Perhaps it’s an obvious metaphor at the heart of Jessica Brody’s science fiction YA romance Unremembered—any teenage girl is trying to define her identity and desires in the face of a cacophony of voices trying to tell her what she is and how she should behave. Brody’s amnesiac heroine is surrounded by people with expectations of her that she can barely understand: is she just an ordinary girl with a teenager’s regular interests and a loving family? A mathematical prodigy? A celebrity? A devoted girlfriend? Or a weapon?

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As it turns out, successfully building an alternate Earth is a lot more complicated than changing a few place-names and dropping in paranormal characters to spice things up a little. In the hands of a more skilled writer, the alternate America of Written in Red could have been used as a setting for an interesting examination of race, gender, and the legacy of colonialism, but unfortunately it ends up being a fairly predictable urban fantasy with many elements that, on further examination, become increasingly problematic.

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The last day of the convention always serves up a cocktail of sadness at the need to return to the real world and slight relief at being able to emerge, blinking, into the bright light and fresh air of the outdoors. Or maybe that’s just conventions at the LAX Marriott, where just about everything is in the basement. The effect seems to be especially jarring at single-fandom conventions like Gallifrey One—for three days straight, you’ve been wallowing in Doctor Who, and when you finally venture out, it feels strange to not see an extra-long knitted scarf around every third neck, and you assume that anyone wearing a certain shade of blue must be a fan.

[Wrapping up with Mark Sheppard, dinosaur puppets, and a look ahead...]

My notes from Sylvester McCoy’s Q&A on Saturday are sparse to nonexistent, and the most notable feature therein is the sentence, “Nothing I write is going to get across the insanity that is this Q&A.”

After you’ve gone to enough conventions, you often find panels or Q&A sessions settling into a fairly predictable pattern, to the extent that you don’t really go into it expecting to be shocked. Oh, it’ll be enjoyable no matter what, if it’s work that you’re interested in, but usually, assuming a good moderator, you can be confident of considered questions, equally considered answers, and audience questions that range from predictable to predictably deranged.

What you don’t expect—unless you’ve been fortunate enough to see McCoy in action before, which I hadn't—is for the star to immediately bound off the stage and into the audience, personally walking up to the people with their hands up to hand them the mic.

[Sylvester McCoy, unleashed!]

Here’s the thing to remember about Gallifrey One: at its heart, it’s essentially a convention run for fans, by fans, with a certain “hey kids, let’s put on a show!” vibe that still hasn’t gone away—despite the fact that the show now completely takes over the LAX Marriott for the duration. It’s not usually the kind of convention where the show-changing, life-altering announcements are made; even with 3200 attendees, it’s still a big, cozy fan party.

That said, we got a pretty big party favor this evening: at the completion of the opening ceremonies, we got a first look at “Airlock”—part three of the First Doctor serial “Galaxy 4”. This serial was thought entirely lost until 2011, and it’s since been recovered and restored for inclusion on an upcoming special release of “The Aztecs”. The premiere of a lost piece of Doctor Who history is an event, and it was definitely a great way to kick off the first night of the twenty-fourth Gallifrey One, in the year of Doctor Who’s 50^th anniversary.

[Daleks, piracy, and Chumblies...]

When we first meet fourteen-year-old Sophronia Temminnick, she’s trying to descend via dumbwaiter to eavesdrop on Mrs Barnaclegoose, a friend of her mother’s who has arrived for tea with a mysterious stranger in tow. After a catastrophic accident with a trifle and a very strange interview (in which Sophronia gets a pillow thrown at her head for her trouble) with a woman purporting to be the proprietor of Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing School for Girls, Sophronia finds herself instantly and summarily banished to said school, where her mother hopes she will improve her curtsy and become a proper lady.

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Retro-futurism is usually associated with the likes of Hugo Gernsback’s stories and the streamlined cars and idealized cities of Norman Bel Geddes. But given the way nostalgia works, it seemed inevitable that the backward-looking retro-future lens would shift its focus from the Thirties and Fifties to more recent science fiction. Having apparently skipped the Seventies altogether (unless you count the attenuation of the Star Wars franchise), we’re now looking back to the Eighties and to cyberpunk, as in Rosa Montero’s Tears In Rain.

