Confessions of a justified Cyberpunk

Did I tell you that I used to be a much bigger SF fan? During the 80's and early 90's I was an unashamed faaan, attending cons, publishing short stories in my friends semi-prozines (ah, the memories that peculiar taxonomy of markets brings back) subscribing to (and therefore, necessarily, submitting to) Interzone and generally inhabiting the ground of a Science Fiction fan.

The reasons for this were many and various - early exposure to Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, the discovery of Space Opera in my impressionable 2nd decade (Asimov once described the Golden Age of SF as whatever you read between 15 and 24, and I think he's right), a newly developed awareness of alcohol and women (it's not true that SF is an exclusively male preserve. Women can be found. It's just difficult), and a hunger for escapism that the Hardy Boys just couldn't satisfy. I was also lucky enough to sign up for a course at Glasgow University called "SF and Writing" at Glasgow University, and so meet up with the essential Duncan Lunan (who almost single-handedly kept Science Fiction and speculative science writing on the solar system alive in the West of Scotland in the late 70's and early 80's), and through Duncan the Glasgow SF Writers Circle, and through them many good friends and my future wife.

Whatever, when I got married and moved to Newcastle my activity in fandom dropped off to zero, and I haven't been to a convention since.

All this will change in August, when, at the urgings of my mate Bill (the Sven Hasselhoff of British Fantasy) I will be going to this year's world con in Glasgow. I'm in two minds about this - I'm not sure I can recreate the 17 year old who went along to Albacon in Glasgow in mumble mumble, sipping orange juice and trying to understand what was going on, but I'm looking forward to trying, and seeing a convention again with fresh eyes, instead of heading for the bar and staying there for 72 hours (which became my default behaviour at conventions in the 90's).

At any rate, this has already re-awakened my interest in what's going on in the field as a whole, which I'm sure is going to set off a few entries here.

I'll keep you posted...

What kind of movement calls itself Mundane anyway?

First fruits of my resurgent interest in the SF movement.

Vian Ken McLeod's blog:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/ (The Early Days of a Better Nation - highly recommended reading)

I found a link to the Mundane Manifesto:

http://mundanesf.com/default.asp?id=2&mnu=2

Now the goals of these fine people are all well and good (although I shuddered at the identification of "Timescape" by Greg Benford as an ur-Text) who the hell calls themselves Mundanes? I know this is used in the same tricksy sense as Neil Game-on's Mundane Egg in the books of magic, and that SF fans are always asked to be careful to avoid freaking out Mundanes around convention sites, it doesn't exactly inspire fervour in the followers, does it?

The last "movement" I got interested in when I was still heavily interested in Cyberpunk was Rudy Rucker's ( http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/ ) Transrealism - basically this was an excuse for RR and friends to write whatever they already did, only more so, but that was a REAL name for a sub-genre.