Readercon is one month away!
Readercon is July 11-14 in Quincy, MA, and programming on Thursday night is free. If you want to join me, here’s my schedule!
Friday
11:30 AM – Reading: Andrea Martinez Corbin
Saturday
9:00 PM – Food at the Corner of Fiction and Community
Andrea Martinez Corbin (mod), N.S. Dolkart, Greer Gilman, Michael Swanwick, Sabrina Vourvoulias
Food plays a central role in many cultures and accordingly takes center stage in the work of many speculative fiction writers. How does cuisine help define, or build, a community? How can food be used to communicate important information about a people to the reader? What are some particularly noteworthy examples of the way food can be used to set, or subvert, expectations?
Sunday
11:00 AM – Lloyd Alexander, Existentialist
C.S.E. Cooney, Andrea Martinez Corbin, Chris Gerwel, Marissa Lingen (mod), Sonya Taaffe
Lloyd Alexander, translator of Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote an existentialist epic fantasy series. As Jesse Schotter writes on Full Stop, “The end of The High King, and Taran’s choice to remain in Prydain… salvage[s] the idea of free will within the deterministic framework of the genre.” How did existentialism influence Alexander’s other work (Time Cat, the Westmark trilogy)? What are other examples of existentialist speculative fiction epics? With the present deconstruction of prophecy-driven epics, how can writers learn from Alexander’s work?
(Please note that I appear to be the Existentialism Expert for this panel, considering I am reading Lloyd Alexander for the first time in preparation. Hooray!)