p0000240 Vernor Vinge and Elizabeth Moon at ArmadilloCon 2003

on the "Building An Alien Society From The Ground up" panel.

Participants: Carol Berg (Moderator), Deborah Chester, Jane Lindskold, Elizabeth Moon, Cary Osbourne, Vernor Vinge

Topic, according to the convention program: A major challenge to science fiction writers is creating believable aliens. Our panelists will give insight into their own creative processes in tackling this task.

Where do writers start building an alien society? (Do they answer questionaires about alien societies?) What do SF writers fail to consider when they are creating alien societies? What are the ways writers can communicate their alien cultures to their readers, without doing an info dump?

Here is the whole article on the Building Alien Societies panel.

Here are my blog posts from other ArmadilloCon 2003 panels:

The Future of Computers in Fiction and Reality -- Alexis Glynn Latner, Bruce Sterling, Kurt Baty, Tom Becker, and Vernor Vinge debate theological implications of ubiquitous computing, disruptive uses of web technologies, and the most interesting recent computer-themed science fiction books;

Special Guest of Honor Vernor Vinge Interview, where he talks about how he got started writing science fiction, numerical parametrization of group minds, some characters in "Deepness in the Sky", and how Technology Singularity could happen, and what current research might lead to it;

The Coming Singularity And What It Means To Me, with Vernor Vinge and other people;

Miscellaneous ArmadilloCon 2003 panels -- short snippets from such panels as Ideas Somebody Should Write a Book About, Frontiers in Weird Research, and Inventing the Next Frontier.