KJ

I am now home!

( Day 2 )

( Day 3 )

I'm so glad that the show went on, although I also don't fault anyone who chose not to risk it. I really enjoy my little home convention, and I'm looking forward to seeing what next year will bring.

The con is happening as planned! (Although without one of the Guests of Honor, Nisi Shawl, who is not traveling on the advice of their doctor. Entirely understandable, given the circumstances.)

If you're going to be there, give me a shout and we can meet up. From a respectable distance, of course. :) I'm also on one panel: Saturday at 4:30, Cities in Science Fiction, along with forestofglory.

It was a bummer to miss FogCon last year, so I'm really glad it's still going to happen. Now, off to finish packing!

I'm not expecting that the day is over yet, because it's only 9:30 which is way too early for me to go to bed, but I decided I needed a break from public spaces, so I'm back in my room for a bit, to relax and do my write-up for the day.

I started my day with a turn through the dealer's room, where I didn't buy anything but might tomorrow, and then went to a reading. I was mostly there for Marie Brennan, who read one of my favorite of her short stories. Of the others, the one I particularly liked was Dominica Phetteplace; she was on the aliens panel the day before, and said good and thought-provoking things, so I was looking forward to hearing her work. I was not disappointed, and will mostly likely seek out more of her fiction.

Afterwards was the lunch banquet, where I was joined by forestofglory, Jed, Mary Anne, and SE, who finally came to FogCon for the first time after my literal years of attempts to lure her here. Next I went to a panel on gender in the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer, who is one of the guests of honor this year. For some reason I had expected it to look at the topic of gender in fiction more generally, and as soon as it became clear that the discussion was going to focus firmly on a series that I mostly haven't read (I think I washed out after the first chapter of the first book), I should probably have left for the panel next door (on information overload). But I stuck it out, and it was still interesting. Especially as possibly the only panel I've ever attended that was mostly critical of the work of a con guest of honor.

And then it was time for my panel! We talked about taking the Bradford Challenge and other attempts to diversify our reading lists. I felt like we had a pretty great discussion about the benefits and challenges of reading more diversely, and then we spent a good fifteen minutes rec'cing books. I feel like I've gotten better at doing panels with time -- I guess last year's four-panel trial-by-fire at Wiscon was good for something! The last event before dinner was a panel with the title "Glorious, Bonkers Romance", which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like. This one was just fun. Probably the most bonkers of all the bonkers settings was The Iron Seas series by Meljean Brook, an alternate history setting where our world was largely conquered by the Mongols, who then developed mind control nanotech that infects everyone they've conquered, and there are kraken and orgies, and a island of lesbian separatists that is guarded by giant robots, and when the moderator was describing the books at first I thought they were talking about multiple series of books, but no! I asked, and both the mod and SE confirmed that this is all one world. I am tempted to check these out just for the world-building alone.

Then dinner, in the hotel restaurant, followed by my last structured event for the night: a reading and performance by the other honored guest for the weekend, Andrea Hairston. She's a playwright and stage director, and she put on a really wonderful show along with her collaborator Pan Morigan.

Now it's time to chill here a bit more, then decide where to wander next: maybe the bar, maybe the consuite, maybe some other adventure. Whatever it is, today has been a good day.

I have returned! Yet another successful FogCon: in the books. Probably jamming two days into one post is too much, but no matter how much I tell myself I can wait for tomorrow to write about today, the fact is I'm very unlikely to do it.

My first panel of the day might also have been the best of the con, and certainly the one that I heard the most people talking about over the rest of the weekend. It was entitled "When Do You Pick Up A Blaster?" and was about revolution: how revolution is depicted in speculative fiction, what fiction gets right and wrong, what can we learn about real-life uprisings from fictional ones, and what is, or should be, the tipping point for the decision to use violence as a tool. One of the panelists, guest of honor Ayize Jama-Everett, suggested that there are types of violence other than physical, namely social and economic violence, and said that the "objective of violence is free the colonized mind from the colonizer. How you define violence is an interesting topic -- another panelist said that he doesn't consider property damage, like bombing empty buildings and shattering store windows, to be the same thing as violence, and although I'm not convinced I agree, it's an interesting point. (Or going back to the previous point, you could consider it a form of economic violence against the property owners). To cover the discussion property would take better notes than I took, but a few other points I wanted to consider: a definition of revolution as when the unimaginable becomes commonplace; the suggestion that you should be willing to risk dying before you risk killing; that you lose something when you fight, even when you win (sometimes it's worth it, but take the costs into considerations); revolution will always take longer than you think it will. As you might imagine, I got a lot to think about here, and took more notes than during any other panel. Lots of discussion centered around the Black Panther Party, and although I'm going to save most of my book recs for another post, I wanted to make note of one here: Black Against Empire, a recent history of the Black Panthers.

