metaphortunate son

Got my FOGcon assignment!

I'll be on A Great Read with Lisa Eckstein, @sairaforreal, and two more awesome people whom I see now (oops, sorry guys) are listed as "anonymous" so I won't mention them unless they say to but seriously they are friends of mine and SWEEEET. I am especially looking forward to this because we will be talking about:

Slow River, by Nicola Griffith

which is an excellent lesbian cyberpunk book about street crime, corporate crime, and sewage. And it is also pretty interesting to contrast it with Solitaire, written by Ms. Griffith's partner Kelley Eskridge, which is also a lesbian cyberpunk book; but which is less about sewage and more about being an introvert and getting lost in your own head. So to speak. Together they are the best fiction that I know of ever written about project management. Solitaire isn't officially part of the panel, but I know that at least two of us loved it, so it may come up.

Incidentally, Slow River won the Nebula award in 1996, beating out Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age; and apparently this so incensed John Scalzi's fundraising troll that 17 years later he needs to run for president of SFWA. Or something. Anyway, if you want to see what the fuss is about, pick up a copy of Slow River and come see our panel! Saturday March 9, 10:30 am.

A brief quote on the book by Ms. Griffith:

Not long after I sent the Slow River outline to my agent, she called:

"This is not a selling outline."

"Why not?"

"Well," she said, "in Ammonite Marghe had a girlfriend because she had no choice, poor thing. But why does Lore like girls?"

"Because she's a dyke, Fran," and I fired her.

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!