The Thing About Readercon

So Jennifer and I attended Readercon earlier this month. The thing about Readercon is that it’s not your typical science fiction convention. Some of you may have an idea of what a con is like. Readercon isn’t like that. This is usually how I explain it: “Take your typical sci-fi convention. Now take away the comic books, the movies, the masquerades, the role-playing games, and all the related paraphernalia. What you’re left with is just the books. That’s what Readercon is like.” For those of us who like science fiction and fantasy books more than anything else, Readercon is a crucible, burning away all the ephemera. It’s all meat and no gristle.

That’s what makes Readercon great. It’s also what makes it hard to attend.

It’s all meat, but you can’t eat the whole thing: it’s like an Argentine steak dinner. At any given moment there are as many as eight things going on, and chances are, unless your interests are very narrow, you want very badly to be at two or three places at once. Picking one is very hard. So is finding the time to recharge your batteries — or to eat.

For the entire weekend, I chanted as my mantra CBE — can’t be everywhere.

Which is why I missed so many things at Readercon. I missed Neil Gaiman’s surprise appearance at the Shirley Jackson Awards on Sunday. I missed the adventures with durian fruit. I missed at least half of the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition. I missed the panel about Gardner Dozois’s short fiction because I attended the panel in which Gardner Dozois talked about the year’s best short fiction. (Yes, they scheduled Dozois against a panel of Dozois fiction. I’m told that’s a feature, not a bug.)

Fortunately, I’ve been able to see some of the programming I missed by watching it online: Scott Edelman and Michael Swanwick have been posting video clips to YouTube.

I did manage to attend some excellent panels, readings and events. Some were better than others, but there were some real gems (such as the panels on Kipling and social Darwinism, and Greer Gilman’s talk on language). Here are just some highlights:

The panel about Jo Walton’s Among Others (see previous entry), where I managed to make the panel flinch by using a gruesome metaphor to describe the novel’s main character.

Readings by Gardner Dozois (his latest story, “Recidivist”), Mary Robinette Kowal (the first chapter of her novel in progress, on which she wanted feedback), and Michael Swanwick (a new story he’d finished only a couple of days before).

(Michael ran over the 30 minutes allotted to his reading, and Readercon’s tight scheduling allows for no room for error. He led his audience out the door like the Pied Piper and finished in the hallway — an astonishing scene — then hustled across the hotel to his kaffeeklatsch.)

The interviews with the guests of honour, Gardner Dozois and Geoff Ryman, were at least not scheduled against anything else, and worth attending.

Meeting Howard Waldrop, whose work I admire very much, and attending his 10 PM reading. Howard’s eyesight is not what it was and he frankly stumbled over his own manuscript, but I was damned if I was going to miss a Waldrop reading, that stuff of convention lore.

And, and, and — if I told you everything, I’d take weeks to write this post, and I’m already overdue.

I will say that we bought a lot of books. Weren’t we supposed to?

But more than anything else, I was struck by how friendly and open so many people were. This was my first American convention (it was also my first trip to the U.S. since 1994, but that’s another story), and I’ve never felt so welcome at a Canadian convention. No disrespect to my fellow Canadian conventiongoers: I do know something about being reserved. But man, American fen are friendly buggers.

I took a lot of photos, and (of course) they’re online: here’s the Flickr set. But as I said, I didn’t catch everything there, so you’ll want to see Readercon photos by Kathryn Cramer, Ellen Datlow, Ed Gaillard and Juliaaa.