I’ll be at Readercon this weekend in Quincy, Massachusetts! This is my first Readercon and I’m really looking forward to a convention that’s just about books.
I’ve got a ton of scheduled events, so join me if you can. If you see me, say hi! I’m very social, for an author.
Classic Nonfiction Essay Club: “Estrangement and Cognition” by Darko Suvin
Meg Elison (mod), Tom Greene, Alexander Jablokov, Marissa Lingen, Graham Sleight
Fri 1:00 PM, Salon B
Darko Suvin’s preferred edition of his essay “Estrangement and Cognition,” coining the oft-repeated statement that SF is the literature of cognitive estrangement, first appeared in 1979. (Strange Horizons later reprinted it online.) It was a decade in the making, and the world and SF both changed quite a bit from 1969 to 1979. We’ll consider “Estrangement and Cognition” in the context of SF’s New Wave, the political upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, and the subsequent shifts in speculative genres.
Autographs: Meg Elison, Cadwell Turnbull
Fri 5:00 PM, Autograph Table
Kaffeeklatsches: Marc Abrahams, Meg Elison
Fri 7:00 PM, Concierge Lounge
Reading: Meg Elison
Fri 9:00 PM, Sylvanus Thayer
Satire, Criticism, and Humility
John Clute, Meg Elison, Victoria Sandbrook, Graham Sleight (mod), Henry Wessells
Sun 10:00 AM, Salon B
Satire and criticism are sometimes presumed to be the province of snobs who enjoy tearing down anything they don’t like, but the most nuanced critique comes from someone who has a genuine desire to improve the world by pointing out what’s wrong with it. How can critics and satirists bring humility to fields that also necessarily require a strong ego and a belief in one’s own rightness? How does one write these works from a place of performing a service?
The Peril of Being Disbelieved
Meg Elison (mod), Gwynne Garfinkle, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Sonya Taaffe, teri.zin
Sun 12:00 PM, Salon B
In the 2017 essay “The Peril of Being Disbelieved: Horror and the Intuition of Women” at Tor.com, Emily Asher-Perrin examines the horror trope of the woman who intuits that a situation is dangerous but is ignored by those around her, and how that trope mirrors society’s refusal to believe women more generally. Panelists will explore the trope, whether and how it is being subverted, and the ways in which other marginalized groups are also disbelieved.
