There are three things you can do while at Readercon during the day: talk to friends, browse and patronize the Bookshop, or attend the program. This is a significantly shorter list than provided by other science fiction conventions (which typically include an art show, gaming, musical performances, and so on).  It's thus not an exaggeration to say that Readercon is all about the program.  As we used to say, it's not just the heart of the convention, but the lungs, brain, liver, and kidneys.

The Readercon Programming Philosophy

The form and content of the Readercon program are shaped by the following principles:

Form

• The broad range of interests and tastes of our attendees should be recognized and satisfied. In terms of genre, attendees may be into any combination of hard science fiction, literary sf, fantasy, horror, or "slipstream" (unclassifiable non-realistic) fiction. They may be variously interested in the writing and reading processes, in editing and publishing, and in the criticism and teaching of sf. They may like to hear panel discussions more than author readings or solo talks or discussions, or vice versa.
• There should be something of interest every hour for all but the most narrowly-focused attendee.
• It's better to force someone to choose between two attractive alternatives than to leave them with nothing of interest in a given hour. However, items with obviously overlapping interest should not be held simultaneously.
• There should be enough programming to keep our program participants reasonably busy: at least one item for everyone, a handful or more for our best speakers.

We've found that we can satisfy these principles by featuring the following simultaneously:

• Two panel discussions featuring five (or occasionally six or four) participants, usually including a "leader" who both directs and takes part in the discussion (sometimes with the more traditional "moderator" who directs but doesn't opine). The participants sit in arm chairs in front of coffee tables, rather than behind the usual table. Usually, the last ten minutes or so are devoted to questions from the audience, but the leader is free to solicit audience input at any stage. Although some of the panels are based on ideas given us by the participants, they are all ultimately the brainchildren of Readercon's Program Subcommittee (see below).
• Two tracks of author readings. Usually, each consists of a pair of compatible 30-minute readings, but there are 60-minute readings as well. Unlike nearly every other convention, we give you the title (and sometimes a descriptive blurb) in the Program Guide.
• Two tracks of solo talks and/or discussion groups (the "mini-tracks"), usually 60 minutes long, sometimes 30. Unlike the panel discussions, these are the brainchildren of the individual presenters or discussion group leaders.
• Two author Kaffeeklatsches — an intimate get-together between an author and up to 15 readers (who sign up in advance).
• Two autograph sessions in the Bookshop.

The items in any hour are carefully selected to avoid overlaps of genre and topic. If there's a hard sf panel discussion, there will rarely if ever be a hard sf author doing a reading, autograph session, or the like at the same time. (There's another reason for this: we want them in the audience of the panel discussion). If there's a panel we deem useful to aspiring writers (who are legion in our audience), it will not be up against a solo talk about writing. In fact, someone with a fairly narrow set of interests should be able to pick and choose their way through the program: first a panel discussion about fantasy, then a reading by a fantasy author, now a discussion, another panel, a Kaffeeklatsch, and so on. The attendee with broader tastes finds themselves (we hope) at a sumptuous but well-balanced buffet.

Content

Very simply, we pride ourselves on doing panel discussions you haven't seen at a previous sf convention. We develop our ideas at meetings of our Program Subcommittee (there were ten of us this year, which is to say roughly half of the entire convention committee). If we have a driving principle, it's to start the panel at the right point, which is often roughly where the typical panel on the topic ends. In other words, we strive for panels that ask the next question (the driving cognitive philosophy of sf great Theodore Sturgeon, Memorial GoH at Readercon 2).

If this sounds attractive (or like a bold claim we need to back up), we urge you to read through the programs of past Readercons!

Schedule

The convention begins Thursday at 7:30 PM with programming open to the public.

Friday's full schedule starts at 11:00 AM. Since many local attendees are arriving after work and hence at dinner time, there’s no dinner break. Special events start at 10:00 PM (see below).

Saturday's full schedule runs from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. While there's no lunch break, we do try to populate the lunchtime hours with some of our more specialized programming — and if that fails, there's a concession stand which sells very satisfying sandwiches! See the "Special Events" section for what happens after 4:00 PM.

Sunday programming once again begins at 10:00 AM and ends at 3:00 PM.

Traditional Program Items

While the bulk of the program items at every Readercon are novel, there are a handful that you can count on:

• The "Bookaholics Anonymous" meeting Friday — a great way for folks attending their first Readercon to meet some of the regulars and get into the spirit of the weekend.
• A set of panels appreciating the career and works of our Guests of Honor, and of the outgoing and new Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award winners.
• A panel reviewing the year in short fiction.
• A series of 30-minute author talks called "How I Wrote Novel Title." This year's titles:
  
  • Dust by Elizabeth Bear
    
  • City of Ashes and City of Bone by Cassandra Clare
    
  • Infoquake and Multireal by David Louis Edelman
    
  • The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford
    
  • The Philosopher's Apprentice by James Morrow
    
  • Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia
  You're all urged to read as many as possible before the con. (One of our past slogans was "The con that assigns homework!"). Also note this year's choice for The Readercon Book Club.

