**edited 01/27/14 
 I picked this up because I fell in love with the title--"Bimbos of the Death Sun" is just so very, very perfect. I've read one of McCrumb's Appalachian books, and thought that she would treat her subject, the world of science fiction and fantasy conventions, with respect and humanity. 
 I was so very, very wrong. The book is somewhat cute and definitely funny, but it is also very cruel. 
 I've never been to a "con"(convention), so I can't actually attest to the accuracy--and since the book is quite dated and was written about the time I was born, I suspect no one who went to one in the last twenty years or so can either. Fandom is an interesting and (as far as I can tell) relatively recent phenomenon, and I can see why McCrumb would be fascinated by it. However, she is clearly writing from the perspective of an outsider: she portrays the fantasy authors as jaded and nasty, the female con goers are desperate, oversexualised, and man-mad, and the men (or rather, boys) are pimpled, obese, awkward outcasts, desperate for approval and to become authors themselves. Obese characters are repeatedly mocked as "weighing more than an average calf," but women of this variety are still prized because cons are filled with desperate engineers--McCrumb calls them "losers,...runty little nerds, fat intellectuals,[and] misfits," who are happy to find anything at all female, no matter how overweight and plain--because clearly men only pick women based on traditional superficial beauty. The main characters, the ones we are supposed to empathize with, are themselves outsiders and rather bemused by the excesses of the fans. 
 ... 
 Due to my disapproval of GR's new and highly subjective review deletion policy, I am no longer posting full reviews here. 
 The rest of this review can be found on Booklikes.