Capricon Science Fiction Convention Review

I'm back from a weekend of Capricon. Unfortunately I was only able to spend Saturday morning at the con as my wife had to work and my oldest son was home sick. The only presentation I attended was Bryan Palaszewski's Moonbases: Not For The Weak Minded Pirate. The first half was mostly devoted to discussing the Apollo lunar program and the second half dealt with moon base designs.

Following Bryan's program I headed off to the Art Show where the first person I saw was one of my favorite ladies of SF, Lori, who was running this year's art show. I also ran into friend and space artist Tom Peters who had some art in the show. We only had a few minutes to talk before he and his wife had to head off. I took this, my one opportunity, to walk through the art show and look at the art on display. Much of the art was small pencil drawings. The most popular themes seemed to be cats and dragons. One of the ladies working the show told me that “ninety percent of science fiction fans love cats.” In fact the only art on which I observed bids had cats, dragons, or both as the subject. Unfortunately for me I don't do either dragons or cats. Tom had some space exploration art in the show – the only such art I saw. It seems to me that over the years space ships and astronauts have been on the decline in the local SF art shows. The only two pieces of astronomical art were my own. The most impressive piece in the show was a very large recreation of primitive cave art. It was wonderfully done and I lingered over it far longer than any other piece in the show.

Sunday was a hectic day. I arrived early so that I could begin the process of packing up my art. Fortunately I was able to get into the show area (the doors didn't officially open till 10:00am) and got my unsold art packed up.

Programming began at 10:00am and I was on for my presentation Imaging Mars which was illustrated with my own Mars images. A good portion of my presentation was actually a tutorial on how people could access the raw Mars mission data for themselves and create their own Martian artwork.

I ran my presentation right up to the hour mark and had to make a mad dash to get to my panel on Podcasting. This panel had very much of a tutorial feel to it in that I and my fellow panelists spent most of our time discussing the how-to aspects of podcasting.

Following the end of the podcasting panel, I had one hour in which to go through the art check out process, get my art into the car, and grab a quick bite of lunch before heading off for my last presentation.

The last hour of programming for Capricon began at 2:00pm and I was surprised to see a nice sized audience for my Space Solar Power for Earth presentation wherein I explain the concept of space solar power and how it benefits both humanity and the environment. Note that the best resource for papers and studies dealing with space solar power is the NSS Space Solar Power Library.

And with that I was out the door feeling that first tickle in my throat that told me that I was probably going to come down with the same bug that caused my son to miss three days of school. Well, better to be sick after a con than before.

Ad Astra, Jim

| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Presentations, SF Cons.