Special Events

• The presentation of the annual Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, Friday night at 10:00 PM. This is followed by:
• The Meet the Pros(e) Party. This is a chance to not only meet the program participants, but a fragment of their work! See the program listing for any recent convention for the details.
• The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan, Saturday afternoon at 3:00 PM (as part of regular programming). The Rhyslings are the annual awards of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and Readercon is proud to be their new annual host. (A poetry "slan" — to be confused with "slam" — is a poetry reading by sf folks. If you don't get the in-joke, ask an sf fan above a certain age).
• Interviews with our Guests of Honor from 4:00 to 6:00 PM on Saturday. Our Guests of Honor are eminent and interesting enough that we don't need to program anything else (except an open Bookshop) opposite them.
• The famous Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition Saturday evening (after a two-hour dinner break). To our chagrin and secret satisfaction, we are perhaps as well known for "Kirk Poland" (widely regarded as the funniest 90 minutes in science fiction fandom, and certainly the funniest 90 minutes at any literary conference) as for everything else we do combined. Again, see a recent program listing for details.
• In some years, Something Else at 8:00 PM, between the dinner break and Kirk Poland. We've had a Poetry Slan, a one-act play, several James Tiptree, Jr. Award presentations and auctions. This year, we expect to present a pair of one-act plays (or staged readings) by our Guest of Honor James Patrick Kelly. Watch this space for further details!
• This year, the inaugural Shirley Jackson Awards Sunday morning. Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, "The Lottery." Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. The Shirley Jackson Awards have now been established in her name for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic; they have been voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics (all of whom are Readercon program participants this year), with input from a Board of Advisors. GoH Jonathan Lethem will host the ceremonies, and there will be nominees present in all seven categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

This Year's Panel Discussions

If All Men Were Tolerant, How Would You Shock Your Sister? Once upon a time "a glimpse of stocking" was a dangerous vision. What is the future of transgression and the shocking in a society that prides itself on its ever-increasing tolerance? What value do shocking and transgressive texts have? How do they read once their shocking element becomes passé?

Snape, Gollum, and Other Moral Linchpins. The two most popular fantasies of all time portray a battle between pure good and absolute evil in which a morally divided character proves to be crucial to the plot. Was Severus Snape ultimately as successful a character as Smeagol/Gollum? What other fantasies have used this device? How is it that we as readers accept a morally labile linchpin character without questioning the solidity of everyone else? Or does moral grayness sometimes leak out from the linchpin to tint the otherwise black-and-white world?

What Has It Got in Its Apocalypses? Cormac McCarthy's The Road never identifies the cataclysm that has destroyed society. So the novel is clearly not at all about any specific Bad Thing that might happen to us; rather, it uses the post-apocalyptic setting as an amplifier of human nature. To what degree has this always been true (if not quite so overtly) of the post-apocalyptic novel, whose history goes back to well before the Bomb? Why have authors sometimes explained the Bad Thing in detail anyway?

The Einstein Introspection. The degree to which we understand our own psychology can vary widely across different periods of our lives. How do stories informed or even inspired by introspection differ from stories in which characterization is largely drawn from observation or is generated unconsciously without self-awareness? Some writers report that writing "introspeculative fiction" leads to the creation of characters less like themselves, a seeming paradox that's well worth exploring.

Rival Revolutionary Movements in the Arts. James Patrick Kelly was both a leading figure of the "humanist sf" movement and a contributor to Mirrorshades, the defining text of the rival cyberpunk movement. That immediately suggests that the two movements had much in common (as would be inevitable given that they agreed about the inadequacy of what was being written at the time). What are some other instances of rival revolutionary movements in the history of the arts? Are they actually rarer than the single, dominant revolution? What we can learn about the nature of artistic revolutions by examining what happened?

Objects in a Room May Be Scarier than They Appear. "The description in crime fiction of domestic interiors, furnishings and possessions … is often crucial to the plot. In Agatha Christie, for example, we can be confident that almost any domestic article mentioned, however commonplace, will provide a clue, either true or false." — P.D James. Objects in a room in sf or fantasy are clues to the world-building, while in much contemporary fiction they are class and status markers and hence clues to character. What about the objects in a room (and by extension the entire described environment) in a horror or slipstream story? How often are they clues, and clues to what? Or is the very cluelessness of the environment part of what creates the horror or facilitates the slippage?

The Critical Review: Griffin, Gorgon, or Sphinx? The book review and the critical literary study serve fundamentally different purposes. Yet sf book reviews have frequently contained valuable critical insights: it's hard to avoid having them if you're a perceptive reader, and hard to leave them out of a review. We'll look at the history and techniques of the critical review and assess just how comfortably the two components have gotten along. What does the continued practice of the hybrid form say about the nature of the reading experience and the way we talk about books?

Trolls Got Rhythm!? One way to address issues of race, ethnicity, and culture in speculative fiction is to map them metaphorically onto the variety of races and cultures that populate the fantastic secondary world or the imagined planet or galactic region. This mapping may be simple and overt, but it is more likely to be complex, allusional — and perhaps not entirely intended. Is it possible to create a believably diverse imagined world without suggesting specific connections to the diversity of our own? How does an author make sure that the allusions (whether planned or not) are salutary?

Another Kind of Truth: The Personal Essay. "The essay appealed to me for its directness and urgency and grace. It seemed to me a form in which one could pursue any question, no matter how difficult, and to which one could bring the full range of intelligence." — Essayist and former sf writer Scott Russell Sanders. While Sanders has turned exclusively to the essay, more often writers are attracted to both fictional and non-fictional approaches — Jonathan Lethem has drawn on his youth as a genre fan in both the novel The Fortress of Solitude and the short personal essay "13, 1977, 21." Why do certain experiences lend themselves to fictional or non-fictional treatments? What are the things you can accomplish in one form but not the other? Which techniques can be used in both?

Finding Hamster Huey's Head: The Nature of the Childhood Favorite Story. Children very often like to hear the same story over and over again, often even insisting on a verbatim rendition (a phenomenon documented wonderfully by Bill Watterson in "Calvin and Hobbes"). Why? Is it simply a comfort mechanism, or do they get more from each hearing? Is this phenomenon related to listening to the same piece of music again and again? What relationship does it have to re-reading favorite stories as an adult?

When Neurons Meet Saurons: The Emotional Roots of Fantasy. In the January 2008 New York Review of Science Fiction, David Swanger examined the emotional underpinnings of horror and sf from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. Central to sf is the emotion of wonder, our response to vastness so great that it requires cognitive adjustment. Wonder comes in five varieties depending on the source, and it is frequently blended with other emotions. Like sf, fantasy has tropes that are notable for the emotions they produce, including communication with animals, the Tolkienesque time abyss, and above all the eucatastrophe. What other tropes and effects comprise the emotional palette of fantasy? How much sense can we make of them as part of the family of wonder?

