Can-Con, day 2...

[fajrdrako]

I got to Can-Con in time for the launching of Tesseracts Fifteen, an anthology of Canadian science fiction. The readers were excellent, so I bought a copy and got the ones who were there to autograph it. Of the stories read, my favourite so far is Fragile Things by Amanda Sun. She read part of it, and then I read the rest of it on the bus on the way home. That story, as far as I'm concerned, is worth the price of the book; if the others are half as good, I'll be happy.

I actually acquired (rather miraculously) three other books - all signed by one or more of their authors:

• An Ye Harm None: Magical Morality and Modern Ethics by Shelley Tsivia Rabinovitch and Meredith Macdonald. Shelley talked about the book, and featured a tasting of many kinds of chocolate, including bacon chocolate. I was probably the only one in the room who doesn't much like chocolate; I sampled a few, and was sorry I did. But I did rather like the bacon chocolate.
  
  She said that she wrote this book because many pagans asked her, "What is an ethical life?" - that since pagans don't have a holy book like the Jews, Christians or Muslims. And my thought was that this is the great virtue of paganism, that religious are better off without holy books. But her book isn't meant as any kind of divine revelation, it's philisophical discussion and advice, so that's okay.
  
  Shelley also had a 'tea reading' teacup just like I have - my mother gave it to me about thirty years ago.
  
  
• Bell, Book & Beyond, ed. by P.D. Cacek.
  
  
• Defining Dianqa by Hayden Trenholm, who did a reading of excerpts from several of his books. I like the setting: Calgary in 2043.
  

I enjoyed a panel by StarWolf on comics from other cultures (mostly Japan and Belgium). I listened to part of a reading by Julie Czerneda, and part of a panel on language which turned out to be uninteresting, as I think I know as much as the panelists did about languages. Or more. Including their use in fiction.

And, as yesterday, I got to talk with friends I haven't seen in years, and I met a few people I've heard about but never met.

And I have some good reading to look forward to.