This weekend, I’ll be at Readercon 18 in Burlington, Massachusetts. Readercon’s kind of special for me, since last year’s Readercon was my first exposure to the SF con scene. (Read my recap of Readercon 17.)
Last year, I headed off to Readercon knowing literally one person two people in the SF field: my editor, Lou Anders and my copy editor, Deanna Hoak. This year, I can look at the programming schedule and see all kinds of friends and acquaintances on the list, including John Joseph Adams, Matt Jarpe, Mary Robinette Kowal, Tom Purdom, Kay Kenyon, Ellen Datlow, Jim Freund, Matthew Kressel, Doug Cohen, Jenny Rappaport, Ernest Lilley, Scott Edelman (for the last time, people, no relation), Elizabeth Bear, Hildy Silverman, and Lee and Diane Weinstein.
I’ll be arriving on Friday afternoon (after making a pit stop to see my sister and my nephew) and heading for the airport after my reading on Sunday. Here’s what I’m doing in between:
- Saturday, 10 am — Other Points of View.
Panel with Laurie J. Marks, Maureen McHugh, Wen Spencer, and Peter Watts. Description from the program: “In several places, Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club adopts a first-person plural viewpoint: ‘we’ are thinking about the conversation described, and the reader gets to think about who, exactly, ‘we’ may be—not everyone in the room! While third person and first person singular are the standard viewpoints in fiction, here we talk about the alternatives, and when we (you?) can best employ them.” - Saturday, 11 am — Political Beliefs and Fiction.
Panel with Paolo Bacigalupi, Karen Joy Fowler, John Kessel, James Morrow, and Lucius Shepard. Program description: “Both our Guests of Honor have histories of political activism. We’ve learned from other authors that the relationship between strongly held political beliefs and fiction is not always what it seems: apparently apolitical stories have hidden political motivations, or the overt political elements which would seem to be central to a story’s conception are in fact late additions. Our panelists discuss their stories with political elements or motivations. How do different creative circumstances (e.g., coolly rational vs. mad as hell) lead to different flavors of fiction or different degrees of success?” - Sunday, 2 pm — Reading from MultiReal.
I will be reading (for the first time) excerpts from my forthcoming novel MultiReal. (Read a preview of MultiReal from an earlier blog entry.) Unfortunately, the folks at Readercon decided to schedule my reading on Sunday afternoon in the last time slot of the con. Well, I guess someone’s got to be there. And to make things worse, I’m programmed opposite Peter Watts talking about “How I Wrote Blindsight” and panels with Elizabeth Bear, David Hartwell, and James Morrow, among others. Somebody please come see my reading.
So if you’re at Readercon and want to say hello, don’t be shy. If you can’t find me anywhere else, you might want to try the bar.