Readercon 2025 Schedule
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oracneMy schedule is finalized! I didn't list participants in case there were changes.
Who will I see at Readercon next month?
The Works of P. Djèlí Clark
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT
Our Guest of Honor P. Djèlí Clark rounded out his first decade as a published author with a Nebula and a Locus for his fantasy police procedural novel, The Master of Djinn, and both those awards plus a British Fantasy Award for his monster-hunting novella Ring Shout. His short story "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" is short-listed for the Hugo this year. As a History professor at University of Connecticut, he investigates the pathways leading from West African storyteller/poets (griots, a.k.a. djèlí) to the American abolitionist movement. Help us celebrate the works of our honored guest!
The Purposes of Memorable Insults in Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 5:00 PM EDT
Some of the most quotable lines in science fiction and fantasy are zingers. Wit can do a lot to build a character, a world, and a universe, and has the ability to either support or undermine reader expectations. This panel aims to explore and elaborate on the use of wit—and especially takedowns—in literature, exposing how a verbal jab can serve as more than just a punchline.
Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing
Salon G/H Friday, July 18, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
It's becoming increasingly common to hear of authors whose self-published work was so successful that they were picked up by a traditional publisher. But what of the authors who have gone the other way, by turning their backs on traditional publishing and going into self-publishing? Panelists will survey the varying reasons for making this transition, how authors have navigated it, and what this might say about the state of publishing overall.
Kaffeeklatsch: Victoria Janssen
Suite 830 Friday, July 18, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
Meet the Pros(e) party
Salon F Friday, July 18, 2025, 10:15 PM EDT
Program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone's attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.
The Works of Cecilia Tan [I'm moderating this one]
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT
Our Guest of Honor, Cecilia Tan, has a publication history that spans Asimov's, Absolute Magnitude, Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, and Best American Erotica, among others. Writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy, especially as they intersect with erotica and romance, she is also the founder of Circlet Press, an independent publisher that specializes in speculative erotica. Her own writing earned a Lifetime Achievement for Erotica in 2014 from Romantic Times magazine. She also contributes to America's other pastime, baseball, in her role as Publications Director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Come hear our panel discuss Cecilia's many talents and accomplishments.
Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?
The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
Create / Collaborate Saturday, July 19, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
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?
Bundle of Holding: Broken Tales
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:44 pmjames_davis_nicoll
The English-language rulebook and supplements for Broken Tales, the tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of upside-down fairy tales from Italian game publisher The World Anvil Publishing.
Bundle of Holding: Broken Tales
Clarke Award Finalists 2003
Jun. 30th, 2025 10:28 amjames_davis_nicollWhich 2003 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Separation by Christopher Priest
7 (14.3%)
Kiln People by David Brin
14 (28.6%)
Light by M. John Harrison
11 (22.4%)
The Scar by China Miéville
20 (40.8%)
The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
24 (49.0%)
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
25 (51.0%)
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.
Which 2003 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Separation by Christopher Priest
Kiln People by David Brin
Light by M. John Harrison
The Scar by China Miéville
The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
June 2025 in review
Jun. 30th, 2025 09:06 amjames_davis_nicoll
I survived another dance season. Go me.
21 works reviewed. 11 by women (52%), 9 by men (43%),1 by non-binary authors (5%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 8 by POC (38%).
More details at the other end of the link.
I don't change, I don't even notice the scene
Jun. 29th, 2025 09:52 pmsovayspatch that the driver who actually had stopped for us like a normal person let out one of those whoaaa sounds as at a game of the dozens, which was extremely good recompense for almost being run over by an SUV whose Lord may have been a shepherd, but obviously not a crossing guard.(The rest of this weekend has been different temperatures of garbage; I take my victories where I can. We were in West Medford to eat tamales on the bleachers of Playstead Park.)
Survived another dance season
Jun. 29th, 2025 10:43 pmjames_davis_nicollAmong my final achievements this season, discovering as I hoisted the last of many garbage bags into the dumpster that the bag was leaking coffee. My last achievement was ducking to the men's to wash my hands, discovering someone had plugged the sinks and turned on the taps, and stopping the flood in time.
farmers market
Jun. 29th, 2025 02:12 pmredbirdI left the house as soon as I'd had my morning tea, and went to a market that opens at 10 on Sundays. I got there at about 10:20, before they'd sold out of anything I wanted, or might want.
What I particularly wanted was raspberries, and I bought two small boxes of those (totalling about a pint).
Busa Farms had a bin full of nice-looking shell peas, and I bought almost two pounds, because Cattitude is very fond of fresh peas. When I got home, he told me that he'd thought he had missed the local pea season this year. I also bought a bunch of red radishes, because they caught my eye while I was in line to pay for the peas. (Busa had both red and purple radishes, which somehow made them more appealing than if there'd only been one kind of radish.)
Hi-Rise Bakery was there, and I bought a small loaf of their concord bread, which is the right degree of crusty for the three of us. (They also have a thicker-crust "luce.")
The raspberries are from Kimball's, where I also bought a few diva cucumbers.
Stillman's Farm didn't have lamb sausages, but when I asked about it, the vendor said "probably next week" and asked what kind I liked. She is going to report back that they had a request for merguez sausages. I don't know whether we'll get to the same market next week, but it sounds like there will be lamb sausages at the other local farmers markets soon.
A lot of other things looked good, but I decided I didn't need lettuce (multiple varieties), cherry tomatoes, or fish.
To Walk The Night by William Sloane
Jun. 29th, 2025 09:03 amjames_davis_nicoll
Jerry's romance with the brilliant, beautiful, eccentric Selena is book-ended with death: first, Selena's husband's, then Jerry's.
