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.

Happy International Geek Day/International Towel Day/Glorious 25th May

When I was little, we would eat biscuits with milk and watch Star Trek. My brother and I would act out scenes from The Wrath of Khan. He was always Kirk.

When I was older, I watched The Next Generation. I was told I couldn't like science fiction because I was a girl. I was told I couldn't be good at maths because I was a girl. My classmates gave out to me when I turned up for a school tour in a Star Trek: Generations jumper. They made no sense to me. I knew who I was.

When I was older still, I watched Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Angel, Roswell, Angel and dozens of others. It was a golden age of science fiction and fantasy on television. I joined my local Star Trek club, of which I am still a proud member. I started to write science fiction, to read it more. I discovered Douglas Adams, and would spend hours in bookshops looking at his books, deciding which ones to buy with birthday and holiday money. Every week I would go in, checking to see if any of my favourite authors had a new book out. I never found out when books were due to be published. I didn't want to know. I just wanted to go look at the books and see for myself. Even if I'd known what Douglas Adams was like with deadlines, I would still have looked. I was given a gift of eighty classic science fiction books, twenty of them by Isaac Asimov. It was an education.

When I was in college, I discovered that I could study science fiction. I spent my twenty-first birthday at a Stargate conference in England. It was one of the best weekends of my life. I wrote a thesis on feminism and science fiction, discovering Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Kate Wilhelm, women who had written what I wanted to write. Women who spoke to me, writing back to them, silently thanking them for being there, for their voices. I entered a competition I'd entered a few times before. I found out I'd won while sitting in front of my laptop, writing another story. I wanted to psyche my mother out with the news, but I was too excited.

When I was in graduate school, I kept writing about science fiction. I found conferences where I could go and talk about and listen to things I wanted to know about my genre. I returned to Douglas Adams for my PhD and discovered that the old love of his work was still there. To this day, over eleven years after his death, I still look for the books with his name, with that same small sliver of hope that today there will be a new book by him. I started to game, and found myself around a table laden with dice and story sheets, laughing at something that no one else could understand, because they had not been there.

There's so much I can say. About how many of my oldest friends are geeks. About long conversations into early morning about anything and everything, wandering around the shows and books and films that have made up our cultural heritage. About how there is a joy in knowing that other people love what you love, and that you can argue about it and never fall out. About how you can get a hold of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish novels or Joss Whedon's television shows and films or Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Terry Pratchett's Discworld and find new ways of looking at your world, answers to the questions you couldn't put into words, new questions that had been hovering around, trying to get your attention. About how you can flirt with a guy over the word 'shiny'. About how my friends seem determined to gift me more sonic screwdrivers than I could possibly hope to use, to my joy. About how sometimes when you fly, you fall. About how it is through suffering that we reach out to each other, that we come through it together and are truly one people. About how you can tell a joke and a truth in one sentence. And more, so very much more than that.

So instead I will just say this: I am a geek. I am proud to be a geek. I hold the glorious 25th of May sacred and will be looking for lilac after work. I am a frood who knows where her towel is. It's on the printer next to me.

Live long and prosper, my shiny friends.

Funtimes

So I took an hour off this afternoon and got to have one of the most fun recurring experiences in my life. I went to the hairdressers and asked to get most of my hair cut off. They are always alarmed. Apparently, many people don't realise how short is short. I was going for something much longer than the pixie cut I've had before, so I was prepared and delighted to once again be sporting a manageable length of hair that, I've discovered, looks very fetching with a hairband.

I must purchase a wider range of hairbands.

Funtimes continued when I wandered to a bookshop and discovered that they have reprinted Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology. It looks fantastic, but beyond that, it is one of the best anthologies of SF that I have ever read. The stories were published in 1967 and includes Philiop José Farmer's 'Riders of the Purple Wage'. The sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions, features Joanna Russ's 'When It Changed', the precursor to the amazing The Female Man. The sequel doesn't appear to have been reprinted since the 1970s, which is a shame, because I think it has some of the better stories between the two anthologies. I read these when I was in my late teens/early twenties and they shaped my writing by introducing me to the 1970s New Wave. Science fiction, Ellison and his compatriots taught, could be really strange. I still haven't figured out some of the stories. SF could also be witty, funny and extremely subversive. It could be unrecognisable (though I think it was probably a good idea that Ellison warned the reader what they might expect). You guys should definitely take a look at those anthologies, because they are brilliant. And hey, if enough copies of Dangerous Visions sell, they might even reprint Again, Dangerous Visions in its own shiny new cover!