“So the boy had nothing of the fairies but chagrin and gingerbread.”

And so we came to Castle Greyskull:  louring from a cliff in Quincy, the new Readercon hotel lacks only a tremendous lightning storm to crown it. What is it with con hotels?  Over the years, we’ve all seen so many non-Euclidean solids and absurdist sites, with hallways by Escher and ballrooms by Shackleton.  Just here in greater Codville, we’ve known and loved the Hell Ziggurat, an exoskeleton of meeting rooms spiked about a great internal void, and the improbably half-timbered Rocket Cottage, with its bellhop guard of disspirited Beefeaters.

After the renaming of the rooms in Burlington (Enterprise, Envision, Enteric, Entropy, Enclitic, Emetic...), it was a relief to find myself in Rooms A, B, C, Blue Hills, and IV, V, VI.  And Nightwing’s very nice green room was Abigail Adams.  You could trust her for a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit.

Some glories and regrets:

The dealers’ room, as ever, was magnificent and ruinous:  a throng of houris in harcdovers, nymphs in paperback, all whispering, buy me, buy me.  I could have spent a month’s income at the Small Beer table alone.  And yet—the room was full of David Hartwell’s absence.

There was a fine opening panel on Science Fiction in Classical Tradition (John Crowley, Haris Durrani, Ada Palmer, Catherynne M. Valente, Jo Walton (leader))—but what were they thinking, not to put sovay and rushthatspeaks on it?  And not to make it two hours?

I gave a reading, in part from A Robe for to Go Invisible, the third tale in the Sirenaiad, the one with Jack Donne; but inspired by Juno’s recent exploits in space, I also read two little scenes from Exit, Pursued by a Bear:   Ben browsing the bookstalls in St. Paul’s yard, and discovering Siderius Nuncius, cool off the press; and Kit Marlowe on Watling Street, the Milky Way whose inns are constellations, at the pothouse kept by Old-Jump-at-Her.

Sadly, my performance was on Thursday night, when many of the audience who might have come were not yet at the con.  The tech guy asked if I minded if Readercon posts a recording:  if they get round to it, I’ll let you know.

After that, I heard rushthatspeaks read from an inrush of new story.  Lifelode meets—damn it all. I’ve forgotten what it met.  I will strike my brow when reminded.  Loved it.

I had Friday entirely off:  no panels, no appearances.  Can’t think when that’s last happened, so I determined to hear as much as possible.  It began with a treasured Readercon ritual for me, breakfast with John Crowley.  After that, I raced off to a celebration of the works of my beloved Diana Wynne Jones, for which her friend and late editor Sharyn November had (only just) come racing from New York.  I knew none of the other young panelists (but for sovay), but delighted in hearing rapturous praises (and few puzzled demurs:  no one’s flawless) from the writers she’d shaped.  I found myself (from the audience) likening Diana to a marvellous gyroscope, travelling impossible threadways at impossible angles, in a whirling dazzle:  yet always righting herself.

Next came Using Real Historical People in Fiction (Phenderson Clark, Jeffrey Ford, Tim Powers, Steve Rasnic Tem, Sarah Smith (leader)).  I noted that the otherwise impeccable Sarah Smith is still an Oxfordian, though covertly:  she referred coyly to “another ‘Shakespeare.’”  I suppose I will never know what possessed her.

Then came Why Don’t Animals Use Magic? (Erik Amundsen, Suzy McKee Charnas, Lila Garrott, Theodora Goss, Ann Tonsor Zeddies).  Somewhat uneven but fascinating conversation:  do animals do magic or are they magic?  Is ritual magic?  Suzy Charnas recalled a marvellous told-as-true story about ravens in a hidden canyon who’d made assemblages of owl feathers, stuck in crevices or weighted down with stones.  Apotropaic altars?  

Reading Works from Long Ago (Phenderson Clark, Michael Dirda, Delia Sherman (moderator), Catherynne M. Valente, Jacob Weisman) got edgy, as discussions do when Lovecraft and Kipling come up.  A great part of the hour concerned whether genius can make up for -isms.

I wish Liz Hand could have made her own recordings of Cass Neary.  That voice is irresistible to me:  I will follow it into places I don’t ever want to be.   She read from the fourth book in progress, from a scene on Charing Cross Road, with the bait of a lost manuscript found, a work so insanely occult that it sounded “like Dan Brown on bad acid.”  The theme of the hour appeared to be scary bookdealers, as Nathan Ballingrud’s reading featured another, this time with swamp zombies.

After that, it was apocalypse all the way down.  The weekend of doom, gloom, despondency, and glee began with The End of the World and After: from Mary Shelley to J.G. Ballard, Russell Hoban, and Beyond. (Chris Brown (leader), Jack Haringa, Faye Ringel, Henry Wessells, Gary K. Wolfe).

Last year’s Bad Influences panel was phenomenal:  I remember Maria Dahvana Headley, wrapped in a wisp of bookshelf-printed silk, with EXIT, PURSUED inked on her right thigh, and BY A  BEAR on her left, talking about tearing the sacred image of Susan Sarandon from her father’s Playboy, and eating it like a communion wafer.  This year’s instantiation, Badder and Influencier, didn’t quite come up to that, despite a stellar cast (Suzy McKee Charnas, Ellen Datlow (leader), Lara Donnelly, Maria Dahvana Headley, Mikki Kendall, Kelly Link, Livia Llewellyn, Vandana Singh).  Still, it was hilarious, sometimes revelatory.  A hard call, damn it, as it was up against Clockwork Phoenix 5 and Delany/Lingen in the reading tracks.  Why can’t I tri-locate?

At that point, I’d listened to seven straight hours of programming, and needed a cup of tea and a little quiet.

The next choice was also very hard, as it was Sonya Taaffe reading opposite Henry Wessells, with a preview of A Conversation Larger than the Universe:  an exhibition to be held at the Grolier Club in New York City from January to March 2018, assembled from his own private collection of first-edition fantastika.  Tough call, but after his marvellous talk on twenties fantasy a few years back, the one that gave me Stella Benson’s Living Alone, I had to hear Henry Wessells.  Much to my delight and awe, I found myself in his catalog.  Me!  In a room with Mirrlees, Tiptree, Crowley, Delany, Dunsany...!  And for that matter, Small Beer Press displayed beside Doves and Kelmscott.  Bliss.

A glitch in the files meant that several people’s Meet the Pros(e) sentences hadn’t printed, so I spent dinner time writing out (as neatly as possible), “So the boy had nothing of the fairies but chagrin and gingerbread.”  Thirty times.

The party, as usual, sounded like the goblins’ boiler room.

I was charmed to meet my brilliant cover artist, Kathleen Jennings, somewhere in the throng, at long last:  come all the way from Brisbane.  I rather overwhelmed her with praise and thanks—her work is both gorgeous and witty.  And unexpectedly, I came across a nice fellow whom I’d known only as Marjorie Garber’s excellent TA at Harvard.  I love that a very proper Shakespearean loves SF.

The eighties dance party (what!?! at Readercon?!?) began, and blasted me out of the room.

More to come.

Nine