I've been invited to be one of several honoured guests at this great-sounding convention in Walnut Creek, California. Here's how the Fogcon website describes it;
Fogcon 2012 will be held March 30 to April 1, 2012, at the Walnut Creek Marriott. Easy access to BART and free parking, great small restaurants and shops in downtown Walnut Creek, and a free shuttle to get you there and back again.
Our theme is The Body. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (published in 1818) to Nalo Hopkinson’s novels exploring race, gender, sexuality, and aging, speculative fiction has always pondered the meaning, use, and power of the body, human and alien. Think about such SF classics as Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain” or James Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” Think about Shelley Jackson’s Skin Project, a short story published as more than 2000 people each tattooed with a single word.
Our Honored Guests have written extraordinary landmark works of speculative fiction about the body. In her award-winning stories and novels, Nalo Hopkinson creates utterly believable mermaid mothers, shapechangers, and ordinary women possessed by goddesses. Shelley Jackson transformed Frankenstein into a hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl, then won the Tiptree Award for Half Life, a novel of conjoined twins. And this year’s Ghost of Honor is Mary Shelley herself, who wrote Frankenstein while she was a pregnant, unwed teenage runaway.
Bring your body and mind here to join in the conversation.
