Yes, I admit it now ...

I'm a science fiction fan.

Well, now I've said it, and you'll assume that this means I have my own prosthetic ears (think! Honestly, would you really want to wear somebody else's prosthetic ears? Laying aside for a moment that they'd almost certainly not fit, just think of the hygiene problems), could repair the Starship Enterprise with my eyes shut, could name every (or indeed any) Blake's Seven episode, and am unable to participate in polite society without bursting out into Klingon poetry.

None of these are true.

Though I am the sort to illustrate an otherwise-innocuous page with the closest thing to a cool black spaceship I could find, and then point out that most spaceships are white for ease of tracking and heat dissipation.

The most SFnal photo I could find at short notice (SR71 with M12 drone, from the Museum of Flight in Seattle)

Being an SF fan, for me, is essentially a literary condition. It's a matter of polite written conversation with hundreds of people around the world, with whom I share a prodigious quantity of textual context both in having read their writings and in having read many of the same books as them - not just SF, though a lot of that, but everything from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (a wonderful book on the evolution of intelligence) to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (about people who, with the passage of time, have become more alien to 21st-century eyes than many of the less imaginative products of SF).

Polite written conversation, that is, on a somewhat wide range of subjects. I've learned a great deal about everything from the cooking of apple pies, to the breed characteristics of the definitive Norwegian Forest Cat, to common errors made by the organisers of five-thousand-person conventions: I now know to insist on a ceiling for any room I talk to more than fifty people in. I've heard about what it was like to grow up in a Communist family in California in the Fifties, to work at an SAC base practising daily for the end of the world, or to run a specialist bookshop in Kitchener, Ontario.

And, from time to time, we get together in exotic places like Basingstoke, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Minneapolis, Oxford, Swindon or Sydney, talk at enormous length and in complete sentences, drink beer and eat curried goat, be fondly presented with foam-rubber cheeses, watch newly-published authors beam gleefully as they find adverts for their new books, and generally enjoy one another's company.

Robert Sneddon with a large foam-rubber cheese on his head

A cat I saw in Robin Hood Bay, which just happened to be the right size to fit an inelegant hole in the page layout

Jo Walton discovers the first advert for her first novel The King's Peace

If you think this is intriguing, just come along to rec.arts.sf.fandom and join the discussion. There are various parallel fannish traditions: for example, exchanging self-published magazines (fanzines); plokta is an excellent example of the fanzine, and Alison Scott, one of its authors, reviews the fanzines she receives here.

Some books and authors I've enjoyed

Should you happen to encounter me when I'm near my book collection, you will probably not escape being lent some of these books

Greg Egan, author of Quarantine, Distress, Permutation City, Diaspora, Luminous, Axiomatic, Teranesia. Very science-driven science fiction, ideal for the sensawunda junkie.

Jo Walton, author of The King's Peace and marvellous Usenet posts without number. The King's Peace is an interesting look at not-quite-Saxon culture on a wonderfully human scale.

Ken Macleod, author of a wonderful four-book series (The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, The Sky Road) of Trotskyite utopias. Fascinating plots, wonderfully written.

Raphael Carter's first, and so far only, novel The Fortunate Fall. A superbly-wrought account of life in a strange totalitarian future.

Vernor Vinge, author of Threats and other Promises and True Names and other Dangers (two long-out-of-print collections of superb short stories), The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime (exploring the literally earth-shattering consequences of stopped time), and A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, in which he invents new universes from the physical laws up, presents two of the best alien races in SF, and constructs at least two truly novel and truly terrifying new classes of villainy. His are the best portrayals of genius I've encountered.

Lois McMaster Bujold, author of the epic character-driven series of Vorkosigan novels (Shards of Honour, Barrayar, Borders of Infinity, The Warrior's Apprentice, The Vor Game, Brothers in Arms, Mirror Dance, Memory, Komarr, A Civil Campaign, plus Falling Free and Ethan of Athos set in the same universe). Memory, her best so far, I claim ranks with Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers as among the best detective romances ever written.

Jane Austen is maybe not the author you'd expect in this company, but I recommend Pride and Prejudice even to those scared off by English classes in school. I'd also promote reading Shakespeare's Henry V as a thriller.

Internet services for the reader

AlexLit, a service which will recommend books you might enjoy reading on the basis of the ones you've already read. What's more, it works. They also sell e-books.

Mind's Eye Fiction, another e-book publisher, with a very good selection of short stories available for no more than the price of a Yorkie bar each - you get the first part for free, and pay to read the denoument.