Yesterday afternoon I headed up to Manchester, and in the evening gave a talk to the local trans group. Manchester has a very well-organized and active LGBT community. It is a very inclusive group as well, as far as I can see. The city is the host to the annual Sparkle festival, the UK’s national trans festival. And the organization I went to see, the Trans Resource and Empowerment Centre, has space in the Lesbian & Gay Foundation‘s offices in the city center.

As befits an organization whose name abbreviates to TREC, the Manchester folks took kindly to a talk about science fiction. I was made extremely welcome, and even the folks there who said they didn’t read SF were very polite about the talk. Afterwards we went off to a nearby pub called, rather appropriately, The Molly House, where I discovered lots of beers I’d never heard of before.

Anyone from Manchester looking for the list of books mentioned, you can find it here. I also added the following:

The Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson.

The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan.

Also if the lady who asked about Marxist SF writers should happen to drop by, I recommend China Miéville, Ken MacLeod and Kim Stanley Robinson.

This morning I did a quick tour around the city center taking photos. They turned out to be mainly graffiti, statuary and trains.

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