Readercon
As I say on the About page, I go regularly to Readercon, the conference on imaginative literature held in Boston each July. This year, I’m going to be giving a talk, as follows:
Why do we read on from one sentence to the next? How and why do we construct narrative from these discrete units? And how does that work in the special context of fantastic fiction? Graham Sleight talks about extracts from a wide range of writers – including Ursula Le Guin, Kelly Link, Michael Chabon, William Gibson and M John Harrison – to try to answer these questions. If he has time, he may also get to other questions, like “Why is it so awkward when you’re told a joke but don’t get it?”, “Why are there no hard sf slipstream stories?”, and “Do you really want to know who Severian’s mother is?”
It’s a sort-of sequel to “Excellent foppery”, the talk I did at Readercon last year; I hope to clean up the text of the earlier one and post it here before too long.
Graham Sleight 