Well, I’m back now, from my weekend at Polaris — where we spoke of Balthar’s nosebleed and Dexter’s fake orgasms; Cronenberg’s Dracula and Cordwainer Bird’s The Starlost; novels that are too long to sell, and stories that are too short to bother about. All in all, a good, busy weekend out, spent talking to people who could get all of those references without batting an eye. Polaris ain’t no literary convention, but it ain’t illiterate neither. So there were the giant Klingons and tiny cosplayers that would’ve been shown the door at Readercon, along with all the talk about the politics of Battlestar Galactica and the dynamics of the short fiction market and other sf-nal things you could want. A feast for the eye and the mind.
Some shout-outs, now, to cool people I met for the first time, like Nebraska sf teen dynamo Shelly Li and Ottawa sf author-entrepreneur Barry Alder, and to old pals like Doug Smith, Peter Bloch-Hansen, Tanya Huff, Peter Watts (who rode shotgun on the dawn and midnight drives to and from the airport hotel), Derwin Mak and Christian Sauvé; and to Sherry Moore, who wing-manned me on the hard-sell of the third copy of The Claus Effect to the even-tempered woman at my, erm, sparsely-attended shall-we-say signing Sunday afternoon. And to Erik Buchanan, author of the new fantasy novel Small Magics, who gamely snagged the first.
And of course a big ovation goes to the organizers of Polaris, particularly Alana Otis and Lance Sibley, who made it all run so smoothly.
That Cronenberg thing is still making my wee little brain go *sproing*. And of course all the way home I was thinking of the things I should have said in panels, one of them being the missed opportunity to get some good discussion mileage out of Jennifer saying that Dracula is “a love story at its heart” just a few minutes after you had brought up the point about the love motivation not working and why. Still and all, I enjoyed the discussion immensely, and hope you did too!
P.S. And you’re on the shiny new portion of the People I Need To Read list. It grew quite a bit this weekend…
It probably bears mentioning at this point that there is no Cronenberg’s Dracula (for those, like me, who vainly google and google and google the phrase “Cronenberg’s Dracula,” in hope that googling will make it so). It was just a notion that came up during the Dracula panel, when we started riffing on which directors could profitably remake the old property into something worth the price of admission.
On reflection, I think the only thing better than a Cronenberg Dracula would be a Cronenberg Dracula in 3D. But I’m getting silly.
I did have a great time on the panel, Valerie. Good discussion all around! (And although clearly outnumbered, I maintain that Dracula is not, no-how, no-way, a love story).
I’m glad you had a good time! Thanks very much for being such an excellent guest. (And also, thank you for offering to drive Peter back and forth. I think I knew he was a non-driver, but it never occurred to me to ask him if he was staying at the hotel or commuting.)
Lance