Thursday, July 22, 2010

Readercon, Beach, New Stories

• Readercon was great fun. I am now just returning from a lovely three-family beach vacation with old friends, and a bit too zonked to write a full con report, or even attempt to list the many excellent people who I got to hang with -- in hallways, at parties, on panels.

  Oh, okay -- since you insist so vociferously -- maybe I'll try: Alan DeNiro, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Ama Patterson, Amal El-Mohtar, Amelia Beamer, Andrea Hairston, Caitlin Kiernan, Cat Valente, Charles Stross, Chip Delany, Diane Kelly, Elizabeth Bear, Gavin Grant, Graham Sleight, James Cambias, Jeremy Lassen, Jim Freund, John Kessel, Junot Diaz, Kelly Link, Liz Argall, Liz Gorinsky, Liza Groen Trombi, Mary Robinette Kowal, Matthew Cheney, N. K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Paul Park, Rose Fox, Scott Edelman, Ted Chiang, Tempest... several more whose name tags are a blur in memory. Pre-con I toured Cambridge with an old friend, Elizabeth de Veer (née Mitchell); post-con I stayed over with Theodora Goss and her awesome family. I got to swordfight and discuss Narnian history with Ophelia, and a short course in genome sequencing from Kendrick.

  At the con, I'd loaded up on books, including the third volume of Paul Park's fascinating and deep Roumania series, and Cat Valente's Palimpest (which I have not yet opened). On the plane back from Boston I devoured (ha, ha) Amelia Beamer's The Loving Dead, which is a masterful book, chock full of character depth, page-turniness and the courage of its convictions -- and a really brilliant ending. The kids are currently loving Greg's Kid vs. Squid -- chapters of which are the current tooth-brushing bribe, and the promise of which even succeeded in luring Noah away from a cloud of kids clustered around the TV.
  

• I think what Readercon needs is a kids' and teens' program; I, for one, want to bring my kids. (What I'd really like to bring my kids to is Wiscon, but that is more inconvenient vacation-timing-wise). I talked to folks there about it; it seems like eminently doable, if enough people requested it. So who among you go to Readercon and would like to bring kids, go to Readercon and do not have kids to bring but would like to see kids there (because you like kids and think they have interesting things to say about SF and reading, or because you want to do market research for your next YA novel, or for feminist reasons -- since "it's definitely going to be your father's wiscon if your mother has to stay home with the kids" -- or because you are sick of hearing about the graying of literary science fiction) , or don't go to Readercon but might if you could bring kids?
  
• Those stories I was working on are now up at shareable.net: Falling and The Guy Who Worked For Money.
  
• In other news, Anthroptic has come to a land down under, where women glow and men plunder.