In Space, No One Can Understand You. The impossibility of communication with aliens was a frequent theme in the fiction of Stanislaw Lem, appearing in Solaris, His Master's Voice, The Invincible, Fiasko, and Eden. Given the unlikelihood of the actual event, these speculations would seem to be largely about the general nature of communication: our desire or need for it, and our tendency to underestimate its difficulties. On the other hand, trying to communicate to people how difficult it is to communicate would seem to be a paradoxical task. Why was Lem so taken with this theme? How have other authors dealt with it?

–Esque No More: Transcending Your Influences. Beginning writers are often heavily indebted to one or more huge influences — a fact which may be more obvious to them than to their readers, or vice versa. Those that go on to be most successful are those who develop their own voice, a process that can take place any time in a writer's career. Our panelists talk about their awareness of their influences and their success at transcending them. To what extent does this happen consciously, or unconsciously as a natural part of a writer's maturation?

Why Don't We Do It in the Reformation?: Underutilized Historical Eras in Spec Fic. There have been many alternate histories of the Civil War and World War II, but almost none of World War I or Vietnam. The Napoleonic Wars are a frequent model for space opera and provide a setting for Naomi Novik's Temeraire and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but the Enlightenment has arguably been less fertile ground. What makes one historical era more compelling than another as a model, reference, or outright setting for speculative fiction? Are the underutilized eras ripe for exploration, or have they been neglected for good reason?

Forty Years of Locus. The newsmagazine of the field got its start in Boston forty years ago as a bidzine (a fanzine devoted to a Worldcon bid) for Noreascon 1. It's come an enormous way since. We'll look back at its beginnings and at its transformation over time. At what point did it become evident that there was a vital niche to fill?

Getting Away With Clever: Self-Consciousness in Unconventional Fiction. "[The] best examples [of interstitial fiction] avoid the self-consciousness of metafiction that can make such novels so wearying to read … Is it possible to be interstitial without calling undue attention to the artist's cleverness in playing around with genre?" — Kris McDermott on the Interstitial Arts message board, discussing an essay by Gregory Frost. We think that Pale Fire pretty much proves that self-conscious cleverness is not in itself a problem. We then wondered whether its close relative ironic distance was the actual wearying element, but in Donald Barthelme's short stories that distance is as delightful as Nabokov's cleverness. Can we figure out how the best writers turn these sometimes distracting aspects of metafiction into strengths? And what exactly are the pitfalls that the clever and self-conscious writer needs to avoid?

We All Took Too Much PKD in the Seventies. Our panelists all admit to a huge Philip K. Dick influence. How have they absorbed it? There are probably as many ways of being influenced by Dick as there are aspects of greatness to his work. Does being influenced by PKD necessarily mean sharing his take on his major themes?

Gatekeepers to the World of Letters. "[The book is] the oldest and the first mass medium. And it's the one that requires the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural training … I make black marks on a white surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It's magic." — William Gibson. We know that YA writers take very seriously their responsibility to tell young readers stories that reflect what they feel is true of life. How aware are they of their responsibility for training young readers in the magic Gibson speaks of? What kind of stories cultivate lifelong readers?

You Say Plagiarism, I Say "The Ecstasy of Influence." Prolific romance novelist Cassie Edwards recently lost her publishing contract when it was discovered that most of the background passages about her Native American settings (and one passage about ferrets) had been lifted nearly verbatim from a variety of sources. But as Jonathan Lethem wrote recently in Harper's, "appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act." Lethem argues that the arts exist not only in a market economy but a gift economy like the open-source software movement, and that creative borrowing is an essential part of that economy. (Indeed, he borrowed the above quote and the economic insight, along with almost everything else in the essay.) Is borrowing as ubiquitous and important as Lethem claims, or has he overstated the case? It seems to us that it's called "plagiarism" only when it's done badly — Edwards got caught because the borrowed passages stood out so clumsily. But where exactly do you draw the line between good and bad theft (in both senses of the words)?

Fantasists as Modern Philologists. Philologists believe that the study of an ancient language is inseparable from the study of its classic texts in their historical and cultural contexts — that understanding a language, the people who spoke it, and the stories they told in it are ultimately the same thing; there is no doing one without the others. It strikes us that this fascination with the interplay between language, culture, and story is reflected in the works of some of the best writers of fantasy, beginning of course with Tolkien, himself a philologist of renown. Who are these writers? How do their works reflect this attitude even when they're not actually inventing the languages of their imagined societies?

The Fermi Paradox Paradox. The Fermi Paradox — the absence of any evidence of extraterrestrial civilization despite the huge size and age of the universe — seems like it should be the basis for much hard sf. The paradox has numerous solutions (e.g., that nearly all civilizations quickly leave this reality and go somewhere else, or they destroy themselves as quickly, or they're consciously hiding from us), and all the solutions seem to be storyable. What sf writers have explored the paradox, and why are there so few of them? Is it because the vision of a galaxy essentially devoid of extraterrestrial intelligence is just a downer?

Sing Along With Text. More and more often writers are providing their readers with soundtracks to stories. Sometimes they are actual playlists, posted online at the author's website or blog or cited in a book's prefatory material; or they may be collections of song quotes, appearing as chapter titles or epigrams or squirreled away within the text itself. Often an author will simply list the music they were listening to while writing the text, but they can also construct the soundtrack after the fact. What do authors gain from making these "extras" available or referencing music so insistently in the text? How many readers are following along, and how does this change the reading experience? Are we moving towards a new mixed medium, or is this just a fad?

Steampunk and Beyond: What Would a "Gibson Chair" Look Like? Steampunk, originally just an sf subgenre, is now also a burgeoning underground design movement. There's precedent for this: modernism was not only a literary movement, but had artistic, musical, architectural, and design wings as well. Is the steampunk design movement an essentially fluky outgrowth of our fascination with all things retro? Or could other f&sf subgenres sprout their own design branches as well? Could the creation of actual, useful, physical objects lead to better-imagined literary art? How close is the relationship between the visually striking artifacts of steampunk and the literature that spawned them, anyway?

