Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
DragonCon: the world's largest science fiction and fantasy convention. Ever. Period. Official
numbers: over 35,000. But that's what we tell the fire marshal.
The following will be a series of reports made about my visit to DragonCon, mostly broken
down panel by panel. I will not spend time complaining about the scheduling, the presentation
thereof, the audio equipment, etc. Each panel will be taken down and put together in transcript
fashion. There will be some inaccuracies, since I lacked recording equipment... even if I had
recorded it, there is a chance that any and all videos of DragonCon posted online may be taken
down without warning. This way is safer.
However, there will be some lines that are unattributed, and there may be inaccuracies scattered
throughout. Most of what is written down is what was said, accurately quoted and attributed.
Guests who will be referenced in these reports will have, at minimum, the DragonCon
descriptions of who everyone is.
Day 1 Panels:
Page 2: 45 Years of Jeannie [The three main stars of I Dream of Jeannie]
Page 4:The Physics of Your Magic [A writing panel for fantasy, with J. Ringo, T. Zahn, et al]
Page 6: DS9: Home of the Prophets [A Star Trek Panel]
Day 2
Page 9: Turning Stellar Rejections into Success. [A writing panel with Peter David and
company.]
Page 12: Researching Hardware
Page 15: Explosives and Heavy Weapons.
Page 18: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Page 21: Supernatural CSI: [The Panel was a poorly done Infomercial, but Jim Butcher had
some good one liners]
Day 3:
Page 22: An Interview with Jim Butcher
Page 26: NYTimes Bestselling Authors [Jim Butcher, Laurell K. Hamilton, Kevin J. Anderson,
Sherrilyn Kenyon, Maybury]
45 Years of Jeanie.
[The I Dream Of Jeannie Panel]
Guests: Barbara Eden; Bill Daily (Bob Newhart Show); Larry Hagman (Dallas).
Host: How's everyone doing? [Blah blah, insert general niceties here.] We're going to be a little
late, so, let's get comfortable.... You know, only in North Carolina can a hurricane be named Earl.
It hits Cape Cod it'll have to be renamed Reginald. Maybe Ernst. The last few DragonCons
have had hurricanes, but this one, it'll hit nothing, it even went past Bermuda. So, Earl the
underachieving hurricane...
I hate the first panel on Friday. You have to hope everyone has done their jobs.
Laughter from Audience.
Host: Ah, it's not your first DragonCon. Did everyone notice the new ramp between the Marriott
and the Hyatt? That was built for DragonCon. Atlanta PD was tired of writing citations for
jaywalking
[Panel starts, 15 minutes late. Barbara Eden seems well preserved. Larry Hagman appears in
full uniform, and Bill Daily's body may not be 100%, but his mind seems as sharp as ever.]
Q: Did you know that you'd be on such a successful show when you started?
Barbara Eden: Larry knew. He knew that the show was a hit from day one. Each time we got a
script, he said “It's a hit.”
Larry Hagman: If we hadn't been married we'd still be on the air.
Barbara Eden: The whole belly button thing was silly. A reporter came down to the studio and
told me that he didn't believe I had a belly button. I told him “a nickel a peek.”
Q: When you were filming it, did you ever think that I Dream of Jeannie would be around that
long?
Bill Daily: I didn't think I'd live this long
Larry Hagman: You didn't.
Q: Did they have the Blue Jinn to exploit the fact that I Dream of Jeannie was in color?
Barbara Eden: No, he wasn't. But he was played by my husbands at the time, Michael Ansara.
Eden was thanked for being the pinup girl of the Vietnam era, by a very tearful vet.
Q: What were your first thoughts when you shot the scene where they first met, in that beautiful
dress on the beach.
Barbara Eden: It was cold on that beach.
Bill Daily: I wanted to jump her.
Barbara Eden: Not with the Blue Jinn around.
Bill Daily: [looks up— Michael Ansara is tall] Oh, yeah.
Q: Mr. Daily could you tell us something about your time with Bob Newhart?
Bill Daily: I was on the second Bob Newhart show, but I had been friends with him before that.
Bob's a brilliant guy, but he's very shy. We both showed up to a costume party, and he came as
Leonardo Da Vinci, and he came in with a painting of the Mona Lisa that was half-filled in paint
by the numbers.
The Physics of Your Magic
Panel: John Ringo, Timothy Zahn, Brandon Sanderson, and Laura Anne Gilman.
Introductions:
“Hi, I'm Brandon Sanderson, and I am currently writing the last of the Wheel of Time books.”
John Ringo: I'm John Ringo. And I've written a coupla books.
Laura Anne Gilman: Oh stop it.
John Ringo: Well, I've been writing since 2000, and I've done [does some mental math], actually,
Citizens, the anthology I did, makes it 33 books in 10 years. And Citizens also makes me
[dramatic pause] an editor....
Timothy Zahn: Hello, my name is Timothy Zahn
Raucous applause. John Ringo keeps clapping after everyone else has stopped.
Timothy Zahn: Thanks John, your check is in the mail. I'm not entirely certain what I'm doing
on this panel, since my only fantasy cred is Star Wars, which is mostly science fiction--
John Ringo: Midichlorians.
Timothy Zahn: Oh, that's just what we tell people.
Laura Anne Gilman: One of the things with magical powers is that there are always three
archetypes. From the Almighty of some sort, from nature and from without, or from within the
person themselves.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, And in the cases where the authors try to explain the source of the
magic, it's usually just an attempt to not violate the first law of thermodynamics. Some don't
even try to explain.
