Polaris Redux

Well, I'm back now, from my weekend at Polaris -- where we spoke of Balthar's nosebleed and Dexter's fake orgasms; Cronenberg's Dracula and Cordwainer Bird's The Starlost; novels that are too long to sell, and stories that are too short to bother about. All in all, a good, busy weekend out, spent talking to people who could get all of those references without batting an eye. Polaris ain't no literary convention, but it ain't illiterate neither. So there were the giant Klingons and tiny cosplayers that would've been shown the door at Readercon, along with all the talk about the politics of Battlestar Galactica and the dynamics of the short fiction market and other sf-nal things you could want. A feast for the eye and the mind.

Some shout-outs, now, to cool people I met for the first time, like Nebraska sf teen dynamo Shelly Li and Ottawa sf author-entrepreneur Barry Alder, and to old pals like Doug Smith, Peter Bloch-Hansen, Tanya Huff, Peter Watts (who rode shotgun on the dawn and midnight drives to and from the airport hotel), Derwin Mak and Christian Sauvé; and to Sherry Moore, who wing-manned me on the hard-sell of the third copy of The Claus Effect to the even-tempered woman at my, erm, sparsely-attended shall-we-say signing Sunday afternoon. And to Erik Buchanan, author of the new fantasy novel Small Magics, who gamely snagged the first.

And of course a big ovation goes to the organizers of Polaris, particularly Alana Otis and Lance Sibley, who made it all run so smoothly.