Recently my wife and I attended the Thirty-Six annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. This was our second visit. The highlight was seeing our son Mark deliver his talk entitled "Separating The Signal From the Noise: Joseph Weber's Search for Gravity Waves and Gregory Benford's Timescape." A job well done, Mark!

The breadth of this conference is truly, well, breathtaking. There were panels on "Early Science Fiction," "Infinite Borges, "Quantum Imaginings and Alternate Realities," "Why is it Science Fiction and Not Fantasy?" "Fantasy and the Literary Form," and numerous author readings. One hundred and thirty-nine sessions in all. The hardest part, of course, was figuring out what to attend.

David Hartwell's bookstore was enticing as always. I came upon a treasure store of old Galaxy magazines from the 1960's, including one issue with work by Jack Vance, Frank Herbert, Robert Silverberg, and a review of Herbert's novel Dune which had recently been published (it was panned!) Wonderful stuff.