John Ringo: Something I picked up while editing Citizens is that there are different paradigms of
writing. Fantastic realism is what most people consider fantasy. It doesn't go into the details of
the magic, like where it comes from and if it has rules. Very little in horror, for example, has
rules.
Timothy Zahn: Yes, but if you have no rules, then it's too easy to cheat. In Doctor Who, they
have the sonic screwdriver, which seems capable of doing practically anything.
John Ringo: The classic example that everyone still like, but drive me insane is JK Rowling.
She pulls stuff out of her butt every book. “Oh, we do this every year,” and when you're writing
about the third and fourth year and no one has every heard about it?
Laura Anne Gilman: Yes, but Harry Potter is very much like a murder mystery, you only use
what is needed for the narration.
John Ringo: Well, as far as rules go, if you look at fantasy from the later 1800s to the early
1900s, there were no rules... except for Lovecraft, where Cthulhu will eat you... everything else
was Calvin Ball. And then, after World War II, you had JRR Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, and
it has rules all over. Now, I don't have an IQ of 195, and I'm not an IT guy, but my one claim to
geek cred is that I have read the Silmarillion, twice, and trust me, there are rules. And there are
rules for rules.
Laura Anne Gilman: If you take a genre like Urban Fantasy, it better have rules, because it has to
fit in with our everyday life. If vampires and werewolves are running around, why don't we see
them? It would all fall apart without rules. In Lord of the Rings, the rules make the world.
Timothy Zahn: Even when they don't spell it out, you can see the rules in action. They never
implicitly say that wizards are meant to inspire and heal instead of manipulate and conquer, but
you just watch Gandalf against Saruman, and you know this.
Brandon Sanderson: And there, it's largely from the point of view of the hobbits, who have no
magic, so the rules are all mysterious, so they have to be explained to the Hobbits, and to us.
John Ringo: And then Peter Jackson screws Faramir again.
Q: What about when there are cheats built into the magic system?
John Ringo: Like “Signs”?
Brandon Sanderson: Well, there are occasions where you can have something that doesn't fit into
the magic system; you can explain it over the course of the book, figuring out why that
happened.
John Ringo: Or it becomes spark-ly.
Brandon Sanderson: I always have two lists. One is the rules of magic, and the other is what is
known about magic within the universe.
John Ringo: Yes, but does anyone know about Quantum physics? It's freaking weird. Observed,
something is a wave; unobserved it's a particle. If you look at magic in a scientific matter, it
disappears.
Timothy Zahn: Then there are occasions when it looks like cheating within the story, but it isn't.
There is a scene in the movie Dark Crystal, where a boy has, for the first time, met one of his
own kind, a girl, and they are trapped at the edge of this cliff. Suddenly, she spreads her wings
and flies them to safety. At this point, I'm thinking “That's a cheat right there.” When they land,
though, the boy says “How come I don't have any wings?” And she says, “Of course not, you're
a boy.”
Laura Anne Gilman: Well, magic can be affected by anything you like to be: different regions,
age, soil, sex; change any of that, and you can get different magic.
John Ringo: By the way, for the writers in the audience, if you explain too much of the magic
system too fast, you can't write yourself out of a corner later on. Magic is like a gypsy dance, if
you start out too fast, you can't finish it, because each iteration is supposed to be faster and faster.
Brandon Sanderson: Right. But if it's an easy system, like the three laws of robotics, that's one
thing. If it's longer and more complex, you have to remember that character comes first.
Timothy Zahn: Also, keep in mind, that your goal is to write a story, not a magic system.
Brandon Sanderson: Though, in writing in Wheel of Time, I have two assistants, who keep track
of the magic system through all the books, as well as anything that Robert Jordan ever said at a
convention.
Timothy Zahn: When you're playing in other people's worlds, like Star Wars, you are playing
with other people's toys. Just keep that in mind, you have to play by their rules.
DS9: Home of the Prophets
A Star Trek Panel full of actors..
Panel: Avery Brooks (Spencer for Hire), Armin Shimerman (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer), Rene
Auberjonois (Boston Legal, Benson), JG Hertzler, Robert O'Reilly (Chancellor Gowron, Star
Trek, The Next Generation),
Host: Garret Wang (Star Trek Voyager.)
The panel started without a host. Garret Wang had been on the “Walk of Fame,” and needed a
fan to tell him “Aren't you supposed to be somewhere now.”
Observations: Rene Auberjonois comes out first, and does a little swamping with the name
plates. Armin Shimerman really is short. Robert O'Reilly is fairly short himself, and a little
pudgy now— apparently, Klingon armor covers a multitude of pounds— I could hardly believe it
was him until he removed his sunglasses and flared his really bright blue eyes.
Avery Brooks shoos off the moderator, (Literally “Shoo, shoo,”) and we begin.
Q: Where any of you fans of the show beforehand? I mean, does anyone speak Klingon.
Robert O'Reilly: [Speaks three lines of dialogue in Klingon] I never had a date on Fridays in
college, I was watching Star Trek... granted, I was drink the rest of the week, but other people
had other plans for college. I only started watching Star Trek again after Whoopi Goldberg
joined the cast.
[Meanwhile, Avery Brooks is pointing into the audience and waved someone up. A little kid,
possibly 8 or 10 years old, comes up, and sits in Avery Brooks's lap.]
