My third panel at Worldcon 2011 and second one as moderator, this one about the increasing trend of reboots in TV shows and movies. Lawrence Person, A.C. Crispin and I took around an hour to talk about franchises from Superman to Star Trek and everything in between, alternating between admiration and despair at various attempts to take another bite of the apple. This was both good fun and instructive, with some surprising information I didn’t know about reboots currently in the pipeline.

A second great panel at Worldcon 2011, this one with some serious star power. I’m not usually intimidated by these things, but I’ll admit to having been a little awed at the prospect of sitting on a panel with Jo Walton, L.E. Modesitt Jr., Pat Rothfuss and Tim Powers. As you might expect with that kind of group, the discussion on magic in fantasy was both illuminating and entertaining, and having a phenomenal turnout (probably close to two hundred people in the room) helped too.

One of a number of interesting panels I was lucky enough to be on at Worldcon in 2011, this one asked the panelists to assess the impact of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy ten years later (without being overly staggered by how much time has already passed since then) on the genre of fantasy specifically and film more generally. Since I’m on record as being both deeply influenced by the books, which first fired my imagination as a child and has continued to do so ever since, and a huge fan of the films, which did such a good job of bringing the spirit of the books to the screen, I was really excited to be moderating the panel. It didn’t disappoint; Arthur Chenin, Stephen Potts and Norman Cates all had interesting things to say during the discussion, and having someone in Norman who actually worked on the films (and the upcoming Hobbit movies) talk about how moving he still finds them was, for me, worth the price of admission by itself.