Post-Worldcon Exhaustion Syndrome

So I‘m back in reality, with my bills and my eternal quest for a comfortable chair. 

I did my four panels – moderating a couple of them. I think I did a mostly adequate job in all my capacities. There were a couple places where I stumbled, and I got to work with some panelists who are much more acclaimed than myself, which adds a fangirlish element of “OMG celebrities! Better not do anything stupid (like I frequently do) In front of them!” Actually pretty much all authors are in that category – I’m just a noob, although I’ve been a noob for a long time so I’m pretty experienced at it. I’m a more experienced moderator now, and I am aware of some pitfalls to avoid the next time I give it a try.

My favorite was the K-Pop Demon Hunters “geek out” – it took place in a nice informal little room with round tables. Some folks sat on the floor. We just talked about our love for the movie from various perspectives. There were all ages present, and people told their love stories with the film – one of my favorites was a singer became enamored with the soundtrack while learning Golden to sing with his vocal group. It was low key, it was loving, it gave me a chance to wear my derpy tiger leggings in public.

The Geek Out was such a nice experience that it reinforced my decision to play hooky during the Hugo Awards, when, as I predicted, Sinners beat KDH. I think Sinners is flawed but good, and I think KDH is a history-making fluke that outperformed Disney, BTS, and many other entertainment industry powerhouses and I am lucky to have experienced it when it was relatively new so I could watch it take over the world.

And the fact that Sinners won reinforced that this is not my crowd, not really. People in this crowd often talk sentimentally about finding fandom being like “coming home.” It’s not like that for me. It’s like visiting some fractious cousins who grew up far away. Most of them belong to a weird religion and have all kinds of unspoken rules, and if you should happen to break one they’ll make a big example of you to impress their friends with their super devout adherence to the in-crowd’s standards. You're kinda family, but you're the next layer between close kin and total strangers. 

Except for the KDH panel. That was like finding a little haven, similar to when I escaped to Disneyland to be surrounded by my most pleasant childhood memories (and quite a few nice Disney Adult memories too).

I made a couple passes through the dealers’ room, where there was nothing I wanted to buy. No witty t-shirts, hardly any toys. Just rows and rows of self-pubbed authors trying to make eye contact with passersby, with occasional displays of the kind of jewelry I don’t wear. I ended up spending my merch budget at Disney.

I had vague plans to get a literary hoodie since I already have several music hoodies. Maybe DC Carl. But there were no such items, and DC Carl’s presence was limited to some moody fantasy art by an artist who was willing to draw any and all game characters in their particular style. And that’s basically what I found – a lot of creatives trying to peddle their own particular idiosyncratic style, which isn’t too unsafe or potentially problematic or drastically different from the style you’ll find at the booth next door. Everyone mining for gold – that fanbase, that TV deal, that merch license.

It's kind of a weird reversal from the prior science fictional scene, which was closer to monoculture and predicated on a fanbase where everyone had seen the same TV shows, read the same stories, kept up with the latest developments, and welcomed a chance for discussion. Now it’s more like everyone trying very hard to sell their own flavor of unicorns-and-wizards or spacefaring-adventure or cyberpunk intrigue. And none of it’s exactly bottled lightning, although I'm sure lots of it is way more entertaining than I realize. 

Meaning no disrespect, and speaking as a strictly average science fiction writer whose aims were sort of like those of these other folks: to be a creative, part of the crowd, part of the scene, having fun doing our own worldbuilding. Crafting.

This was my goal ten years ago, when I went to my first Worldcon, in Spokane. Partially in response to the Sad Puppies thing, to help vote them down, and partially because I had just finished my own first stab at science fiction and wanted to make sure the coast was clear as far as reactive cancel culture before putting myself out there.

Lots of things got in the way. The pandemic. The country’s weird shift toward fascism. Other people. My own self. My conflicting desires to write sci fi … no, horror … no, thrillers … no, horrific sci fi …

 But here’s the interesting part … a few of the things I’ve been quietly championing from my obscure corner have bloomed. We now have (gasp) neurodiversity acceptance content, and an autistic writer (Jason Sanford) won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer. That’s been my hobbyhorse for a while, and I’m glad to see other riders are joining the stampede.

