ReaderCon 23 was a marvelous time: It’s the third year that I’ve attended, and increasingly, I’m finding myself more and more comfortable there. Over the last three years, a lot’s changed: I’ve been working for Lightspeed and Kirkus, and I’ve bet and continued to see people in our relatively small pond, and increasingly, I’m finding myself looking forward to the next time when the group is together again.
This year’s programming was light, but interesting. My favorite panel of them all was about the Expanse series, with Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck in the room outlining all of the background on the creation of their incredible world. The pair was witty, interesting and already, I’m eagerly awaiting the next novel in the series, and can’t wait to get a better glimpse of the cover.
There were some other fantastic panels as well – a talk on Post-Colonial science fiction was very enlightening, as well as a talk on why authors might choose a different name for their book’s cover and an excellent talk on the works of Shirley Jackson. There were also some good talks on the future of copyright, and of course the Shirley Jackson awards.
Even cooler, I got to meet some awesome people, and got some books signed: Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, Science Fiction Grand Master Joe frickin’ Haldeman, Scott Lynch, Brit Mandelo and Ken Liu. I also got to meet some interesting people for the first time: Jaym Gates, Brian White, Molly Tanzer, and Karen Burnham, which was very awesome. Too many awesome people to list in all, and I’m looking forward to going again. After it all, I came away happily exhausted.
It should be noted that there were some issues, such as what happened with Genevieve Valentine over the course of the weekend, a stark reminder that there’s problematic people who attend these things. Don’t be that person.
This year was also successful in that I was given more books than I bought – I still ended up buying a good handful that have already been interesting and useful. Now that the weekend is over, it’s time to get to reviewing, working on new awesome projects and reading a few good books.
I’m still rather sad that I didn’t get to attend the post-colonial sf/f panel. It’s relevant to my interests! I’m glad to hear it was enlightening, though…
It was an interesting talk. I don’t agree that all of SF stems out of colonial racism, but it is intereresting to see where it impacts, and how influential it is at points.
I think there’s definitely a strong background in colonialist thought, and in racist thought, and also the whole “military domination” thing. There’s a huge amount of othering in SF, and that takes many forms. It’s worth thinking about when reading and writing, certainly, and definitely interesting to take a look at where it does crop up…