yaaargh

Oh coworker. I fully sympathize with your desire to make long personal phone calls on company time. And yet. Is the multi-stall bathroom really the best location? Have you adequately considered the issue of, um, background noise? Not to mention the psychological effect you may be having on your suittemates who are shy of bladder?

FOGcon 2012 wants your programming suggestions!

FOGcon is looking for programming suggestions.

Because I had my little timesuck this year, I am not involved in organizing this year's FOGcon: except that they asked me if I wanted to do the cover again, and I said YES. Because I knew immediately what I wanted to do. Which is not what it was like last year. Last year I had the most enormous trouble getting inspired. I almost punted, actually. And if you saw last year's cover you may have noticed that it had fuck all to do with last year's theme, The City.

But this year's theme is The Body. And every single revision that I've made to my very first sketch back in September has only been trying to more clearly draw out the drawing's themes of paranoia, alienation, fracturing, vulnerability, and early 70s science fiction.

Because that is apparently what I think of when I think of The Body.

The running figure in the drawing is fat for two reasons. First, fat people should be represented in visual depictions of the world, because we exist, and no one else is going to do it, so I guess I have to. But more importantly: a fat body seems more embodied to me. I mean, there is literally more body there. But also - Le Corbusier famously said that the house was a machine for living in, but it seems to me that that is also not a bad description of the current ideal of the body. It should be sleek, efficient, speedy, featuring the hardness and lickable curves - and endlessly duplicatable aesthetic - of an Apple product. And yet it's not like that. It wobbles, it jiggles, it weighs, it sweats, it varies wildly from the spec. And fat bodies more than most. You can't ignore that about a fat body. A fat body shouts that the nature of the body is something very different from that ideal and that the reality cannot be successfully ignored for long.

What do you think of when you think of the body in science fiction? Tell the programming committee, so that we can talk about it at the end of March! Oh, I should mention that this year's Honored Guests are Nalo Hopkinson and Shelley Jackson - and Honored Ghost Mary Shelley - so there's some great places to start!