Talking about what you love

I sit here with a cup of decaf tea by my side, about to play some Broken Sword V (it is astonishing to me that they are still making new entries for my very first point and click game), and thinking about how, in June of this year, I'll be getting up in front of a room full of people at CRSF 2014 and telling them what I think about narrative in computer games. This will be the tenth time I speak at a conference, my fifth time internationally. My first conference was terrifying; it was at 'The Politics, Poetics and Philosophy of Battlestar Galactica', at Buckinghamshire Chilterns New University back in 2007. I was terrified; I had finished my undergraduate degree so recently, I hadn't even had my graduation ceremony yet. At the time I was working a job with only ten hours between shifts, proofing Masters' students dissertations, and trying to get two buses to my college library on my days off to read up on Judith Butler's identity theory. On top of that, despite owning season three of Battlestar Galactica, I hadn't finished watching it by the time I flew over. I did not have high hopes for how the paper would go. When I received the line up, I was even more distressed; I was speaking between two doctors! Seventeen years of speech and drama training almost went out the window when I got up there and tried to adlib some jokes, leading to one academic commenting on how I didn't like Baltar much. (For the record, I do like Baltar. He was just an easy target for me that day.)

But it went well. The question and answer session (which managed to turn all my internal organs to stone at the mention) was not as heinous as I had feared. I was among people who were genuinely interested in my ideas and in helping to improve them. I loved it. I was also fortunate enough to meet Roz Kaveney that day, though, to my shame, I did not discover the full awesomeness of the woman until much later and so did not appreciate her presence as I should have. A wonderful upshot of the conference was my eventual inclusion in Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: MissionAccomplished or Mission Frakked Up?, first with the brilliantly named 'I Frak, Therefore I am' (the editors' idea and I still adore it), and secondly with the anonymous 'Dreamers in the Night' (we were making a final five joke. I still like that too).

Since that fateful 2007, I have spoken in Ireland, England, and Scotland on European science fiction, slasher films and 70s feminist science fiction, science fiction within science fiction, Fringe, Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman, Lord of the Rings and Metropolis (which landed me in JRR Tolkien: the Forest and the City), science fiction in the Irish literary canon, and zombies. I have been very lucky; these conferences were all organised by brilliant, enthusiastic people, and I have fond memories of all of them -- though few things will top my delight at being called "Bold, in both senses of the word" by the conference organiser at the University of Aberdeen for saying Samuel Beckett's Endgame could be read as a post-apocalyptic text.

Thinking about this, and about how meeting people as interested in genre fiction as I am has helped my own critical thinking, I start to consider how I got into all this in the first place. It comes down to wanting to talk about the things I've read and seen, wanting to dissect them, find out what they're doing. One of the infinity of things I love about the Young Man is that he likes to discuss texts just as much as I do (and he's good at it too. I am very lucky). We could talk for the rest of our lives about the books, movies, and television shows we've seen, and never get tired of it.

My love of literary criticism also comes back, as so many things do for me, to Douglas Adams. I think I was about eleven or twelve when I found a tape in my house called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Having nothing better to do, I put it in and watched it. Despite only having the first couple of episodes, I relished it, but it stuck in my head not just because it was science fiction and it was funny. It stuck in my head because Adams spent the first few minutes making me laugh and then, just when I was comfortable, he gave us that terrible silence when the Earth was destroyed. And I couldn't understand how I felt about it. To some extent I still don't, which is why I research Adams's worldbuilding, and why I research other genre fiction. In the end, I want to know why I react the way I do to these texts.

There is, to me, something inherently beautiful about genre fiction, no matter the medium. It is an expression of something someone has created from themselves, and from the knowledge and experience they have to hand. It is crafting, weaving words and imagery into art. It is taking a journey and hoping the reader is willing to join them, walk the paths of this new world with them, to fill in the gaps they have left in the building with what the reader knows would be there. It is something potentially so fragile a single word could break it, and so strong that a million people will invest their time and energy into loving it. Speculative fiction is about the places which have never been, could never be, might never be; it is the child of imagination and intelligence and joy in different words, different images, different places. It is a celebration of hope, despair, joy, hatred, fear, faith, and wonder. While I accept not everyone will like it, it is genuinely hard for me to understand why anyone wouldn't. These are adventures the like of which we can never find for ourselves, paths we cannot take, roads which do not exist in our world. Who wouldn't want to walk down those roads?

So I go to conferences and I meet people who love these things, these imagined worlds and people, just as much as I do; who seek to find the meaning in the texts just as I want to, and to enjoy them as they do. It is, I have found, a nourishment for my soul, as doing what you love always is. If I could have a lifetime of talking about these things, I will find my life well-spent.

But in the meantime, I'm going to have my tea, and indulge my love of computer games. Because you can love a lot of things at once in this world. That's why it's the best one.