And now we have K-Pop Demon Hunters. Which isn’t quite where I was aiming, I was writing something more like K-Pop Jurassic Park, but I knew there would be K-Pop involved, and capable yet romantic girls, and handsome bad boys.

I spent a lot of time at Disneyland meditating on my connection to the future, and the best conceptualization that I can come up with is that the future looks especially bright and sparkly to me. Sometimes I’ll hear a song. Or see a movie. Or get a glimpse of an especially energetic racehorse. Or check out a new musical act – this is one of my favorites, when I stumble across some band or singer that’s about to be huge.

 And they don’t know it yet, and I don’t know it either, but the aura around it just crackles, and all I can think about is “more of this!!” I’ve felt that for music artists like Billy Strings, and Taemin, who are as different as can be yet are both GOATs in their respective dimensions – and both of them just dropped new albums, which are both fantastic. I felt it for KDH the first time I saw it, when the tiger knocked over the flower pot and all I could think was “holy shit!” I felt it when I saw Michael Jackson moonwalk, when I heard Eddie Van Halen play Eruption, when Britney tapped her pen on that desk, when Donut remarked to Carl that sure was a lot of babies, when Carrie flexed at that rotten little bike-riding kid – that moment when some art-type thing utterly transfixed me with powerful, pulsating “this way to the future” vibes.

I basically live for that. There’s a rich vein of it here in San Francisco where I can mainline trendiness from the safety of my own domain. I might never write anything that trendy, and actually I kind of hope not, I really dislike being a public person. Sneaking around in the shadows of obscurity is actually way more fun if you do it correctly.

So I try to put energy into wherever I smell that sweet whiff of tomorrow, and lately it’s been more about K-Pop and neurodiversity than me making up my very own hand-worldbuilt world (based on somebody else’s world with the serial numbers filed off). If I end up using my DNA-given loquacity powers to further someone else’s interests rather than toot my own horn, I’m okay with it.

So I am going to write about lawyers for now, and court battles. Maybe I’ll eventually do one set in space. I’m keeping this sci fi blog going just in case I ever have a burning desire to do that, or commit more reviews.

Here’s my most-complimented Labubu fit from the entire weekend: Tinkerbubu. The ride operator on Peter Pan’s Flight approved of her, which made me feel warm inside. 

On My Way To Worldcon

My bag is mostly packed, except for last minute things like my recharger and my neck brace. Again, my panels are Oral Tradition and Neurodivergent Writing at 1 and 4 Thursday, and K-Pop Demon Hunters followed by Healthy Aging Brains at 1 and 4 Friday. 

My Labubus have their outfits all ready. I’m actually kind of glad the fad is fizzling so I can make them my own special unfashionable quirk. I’m not like those silly old ladies who collect Precious Moments and Hummels, I’m into fuzzy monsters. 

Saturday my plans are to wander randomly around, and take naps, with sporadic socializing, and then once I get through that I’m going to Disneyland. 

I don’t really have anything to sell or promote this time, and I don’t have a lot of expectations, so I’m thinking of just wandering around being present in the here-and-now, just to see how it feels. 

My body is being a wee bit difficult. I’m on a new med that works wonders for the nerve pain but makes me relatively lethargic, so instead of charging out of bed at 6 am and writing a couple thousand words before sunrise, I’m … napping. And sleeping late. And changing size, as I drop fat and gain muscle, in a quest to have something vaguely resembling the body I had in my 20s – in cubic displacement if nothing else. 

But I’m optimistic, and looking forward to connecting with other fans of things like Dungeon Crawler Carl and K-Pop Demon Hunters. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Official AI Policy: Not In My Art, Thanks

Recently there was a brouhaha in the writing community when Sephera Giron wrote an unpopular editorial and faced backlash – here’s File 770’s write-up.

I’ve written before that the only permissible opinion about AI in this community is that it’s all-bad and shouldn’t exist. 

My own opinion runs more to “it’s good for quite a few applications, such as medicine” and “latest permutation on punk collage art like Robert Mapplethorpe used to do” but my feeble room-reading skills are adequate enough to not allow me to go around accusing detractors of being ignorant Luddites. And yeah, I did do a book cover in AI, and the essay starts out by informing everyone that people who do that are not the enemy. 

