My friend Doselle Young sent along this picture of a big-ass Stargate: Universe ad on the side of an LA hotel, and over the last couple of days I’ve seen double-sided ads for SG:U in both Rolling Stone and Wired. And I’m thinking, damn, I wish every project I worked on was this well advertised. On the other hand, not every project I do employs hundreds and costs millions of dollars to put together, or is going to be seen by millions of people on a weekly basis, so that may be a contributing factor here.

Nevertheless, it’s kind of exciting to look at this big promotional push and think, hey, that’s my show. Not just my show, of course (and not even primarily my show, since the producers, writers and stars all get bows long ahead of me, and rightly so). But still. Neat.

It was at Torcon 3, in 2003, which was after Tor bought Old Man’s War but was a year and a half before the novel actually came out, and which was my very first science fiction convention, ever. The interview was with CBC radio dude Joe Mahoney, who met me at the Tor Books Worldcon party, was putting together a piece on the convention for CBC, and decided to get the perspective of the “new guy.” He recorded nine and a half minutes of an interview, of which roughly thirty seconds made it into the finished piece (which I linked to almost exactly six years ago in this entry). I was pretty pleased to get a moment in there with the likes of Cory Doctorow and Robert Sawyer.

As for the rest of the interview, well, it was lost to the mists of time, until right this very day, when Joe decided to post it up on his Web site. It’s a very interesting interview from an archeological standpoint, because among other things it has me reflecting on attending my first science fiction convention and trying to make sense of fans and fandom, which was definitely a new concept for me at the time. I hope the fen listening now won’t judge me too harshly.

2003 is six years ago, so I can’t really say that I’m discussing events across a great bridge of time, but I will say that the Tor party that year was particularly interesting for me. Aside from being the occasion of my first interview as a science fiction author, it was the place where I first made the acquaintance of a number of writers and sf/f notables. I was introduced to Rob Sawyer there, who was having a very good con (he won the Best Novel Hugo); we were introduced just briefly and he had quite the crowd about him so I don’t imagine I made much of an impression on his memory track at the time. I also got to make the acquaintance of Robert Silverberg, who was both droll and gracious with his conversational time. And it was also the place where I first met Alan Beatts, owner of San Francisco’s Borderlands Books, which has since become one of my all-time favorite bookstores, and where I’ve had quite a lot of fun. In all, a good party for me.

In any event, enjoy listening to the amusingly-clueless-about-science-fiction version of me, circa 2003. How far I’ve come since then.

The Internet does seem to be full of people whose knowledge of complex concepts appears limited to a dictionary definition.

Some of them seem to be proud of that.