Avery Brooks: Do you have a question?
Kid: How does Odo change his mass?
Avery Brooks: Okay, you can leave now.
[Cue laughter, etc, kid eventually leaves.]
Q: You know, I was a fan around his age—
Hertzler: Come up and sit on my lap young man!
Q: [Goes up, does so, pause].... Wow, this is distracting.
Heztler: You think this is distracting for you?
Q: On the show, there was a lot of character development and intimate relationships—
Herztler: Intimate?
Q [Quickly standing]: What was that sort of development like? [Quickly leaves platform.]
Herztler: There was one episode, called Far Beyond the Stars, directed by Mr. Avery Brooks.
During one scene, Avery told Rene, “I want anger! A... a... white, hot, burning anger!” And
Rene said “I'M GIVING IT TO YOU!” Avery said, “That's it!” Rene answered. “NOOO,
THAT'S MMMMYYY ANGER, AND YOU, CAN'T, HAVE IT!”
Rene Auberjonois: Avery is the quietest actor I have ever met... and the loudest director.
Lynn Abbey: There was a point where it was a prevalent belief that male authors sold better than
female authors. I was only allowed to keep my name as Lynn because there are some men named
Lynn.
Christopher Golden: I had one tv show that had been scrapped because it had one person as the
survivor of a plane crash. Why? Because the movie Unbreakable started with Bruce Willis
being the only one to walk away from a train crash. The plots were completely different from
there, but they canceled the plans anyway. A few years later, it was about to be picked up, but
then 9-11 happened, and TV wanted nothing to do with a plan crash. I said to heck with it and
started to develop it into a comic book. Suddenly, with the first issue, someone bought the rights
to it. And it's been bought for several years, and nothing's happened with it.
Peter David: Caught in development Hell?
Christopher Golden: More like Development Heck, because they keep paying to hold onto the
rights.
Peter David: Well, then there's the other side of the spectrum, isn't there? My first job was
reading through the slush pile and sending out rejections or acceptances. There was one where
the cover page was in limerick. Now, Limericks had nothing to do with the book, and not even
about the Irish. And she was from Wilmington Delaware. So I couldn't resist
Peter David: There was one book that I wanted to be published. A few years ago, you might
remember, there was a contest for a Peter Pan sequel. My agent told me that it was unlikely to
go anywhere, but I wanted to anyway. And another, vastly inferior book won
Lee Martindale: It's good to keep your ego up.
Peter David: Absolutely. And I later rewrote it as Tigerheart, and it's one of my favorite books
I've written.
Lynn Abbey: Though that's another lesson you have to learn. Our books are our babies. And
sometimes you have to cut your baby's arm off. One time, I had two cut around 45,000 words
from one of my books.
Christopher Golden: But one of the morals of that is: never throw anything away. I had one
serious called Gatekeeper that I was going to make for a comic for Marvel. And the man I was
working with died. I came back after to talk with his assistant— who had now replaced the man
I worked with— and said “I don't think it's right for me,” and then went back to his paperwork.
Later on, when I was working on the Buffy books, they wanted a trilogy. So I brought out my
old Gatekeeper stuff, and it was one of the better received Buffy novels.
Peter David: Good for you.
Christopher Golden: That's better than my other story reception, where I wanted to do a possible
future, where everything had not turned out very well. When I told them my idea, they rejected
it, because it was too dark.
Peter David: Aren't these the people who wrote the episode THE WISH?
Christopher Golden: I told them to tell Joss one sentence, that this was The Dark Night Returns
for Buffy. And I know they never told Joss about it, because they came back to me saying that
the fans would think this was cannon and be too taken aback by it, so I would have to tell a frame
tale around it to bring it back to the modern day Buffyverse.
Peter David: Yeah, you have to go to Joss, because the people at Mutant Enemy are there to
insulate him from every idea. I wanted to put his character Ilyeria into my comic book Fallen
Angel. I walked up to him at Comic Con and asked him, and he said “Cool.” But I was told by
mutant enemy that none of Joss Whedon's characters would ever show up in a a non-Joss
Whedon universe. After a year of dealing with them, I walked up to Joss at the next Comic Con
and said “You want to talk to your people?” The next week they were cooperating.
Jim Baen once told me that. “Nothing has ever been rejected for being too short.”
Peter David: A man named Joseph Straczynski wanted to break into scifi, but he was
continuously rejected. And he called a writer named Harlan Ellison. And Harlan answered the
phone in his typical fashion “Yeah?” And Joe explained it to him, Harlan said, “I'll tell you
what's wrong with your writing. It stinks. It's crap. Stop writing crap. Got it!” “Um, yeah.”
“Good!” And hung up the phone.
Which is true, when you think about it. Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. But on the
other hand, Madeline L'engel had been rejected by every publisher until a publisher took pity on
her and published her book. It was called A Wrinkle in Time.
You also had John Kennedy O'Toole, who had written a book called A Confederacy of Dunces.
And he was rejected so often, he committed suicide. His mother continued to try and get it
published, and she sent it to a writer... don't ask me his name this early.... and he picked it up out
of pity, and started reading it. He looked for where it fell apart, and he couldn't find it. And it
got published and the rest is history.
So, three rules: don't suck, stay with it, and don't commit suicide.
Rewrite, don't resubmit to the same person over and over. Submit to other people. And don't try
to resubmit to someone else at the same company, because we all talk to each other
Peter David: Yeah, there are a lot of people who are like the first few episodes of American Idol.
