Serial News

Serial Box Authors take ReaderCon!

This weekend Quincy, Massachusetts will be taken over by authors, writers, and creators for ReaderCon, the conference on imaginative literature. We are happy to announce that eight of our writers and one of our cover artists will be in attendance to participate in panels, readings, and autographing: Andrea Phillips of ReMade and Bookburners, Ellen Kushner and Kathleen Jennings of Tremontaine, Gwenda Bond of ReMade,Max Gladstone of Bookburners and The Witch Who Came In From The Cold, and Delia Sherman, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Sarah Smith of Whitehall. Check out their schedule below and don't forget to say "Hi" at the con! (The full con program can be found here.)

Andrea Phillips Headshot April 2016 (1)
Ellen-Kushner
delia_sherman_2014
Sarah Smith BW Square
Max Gladstone Author Photo
kathleen_coloursmall
Gwenda Bond BWSQ
mary-robinette-kowal

Thursday July 7

8:00 PM 5 Living in the Future.John Chu, Barbara Krasnoff (moderator), Andrea Phillips, Tom Purdom, Terence Taylor. Today, if we're going to see another person, we have cellphones to instantly communicate with that person, and maps on the cellphones to help us find our agreed-upon location. Twenty years ago we would have had to phone each other on landlines, pick a restaurant in advance or agree to meet at a landmark known to both of us. Five hundred years ago we wouldn't have had watches on our persons, so even keeping to the correct time of the appointment would have been difficult—how would we even know when the agreed-upon time of our meeting arrived? Our panelists will discuss some of the conveniences, large and small, that we take for granted, and the absence of which would cause difficulties of the sort that are often elided in fiction. The discussion will also discuss science fiction novels and stories that incorporate and project modern technology into their fictions, and which fail to take these things into account.8:00 PM BH Bees! .Erik Amundsen, Max Gladstone, Natalie Luhrs, Julia Rios (moderator), T.X. Watson. From the serious scientific question of colony collapse disorder, through the also-serious metaphoric House of Evil Bees of Captain Awkward, to Chuck Wendig's ridiculous #facebees, bees seem to proliferate among the interests of our genre community. Why? Are we in it for the honey or the sting, or is it the combination that attracts us?9:00 PM 6 Books That Spoil Themselves .John Crowley, Jim Freund (leader), Max Gladstone, Yves Meynard, Lauren Roy. "Little did she know that was the last time she would see him alive" and similar lines in books go beyond foreshadowing and into the realm of spoilers. The movie Stranger Than Fiction explores the use of the phrase "little did he know," and Joe Hill's The Fireman (among many other books) includes several examples. Why and how do authors use this often derided literary device, and how does it affect the reader's experience of a story?

