I spent the Memorial Day weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, at my favorite science fiction convention: Wiscon, which is devoted to feminism and all things progressive in scifi. I spoke on two panels, one about Dollhouse and the other about bisexuality in science fiction. The Dollhouse panel wound up being incredibly interesting, with other panelists and the audience riffing for an hour about what the Dollhouse might represent – prison, the military, a brothel, a chattel house? We also hashed out which characters really were the heroes of the show, determining that in fact nobody is really a hero and that’s probably why the show will ultimately fail to gain a broad audience. My favorite character has wound up being Adele DeWitt, the ambivalently amoral manager of the Los Angeles branch of the Dollhouse. There were a surprising number of people who agreed with me.

I also attended a ton of interesting panels, and wrote about one of them on io9: The “what gender is your Roomba” panel, which raised a lot of interesting questions about why we feel compelled to gender technology which is essentially genderless. Read about that here.

One of the issues I heard a lot about over the weekend was the increasing difficulty of getting published in the current market. As the publishing industry shrinks, there is less room for the kinds of social science fictional explorations that many Wiscon attendees write and read. It seems anecdotally that women are being hit harder by this downturn than men are – but then again, the women at Wiscon are ones who like to deal with unpleasant truths and difficult ideas in their fiction, and the publishing industry’s aversion to such stories has always crossed gender lines.

I attended several panels where people talked about how outrageous it is that science fiction remains such a white-dominated field, despite the huge numbers of people of color who read and write SF. This bias is reflected in which authors get contracts, but also in the subject matter of published novels. When was the last time you read an SF novel where all the main characters happened to be black or Asian or native? It seems bizarre that the future-looking genre of SF should remain so white in the US, especially at a time when our president and one of the wealthiest entertainment moguls in the country (Oprah Winfrey) are black. Some of our most popular literary authors are black, like Toni Morrison. And one of the biggest bestsellers in American history, the novel Roots, has a cast of characters which is entirely black. Another mainstream mega-bestseller, Joy Luck Club, has an entirely Asian-American group of characters. If the mainstream can do it, why can’t SF?

Obviously the answer is for publishers to reach out to authors who are people of color. But in addition readers who are concerned about this issue should consider donating money to groups like the Carl Brandon Society, which give out scholarships to people of color who write science fiction. If we want to support the careers of people of color in SF, one way to do it is quite frankly to give them money so they can write.

This Friday come out to celebrate May Day and revolution at the “Manifesto!” show at for SF in Exile at Modern Times Bookstore, 7 PM – 9 PM. I’ll be reading from Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” and possibly from some other manifesti as well. Joining me will be Naamen Tilahun, Danny O’Brien, Nick Mamatas, Zuleikha Mahmoud, Liz Henry, Steven Schwartz, and Daphne Gottlieb.

Once upon a time I helped write a manifesto, which is why I have such a love for them. The evening should be a wonderful and crazed celebration of declamation. So, come, listen, and get hit by shrapnel in the War of Ideas!

Tomorrow night I’ll be joining scifi superstars Cory Doctorow and Rudy Rucker, along with my fellow io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders, at a geek reading to benefit Electronic Frontier Foundation. I’ve always been a giant supporter of EFF – even worked there for a couple years – and I’m excited to help raise money to support their digital freedom-fighting ways.

Want to come out? Show is Monday, March 23, at 7 PM at 111 Minna, San Francisco. $25 at the door (this is a benefit after all!) but nobody will be turned away for lack of funds. Hope to see you there!

I’m heading down to New Zealand, where I’m going to Kiwi FOO Camp in Warkworth, then on to the alarmingly-cool Webstock Conference in Wellington. Still not sure if I’m going to present anything at FOO – I’ll have to see if I get any ideas on the plane.

I’m giving a talk at Webstock called “Your Business Plan Is Science Fiction – And That’s a Good Thing.” Which is sort of a lie, because sometimes it’s a bad thing. The talk is about the way inventors and developers have to grapple with what I’m calling the “science fiction baggage” that comes with any new tech creation. I talked to synthetic biologist Drew Endy about this quite a bit – he claims he hates science fiction because it’s made his work with cloning and inventing new life forms so difficult to do. He’s always having to say, “No I’m not doing a Frankenstein thing – no I’m not inventing a zombie virus.”

Futuristic stories helped prepare people for everything from smart phones to robot warfare, and even (back in the old days) the web itself. But scifi can also scare people off of good ideas like cloning because there is so much misinformation about the science in popular works of scifi. So inventors should try to be savvy about the cultural environment where they’re releasing their cool new ideas. Have they created something that will freak people out because it reminds them of the bad guy in Batman? Or have they created something people will misunderstand because it involves robots, and most people think of Battlestar Galactica when they think of robots? I’ll even have some pointers on how to get rid of cultural baggage – or at least make it weigh a little less.

Plus, this talk will give me a chance to talk about the not-so-secret connections between Battlestar Galactica and Google’s Android platform. And to show a special clip from the new Joss Whedon TV series Dollhouse when we talk about brain-computer interfaces.

Also I’m really, really hoping that I’ll get a chance to tour Weta – both the digital side and the real-life props side. I am a total prop geek. And needless to say, I was a fan of Peter Jackson back in the Bad Taste days, OK? I’m serious. I love alien barf.

Over the weekend, I wrote a featured article for Washington Post’s “Outlook” section on how people living in tough times have imagined the future using science fiction. Here’s an excerpt:

When the present promises only economic hardship and political upheaval, what does the future look like?

