At WisCon

I've been reading science fiction since I was 11 or so, but I've never been to a science fiction convention. Not sure why.

So a friend asked if I wanted to travel to Madison for the annual WisCon, which is a 32-year-old feminist science fiction and fantasy convention. It was a great trip, with panels on topics related to Part of the Solution (as it plays out in science fiction), the boundaries that surround young adult fantasy novel content, and what themes and writers we, as readers, "can't forgive" for their politics, writing ability, or what have you.

The moment that I loved but felt torn by was at 2 p.m. Saturday, when there were three separate panels that included writers I would normally go out of my way to see:

• Tamora Pierce (author of the Alanna the Lioness and Lady Knight series) on villains in YA fantasy
• Amy Thomson (author of The Color of Distance) on the rights of simulacra (such as robots), and
• Lyda Morehouse (author of the Archangel Protocol series) on the travails of writing endings.

I was torn, but since I had already gotten to see Tamora discussing another topic, and had sort of met Amy the night before at a party, I opted for the Lyda Morehouse option. She is on my all-time favorites list, after all.

The sessions that I think of as Part of the Solution were both invigorating and overwhelming, of course. The general consensus on how long humans have until we've reached the environmental tipping point varied from "we've already reached it" to "we already passed it" to an optimistic 25 more years.

The session that offered the most suggestive approach was called Soylent Green or Just Plain Soy? and dealt with vegetarianism and especially veganism as a partial way out of the carbon footprint dilemma. Local food and growing your own food came up as well, including reference to Milwaukee's Growing Power that I have written about before. In a fiction context, all of this translates into a question of how we imagine utopia -- with a diet based on animal consumption or not, with food technology or food localism providing the key to solving our problems. At least one of the panelists was involved with a blog called vegansofcolor.wordpress.com, and there was a general racial justice perspective on the topic that I appreciated.

One amusing thing about the convention (at least to me) is the fact that I kept mis-seeing the WisCon logo. It's a fine example of how we read by seeing each word's shape, rather than reading it letter by letter. As you may know, I am a Twin Cities co-op hanger-on, so the word I kept confusing with the WisCon logo was the old Wedge co-op logo. See what you think:



I know, I know, one word is sans serif, while the other is serif. But both are slanted (italic), beginning with W. The "is" in WisCon is about the same width as the "e" in Wedge. The capital C in WisCon is located at about the same spot as the "d" in Wedge, and the tail of the woman symbol in WisCon parallels the "g" in Wedge.

Now that I see them side by side like this, I have to admit it's a bit of a stretch, but when I kept seeing WisCon out of the corner of my eye on all the conference name badges, my brain read "Wedge."