Last weekend I went to Readercon, the speculative fiction literary convention in Burlington, MA. (No, not Burlington, Vermont.) I went to this convention last year, when I was very new to both BSpec and to the whole idea of paying attention to the current literary scene in general. This time I went in knowing—and knowing
about—a hell of a lot more people, but I still met many awesome new ones.
This time, the hotel lobby and bar were also open (last year they were under construction). The bar was fairly snazzy in a This Is A Fancy Corporate Executive Bar sort of way, and the lobby was very spacious but only had like two couches so that there could be more modern-looking white space. Also, they renamed all the non-letter salons from states’ names to inspirational buzzwords like Enliven and Enlighten and Creative and I think one of them was actually Inspire and you get the idea.
Due to starting a new (more exciting, better paid, back in the city, sadly temporary) new job, I was unable to attend most of Friday. Robert (who I’d given a ride to) and I arrived at about seven, which was precisely the time when our posse (it is actually Gillian’s posse) went out to dinner. The end result of this is that, while I had a lovely dinner with many lovely people in our gorgeous air-conditioned hotel room, I only got to attend ONE panel on Friday. This was a bit of a bummer since Friday honestly looked like the best panels day.
On the upside, the one panel I did attend was
The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction, a presentation by Jess Nevins, a dude I had never heard of before but who is now on my A+ list, partly because he had the grace to put the entire paper he presented online (
http://jessnevins.com/blog/?p=234). Since I am a giantly giant fan of all forms of Gothic nonsense, it was somewhat inevitable that I would enjoy this talk, but whether I would learn new things was something more in question. I did, in fact, learn fun new things, particularly since I have heard the terms “male Gothic” and “female Gothic” a few times before but had never really read much that explained what they meant and tried to take a good critical look at how they function. I strongly recommend reading the entire paper, if only so you will fully appreciate the facepalm when I tell you that during the Q&A at the end, somebody asked “What do ‘male’ and ‘female’ Gothic mean?” BUT BESIDES THAT it was pretty great. If you asked me if I preferred this talk or last year’s
The Fainting Narrator talk I would be hard pressed to pick one. (I thiiink I saw the guy who presented
The Fainting Narrator at the bar and I almost went and fangirled at him but he was talking to people and also my drink was ready.)
After that it was party time! The Meet the Prose party is an attempt to force awkward introverted people to talk to each other by putting a bar in Ballroom F/G and giving all the authors stickers with lines from their work on them and everyone else pieces of wax paper. The object is to collect all the stickers, or, for authors, to get rid of all your stickers, or possibly the object is to have as many conversations as possible, or maybe it is to practice your ninja pickpocket skills and collect the most stickers without having any conversations. I’m not sure; the rules weren’t posted anywhere that I saw. But it was fun, and I got to talk to cool people like Neil Clarke, cyborg overlord of Clarkesworld Magazine, and Sofia Samatar, whose collection of scarves I am most envious of. Then we attended a super secret midnight speakeasy. How secret? So secret that people were yelling about its location in the hallways! That’s my kinda secret. Bo Bolander read a fragment of a piece that consisted about 50% of the word “fuck” and was pulpy and awesome. I sadly had to leave the speakeasy early because I hit the Wall and had to go to bed.
Saturday began with a visit to the dealer’s room, where all my virtuous thoughts of I Should Save Money Because I Am Young And Broke and But I Have Access To A Library and I Totally Have A System For What I Will Decide To Buy Today melted away into a sort of avariciously bibliophilic fugue state, and between ten and eleven o’clock in the morning I acquired the following:
In totally unrelated news, if anyone knows where I could grab another bookshelf for cheap, comments are open.At noon I did start going to panels, beginning with
Writing and the Visual Arts, where I learned that Greer Gilman once took a Historical Art Techniques class and it was awesome. I also learned that Shira Lipkin knits to figure out story structure and texture and otherwise un-knot her writing, which sounds so incredibly useful that it made me wish I could knit. (I cannot knit.) The people on the panel are involved in poetry, music, painting, drawing, handicrafts, cinema, basically the whole run of the arts. They are also, it seems, to a person, typography nerds, with strong feelings about paper and typeface and binding, and preferences for which fonts to work with under what circumstances. This led to a really interesting discussion of the state of the art of printing, including the rise of ebooks with their customizable fonts and letter sizes, and the physical book as an art object.
