I am not long back from a trip to the States. Virginia Beach, VA to be precise, where I was the featured science fiction guest at Marscon 2025. After a rather more eventful trip than I would have liked (it is, in fact, possible to enter the United States on an expired passport) I reached my destination and spent an amazing four days surrounded by weird, wonderful and stimulaing people.
I must confess I did not fully appreciate what I was signing up for until after I arrived. I had assumed, because, like the terrible lawyer I like to think I’m not, I had failed to read the fine print. I had thought that Marscon was a SF book festival. It is not. It is way, way more than that. The first clue was the cloaked wizard who turned up at registration. Followed by the Star Fleet officer. And the Japanese vampire. Full disclosure, I had no idea what a Japanese vampire looks like. Someone else in line said: “Hey. Are you a Japanese vampire?” To which the reply was, “Yes.” You learn something new every day. Sometimes several new somethings.
Marscon is a full-blown fan convention. It has SF writers to be sure, accompanied by their Horror and Fantasy cousins. But it also has gamers, and costume competitions, and art, and music. The music was both incredibly good and incredibly geeky. For a sense of what that means, let me introduce you to House Rules by Rhiannon’s Lark, the musical guest of honor, a beautifully rendered folk homage to the perils of gaming under someone else’s roof. An experience to which I can relate!
Also, unlike a book festival, where your obligation generally extends to a one-hour panel where you will talk about your latest book alongside a couple of other authors, the science fiction guest of honor was expected to turn up to several panels, at none of which he talked about anything he’d written – or not much, anyway. I think my favorite was Your Weird Civilization Is Infringing on My Utopia, a discussion (mostly) about whether utopia was even desirable, never mind possible, and why people keep writing about them. One of my fellow panelists, Tory Brown, had spent time as a union organizer and I was very struck by one of the things she said: that no matter how miserable conditions might be at a non-unionized workplace, the hardest part of her job was getting people to even imagine that it could be different. Though Tory herself is a gamer, it brought home to me how important it is to write fiction. To write down things that are different. To help someone imagine. To pave a road across the undreaming desert, opening a path from “here” to “there.”
That is no small thing.