Though I did sometimes wonder why everyone in the future would have English names. I do realize that makes me a very strange little Portuguese girl, (wink, nudge) but I really didn’t need a Portuguese female character to be interested. What I cared about was that the characters be interesting, and the setting plausible and vivid. Just as I couldn’t care less if I read books that contained only male characters (Look, mostly not even science fiction, but dad’s World War I and II historical fiction library.) (And heck, I grew up in Portugal.) However, there is to the vast SF geekdom this: that we forget everything in the presence of really compelling ideas, and I have always had a way of making men forget what I looked like, when I started talking.Īnyway, up till then, I really didn’t have a mental image of what the authors looked like, and I couldn’t care less. But I doubt very much that it would have gone beyond that, without encouragement. Oh, I’m not saying there wouldn’t have been flirting, some of it likely inappropriate. Argued with me, to the last ditch, sure, but like my husband on the day they met and, for reasons known only to the psychiatrists we don’t have, fell into a heated discussion of parallel worlds from philosophical and mathematical perspectives, they’d be enthusiastic and happy to trade opinions. And I know too that they wouldn’t have sent my 17 year old self away. Now that I’m well, old and one of the group - because the group of science fiction authors extends through space and time, and we don’t make much nevermind about vital status - I look at pictures of worldcons before I was born, and I can imagine myself walking into the hospitality suite, grabbing some stale peanuts and sitting on the floor, where the greats are talking, just to listen. But did they all (I found other pictures later) need to look old and nerdish, and like they’d dismiss me with a “Little girl, we’re talking about important stuff here?” Couldn’t one of them at least be ravishingly handsome, rugged and about thirty if that? Look, I knew my favorite authors were my dad’s age or older. (I think I’ve made mention here, but maybe not, of how Portuguese did book covers: generic images, no author picture.) I borrowed a Clifford Simak hardback from the library, turned the picture over, and…. The first time I saw a picture of one of my favorite authors, I was seventeen and an exchange student in the US.
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