Last night I gathered my wits about me, girded my liver, popped some anti anxiety meds and headed downtown (or whatever they call the tall building place in San Francisco) to the Minna Gallery for the Geek Reading with Cory Doctorow, Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders to benefit EFF.
EFF (The Electronic Frontier Foundation) is like the ACLU of the internet. They've been around forever (or, at least since the early days of the webitrons) and have been steadily working hard to keep your precious interwebs filled with freedom so that you may post pictures of stuff on cats with impunity.
The Minna Gallery is a pretty loft space with two rooms and, more importantly, two bars.
Unwittingly, I had sat myself down next to Alice Doctorow, Cory's wife. Alice is a writer and blogger herself and was unbelievably charming. Asking her about EFF, she replied, "Do you live on the internet?"
"OH MY GOD I TOTALLY DO ARE YOU PSYCHIC I LOVE YOU" was what I said. I think. God.
"Then you need EFF." Fair enough. We all need EFF.
Click the jumpy for more about Charlie Jane, Annalee, Rudy, and Cory.
Charlie Jane Anders from io9 was first up to read an excerpt from her story "Low Resolution". According to her bio, she's the author of Choir Boy, a novel and the co-editor of She's Such A Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology And Other Nerdy Stuff. She organizes the Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco (That's me! I'm a writer with drinks!) and her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Salon.com, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the SF Bay Guardian, ZYZZYVA, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Monkey Bicycle, Pindeldyboz and many anthologies. She also let me be her plus one for Race to Witch Mountain a couple weeks ago which obviously is more important than any of those other credentials.
Annalee Newitz (Annalee was a policy analyst for the EFF, is the editor of io9, and writes incredibly smart blog posts about BSG, among many other things ) read next, directly from her laptop.
Rudy Rucker, who is a blogger, professor, artist, and incredible science fiction author took the mic after Annalee and proceeded to fumble around with the sound, liberally using the word "Fuck" and taking pictures of the audience because "I'm a blogger".
He could not have endeared himself more to me if he had swaddled a purring kitten in a cashmere pashmina and set it gently in my lap. His story was good as well, something about magical realism. I'm sure it's brilliant. KITTENS.
And finally, Cory Doctorow read from his New York Times Bestseller "Little Brother" which is "a story of high-tech teenage rebellion set in the familiar world of San Francisco". Cory is the founder of Boing Boing and if you don't know what that is then I'm confused as to how you ever navigated your way to this blog post without crawling out from the cave you live in.
I wish I could give you a better rundown on what the stories were about and the particular writing styles of each author but I believe I mentioned I was sitting right next to the BAR. Also, I was super excited just to be around all these writers who I LOVE but had never met before so I was a bit more focused on socializing than on journalizing. SORRY.
Still, the readings were terrifically engaging and the impression I got from each of them was that they were all writing something far different than your run of the mill space and asteroids and rockets science fiction (not that I don't like that kind of sci fi because I do). Most seemed to involve some kind of alternate future, a focus on technology, a reliance on character driven dialogue, the pharmaceutical industry (that was Annalee) and, in Rucker's case, one mysterious golden eyed seal.
It was a magical, boozy evening. I'm going to go eat some tacos now.
