Better late than never, eh?
Readercon 25 was not that long ago and it was my second trip up to that con. It’s a lot more commuter friendly than Boskone. Readercon isn’t in the middle of Boston, one of the suckiest places on earth to drive, and the likelihood of having a blizzard (again) was pretty low. Also, free parking. So I look forward to this one a lot. The hotel that houses the con was remodeling last year, so the facilities were swankier this time around.
Anyways. I doubt anyone really cares about how nice the hotel was. Content! What about the content?
I’m getting there.
And now I’m here.
A lot of the con programming, at least on the Saturday-Sunday that I was able to go to, skewed to genre talk and publishing chatter. There was not a big emphasis on craft. That’s not a good or bad, just a thing. My favorite piece of genre talk was “The Shiny, Candy-like Zombie: Commoditizing the Undead” and featured one of my new con favorites, Max Gladstone. Part of why I liked the panel is that it drew in other types of media into the discussion. Yes, it’s a book con, but books don’t exist in a vacuum and are influenced by other types of media too. It can be a positive to talk about all that sort of stuff too and on this panel, it most definitely was.
My other favorite genre panel was Long Live the Queen. This was all about Victorian influences on genre writing with (the obvious) steampunk as a starting point. The panel, in particular Theodora Goss and Catt Kingsgrave, were very well versed in the history of Victorian times which brings in a whole additional layer to a genre discussion.
The only sad part about that panel was the old couple that sat behind me saying “Oh this is steampunk, I hope it’s not.” They sat there and talked down on the newer subgenres and then walked out of the panel acting all disgusted. To each their own. You can like whatever you want, it’s not going to bother me, but there’s no need for people to be condescending tools. Good riddance. Better off without “fans” like that. That one incident aside, I thought this year’s Readercon was better than any con I had been to before in regards of avoiding “Old Timer Wanking about the Past and Hating on Anything Not Twenty Years Old.”
One of my new favorite con people is Kameron Hurley. She’s rad. I knew this thanks to twitter and her kick ass book, but it’s still nice when that translates into real life. She signed my copy of God’s War and was all like “Hey, you’re Mike from twitter.” So I won at the internet. Again, since that’s the second time I’ve had an author say that to me out of the blue at a signing. I saw Hurley on two panels and a reading. She’s very well spoken and I think if she suggested we all went and jumped off a bridge, there’d be takers based solely off her rhetoric and not the fact that jumping off of bridges is fun. She moderated an excellent panel on New Models of Masculinity, which later gave me a chance to recommend Saladin Ahmed’s short fiction to someone. Hurley was also on a panel about Marketing that had another one of my con favorites, Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld. One of the other panelists decided to make a point about “Marketing only works if you’re the first person to do something.” I don’t think there was a single person that thought it was a good point but Hurley had a Picard level face palm and then proceeded to own this guy.
This brings me to the highlight of Readercon. A whole crew from Women Destroy Science Fiction and Women Destroy Horror had a group reading. Amal El-Mohtar, Sarah Pinsker, Holly Schofield, Kameron Hurley, Liz Argall, Livia Llewellyn and Gemma Files all read pieces from the anthologies. I was actually pleasantly surprised that my favorite piece was a nonfiction from Argall. Hurley also read a nonfiction piece from the essay/blog that she got the Hugo nom for.
So that’s Readercon 25. I had a lot of fun. I’m going to end with some quotes really fast now since my kiddo is demanding satisfaction right now in the middle of the night.
- “Yeah, he’s an old man leading a charge… but he’s a fucking wizard!” -GoH Andrea Hairston on Gandalf making a point on realism in SF
- “I like men and I wish people would stop writing them lazy.” -Catt Kingsgrave on New Models of Masculinity
- “As an erotic story, there is too much body horror with zombies, but-” shrug “-people are weird.” -Max Gladstone
- “It’s like 1998 again. The Internet, it’s going to kill us all.” -Robert Jackson Bennet on Extrapolating SF from Science
Mike Douton's Stuff and/or Junk 