To say that it wears its Blade Runner influence on its sleeve is an understatement; almost anyone reading this review will recognize that the title is derived from Roy Batty’s famous dying words. That scene itself is quoted verbatim when the heroine recalls how a friend showed her the “old, mythical film from the twentieth century in which replicants first made an appearance”, and the “technohumans” of 2109 are referred to colloquially as “replicants” or “reps.”

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You hear it all the time on DVD commentaries, talk shows, and making-of featurettes—“we were like a family, we were all best friends!” Usually you feel like taking that sort of statement with a big or small grain of salt, but when you hear it from the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, you genuinely believe it. This is a group of people who are still friends after seven years of TV and four films; very much in evidence is the collective sense of humor and rowdy playfulness that drove one director in Patrick Stewart’s recollection to get down on his knees, “begging us to do the scene as written.” At one point LeVar Burton asked Stewart if he was going commando (after Marina Sirtis had darted across the stage to expose Stewart’s abs to an admiring fan); at another Stewart told Wil Wheaton, “You were never a young person, Wil. You were always mature, like a ripe cheddar cheese.”

[The Star Trek: The Next Generation 25th anniversary reunion]

On Thursday night I stood in line outside the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX, two and a half hours before the midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. A girl in a Suicide Squad Harley Quinn costume was handing out free promotional Batman: Earth One comics, and there was a Burton-style Batmobile parked right by the theatre’s front door. The Batmobile’s stereo was playing music from the Burton Batman films on a loop, which meant that I ended up hearing “Batdance” about a dozen times before they finally let us into the theatre.

The familiarity of the scenario was unmistakable: the outlandishness of the hour (out on a school night for a movie that wouldn’t be over until 3:00 AM!), the long lines of people who were actually happy to be in line, because at the other end of it was something exciting that they’d been looking forward to for days, weeks, months. There was a guy dressed as Ra’s Al Ghul in a natty black suit, his beard trimmed just so. Another guy showed up in a Bane mask, and a woman in a Julie Newmar Catwoman costume strutted by. People wore their Batman t-shirts, and some had donned capes and cowls and masks. It was as if San Diego Comic-Con had come back to Austin with me.

This essay started out as something about San Diego Comic-Con. It has since been overtaken by events.

[Something larger emerges when we convene for that which we love]

I think I saw more panels this year at San Diego Comic Con than I have in any years past—it tells you something that I actually didn’t get to spent any significant time in the exhibition hall until Saturday.

(I skipped out on the Warner Brothers presentation for that. Yes, that’s right, I actually walked away from The Hobbit. But by then I felt like if I didn’t spend at least some time walking around and occasionally going outside, I was going to waste away.)

So since the panel writeups that I’ve done so far actually represent only about half of what I saw, I thought I’d offer some brief roundups of the other things I went to.

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It took a Dalek to ask the question that was surely on everyone’s mind at the Doctor Who panel on Sunday morning. After the obligatory cries of “WE WILL EX-TER-MIN-ATE YOU AND ALL OF HALL H,” it came: “Will there be a multiple Doctor episode?”

“I’m not going to tell you!” Steven Moffat cried. “Not even for the Daleks! Sorry!”

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The panel was called “Epic Fantasy War,” but it ended up being more about epic fantasy worldbuilding in general. Editor Betsy Mitchell led a discussion with a veritable who’s who of fantasy authors, including Brandon Sanderson, Raymond E. Feist, Robin Hobb, N.K. Jemisin, Christopher Paolini, Rachel Hartman, Patrick Rothfuss, Heather Brewer, and Lynn Flewelling.

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John Scalzi’s Friday afternoon panel was a hilarious conversation between himself and Patrick Rothfuss, roaming over subjects from the principles behind Hollywood adaptations, how long it takes to write a book, and why the nanotech ammunition in Old Man’s War exists (because of Half Life and the fact that “Gordon Freeman could not carry around so many fucking weapons!”). Naturally, much of the conversation revolved around Redshirts, Scalzi’s send-up of the classic Star Trek trope.

