FOGCon! Yay! This is a small but intense local con, focusing on literary science fiction and fantasy, held every year in Walnut Creek, California. This year the con is at the Walnut Creek Marriott hotel. The theme is “Transformations”, and with a new novel (Outcasts: A Novel of Mary Shelley) about the writing of Frankenstein coming out in a couple of months, this is the perfect con for me!
I will be here all weekend at FOGCon in Walnut Creek, either on panels, book signings, heckling panelists from the back row, or hanging around the dealers’ room trying to decide between the dragons-blood tea or the light saber. Here’s my schedule:
They Walk Among Us, Saturday March 12, 9:30 to 10:45 PM, Salon C
Some of the scariest monsters in fiction are those who can assume human form. From werewolves to the Kandra of Sanderson’s Mistborn series, from Dr. Jekyll and his notorious other half to the Thing from Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”, these monsters make us look at everyone around us in a new, paranoid light. Some books use this fear better than others, and our panelists will discuss the best and worst uses of the “monsters who can look just like us” trope in popular fiction.
Homo Sapiens Tekhne, Sunday March 13, 10:30 to 11:45 AM, Salon A/B
We are, some say, becoming more and more dependent on technology to survive — from my glasses or medications to my friends’ mobility aids or prosthetic limbs, technology is making it easier for those of us who aren’t so young or so hale to be engaged in the world around us. At the same time, more and more people are interested in “hacking” the human body, whether that’s implanting magnets under the skin or implanting circuits or devices. What does it mean to be human when some of us are more after-factory parts than not? What’s possible now, and what may be possible in the future? How will the growing technological and economic divide affect the cultural changes involved? Is our technology actually changing how our brains work?
If any of my readers here are at the con, look me up. We can discuss X-Files or the current state of sci-fi or the heat death of the universe, whatever comes to mind. See you there!