sent you. Lynda read the bit of The Courtesan Prince where a Reetion pilot (Ann) is improvising her way through the first official encounter with the Gelacks in centuries (including Amel). Subsequently I was on a panel on “Humans in Space”, where I felt like the lone technophile among social scientists; I had come prepared to speak on the medical challenges facing humans in space, whereas the panel went off in the direction of the political and social challenges facing the US (mainly) and the world of justifying space travel given the problems of earth. My reference, by the way, for a chunk of my research, is Frances Ashcroft’s Life at the Extreme: The Science of Survival on the subject of human adaptation to all extremes of environment, compared with other animal adaptation. Good panel, covered a lot of ground. My other panel was “Babylon 5: Five years after”, in which panelists and audience agreed that, yes, it was a great show, but disagreed on where exactly we would mark the point of it becoming great (do we hide the first, or the first and second seasons from people we would like to convert?), and whether fandom is its own worst enemy because we will point out the flaws and expect greatness. (Where I got hooked was Season 2, Episode 2, “Revelations”, which is not a bad place to pick it up. About half of the Season 2 episodes are well worth watching and watching again. And Season 3, yum!).

Events I attended were a reading by Dave Duncan from his forthcoming Blades’ novel Impossible Odds; the prologue is up at his website and this was Chapter 1, wherein one undistinguished and one too-young Blade are set an impossible task. Lynda has a photograph of Dave brandishing the cover. Marie Jakober had the paperback cover of her award-winning Civil War novel to show; that is also due out shortly. A preliminary, very small, image of the Edge edition of her fantasy Even the Stones is up at the Edge site. on the future books page. Dr. Phil Currie of the Royal Tyrell museum gave a talk on “Dinosaurs on SF”, complete with book covers ranging from pulp Edgar Rice Burroughs to Greg Bear’s Darwinia and Robert Sawyer’s Farseer series. Not to mention Jurassic Park. He filled us in on the behind-the-scenes of the feathered dinosaurs story and introduced us to some ofthe bestiary from the Alberta beds. I also heard Tim Hills talk about archery in SF, an expert free-associating about everything from bow design, styles of archery in various cultures, the sharpest points (obsidian, as shown by the researches of a surgeon enthusiast), the fastest fastshooter (2.1 s/arrow), the Mongol Ambassador outshooting the cream of English Bowmen in the ?Tudor years, Cape Buffalo hide …

An actor's life

The prisoner of the tower of London is finally free. The run of Yeomen of the Guard (Gilbert and Sullivan) that has been absorbing all my spare hours concluded triumphantly with yesterday’s matinee, set-strike, and cast party, after Saturday performance wherein the leading man fell down the stairs (but landed on his feet AND delivered his line), and the overexcited chorus escaped the chorus-master’s control and beat the orchestra to the end of Act I by 2 full bars. Ah well, that’s what makes it live theatre.

SARS disinformation and information

I take the last sentence back. This last week I decided to give up on the weblog, having decided that it wasn’t my preferred form, and that all I was doing was contributing to what David Sheck called “data smog”. Then I had a noxious item of spam forwarded to me that disproved the assertion in my last statement of my last entry. It was from an individual claiming to be a Dr of alternative medicine, advancing a conspiracy theory about the origin of SARS (that it is intended as a population reduction measure) and that there is a big coverup going on, that the media and public health were involved in scaremongering. No sources referenced, needless to say, and in tone and strategy fitting the very case-definition of quackery. NB: personal opinion is that alternative medicine is not quackery; in a broad sense the wise application of the principles underlying alternative medicine will carry us further beyond absence-of-disease than conventional medicine, but certain of its practitioners are, not to put too fine a point on it, a menace.

So, here I go, with my own preferred SARS links:

  • World Health Organization site, offers daily updates and the occasional summary (see April 11 update) where the tone is sober and the perspective global. The SARS outbreak shares space with reports of Ebola, drought and the looting of hospitals in Iraq.
  • The Canadian Medical Association Journal based in Ottawa (3-4 hours on the ground from Toronto), has a SARS update page with the latest consensus advice for physicians and patients, public contact numbers, and news items, and in addition is starting to produce preprint copies of articles and commentaries around the outbreak – describing the experience of patients, health care workers and families in one of the affected hospitals and describing the use of the web and the internet in enabling collaboration.
  • The Globe and Mail has an annoying tendency to qualify the word ‘virus’ with the word ‘deadly’ – one might call it a ‘reflex’ or perhaps a ‘knee jerk reflex’ – and they have the automatic newspaper skew that the new and disturbing developments and concerns get reported but the boring old follow-up and implementation of counter-measures don’t. But I’m still with them.
  • Sarswatch is a weblog dedicated to detailed, considered reporting of SARS.

Dire warnings and denial

I was narked to read in my local paper at the beginning of this week a quote from a local public health spokesman to the effect that ‘we are in the midst of a major epidemic and Ontario has lost control’ … followed by the usual mealymouthed exhortations against excessive concern. At medical school our instructors drummed into us that we have to watch our language. To the specialist ‘epidemic’ means essentially that we’re seeing a rise above background levels of a disease. To the layperson, ‘epidemic’ means ‘we’re all going to die!’ And as for Ontario losing control, not at that point. There was no evidence that it had got out into the community, that there are any chains of transmission that did involve contact with SARS patients in hospital – whose disease in turn could be traced to Asia. Whether that will change, with an eighth person dying of SARS in Toronto yesterday, and ongoing emergence of new cases and suspect contacts, remains to be seen.

An article by Jan Wong in the Globe and Mail Saturday summarized the information that has belatedly emerged from China about the initial spread of the disease. She attributes the release of the information to the WHO having issued a travel-advisory, thus bringing the problem to the attention of the travel and tourism industry. Up until then the official position of the Chinese government was ‘no problem, everything’s fine’ …

The Canadian Medical Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine both have pages dedicated to SARS, monitoring the outbreak and its response. The NEJM has an ongoing plot of cases and deaths, and an early release of an editorial by Julie Louise Gerberding from the CDC that describes the impressive international collaboration and Internet-wide information sharing involved in identifying and containing the outbreak – and also wonders whether the fast response will be fast enough. At this stage, we don’t know. But at least with SARS all the ingenuity and all the heroes are on the same side.

Draft 2 (and rantlet)

I now have a complete Draft 2 of Graveyards of Nereis, pending spellcheck and proof-read. Though spellcheck is a doleful prospect. My default spelling is British, since it was in Scotland that spelling was drummed into me, as far as it went. (Much rewriting of misspelled words; much learning of synonyms to circumvent use of certain words, such as ‘receive’). But I’m using MS Word. And I’m writing SF. There are going to be a lot of squiggly red underlines to pick through, with trips to my old red Chambers or my newer Collins as final arbiter, because I am not a confident speller, and I don’t dare put anything into the spellchecker memory without verification. But I won’t let MS Word grammar check for me. I am a law-abiding person, but grammar must be subordinated to (a) sense and (b) sound and rhythm. To take an example, some sentences simply need the softness of ‘which’ in them; ‘that’ is just too harsh if the other words in the sentence are soft ones, or I am trying to characterize the speaker as someone gentle or diffident. And I will resist to my last misplaced comma the devolution of the wonderful, supple, quirky English language into a form dictated by the programmers at Microsoft!