This past weekend, I attended my very first science fiction convention, Readercon 15, in Boston. It is my goal here to craft what I believe is termed a 'con report', that you, Gentle Reader, might share in the experience. However. There are a few howevers, in fact.
You may not, yourself, enjoy science fiction; a substantial portion of this blog's readership consists of folk who Google 'dirty poems' or who come for the intermittent abuse of Andrew Sullivan. (He's an arsebucket.)
You may enjoy science fiction, but have little familiarity with the world of fandom. I, myself, fall into this category. I enjoy science fiction, and, though I have no discernable talent, I've had a certain whimsical desire to write it from a young age. I'd never been to a convention, or read a fanzine, or participated in a reading group, or met a science fiction author, 'til this past weekend. To be fair, I've talked about science fiction from time to time with Graham Sleight, who is making quite the name for himself as a reviewer and was, in fact, invited to speak on several of the panels at Readercon...I knew him, by the way, before he was famous. He said, boastfully.
You may, perhaps, be a Readercon attendee yourself, who, by some quirk of fate, has Googled your way here. In which case, you're undoubtedly a lot more familiar with the people and events I'm about to describe than I am. It's conceivable you may be mentioned in this very articlet. It's conceivable that I met you, although probably very very briefly, because I'm extremely shy and have a quiet, mumbling voice that doesn't carry well. It's conceivable that I'll misquote you, or misrepresent you, or accidentally offend you in some way. Or possibly fail to mention you at all, which is not meant as a personal slur in any way, shape, or form.
It's vastly more likely that a Readercon guest might find their way here than that, say, Andrew Sullivan would. A certain amount of caution is thus called for, given that if I were to write 'Nels Beaverbrook seemed mentally flatulent on Panel X,' Nels Beaverbrook himself might wind up reading it.
Nevertheless, I shall press on. I'm going to assume you, Dear Reader, know no more, and possibly slightly less, about science fiction than I do. Bear with me.
Why science fiction at all? And why Readercon in particular? I've enjoyed science fiction for approximately 80% of my life to date; it's all my parents' doing. They had me hooked on Doctor Who reruns on PBS by the time I was four. I soon began digesting Terrance Dicks's charmingly inept novelisations, and, as I got older, began working my way through my father's collection of SF paperbacks. I branched out into more mainstream literature as I got older, but I remain a devotee. I can't imagine not liking it. Like Depeche Mode, it just seems natural for me to enjoy it. Partially, it's the science portion; I love science. Mathematics and the sciences offer the only glimpses of truth we are afforded, and I've been in love with them longer than I can remember. I somehow wound up with a BS in physics, despite being the absolute worst experimentalist you are likely to meet (as the stench of burning diodes can testify). I like literature that deals with things I'm passionate about. Science fiction deals with science; therefore, I like science fiction. There's also the unfettered imaginativity of it. Science fiction writers have extraordinary latitude to invent characters, places, situations, experiences that do not exist in the real world. They force the reader to transcend the mundane, look beyond the commonplace. Science fiction can, at times, offer a certain hope that no other genre can, the hope that humanity will actually survive a few more years and that, just possibly, things might some day be better than they are. There's also a certain amount of escapism in my love for science fiction. I see nothing wrong with that.
And science fiction can, when all is said and done, be serious literature, too. That is what Readercon is all about: the high-brow end of things, for writers who give real care and attention to their writing as writing, not just as genre fluff.
Readercon was a very civilised and respectable event. The Comic Book Guy was not present. No-one was dressed up as Darth Maul, a Klingon, or Mr Spock (although Barry Malzberg does bear a slight resemblance to Leonard Nimoy). It is a convention, as the name suggests, for serious readers, and the writers they read. The guests were accomplished, insightful, and talented, intelligent, with a lot of very interesting things to say about the genre, about writing, and more or less everything else imaginable. The panels and discussions were well-thought-out, interesting questions were asked, many books were sold. People at Readercon care about making science fiction (and fantasy, too, though I'll refrain from mentioning it explicitly) the best it can possibly be. I enjoyed it a great deal. It was educational; writers, I learned, do not speak in prose. They are, in fact, as near as I can tell, mortal humans. Only famous. This is not unintimidating, in its way. What do I have to say that could really be of interest to such people? I didn't talk a great deal. Despite that, everyone was very friendly. Though famous. Did I mention famous?
It's deeply odd, to meet someone who's written a book you've read and enjoyed. Something of theirs has come to you, but they don't know you from Adam (or Eve, as the case may be).