Then I basically gave up on that last book, and speculative fiction apparently. I spent the next year or so unable to get any writing done until I decided to ditch SF entirely and write something based in the real world. 

Meanwhile, I have discovered people who actually prefer AI writing. 

One of my social media women’s groups has been plagued with AI slop essays, usually along the theme of “inspiring moments when women rose above sexism.” A couple months ago, one of them complained that she saw a movie about an inspiring female hero and it didn’t contain any of these inspiring moments – and that was the whole reason she had watched it, hoping it would be a fertile source of inspiring moments. 

I’m pretty sure the future will have plenty of streamable AI-written movies of AI-rendered people enjoying a steady stream of inspiring moments. And this is supposed to make me feel enraged, according to a lot of the other people I follow, who ceaselessly post essays about how AI and data centers will destroy humanity. 

But I try to avoid outrage. I mean, c’mon, I work with trial lawyers, that “inflame the jury” type arguing doesn’t really work that well on me. I have a pretty substantial resistance score in relation to bullshit arguments in general. 

Right now I consider myself more of a futurist than a science fictional type person. A futurist looks around and says “based on the evidence, I think this probably is going to happen.” Science fiction these days seems more about replacing that “probably is going to” with “should.” 

Other than a general blanket hope for minimal harm, I don’t really have any opinions about what we should or shouldn’t do. I have opinions about what I personally should not do, and the obligatory sharing of mass produced political opinions is right there on top. 

So with that in mind, I have No Opinion about AI, or data centers, from a “should” perspective. Mostly because if I did have opinions, expressing them wouldn’t really sway anyone capable of making changes. From a probability perspective, they’re a huge trend right now and will proliferate; learning about them is advantageous. 

Last time I had an emphatic opinion, it was about climate change, and it happened in the ‘80s, when I gave up my Cadillac, moved to a walkable city, and learned to embrace recycling. All my peers thought I was ridiculous as they moved to minimansions in Outer Burbaria and invested in gigantic SUVs. 

It wasn’t a moral opinion though. It was more like a probability, like data science – trying to figure out what’s going to happen anyway, and where to stand to avoid the worst of it. And I’ve been living in my walkable city, where the average temperature is in the sixties, going “yep, getting pretty warm out there.” And lately, “sure are a lot of robot cars and AI billboards around here.” 

Besides AI, there are a whole slew of things I have no “should” type opinions about. Religions, and people who follow them. Countries, and people who live in them. Orientations and genders and pronouns. Musical styles that I don’t follow. Sports. Whatever today’s ragebait is about. Things I can’t talk about due to my NDA. Things I won’t talk about because I am uninformed. 

Now I’ve been known to have an aesthetic opinion every so often, and I haven’t seen anything AI-produced that fits my definition of art. My sole involvement with AI “creativity” had to do with the desire to create a face that only existed in digital reality rather than trying to find a model to take a picture that I could digitally manipulate. Oh well, that certainly backfired. Still, I have no quarrel with those who object to AI attempts at visual and prose art. I tend to block it when I see it … but I also tend to block long bossy essays telling me why I should hate it more. For aesthetic reasons. 

At the end of the day, we’re going to be sharing our planet with some lying robots for the indefinite future. It’s a good idea to learn about them, since the window for “let’s just not invent them” appears to have passed.

We can choose when to involve them, however. I refuse to use AIs in my fiction. Or my music. 

Or in my fabric art, now that I think about it. Fabric art groups have been plagued with splendid photos of projects that can’t really be completed in the real world. Having to repeatedly explain that’s AI, if you bought a kit you got ripped off, you can’t make it, not possible. 

And that’s pretty much my opinion on AI. It doesn’t belong in my art the same way sardines do not belong on my pizza or sugar does not belong in my coffee. 

As far as the packaging … I tried it. Unsuccessful. Won’t try that again. 

As far as stern, sweeping opinions … fresh out. Try asking me something important, like which member of Ween is my favorite.

Worldcon schedule: the graphic

 

Author Bio -- The Long And Pertinent Version

 I temporarily unpublished the Worldcon entries until the schedule is finalized, and should have read more of the fine print; in my defense I’ll just say that I’m an obscure self-published writer who doesn’t attract much attention, mainly because I’m hesitant. 

