This past weekend I was a participant at the 23rd annual Readercon convention in Burlington, Massachusetts. As always, I had a great time. The con (-vention) committee did their usual superb job of keeping everything running smoothly. These are fans who do this for fun, and yet manage to do a better job than many professional event managers. If you ever want to put on a large event, get a bunch of science fiction fans to run it.
Friday was my big day. I was on two panels. The first concerned "anthropology for writers" but basically turned into a world-building tutorial. Harold Torger Vedeler kept the audience laughing by using John Norman's "Gor" books as examples of how not to do it.
After that I did a reading. I had originally said I'd read my unpublished short story "Rene Descartes and the Cross of Blood" but after doing a run-through I wasn't sure I could get through the whole story in my time slot. Since I didn't want to read an old piece, I decided that if one is going to read just part of something, give them part of a novel instead of a short story. So I read the beginning of my work-in-progress, Corsair.
Short break, and then "my" panel: a discussion of "Have We Lost the Future?" based on a suggestion I submitted back when the convention was soliciting program ideas. The issue was whether science fiction has turned away from trying to envision the future (my data based on past years' Hugo nominees suggests yes), and why. I was the moderator, but the panel were very insightful and entertaining. We batted around ideas but of course didn't "settle" the question. Con panels never settle things, any more than conversations between barbershop patrons settle anything.
Rounding out the evening was a group reading by the mighty Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop. Being a collection of professionals, we brought the reading in exactly on schedule: eight stories in an hour. Because of the limited time I read "Makeover" rather than "Parsifal," as originally planned.
Friday finished up with the annual "Meet the Prose" party, in which participants have sheets of stickers bearing sentences from their published work. Con members can collect lines from their favorite writers, assemble them into some kind of William Burroughs fiction, wear them instead of tattoos, or (as at least one attendee did) post them above the urinals in the men's room.
Saturday I woke at my usual time, which meant I was severely sleep-deprived. I breakfasted with hard-SF master Allen Steele, attended a couple of morning panels, and bought more books. Then I moderated a panel based on a blog post of mine, on "Unexamined Assumptions in SF." I learned that people's ideas differ about which assumptions are unexamined, and that the very act of discussing unexamined assumptions tends to reveal your own unexamined assumptions.
Saturday night Diane Kelly and I dined with friends at the hotel restaurant -- which has undergone a startling transformation. In previous years it was fairly ordinary "hotel food" but now it's a genuinely excellent restaurant. I actually look forward to dining there at future Readercons. Diane headed back home while I spent the rest of the evening in some interesting conversations. For the first time in years I didn't attend the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Contest. Just not in the mood, somehow. I very unwisely stayed up to read one of my new books, so that for a second night in a row I got about three hours' sleep.
Sunday I breakfasted, then attended a very interesting panel on the origins of creativity. (Short summary: Kipling had it right, there is no "right way" to write.) After a final pass through the dealer room and a round of goodbyes, I left.
The Haul: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, by Mike Brown (nonfiction about how Pluto got demoted to dwarf planet); The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart (an omnibus edition of his three Chinoiserie fantasy novels); The Bible Repairman and Other Stories, by Tim Powers; Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (stories by divers authors set in Jack Vance's far-future fantasy world); The Apocalypse Codex, by Charles Stross; Redshirts, by John Scalzi; and The Mongoliad, Book One, by Neal Stephenson and a whole passel of coauthors.
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