Let's talk about time...

Time travel, more specifically.  This past weekend I participated in the 2nd annual English Graduate Student Conference at the college.  I had originally submitted two proposals - a creative reading (in keeping with my actual degree), and a second, pseudo-scholarly work tied to one of my other interests: time travel.

The original idea sprung from going to Readercon last year, and sitting in on a couple of session talking about some of the stock SF tropes, time travel being one of the biggest.  It sat and festered, wanting to be used in some way in a story (and it's still festering for that, but I digress), and then I looked into WorldCon (Renovation 2011), where one of this year's guests is Tim Powers.  I recognized The Anubis Gates from several of my wanderings trough the local B&N, then thought about the connections - and the paradoxes involved.  And the paper idea was born initially as a piece pitched to WorldCon for their Academic program (as of this writing, I'm still waiting to hear on it's acceptance... but the key thing is I submitted, which is the all-important first step), as a way of exploring the handling of the paradox in the book.  The idea morphed into something a little bigger, and encompassed two other works of shorter lengths (both   contemporary pieces instead of going back to "classics").

Due to time restrictions, they could only accept one, so I hedged my bets towards possible acceptance, and presented a (rough) Time Paradox talk.  I think it went well, and I tried to tailor the presentation to a generally non-SF crowd, and mixed in other pop culture references that would be an easier base to illustrate points that I would make from the stories.

In all, I think it went well, and should help me quite a bit in the comfort stage should it get picked up for WorldCon.  Here's to hoping...