I remember my first scifi convention. I was a little awed, a little Dorothy-opening-the-grayscale-door. I’d married the only girl in college who read Terry Pratchett and Lois McMaster Bujold, and here I was in a convention center filled with fans of scifi. Some might even know more about force fields than I did.
Some did, but then came the dreary twenty-teens. One friend called LonCon 2014 the “last safe WorldCon.” Another, when I asked her in 2024, said “why would I pay so much money to spend four days with people who hate me?” As the dreary decade slumped on, I found myself bored, snubbed, and egregiously robbed of my time.
And yet here I was again, twelve years later, at Prague Comic Con with my Bujold-loving wife, under the auspices of Anna and her husband, who I’ll call Jakub. Back at their wedding, I’d shaken hands with Anna over a deal to split the cash with her from any publishing projects she could arrange in the Czech Republic, and she’d held up her end of the bargain. She’d invited me to this con and spent the weeks before cold-emailing Czech publishers about my work. On the first day, she marched up to a pair of comic localizers and introduced herself as my agent.
At first, I was more of a good sport than a participant in Anna’s machinations. Pavlina found wearable kitty-cat ears for our daughters, but there was nothing I wanted to buy for myself, and my backpack was quite heavy. But then we passed the booth set up by the Czech armed forces, with all these little plastic doodads arranged on a table. One of them looked like a pineapple.
“What’s that?” I asked the soldier behind the table.
“A proximity mine!” he said, absolutely delighted to speak with me. “From Italy. It has magnetic coils inside. If something made of metal passes close enough, it detonates.”
“How do you bury it?”
“You don’t need to.”
“So, you hide it in the bushes…”
“You don’t even need to do that! If you’re entrenched somewhere in Ukraine, and you want to deny an area to the Russians, you put these things in a field. They can’t roll their tanks through before they clear out the mines. It’s called ‘area denial.’”
“Wow,” I said, “you don’t even bury the mines. You could paint bright colors to —,” I was going to say ‘to warn away predators,’ but the soldier evaded my dumb joke by hopping over to another display.
“This is a butterfly mine.” It was the size of my hand, with two lobe-shaped fuel tanks connected by a thumb-sized detonator. “It detonates when you step on it or squeeze it. The Serbs,” he said, “painted these things in bright colors, so that children would pick them up.”
What is the frame of mind of a person who makes mines in tempting colors? It was a cold thought in that noisy, dazzling event space. Clarifying. We all have goals, especially if we don’t admit them to ourselves. The Czech government wanted to recruit the sort of young man who thinks Warhammer 40K is cool. The publishing houses wanted to sell books, and the fans in T-shirts, cloaks or space-armor, wanted to become something larger than themselves, to have fun and find meaning at the same time.
Anna, for her part, was determined to find paid work. She set me up for coffee with a Czech author, who had a village house he wanted to fix up. Thinking about it now, I realize that conversation would have gone better if I’d connected him with my father-in-law, who knows how to design a brown-water recycling system. Instead, I talked about what I wanted, which was for hundreds of thousands of people to read my books. We made no particular connection.
But Anna and Jakub weren’t done. He translated a whole marketing panel to me in real time, and she parlayed a series of short conversations into a meeting in the event center’s cafeteria with Jan Kotouč.
Jan Kotouč is another of Jakub’s favorite authors, a prolific writer of scifi and alternate history, and one of the few in the Czech market who supports himself entirely with his fiction. I’d had enough of talking shop, though, so I asked him about his next book.
Kotouč wanted to explore space warfare at close range. Using their zero-acceleration drives, ships would instantly gain velocity, flashing past each other dogfight style, while deflecting each other’s missiles and lasers with shields. What an image!
“Okay!” I said. “So, these shields. When they turn on, do they do this?” I pushed a pepper shaker away from a salt shaker. “Or this? I chopped the edge of my hand onto the pepper shaker. “If the first, one ship can get in close to another, turn on its shields, and bash the other one. Bam! Like bumper cars. If the second, you can have a small ship or a drone that gets in real close, flicks on its shields, and slices a spherical chunk out of the side of the enemy ship. You know what this guy in the army just told me about area denial?”
“Probably not possible in space,” said Jakub, who designs the guidance and control systems of satellites. “Too much volume to defend.”
“So, you’re American?” Kotouč asked Anna. “What do you do?”
“She’s an editor,” said Jakub, and Kotouč refocused. If he’d had kitty-cat ears, they would have perked up.
“Really?” he said. “I have students who write in English and they need an editor.”
Anna was overjoyed. Here was some real work.
It was the last day of the con and people circulated tiredly through the cafeteria. Furries in body-suits, fathers pushing strollers, high school sweethearts who’d just spent four thousand koruna on books, and writers trying to look professional when really they were desperate to get their stories out. They seemed to work well together.
There was a sense of, if not community, at least health - readers, writers, and publishers all going home satisfied. Anna got a very warm lead on an editing gig, Jakub bought books, my daughters got fuzzy new ears, and I now know what a green shoot looks like, poking up through the ash.