In 2009, it looks like a world of gleaming spaceships filled with enlightened people who have emerged with their humanity intact after a terrible war. They have entered the 23rd century, shed racism, no longer use money, possess seemingly magical technologies and are devoted to peaceful exploration. I refer of course to “Star Trek” and its powerful story of a better tomorrow, which has been mesmerizing audiences for almost half a century and returns to movie theaters this coming May with an eagerly anticipated 11th full-length feature.

But wait. The future also looks like this: a dark, violent world where a horrific war between humans and cyborgs leads to the near-extermination of humanity. This vision, in the latest “Terminator” movie, is also arriving at your nearest mutiplex in May.

We imagine the future in places other than the movie theater, of course. Still, these two familiar franchises underscore the conflicting stories we tell ourselves in uncertain times about what lies ahead: Either we’re bound for a techno-utopia of adventure, or a grim, Orwellian dystopia where humanity is on the brink of implosion.

Read more at the Washington Post.

I also followed up the article with a live chat on the Post site about whether the future will be bright or dark. Read that here.

Today I’m giving a presentation at the National Association of Science Writers about technology writing, and one of the basic points I’ll be making is that it’s almost impossible to characterize what “tech writing” is when our daily lives are pervaded with everything from computers to biotech gadgets. Tech writing can be, as a result, focused on almost anything. This makes tech writing quite different from science writing, which is often (though certainly not always) focused narrowly on pure research, as well as publications in scientific journals.

In that spirit, I offer to you a list of articles that could be categorized as technology writing despite the fact that they are also just as focused on other topics, such as parenting and consumer decision-making. All of these stories are chosen to reflect recent examples of tech journalism.

Technology for its own sake:
World’s Smallest Storage Device Lies in the Nucleus of an Atom [IDG via New York Times]

Technology and culture/arts:
ROFL Con Main Event [NPR]

Technology and business:
Yahoo Layoffs Won’t Solve Bigger Issues [CNNMoney]

Technology as service writing or consumer-oriented writing:
Google’s iPhone Challenger [Financial Times]

Technology and crime:
Identity Theft Harder Than Ever to Prevent [io9]

Technology and the family:
Web Content “Disturbing Children” [BBC News]

I’m here in lovely Denver, attending the World Science Fiction Convention. This annual event is a gathering-place for SF writers and fans — people who want to geek out over books rather than the latest Star Wars series (although there is a fair amount of Star Wars geeking, partly because several authors here have written Star Wars books). I’m not on any panels — just came to meet people and see some readings.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to join a bunch of brilliant SF writers for an afternoon tour of NORAD, the vast underground facility built inside Cheyenne Mountain during the Cold War to serve as a military command center during nuclear attack. Now it’s mostly a museum, but it was still “top secret” enough that we couldn’t see the fabled command center room portrayed in WarGames. Here’s what I wrote about visiting NORAD.

If you’re here and want to meet up, io9 will be having a cocktail meetup tomorrow night at 5 PM in the Hyatt Regency bar. Come drink with us and then go see the Hugo Awards ceremony.

I have finally returned, after a long melodrama involving myself and the new (lovely) WordPress upgrade. In the end, I got help from the awesome Elly with my upgrade. Sorry for the long absence, during which a lot has changed.

First, what hasn’t changed: I am still running the science fiction and science blog io9, which is part of the Gawker Media Network. I’m proud to say that the blog is doing fantastically well, and we hit an all-time high last month with over 8.8 million views. A lot of that had to do with our coverage of geek media extravaganza Comic-Con, where studios and publishers announce their upcoming creations for next year.

What has changed: After nine years, I finally decided to move on and stop writing my weekly culture and technology column Techsploitation. I had a blast writing it every week, and it was great to have a regular outlet where my radical leftist side could team up with my super geeky side. But I had been writing it weekly for nine years (did I mention the nine years?), and I wanted to go out on a high note, before I started to burn out. I was sad to let it go, but I’m happy to put more energy into the posts I do for io9 — many of which are fairly political, and all of which are alarmingly geeky. You can read my farewell column here.

I’m excited to be part of an excellent panel at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Organized by feminist-scientist dynamo Patricia B. Campbell, the panel is called Blogs, Boards and Bonding: Using Electronic Communities to Support Women in Science. I’ll be joining several other distinguished panelists, and talking about my experiences trying to squash gender stereotypes in the world of science writing, as well as how blogging has helped female scientists find community and get their work noticed in unconventional ways.

Despite my furious posting on io9, I am continuing to write my weekly column Techsploitation. It’s nice to have a place where I can still be an angry leftist when it comes to science and tech, and these days there’s more than ever to be pissed about. Here’s what the radical, destroy-the-current-hegemony part of my brain has been doing for the past several weeks.

I thought a lot about consumer biotech. I worry that companies such as 23andme.com, which offers to sequence your genome for $1000 and tell you things about yourself based on your genes, will become the basis for new social networks based on genome-compatibility. Think of it as user-generated eugenics. Then I scoffed at people’s concerns over eating cloned meat, and talked about how cloning livestock for meat isn’t the real problem. Factory farming is.

I told you about how Comcast has a subtle but nefarious plan to stop file-sharing by occasionally stopping data packets that it believes are from file-sharing programs. And I screamed and yelled and stomped my feet about the government’s nonsubtle, utterly evil plan to grant telcos immunity for having handed over their customers’ personal data to the NSA without warrants.

Now that I am editing and writing a mainstream blog, I worry a lot about what will happen to this once-upstart medium as it merges with more traditional media. I wrote about my concerns that blogs will lose their edge and make the same mistakes that mainstream magazines and newspapers did when they started self-censoring and narrowing the range of what it’s permissible to talk about in a public forum.

And just last week, I wrote about the mysterious severing of 5 undersea fiber optic cables, which cut off network service to many countries in Asia and the Middle East.