After a lunch break I went to
Portrayals of Code-Switching, partly because I am all interested in language and linguistics and stuff and partly because Daniel José Older was on the panel and I remember him as being a really insightful and entertaining panelist. He did not disappoint, and neither did any of the other panelists, none of whom I was familiar with. The panel discussed a number of forms of code-switching: the moderator, Chesya Burke, brought up the idea that not all code-switching is entirely done through language; things like posture and dress are forms of code-switching, too. There was also some talk of bi- or multilingual code-switching versus code-switching within a language (register-switching). Then we got into the really fun stuff: writing and representing different codes in writing, and especially the questions of “translating” or italicizing words that aren’t SWE in a text that’s going out into an English-language market. Older gave as an example that Spanglish conversations usually do not take the sharp turn in accent and inflection between Standard American Broadcast English and perfectly correct Spanish (I do not know my Spanishes, sorry) that would be implied by putting all the English in roman type and all the Spanish in italics. (It was funnier and more illustrative when he said it with examples.) I had a thought during this panel that I wasn’t quite able to congeal into a coherent question, so I’ll burble it out here: on several occasions the panelists brought up the idea of not translating things because people from similar cultural backgrounds as the author would know what it meant and feel alienated having it explained, but people who weren’t from that cultural background can just go look it up like anything else you find in a story that you don’t know about, and that they’re OK making their readers do that tiny bit of work on their own. This made me think of a thing I ran into when studying big fat monstrous nineteenth century novels, which is the idea that Back In Ye Day, audiences
couldn’t easily look shit up, and partly read fiction in order to learn more about nonfictional stuff, which is where you get those books with entire fucking essays sandwiched between the chapters (eff you,
Moby-Dick), and so if, for example, you have a character who is a street kid, you follow up the introduction of this character with five chapters about the daily lives of street kids, including three about their
argot, and a long essay in defense of
argot as an interesting and imaginative part of culture, and
then we get to poor Gavroche actually fucking doing anything (eff you too,
Les Misérables). But so anyway now I have some vague and not-well-worded wonderings about the role of communications technology in the development of stories that allow larger audiences access to very culturally specific things without having to homogenize everybody or dumb stuff down the way that happens when you have solely top-down broadcasting kind of mass communication, and to allow more people to talk to each other without everyone having to give up their local culture and go totally Standard American. I’ve got a vague idea of “It sounds like the Internet has made this easier and more awesome” but I also squish other people’s text into SWE for a living so what do I know.
After that I went to
Dark Fantasy and Horror, an interesting if occasionally confused discussion about what “dark fantasy” and “horror” are and how (and if) they differ from each other and the collapse of the oversaturated horror market in the eighties. Sadly I did not take too many notes on this panel! I do remember one of the speakers making the excellent point that one of the reasons genre labels like “horror” can be so tricky to suss out and apply is because we name genres after different things—so “horror” is an emotion that the text is trying to evoke, but “western” is a setting and “mystery” is a plot type. While this panel was going on, there was a panel in the salon next door about butts, and apparently it was VERY entertaining.
Then there was two hours of drinking: one in the room and one in the bar!
This meant I was ever-so-slightly tipsy for the
Works of Mary Shelley panel, where I forgot to take notes because I had to put all of my brain into listening. It made me very glad I had bought
The Mortal Immortal at the dealer’s room that morning, though, after I saw Adrienne Odasso with it at breakfast! The panel focused a bit more heavily on
Frankenstein than I expected, although all the
Frankenstein stuff was very interesting, and they did talk about the myriad other writing she’d done—I knew she’d written another novel and did a bunch of editing/curating of Percy Shelley’s work, but I didn’t realize just how much other stuff she had written and published because
Frankenstein is really the most talked-about thing.
That was pretty much the end of the official intellectual programming that I went to on Saturday; a big group of us went out to dinner, including Jay, who brought a friend of his that the rest of us had never met before, and who surprised us all by paying for dinner for the whole group of us (there were like ten people at this dinner) and said it was no problem since he could write it off as a Business Expense. Turns out Jay’s friend,Warren Lapine, is actually a well-known figure in the small-press sci-fi publishing world and taking writery types out to dinner really is a business expense! (A publisher bought me dinner! I should probably go write stuff.) Then there were a bunch of parties, including one that I don’t know who was hosting but the entire back third of the room was all dudes with beards drinking scotch, which made me really happy even though I am not a dude with a beard and scotch is actually my least favorite drink in the whiskey family, but it was good socializing. Then we went to more room parties, and then we went to a sort of impromptu party in the middle of a hallway where I met Kate Baker, and then we got kicked out of the hallway so we all sat around in the lobby drinking some very, very sweet German honey liqueur out of bottles provided by this one dude (Marco something?) who just seemed to have an endless supply of it. This went until about two o’clock in the morning, which I was fairly certain I was going to regret the next morning.
