jblum's Journal

Convention!
Kate and I just spent a slightly-delayed tenth-anniversary getaway weekend at Manly Beach, and felt our brains expand like Nerf back to their proper size. We're feeling more human than we have in ages, and very, very much in love.

Now that I'm back at my desk, I'm already feeling my brain compacting back down to its previous stressed-and-compressed state. So while I've still got the nous to announce things...

We're going to be guests of honor at Conjunction 2008, the New Zealand national SF convention, on the weekend of March 21-24!

We'll be doing all the usual guest things we haven't done for a few years now... this time including a guest-of-honor speech. For which I want to do a bit of a spiel about telling myself ten years ago (the last time I was in New Zealand) about the big things that have happened in SF since then.

But to make sure I'm on the right wavelength... what do people think the big things are? I'm talking about the literary side of things, at least as much as the media stuff (which I can babble on about in my sleep). Who do people think have been the big breakthrough authors, the genre-shaking trends, the things which have been relevant about SF in recent years? Especially the ones which have made SF relevant to the modern world.

(To put this in perspective: ten years ago is right after "Phantom Menace" came out, when "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" had yet to be published in the US.)

Has there been an SF equivalent of the way fantasy has so thoroughly mainstreamed? There are obvious TV examples like Doctor Who, Heroes, Lost, et cetera... but what about the print side of things? I'm really interested in peoples' thoughts about ghettoization or the lack thereof...

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