Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Readercon 2021: Online!

The time is upon us. Readercon 31 lives!

I'm really excited to be part of such an all-star line-up. Register for the upcoming weekend of August 13-15 for a damn good program. And on Sunday, you can see me yelling about the ethics and boundaries of fiction! Hurray!


Sunday - 2:00 PM Main Track 1 • Everywhere a Threshold • Gillian Daniels (moderator), Amal El-Mohtar, Erin Roberts, Geoff Ryman, T.X. Watson 

Fantasy has always drawn energy from the border between quotidian Here and numinous There, out beyond the fields we know. But we can no longer assume we share the same Here. The shrinking of the globe has brought many of us into contact with worldviews that are profoundly different from the ones we know, in addition to uncovering unexpected commonalities. How does fantasy handle this tectonic shift? What are the works that navigate, nimbly or otherwise, this multiplicity of Heres and Theres and the blurring of the borders among them?

 

Sunday - 4:00 PM Main Track 2 • Content Tags: Implementation, Accommodation, and Ancillary Art • Katherine Crighton (moderator), Gillian Daniels, Foz Meadows, AJ Odasso, Megan Whalen Turner 

The increased prevalence of content tags has lead to growing questions around implementation. Useful for accommodation, content tags are also deployed on dynamic platforms such as AO3 to warn, advertise, and joke, becoming extra-diagetic material that is enjoyable on its own terms while providing meaningful context for the work. Still, there is a divide between those who want them and those who find them objectionable. How do content tags enhance and complicate reader experience, and what are emerging best practices that bookstores or publishers could adopt?