Generation Dark. There's some anecdotal evidence that the readership for horror and dark fantasy is younger than the readership for the rest of the field, and this shifting demographic is also reflected in our guest list. To what extent is the boom in young writers and readers of dark fantasy a reflection of the darkness of the times? And to what extent are we simply seeing the first generation to grow up with horror as a successful commercial genre and Stephen King as an icon? What other factors are in play?

F&SF + MFA > 0. We all know that writing f&sf is taught at specialized workshops like Clarion, but you can also go to school and get an MFA in creative writing in the genre. James Patrick Kelly and his frequent collaborator John Kessel have taught writing at this level, and they're joined by three of their students. How does teaching students who are already accomplished writers differ from teaching the newbies at Clarion? Why devote so much time to polishing your craft in an academic setting when most of your peers are managing without it?

It Gets Strange ‘Round Here: Regionalism and the Fantastic. American literature contains vibrant regional traditions, from the well-known Southern and Western to others more obscure. These traditions often have a natural tropism towards the fantastic, presumably as a reflection of local folklore. How do regional traditions and their relationships to the fantastic differ? Does the regional flavor evident in fantastic fiction differ from that found in mimetic fiction set in the same locales? When you write a fantastic regional story, are you simply mixing two different fictional flavors, or can the sum be greater than the parts?

If Free Electronic Texts Are Good Promotion, What's Piracy? "Webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free … [are helping convert] the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch." — Howard V. Hendrix, former Vice-President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). In a recent issue of Locus, Cory Doctorow summarized the evidence that giving away free electronic versions of books actually helps rather than hinders sales of the printed versions. If Doctorow is right, then the illegal online sharing of texts — the policing of which has recently caused controversy in SFWA — may not be harmful and may well be helpful to the vast majority of writers. What are the differences between giving away a text electronically yourself, and letting others disseminate it without your knowledge and/or permission? Is it possible for self-promotion to be beneficial but "piracy" harmful? And if "piracy" is actually good for all except the best-selling authors, how do writers reconcile this reality with long-standing and deep-rooted feelings about intellectual property rights and getting paid for work (Hendrix, op. cit.)?

We: Compare Translations. One of the best-received panels at Readercon 17 was a line-by-line comparison of three Borges translations, with attendees following along on a handout that showed the texts side-by-side. This time, our panelists will compare three translations of a passage from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (by Mirra Ginsburg, Clarence Brown, and Natasha Randall). What we learned last time was that no one translator was clearly the best; someone who rendered one sentence beautifully might miss something essential in the next. And yet the translations were essentially similar in style, so that it seemed possible to construct a consensus text better than any of the individual ones. Will the same thing be true with Zamyatin? Or will we see more stylistic variation among the translations? Is the stylistic range a function of the language, the author, or the translator's daring?

Describing the Elephant in the Room: A Conversation about Genre and Career. Jonathan Lethem has become the first author since Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to begin his career as a "science-fiction writer" and completely shed the limiting (and to some, damning) qualifier — a feat that eminences as great as Harlan Ellison desperately strived for and could never quite manage. Whereas Vonnegut felt compelled to joke about peeing in his drawer full of old sf manuscripts (even while continuing to write new ones), Lethem has kept his ties to the sf community. He and Gordon Van Gelder have had an ongoing conversation about the issues involved in this extraordinary career move and have graciously volunteered to share their thoughts.

Economics as the S in SF. SF stories concerned with economics have predominantly been either satires of consumerism or arguments for libertarianism. But there are also sf stories that investigate economic principles in the way that traditional sf explores the physical sciences. Damon Knight's A For Anything examines the impact of a new technology on our current economic system; Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom imagines an entire new system; and John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider does some of both. We'll discuss these and other classics of the subgenre. Is today's generation of writers more economically aware than their predecessors, and has there been an uptick in these stories as a result?

Waking Up Sober Next to a Story Idea. Really, it seemed absolutely beautiful once upon a time. Now that you've had intimate knowledge of it (say, midway through the novel), you can see all the less-than-flattering sides. You may even wonder, What the hell was I thinking? How do you recover enthusiasm for the work? Now that you see the flaws, how do you begin the process of fixing them?

Cyberpunk Goes Post-al. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have recently co-edited Re-Wired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. How have stories written in a cyberpunk vein evolved since the subgenre originated? By precedent, the prefix "post" could have one of two meanings: a reactionary successor (as in post-modernism) or a contemporaneous stylistic expansion (as in post-punk). Do either of these meanings apply? If not, have the stories nevertheless evolved far enough from the original model to warrant the prefix? Or are they really just "late cyberpunk?" And if that's the case, does the use of "post" indicate some kind of attempt at distancing from the subgenre even as we continue to write and read it?

Beyond the Slipstream Canon. Last year at Readercon an intrepid group of panelists compiled a first draft of a "slipstream canon," comprising 112 mostly well-known novels, collections of short fiction, and anthologies. The list was complemented by over 150 rather more obscure works the group also considered but could not achieve consensus on. Which books from this supplementary list are neglected masterworks, capable of holding their own with the books in the proposed canon? And what works did our panelists, for one reason or another, miss completely?

Twenty Years of The New York Review of Science Fiction. A dummy "issue 0" of NYRSF was distributed at Readercon 1 in 1987, and this August's issue completes twenty years of on-time publication for the perennial Hugo nominee. While the usual next sentence runs "How has the magazine changed over the twenty years?", we wonder whether in fact it hasn't. And why would it want to, if the magazine's initial conception was so strong and timeless?