Lunch was the annual FogCon banquet, where I sat with friends old and new and chatted about a number of things -- for one, I ran into a fellow Dragon Age fan, and then we decided to stop boring the rest of the table to death and talk about the Hugos instead. Then my afternoon consisted of two guest of honor events. First was an interview with the other guest of honor, Delia Sherman, who talked about her writing process and her stories. After that, Ayize Jama-Everett gave his GoH presentation, a conversation with Afrofuturist Lonny Brooks. The theme of the talk was Jama-Everett asking Brooks to help him imagine a future that isn't bleak. A challenging project in these times, but I think also a worthy one. Some of Brooks's ideas included looking at Peter Diamandis and his thoughts on abundance, platform cooperativism (a worker-centric alternative to the so-called sharing economy promoted by companies like Airbnb and Uber), and diverse communities that celebrate difference rather than fighting against it or practicing separatism.

After dinner -- I crashed an event for members of a writing message board, and had a great chat with a doctor from Illinois whose name I unfortunately cannot remember -- was my one panel of the con, "Between the Pixie and the Crone: Middle Aged Women in Speculative Fiction". Other members of the panel included the aforementioned GoH Delia Sherman and the always-entertaining Ellen Klages, so that was not intimidating at all. Unrelated in any way to the panelists (they were all great), the discussion got tense in a couple of places, which I think is a risk with any panel on a topic that deals in a trope about women at a con that tries to be feminist -- it's going to hit too close to home for some people, feel completely off the mark to others, and it's easy to fall into talking stereotypes. But overall I think it went pretty well. Folks seemed engaged, asked good questions and made good recommendations, and almost no one left before the end, which are all positives, and I got to make most of the points I had planned, including a comment about not falling into the trap of defining all women by their relationship to motherhood, even including women who are mothers, which got a little "whoop!" from someone in the crowd. Last up was a panel on podcasting, which focused almost exclusively on fiction podcasts and never even got to fannish pop culture reviews, although I did get to rec Black Tapes and found a few new shows to look up. Afterwards I wandered by the bar, where I hung out for a little bit before bedtime.

Today I took it a little easier, as I usually try to do on the last day of the con. The first panel of the morning was the guest of honor reading, which I always try to attend and almost never disappoints. I was completely sucked in by Ayize Jama-Everett's reading and bought all three of his books (the only other time that's happened was all the way back in FogCon2, after Nalo Hopkinson read from The Chaos). For lunch I walked over to the farmer's market with forestofglory, and after I went one last panel on how to write dystopian fiction in the age of alternative facts. The panelists agreed that, for all the stories where false information is commonplace and fed to people by the government, no one ever saw coming that we would impose the world of wrong facts on ourselves, without a repressive regime forcing us into it. The discussion was mostly about real-world information bubbles and info overload, less about fiction, but it was still interesting. As usual in this type of conversation, I walked away convinced that librarians are more necessary than ever, and I need to do a better job of turning my information literacy skills into political activism.

Next up: WisCon! Two and a half months away, and I can hardly wait.

Today I went to two events (a reading and a panel), and also had a lovely, wide-ranging lunchtime chat with someone I met randomly in the bar. Maybe it just takes me this many years of being in the same place with largely the same people to get comfortable putting myself forward like this. I thought about staying for the post-con feedback session, but decided it was time to leave Con World for everyday life.

First up was the honored guest reading (which is always on Sunday morning and always a must-see for me). Ted Chiang (whose panels I somehow managed to completely miss) gave an excellent and thought-provoking talk about life-logging and its potential effects on memory, both good and bad, a sort of non-fictional response to his story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling. Donna Haraway read from her work in progress (and covered very much the same ground as the presentation she gave yesterday; it was well down, but I found myself wishing that she had done something different). And Jo Walton read a sonnet and the opening section of her book The Just City, which may have moved somewhat further up my to-read list. Walton is a particularly gifted reader -- she infuses her words with life and humor.

After lunch came the Draconic Appreciation Society panel, for which I had high hopes, and those hopes were realized. Marie Brennan was on it -- always a plus in a panel, for me, but especially since I really love the dragon series she's currently writing (the Isabela Trent books). Jo Walton was on the panel as well, and it was just generally a good mix of entertaining panel and enthusiastic audience. Discussion started with the history of dragon myths in Europe, and Jo Walton's theory that Northern dragons are based on stories about snake creatures -- when there were no snakes in Scandinavia. From there, they talked about dragons in different cultures (and the curious fact that many different types of creatures are all recognizable as dragons), books that disappoint their readers by having dragons in the title but not in the story, whether dragons always mean fantasy (like space ships always mean science fiction) and what that means for books like Pern, and whether the discovery that dinosaurs had feathers is going to start influencing dragon design in the future. I was actually the first person to bring up the Temeraire series, in the context of dragons as partners to humans rather than either pets (ala Pern) or threats (like Smaug or Dragon Age), but then someone in the audience linked that to the different dragon myths in cultures around the world.

