Tuesday, October 31, 2006

MileHiCon was great



Carolyn and I are back safe and sound from Denver, where I was one of the Guests of Honor at the science-fiction convention MileHiCon 38. We had a truly fabulous, very pleasant, and very relaxing time.

A large part of the joy in attending this con was our fellow guests of honor. Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens are great friends, and we got to spend more time with them this past weekend than we had since they left Toronto almost two decades ago. Alan M. Clark, the artist guest of honor, who turned out to look an awful lot like me (people kept calling me Alan and him Rob all weekend long), was a wonderful guy, and we got along fabulously. And we had some great conversations with Mark Ferrari, the toastmaster.

As an added bonus, old friend John E. Stith -- the Nebula-nominated writer, whom I've known for 19 years now -- came out, as did new friend Paolo Bacigalupi, the Hugo and Nebula finalist I met at the John W. Campbell conference in Kansas this past summer.

I had a wonderful breakfast Saturday morning with Mark J. Graham, the reviewer for the Rocky Mountain News, whose statement that I'm "just about the best science fiction writer out there these days" appears on a number of my books. After that, I gave a well-attended reading from my upcoming novel Rollback, the longest reading I've done to date from the novel; it was very gratifying to see how well it was received.

Saturday lunch was with John E. Stith, and we had a fabulous time catching up. Dinner -- which lasted three hours -- was Paolo, John, the Reeves-Stevenses, Carolyn, and me.

Saturday afternoon, I attended a great seminar on breaking into Hollywood given by Melinda Snodgrass (who wrote the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Measure of a Man," among other things).

Sunday morning, we all gave Guest of Honor speeches. Then Carolyn and I had lunch with Mark and Alan. After that, it was a lively "Hour with Robert J. Sawyer." Dinner started out with the Reeves-Stevenses and writer Edward Bryant, and we were joined later Melinda Snodgrass and her husband Carl; another wonderful, three-hour affair.

The Denver folk put on a very good convention, and I'm looking forward to returning in two years for the World Science Fiction Convention there.

(Pictured left to right at dinner on Sunday: Robert J. Sawyer, Melinda Snodgrass, her husband Carl, Edward Bryant, Judith Reeves-Stevens, Garfield Reeves-Stevens)


5 Comments:

At October 31, 2006 4:25 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Out of curiosity, is Melinda Snodgrass still writing professionally? I can't say that I recall seeing or hearing much of her on either the TV or prose fiction fronts in recent years.

 
At October 31, 2006 4:30 PM , Blogger RobertJSawyer said...

Very much so. She spoke publicly at MileHiCon about working on a Wild Cards movie script, and she also has a new series of novels coming out from Tor.

 
At October 31, 2006 5:10 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good to know. Thanks much!

 
At November 01, 2006 10:25 AM , Anonymous Hayden Trenholm said...

Something you may not know Rob but Edward Bryant was directly responsible for the creation of the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association. The group formed out of a writing workshop he gave at ConVersion. I think that was in 1990 -- a couple of years before I joined the group.

 
At November 01, 2006 10:56 AM , Blogger J Erwine said...

Glad you had a good time! I wish I could have seen more of what you were doing, but my schedule and yours didn't fit together very well.

See you at WorldCon!

 

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