What did I see, you ask? In no particular order...
Mathematics and SF was a panel I was dead keen on seeing, as Rudy Rucker was on it. Rucker was not only one of the Guests of Honour, but is a real, live, breathing, honest mathematician. His novel White Light involves transfinite numbers, the Continuum Hypothesis, and the Banach-Tarski Paradox, and he's dead good indeed. Donald Kingsbury was on it, too, author of Psychohistorical Crisis, a splendid homage to Asimov's Foundation books that treats the concept of psychohistory rather more mathematically. He gave a very convincing defense of the possibilities of prediction, arguing it was more a matter of control theory than complexity theory: the predictor takes an active role in ensuring that his predictions come to pass. This completely demolishes a sort of thought experiment I'd devised to show that predicting the long-term evolution or future of a civilisation would be impossible, which I won't bore you with. Catherine Asaro was there, too, whom I've never read, but I mean to after hearing about her Spherical Harmonic. I like Hilbert spaces. Unfortunately, the panel spent its time talking about things people had already written, as opposed to things people could write, or the possibilities for mathematics in science fiction, and I fear this is a more or less inevitable consequence of the fact that mathematics is such a specialised field. Plenty of lay people know about relativity, string theory, singularities, and suchlike in physics, thanks to people like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. Very few people know much serious mathematics. (Keep in mind my ideas about what constitutes serious mathematics are likely to be somewhat biased, given that I seem to be turning into an algebraist.) I think very few people would be interested in a discussion of how to dramatise the Axiom of Choice. Ah well. On the bright side, I heard rumours that there's a story about representation theory in the Rucker-edited anthology Mathenauts...
I was just as pumped about Catholicism and Imaginative Literature, though I am not a Catholic. This panel was dominated, I think, by Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick, two of my favourites. Wolfe is a practicing Catholic; Swanwick was raised Catholic, and is now an atheist. In a mid-panel poll, probably over half the audience identified themselves as Catholics, too. All the panelists talked about the influence of Catholicism on their work, everyone, I think, mentioning the benefits of an old-school Catholic education, except Swanwick, who I think was trying desperately hard not to be really really rude about his former faith, and related an anecdote about the Nun from Hell. Catholicism appears to be quite an experience; Swanwick said 'The Catholic God is the God I don't believe in.' Gene Wolfe gave a very spirited account of the influence of redemption on his work; no-one, not even a villain, is beyond redemption. No-one, he says, goes around in life thinking 'I'm a bad person.' He then launched into an improvised impersonation of an actual bad person, in the course of which I began seriously to wonder if he was going to punch through the floor with his cane. The question I most wanted to ask was 'Why?' Why do they believe the things they believe? It seems strange to me, that people who write a literature so grounded in science, rationality, and logic can still find room for faith. I've never understood religion. I was never given any religious instruction of any kind as a child, and by the time someone mentioned the idea of God to me I'd already gotten hooked on science, and God just didn't strike me as plausible. Since then I've developed into what you might call a fairly militant atheist, and I have what you might charitably describe as a bit of a grudge against most organised religions and the idea of God. (At one point at Seattle's Pride festivities, I believe I said 'God loves my gay **** up his ***.') I couldn't think of a way to phrase my question that wouldn't be really wildly offensive, and so I held my tongue.
Swanwick, by the way, has written a novel, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, that involves an attempt to kill the deity. Very regrettably, I did not get a chance to hear James Morrow at all, who has written at some length about God's death. I did, however, catch a kaffeeklatsch with John Clute, a potent critic whose novel Appleseed also treats a war against the ultimate malevolence of God. I made a valiant effort to actually say something and ask him about that right at the very end, but we ran out of time. The session was mostly taken up discussing his thesis that we are heading towards the death or transformation of science fiction as the Industrial Revolution gives way to Something Else, and to a lot of questions about why Appleseed was so lingustically convoluted. (Which it is, though I enjoyed it; I counted the word 'circumambient' used thrice, and 'circumambiated' once.) Clute's an interesting fellow; you can tell he's Canadian. You can see it in his eyes. He occasionally uses British terms like 'suss'. He's also quite tall. I'll have more to say about him in another panel summary.
But the hour grows late, and I, your faithful bloggist, must retire for some much-deserved slumber. Part the second shall follow on the morrow.
Posted by aloysius at July 15, 2003 11:40 PM | TrackBack |