Friday July 8

11:00 AM 5 Background and Believability.Danielle Friedman, Carlos Hernandez, Kathleen Jennings (moderator), Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Sarah Smith. When a reader calls a story "implausible," what they often mean is "I've never experienced that" or "I've never known anyone like that person." Writers creating their own wish-fulfillment stories (e.g., wielding a shotgun to rescue a woman from zombies) may fail to connect with readers who don't share those wishes (e.g., pacifists, women who want to rescue themselves, oppressed minorities who've been threatened by authority figures with guns). How do we bridge the believability gaps within ourselves to connect with stories stemming from experiences we've never had, and to write for readers whose ideas of possible and plausible don't match up with our own?12:00 PM 5 Using Real Historical People in Fiction.Phenderson Clark, Jeffrey Ford, Tim Powers, Steve Rasnic Tem, Sarah Smith (leader). From Byron to Philby and beyond, Tim Powers's secret histories use real historical characters to do things they never did, and say things they never said. What is the author's responsibility in this situation, to the historical figure, to history, and to the character?1:00 PM 5 Why Women Become Protagonists .Gwenda Bond, Lisa Cohen, Rosemary Kirstein, Hillary Monahan, Navah Wolfe. In a 2015 essay about portrayals of female protagonists in crime fiction, Sara Paretsky writes, "Detectives like V.I. came to life in a time of bravado, when my peers and I... wrote out of a kind of cockiness: we're doing a job because we want it, we like the work, no one can stop us. Today, the female hero often has been brutally assaulted... or suffered some other form of serious trauma. It's as if the only acceptable reason for a woman to embrace the investigative life is to recover from damage, or get revenge for it—not because she takes pleasure in the work, and comes to it as a free spirit." Let's explore the reasons that female protagonists decide to protag, and discuss the many ways to motivate them other than assault and trauma.3:00 PM 6 Steven Universe.Susan Jane Bigelow, Max Gladstone, Bart Leib, Kate Nepveu, Julia Rios (leader). How has a cartoon show meant for children so thoroughly captivated some of the most interesting adult SFF writers we know? Our panelists will dig deep into what makes Steven Universe work so well for the different ages of its audience and try to glean some tips from how it packs such huge amounts of story into very short episodes. Warning: There may be singing.3:00 PM C Fantastical Dystopia.Victoria Janssen, Ada Palmer, Andrea Phillips, Sabrina Vourvoulias, T.X. Watson. Dystopia is popular in YA fiction for a variety of reasons, but why do authors frequently base their future dystopian society on some flimsy ideas, rather than using history to draw parallels between past atrocities and current human rights violations? Is it easier to work from one extreme idea, such as "love is now considered a disease" rather than looking at the complexities of, for example, the corruption of the U.S.S.R or the imperialism of the US? If science fiction uses the future to look at the present, is it more or less effective when using real examples from the past to look at our present through a lens of the future?4:00 PM C Harry Potter Goes to Grad School and Gets a Job.Jim Freund (leader), Max Gladstone, Josh Jasper, Ellen Kushner, E.J. Stevens. Charlie Jane Anders's All the Birds in the Skyand Lev Grossman's The Magicians give us an unsentimental treatment of life after attending a magical school. As adults, many of us read and enjoyed Harry Potter, but its relevance to our day-to-day lives was not as great as for its target audience of school-age children. All the Birds in the Sky and The Magicians seem to fill that void, but with some interesting topical shifts. What further futures for magical students might we see?5:00 PM BH WTF is Transmedia?.Andrea Phillips. Quick answer: transmedia storytelling is the art of using multiple platforms to tell a unified story. Sometimes it looks like the MCU, and sometimes it's stories that infiltrate the real world. Transmedia veteran Andrea Phillips will talk about her years as a pioneer in the transmedia mines, and how it made her a better writer—and a worse one!5:00 PM CL Kaffeeklatsch.Kate Maruyama, Kit Reed, Delia Sherman.7:00 PM B Reading: Sarah Smith.Sarah Smith. Sarah Smith reads either from Whitehall or from the Titanic book.8:30 PM A Reading: Ellen Kushner.Ellen Kushner. Ellen Kushner reads from the forthcoming Season 2 of TREMONTAINE, a new Swordspoint prequel from @serialboxpub.

Saturday July 9

11:00 AM 5 Beyond Strong Female Characters.Terri Bruce, Kathleen Howard, Ellen Kushner (leader), Natalie Luhrs, Delia Sherman. In a 2015 post on Tor.com, Liz Bourke puts forth that "volition and equal significance are better ways to think about, and to talk about, women's narratives and storylines and presences in fiction," rather than agency or strength. Bourke goes on to discuss the possibility of different types of heroism, and the possibility of a character being able to make choices in one form or another. The essay ends with the questions "Is the female character represented as having a will of her own? Does the narrative respect her volition? Does it represent her as possessing an equal significance with everyone around her, even if people around her don't see her as equally significant? Does it, in short, represent her as fully human? Fully human, and not a caricature or a type?" Panelists will discuss ways to give women equal significance beyond physical strength.1:00 PM 5 If Thor Can Hang Out with Iron Man, Why Can't Harry Dresden Use a Computer? .Gillian Daniels, Elaine Isaak, Andrea Phillips, Alex Shvartsman, E.J. Stevens. In a series of tweets in 2015, Jared Axelrod pondered "the inherent weirdness of a superhero universe... where magic and science hold hands, where monsters stride over cities." This is only weird from the perspective of fantasy stories that set up magic and technology as incompatible, an opposition that parallels Western cultural splits between religion and science and between nature and industry. Harry Dresden's inability to touch a computer without damaging it is a direct descendant of the Ents destroying the "pits and forges" of Isengard, and a far cry from Thor, Iron Man, and the Scarlet Witch keeping company. What are the story benefits of setting up magic/nature/religion and technology/industry/science as either conflicting or complementary? What cultural anxieties are addressed by each choice? How are these elements handled in stories from various cultures and eras?1:00 PM C My Character Ate What?.John Chu, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ada Palmer, Lauren Roy, Catherynne M. Valente, Fran Wilde (leader). "My Character Ate What?," based loosely on Hollywood Squares, that uses food in SF as the subject matter for questions. You are signing up to be a contestant in Fran Wilde's game.2:00 PM 5 David Hartwell Memorial Panel.Robert Killheffer, Ellen Kushner, James Morrow, Sarah Smith, Gordon Van Gelder. Readercon owes its continued existence to David G. Hartwell. In our early days we strip-mined The New York Review of Science Fiction for panel ideas (we still do). We could rely on David to have something to say about almost any topic, a trait that made him our go-to moderator and fill-in panelist. He took whatever we threw at him without complaining. When we made him Editor Guest of Honor for Readercon 13 (by unanimous vote, the shortest such discussion we've ever had), we realized that he would be on fewer panels than his usual load. David was always coming to us to say "I think [new writer name here] is going to have a great career. You should invite them to Readercon." Or "Have you considered [insert name of literary genius here] for GoH?" And he was never wrong. He was always our greatest and and loudest cheerleader. When we were beginning to get worn down by the stresses of running the con with a skeleton crew, he gave us pep talks, telling us we were doing "important work." He believed that so much that he nominated us for a World Fantasy Award. Some years his birthday fell on Readercon weekend. We'd have a cake at the Meet the Pros(e) party, hand him a mic, and ask him to say a few words. Without fail, he'd wait for the room to get quiet and then lead us in a singalong of "Teen Angel." We'll still have Readercons, but they'll never be the same. Our panelists will discuss David Hartwell's work in the field and his outstanding character.2:00 PM B Reading: Delia Sherman.Delia Sherman. Delia Sherman reads from her forthcoming middle-grade fantasy, The Evil Wizard Smallbone.3:00 PM C What Good Is a Utopia? .Michael J. Deluca, Chris Gerwel, Barry Longyear, Kathryn Morrow (leader), Andrea Phillips. If an author sets out to write a utopia, several questions arise. Character and interpersonal conflict can drive the story, but how do you keep the utopian setting from becoming backdrop in that case? Were the Talking Heads right in saying that "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens"? And how do you showcase how much better things would be "if only"?3:30 PM B Reading: Max Gladstone.Max Gladstone. Max Gladstone reads either a selection from The Highway Kind, forthcoming in 2017, or from a Craft work in progress.

