I am a native of sf, but not a resident.
— William Gibson
Apparently this is something Gibson said at his induction into the SF Hall of Fame last month. It encapsulates beautifully how I feel about what I write.
I got the Gibson quote, above, from a conversation at our dinner party on Saturday–one of our guests had been at the induction–and I told the story I first told Cat Rambo at Suite101.com of the moment at WisCon 30 that I knew I really did belong in sf:
Q: Did you enjoy WisCon? What was the highest point for you? Are there conventions that are “can’t miss” for you?
NG: The stand-out moment for me, no question, was a point in the Tiptree auction when what was under the hammer was a fan letter from Alice Sheldon (in her Tiptree persona) to Carol Emshwiller. I felt this enormous swelling under my breastbone, a vast bubble of history and connection. I thought: I’m here. I’m part of this continuum, this line of writers whose focus, cares, and struggles are linked to mine. I thought: I belong.
I’ve never much felt like part of a community; I’ve been a stranger in a strange land most of my life. I’ve moved a lot. I was a dyke in a Catholic girls school. I had a posh accent in a tough northern city when I left home. I was a writer among drug dealers and prostitutes and bikers. I have MS in a mostly able-bodied world. I’m English in America. But right there, right then, I belonged. It wasn’t a sweet, misty feeling; it was fierce, hard, brilliant. It will sustain me.
Last year I wrote an essay, “Identity and SF: Story and Science as Fiction,” about how and why I love sf. It was published in SciFi in the Mind’s Eye (ed. Margret Grebowitz, Open Court, 2007) and I’ve just made it available for free on my website. Enjoy.
Nicola Griffith 
Great quote. Gibson is a wonderful writer; Pattern Recognition is one of my favourite novels.
I had that exact same feeling watching that letter being auctioned. It was an incredible rush.
lynne: I love the quote, too.meg: That WisCon just blew me away. The sense of community was overwhelming. I hope WisCon has babies…
I’m slow with this response, but here it is anyway.I thought what Niall over on the LBC had to say (about his reviewers being mostly men and about how all of his reviewers mostly picked women’s books to review) was pretty telling. He also said he doesn’t get as many women’s books submitted to review, but of course there aren’t as many published either. Do most hetereosexual women read books by/about men because they are attracted to men?That was a great little history review you gave in your essay regarding the origins of this line of thinking/being. It’s always annoyed me to see the way that women participate in the perpetuation the whole ‘women as second-class’ thing. Maybe what Kelley mentioned in her interview — re: the systemization of sexism in our culture being not always felt on an individual basis — is one of the big reasons for this. I know that I personally don’t notice it so much on a day to day basis.How are we ever going to break out of this if the majority of women don’t seem to care all that much about it?Well, maybe because it’s the vocal minority that makes things happen anyway. It just seems like it’s such a big job that everyone needs to do a little bit instead of a few doing a lot.I’ve been following all of your posts and links, and I enjoyed it all. However, I do want to point out an error in the reference to Susan Sontag. Actually when she wrote that book on the AIDS situation, she had come out publicly as a bisexual. She did that in 1995 in a New Yorker profile, and that book was published in 2001. Some people (even gays and lesbians) just can’t seem to accept the concept of bisexual. She was publicly berated for basically ‘pretending’ to be bisexual instead of lesbian. I found < HREF="http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,283623,00.html" REL="nofollow">this interview in The Guardian<> from 2000, wherein she talks about loving 9 people – 4 women and 5 men. Nine people — no wonder she didn’t have time to be a political activist for feminism or glbt stuff. Never mind her battles with cancer. People have to make choices about what they are interested in doing with their lives, and I am certainly not one to say how they should choose (most of the time). Sounds like she may have had a few regrets.Anyway, this is getting way too long. Thanks for writing these thought-provoking posts and for making that essay available.
Wups, I replied to the wrong post; meant this for ‘separate, but unequal.’ Been reading all of them.