Back from TetZooCon 2022

 TetZooCon is over. It lasted two whole days instead of one and could have lasted longer as far as I am concerned. From what I heard people say, they felt it was a big success.

There were interesting talks or events about a wide variety of subjects, covering zoology, palaeontology, palaeoart, and last, but not least, speculative evolution. Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of TetZooCon is that hard science and art are received with equal enthusiasm and humour. For me, that is not only a defining characteristic of TetZooCon but also my main reason for going.

To give you an idea about the zoology content, we were treated to talks about platypuses ('the best animal ever') by Jack Ashby, and a talk by Jennifer Colbourne about tool use and intelligence in birds, touching on the question whether theropod dinosaurs might have been capable of tool use. Probably not.   

Palaeontology was of course well represented, with Dean Lomax showing examples of his book 'Locked in Time' and an excellent pterosaur session with items such as dealing with how to CT-scan a pterosaurs, how to describe a species scientifically, and an insightful roundtable discussion.

John Conway showing how Paolo Uccello painted dinosaurs around 1450

Palaeoart was very well represented, with a talk by Steve White on how to publish a palaeoart book and as well as an extra talk by John Conway about his new tongue-in-cheek book illustrating the history of Western art through selected dinosaur paintings by famous painters. Or at least how John imagined the old masters might have done if they had only bothered to paint the occasional dinosaur. It is a fun book; I showed it to my wife, who is much better at telling painters apart than dinosaurs, and she attributed most paintings correctly at once; recommended!

John, Darren Naish and Memo Kösemen also talked about their book 'All Yesterdays' on the occasion of its tenth birthday. In that book they had fun with the idea that someone (or something) in the far future would come upon remnants of present-day animals, without knowing that mammals had fur or that birds had wings. The resulting 'reconstructions' were deliberately wrong in many ways, making the reader wonder about the accuracy of our present-day reconstructions. That is of course a fair point; you only have to look at how much images of Tyrannosaurus changed over the years to realise how much guesswork they contain. 'All Yesterdays' had fun with exploring shaggy pelts or unexpected behaviour, such as Protoceratops climbing trees. Apparently, the book seems to have led people to conclude for a while that anything goes in reconstructing dinosaur appearance or behaviour.

Speculative biology was represented by a one-hour roundtable discussion, with Darren Naish, Jennifer Colbourne, Joschua Knüppe, Dougal Dixon, Adrian Tschaikovsky and me. I do not think the session was recorded, at least not officially. The discussion could easily have lasted another hour. 

Dougal showing a Greenworld model. Adrian and Joschua are looking on.

Here is Dougal, showing a model of 'Greenworld', still only available in Japanese. Read more about Greenworld here, here and here. There may be a new version of the book with higher production quality, but that one will still be available in Japanese only, I'm afraid.

I spoke with Adrian before the session. It turns out that he was present at the speculative biology sessions at LonCon3 in 2014. Actually, he said that those sessions made him include more speculative evolution in his science fiction novels. That makes me very happy, as I had proposed those sessions, in which Darren, Dougal, Memo, Lewis Dartnell and I spoke about speculative biology. If you do not yet know Adrian's work, but you do like SF with biology in it, have a look. In his 'Children of…' series you will find intelligent cephalopods and spiders. Their biology is not a simple prop to make them look nonhuman, but it shines through in their senses, thought patterns, and even in the way they are aware of self. The books are called Children of Time, Children of Ruin, and Children of Memory is just out.           

A few of my prints at the Art Exhibition

Finally, the Art Exhibition. Many artists participated, and I hope that an Art Exhibition will return in future TetZooCons. I had brought 12 prints of 40x60cm and sold five, even though they were not advertised as being for sale. I think people liked them and think I will bring more at next year's TetZooCon.