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Comics fans might have been wondering: what’s Dave McKean been up to? He brought an update to SDCC on Friday with his panel “Dave McKean: My Two Years with Dawkins, Christ, and a Small Crab Called Eric”—and that title really does sum it all up. “I have a very short attention span,” McKean admitted. “I don’t have a grand plan, I don’t have a career line, I make hopelessly uncommercial decisions … but my decisions are always driven by ‘what can I learn out of this?’”

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At the end of the intense, emotional Firefly panel, moderator Jeff Jensen said to Joss Whedon that “‘We’re still flying’ is a big mantra of the fan community”—what, he asked Joss, do the fans mean to you? 

For Nathan Fillion, a handkerchief came out, and not for the first time. Joss clearly was trying not to weep openly, and everyone else on the panel was nearly in tears, if not completely so.

Finally, amid a standing ovation, Joss finally said, “Only an idiot would try to follow that,” but of course, he was going to try. What follows is an incomplete transcript, but the core of his words are there. 

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Comic-Con attendees from 2009 might remember Gerard Way (otherwise known for The Umbrella Academy and some band called My Chemical Romance) talking about a comic he had in the works called The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. And then … nothing. Well, there was the MCR album Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys and the trippy accompanying music videos that featured Grant Morrison as the Killjoys’ antagonist Korse, but the comic seemed to have slipped into the ether.

Until now....

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I have to admit: in light of the circumstances of Dan Harmon’s departure, I expected a little more tension at the Community panel than there actually was. You could definitely tell that the applause for new producers David Guarascio and Moses Port died just a bit more quickly than it did for the cast and the writers. But moderator Mike Schneider was quick to nail the elephant in the room and deflate much of the tension: “It’s gonna be okay?”

Guarascio: “It’s all gonna be okay.” Throughout the panel he was firm: he and Port have always been huge fans of the show and want to keep it “the weird wonderful gem that it’s always been; that’s not going to change.” As Port said later, after talking about how the cast and writers are some of the best on television, “What I mean to say is, we’re not going to screw it up!”

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This is the second annual Racebending panel on media diversity; this year the panel featured comics writers Marjorie Liu and Brandon Thomas, video game writer David Gaider, screenwriter Javier Grillo-Marxuach, writer Sarah Kuhn, and author N. K. Jemisin.

That there are still problems with diversity in mainstream media is the foundation on which the entire discussion is predicated, and this thesis is borne out by the experiences of the panelists. Misconceptions, bias, and prejudice abound, on the editorial side and in the audience. Liu was encouraged by an editor to adopt a less obviously Asian pen name; Thomas talked about how his mother worried that there would be problems if the readers of his comics column knew he was black (“and she was right!”). N.K. Jemisin observed that epic fantasy is still thought of as being restricted to a whitewashed version of medieval Europe; as a fantasy writer who is black (rather than a “black fantasy writer,” she points out), she encounters both readers who are shocked to discover her race and also those who assume that all her characters must be of a like race.

If there’s one theme that seems to be emerging at SDCC—not just in the panels, but in the convention as a whole—it’s the tension between what we’ll call the “mainstream” and what lies outside of it—the indies, the marginalized, the outliers. The definition of “mainstream” varies, of course, depending on where you’re standing; if you’re a comics person, “mainstream” might mean the Big Two, but it also might mean the Big Studios setting up camp in Hall H.

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There’s a good chance that Get Jiro! will make you reconsider ordering a California roll the next time you go out for sushi. 

Of course, it’s extremely unlikely you’d ever meet the same fate as the dumb schmuck who does so at Jiro’s tiny sushi restaurant—compounding a list of offenses that includes soaking his nigiri rice-side-down in a wasabi-soy slurry—and loses his head to Jiro’s finely-honed tanto blade for his trouble. Still, that kind of thing makes an impression.

And it’s par for the course in the over-the-top future Los Angeles of Vertigo’s new graphic novel Get Jiro!, written by Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose, illustrated by Langdon Foss, and colored by José Villarubia. This is a time and place where all other forms of entertainment are moribund and food culture is dominant: “Chefs are the new power. All desire is based on access to them.”

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