Lunacon Report

This past weekend my celebrated wife Diane and I drove through irritating Connecticut traffic to Rye Brook, New York for this year's Lunacon, the venerable New York science fiction convention. We had lovely weather, and took advantage of the fact that one of our kids is two weeks away from legal adulthood to have a little working getaway.

I'm not joking about working, either. The Lunacon organizers got full value from me: I participated in nine events from Friday evening to Sunday morning, with six of them on Saturday.

But it was fun work. I got to meet comics legend Walter Simonson, talk about Rudyard Kipling, try (and fail) to master the hula hoop, discuss how to use games for education, argue about inter-temporal trade, gush about the film Gravity, discuss human exceptionalism in science fiction, and thrash out how to combine mythologies in fantasy.

In between events I got to share drinks and canapes with the magisterial Michael Flynn, consume large amounts of meat with the Masonic operative Walter Hunt, and — of course — buy books in the dealer area. Like everyone else I was baffled by the layout of the Hilton Westchester hotel. And in the nearby town of Port Chester (which has a large South American population) I took the opportunity to get empanadas at a Uruguayan bakery.

So, overall it was a fun time. After my experience at the New York Comic-Con last fall, I was a little surprised at the intimate, old-school feel of Lunacon. It strongly resembles Boston's equally venerable Boskone, and feels almost like a private reunion of longtime SF fans. 

Books acquired: The Martian, by Andy Weir, and The Hermetic Millennia, by John C. Wright.

 

 

Comments

[Ryk E. Spoor]

I missed meeting Walt Simonson, which makes me sad. Or if I did meet him, it wasn't pointed out that this was WALT SIMONSON.

Perhaps that was just as well because I would have been reduced to a raving fanboy.