You know, the ones who say “All my life my friends and family have told me I can sing,” when
it's obvious that they were lied to. You need critics, people who will read your stuff and give you
good and honest advice
Comment from audience: Frank Herbert wrote car repair manuals, and he had to self publish
Dune, and now it's one of the classics of science fiction.
Peter David: Heck, it's a franchise!
Q: Do you put more content in your rejections when you sent them to agents instead of author.
Editor: When I was younger I used to send personal rejections to authors. Then I was told that
“You just don't understand my genius.” Then I stuck with generic form letters. To an agent, I'll
tel them some more, Though nowadays, the biggest science fiction being told is either military
science fiction, or science fiction with a romantic element.
Publish on demand is a problem. It's hard to resell once you've done it, and it only works if it's
an E-book and sells 50K copies, then you can sell it to a publisher.
Q: I have an agent, and he's given it to a publisher. I'm waiting for the publisher to get back to
me, do you have any suggestions on what I can do for the book in the meantime?
Peter David: Six months for a reply to an agented manuscript is inept. Get an agent that is more
ept. Mainly because the Agent is a filtering mechanism. If it's taken this long, there's a problem.
Peter David: There is no magic bullet. You should do this only if professional writing is not an
option for you, what you can't not do it. We've all been where you are. We've all been on the
outside looking in. You've got company.... but I have to tell you that slipping $20 in with your
manuscript will not serve as a bribe. I'm not that cheap.
[Dockery is about six-feet tall, a few years passed middle age, but well preserved. He wears a
large red short with a gun on it that says simply The Armory.]
KD [smiles]: For the record, my red shirts don't go down, so don't try it.
Q: [Indistinct]
KD [points to a model]: The Thompson submachinegun. For killing longer, you slap in a drum
fed magazine.
KD [To audience]: You know, whenever one of these guys dressed as zombies walked into the
armory, it's tempting to just pick up one of the guns and go for a head shot.... then people tell me
“But Kevin, the firing pins have been removed.” [Big grin.] We know which ones are still
active.
Hello, I am Kevin Dockery, and I have been writing books on weapons since Desert Storm. I was
quite precocious in terms of weapons. I field stripped an MP4 at age 14, never having handled a
weapon before, the owner turned around and asked if I could reassemble it. I told him “I don't
know, I haven't tried yet.”
I have been the head of the Pentagon's museum of arms, so I have handled every weapon the US
Army has ever used, and that includes muskets. In fact, the first book I ever wrote was for the
Pentagon when I was about to leave. It was a technical manual; they told me “You got this all to
work, now tell everyone else.”
This panel is about researching weapons, because the internet is an amazingly screwed up place
to start looking for anything. I was actually part of a discussion online because someone had
posted the merits of a Semtex grenade. There is no such thing as a Semtex grenade, it was part
of a video game, but they were discussing the merits of it as though it was real. They had even
said that Semtex was the most powerful non-nuclear explosive.
They get this impression because the Lockerby plane was brought down by a block of Semtex
half the size of my fist. Now that isn't because Semtex is powerful, it's because planes are easy
to break. IF you don't believe me about the strength, get the catalog from their manufacturer.
Manufacturers are one of the best places to get information about a product. Though in my case,
manufacturers ask me about their products. I bring a scale to gun shows, weigh the weapons
myself.
And for the record, these are the big shows for the military, down in D.C., where GenDyne one
time brought in two Abrams tanks and put a dance floor on top of one of them.
Again, they're a good place to get information. You want pictures, you go to a military show, and
ask for their press kits.
In terms of research, you have to go to a trusted source. One of them is Jane's. I have about
twelve linear feet of them at home. I even have two of them signed.... most of them were written
by Ian Hawks. He looked like a regular Sargent, which is what he was, and he was British. Holy
shit British.
I walked up to him one time and asked him to sign one of my volumes for me. He said “Well, I
really don't do this, except this one time a daft young American followed me around for three
days asking for my autograph.”
“No sir, it was only one.”
“Oh, it was you.”
Now, to show you my opinion of the internet, Wikipedia at one point had a picture up on their
page for the H&K-33, and it was held by a Navy SEAL. Only it was a 15th generation picture –
those of you who know photography know what I'm talking about – and it was actually an H&K
G3, which looks like the 33, but it isn't. When I told them as much, they asked how did I know.
I told them “I talked to the guy in the picture. And his buddy, who owns a bar in Coronado.”
Now, as I said before, we have brought real weapons to DragonCon. My head of security is a
police officer. I just thank God that the truck didn't have a flat tire along the way.... You see, we
have a nuke. And I can just see the weapons spread out over the road, me in handcuffs, and a
police officer radioing in “You can't believe what we have here.” My friend told me, “Don't go
to the dark side.” Heh.
So, when planning a terrorist attack for a book, what's the difference between that and planning
one in real life? Intent. And intent doesn't mean shit to Homeland security. So you are not
going to try to call the FBI about weapons information.
Who do you talk to? You call the company that makes the gun, and you talk to marketing.
However, when you talk to people, and you're asked to keep something off the record, you keep
it off the record. That is how you keep your integrity as a writer. That's how I've done so many
books on the Navy SEALs. I never was one, but I respect them when they ask me not to write
something. When I write about missions, I don't give names. I don't even keep it in the same
hemisphere. And now, when I ask someone “What was so and so carrying on this mission?”