Satire With and Without Freedom of Speech. In the free West, writers like James Morrow write satire and trust that their desired readership will extract a direct and pointed critique from the art. In the Communist bloc, writers like Stanislaw Lem wrote satire and trusted that an undesired readership would fail to do so. We'll talk about the best and most important satire written under authoritarian regimes. How does it differ from satire written where speech is free? Can we imagine how the classic satires from both political environments might have read if they had been written in differently restrictive circumstances?

Under the Rainbow: Multiculturalism in Young Adult Fiction. "I'm old enough to still be excited by the ‘newness' of multicultural art, but I know my students have grown up thinking of monoculturalism as the exception rather than the rule." — Kris McDermott on the Interstitial Arts message board. How aware are YA authors of their readers' expectations for multiculturalism? How do you meet this expectation if your own background is less than worldly? How do you create a reasonably and realistically multicultural set of characters without resorting to tokenism? How do multicultural tales differ depending on whether the multiculturalism is incidental or integral to the plot, and what does each kind of story tell its readers about the nature of culture?

I'm Not Terse, I'm Just Edited That Way. We now know that Raymond Carver's famously minimalist style was essentially the invention of his editor Gordon Lish, and plans are underway to publish the much longer original versions of his stories, which Carver in some ways preferred. Of course, the sf world has already seen this happen with the novels of Robert A. Heinlein. Competing versions challenge our assumptions about the identity of authorship (or at least authorial style) and the nature and integrity of texts. But the upheaval may be even bigger than that. It's easy to imagine a day when every reader could use their e-book software to create their own half-terse, half-discursive version of each of Heinlein's novels and Carver's short stories. Well, there goes the commonality of the reading experience, too! What's a writer and reader to do?

A Tale of Two Disciplines. "The scientific world of the future will be pairs, or connections. Everybody is going to be a bridge between specialties." — Donald Knuth. Combining ideas from two or more disciplines is not just a fresh approach to doing science, it's a great way to generate thought-provoking hard sf. We especially want to talk about stories where the ideas don't just co-exist as separate elements of an extrapolated future, but combine in interesting or unexpected ways.

Over the Hills in Farah's Way: Four Categories of Fantasy. Every Readercon attendee is urged to pick up and devour a copy of Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, in which she describes four types of fantasy distinguished by the relationship of the protagonists, and hence the reader, to the fantasy world. In the portal-quest fantasy (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Lord of the Rings), the protagonists leave their mundane world and cross through to the fantastic, and the protagonists and reader discover and understand the new world together. In the immersive fantasy (Perdido Street Station or The Iron Dragon's Daughter), the fantastic is presented without comment or explication as the norm for both the protagonist and reader. The intrusion fantasy (Dracula or most of Lovecraft's short fiction) is in many ways the opposite of the portal-quest: the fantastic enters the ordinary world, where it is met with awe, shock, amazement, or the like. (Most intrusion fantasies are horror, but there are interesting exceptions.) In the liminal fantasy (Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist or Little, Big) there might be an intrusion into the ordinary world, but the reader is disoriented, estranged, or challenged by the casualness with which the protagonists accept the intrusion or by their doubt of its reality. We'll discuss the usefulness of the taxonomy and look at each of the categories, highlighting the most interesting of Mendlesohn's insights.

Genius is 90% Higher Standards: The "Unnecessary" Rewrite. Not all stories that could use a rewrite are seriously flawed. Sometimes the rewrite is about turning an already good story into a great one. How does this sort of rewrite differ from the more usual one, where significant flaws are being fixed? Our panelists share true tales of going the extra mile in order to realize a story's potential.

We Do Know Dick (and His Midlist!). Jonathan Lethem's essay "You Don't Know Dick" deals in good part with the much-debated midlist of Dick's large canon. We can agree on ten novels as being the crème de la crème (the first ten Lethem mentions in section 16 of the essay); after that, all bets are off. Can we figure out why these midlist novels work so differently for different readers? And will anyone defend Vulcan's Hammer?

It Came From the Suburbs and Went Somewhere Else. It's been suggested that the suburbs have become the natural setting for the contemporary horror story, much as pastoral settings are natural for fantasy, and futuristic and high-tech settings natural for sf. What's behind the connection of horror to the suburbs? Urban fantasies conjure much of their energy by consciously transgressing against the standard setting; likewise for the occasional pastoral sf novel like Clifford Simak's City. Are there settings for horror that provide similar opportunities for surprising the reader? Or does horror seem natural happening anywhere (any special felicity for the suburbs notwithstanding)? Are there any other branches of the fantastic which seem connected to the ‘burbs and about which we could ask the same questions?

Podcasts of Mars. Podcasts like Escape Pod and Free Reads from James Patrick Kelly are presenting audio discussions, short stories, and even entire books in a free portable format. We'll take a critical survey of what's out there and discuss the future of this new medium. Is it possible to model the podcast on the science fiction convention, which also includes discussions and readings? Could new technological approaches allow the podcast to go places that earthbound discussions can't?

Punkgate: In Search of the Next Suffix. It's a scandal: "-punk" is over thirty years old. There has to be a newer, better suffix for wannabe movements! Or maybe we need a prefix? (How important is it to a literary or other artistic movement to have the right name, anyway?)

Triumphing Over Competence. Jeff VanderMeer created an online ruckus with the assertion that today's short fiction market has been overwhelmed by "the triumph of competence." We can think of nothing less useful than a debate between those who agree with VanderMeer and others who feel we are in a Golden Age of short fiction, since the presence of both camps argues convincingly that any response to today's short fiction market is subjective. Instead, let's ask: what practical things can we do to make things better, regardless of how good we think they are now? What can we do to promulgate the writing of more (or "even more") great stories? And what can we do to help readers find stories they'll love, especially if they've been burnt out by over-exposure to the merely good?

The Readercon Book Club: John Crowley's Ægypt Cycle. An in-depth look at the four volumes of John Crowley's Ægypt cycle: The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love and Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things.

