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speaking of fiction...
Jun. 29th, 2020 06:53 pmCan we just pause a moment and roll our eyes really hard at the idea that Arisia is all about Doc Smith Lensman fandom? And the idea that if we're ditching some of the Lensman iconography, we should ditch the name Arisia, because it's all about Lensman?
OK, even though I've never read a bit of Doc Smith, not even a synopsis, I get it: apparently, if you've read it, "we're the not-Boskone... so we are Arisia!" is a really really funny joke for half a second. But then when you stop laughing it's still a pretty good name. It's short. It's distinctive. Unlike Boskone, WisCon, PhilCon, BaltiCon, Baitcon, Confluence, WorldCon, or ConFusion, it's not some forced tired play on the word "con", the universe of such possibilities having been completely wrung dry by now. It's what this particular 'imagined order' is now known as.
Some older fen are shocked that so many of us have never read the relevant book(s) and don't know where the name "Arisia" came from. I don't care. I used to feel like an imposter in the sci-fi world because I had managed to wade through so little Heinlein and Asimov. But fuck that. Maybe there's reasons Heinlein and Asimov don't speak to me. I don't know. What I do know is that Vic and I need a community of people who have also watched Deep Space Nine. So, there, that makes us the target market for something like Arisia.
Life is too short to fret about the fact that I haven't read Lensman. Maybe, someday, I will have spent so much time waiting for the slow as fuck printers at NESFA to print stuff that I will have finished everything written by Bob Stickgold that NESFA has, and go casting about, and pick up Lensman. But, no promises.
OK, even though I've never read a bit of Doc Smith, not even a synopsis, I get it: apparently, if you've read it, "we're the not-Boskone... so we are Arisia!" is a really really funny joke for half a second. But then when you stop laughing it's still a pretty good name. It's short. It's distinctive. Unlike Boskone, WisCon, PhilCon, BaltiCon, Baitcon, Confluence, WorldCon, or ConFusion, it's not some forced tired play on the word "con", the universe of such possibilities having been completely wrung dry by now. It's what this particular 'imagined order' is now known as.
Some older fen are shocked that so many of us have never read the relevant book(s) and don't know where the name "Arisia" came from. I don't care. I used to feel like an imposter in the sci-fi world because I had managed to wade through so little Heinlein and Asimov. But fuck that. Maybe there's reasons Heinlein and Asimov don't speak to me. I don't know. What I do know is that Vic and I need a community of people who have also watched Deep Space Nine. So, there, that makes us the target market for something like Arisia.
Life is too short to fret about the fact that I haven't read Lensman. Maybe, someday, I will have spent so much time waiting for the slow as fuck printers at NESFA to print stuff that I will have finished everything written by Bob Stickgold that NESFA has, and go casting about, and pick up Lensman. But, no promises.