They say “I don't know, here's his number, go ask him.”
As far as technical items go, especially with taking pictures of a handgun... this is a S&W
revolver. It's black. I carry around a light blue cloth with me when I need to talk a picture of
something like this.
Oh, I should mention this— do NOT wander around a gun show taking pictures. Ask to take
pictures. If they want you to conceal the serial number, use a post-it. And if you want to raise the
number from a historical piece where the number is faded, use simple chalk....
Oh, and use gloves when you handle vintage weapons that don't belong to you. There will
usually be someone next to you with a bag of gloves, but all the same, be careful.
In terms of technical details... For example, this is an MP-40, German, World War II
submachinegun. How much does it weigh? Do you count the weight with or without the load?
You see this? How long is it? [Extends the collapsible stock.] How long is it now? Do you
measure from the toe of the stock to the muzzle? The heel of the stock? My preference is to
measure from the heel to the forward sight, because that's the part the soldier is using.
With a handgun, you measure from the hammer, to the sight. But, when you're measureing the
barrel of a revolver, ignore the chamber, since the cylinder can come out.
Now, with the MP-40, what's the rate of fire? Thousands of rounds a minute.... but the magazine
only has thirty rounds. Now how fast does it fire? The time it takes to swap out the magazine
and finish reloading, the practical rate of fire is about ninety rounds a minute.
Also, you want to be careful with your language. There is Ordinance. And there is Ordnance.
One has an I in it, and the other doesn't. With an I, that is a law. Without an I, it blows things
up.... One time I was walking through a gunshow, and the Israelis had a sign up about “Guns and
Ordinance.” I asked them “You're doing something about gun laws?”
There is also the same problem with fuse and fuze. The difference is, fuse with an S has to do
with anything that burns.
You are going to have to copyedit your own technical descriptions in anything you write, because
the publisher isn't going to know.
Now, to go back to reference materials for a moment. You can get a lot from scribd.com. In fact,
I need to post more things on it, I've downloaded so much that they've cut off my downloading...
anyway, scribd.com has military manuals you can find and download. Theses from Monterey
California, they have an academy there....
Now, one of my books is called future weapons. I broke them down by sections. For example,
the chapter on handguns opened up with the story of a crashed helicopter. One man had taken
two .45s and held off the Japanese with it. He was a trick shooter, and he had everyone else's
bullets. It was based on a true story, only I novelized it for the book. And I simply use the book
to cover what has come before. I do not try to predict actual guns to be issued on the front lines.
I don't cover vaporware. It doesn't exist....
I was actually a consultant on the movie Eraser. Any of those guys firing the movie's main
weapon would have only gotten one shot off, and the recoil would have ripped his arm off. They
are not man-portable weapons. And lasers aren't effective weapons, since we don't have a
portable energy source to make them practical for combat. That's one reason why David Weber
has his character, Honor Harrington, carry a .45. He stole it from Heinlein, but, one of the
reasons Harrington carries a .45 is that it's a big fat bullet, and if you use it and the other side isn't
expecting it, they are going to be surprised. Even if you're wearing armor, and you're hit with
that thing, you're going to fall down.
[Murmur from the audience that I can't catch.]
Methuselah's Children, “An armed society is a polite society.”
Explosives, Heavy Weapons.
Lecturer: Kevin Dockery (Author of Future Weapons.)
When I originally designed these lectures, they were part of a three part course. Edged weapons,
Researching Hardware, and Explosives and Heavy Weapons. I called it Zip, Bang, Boom. I
apologize in advance if I'm not loud enough. I'm still adjusting to my new hearing aides. This is
my third set. Apparently, they don't react well to gunfire.
I am the author of... a lot of books, mostly to deal with the Navy SEALs. For one book, I
interviewed over a hundred SEALs, and a third of them are dead now... many of them were from
World War II, it covered from then to 1998. After that, missions are classified, and people die if
you write the wrong thing.
Explosives... are not actually called explosives anymore. Bombs are filled with “energetic
materials.” They use shock or heat or both, in order to wreak devastation.
With high explosives... that's just another way of saying that something has a high deflagration
rate..
If something has a deflagration rate below 400 meters per second, that's a low explosive. Black
powder was one of the first explosives... does anyone know the origin of the phrase hoist on your
own petard? A petard was essentially what military engineers used to blow throw walls. It was a
barrel of black powder. And if you were too close to it, you were hoist on it.
Anything that has a deflagration rate above 400mps, it's a high explosive. We don't know how
high it goes, but to give you an example, PETN is what's used to make DetCord. It burns at
2,600 feet per second. Which means six miles of it can go up in a second. New explosives can
operate in the 36,000 feet per second range.
One of the primary explosives used on the field were grenades. This model is a Mark M36. The
M is for “Mediterranean.” Eventually, they just made all of the grenades waterproof, and the
only versions were the M36. We've recently found that grenades go back a long way. There
have been pottery grenades that held Greek fire.
Do you know how close Saddam Hussein came to not being hung? He wouldn't come out of the
spider hole, and no way were they going to go in and get him.
Anyway...