Remembering Arthur C. Clarke (and Others We've Lost This Year). It's a truism that "sf is not really about the future," but Clarke was both exemplary futurist and visionary storyteller. We'll spend most of the hour discussing his extraordinary career, and we'll also pause to remember the other writers (including Madeline L'Engle and Janet Kagan) who've left us in the last year.

The Year in Novels.

The Year in Short Fiction.

The Fiction of Daniel Galouye, Current Cordwainer Smith Award Winner.

The Career of James Patrick Kelly.

The Career of Jonathan Lethem.

The Career of Stanislaw Lem.

Additional Program Items

Special Interest Panels

The Aesthetics of Online Magazines. Online magazines are a growing section of the speculative fiction marketplace. But is there more to an online magazine than simply publishing in pixels stories that would otherwise be printed on pulp? How have online magazines adapted to the new medium in terms of story subjects, story length, design, and the attraction and maintenance of audiences? How do these choices differ from those made by print magazine producers? If the medium is the message, then what is the message of Internet-based magazines?

Nearly Thirty Years of "The Reference Library." Thomas A. Easton began writing the "Reference Library" book review column for Analog: Science Fiction and Fact in 1979, and the December 2008 column will be his last. What's it like reviewing for a readership whose tastes are as well-defined as those of Analog's readers? We'll talk to Tom about his career as a reviewer and take a look forward at the future of the column and at Tom's possible successors.

The Rebirth Of The Non-Theme Original Anthology. It started in the fall of 2006 with Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Last year saw the publication of no less than four anthologies with annual designs: The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction edited by George Mann, Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction From the Cutting Edge edited by Lou Anders, Eclipse 1: New Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Mann's The Solaris Book of New Fantasy. This year has seen a second Solaris SF volume and Datlow's The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy — each including a handful of stories by Readercon 19 guests. What role has the non-theme anthology played in the history of the field? What's behind the recent resurgence?

I've Seen Things You People Wouldn't Believe: The Influence of Blade Runner. This year saw the twenty-fifth anniversary release of the definitive version of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, a film universally recognized as one of the two or three greatest achievements of sf cinema. The film's groundbreaking (and insanely detailed) visual design has influenced everything from runway fashions to building architecture, and some would argue that the current "default" dystopian science fiction vision comes right out of the film's dark LA streets. How pervasive has Blade Runner's influence been on sf (both written and cinematic)? Has the film altered the way we look at ourselves and our future? Is it possible that its dark landscapes have discouraged us from envisioning a better tomorrow?

"Are You Writing a Sequel?" Readers love them. Editors want them — sometimes. What do writers think about them? When do they think of them: before, during, or after work on the first book? How do they think of them: all planned out or a grope in the dark? What's the difference between a sequel and a series? Our panelists will answer these and the questions that naturally follow them.

Discussions

If Fantasy Is Created, Does Science Fiction Evolve? Jeff Hecht. Fundamentalist Christians and a sprinkling of other religious groups are attacking the scientific evidence that life has evolved to its present form. The conflict reflects a deep dichotomy in world views between science and fundamentalist religion. Is there a similar divergence between worlds of fantasy and science fiction? Strictly speaking, both sf and fantasy writers create their worlds. Yet science fiction writers often build their worlds around scientific laws, while fantasy writers create the rules themselves. Does this tell us something about the difference between the two — and who created that difference, or did it just evolve?

The Sycamore Hill Conspiracy, or How Bad Stories Go Good. Gregory Frost. How did one particular peer workshop started by John Kessel in Raleigh, NC way back in 1985 produce remarkable and frequently award-winning fiction? What's it like to workshop a story when everyone in the room is an invited author of note? Does a workshop at this level use the standard Clarion techniques, or does it have its own style? Veterans of the Sycamore Hill conference tell all.

You Got Spec Fic in My Romance! (And Vice Versa!) Victoria Janssen. One of the hottest romance sub-genres at the moment is paranormal, which encompasses everything from vampires to valkyries, werewolves to gargoyles, men who are cursed and women who carry demons on their skin. Many of the more recent paranormals, such as those by Patricia Briggs and Eileen Wilks, arguably have more fantasy than romance. Is paranormal "true" speculative fiction? How often do readers cross genres? Are paranormal romances and speculative fiction showing cross-genre pollination in their content?

Writers' Groups and Writers: A Match Made in Heaven or Hell? Matthew Kressel and Alaya Dawn Johnson. Writers groups: some writers swear by them, others swear at them. Many writers consider critiques from their writers' group an invaluable part of the submission process. Others believe that writers' groups tend to dilute individual style, tending toward "groupthink." Our discussants include members of Altered Fluid, a Manhattan-based writer's group that has met regularly since 2001.

Interstial Arts. Ellen Kushner & Sarah Smith. The Interstitial Arts Foundation is a group of "Artists Without Borders" fighting the Balkanization of art. They celebrate work that crosses or straddles the borders between media, the borders between genres, the borders between "high art" and popular culture. They are not opposed to mainstream fiction or genre fiction, nor are they seeking to create a new category. They are just particularly excited by border-crossing fiction (and music and art), and want to support the creation of such works and to establish better ways of engaging with them. The IAF has had a presence at Readercon from its beginning, and last year Small Beer Press published Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstial Writing, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss. Interstitial Arts is an idea, a conversation, not a hard-and-fast definition — and it's a conversation you are invited to join.

Bookaholics Anonymous Annual Meeting. The most controversial of all 12 step groups. Despite the appearance of self-approbation, despite the formal public proclamations by members that they find their behavior humiliating and intend to change it, this group, in fact, is alleged to secretly encourage its members to succumb to their addictions. The shame, in other words, is a sham. Within the subtext of the members' pathetic testimony, it is claimed, all the worst vices are covertly endorsed: book-buying, book-hoarding, book-stacking, book-sniffing, even book-reading. Could this be true? Come testify yourself!

