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Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Readercon Schedule 2010
A Dramatic Reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream
12:003:00 pm, RI
I was Oberon in high school. I think I'm playing Theseus and Lysander this time. I'm in it for the whole three hours, with my reading directly afterwards... it's either in retrospect going to seem like a really dumb idea to have signed up for so many hours of unremitting performance, or be one of those non-traditional format con highlights like "Let's Build A World" at Wiscon.
Reading
3:00-3:30 pm, NH / MA
"The Ant King and Other Stories" and/or unpublished work in progress
Suggestions for what to read?
Imagining Anarchy
1:00 pm, ME/ CT
Ursula K. Le Guin did it in The Dispossessed; Cecelia Holland in Floating Worlds; Kim Stanley Robinson in Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. What other depictions of anarchist societies can we find in speculative fiction? How does the setting (and the resources available) influence and shape the politics? Different readers have viewed Le Guin's Annares as utopian or dystopian; is that the rule for portrayals of anarchism, and what does that tell us about anarchism as a form of government?
Cecelia Holland, Walter H. Hunt, Barry B. Longyear, Benjamin
Rosenbaum (M), Graham Sleight.
I'm listed as a non-participant moderator here -- interesting! I actually think that constraint might make it more fun.
The 9,191,935,961 Names of God: Metaphysical Hard SF.
10:00 am, Salon G
The climactic speculations in Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker have the rigor we ordinarily associate with hard sf, but it is unlikely that science could ever verify the speculations, which are fundamentally metaphysical. What other sf has speculated as rigorously about things final and unknowable? And where does sf based on unverifiable ideas in contemporary physics (like the multiverse and the anthropomorphic principle) fit? Do we distinguish between unverifiable ideas depending on whether they have a spiritual component or implication?
Paul Di Filippo (L), Ron Drummond, Ed Meskys, Benjamin Rosenbaum.
It Is, It Is, It Really Is Fiction: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary F&SF.
2 pm, Salon F
Over forty years have passed since words like "frelk" and "kemmer" became part of the literature, and nearly twenty since the establishment of the Tiptree Awards -- if we have not reached the gender-fluid futures of Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun or Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X, where are the contemporary explorations of sexuality that is genuinely other? As it is inconceivable that there is an upper limit to the polymorphously perverse (and indeed, the internet disproves this theory on a regular basis) and on the understanding that one reader's speculative fiction may be another's day-to-day routine, we ask our panelists to consider the sexual state of the field, whether it be Simon Logan's fetishcore fiction, the transformative erotica of Caitlin R. Kiernan, or the distinct possibility that the appeal of the modern vampire is merely necrophilia with better conversation.
Caitlin R. Kiernan, K. A. Laity (L), Shariann Lewitt, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Catherynne M. Valente.
Posted by benrosen at July 7, 2010 02:17 PM
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just wondering- do you sleep or breathe or any of those things? whenever I look at your blog, it's like one of those vaudeville comedies and you're being pulled off by some enormous shepherd's crook to another destination offstage.
Anyway, though I wasn't there, and though the wiscon thingy has, I take it, come and gone, I rather liked your bizarre version of Sense and Sensibility and think it would be fun to have it read aloud...
have a good sommer, try not to bake...
I averaged about 5 hours of sleep a night during a con, which is pretty typical for a con. I'm totally zonked afterwards. Between cons I do sleep and breathe.
S&S is great fun to read aloud -- too long to read all of it though. In the event I read some quick, standard Other Cities and then some work-in-progress short stories. Reading them was useful in figuring out what to do next with them.
Good summer to you too!
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