I skipped out on my weekly writer’s group meeting last night to attend a signing by Lois McMaster Bujold at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. I debated about going for a few days, because San Diego is a long way, gas is not cheap, and it was a school night. But when I didn’t manage to talk myself out of wanting to go, I decided to make the trip, and am very glad I did.

Ms. Bujold was a very engaging speaker and answered a lot of questions from what I feel was a very enlightened audience. I’ve been to a lot of signings where the audience asked a lot of questions about the content of the books — why did this happen, what about that character, etc — but this group were more interested in her process and experience as a writer. Very interesting stuff, from this writer’s point of view. It was recorded for a podcast, so within a few weeks you can hear it yourself if you like.

There’s one point in particular that I’m glad she brought up, which had caught my attention while reading an interview with her last week:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.) (Source: Fantasy Book Critic

I think it’s an interesting observation, but I am not sure I entirely agree. Or maybe it’s that I disagree that fantasy should be that way, though it certainly seems to be the case with the bulk of modern popular fantasy. I’m currently preoccupied with the labels we apply to the different genres. Typically, we classify them according to their dressing — this one is fantasy because it has magic, elves and dragons, that one is SF because it has spaceships, time travel and alien viruses. But with all the cross-over and blending, this way only leads to madness and an eternally growing list of sub-genres. Maybe we need to start labeling stories according to the kind of story they tell, instead … but that’s a topic for another post, when I have a better grasp on what it is I actually want to say.

After the signing (I had my ARC of Passage signed, along with my copy of Paladin of Souls and a second copy of Passage that will be a gift for my eldest sister) I got to enjoy a long Girl Geek Gab. I paused on the way out to tell Sam, who works at the store and who is also the co-host of the afore mentioned podcast, Adventures in SciFi Publishing, that I was a fan of the show — this is a very out-of-the-box action for me, since it is not always easy to get my introverted self to initiate conversation, but it really paid off.

We were joined by two other attendees (whom I had conversed with previously while in line to get my books signed) and spent the next hour talking about just about every major SF&F fan topic that you can think of, with topics ranging from whether it was Eowyn or Merry who killed the Witch King, why it was probably a good thing that The Golden Compass didn’t do well at the box office, and a comparison of the relative sizes of particular body parts of certain Jedi knights (”May the Schwartz be with you.”) It was GREAT!

I don’t often get the opportunity to converse about this sort of stuff anymore. My co-workers are great, but none of them are into the SF world (except for the owner of the company, who surprised me by being a Firefly fan) and only look at me strangely when I burst out in defense of Star Wars at a company luncheon. Oh, they all have their own fannish pleasures, so they understand, but their different fandoms so we can’t really share them. My social contacts outside of the office are very slim to none (I’m such a houserat). How rare a treat to be able to say, “Have you seen Viggo’s photography?” and have them know exactly what I’m talking about!

So it was a good night, and not too late (I was home by 11), and hopefully Lost was taped properly so I can watch it over the weekend without having to download it. Next week it will be back to the writer’s group (another group of people I enjoy talking with, but also not into SF-dom) and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have something to share for critique.