Solo Talks with Discussions

Science Fiction as a Mirror for Reality. Robert J. Sawyer. Science fiction has always been a powerful vehicle for commenting on the here-and-now, letting us explore the burning issues of today in the guise of talking about tomorrow. Sawyer is currently under contract with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to host and co-produce a pilot for a web-based new-media series based on this idea. He'll talk about sf as a mirror of reality, discuss the project, and brainstorm with audience members about recent sf that comments on the here and now and might be worth spotlighting should the CBC series go beyond the pilot stage.

"The Cossacks are Coming!": Defining the Fantastic by Coherence of Story. John Clute. We normally define the fantastic by the presence of non-mimetic content. In this talk, Clute proposes that the "undue coherence" of Story, when wrought past a certain point, becomes inherently fantastical, regardless of content. The talk takes its title from the climaxes of John Buchan's Greenmantle (1916) and The Lord of the Rings; Clute argues that the shout of the beleaguered heroes of the first tale as their saviors come from the north and fall upon their foes — "The Cossacks! The Cossacks!!" — is not just superficially similar to Gandalf's cry — "The Eagles are coming!" — but that both cries have the same function, a function inherent to the experience of reading the fantastic. In other words, any story sufficiently advanced to have become entirely visible is indistinguishable from magic.

Breaking Into the Ghetto. David Anthony Durham. Durham's decision to move into fantasy after three successful historical novels shocked his editor, who saw a whole host of problems, concerns, hurtles, and uncertainty in the decision. But why is such a career move considered so risky? Is fantasy still somehow disreputable despite the huge commercial and reasonable critical success of Tolkien, Rowling, and others? And aren't readers smart enough to accept different things from writers? Durham takes a personal look at the topic and discusses the issues with other authors that have tried to (or would like to) cross genres.

Magic and Myth in Human Culture and Fantastic Fiction. Judith Berman and Sarah Micklem. Within our cultures, humans create consensus views of what is real and what is not, and these views are both explanations and operational (curses, oracles; germs, electricity). The modern scientific model of reality excludes the beliefs and experiences of many people around the world, not to mention in most of human history. How do we, as writers, step outside our own worldview to create imaginary cultures in which magic is a fact of life? Berman will talk about anthropological understandings of magic and myth, and issues of authenticity and appropriation, while Micklem will share some sources, primary and anthropological, that influenced her own fiction.

Radio Yesterday: Today! Adam Golaski. You may be familiar with some of the classic shows from Golden Age of Radio, such as The Shadow, Lights Out! and Inner Sanctum.  You may even have heard of some shows produced in the decades after radio's heyday, like CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, Nightfall and Ruby, the Galactic Gumshoe.  But did you know that radio drama is alive and well in the 21st Century?  And being made in New England? Members of NEATPro (New England Audio Theater Producers) talk about their productions, play samples and answer your questions.  Come hear clips from such programs as Red Shift: Interplanetary Do-Gooder, Second Shift, The Fantastic Fate of Frederick Farnsworth the Fifth and more, then find out about upcoming releases and live performances!  Panelists include representatives from the Post-Meridian Radio Players, Blue Sky Red Entertainment, Wyrd Enterprises and others.

Genre Distinctions and Reading Protocols: Insights from Styx's "Come Sail Away." Ken Houghton. Does the use of a science fiction or fantasy element in a story require that we read it as genre?  And what do we gain or lose by doing so?  Houghton proposes that certain genre tropes have been mainstreamed to the point where their presence does not, in fact, indicate that we are reading a genre story, and that many books claimed by the field as sf or fantasy have not been improved by reading them as such. As a simple exemplar of the phenomenon, he looks at — of all things — "Come Sail Away" by Styx.

How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction. Barbara Krasnoff. How do you pay the rent if you can't yet live off the royalties from fiction writing? You can marry somebody with a steady income who's willing to support you, you can get a full-time job and try to write during that hour or so when you're not working — or you can find freelance work writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-sfnal stuff. We'll talk about where you can sell your writing skills, how to promote yourself as a professional nonfiction writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and whether skills learned as a working nonfiction writer can be transferred to your fiction.

Return to Riverside. Ellen Kushner. In 1987, Kushner published her first novel, Swordspoint. 2006 saw the publication of The Privilege of the Sword, a sequel set about 15 years later. In between there were various short stories featuring the same characters, and a novel (and novella), The Fall of the Kings, written with partner Delia Sherman and set long, long after Swordspoint. What's it like to stay so long with one imaginary city and cast of characters, and to grow older along with them? How do you keep the theme of the books fresh and edgy when an entire generation has grown up between them? Kushner answers all your impertinent and importunate questions about the world and the characters . . . and what might be next. 

What's it All About, Skiffy? Graham Sleight. Sleight presents a history of the last twenty years of sf, fantasy, and horror — a history which, by and large, no one has yet written. Some questions he may or may not address: why are there all these stories that aren't clearly in one genre? Why are there so many subgenres and manifestos around now? What have new printing technologies and the web done to the field? A grand unified theory may or may not emerge.

Imagination and Ambiguity in Pan's Labyrinth. Andrea Hairston. Guillermo Del Toro's Hugo and Nebula-winning Pan's Labyrinth plays off a well-established tradition of narratives in which a portrayed fantastic world might either be real or the product of a child's imagination. But Del Toro is doing several things that are anything but conventional. He constructs a story where the fantastic world is not just an escape from an intolerable reality, but an act of resistance to it. And he ends his tale by neither resolving the ambiguity or leaving it undisturbed, but by doing something else entirely. Hairston will talk about imagination as resistance and about the film's ending. How do they combine so powerfully? Note: if you haven't seen Pan's Labyrinth, this talk will spoil one of the most thought-provoking and remarkable endings in all of cinema and all of the fantastic.

