Freesteel Blog » SF con in Scotland

SF con in Scotland

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 11:01 am Written by:

Just come from this Science Fiction convention in Glasgow. Four days of beer, listening to talks, and sleeping in the middle of a little patch of trees in the carpark by the river (I am an extraordinary a cheapskate when it comes to hotels). I think I enjoyed it, though I can’t remember much specifically. It’ll come back. Maybe what was most enjoyable was being unable to do anything with a computer for such an extended period. It gave my field of vision time to recover. At 70 quid connection fee in the hotel, no one there was online.

I did see five other guys I knew from university 17 years ago when we were all in the SF society and met every week. I barely had a conversation with most of them. I am regularly surprised by what a boring person I can be in certain contact situations. Ask about work, it’s always programming computers for all of us. One often has to struggle after that. Two now work on stock exchange trading/life insurance software. Given as I believe that the entire financial “services” sector is a con-trick from start to finish, it can be like meeting a nice RAF man and trying not to ask how many children he’s bombed to defend British interests. Oh dear.

Science Fiction is in some ways an extraordinarily conservative genre. Its usual performance is to take some huge lie, like the ideas that there are time travel machines, gods, parallel universes, thinking computers, an infinite energy supply, no global warming; and then make it the truth. It’s very rare to take something we all believe in, like nationhood, or the existence of money, and write a story which exposes it as the lie that it is.

I am still looking for an effective way to put my one sold story online so it looks good.

Now in Aberdeen visiting my ma for a couple of days. It’s a long way up here. There is a heck of a lot of Scotland, especially the coast. Hope to do some trips in the summer if we get lucky with cars. It seems impossible to hire ones that can carry sea canoes.

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