In the exhibit hall, many examples of fannish creativity. Like these paper-bag puppets representing characters from The Lord of the Rings. Why? Who knows:
Cars made by fans to honor famous SFnal cars, including the Marty McFly’s time-traveling DeLorean:
The 2054 Lexus Tom Cruise drove in Minority Report:
And a completely imaginary terrestrial version of Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder (note the R2D2 on the trunk);
Nice fans come in small packages:
There’s a full-size replica of the bridge of the Enterprise you can get your picture taken on (in uniform!):
Or you can relax in a Zen garden right in the middle of the convention center:
(I love the fact that there’s a Zen garden right in the middle of the convention center. There are some Japanese fans here, it’s true, probably because next year’s Worldcon is being held in Yokohama and perhaps they’re scoping out some of the issues they’ll have to deal with when throwing a party for 6,000 of your closest friends, but mostly it’s here, I think, be SF fans are simply more open to and more interested in all sorts of different philosophies, whether they’re fictional or not.)
There’s also a full-size replica of the Mars rovers, courtesy of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has a really nice exhibit on all the cool new stuff we’re learning about Mars:
There’s also an exhibit of movie matte paintings and storyboards by members of the Illustrators and Matte Artists union, local790.org:
(I didn’t feel comfortable actually photographing anyone’s work, but I wanted to give a sense of how big this exhibit is... which this photo fails to do. I could have spent hours looking at the hundreds and hundres of illustrations here.)
Speaking of art, the art show reception was held on Thursday night. No photography at all is allowed in the art show, but I snuck this pic of the nice nosh they spread out for us. And anyway, it’s all about the food, isn’t it?:
Coming up: my Thursday panels, my all-day panel marathon on Friday, my Friday-night party celebrating the release of my Princess Bride book, and more. And now I’m off to enjoy Saturday at the convention...