Afterwards, I had my second opportunity of the weekend to geek out over Dragon Age with Marie Brennan, which is one of the things that has most boggled my mind about going to cons: the idea of chatting with authors who I admire about totally unrelated works that we're both fans of. I'm glad to be getting less shy about that sort of thing, and I hope I'm able to not become completely star-struck when the time comes at WisCon.

Turns out it's difficult to spend a whole lot of time documenting your con experience when you're busy participating in the con experience! ;) So, no real-time updates today, but both of my panels went really well, I think -- we got good discussion going, and I feel like I made useful contributions, and people said complementary things afterwards. I also hung out with forestsofglory, had dinner with friends, and played a game of Pandemic with Jed (which we lost, badly), and dropped by zahraa and zyxwvut's room party, and have just generally enjoyed chatting with people and listening in to good conversations. Now I am winding down before sleep, getting ready for the long full-con day tomorrow. My active participation parts are done, so now I get to go be in the audience for the rest of the weekend. I kind of wish my panels had been spread out better, but on the other hand it's nice to just relax, too.

I'm making good on my personal threat to attend lots of cons in 2016: I've now registered for FogCon (as always), WisCon (which I've been meaning to attend for a few years now and the stars finally aligned), and WesterCon (SE's suggestion; Scalzi is the guest of honor, and it's in Portland, which is a city I've always meant to spend more time in). So that's the first half of 2016 scheduled up.

I finally watched Daredevil. I'd been meaning to get to it for awhile; wanting to finish before Jessica Jones drops next month finally pushed it up the queue. Overall I enjoyed it, although I also had some issues. Some of the more pressing complaints are detailed in this Tumblr post ('ware major spoilers). I want to write a longer post about it soon.

Instead of other things I'd been meaning to read, I picked up the biography of Alice B. Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr.). I've never read any of Tiptree's fiction, but I've heard the bio is excellent, and so far it has delivered.

Finally, just because I haven't posted about it here doesn't mean I'm not caught in the full throes of a Hamilton obsession. If you've been wondering what the heck Hamilton is, or this is somehow the first you've ever heard of it, the short answer is that it's a Broadway musical based on the life of Alexander Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The cast album was released a few weeks ago, and made available to listen online shortly before that, and half the Internet has been freaking out over it ever since. Here's a good primer (thanks to umadoshi for the link). If you want a taste of it without committing to the whole album (although it's free on Spotify), check out Miranda's White House performance of an early version of the first song. Warning for highly addictive earworms.

I feel derelict in my duties for not having written up more of my FogCon experience, but maybe it's okay that I just experienced it this year, rather than feeling the need to write it down. I did get involved in an interesting conversation about cultural appropriation and assimilation tropes at the last panel I attended. We were a small group in a large room and would probably have been better off sitting in a circle, but it worked out. I got to recommend "The Goblin Emperor" and a Kate Elliott essay, so my work was done. (I also rec'd Goblin Emperor in a conversation in the con suite, and I rec it to everyone reading this post as well. It is just That Good.)

One sort of recurring theme for me at FogCon is that I'm not very good at making lasting connections. I make contributions to discussions in the structured context of a panel, and I'll force myself out of my shell to make conversation during unstructured time, but it's very rare for such an interaction to end even with the exchange of contact information. So I have no way to continue the connection beyond the con, and when I come back the next year, I feel as though I'm starting all over again, even after five years of seeing many of the same people around.

This year, I actually opened up to a few people on my feelings about this, and I discovered other folks who feel much the same way. So I'm glad it's not just me. At the post-mortem session, I thought about saying something, but my thoughts aren't well-formed enough on this point to say anything coherent, and I'm not sure there's much the con culture could do about it anyway -- I have similar feelings about the professional librarian conferences I've attended, after all, so it is at least partly on me! For one thing, I do intend to seek out more folks on social media and see if I can be at least a bit more engaged. So if you're reading this post because I've recently added you on some platform or another, and you're trying to figure out why, now you know. :) Also I renew my semi-regular pledge to attempt to engage on Twitter more, since that's where so much of the sf/f fandom action is these days.

Will it make a difference in future years? Maybe. It certainly can't hurt, and having more cool people in my online social circles is always a good thing. I have hope for it, anyway.

Do others of you who go to cons feel this way? If so, what if anything have you done about it? I'd be interested to hear about other people's experiences.

I finally stopped forgetting to register for FogCon today. I don't know why I didn't just do it at the end of the con. Means I missed all the early bird rates but oh well. I also got a hotel room and raised my hand to be on a couple of panels, both fanwork-related. Even if I'm not a panelist, I hope at least one of them makes it onto the track -- as far as I know, there's never been a panel about fanfic and/or transformative work at FogCon, so it's high time we had one. (Yes, I realize I could have just proposed one. But I never came up with a good angle. So I'm glad someone else finally did that for me.)

Anyone else going?

Another day of good panels and good chats. Also, they announced not just the theme for next year's con ("The Traveler"), but the guests of honor: Kim Stanley Robinson and Cat Valente. Color me officially excited!

( Some thoughts )

One day more.