CONsensus ...

That a good time was had by all.

I'm rested up (just a bit) from last weekend's Worldcon, aka LoneStarCon 3 in sunny(!) San Antonio. (Up to 103 degrees. Yikes. But no matter the heat, the shaded, miles-long river walk was ever delightful.)

What did I do at the con? You name it! Attended a plethora of sessions. Hung out with fans and author colleagues, with editors and my agent. Cruised the dealers room and admired the art exhibit.

The programming committee gave me a nice variety of activities:

• Colossus, Skynet, or the Culture? A panel on our coming AI overlords.
• The Rapture of the Geeks. If, when, and how we'll upload our minds to the cloud.
• Care and Feeding of Your Aliens and Magical Beings. Who does convincing critters and how to roll your own.
• John W. Campbell Created it All. The contributions of, and myths about, one of the great editors.

But wait! There was more!

Deconstruction

I spent the weekend before last (i.e., August 5-8) in Raleigh, NC at ReConStruction / NASFiC (aka the Tenth Occasional North American Science Fiction Convention). NASFiCs are held in the years, like this year, that Worldcon is outside North America.

The con had a lot to offer, and I thank the organizers for their hard work and for including me in the program. I took part in four panels, did an autograph session (and thanks to all of you who came), and held a kaffee klatch. I synched up with friends usually scattered around the country, especially from among the MAFIA. (Acronym.com does not yet know it, but that's writers  Making Appearances Frequently In Analog.) I saw a bit of downtown Raleigh, which seems quite nice. All good fun. 

And yet ...

What's in a name?

In the beginning (as our beloved genre judges these things), we had scientifiction. It was the age of the pulps.

Scientifiction was a name only Hugo Gernsback could love. (Yes, that's opinion -- and I wait to see who can prove me wrong. Did anyone admit to liking the term once s/he wasn't submitting stories to the man?) Still, let it be remembered that Gernsback did a lot for the genre in its early days. The World Science Fiction Society honors his contributions each year with the prestigious Hugo Award.

Then the name became science fiction: tasteful and precise. A golden age began ...

Science fiction? Four syllables. It's madness! We can't expect anyone to expend that much energy. Can we? And so we got SF, an honest acronym and the tag I often use. But too many, evidently, found SF stuffy. That brings us -- ugh! -- to "sci fi."

Maybe "sci fi" was insufficiently cute. Some took to pronouncing it "skiffy."

I thought skiffy was as trite and self-deprecating as we could get. Silly me.

No lesser source than the New York Times tells us that the Sci Fi Channel is planning to rebrand itself as ... wait for it ... Syfy. Who would have imagined there was a way to make scientifiction sound good?

The more we disparage ourselves, the less surprised we should be that the broader community disparages our genre.

It's not too late. Say it ain't so, Sci Fi Channel.

Why IS fandon gray (Part II)

I blame Sesame Street.

Bert, Ernie, and company conditioned generations of kids to demand their information in tiny bites. And that learning must entertain. We can't require any of that pesky thinking and effort.

And the results? Pop-ups on TV remind us what we're watching. And newspaper audiences, like SF fandom, have become gray. For too many, news must fit on a screen -- and that screen is becoming an iPhone.

Mastering science takes time and effort. Ditto opening a new frontier. And -- here's a shocker -- both keep fading in popularity.

Why read the literature of the final frontier if you can't imagine ever getting there?

Why IS fandom gray? (Part I)

Or more precisely, why is science fiction losing mind share among the young(er)? I have a theory. Several actually, but I'll limit this post to one.

To wit: Not all SF takes place off Earth -- only most of it. And for many, to travel off-Earth must seem like yesterday's future.

Those of us of a certain age (i.e., gray- and non-haired) grew up with the excitement of the space race. The progress was dizzying: suborbital flights, orbital flights, orbital rendezvous ... . From Sputnik to One Small Step in twelve years. Inspiring!

But for anyone thirty five or younger, the manned space program has been endless circling of the Earth. For far too long, the program has been the international space station -- where nothing, besides construction and repairs, ever happens -- punctuated by shuttle disasters.

Not so inspiring.

If SF is mostly in space, and space is mostly (a) boringly repetitive and (b) your father's notion of the future -- why would you read it?

Judging by the numbers, you wouldn't. And that's a damn shame.

The purpose of space exploration isn't to inspire SF -- but one of the best uses of SF is to inspire space exploration. Because when we stop exploring -- and Earth itself is rather well explored -- we lose something of what humanity has always been about.