Sunday July 10

10:00 AM C Words Alone or Words and Pictures?.Kathleen Jennings (moderator), Jess Nevins, Sarah Pinsker, Vinnie Tesla, Gregory Wilson. Words alone can leave a lot to the reader's imagination, and this can be wonderful, but it can sometimes be confusing to keep track of everything while reading, especially with large casts or complicated narratives. Comics, graphic novels, and other types of sequential art can make things clearer, obfuscate further, or suggest the narrator is really unreliable, but it can also leave a lot less to the reader's imagination. What are some pros and cons of each form when telling a given story? What are good examples of what each does really well?12:00 PM BH Short Stories Explained (For the Novelist).Mary Robinette Kowal. Many writers can't keep their short stories short. In this workshop, Hugo award-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal will walk you through how short stories are structured using a combination of lecture and in class exercises. The session will cover economical prose, effective use of point-of-view and how plot works in short form.12:00 PM CL Kaffeeklatsch.Max Gladstone, Maria Dahvana Headley.1:00 PM BH Power, Wealth, and Economics in Writing and Plotting Romance.Max Gladstone, Ada Palmer, Tom Purdom, Julia Rios, Terence Taylor. There are many modern romances with a wealthy man and a woman who isn't, and many with both male and female partners with money, but few with a wealthy woman and a man who isn't. Does the wealth disparity create a power dynamic similar to the one that was inherent between men and women in pre-modern society? Modern romances frequently imitate and reuse formulas and tropes from romances written in pre-modern society when an inherent power tension between empowered men and comparatively politically/economically dis-empowered women existed. Do these power differentials still exist or do modern romances artificially recreate the same kinds of tensions and stresses by writing about the very wealthy? Why wouldn't reversed roles be as compelling in a modern romance? What happens when other genders are included or polyamorous lifestyles are considered? Is the wealth disparity the be-all and end-all of romantic settings? How do wealth and other types of modern power work in modern romance, and how does it relates to pre-modern ideas of romance?1:00 PM B Reading: Kathleen Jennings.Kathleen Jennings. Kathleen Jennings reads an extract of "Flyaway", an illustrated Australian Gothic novella-in-progress.2:00 PM 5 SFFF: Science Fiction and Fantasy Fashion .Lila Garrott, Liz Gorinsky (leader), Kathleen Jennings, Julia Starkey, T.X. Watson. Let's talk about future fashion. According to Carrie Fisher in her memoir Wishful Drinking, George Lucas told her that there were no bras in space, so she wasn't allowed to wear a bra in the first Star Wars movie. He explained to her in 2012 that in space, skin expands, but a bra doesn't, so a person would be strangled by their bra. Setting aside all of the other questions this raises, what scientific and future technological oddities could end up affecting the way we dress? Many designers and writers over the years have tackled this question with clothing to protect from increased UV rays and Star Trek uniforms that include personal climate control. Do we think that future clothing will be purely functional jumpsuits, or will new technologies provide new sartorial delights and abominations? Do our aliens dress like humans or eschew clothing entirely? In fantasy, does historical accuracy matter, and does boob armor really ruin a story?2:00 PM E Autographs.Mike Allen, Max Gladstone.

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