From the Moon to Magical Cities

It's the season for conferences right now, and it just so happens that I'm attending two in close succession this month.

Last weekend was the annual general meeting and mini-con of the British Science Fiction Association,  held in London.  it was a fascinating day of talks about the science fiction genre and the Moon.

An interesting point about reading came from the panel discussion about letting literary writers into the SF genre, prompted by the furore generated by Ian McKewan claiming that his recent book Machines Like Us wasn't SF. The panellists pointed out that older readers read deeply in the genre, delving into all the backlist in the library.  Today there is a tremendous width of content, but that depth has been lost.  I'd agree. Very few people I talk to have heard of the 1980s books by women SF writers which got me into the genre in the first place.

Astrophysicist Rachel Livermore gave the most understandable explanation of the phases of the Moon I've ever seen.  She's also an SF movie geek, and did an amusing analysis of how so many SF films got their representations of the Moon wrong.  She suggested the intriguing prospect of mining for Helium 3 on the Moon, to use as fuel for fusion rockets which don't leave radiation behind.

She also gave some eye-opening statistics about the universe. 1 in 5 Sun-like stars has an Earth-type planet orbiting around it.  There are 2 billion Sun-like stars, and an estimated 4 billion Earth-type planets our there.  Faced with these stats, and the knowledge that life on Earth expands to fill every available niche, I think it's almost inevitable that there are other life forms out there.

This week's conference is more down to Earth.  On Saturday I'm  going to the Magical Cities conference at the University of Portsmouth.  This is a one-day conference seeking to 'explore the magical potential of urban environments'.  The panels include topics like cyberpunk cities, fictional cities, imaginary spaces, and ghostly and grotesque cities.  There'll be monsters in cities, magic in cities, and enchanted London.

Between the two conferences there should be lots of material there for a science fiction writer to pick over and re-use in her stories.  Perhaps I'll end up combining it with some aspect of a threatening Moon.  Who knows?  You never know what nuggets will turn up at conferences.