The Way from San Jose

I just got home from the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, which was an exhausting, enlightening, and mostly wonderful experience. My primary objective, not surprisingly, was to get out the word about my book Astounding, which was originally scheduled to come out last Tuesday, or the day before the convention began. At the last minute, my publisher—for perfectly valid reasons—pushed back its release date by two months, so instead of flying in with boxes of finished hardcovers for sale, I had to do what I could with a few advance copies, some promotional swag, and myself. And I wasn’t sure how it would go. Half an hour before my first event, at which I would be talking about the book on my own for fifty minutes, I told myself that if twenty audience members showed up, I’d be happy. (I was even ready with a funny remark in case only four or five of my friends appeared, which has happened at readings I’ve done in the past.) When I finally arrived at my assigned room, there were already attendees waiting outside the entrance to get in. Every seat was filled. There were people standing at the edges of the room and seated on the floor. I was blown away, and the event went great. It was only afterward that I reflected that if there’s one time and place in the world where I should be able to draw a crowd for a book like this, it was last Thursday at the San Jose Convention Center. It’s still the center of science fiction fandom, especially for an older generation, and it’s where this project was born. Looking back, I see now that if I hadn’t been able to fill the room, or if only half the chairs had been occupied, it would have been a very bad sign. And the fact that it went well is at best a neutral indicator for how it will fare in the world beyond Worldcon.

But I can’t deny that I was gratified and moved by the response. In the days that followed, I held a casual roundtable with readers and moderated a panel on John W. Campbell featuring Robert Silverberg, Greg and Astrid Bear, Joe Haldeman, and Stanley Schmidt, which also drew a sizable crowd—although I wasn’t really worried about that one. I also had a good time tracking down people in the lobby and at parties, and I heard a lot of kind words from attendees who were looking forward to the book. (My five-year-old daughter, pictured above, also had fun. She spent most of the trip with my parents and my very understanding wife while I ran around to various events, but I brought her by the convention center a few times. One of the high points of my life was when she met Silverberg, which I hope will someday feel like a historical moment in itself.) But it also left me with a host of unanswered questions about this project, its subjects, and its future. I interacted with hundreds of enthusiastic fans about this book, but only a handful were under thirty. At my first event, I took questions for half an hour, and the majority weren’t about Campbell, Asimov, or Heinlein, but Hubbard, which points to an untapped interest in his career as a science fiction writer that I hadn’t entirely anticipated. For most of the last two years, I’ve been thinking about how the unpleasant aspects of a writer’s personal life can affect how we read the work, and the convention turned into something of a trial run to see how these problems play out in public, with mixed results. I’m still trying to sort out my own thoughts, but over the next few days, I’ll do what I can to work through some of the issues that I took away from San Jose.