The heat is on in Avilés!

The annual Celsius 232 festival for science fiction, fantasy and horror

I heard of this gathering about two weeks from now (July 15 to 19, 2025) from an author I haven’t seen in nearly 40 years, whom I have followed since the time she was am aerospace tech writer along with a friend of mine and sold her first novel the day she got her pink slip. He was appreciative not only of her writing skills, but also for her skilled fists, which he claimed had saved him from two aggressive bikers in a bar at lunch one day.

Once upon a time I was privileged to meet many colorful, inspiring characters who wielded pens, typewriters and word processors as well as any fists, and the examples I saw with the likes of Barbara Hambly, Lucius Shephard, Octavia Butler, Tim Powers, James Blaylock, Larry Niven, A.E. van Vogt and others became part of my verbal and emotional DNA. But it’s been nearly 40 years since I had time for chats at book signings, and longer than that since I could hang out at fan conventions, but when I heard that one of my personal favorites would be a guest at an event in a neighboring country, only an 11 hour bus ride distant, I knew that I had to make that road trip.

Now if I were still chipping away each day at the productive wordface, I might be thinking of this as a professional journey to meet authors whose works I might translate. Yeah, most of them are Spanish, but I’ve picked up enough of the language living on the border of Spain and Portugal and being thoroughly tired of my companheira butchering Spanish into some kind of horrifying Portuguese dialect that this could actually be a thing. But it won’t be. I’m going for unprofessional fun and to lift the fog that four months of mental torture with Gemini-generated news labels has inflicted on my mind.

You, Dear Reader, may disregard such notions and go for your own reasons, professional or other wise. Or not. Your loss. That leaves all the more Asturian cider for my personal consumption.

This year is just a taster as it were (my companheira has been telling me for a decade now that I must taste that cider), but I suspect it won’t be my last visit to the festival unless I die in a firefight with cork-stealing gypsies, get gored by a boar, lose a renewed duel challenge by that FSB agent known to ladies in the language professions as “Stinky Sergei” or become otherwise incapacitated and/or inoperable.

My current corporate overlords were not entirely cooperative with the scheduling, so that bus will, at some point, become my bouncy castle of Chromebook coding and remote eSIMetric wordfare.

Nonetheless, I shall overcome. Will you join me?