Siddity In The City: Get your geek on

Thursday, August 05, 2004

Get your geek on

So, call me all sad and out of the loop, but I just heard about Noreascon Four, this year's Worldcon, annual mecca of SF fandom. It will be in Boston this year! Yippeeeeeeee! I must go. The sucker won't be in this country again until 2006, and even then it'll be out in Cali. Now, I love me some sci-fi, but I ain't goin' back to LA to get my geek on. Dang. It's a minor quandry figuring out if I can swing convention admission ($50-80 per day or $200 for the whole shebang) and the round-trip Chinatown bus. Which I guess means I am not a true fan, since people save up for months to follow this thing around the world, and I'm whining about $100. Still, I reallyreally want to go. The problem is more a matter of logistics (can I get any of that time off?) and finance (do I want to spend a quarter to a half of my monthly student loan debt to hang out with people wearing homemade chainmail? [Yes. Ooooh, yes.]) than lack of desire. Not to mention, I'm not sure any of my friends are geekly enough to go with me, and I don't want to go all alone (wanna join me?). I love spec fiction, but sometimes I do feel a little bit fringe of the fringe. There are plenty of SF/F fans of color, but the writers in this genre are few and far between: Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due. I wonder if mine would be the only brown face in the crowd. I'm goin' anyway. I just wonder.