My writing career goes like this:

Until age 50 I never finished a novel, and the only fiction I published was occasional informal fics (some of which might now qualify as LitRPG) for my assorted subcultures -- plus I also did things like walkthroughs and reviews under pseudonyms. It had to do with pessimism regarding my ability to mesh with the speculative fiction crowd – why put a lot of energy into making art for a subculture I don’t get along with? There were other factors too, like not wanting to squish myself into a genre, and not wanting to write anything too outrageous that would complicate my relationships with the non-writing world. 

Finally, after way too many circular re-writes, I finished the Sonny Knight trilogy (One Sunny Night, Retrograde Horizon, A Dark and Stormy Day), which is about a far future with a changed climate, and humans setting up very different “utopian” societies in different regions, with travel between them being quite difficult, except for this one unlucky boy who stumbles into a political plot involving a country entirely made up of clones. 

It wasn’t really a “good” story, but it’s compelling in places, and most importantly, it contained most of the checklist items I decided should be in my first novel. Once it was out of the way I felt more free to experiment. 

The second one was a collaboration, and that’s why it fell apart. I wouldn’t recommend collaborating, but I thought it was a good idea at the time. Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler still isn’t technically in final according to my co-author, but she won’t give me her final edits either, and I wasted lots of time trying to work on sequels. I’d still like to give it one more round of editing – for one thing, I want to get rid of this one character named after Lizzo per my co-author’s request. It’s a fantastic story, very “page turny” and fun, but I’m still kind of salty about having IP battles over Baz Rose, my personal Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

After that I tried working in the horror genre, and a novel about a girl fighting a qanon cult. It’s out of print for lots of reasons, mostly because the qanon cult won and is currently in power, plus I had more personal complications with the editor I worked with to the point where I didn’t feel like compunding it by complicating either of our lives with a crappy horror novel making fun of conspiracy believers. They told me the dark fantasy aspect was actually the best thing about this book, so I might try that at some point.

I wrote a non-fiction book, about astrology, explaining things like its origins and cultural history, how people have used it in lots of ways from art to con artistry, how the symbolism has evolved over time. I pulled that one too, because it’s too nuanced – people wanted either an endorsement or a condemnation, and not a meditation on all the deeper nuances involved with superstition.

And finally, the nail in the speculative/horror fiction coffin was Star Language. Which is a first contact with aliens story based on the relationship between Malinche and Cortes. I made the mistake of involving AI image generation in the cover (I used different AIs simulating different art techniques to process the image of a girl’s face that I kept revising and feeding into new prompts), as well as standing up for the idea that AIs don’t necessarily represent the end of the world. Unfortunately, the spec fic community has come together for the idea that AIs are the end of the world, there is no permissible level of involvement with them, and they should be uninvented.

At the same time, I entered Star Language in a literary contest, where it was doing all right, and one of the reviewers actually … 

 … got me. 

That doesn’t happen very often in my life. That's my goddamn grail. That's why I keep writing this stuff, like that whale who finally found another whale in her obscure frequency. 

Then the contest organizer went down in flames due to some sex scandal.

And I gave up on Star Language. It’s still in print, but it feels to me like one of those accursed Lovecraftian books that just exists to mess with lives. Maybe I’ll unpublish it but for now I’m kind of in denial.

After that I started working on a book called Lahaina Noon, another horror tale, involving a Maui new age cult run by haoles that conjures a supernatural monster, and an unlikely Scooby gang made up of local types and sympathizers who fight it. Recently a Hawai’i cult similar to the ones that inspired me was in the news, and you can read about it by googling Tulsi Gabbard. 

That one fell apart too. It was a reaction to an argument I had with an absolute cunt from the East Coast, who started attacking me online because I was expressing sorrow for the Lahaina fire as a kama’aina haole who was born there, and according to their political worldview (which was shaped by a qanon meme that was going around, circulated by a real estate developer trying to get people to sell cheap), this makes me a problematic colonizer. 

I got a few chapters done but I stopped, assuming I'd just get more cancellation type screaming if I tried to write about the place where I grew u p. Getting cancelled for being sad about Lahaina made me think long and hard about continuing to write speculative fiction. 