Early grenades in the modern period were used by Grenadiers. You might remember them as
being tough asses, one of the harder troops on the field. They should be, they were using
explosives that, most of the time, had unreliable fuses. One of the advantages of grenades is that
you don't need to see the target to get it, which made them perfect for trench warfare. Grenades
disappeared for about a hundred years, and made a comeback during the Civil War, because is
had trench warfare. The Confederacy had cannon balls with fuses in them. The Union had
Catchem grenades, that were fins and a percussion cap, and they were essentially lethal nerf
balls.... the Confederacy used to have blankets in the trenches that would catch the grenades and
throw them back out again.
In 1905, grenades made a comeback during the Sino-Japanese war, and the Russians and the
Japanese had reinvented them. In come cases it was a can of black powder, a primer, which was a
short fuse, and some rocks for fragmentation. Light the fuse and throw.
Now, there are two kinds of grenades, offensive and defensive. Offensive grenades you can
throw at the enemy while you're moving, and you can still stay out of the blast range while
moving forward. With defensive grenades, you should only throw while behind cover or in
entrenched positions before you throw, because you'll be within the blast radius. One example of
an offensive grenade is a stick grenade, which is just black powder and some sheet metal on top
of a stick. You've actually seen an offensive grenade stick in Star Wars, they used it for the
handle of a light saber... I hate that movie. Do you know how hard it was to find those grenades
after that film came out? Other variations of grenades are anti-personnel, sometimes just some
TNT with nails wrapped around it—that's so popular, it's on the flag of the IRA.
In World War I, John Mills made the Mills bomb. John Mills was an engineer, and the military
brought him the M36 and he said “That's good. I can make it better.” So the M36 became the
Mark 5. Don't ask about one through four.
The Mark 5, or the Mills bomb, were so successful, they made six million of them a year and
kept running out. He's the one who created the format we see today. It has the spon, a firing pin,
a fuse, and a filler charge. The filler charge he used was called Beritol, which was used in only
one other major explosive... Fat Man.
(I am not going to pass this model M36 around, the person who owns it would hurt me if I lost it.
And by hurt me, he's a Texas SWAT sniper, who makes sniper rifles. With silencers.)
There was also a Mark 2, which resembles what is commonly known as a pineapple grenade. It's
basically the Mills bomb, the American version.
One of the advantages of the Mills bomb was that it could be disarmed before use. Before then,
when you lit it, you threw it, even if your target moved, or if you had misjudged the range the
first time. In this configuration, a solider could put back the pin, lodging the spoon back into
place. They even made for safe shipping, you could just remove the detonator.
After he died, Sir John Mills left papers behind for the modification of the grenade. You see, the
segments in a pineapple grenade are not for fragmentation, they're for grippling the grenade in a
muddle trench in a battlefield. The fragments would breakup into the size of .22 caliber bullets,
and would be lethal up to five-ten meters. After that, they lose velocity and the size makes them
relatively harmless. It was actually the M33, baseball grenades, that were internally serrated.
Now, this is a German stick grenade, from both World Wars. An offensive grenade, where the
blasting cap was in the bottom of the stick. You just took it out of the bottom of the stick, stuck
it in the top, and threw it.
Now, the first High Explosive was made in the 1830s, but Nitroglycerin was one of the bigger
elements, and most often used. Unfortunately, it wasn't always flammable. It was a
temperamental explosive. You couldn't always set it on fire, but John Wayne can shoot it and it
will go off. However, you couldn't touch it without massive heart problems. You know those
little nitroglycerin pills? They have three thousandths of a gram in one of them. Which tells you
how much it would upset your heart rhythm if you touched it with your bare hands.
Dynamite was basically nitroglycerin mixed with dirt, a special clay, and a blasting cap, which
was important for setting it off, a more reliable way of making it go off.
With the creation of TNT, it was the first time that something had a chemical composition that
could be used as a standard. It was also brissant. You could melt it and pour it into shapes.
Unfortunately, it was hard, and it could shatter.
However, there were gelatine explosives. The most popular of which is RDX... short for
Research Department formula X. The explosive power of TNT is 1, because that's the standard.
RDX crystals is 1.36.
One of the advantages of the crystals is that they could be pressed and loaded into wax. The PG7
rocket was 8% wax and 92% RDX.
Instead of wax, there were also plasticizing agents for the explosive. One agent was
Composition 2. They were turned into sticks, known as PE2 sticks. Plastic Explosive 2. They
were used against pillboxes in WW2. When they wanted to make a more reliable explosive, they
came up with the Hagenson pack... which put Composition 2 explosives in a sock, tied shut with
a wire, and you had an explosive. Before Normandy, they made ten thousand bombs with C2
and socks. In 1944, there was C3, and after 1945 we had C4.
Now, Semtex... it's basically plastic with an RDX base. Semtex stands for Semtin
Czechoslovakian Explosiva. They sued Madonna when she tried to form a British band called
Semtex. They're even color coded. Now, this, as I said, is not the most powerful explosive.
[Rolls in a model.] This is. A ten thousand kiloton implosion explosion device. As of August
31st, 2:30 in the afternoon, DragonCon became a nuclear power.
But wait, there's more.
This is an EMP bomb. The outside is an electromagnetic coil, wrapped around a length of C4
explosive. There's more to it than that, but we follow the MacGyver rule, we don't tell you
enough to make your own.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19935957/RDX
[An article on RDX readcast by Kevin Dockery.]
Star Trek, The Next Generation
Garret Wang [looks out at audience]: Where were all of you while I was on the Voyager panel?
