Tag: Star Trek

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Kansas City Planet Comicon 2025

This year I once again had a wonderful time at Planet Comicon, hanging with cosplayers, authors, artists, gamers, collectors, and other strange and wonderful creatures. As always, I took a lot of pictures because some of these folks are so amazingly imaginative and talented that I had to capture it for future inspiration. In spite of the huge crowd, everyone was polite and patient and friendly, kind of makes you wonder why people aren’t that way all the time. People of all sorts were welcome and accepted–well, there might have been a little Star Wars versus Star Trek rivalry, but not so’s you’d notice unless you were really looking for it.

Of course, I had to spend some money on a few unnecessary items–how could I not? And “unnecessary” is really a judgement call, wouldn’t you agree? I noticed most people were careful of their budgets, adapting the best they could to uncertain times, but sometimes you really need one or two (or five) more books, comics, action figures, autographs, accessories to round out your costume, and so forth. You know, the bare essentials.

Some of the highlights for me personally at this year’s con were:

1. Recognizing that you don’t have to be only one thing. I loved the mashups of genres and identities. My personal favorite was the little girl in a Tardis dress who was wearing elf ears. Why not?

2. Hanging with the authors and meeting some aspiring authors. There aren’t too many things more fun for me than encouraging people to write. Everyone has at least one story in them. And if I can help make it a good story and well written, all the better.

3. The generosity and graciousness of the guests. These folks are famous and probably have a heck of a lot more money than I do, but they were wonderful in every way, taking time and effort to interact with the crowds of people there to meet them. The number and diversity of the guests was amazing, representing a wide variety of entertainment forms and genres.

There was a lot more, of course. If you’ve never been to a con like this, large or small, you really ought to visit at least one. It will restore your faith in people. And aliens. And monsters. And elves. And fairies. And…whatever that thing over there is.

Image: Dennis Young, author, and me hanging in his booth.

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Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” Popular Mechanics (1949).

The wonderful actor, Rutger Hauer, died recently. I’ve loved him in so many movies, but Lady Hawke and Blade Runner are two my friends have been talking about a lot. In Blade Runner (made in 1982), Mr. Hauer plays Roy Batty, a replicant or bio-engineered being. The film takes place in 2019 Los Angeles. Some people are noting Rutger and his character, Roy, died in the same year. The film has flying cars, bio-engineered people and animals, and references to mining operations in outer space. Here in the real 2019, we don’t much have those things. Blade Runner was based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, first published in 1968. Dick’s version of Los Angeles was post nuclear war, and the story takes place in 1992, then in later editions, in 2021. So far, we’ve avoided nuclear war, and we still don’t have replicant pets, although cloning is making strides.

Sometimes stories of the future get it wrong, sometimes they get it right. Sinclair Lewis, in his 1938 novel It Can’t Happen Here, was probably thinking about Huey Long when he wrote his story of a potential totalitarian regime in America, but the satire bears an uncanny resemblance to the rise and rule of Donald Trump.  Orwell, Huxley, Wells, and Verne got some things right, perhaps more right than most other science fiction and futurist writers, but predicting the future and how we will live in it is hard. Some things we think will change don’t or do so very slowly, other things change at an unimaginable pace. Dick Tracy’s two way wrist radio, introduced in 1946, is a more accurate description of today’s technology than many science fiction stories of a similar era.

Even near future predictions can be tricky. Throughout the 1950’s, we all expected nuclear war, nuclear accidents, and the results these things would bring. We weren’t expecting global climate change. Now that we’re experiencing it, we may still get things wrong. In my novella, Wasting Water, I was expecting massive droughts throughout the United States. Instead, we seem to be having floods, followed by droughts followed by severe storms, excessive heat, excessive cold, and who knows what next? The droughts may come and stay yet, but it’s hard to predict. It would be nice to be right, but I wouldn’t wish that on my planet.

In 1949, it was hard to predict that computing would become what it is today, not a 1.5 ton machine, but portable, readily available, and ubiquitous. I often wonder what breakthrough will make the next unpredictable leap in technology, the next science fiction moment. It may be decades in the future, or maybe just around the corner. Perhaps we’ll get those flying cars yet. After all, we got our Star Trek communicators.

Image: Even with Abby standing on them, none of my computers weighs 1.5 tons. By Marilyn Evans.