Views from Medina Road

So here I am in Boston, attending Noreascon 4, this year's World Science Fiction Convention, my 17th consecutive Worldcon (and 18th overall), sitting high atop the Marriott Copley Place hotel with a view of the Charles River from the 36th floor.

I flew in from LA yesterday -- on United Airlines, with no troubles at all -- meandered over to the convention center midday today, signed in, wandered around the cavernous facility, where the SF con seems to occupy only the occasional odd corner, long enough to find the dealer's room, and hung out there most of the afternoon, either sitting at the Locus table with Marina and Pat and Russ, or perusing the room, chatting with Paul and Connie and Eileen and Kelly and Sheila and others.

It's on the Asimov's discussion board, but nowhere else more official that I can find, that Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper were in a car crash yesterday; Gardner's shoulder was broken and he underwent surgery today. They will not be attending the con as scheduled. Get well cards circulated the SFWA suite.

For more details of Noreascon's goings on, check Cheryl Morgan's Emerald City blog or Noreascon 4's own blog; my notes here will not pretend to be any sort of comprehensive coverage.

Last weekend I shopped for and bought a shiny new laptop, partly because my previous mobile machine was 5 years old and thus quite decrepit, but mostly because with a long weekend convention I wanted something with high-speed internet access capability. For the first time, I arrived in my hotel room, plugged the ethernet cable into the outlet on the desk, and could surf the web and download my thousands of spam just as quickly as I could at home. Why, I can even get some real work done on the website from here--see, I just posted a new magazines page. With an end-of-August new books page in the next day or two.