It's all about books

Wow, these people read BOOKS. I knew I was at a different sort of con (my favorite type) when I saw that the sign outside the room we usually refer to as the Dealers' Room actually reads "Bookshop". There are so many booksellers in that room, and so very many books, it's almost overwhelming.The attendees at this convention read like a Who's Who of speculative fiction. Paul Park, Karen Joy Fowler, James Morrow, John Crowley, and on and on and on. But the most fascinating thing is that, in discussions, no one gets a free pass. Names don't matter. Ideas do.I was on a panel called "The Singularity Needs Women", with James Morrow, Kathryn Cramer, Victoria McManus, and Elizabeth Bear. Discussion ranged from gender blurring to whether or not we would want bodies after the Singularity, and simply exist in cyberspace, and somehow, strange as it sounds, it all made sense. SF struggles these days, of course, to be weird enough to even quality as speculative. It may be one reason some of us have turned to an internal rather than an external landscape.Cool, isn't it?