Friday, August 19, I spent the day in Kansas City at Mid Americon, the annual meeting of the World Science Fiction Society, which sponsors the Hugo Award, highly coveted by science fiction writers.
Aside from just plain fun, attending cons such as this one is a great learning opportunity. Themed conventions such as Mid Americon and Planet Comicon, which I attended in May, have dozens of presentations and panels to help artists and writers from a broad spectrum of genre perfect their craft. There is a great deal of overlap in all types of the events labeled as “cons,” so if you have the opportunity to attend one, I highly recommend it. Go in costume if you can—you’ll have more fun, but you can wear normal clothes if you’re more timid (chicken!).
At Mid Americon I had the opportunity to attend sessions on fantasy/scifi world-building, two sessions by panels of physicists and NASA scientists on the future of space propulsion, and one in which participants could ask questions of an astronaut.
My second book includes a chapter in which the crew encounters a radiation storm in space and has to retreat to a shielded section of the ship, then decontaminate the ship afterward. I was thrilled to learn from the astronaut that during coronal mass ejections from the sun, if they are large enough, NASA recommends that the space station astronauts retreat to quarters that have extra shielding. I was not so happy to learn that it is not necessary to decontaminate any parts of the station afterward, as the station is very well shielded from radiation.
Sometimes, however, you learn what questions to ask. The astronaut mentioned the earth’s magnetic field, which is what shields the earth, and the space station, from most of the sun’s radiation. Aha! What if the ship in question is beyond such a field? In that case, it is subject to the far more dangerous “galactic cosmic radiation.” Cosmic radiation poses one of the greatest problems for a mission to Mars.
I will have to do additional research before I know if my current rendition of decontamination aboard an interstellar ship after a radiation storm will pass scientific muster, but at least now I know what questions to ask.
P.S. One thing I learned is that there is a page on the Science Fiction Writers of America website (sfwa.org) that lists thirty one pages of questions to ask in order to craft good science fiction. (http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/) If you have trouble with the link, just go to the sfwa.org home page and enter “questions” in the search bar in the upper right corner.
Was there anyone out there who didn’t think writing was hard work?
