I’ve packed seventy boxes of books this week, so please forgive brevity. The house-move is next Friday, so there is likely to be a blogging hiatus while we get ourselves sorted, but I’ll be looking forward to posting again as soon as I have a) internet and b) an office space that is halfway sane.
In the meantime, here is my schedule for the WorldCon. I have to say that from what I’ve seen so far (my own panel events, plus those of friends and colleagues I’ve been made party to) the programming for LonCon looks fantastic. The committee have clearly been working very hard to bring us a programme that is adventurous, relevant, diverse, entertaining and enjoyable to be involved with and I for one want to congratulate them on that.
I’m looking forward to LonCon. All the more so because I’m hoping we’ll have all our books out of boxes by then.
Friday 10:00 – 11:00 Don’t Tell Me What To Think: Ambiguity in SF and Fantasy
What does ambiguity (of setting, plot, identity, and so on) bring to a work of fantastic fiction? How is ambiguity created, and what effect does it have? Does it always work? Can a story be too ambiguous? The panel will discuss stories by Thomas M. Disch, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and M. John Harrison, exploring exactly how they achieve their effects, and asking what divides a satisfyingly ambiguous story from an unsatisfying one.
(David Hebblethwaite, Nina Allan, Scott Edelman, Patrick Nielsen Hayden)
Friday 11.30 – 12.00 Reading (probably something from The Race)
Friday 16:30 – 17.30 NewCon Press launch event
This event will see the official launch of The Race, along with a thoroughly revised edition of Chris Beckett’s novel Marcher, Adam Roberts’s collection of reviews and essays Sibilant Fricative, and the new NewCon anthology Paradox. I’m very much looking forward to this. Do please come along, say hello and get your signed copies!
Saturday 10:00 – 11:00 The Lexicon Gap
Prose Stylings, Voice, and Narrative Structure: As a reader, why should I care? These terms are often thrown around, but what do they really mean? And more importantly how should a reader translate them in to something useful for evaluating what they read?
(Alistair Rennie, Nina Allan, James Patrick Kelly, Stanislaw Krawczyk, Gary Wolfe)
Sunday 13:30 – 15:00 The Wrong Apocalypse
Zombies, aliens, and monsters from the deep are all very well, but — unlike climate change and other ongoing environmental damage — they’re not actually likely to cause the downfall of industrial civilisation. Are contemporary TV and film neglecting the apocalypse-in-progress? Where can ecological perspectives be found in SF and fantasy on screen, and how are they portrayed? What are the strengths and weaknesses of visual climate narratives, compared to their prose counterparts?
(Ramez Naam, Nina Allan, Jeff VanderMeer, Tiffani Angus, Ivaylo Shmilev)
Sunday 16.30 – 18.00 The Darkening Garden
John Clute’s The Darkening Garden (2007) argues for horror as a core mode of twenty-first century fiction. It proposes a narrative “grammar” for horror stories that progresses from SIGHTING through THICKENING to the REVEL and then AFTERMATH. What implications does this structure have for our understanding of horror, as a commercial genre and as a literary form? What works escape its grasp, and why?
(Paul Kincaid, Paul March-Russell, Nina Allan, Lisa Tuttle, Jeff VanderMeer)