Sigh... A gunny thing happened. There was one guy who came up and said “I was one of the few
people who thought Voyager was a good show.” Talk about a slap and stroke. Anyway, the
panel is going to be a little late, the shuttle from the Walk of fame took them in the wrong
entrance, so I'm here to tap dance for you? Or is that riverdance? That was actually something
we did at Kate Mulgrew; since she was Irish, me, Robert Beltran and Robert McNeil would turn
to her and start dancing. Oh, do you like my shirt? It's made by a friend of mine. It says rock,
paper, phaser.
When everyone finally arrives, it's interesting. Marina Sirtis is starting to resemble the mother
from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Levar Burton comes out, filming the crowd on his Iphone
clone.
Finally, they're seated.
Levar Burton: Sorry we're later, we're old.
Garret Wang: You look good.
Brent Spiner: You too
Garret Wang: Any questions
Armin Shimmerman [runs down to the microphone from off stage]: Yes, I have a question, I'm a
big can of the show.
Jonathan Frakes: Obviously, not that big. We need a shorter mic.
Q [for real]: I feel that in the recent poll of favorite scifi of all time, Star Wars should have
won-- I mean Star Trek—
LV, Jonathan Frakes, stands, like pro wrestlers telling him “Come on, get up here.”
Brent Spiner: Set phasers to kill.
Q: What do you think of the other versions, like Voyager and DS9, Classic Trek
Brent Spiner [Looks to Armin Shimmerman]: What is DS9, anyway?
Armin Shimmerman: The better show.
Marina Sirtis: I always call the first series The Original Series, because if they're Classic, what
are we, diet? But I always thought that they were rude, because they never watched our show.
But I haven't watched Star Trek since The Next Generation, even when I appeared on them, like
on Voyager.
Brent Spiner: Voyager, what's that?
Q: What technology would you like to see from Star Trek in the 21st century?
Armin Shimerman: Medical Technology
Brent Spiner: The Celebration of All People.
Marina Sirtis: Except the TEA parties, I hate those people.
Levar Burton: In the case of my follicly challenged brother Michael Dorn, I would like to bring
something back from the original series, because no one has a hair piece as good as William
Shanter's.
Q: If they did a Star Trek The Next Generation reboot, who would you want to play you? Maybe
Megan Fox for Miss Sirtis?
Marina Sirtis: Megan Fox? How about an actress?
[Meanwhile, Jonathan Frakes and Denise Crosby have been muttering at each other the whole
time.]
Jonathan Frakes: This is what I get for expressing my emotions in front of thousands of people.
Audience member: Turn off your emotion chip!
Denise Crosby: Did I have a chip on that show?
Jonathan Frakes: Only the one on your shoulder.
Denise Crosby walked off stage in a huff, and Frakes blinkes, confused, and follows her.
[Wait a few minutes while they figure out how to turn on the microphone]
JB: Harry Dresden is to CSI the way The Rockford Files are to CSI.
“I don't think about the narrative tone, I just think about the end of the chapter, then the end of
the book.”
“I don't think about politics all that much. With Harry Dresden, it's all sorts of different politics
on a magical level. The most I ever thought of it with real world politics are in my Codex Alera
series with the Zarg-- I mean, the Vorde. Negotiating with an enemy in that case is like cows
negotiating with wolves. It doesn't work very well for the cows. Or like negotiating with
vampires only gets you eaten slowly.”
“I spend time deciding who Harry's sidekick for that book will be. You're dealing with
necromancers, give him the medical examiner. You need sidekicks, it's hard to lipoff to yourself.
Banter doesn't work without others.”
“When I go into a book, I know what the ending is, and I have one big special effects scene. But
my characters work for me. They will fall in line, for I am the god of my universe!”
“Mouse is the dog that my dog thinks he is. I have a little one pound frisse. He thinks he's a
rotweiler. Or a pit bull.”
Day 3
Spotlight on Jim Butcher
“It turns out there really is a ten in the morning... who knew.”
“I initially started writing because there were enough books out there that I wanted to read. I
started writing my first book at nineteen. It was awful. Then I wrote my second. It was awful.
My third and forth books were hideous. I rewrote the first one, and it was a different kind of
awful. I went to get a degree at the State University of Oklahoma, and got a bachelors degree in
English literature. And one writing class... they told me some ridiculous things about writing.
They must have set me back about two or three years. I mean, I had a bachelors in English lit,
and the professor had only published about forty books. And I looked at this stuff, and I was
going to prove her wrong. I was going to be a good little writing monkey, and show her that it
would turn out the same exactly kind of cookie cutter crap. I handed it in and she said 'It's good.'
'Wazzat?' 'I think you can sell this down the line.' And that was the first book of the Dresden
files.”
Q: What do you think about the role playing games for Dresden?
Butcher: I think they're great, like a Dresden Wiki. I don't need to go hunting for information
anymore... you have to realize, for every Dresden book, I have rewrites, beta readers, editors,
line editors, and a final copy. By the time I'm done, I've gone through seven to nine variations on
the book, and fans only get the one final version. So you probably know some of this stuff better
than I do. In fact, the guy who made the RPG actually found some stuff I had planted in book
one, and I asked him not to write it down, otherwise it would give stuff away in the later novels...
he was creepy good about finding those details.
[Time for audience Q+A.... the line backs up.] Butcher: “It looks like we should just give you
guys a belt and a coupla knives so you can sort yourselves out.”
“When I started working on the Dresden files, I went down to the bookstore and grabbed books
on magic and forensics, for background, and because it's cool. I recommend the writer's guides.
