Capclave 2024
Capclave is a small regional convention held in Rockville, Maryland that I’ve attended every year since 2015. Its ostensible focus is short fiction (it’s organized and run by the Washington Science Fiction Association) with a dodo bird as its mascot (“Where reading is not extinct” the motto says).
As one might imagine: my type of con.
Full disclosure: as part of my general taking a step back from many SFF fandom spaces, I had decided I’d likewise not attend this past Capclave. . . until they invited me.
Pleasantly surprised, I agreed to go...but wouldn’t you know it - they expected me to moderate all of my panels.
I’m joking, but having Michael Swanwick as one of my panelists stressed me out a little. I shouldn’t have been. He was a perfectly lovely panelist, and agreed to sign my copy of Stations of the Tide.
My first two - Cooking Up Fiction and How Much Is Enough? - went well, with lively participation from the audience. The third one (Important Rituals) was where I ran into an issue. I kicked off the conversation with examples of real-world personal or communal rituals before getting into more fictional ones. In the midst of a Q&A session, one of the audience members waited to be called upon - only to admonish us for 1) not discussing rituals that she considered important; and 2) why weren’t we talking about science fiction?
I explained that the audience might want to know how writers often use real-world examples to extrapolate from to make their fictional ones feel grounded. Once we’d covered that, we’d be moving onto more SFF-centric examples.
I like to think I handled it well.
But honestly, I was taken aback by her sense of umbrage. How dare we talk about anything that doesn’t center SFF?!
First off, please don’t be this person.
More importantly, it jabbed at a sore spot I’ve had with some areas of fan culture in the last few years. Specifically, that SFF (and discussions around it) seems to be turned inward, only able to speak to itself about itself. The “real world” is viewed as an unwelcome intrusion. Believe you me - I can sympathize!
But someone once told me that fiction often reflects parts of the real world back at us - but from a different angle. Why should we want speculative fiction to only reflect us back to ourselves?
One More Thing. . .
As the year winds down, we’ll have to see what kind of schlock my co-host, Kurt Schiller’s curating for our Violence Concerto. And you’ll definitely have something to be thankful for when we cover The VVitch.
And that’s all she wrote!