BayCon, a science fiction fantasy convention held in the San
Francisco Bay Area over Memorial Day weekend, has been my local con for almost
20 years. Attending has been more of a challenge these last couple of years
when the convention moved from a location where I could commute from home, to one
that required me to either get a hotel room or crash with a friend. Last year,
I stayed with a fellow writer and carpooled to the hotel. This year she was out
of town, so I booked a room for Saturday night and asked the programming folks
to schedule me for only Saturday and Sunday. It was an interesting experiment,
one I am apt to repeat.
In order to discuss the convention, I have to write about
the hotel. The San Mateo Marriott has earned its nickname of “the Escher hotel”
not only for its inexplicable split-level staircases but the difficulty of
finding the elevator that will take you to your destination floor. (Once you’ve
made it to the floor on which most but not all of the events are held, it’s not
all that hard to navigate – but beware if you want to go from there to, say,
the Green Room or Con Suite.) This year, major renovation of the hotel’s lobby
added a whole new dimension to the chaos. The restaurant got moved to the 6th
floor, the bar to the 3rd floor (meaning that from the convention
floor, you had to go down one elevator, through a maze of corridors to another
elevator to go back up to either destination). Given these challenges, the
convention folks put forth a heroic effort, by way of signs and many helpers
wandering the halls in search of those who are lost, to ameliorate the
confusion. And the hotel registration staff allowed me to check in quite a few
hours early, so I was all set for my first panel.
As for what I was thinking when I asked programming for my
usual heavy schedule, without taking into account unforeseen illness, the less
said the better. I was a Very Busy Camper.
My first panel, one I did not moderate so I had a chance to
transition from driving through my redwood mountains to being in a hotel with
lots of people, all talking at once, was Saving What We Love: A look at how the
concept of resistance in SF has changed as well as kept a continuity and what
different generations have to teach each other, ably moderated by Jennifer
Nestojko, with Colin Fisk, Skye Allen, and Tyler Hayes. We looked at
how resistance movements have been depicted in genre literature over the
decades, and examined the role of literature in general and sf/f/h in
particular in generating, supporting, and being the voice of the resistance. I
talked about how I came to write Collaborators,
my occupation-and-resistance sf novel that was a Lambda Literary Award
Finalist. I’d lived in Lyon, France, the center of the French resistance to the
Nazi occupation, and had become intrigued by all the ways people either
resisted or collaborated. With my memories of protesting the Vietnam War in
mind, I wanted to show each side acting for reasons that seemed good yet
getting caught in a cycle of escalating, violent retaliation. It’s important in
our fictional portrayals that we not demonize or dehumanize the other side but
to create bridges where, by slow steps or sudden epiphanies, enemies can
discover common ground.
