The evidence

Here are some con photos.

Four days on Raisa

Got home yesterday afternoon, after a brief post-con interlude with friends in Maidenhead, and now I feel the need to reflect on the whole puzzling Orbital experience. Puzzling because, in the main, I should not have enjoyed this, and the two other cons I have attended, anywhere near as much as I did since I am not in any way A Fan.

This is not to say that I don't like science fiction because I do, very much, and have done since my teens when I read first the excellent John Wyndham and then the less-than-excellent-and-extraordinarily-sexist Edmund Cooper, in some quantity. Fantasy too has been a occassional addition to my literary diet, beginning inevitably with LoTR at the age of about 14 and followed by a looooooooooooong dry spell until Husband introduced me to Tad Williams in 1990. However, I feel that merely liking the stuff and being A Fan of the stuff are two very different things. I can barely remember a thing about a book/film/TV episode/series once I have stopped interacting with it. For me it's all about short-term gratification - read/watch and move on. I can't recount series numbers, episode titles or plot details. I feel no sense of ownership of the characters or their millieu. If a book or episode is bad, I'm likely just to stop engaging with that author/series rather than to agonise about how the writers/producers have let us down. If characters do things that I didn't expect and don't particularly like, I may grump about it a bit but I accept that that's the way it goes with fiction sometimes. For Fans, I feel, things are very different. Which is not to say that Fan-dom is bad, just that I am different from A Fan and A Fan is different from me.

So why do I enjoy conventions so much when the whole premise of the event is that it serves Fans, a group to which I demonstrably don't belong? Answer is, I don't know. Since I am also not a particularly gregarious person, it can't be the opportunity to meet lots of people. I go to the occassional panel but am frequently confused and nonplussed by the content. I don't read an awful lot of fiction at the moment so have few favourite authors whose autographs I would seek out. I'm far too shy to get dressed up for the Masquerade. I did get involved in running the Easter day service this year, which was terrific but not unstressful.

I guess part of what I enjoy is seeing my partner and friends having such a good time - four days in the happy company of these people whom I love, admire and respect is no small treat. And I like hotel life, the self-containedness of it all, the slightly off-world feel*, the free shower caps. And when I do summon up the nerve to make conversation, I always find that very rewarding. Ultimately, I guess, it's about being part of something, no matter how peripherally, that matters to other beings. So while I a not A Fan, not part of The Tribe that Neil Gaiman talked about on Sunday, I like to think I am something of a fellow traveller.

In the world of transgender, where my research interests lie, there is a term SOFFA, standing for Significant Others, Family, Friends and Allies. Inspired by this, but not wanting to colonise someone else's discourse, I name myself a SOFTy - Significant Other/Fellow Traveller. Maybe at the next convention, if there are any other SOFTy around, we can get a drink together in the Real Ale Bar and swap stories about what it's like on our planet. Check us out with your bioscanners as you pass by - I think you'll find us harmless.

* like Raisa, while the world outside the Radisson Edwardian was harsh and forbidding, inside there was everything for pleasure!