Last weekend I went to LunaCon. It was smaller than the last time I went (2014?), but I had a good time anyway. There was some speculation in the con suite as to whether it was so small that it would not be able to continue, but that remains to be seen. I would hate to see the con end as it has such a long history in the region. I don’t really have a network there, though, so there’s nothing personal in these remarks.

On Friday night I attended the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers reading which was 2 hours of good to great fiction. I would like to get more involved with them if I could get my act together to actually write stuff.

On Saturday I went to a panel on “How Star Trek Shaped My Identity.” This was a good panel with interesting panelists. Topics ranged through career pursuits, cultural assimilation, feminist awakening, gender transitioning, and emotional balance. Eventually the conversation devolved into cautious optimism about the supposedly forthcoming new series Star Trek: Discovery. [For those not following Trek news: Caution is warranted because the new series has already been postponed several time and changed show runners; furthermore it will only be available on CBS’s new subscription streaming channel. (I am personally annoyed because the show is set in the near far future, before the original series. We already explored that in Star Trek: Enterprise which was my least favorite of the series.)]

Later on I went to a panel on New York Fan History. In September, there was a great fan history panel at the Star Trek: Mission New York con which emphasized the role of New York fans in getting the Trek fandom rolling. However, that panel was comprised of mostly women. This panel was comprised entirely of older white men who talked about the longstanding feuds of various NY fandom clubs and where everyone’s apartment was back in the day. Sometimes they would mention a great event and then say, “Oh yeah, [woman’s name] did that.” But none of these women were available for this panel apparently. Once someone started talking about the attractiveness of college-aged female fans who were too young for him, I left.

I bought a very pretty ring in the small Dealers Room from Janet Kofoed.

Finally I went to a poetry workshop run by my colleague, poet Christina M. Rau. It was called “Erasing Sci-Fi and Fantasy: Creating Found Poems.” We used selections from random science and fantasy texts and wrote through them to create new poems from their language. It was fun, and there were colored pencils and crayons. I used two pages from a science textbook explanation of genetics and wrote this poem:

Clone Poem

This is the law:
Segregate independently
to any other combination.

Sorted,
we now know the logic of this law
inherited, determined by

Yellow seed
Green seed
Round seed
Wrinkled seed

Rye wry rue roux

It is now known that
the presence of many mistakes
tend to be in groups.

Fragments extracted from any tissue
Using restriction a number of times
The blotting paper membrane splits.