The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was held this past weekend in Fort Lauderdale. Although you probably didn’t know it, it sounds like you and I would both have had fun there. Lots of cool interesting people, all talking about SF and stuff. One year I’ll make it.

This year the guest scholar was Australian writer and academic Damien Broderick. Damien is a really interesting guy who writes everything from hard sf to dense critical stuff, and a lot of it is really top notch. During the conference the IAFA people presented Broderick with their Distinguished Scholarship Award. This is very cool. I don’t know which piece of scholarship specifically they were thinking of when they decided to give the award to Damien. It might have been for The Architecture of Babel, Discourses of Literature and Science, Reading by Starlight, Transrealist Fiction, or even for his recent fascinating book x, y, z, t: Dimensions Of Science Fiction (which, as an aside deserves a Hugo nomination in my opinion) – I don’t know. I do know it’s well deserved. Australia, for all its well-earned reputation for turning out SF academics (think Peter Nicholls, Russell Blackford, Janeen Webb and so on), has not turned out any more distinguished academics than Broderick. Who knows, if he had a blog he might even get a William Atheling nomination. It could happen.