Every Critic His Own Aristotle: The Languages of Writers, Critics, Academics, and Fans. Gary K. Wolfe. Writers of sf and fantasy criticism feel free to invent their own terminology in addition to that traditionally used in mainstream literary studies. And this new terminology has seldom been portable among the multiple communities that talk about sf — writers, reviewers (both inside and outside the field), academics (ditto), and fans (including fan scholars). Wolfe will discuss the communities and their relationships to one another. Is there hope for developing a coherent dialogue among these groups, and eventually a unified language?

Quantum Reality for Smart Children and Very Smart Adults. Carl Frederick. Subtitle: "A Bowl of Possibly Sour Milk for Schrödinger's Cat." Richard Feynman once speculated that we wouldn't be so troubled by the paradoxes of quantum mechanics if we'd grown up with them as children. Frederick is currently writing a YA novel that explores this idea in the guise of a "Feynman Elementary School for Advanced Physics." How would they teach quantum mechanics at such a school? Come find out!

Consciousness, Free Will, Evolution, and Memory. Eric M. Van. Van gives a short version of his theory of consciousness (first presented at Readercon 11 in 1999) which underscores that the "philosophical" (really scientific) questions of the nature of consciousness and the existence of free will are inextricable: conscious experience only makes sense as a vehicle for true free will in an otherwise deterministic universe, and free will could only be implemented by conscious awareness. He then presents some recent implications of the theory that he's been speculating on as he prepares it for publication. What's the evolutionary argument for free will? What neural mechanisms would be necessary to implement it? Is it possible to tell the difference between an absence of conscious awareness and the absence of the memory of conscious experience?

Solo Talks

The Post-Posterity Writer. Scott Bakker. If nuclear / epidemiological / environmental Armageddon doesn't get us, then post-humanism certainly will. How does this change the stakes and the imperatives of writing? What forms of writing are appropriate to writers of social conscience, and what forms are anathema? Bakker argues that writers can no longer pretend to write, as Ben Jonson says of Shakespeare, "not of an age, but for all time!" — and that writers of literary fiction, who generally think themselves the most socially conscientious writers, are in fact the least.

Polish Science Fiction and Fantasy Today. Michael Kandel. Kandel gives a brief account of Polish science fiction and fantasy since Lem, giving a general idea of what makes this body of work particularly Polish. He'll talk about several writers and their works, including mini-readings from stories he's translated. (30 min.)

A Taxonomy of Realism. Sarah Monette. In criticism on her blog, Monette has been using two coinages of her own — "contrarealism" and "pararealism" — in addition to the more usual "realism" and "surrealism," the four comprising a taxonomy of possible approaches to the real. The Readercon program committee has found the terminology so useful that we've asked her to present it formally. "Pararealism," in particular, appears to be a term we need: it includes human behavior that would never happen in real life (e.g., as in satire and broad sitcoms) but that isn't non-real the way sf or fantasy is (that's "contrarealism"). (30 min.)

The Last of The Children of Hurin? Faye Ringel. With the publication of The Children of Hurin in 2007, we may have seen the end of Christopher Tolkien's presentation of this part of his father's Legendarium. Or have we? The reception of this "stand-alone" novel ranged from critical acclaim in The Washington Post to deep disappointment from the ranks of newer fans who were hoping for something more like LoTR. How does The Children of Hurin differ from the many previously-published versions of these legends from the First Age? Is it a coherent work of literature, readable by those not familiar with The Silmarillion and the History of Middle Earth? (30 min,)

The Fiction of Nelson Bond. Mike Allen. He influenced Ray Bradbury, counted Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman among his admirers, and earned favorable comparisons to Robert Bloch and Fredric Brown from John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Yet he's largely forgotten today. Come hear about this versatile master of sf's golden age. (30 min.)

Researching the Fantasy Novel (And Why it Matters). Resa Nelson. Nelson's research for her new novel, The Dragonslayer's Sword, included courses in blacksmithing and historically accurate techniques with medieval weapons. The research changed not just the novel's main character and plot, but Nelson herself. Come hear why even the fantasy novel can benefit from research, and often does so in surprising ways. (30 min.)

The Royal Navy's Campaign Against the Slave Trade. Tom Purdom. The Royal Navy's fifty year campaign against the African slave trade is the background of Purdom's time travel novelette "The Mists of Time" (Asimov's August ‘07, and just reprinted in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best SF). Purdom tells this great epic sea story and how he got interested in it many years ago, and discusses how he used it in his story. (30 min.)

Plus our popular "How I Wrote" series of 30-minute talks

Open Workshops

Writing Jujitsu: Turning Writer's Block into Stories. Barry B. Longyear. You can't sell it until it's on paper and you can't get it on paper if things keep eating up your time, nag at you, bully you, or you're filled to the brim with illnesses, insecurities, or crushing doubts. Longyear presents a how-to workshop for beginning writers and those who have been there on how to turn what's blocking your muse into stories.

Reading Aloud for Writers. Jim Freund. Freund has produced professional broadcast radio of f&sf writers reading their own work for almost 40 years for NYC's WBAI-FM, and is also the curator of The New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series, and a professional performer himself. In this workshop, Jim will share and discuss live reading technique in almost any setting a writer may find themselves: bookshop signing, library, convention, broad- or pod- cast. He'll discuss selecting your material, presentation (intro, Q&A), microphone usage, characters versus narration. For studio performance (or at-home podcasting) he'll share knowledge of simple yet professional recording technologies and sound ambience. This is a workshop, so you will have a chance to get some paragraphs in edgewise.

Stop Making Sense: Next Stage Dialog. Kay Kenyon. Dialog is one of the toughest things for a writer to get right. Is it possible that too often fictional dialog makes too much sense? This workshop looks at buried truths, game-playing, bald-faced lies, and other ways that people avoid saying what they mean — and how in doing so they actually reveal the truth.

Speculative Poetry Workshop. Mike Allen. Speculative poetry is also known by the equally puzzling monikers "science fiction poetry" and "fantastic poetry." What is it? Who publishes it? How do you write it and why would you want to? Come prepared to write.