From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] National Book Festival
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2012 23:43:16 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

I spent this afternoon at the National Book Festival on the mall.  The
weather was much better than past years.  This was only the second
time in its 12 years that it had an SF tent.  The first time was eight
years ago.

However, that tent was on Sunday afternoon only (it was a two day
event), it alternated with fantasy and with comi^H^H^H^H graphic
novels, and it was only half of a tent anyway, resulting in poor
acoustics as it was no louder than the events in the other half
despite a curtain between the two halves.

I went to the Lois Bujold and Vernor Vinge talks and book signings.

There was an upside to the alternation:  Since the person before Vinge
was a young-adult graphic novelist (i.e. a comic book artist/writer
for children), there was essentially no overlap between the audiences,
so I knew I would be able to snag the best seat in the house if I
arrived early.  The best seat in this context was the one closest
to a loudspeaker.

By chance this also put me near one of the two public microphones.
So I was able to ask a question.  I asked him how he reconciled his
continuing belief that there will soon be a technological singularity
with the fact that progress appears to have slowed down.  I said that
daily life in the US had changed much less in the past fifty years
than in the fifty years before that.  About the only significant
new things were the Internet and cell phones.  He replied that the
Internet is tremendously important, perhaps more so than fire,
writing, or apprenticeship, and that it would soon change everything.

I saw WSFAns Colleen Cahill (who was on duty as a Library of Congress
employee, always with Vernor Vinge), Sam Lubell, Cathy Green, Carolyn
Frank, and Mike Walsh, PRSFSes (pronounced prissy-fishes) Monica
McAbee, Wendell Wagner, and Ellen Vartanoff, and Philosophical Society
member Bob Hershey.

Two days earlier, I ran into WSFAn Keith Marshall at a hotel at which
I was meeting a friend, Mike Vassar.  Keith was there for a convention
<interventioncon.com>, but he found our conversation in the hotel
lobby more interesting than the con, so he joined us.  (Neither Mike
nor I were convention members.)