Hanging with my SF tribe

Last week I was blogging Fromm the ExCel centre, in the midst of Loncon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention.  A week later, and I'm back home, thinking about what a great time I had in London, and about how much I learned.

I spent a lot of time with other writers who 'get, the SFF genre. I also had my work critiqued by a group of fellow SFF writers.  My usual critiquers aren't SFF writers, and it was great to get feedback from my own tribe.  I didn't always agree with what they had to say, and some comments had me scratching my head wondering why they'd been made, but listening to the discussions made me feel like I belonged to this tribe,

Do AIs have gender?  Should they have?  Should we be using pronouns other than 'he' and 'she' to denote a multi-gendered future?  The whole idea of  "gender" gets challenged when the intelligence is manufactured and not a product of Darwinian evolution.  

I listened to a group of genre writers talk about how they got their agents.  For the first Angry Robot Ooen Door reading period hundreds of manuscripts were submitted.  Of those, the publisher sent out 65 requests for the full manuscript.  From those requests, 5 authors were signed up.  These writers shared tips on quizzing an agent who is interested in taking you on, and warned against grabbing the first agent interested in you.  And I got a sobering reminder that the query letter is more important than the manuscript.

One of the best mind-expanding lectures was "The Post-Human Future", delivered by the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees.  "Too many people think that humans are the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree", he said.  "No astronomer can believe that."  He offered the sobering thought that this century might be "the final century" for humans.  He talked of global warming, the dark side of tech development, space and space tourism, and life elsewhere.  And speculated that space could contain a quantum computer the size of a galaxy.

Fact - or at least, hard science speculation - segued into fiction as I went from the lecture to the fan village and stood by the Tardis.  And this was the wonder of Loncon 3.  You could have spent all five days going to serious science lectures and dealt with nothing but hard reality.  But if you're a dreamer and an SF writer like me, absorbing a heady mix of fact and fiction will keep me going for months.  Loncon 3 was one of those magical experiences that will never be repeated, but will live for ever in my memory.