The main reason I write is so I can be part of the greater community of writers and readers, and find intelligent conversations with other humans. I started out with YA, realizing that would hold me to a higher standard about avoiding mature subjects, but I felt it was workable and started crafting kind of an experimental “dizzy blonde lady who writes YA” persona to see if I could pull it off. 

Didn’t work. For one thing, chronic pain combined with lots of other things to make me a lot more solemn. For another ... it's a hostile environment, and I assumed it would just result in more people raging at me for ostensibly political reasons. 

Sometimes with real consequences – there was a story I pitched to someone that had artificially gestated babies as an element, and she had a major conniption in which she denounced me as sexist and demanded I inform myself on the history of science fiction … and a story about that’s up for the Hugo this year. I voted for it. I wonder if my story about the same thing would have come out any better. 

It all combined to make me think seriously about putting any energy into the SFnal ecosystem. So I moved out of spec fic, and right now I’m writing a courtroom drama about a novice lawyer with a wrongful death claim resulting from an enthusiastic fan who got electrocuted when she encountered faulty wiring while hanging around outside a K-Pop idol’s rented house. She’s up against a ruthless tech bro representing the rental agency, a handsome idol whose fans are willing to leave retaliatory glitter bombs on her front porch, and Bunky Woodcock, allegedly negligent homeowner and author of several western novels as well as beloved regular on the western novel convention circult. He might be partially inspired by a science fiction writer. 

When you write speculative fiction, you’re open to anyone and everyone condemning you, with their best performative rage displays, for not envisioning an future in accordance with their utopian visions, which constitutes harm. There was a time when the performative rage was more aligned with speaking truth to power, but now it feels a lot more like what Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill describes in her biography, where scenesters with trust funds were using punk purity tests mainly to gatekeep working class blokes like Kurt Cobain. 

But when you write in the real world, about lawyers and witnesses, you can describe what you see, and what you know, and what you can reasonably infer. You bear no responsibility for problematic worldbuilding or unvirtuous role models. And even better, you can write about all the godawful people you met in speculative fictionland as thinly-disguised-yet-fully-conforming-with-applicable-slander-and-libel-laws parodies, and caricatures, and muses. So I’m going to take the basic writing advice, and write about what I know, and I’ve spent something like forty years working in civil litigation. Instead of trying to make up science fictional worlds where I can escape from it, I’m going to lean in. 

And that’s kind of where it stands with Worldcon this year, and why I’m not actively promoting my books, or myself. 

I feel like I’m a legit member of this population, my best book sold more than the 15 copies (the rumored threshold for most trad published books), I’m in SFWA, I’ve an experienced panelist, and I know enough about science fiction to have a discussion with other nerds about it.

But I'm old, and will die before long, and don't want to spend the rest of my life on the fringes of some subculture full of people who actively seek out rage bait. I had a brief period during my teens where I was interested in science fiction and gamer conventions but the sexism put me off; now upon my return it feels like I don’t really thrive in a Mama Bear environment either. 

So this Worldcon is a lot about doing a reality check to see whether I feel even slightly at home in this crowd, or whether I end up bouncing between weird little microaggressions like the last time I went to Baycon, or hooking up with the kind of frenemies who are liable to detonate into drama bombs for random reasons, if any. 

I’m an awesome futurist though. I totally called it with regard to K-Pop Demon Hunters and I’m going to be crowing about that. As long as I can continue being a futurist it doesn’t really matter whether or not I’m a science fiction fan.

Ragebait (a poem) (by me)

(I'm kind of a poet now, or possibly a lyricist)

Ragebait

© 2026 by Charon Dunn

I acknowledge transmission of the ragebait
You generously have shared with me
I validate your ragey expression
And assure you I quite agree
That this ragebait is indeed rage-inducing
And you are rightfully appalled
You must be exquisitely sensitive
Since you posted this bait on your wall
You have assured all of us onlookers
That your righteousness is beyond compare
Your moral goodness is a bright shining beacon
When held up to the ragebait you share
All of us here in your audience
Stand in awe of the saintliness you exude
We agree this person in your spotlight
Is simply catastrophically rude
We’re so glad you called our attention
To the fact this asshole exists
They deserve no less than an agonizing death
Beaten by bludgeons and fists
Drawn and quartered, broken on the wheel
Sent to the iron maiden’s embrace
Shot from a powerful cannon
On a one way trip to outer space
While you deserve canonization
For your bad-person-singling-out skill
We applaud your refined sensibilities
And the way you’re so admirably shrill
Your sources are always impressive
Such philanthropists they must all be!
Steadfastly programming AIs and bots
To provide you with ragebait for free!
You only post quality ragebait
The finest that I’ve ever read
I hope your ego is appeased now
From this patting I’m applying to your head
Such a good good person you are!
Hope you have all the empty flattery you need
So you can switch to doing something productive
And quit posting your shit on my feed

