Trippingly on the tongue

My Readercon schedule.  Few but fabulous!

Friday July 13

6:00 PM
Speech Patterns.
Judith Berman, Leah Bobet, Greer Gilman, Sarah Smith (leader), Vinnie Tesla.

Writers can adopt the convention that people in the future (or past) speak just as they do now. Or they can take contemporary speech patterns and tweak them to suggest the different time or place. Or they can go for verisimilitude (historical or imagined). Why do we see more tweaking of speech patterns in stories set in the past than the future? Is altering speech patterns to give a flavor of the future an underused technique, or does it present more difficulties (see Riddley Walker, A Clockwork Orange, or Ambient)? Some writers the altered speech pattern for the aliens reserve, as a way of underscoring their different psychology. What other techniques are available?

7:00 PM
The Literature of Estrangement.
Christopher Brown, Lila Garrott (leader), Greer Gilman, Anil Menon, Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Witcover.

In a 2011 interview in The Guardian concerning the paucity of SF and fantasy texts among Booker nominees (and, we might add, Pulitzers or National Book Awards in the U.S.), China Miéville suggested repositioning the debate as not between the realistic and the fantastic, but between "the literature of recognition versus that of estrangement," though he admitted that "the distinction maps only imperfectly across the generic divide" and that "all fiction contains elements of both drives." Is this a more useful set of terms for discussing the familiar schism? Does it reveal literary alignments in an inventive new way? Or is it simply cutting the same cake at a different angle?

Saturday July 14

10:30 AM
Reading.
Greer Gilman.

Greer Gilman reads from a work in progress, a Jacobean revenge procedural.

Sunday July 15

1:00 PM
Mapping the Parallels.
Greer Gilman, Walter Hunt (leader), Alison Sinclair, Howard Waldrop, Jo Walton.

Stories of parallel worlds are often actually stories of divergent worlds. As such, they contain implicit ideas about how and why divergences can happen: questions of free will and personal choice, theories of history, and speculation about the core constants of the universe. The range of divergences, and the reasons behind them, also serve as at least a partial map of the kinds of possibilities considered worth telling stories about. With this in mind, let's talk about what has been done, or could be, with the idea of parallel worlds in fiction—both classic and contemporary examples in SF&F, women's fiction, MG/YA, and more. How do the differences in usage of the trope—such as the scope of divergence (personal vs. societal vs. scientific, human-centric vs. extra-human), the degree to which the causes of divergence are explained, and the ability to travel between divergent worlds—play out across parallel and divergent world stories? How do they express ideas about what is possible?

Nine