Philadelphia Science Fiction Conference

The "Women in Science" panel at the recent Philadelphia Science Fiction Conference attracted some ten women, all scientists or technologists. The moderator was a NASA astrophysicist, and the audience included a nuclear engineer and a molecular biologist who had switched to medicine after several years in pure research. All had overcome the barriers that confront women scientists, including the junior high "Boys don't like smart girls" syndrome. They had stuck it out, from what they said, primarily because they'd become fascinated by a scientific field when they were young and decided they would work in it no matter what.

All the women on that panel, incidentally, cited science fiction as one of the reasons they became interested in science and technology. Nobody ever became a wizard because they read fantasy. But plenty of people have become physicists and biologists because they read science fiction.

As a science fiction writer myself, I've been defending this field against various onslaughts ever since I started reading it. For me, it's a literary response to the knowledge that the future will be different from the present— probably very different.

Like nothing our ancestors imagined

For a writer, a science fiction convention is primarily a talkfest. You talk on panels. You sit around the restaurants and bars talking to writers, editors and the friends you've made in the community of readers that's grown up around science fiction. You talk at parties. You also spend a lot of time listening. In this milieu, almost everybody has something interesting to say.

I mostly listened during the Women in Science panel as well as most of the panel that preceded it. That one explored current views on the structure and ultimate end of the universe, and the guy who did most of the talking was Tony Rothman, a cosmologist/science fiction writer. The other writer on the panel was a technical administrator named L. Hunter Cassells, and she and I limited ourselves to a few thoughts on the meaning of our contemporary struggle to understand a universe that's bigger and more complex than anything our ancestors ever imagined.

Readers burning to meet writers

Science fiction conventions are founded, like many literary events, on the assumption that readers develop a burning desire to meet writers. The U.S. science fiction calendar includes a few dozen regional conventions and an annual World Science Fiction Convention that attracts several thousand people and justifies its title by moving to sites like Tokyo and Melbourne at least once every four years. Contemporary American science fiction writers can receive invitations to speak at local conventions in most of the countries capable of publishing translations of their works, including Russia and China.

This peculiar cultural phenomenon began in 1936, when half a dozen young science fiction fans came down to Philadelphia from New York, rendezvoused with half a dozen young Philadelphians, and dubbed their gathering the first science fiction convention. The first world convention took place just three years later, in New York, and attracted about 200 registrants. In peak years these days, the conference can bring as many as 2,000 visitors to Philadelphia. (This year it attracted about 700.)

An intellectual smorgasbord

The convention activities include special areas for people who like to play complicated games, programming tracks for people who are into anime and media science fiction, and a costume competition (the aspect that traditionally fascinates the news media). For those of us who are primarily interested in reading and writing, however, a science fiction convention is an intellectual smorgasbord.

The other panels I participated in included a session on the economics of interplanetary and interstellar trade, and a look at the career of Robert A. Heinlein, who was the dean of the profession when I first started reading science fiction in 1950. In other rooms, inquiring minds could listen to writers, editors and scientists holding forth on topics like the probable lifespan of electronically stored materials, the demographics of the science fiction audience, the open source revolution in software, future religions and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.

A Cold War veteran

Often the audience at these panels is as interesting as the panelists. The highlight of a panel on "Science Fiction and the Cold War" was an unexpected statement from the floor. One of the panelists had referred to a study that indicated the personnel who controlled our missile force might not have obeyed a command to launch. An audience member raised his hand and let us know he had spent four years in a missile silo and he and his fellows would definitely have turned the keys if ordered to do so. They were trained to do it, he emphasized, and they'd been through the procedure many times in simulations.

For most of us, nuclear war was essentially a theoretical possibility during the Cold War. This was the first time I'd ever talked to someone who had actually manned the front line of the balance of terror.

For me, it was an exchange that captured one of the basic appeals of science fiction. If you read it long enough, sooner or later you're going to find yourself talking to some of the people you've read about. There was a time, after all, when women who worked on interplanetary spacecraft existed only as characters in science fiction stories.


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