Panel 4 – Oral Tradition

I have a lot of unusual background traits that made me think about signing up for a panel about Oral Tradition:

• I spent several years working as a legal transcriptionist dealing with audio such as witness interviews, first responder recordings, and psychological exams.
• I grew up around Polynesian people who come from a tradition with no written language, where it’s common and routine to memorize long stories and recitations. 
•  I’ve spent much of my life working with multilingual people, and although I am monolingual myself, I really enjoy texting with people who don’t speak my language using autotranslate. 
• I just lost my audiobook virginity with Jeff Hays’ rendition of Dungeon Crawler Carl, which I have already read in the text version. 
• The last book I published, Star Language, involved a multilingual girl who ends up being official translator for the alien invasion. 

I am primarily text-based. I was a precocious reader and have always been more of a bookworm. I went through a cinema nerd phase but I don’t really like to watch video, I have never listened to a podcast, and I only get through a handful of movies every year. I like music of various types, and I also really cherish my urban version of silence, where I can hear the constant flow of traffic and other background but my blackout curtains keep the overall decibel level low.  Depending on how busy I am at work, sometimes I might go for a week or so without talking to anyone (although I’m probably texting and emailing). 

In fact, I’ve noticed that when I don’t speak very much, I tend to occasionally have difficulties with things like aphasia, and occasionally forgetting my own native language, and since this is my first panel, I’ve been blathering with anyone I can find to get my loquacious muscle toned up, so hopefully I won’t forget any important words as I shift from eyeball mode to voice mode. 

I’ve noticed the world around me gradually shifting from being text-based to relying more on video and audio, while text becomes the place where you run into unpleasantries like trolls, catfishers, people who post those soppy AI glurge stories. Some of my discussion groups have completely mutated into Tik Tok and Instagram videos, and my job tends to use videos for training and continuing ed. Audiobooks are just as popular as print books, and if Dungeon Crawler Carl is any example, they’re lots of fun.

I’ve been hearing people say that maybe literacy was a fluke, and perhaps the future belongs to speech. However, we’re not really reversing back into oral tradition because we can record speech, which saves us from having to memorize entire books, like in Fahrenheit 451. Most people do seem to prefer speech over text, aside from a few weirdos like me, and text-based composition might end up being an artisan skill, like maintaining wooden ships, or writing in cursive.

In an oral culture with no way of recording language, people use memory tricks to help them stuff pages of information into their minds. Polynesians would often anchor everything to a geneology. Westerners had a tradition known as “memory palaces,” where you imagine yourself filing away each new bit of information in your own imaginary castle, so you can access it later. I knew a hippie who had a memory spaceship where he would go when he meditated.

But now we have an active spoken-word-based culture, plus we can record it. We no longer have the advanced memory training practices required by those who seek to master knowledge in a world without books, so we’re more like Oral Tradition 2.0: The Sequel. 

Some of my other panels touch upon neurology – neurodiversity, and keeping your brain healthy. I suspect a preference for speech over text is another one of those things that is more about neurology than conditioning, since hardly any of us grew up in an oral culture, but a bunch of us decided to create one the moment technology made it possible, and lots of others decided to follow. 

I don’t think oral culture will “replace” written culture, in the sense that every human suddenly develops a preference for it. There will always be bibliophiles, and people with impaired hearing, and people who tend to zone out when people are droning on and on until they start to sound like the teachers in Charlie Brown cartoons. 

But I can see a day when people can get through college without reading, or writing. And I don’t think that’s something to be alarmed about. Not everyone has to be bookish. Diversity and inclusion extend to neurodiversity. 

Just as long as text-based people like myself can still fling walls of text at each other (like this one) I’ll be fine.