The subject is a little confusing, as this is the first day of the actual conference. Anyway, came down for breakfast and met some fellow-attendees, all pleasant folks. I found out that one of them, Angela Yiu, would be moderating the block of presentations that I’d be part of, so we got to talking. She’s from Hong Kong but teaches Japanese literature at Sophia University in Tokyo, a really nice school. Her husband is Japanese, though he has lived most of his life in the USA, so she claims to speak better Japanese than he does. They have two daughters and a whole lot of pets, including a goat, which makes them semi-celebrities in Tokyo, though they always turn down the numerous requests to feature them in "check out the weirdies" type TV shows. Anyway, she turned out to be really nice, and we did a lot of hanging out together during the conference.

Then it was over to campus. There had been a huge storm the day before I arrived, but now things had dried out and the bush flies were starting to get out in force. They don’t bite, thank goodness, and they’re smaller and have a lighter touch than American houseflies, so they’re not too hard to ignore, but they can be quite annoying if there are a lot of them–as there would be the next day. Luckily, when the sun goes down, they disappear, so evenings were nice.

Tom Moylan, scholar of utopia and dystopia in SF, kicked things off with a lecture titled, "Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction," in which he compared utopian writing to the Subtle Knife from Pullman’s series, something to slice a window into another world, allowing us a glimpse.

After that, the regular presentations began. I went to one by Paul Cheung on a whimsical pre-WW2 Chinese SF novel, Lao She’s Cat Country, about cat people living on Mars, one that called for a communist revolution but which also made it clear that the revolution would end in disaster. The author later under interrogation by the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. This was followed by Kong Xinren’s presentation on several recent Chinese SF novels, but her English skills left a lot to be desired, and nobody really got much out of it.

The rest of the day was a mix of really interesting presentations, barely comprehensible ones, and the occasional "who let this guy in?" disasters. I was really sad that I opted to go to one block that ended up having nothing interesting, causing me to miss a presentation on Farscape’s wormholes (never figured out what that had to do with utopias), and grad-student Evie Kendal’s one on the role of the author in utopian writing, which I was told later was one of the best presentations in the conference.

We ended at 6pm, a really packed day of lecture after lecture, Q&A sessions, my brain left bursting with new ideas. Despite the few damp squibs, I was really enjoying the conference as a whole, having lots of conversations between blocks.

That evening after dinner at the dorm, I decided to wander out to the shopping area about 25 minutes away by foot. The flies were still around, since the sun wouldn’t be setting until about 8:30. Again I was reminded of Texas–the little houses with tile roofs and dry, scruffy yards achingly reminded me of South Austin. This is out in Clayton, a suburb of Melbourne, and so like in most American cities, everything is far away and hardly anyone walks, so I was pretty much by myself. As I approached Clayton’s "downtown," I was really happy to see the Korean and Indian and Greek and Malaysian shops and restaurants, a kind of ethnic diversity I’ve missed in Japan. Fukuoka has some diversity of course, but it’s 95% Japanese and most of the rest is American fast-food. I regretted having already eaten, but I bought a few things to take back to my room anyway. I was downing a local beer in my room when I suddenly realized I might be breaking some rule of the College–oh well, too late.