Bubonicon 47 is over. Now for the post-mortem.
Bubonicon 47, that is the 47th running of the Albuquerque Science Fiction Convention, was held August 28-30, 2015. This was my seventh con to attend, and as usual it was filled with the interesting and interested, the timely and the timeless, the bizarre and a bazaar (I’m thinking of the dealer’s room here). As usual, I spent all day every day at the Con, attending the panels, browsing the dealer’s area (I didn’t buy anything this year), and browsing the art show (I did buy a computer designed work by Lance Beaton entitled “Phantom Flight.”)
The theme of the Con this year was “Women of Wonder,” celebrating the role of women in science fiction and fantasy, especially women who take the leading role. Wonder Woman, Princess Leia, Ridley from the “Alien” movies, and so forth. Since my (as yet unpublished) science fiction novels have women in leading roles in most cases, I took a special interest in this con, especially to see if I could glean some good details about how to write strong women characters. There were discussion panels on women in combat, strong females needing strong males, the romance subplot, the curse (?) of the strong female, and a few others. The panels were populated mostly by women writers (as you’d expect) and I took home several important tidbits about female characters. One of the most important was in a session entitled “Warrior Women In Combat: Fighting Females.” One member of the panel, Jeffe Kennedy, a Santa Fe author and resident, made the comment that using rape and sexual abuse just to “incentivize” a woman to fight is probably not a good idea. Why not? Because it demeans and diminishes the warrior woman, as though she needs some sort of “extra” incentive to fight for what she believes in, an incentive a male warrior doesn’t have or need. I took that to heart because I’m in the process of writing the third novel in my sci-fi trilogy, and one of the leading characters is a woman raped and abused. That was supposed to give her a reason to fight back against the forces abusing her. But she doesn’t need any special reason to fight so I took that out. She fights for what she believes in, the same as any male would in the same situation.
The recent announcement that two female army officers just completed Army Ranger training under the same circumstances as the men who’ve been going through that course for years, made just before the Con opened, cast an exciting tone through the conference this year. It fit exactly with the theme, and was mentioned a couple of times that I heard. Women have tried Ranger training before, but none of them has finished the course. (I’m not sure I could finish it, even in my prime. It’s a tough course.) But the two women who did certainly didn’t need any extra incentive to get through. They did it on their own, and your characters in your books can too.
Enough said. Looking forward to 48.