This weekend, starting today and running through the 20th, is Readercon at the Boston Marriott in Burlington, Massachusetts! Duck Prints Press is delighted to be returning to this con for a second year as a vendor in the Bookstore, and I’m also honored to share that I’ve been selected to contribute to programming! I’ll be in five panels (and arriving Friday morning).
I hope to see some of you there! Don’t be a stranger – come say hi!
Friday, July 18th, 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.: Sustaining the Small Press Ecosystem
Panelists: Catherine Lundoff; Claire Houck/Nina Waters (I’m moderator for this one!); Julie C. Day; Leon Perniciaro; Neil Clarke
Description: Small presses are often held up as the life blood of the genre, providing creative outlets for work that isn’t a great fit for the Big Five, space for new voices, a jumping off pad for some careers, a gentler landing for others. And many of these things are true to different extents. But the attrition rate is enormous and the obstacles to success are daunting. So what do small presses bring to the table, what are some of the obstacles that they face, and Is there a way to support a healthier publishing ecosystem in the field?
Saturday, July 19th, 1 p.m. – 2 p.m.: The Author as Public Persona
Panelists: Charlie Jane Anders; Claire Houck/Nina Waters; Lyndsay Ely; Marianna Martin PhD (moderator); Max Gladstone
Description: In a recent Publishing Rodeo episode, the famously anonymous author Chuck Tingle argued that being an author is at least somewhat a public engagement, and that writers should not shirk that duty or shrink from that relationship. How can authors, from frontlisters to backlisters to self-publishers, navigate their careers as public figures? What responsibility do authors have to their audience, their society, and themselves?
Saturday, July 19th, 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.: Neurodivergent Approaches to Story
Description: People have a tendency to understand and process our world through story, whether it’s the stories we tell ourselves or how we relate our lives to stories we read and heard as children. People don’t always approach fiction the same way as each other, however, and those of differing neurotypes can have very different approaches to both reading and writing fiction. How do these approaches differ, what common pieces of writing advice are best seen as meant for neurotypical ears only, and what less commonly-discussed methods have worked better for neurodiverse writers?
Saturday, July 19th, 8 p.m. – 9 p.m.: The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
Panelists: Claire Houck/Nina Waters; Kate Nepveu (moderator); Laura Antoniou; Victoria Janssen
Description: In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how “2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides.” Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?
Sunday, July 20th, 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.: Content Warnings: Pros, Cons, and Purposes
Description: Many romance novels have started including content notes or warnings, which advise readers of potentially sensitive plot elements or themes, such as grief, murder, and self-harm. Content notes appear far less frequently in SFF novels, whereas some venues for speculative short fiction have been including them for years. Panelists will share examples of particularly effective—or ineffective—content notes, while surveying the reasons for their rise in romance and the potential applicability of those reasons to long-form speculative fiction.
The Readercon program for 2025 came out at last and while I won't be able to attend in full I am absolutely jumping on the opportunity to go to the free sessions on Thursday night.
A list of the works mentioned in the "Life Cycle of Political SF" panel at #Readercon.
I was privileged to moderate an excellent panel during this year’s Readercon that dealt with the life cycle of speculative fiction. Several books were mentioned, both in the description and during the panel, and I thought I might list them here, beginning with books by the folks on the panel. (If you were there and I’ve left any out, please let me know and I’ll add them.) Panelists Dennis Danvers…
Readercon 28 is July 13 through 16, 2017, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Friday July 14
1:00 PM BH Body Modification and Post-Humanism: Beyond Body Horror.
John Benson, F. Brett Cox (leader), Jim Kelly, Sarah Lynn Weintraub, T. X. Watson.
Body horror seems to be falling by the wayside as body modification, cyborgs, and post-humans have become increasingly common in fantasy and SF. Are we getting more comfortable with our bodies, or more interested in treating them like machines to be tinkered with? How are advances in surgery, tattoos, contraception, cosmetics, and other present-day forms of body modification influencing this trend? What cultural anxieties are writers reflecting with these metaphors?
2:00 PM 6 Problematizing Taxonomizing: Maybe the Most Readercon Panel Ever.
John Benson, John Clute, Samuel R. Delany, Kathryn Morrow (leader), T. X. Watson.
Countless Readercon panels have been devoted to questions of taxonomy, so let's ask the next questions about taxonomy itself. What is the importance of categories? What is the language of categorization? It is important to define terms, but when do the terms themselves become an obfuscation rather than a clarification? How do taxonomies, and perhaps even the notion of taxonomy, perpetuate problematic power structures? Will we end up coming up with a taxonomy of taxonomies? Will our heads explode?
Saturday July 15
2:00 PM 5 The Life Cycle of Political SF.
Dennis Danvers, Alex Jablokow, Barbara Krasnoff (moderator), Sabrina Vourvoulias, T. X. Watson.
SF writers have often written deeply political books and stories; some stand the test of time, while others become dated very quickly. John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The New Atlantis," to name just a few, directly addressed major issues of their day and are still relevant now—but differently. What affects how political SF ages and is read decades after its publication? What are today’s explicitly political books, and how do we expect them to resonate decades in the future?
3:00 PM B Reading: T. X. Watson.
*T. X. Watson reads "The Boston Hearth Project," which will be in the upcoming Sunvault anthology of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation.
I'm back from the free Readercon panels this evening and trying to wind down for bed. I'll write up my thoughts and post them tomorrow but in short: it was a lot of fun and I've become even more determined to go in full next year.
It’s that time again: My schedule for Readercon 34 has dropped, and I am in love.
Housekeeping details first: It’s July 17 – 20, this time at the Boston Marriott in Burlington, MA, with Guests of Honor Cecilia Tan and P. Djèlí Clark. As always, I absolutely recommend registering and attending if you can. Previous years’ schedules can be seen (and drooled over)…
