Baycon 2026 report

I don’t attend many science-fiction/fantasy conventions these days. Pre-pandemic, I often attended conventions on the West Coast, including Orycon in Portland, Oregon. I’d add a day or two on each end of the convention dates to get in a visit with my best friend from college and a dear writer friend. Ditto going south to Loscon in Los Angeles or Condor in San Diego, or larger conventions like World Fantasy or SFWA’s Nebula Awards weekend when they’re held on the West Coast. Sadly, both friends have died, so even before the pandemic, I found it harder to fly north. Orycon has closed, and I believe that Condor has, too. Nevertheless, I always try to make it to my local con, Baycon/Westercon. It’s within driving distance, although a bit far to commute, and it’s a vibrant, diverse community.

When I attend a convention, I do so as a professional author, so I almost always appear on panels, readings, and autographing sessions. Some conventions request that potential guests submit proposals for events. If panel topics are accepted, the guest then moderates them. This was the case for 3 of the 6 panels I appeared on (* = I proposed and moderated this panel). Here are descriptions, with a few notes on how the discussions unfolded. With only one exception, I have avoided using the names of panelists and audience members. All the opinions are my own!

 

The Reality of Fiction. We normally think of fiction as unreal, but quite a few authors talk regularly with their fictional characters about the story and where it should head. How does this work? How can knowing some of the psychology involved give us a livelier relationship with fictional characters? What wisdom for life might they impart when listened to?

I arrived a bit early, as is my custom, to find the panelists wondering who the moderator was and expressing their unwillingness to do it. “Okay,” sez I, “I’ll do it.” Therein followed a fascinating divergence between the tired, perennial question, “What to do when your characters won’t behave the way you want them to?” and how much your characters reflect yourself—is this a good thing or a bad thing?--versus my personal focus, “Where is the energy in the story? Character (Hamlet), plot (thrillers), ideas (mysteries)…and how difficulties with characters arise from mismatches between different elements.

 

*Writing our Nightmares. What horror, dark fantasy, and related genres can teach us about surviving personal and political catastrophes.

The idea for this panel arose from two incidents: Octavia Butler told me that she took the things that really scared her and put them on paper; in a horror panel many years ago, when I said I had enough nightmares in my life, the other panelists showed me how horror can shine a light in the darkest places. As writers, we have agency; as readers, we trust that the protagonist, no matter how vulnerable, has or gains power over their fate.

We talked about having lost many traditional methods of dealing with trauma, so horror as a genre offers catharsis via the story journey; the end is different from the setup. “Horror is safer than memories.”

Finally, the zinger trope: “Play nice or I’ll put you in my novel” (and you won’t come out unscathed)!

 

*Finding Our Tribe. Writers, readers, and fans share how storytelling creates communities of understanding, acceptance, and celebration of differences. From fandom as family to writing as a way of healing, stories transcend the fear and prejudice of our times.

My thought in proposing it was to celebrate how the science fiction/fandom community welcomes and celebrates those who feel they don’t fit in anywhere else. This could be folks “on the spectrum” (of autism), sexual and gender minorities, racial and ethnic minorities, geeks of all flavors, and so forth. Everyone in the room had a version of a “finding my home here” story.

The second aspect was ethnic or ancestral communities. I was fortunate to run into one of my favorite co-panelists, an Indigenous elder, and invite him to participate in the panel. He brought the perspective of tribal membership being integral to identity, the history of near-extermination, and the separation he experiences between his role as elder and teacher, and his love for science fiction not shared with fellow members of his tribe. He helped us to understand the difference between tribal and tribalism. Tribal affiliation nourishes community and deep understanding of collective history. Tribalism creates a distinct "in-group" (those we identify with) and an "out-group" (everyone else). 

Three of us were Jewish, and the only thing we agreed on was that we don’t agree on anything except being Jewish (“two Jews, three opinions,” more like “twenty-five opinions with footnotes and appendices spanning 2,000 years of commentary.” You can join if you’re willing to study hard for a year and pass a board examination. Otherwise, “Are you nuts?”) Much laughter ensued.

[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix

Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologist

Ali Jasemi, Wilfrid Laurier University

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they’ve stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.

This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, 69 per cent of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.

Globally, 40 per cent report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.

As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.

Wired for bad news

Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.

A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.

Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.

Scanning the whole world

For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.

Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 per cent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 per cent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six per cent of those who didn’t.

For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.

Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we’re not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.

Looking away is not the fix

#BookReview: Another Whimsical, Quirky Fantasy from Heather Fawcett

Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter, by Heather Fawcett (Del Rey)

I became a huge fan of Heather Fawcett on the first page of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies. What a glorious, romantic, silly, unexpected adventure those three books were! I picked up Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter with anticipation and was richly rewarded. Like Emily Wilde, this story brings together an unusual heroine (obsessed with saving every stray cat in 1930s Montreal) and a mysterious, wounded dark wizard (widely known to have almost caused the end of the world). In this world, like Emily’s, magic exists on the fringes of human society. Most uncomfortably so, for at the beginning of the story, a duel between two magicians resulted in the partial destruction of the building that Agnes has leased for her cat shelter, and she (and her irresistible sister, Elise) must find new quarters before winter storms sweep in. The only suitable place that will rent to her is the shop above the secret hideout of Havelock, the notorious “dark wizard” widely known to have almost brought about the apocalypse. Inevitably, they encounter each other…only to discover that he is allergic to her beloved cats.

Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter is a delightful concoction of whimsy, dark secrets, grief, quirky characters, and cats. The cats, of course, have their own personalities and agendas. The magical system is fresh and interesting (and a little scary in its own right). Second chances are not only for rescue kitties.

 

Reprint: A Better Way To Clean a Reflecting Pool

 

When your local reflecting pool or pond turns green with algae, don’t reach for chemicals – nature has better solutions

A National Park Service employee uses a vacuum to clean the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 20, 2026. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

Eric Palkovacs, University of California, Santa Cruz

When the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned green with algae just days after a US$15 million renovation, the U.S. government scrambled for chemicals and expensive technical solutions to fix the iconic landmark.

Trying to kill algae with chemicals is a common response when community ponds or other water features go green. But as a scientist who studies freshwater ecology, I can tell you there are better solutions that cost far less, last longer and carry less risk of harm to pets and wildlife.

Rather than battling against nature, these alternatives work with nature for long-term solutions.

What went wrong on the National Mall

The algal bloom that turned the Reflecting Pool a vibrant green shouldn’t have been a surprise.

The pool is big, more than a third of a mile long and around 165 feet wide. But it’s shallow, meaning it warms up quickly in the sun. When it was repainted “American flag blue” during the renovations in spring 2026, the new color darkened the pool, and darker colors absorb more heat.

On top of those conditions, the pool was refilled with water from the nutrient-rich tidal basin of the Potomac River. The combination of warm water and nutrients created prime conditions for algae to bloom, turning the water pea soup green.

In addition to hydrogen peroxide and vacuums, the government ordered nanobubble ozone technology to break up the algae. The nanobubbler contract was for $1.7 million. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

As the national conversation over the Reflecting Pool shifts to political finger-pointing, an important environmental question deserves careful scrutiny: What is the best approach to maintain water quality in a case like this, whether for a national monument or a community water feature or pond?

Trying to chemically or mechanically remove algae can damage the structure of a water feature and may harm species in the water that could actually help solve the problem.

Importantly, chemical and mechanical solutions are only temporary fixes. When the Reflecting Pool is drained and filled again, there’s a good chance that algae will bloom again.

Natural algae control

Book Review: A Compassionate Hero

 Wearing the Lion, by John Wiswell (DAW)

I requested an ARC of Wearing the Lion, by John Wiswell from NetGalley because I loved his novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, a tour-de-force queer heart-story told by a murderous but ultimately sympathetic monster. Wearing the Lion is Wiswell’s retelling of the Hercules mythos, the title being a reference to the ferocious Nemean Lion, one of the “labors of Hercules.” It’s told in alternating points of view, primarily the goddess Hera and Hercules himself. The opening is awesome, every bit as captivating as Someone You Can Build a Nest In. Hera is anything but divine; she’s petty, spiteful, and thoughtless in how she uses her powers, so fuming mad at her “dipshit husband” (the ever-absent, ever-promiscuous Zeus) that she never gives a thought who might be hurt in the process of lashing out at him. Hercules is just the opposite—compassionate, sensitive, earnest, and devoted to his goddess and his family. By the time he encounters the Lion, I was thoroughly enchanted with him. What does he do, when tasked with conquering (aka, slaying) the beast? He cuddles the Lion until it purrs contentedly and falls asleep in his arms. (Yes, I know that lions can’t purr, but it’s superb storytelling.) What he does with the creatures from the subsequent tasks is equally unexpected and delightful. I love the message that heroism does not mean brutality; it can also be kindness and the ability to see into the heart and spirit of even a hideous creature.

As the story progressed, however, my sympathy for Hera plummeted as much as my admiration for Hercules increased. Her spitefulness and resentment of Hercules’s devotion lead to a horrible tragedy, one that all but breaks Hercules as all his trials could not. In a dawning moment of responsibility, Hera first tries to hide her part and then attempts to destroy Hercules before he can discover the truth. By this time, however, I disliked her so much, I did not care what happened to her and I absolutely did not want to spent another moment in her point of view. Ultimately, Wiswell weaves the two stories together into a tale of the families we create, a lofty goal. For me, however, the resolution came too little, too late. All I wanted was a time machine for Hercules to go back before his devastating losses or, failing that, for him to find true comfort, self-forgiveness, and healing.

I applaud Wiswell for tackling this story in such an ambitious and creative way, even if Hera’s part did not work for me. He’s a marvelous, wildly talented author worth reading. I look forward to his next.

Recommended, with trigger warning for violence against children