I even picked up a couple of paperback originals: “The Best of Walter M. From Canadian dealer and collector Peter Halasz I bought a beautiful copy in dust jacket of George Orwell’s “The English People,” a monograph in the “Britain in Pictures” series that its author never allowed to be reprinted. Me being me, I couldn’t resist spending a couple of hours in the con’s “Book Shop.” Fred Lerner, a historian of libraries and science fiction, pointed me to his annotated edition of John Myers Myers’s “Silverlock” (NESFA Press), a fantasy classic that features cameos by many of the most celebrated characters in fiction. Panel subjects ranged from “Billionaires in Science Fiction,” “COVID’S Effects on Literary Tone” and “The Queer Tropes of Speculative Literature” to “The Fantasy Fiction of Sylvia Townsend Warner” and “Do Short Stories Still Matter?” Offered so many appealing topics, I found it hard to choose which panels to attend, finally settling on “How We Shape and Reshape Older Works,” “The Pyrite Age of Science Fiction” (a revisionist look at science fiction’s so-called golden age of the 1930s and ’40s), “Space: The Ultimate Locked Room,” “Speculative Memoir” and “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.” This last took the form of a conversation between two of its editors and contributors, John Clute and Graham Sleight, who pointed out that the field’s major reference work, now in its free online fourth edition, was fast approaching 7 million words. Each day featured up to eight tracks comprising panel discussions, readings, autograph sessions and Kaffeeklatches, in which writers answered questions from a small group of fans. The con ran from Thursday evening, July 13, until Sunday afternoon, July 16.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |