The Mumpsimus

Readercon 21 was, for me, exciting and stimulating, though this year in particular it felt like I only had a few minutes to talk with everybody I wanted to talk with.  I think part of this is a result of my now living in New Hampshire rather than New Jersey, so I just don't see a lot of folks from the writing, publishing, and reading worlds much anymore. Before I get into some thoughts on some panels and discussions, some pictures: Ellen Datlow's and Tempest Bradford's .  Tempest asked everybody to make a sad face for her, not because Readercon was a sad con (just the opposite!), but because it's fun to have people make sad faces.  The iconic picture from the weekend for me, though, is Ellen's photo of Liz Hand's back .  I covet Liz's shirt. And now for some only vaguely coherent thoughts on some of the panels...

Rain Taxi has posted online an interview I conducted with James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel , editors of The Secret History of Science Fiction . Most of the discussion took place in a Masonic lodge in southern New Hampshire, although at one point I was blindfolded and taken to an undisclosed location that smelled of patchouli and motor oil.  Jim Kelly ducked out briefly to launder some money vacation in the Cayman Islands, and John Kessel made me repeat long passages of Latin that made my skin itch.  But I let nothing stop my relentless pursuit of the truth...

For my first bit of venturing back into 1990 , two stories offer not only a good place to start, but an interesting pairing: Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Shobies Story" (first published in Universe 1 ) and John Kessel's "Invaders" (first published in F&SF , October 1990), both of which were reprinted in Dozois's best-of-the-year anthology . (By the way, in these posts I plan to discuss the entirety of the stories, which means that if you don't like to have plot elements revealed, you should not read here about stories you have not read.) David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have offered a good basic summary of the ideas Le Guin is exploring in her story: "The Shobies' Story" describes a society in which consensus matters more than individual viewpoints. [... It] posits a reality that emerges as the sum of what all the participants say: a meta-narrative, a democratically constructed myth.  Le Guin tells us that the observer is part...