FOGcon time!
It's that time again! The time to tell the FOGcon programming committee what you're interested in talking about at FOGcon next year on March 8-10!
As always, FOGcon runs its programming on the Wiscon model, where when you think "Man, I wonder if I'll ever get the chance to see a Q&A session with Honored Guest Terry Bisson on short stories as an art form and a financially viable fiction selling model, or play a game of Eat Poop You Cat with Susan R. Matthews and other Bay Area writers, or take part in a bitter, heated public argument about whether Duv Galeni's dad was merely prescient and Barrayaran society was evolving towards the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism?" instead of just sighing wistfully and getting on with your day, you tell the programming committee! That these are things you would be interested in! Without any commitment to be on the programming or even to show up to the con, because they know that life is hard to plan for! And then all the programming is things that people are interested in and we don't end up with a schedule full of sad, 9 am five person panels on identifying alien woods.
This year's theme is Law, Order, and Crime:New times create new crimes.
As societies change, both law and crime evolve, and punishment changes as well. Advances in technology (or the workings of magic) make possible crimes that we could never have predicted, methods of crimefighting unforeseen, prisons unlike any we have now. If a dragon is a citizen, are they allowed to eat people? How do you imprison a telepath? How does a civilization of teleporters keep from descending into anarchy? What rights do aliens or androids have? How can vast empires covering many lightyears maintain some sort of order?
The implications are much broader than the basic question of whodunnit. We are currently seeing major shifts in the balance between the individual and the state, privacy and convenience, freedom and security.
Speculative fiction has always explored questions like these, and the results have been some of our finest fictions. At FOGcon 3, we’re going to be discussing those questions and possible answers for our own future.
And once again, I got to do the program cover illustration.
I'm pretty pleased with it.
Note also that this year FOGcon is running a student writing contest! It's open to anyone enrolled at a Bay Area high school or university. The prize is a free membership to the con and the opportunity to publicly read the story as part of programming.
ETA: WRT the illustration, I feel like I need to mention that in my original idea, the astronaut's background was a room, and the starfield was tritely reflected across the astronaut's visor. It was imnotandrei who had the insight that the astronaut should be imprisoned in space.
ETA 2: I of course wanted the astronaut to be gender neutral, but after that change he became Rocket Man to me. Now I get an earworm every time I see the drawing.
(Crossposted to http://metaphortunate.dreamwidth.org/37588.html with
comments.)
As always, FOGcon runs its programming on the Wiscon model, where when you think "Man, I wonder if I'll ever get the chance to see a Q&A session with Honored Guest Terry Bisson on short stories as an art form and a financially viable fiction selling model, or play a game of Eat Poop You Cat with Susan R. Matthews and other Bay Area writers, or take part in a bitter, heated public argument about whether Duv Galeni's dad was merely prescient and Barrayaran society was evolving towards the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism?" instead of just sighing wistfully and getting on with your day, you tell the programming committee! That these are things you would be interested in! Without any commitment to be on the programming or even to show up to the con, because they know that life is hard to plan for! And then all the programming is things that people are interested in and we don't end up with a schedule full of sad, 9 am five person panels on identifying alien woods.
This year's theme is Law, Order, and Crime:New times create new crimes.
As societies change, both law and crime evolve, and punishment changes as well. Advances in technology (or the workings of magic) make possible crimes that we could never have predicted, methods of crimefighting unforeseen, prisons unlike any we have now. If a dragon is a citizen, are they allowed to eat people? How do you imprison a telepath? How does a civilization of teleporters keep from descending into anarchy? What rights do aliens or androids have? How can vast empires covering many lightyears maintain some sort of order?
The implications are much broader than the basic question of whodunnit. We are currently seeing major shifts in the balance between the individual and the state, privacy and convenience, freedom and security.
Speculative fiction has always explored questions like these, and the results have been some of our finest fictions. At FOGcon 3, we’re going to be discussing those questions and possible answers for our own future.
And once again, I got to do the program cover illustration.
I'm pretty pleased with it.
Note also that this year FOGcon is running a student writing contest! It's open to anyone enrolled at a Bay Area high school or university. The prize is a free membership to the con and the opportunity to publicly read the story as part of programming.
ETA: WRT the illustration, I feel like I need to mention that in my original idea, the astronaut's background was a room, and the starfield was tritely reflected across the astronaut's visor. It was imnotandrei who had the insight that the astronaut should be imprisoned in space.
ETA 2: I of course wanted the astronaut to be gender neutral, but after that change he became Rocket Man to me. Now I get an earworm every time I see the drawing.
(Crossposted to http://metaphortunate.dreamwidth.org/37588.html with
comments.)