To Walk The Night by William Sloane
acelightning has died
Jun. 28th, 2025 04:36 pmredbirdacelightning has died. She was one of the people I only know online, but feel like friends because we have real conversations (in her case, here on Dreamwidth and previously on LJ).Books Received, June 21 — June 27
Jun. 28th, 2025 10:14 amjames_davis_nicoll
Three books new to me, all fantasy (Although the Stross is an edge case), and only one is clearly part of a series.
Books Received, June 21 — June 27
Which of these look interesting?
Until the Clock Strikes Midnight by Alechia Dow (February 2026)
16 (30.2%)
The Regicide Report by Charles Stross (January 2026)
32 (60.4%)
The Beasts We Raise by D. L. Taylor (March 2026)
4 (7.5%)
Some other option (see comments)
3 (5.7%)
Cats!
34 (64.2%)
Waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone
Jun. 27th, 2025 09:22 pmsovay
My father adores his Diplocaulus salamandroides. My niece has been sent a picture of hers with its accompanying book, to be held in trust until her next visit. My mother has been presented with its enamel pin form, which is done in bands of lighter and darker purple instead of newt-like red and black. I had forgotten entirely about the stretch bonus of Bandringa rayi, whose spoonbill suggests the Amazon river dolphin of the Pennsylvanian period. I really am invested in the continued existence of the Paleontological Research Institution, which is one of the reasons I have gladly thrown in to its Kickstarters for almost ten years. The present being so very full of horror and stupidity, it is important that it can also produce such snuggable plush of the past.
Vanya and the Wild Hunt (Vanya, volume 1) by Sangu Mandanna
Jun. 27th, 2025 10:11 amjames_davis_nicoll
A schoolgirl abandons the UK's post-Brexit educational system for the comparative safety and comfort of a magical school designed to turn out magical soldiers in the war on eldritch horrors.
Vanya and the Wild Hunt (Vanya, volume 1) by Sangu Mandanna
The Royal Sanctuary: The corridor (Tempestuous Tours)
Jun. 27th, 2025 09:27 amduskpetersonA long, windowless corridor leads into the royal sanctuary. The corridor's entrance is next to a walled-up gateway that originally led directly into the courtyard of the royal residence. The corridor itself is kept deliberately unlit, to recreate the circumstances under which captives were led here before being enslaved. Just walk toward the light at the end of the corridor to reach your destination.
[Translator's note: A chase takes place in that corridor during Death Mask.]
It's two in the afternoon and thirty-four degrees
Jun. 27th, 2025 02:06 amsovayI had worked up an entire rant about the scaremongering of this article and especially its anti-intellectual characterization of Zohran Mamdani as automatically out of touch because his father teaches at Columbia and his mother has directed films in Hollywood as if he were a Cabot who talks only to God when both of these professions especially in these days of DEI demonization mean something very different without whiteness and then I discovered that the author's big shtick is that she "came out" as politically conservative while an undergraduate at Harvard, at which point her already tenuous right to slate anyone for attending Bowdoin fared poorly on the pot-to-kettle scale. Anyway,
spatch liked Monsoon Wedding (2001).The Europeans (1979) turns out to have been the first foray of Merchant Ivory into costume drama and its modest budget gives it a slight, wonderful ghost-look of New England, nineteenth-century carriages on twentieth-century streets, the tarmac dirt-roaded over, telephone poles discreetly out of shot, the dry stone walls tumbledown in the picturesque rather than practically maintained day. I got such déjà vu from the Federal style of its historic houses—and the occasionally more modern construction of their neighbors—that I was reassured to see it actually had shot in Waltham, Concord, and Salem which I recognized from the red-bricked back side of the Customs House. Its autumn is the sugar-red drift of maple leaves, the pale punctuation of birches. Its actors have an indie air with their precisely characterful period clothes doing half the worldbuilding. Robin Ellis sports a moss-bronze corduroy coat and a waistcoat in pheasant paisleys I should like to bid for and a creditably mid-Atlantic accent, cast ironically on the colonial side of the plot of two sets of American cousins and their entanglement with a third, European set. I have not read its particular source novel by Henry James, but it has the light, sharp, not overly mannered observations, a sweet-sour bite in the chocolate box. In light of the setting, variations on "Simple Gifts" and "Shall We Gather at the River?" may have been unavoidable contributions to the score.
Because I had showed
spatch a clip of a trumpet played into Jell-O, my attempt to explain Chladni figures netted us a 1989 Christmas lecture by Charles Taylor, after which we went through Delia Derbyshire's "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" (1967), Belbury Poly's "Caermaen" (2004), and finally thanks to what must have been a very confused sidebar landed on Les Luthiers' "Rhapsody in Balls" (2009). Today has been generally breaking-down-tired, but during the part of the evening where I was still working on implementing a bagel for dinner, WERS had the decency to play the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" (1988).Five SFF Stories About Making Amends
Jun. 26th, 2025 10:20 amjames_davis_nicoll
People adopt very different strategies when it comes to making up for mistakes.
Five SFF Stories About Making Amends
Trade show! in! spaaaaaace!
Jun. 26th, 2025 09:07 ammrissaNew story out today in Lightspeed magazine: All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. Visit the space gift shop trade convention and learn who's most likely to try to ruin things for all of us (hint: it's Earth people, UGH).
Don't miss the Author Spotlight discussing the story afterwards!
Golem100 by Alfred Bester
Jun. 26th, 2025 08:50 amjames_davis_nicoll
What could possibly go wrong with a little harmless Satanism between friends?
Golem100 by Alfred Bester
Wednesday reading
Jun. 25th, 2025 09:32 pmredbirdI gave up on Twelve Trees (mentioned in the previous post) because the printing was hard on my eyes, and since it's a hardcover rather than an ebook, I can't change the font or print size, and I have to take it back to the library.