There was one called Deadly Doses, on poisons. That was neat. It was during research like that
where I discovered that there were so many kinds of werewolves, none of which looks like the
wolfman. If you ever have to do research on that sort of thing, go to the children's section of the
library, they'll tell you the stories. If you go into the adult's, all of the books you find there won't
go three pages without mentioning Jung or Feud. Or you can do on location research.”
Q: You ever going to explain how Nicodemus and Tessa got together?
Butcher: The romance between the two of them covers thousands of years, murder, chaos, and
cities abandoned. It'll take someone with a stronger constitution than me to do it.
SPOILER ALERT.
Q: Would you like to talk about Ghost Story?
Butcher: Harry is dead. And he has to solve his own murder, as a ghost. I can't tell you too
much, but he will have the line “I always wondered why ghosts were always moaning and
screaming when they went through floors and walls. That stuff hurts.”
SPOILER ENDS.
Q: What did you think of the Scifi channel Dresden? Sorry, I guess I show say Syfy.
Butcher: You mean the syphilis channel? It coulda been worse. They only started making them
like the books after Howe's kid took some swag home from the press briefing, and told his father,
the owner of the channel “Why couldn't this be more like the books?”
Q: Are there people in your life you used for Dresden characters?
Butcher: Yes. Shiro was actually based on my dojo instructor. He actually grew up being taught
martial arts by monks, while he was in hiding during the war. When he was growing up, he had
some problems with the Yakuza. They tried to kill him about five times, and he kept killing their
guys. After a while, they said “Hey, you want to work for us?” He said, “No, I want you guys
off of my street.” It was cheaper in the long run to leave him alone. So they did. And he's more
like Mr. Miagi than he has any right to be.
Anna, in White Night, was someone who won a charity auction to earn a horrible death in one of
my books.
Most of my female characters I base off of my wife. [Audience “Awwwww”]. Do you people
remember how many women are villains in my books?
“I'm going to have a final apocalyptic trilogy to end the series. They'll be titled Hells Bells, Stars
and Stones, and Empty Night. Despite that Harry just keeps saying them as phrases, they
actually mean something.”
“Lily, the Archive, is like a grown up version of Bob, with better bandwidth.”
“I just tell the characters that You work for me. If they don't agree with what I want, then I'll go
back and make them. And then I have a rush of power as a godlike creator.
MUAHAHAHAHAHA. Next question?”
Q: Why do you have magic screw up electronics? Won't that screw them up as technology
becomes more and more prevalent?
Butcher: Magic has always had side effects, and every three hundred years, the effect changes. It
used to make cream go sour, or make flames turn color. Harry will eventually say that “Maybe
in another hundred years, using magic will make the user attractive and popular with the opposite
sex, though I'm not holding my breath.”
“2012 will either be a bumper year for Harry, or it's a time he's going to want to be on another
planet.”
“I gave up on my old college when the Dean invited me to give my opinion of the school. And I
thought he meant it.”
“I was initially interested in the martial arts because I was not only the smart nerdy kid, but I had
a tendency to mouth off in school-- go figure, right? My dad said no. But one day, I was on my
bike, and someone pulled a knife on me. So I picked up my bike and hit him with it. Of course I
was the crazy kid who beat someone with a bike. I don't my dad about it, it was awful. He said
that now I could go train.
“When I was heading off to college, my instructor told me: 'No spar. Other student want to spar
with you. You no spar with them.' I told you he sounded like Mr. Miagi. After a while, I finally
sparred with someone just to get them off my case. I caged up, blocked everything, until I had
one good mid-line punch. And I think I got him on an inhale, he was doubled over and vomiting.
I didn't mean to hit him that hard. When I came back and told my instructor he said, 'You make
incorrect punch. Correct punch would have killed him. I show you how to make proper punch.'”
NYTimes Bestselling Authors
Panel: Laurell K. Hamilton (Anita Blake seris); Sherrilyn Kenyon (Dark Hunters); Jim Butcher
(Dresden Files); Kevin J. Anderson (Misc Star Wars); Jonathan Maberry (Co author: Marvel
Zombies Return.)
LKH: Wow, this is my fourth year at DragonCon, and it's the first time I've actually seen it. It
looks like fun. My tenth book, Narcisscus in Chains, was the first one to make it to the
bestsellers list. I've had decades of fan buildup... and going whole hog into sex might've had
something to do with it.
KA: My first three bestsellers were within a month of each other. MY first Star Wars trilogy,
with the Jedi Academy books. Before that, I had published nine books in eight years.
JM: My first bestseller was the novelization of the movie The Wolfman. Before that I had
written books on judo. When they gave me the screenplay, it had virtually no details, so I had to
add a lot of my own. When the reviews came out, they said “Read the book.” Which proves if
you sacrifice goats, God will listen.
SK: Goats work. As do chickens.
LKH: I got in at a good time, right after the Buffy television series kicked off.
KA: Sometimes you get lucky, when you ride the wave of a trend's popularity. Da Vinci Code
was the last gasp for Dan Brown. His previous novel, Angels and Demons, didn't sell. And
suddenly, people are buying books that the industry didn't know the public wanted.
Q: What is your favorite book, what you've written and what you read?
JB: My favorite book that I've written, Dead Beat, because you can't beat the zombie dinosaur
marching down Chicago. Or, the last five pages of Changes. And I like Lois Bujold's Mirror
Dance.