The Fellowship of Condor

Locals call San Diego “America’s Finest City.”  It offers tourists attractions that residents enjoy year-round, including Sea World, the museums of Balboa Park, and a world-famous zoo.  It also hosts world-renowned events.  For example, tens of thousands of Science Fiction and Fantasy fans (including our good friends Sheldon, Leonard, Raj, and Howard) descend on our downtown each summer to celebrate ComicCon.  But it is another local SF event, Condor, that I mark down as a must on each new calendar.

Condor offers up a full slate of programming, with a stable of knowledgeable and fun guests that keep the panel discussions from growing stale.  What it lacks in bags of swag and lavish media presentations, it makes up for with its quieter, less-hectic atmosphere, and the accessibility of its guests and panelists.  Each year brings a new Guest of Honor whose wealth of experience in writing fiction gives members plenty of talk about, as well as a role model to learn from.  This year’s special guest will be Dr. Gregory Benford, an author whose Hard SF stories have won major awards. 

If Science Fiction is Fantasy with rivets, then Hard SF not only provides schematics for the rivets that hold a fantasy world together, but demonstrates what happens when the rivets fail.  Few SF works that I have read in recent years reveal those rivets, in quite an easy-to-comprehend way, as Jupiter Project by Dr. Benford.  In this early novel, JABOL, a space station orbiting Jupiter, is threatened with closure due to tightening budgets.  His young protagonist, Matt Bowles, has spent most of his life on JABOL, and fears being forcibly relocated to Earth.  Dr. Benford paints such a compelling portrait of Matt’s life and work on JABOL (as well as operations on Ganymede, which supports the station), that by the time the novel is over, I, like Matt, have fallen under JABOL’s spell.  Perhaps of greater importance, the novel highlights the potential importance of a space program to Earth, and warns of the implications for humanity, should we fail to ascend to the stars.

To prepare for Dr. Benford’s upcoming visit, I’ve read several of his early novels.  They reveal a visionary author of growing skill and tremendous range.  I hope you will follow along as I celebrate these entertaining stories, starting with Jupiter Project.  If you live nearby, come and enjoy The Fellowship of Condor’s Members, and meet an author who has been entertaining and inspiring us for over four decades. 

Dragon Dave