Today (it being past midnight) is Gary Wolfe’s birthday, so we’ve been having a little party. A bunch of us had dinner together in the hotel restaurant and amusing conversation flowed. Charles was curmudgeonly – something he’s very good at. Ellen Klages was hilarious – something she is very good at. Clute has become obsessed with the hotel’s habit of distorting the aspect ratio on their TVs so as to make the pictures fill up the whole wide screen surface, thereby making people look shorter and fatter than they really are. There was a running gag about the World Fantasy Award trophy as a result of which I discovered I was one of the few people at the table who did not have a big, ugly head.

The hotel kindly brought Gary a candle with his desert, and we discovered that the Big, Bad Wolfe is indeed not very good at huffing and puffing.

But Gary did come up with one of the best one-liners of the entire conference. Here it is:

“Realism is nothing but the domestication of fantasy.”