MileHiCon Wrap-up

Wow! MileHiCon was awesome, as usual. It was great to see old friends, make new friends, and hobnob with famous writers. For example, Jeanne Stein and Mario Acevedo were there up to their usual tricks. See Mario's post about it on their blog the Biting Edge (Including a picture of Editor Betsy--IN THE BAR!)

My panel on dystopias was standing-room-only because of award-winning novelist Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo said he doesn't really consider his work to be dystopian. I have to agree because, at least historically, a dystopia is a futuristic society that has degraded into a repressive and controlled state/government. ==> This means individuals have lost their personal rights/liberties because of this repressive entity. Ultimately, however, we posited a dystopia is in the eye of the beholder. This prompted me to ask: do we live in a dystopia now? Hhm...

My panel on weird physics was also standing-room-only--because people like weird physics, I guess. :) Initially, I said I didn't think physics was that weird; it's based on logic and math, etc. But the other panelists and the audience kept coming up with weird stuff, so I was forced to change my stance: physics is weird. Upon reflection, afterwards, physics is weird when a theory is about to be overturned/supplemented, i.e. when we're on the verge of discovering something new. Awesome!
I did have a handout of an interesting article I saw "The 10 weirdest physics facts, from relativity to quantum physics" by Tom Chivers of The Telegraph.

See Betsy's impressions here. Perhaps Dave would like to add some impressions of MileHiCon?

In other news, we are hard at work on the next issue. Keep sending us your stories.