Which way to the mainstream?

Jen managed to talk Diane and Stacey into attending this year's Readercon - a science fiction book festival in Burlington MA. None of us are avid science fiction readers but we have enjoyed some crossover books like The Sparrow and The Unit (Diane is laughing right now because I wrote "unit").


We soon discovered that Readercon is not for the lightweight, dabbling, scifi wanna be's....We attended two panels - Starmaker My Destination: Telelogical SF and Orphans of the Time Stream. We walked out of both after about 20 minutes. I remember hearing these words:

• wormhole
• trope (as in "what is your favorite trope?")
• Stephen Hawking
• space travel
• speculative psuedo-religious consolation
• Stapledonian

which, when combined with some sort of science geek speak, made absolutely no sense to us whatsoever. We tried 2 different reading sessions which were ill conceived - the first was a ghost short story that was too long for the allotted time so we never heard the ending! The second was a zombie story...but the author read 20 minutes of zombie free material.


There was a variety of....interesting people....that attended this festival. I had the pleasure of sitting behind a main who looked completely ordinary save for the 2 foot braided 'rat tail' hairstyle dangling in front of me. Duel colored hair, faerie tattoos, and a general lack of fashion sense was prevalent. But it got us wondering - are WE the freaks here? Are they mocking our Ann Taylor t-shirts and tasteful coach bags?
We were totally fascinated by the cool plastic name tags though. So maybe there is a little geek in all of us.