Sunday morning was really not all that bad; I drank a lot of water and then was able to go to three panels and get a bunch of books signed. The 10 am panel I went to was
Variations on Unreliable Narrators, which I admit I mostly went to because Theodora Goss was moderating and she is a delightful fairy princess, but unreliable narrators are also fun (except for
The Turn of the Screw). We got a good basic grounding in the more “official” definitions and examples of this trope and then the conversation turned to people’s favorites, the panelists’ thoughts on the unreliability of narrative and point of view generally, and all that sort of analytical stuff that is why nerds like me go to Readercon. Adrienne Odasso talked about unreliable narrators in medieval poetry, even!
Then I went back to the dealer’s room and was very good and didn’t spend any more money, but I did get autographs from Theodora Goss and Sofia Samatar. A weird thing happened where, every time I have heard Theodora Goss say anything about her upcoming novel, I feel like she is writing it
just for me, and so when I got my book signed I told her I was particularly excited about her upcoming novel, and she looks me and Lura and Andrea straight in the face and says, “I’m writing this novel
for you.” So that was odd! I also got my copy of Greer Gilman’s
Cry Murder! In a Small Voice signed, right after she won a Shirley Jackson award for it.
The
Horror for Diverse Audiences panel was a good but I didn’t end up taking many notes on it, just that Shira Lipkin (who I was apparently stalking around all Sunday; she was on all three of the panels I attended) said she tries to create “horror through empathy,” and one of the other panelists whose name I did not write down mentioned that horror is—or should be—ultimately universal because it’s rooted in fear of death, which everyone has; it’s the specifics that get tricky.
The last panel I attended was
Long Live the Queen, which was a great panel to end the con on, particularly because I was exhausted by this point and couldn’t have handled anything other than a truly fabulous panel about my particular interests. This panel was basically about portrayals of the Victorian era in speculative fiction, particularly steampunk. We got a lot of book recommendations about history and clothes and stuff, all of which I will have to check out at some point. The panel discussed Victorian medievalism and its effects on how we view both the medieval and Victorian periods, as well as Victorian medievalism as a forerunner to the modern fantasy genre; Victorian Arthuriana; Victorian volatility and social anxiety as opposed to the current popular view of the Victorian genre as being somehow ordered and idyllic (apparently there are a lot of wildly historically ignorant people involved in steampunk??); Victorian ideas about “culture” (singular) and their habit of plundering the entire globe for history, stories, and STUFF (Dora Goss mentioned the British Museum and ho boy do I have opinions on that place); the ways in which the Victorian British Empire was deliberately and calculatedly modeled off the Roman Empire; and Victorian progressivism. Dracula was argued to be a technological romance (a couple panels I was at actually pointed out the role of technology in Dracula, which is not something I’ve heard much about, and I’ve heard a
lot of stuff about Dracula). Someone brought up that he was surprised at the Victorians’ popularity because thirty years ago they were definitely known for being a repressive, stuffy, judgmental time period with bad art. I am always surprised to hear this because, while I am well acquainted with the Victorian’s history of being repressive, conformist prigs, I had sort of assumed that if people overlook this it is because they are bamboozled by how undeniably pretty it all is, as it is self-evident that Victorians stuff is pretty. I’m always surprised when I am reminded that a few decades ago people thought all that ruffly Victorian stuff was in terrible taste, but then I remember that a few decades ago it was the seventies and eighties, and I'm like, you’re one to talk, seventies and eighties people! I suppose I already knew that the seventies and eighties hated pretty things, but I still manage to forget. We also got into the most fun part of talking about Victorians, which is the ludicrously deadly standards of beauty (when I am participating in one of these sorts of conversations I will almost always bring up “arsenic face cream”)—in addition to a wonderful lesson about crinoline fires, there was the mandatory discussion about
corsets, and we all learned that an 1840s Sears catalog once listed a device called an “organ stopper” which was basically a thing you put into the lower end of yourself so that when your corset squished all your internal organs downwards they didn’t actually prolapse and fall out of you. (My organs hurt just thinking about it.)
As that was the best possible note one could end a convention on, we then cleared out, got lunch, went home, and I promptly napped like I was getting paid for it, and also threw out half my clothes.
SO THAT WAS READERCON. I AM GOING EVERY YEAR UNTIL I DIE. In the meantime, I will endeavor to review all of the million books I bought over at my review blog,
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