You're listening to the BBC World Service Space Podcast.

We're going to tell you how to live, work, play and fight at the Final Frontier,

as well as saluting some of history's space pioneers.

Happy listening.

Hello, I'm Ben Hammersley and for BBC World Service I'm at the San Diego

Comic Convention where more than 130,000 fans have gathered to celebrate

their favorite science fiction and fantasy comics, books, TV series and movies.

It's huge, it's loud, it's full of people in strange costumes and I'm

here to discover just why in 2015 it's become the epicenter of global culture and why it's time now to take these

fantasy worlds very very seriously indeed. They want to devour anything that has to do with this world, these universes, these

characters. That's pretty amazing once you start to think about it that way and

how many possible people are checking this stuff out. It was almost immediate that

this outside audience we weren't expecting started watching it and started liking

it. Everybody was completely surprised. We live in an era now where to be nerdy is to be cool.

Geek culture has taken over.

There are cool people who pretend to be nerds now.

That was unfathomable to me when I was a kid.

For me it wouldn't be really that delightful if I was writing a novel for Star Wars or for Star Trek

and they'd say, well, this isn't true, this isn't real.

It's sort of like, well, all of it's fiction fiction actually so I hope it's not just me

Doing it for me and nobody even notices

But in some ways you are just doing it for you right I mean there are details and things that

...