Tag: cons

The schedule for this year’s Fourth Street Fantasy convention is up! I hope to see many of you there. My scheduled programming items during the con this year are:

RELIABLY UNRELIABLE NARRATORS

9:20 AM Saturday

W.L. Bolm, Mary Robinette Kowal, Marissa Lingen (M), C.L. Polk, Shen Tao

For obvious reasons, we talk a lot about suspension of disbelief in the fantasy genre. But what about stories where the reader could stand to benefit from a healthy sense of skepticism? Plenty of speculative works make use of the good old unreliable narrator: a first-person protagonist with a precarious relationship with the truth, a 3rd-person ensemble impacted by their own limitations and biases, or even a seemingly omniscient narrator who looks away at some convenient moments.

How can authors best balance a narrative’s need for obfuscation, omission, or outright deceit runs up with the reader buy-in required for fantastic elements? How do readers navigate a story where the author is asking you to trust them about one thing, and lying to you about the other? And what specific possibilities can be unlocked by a story where the narrative tour guide to an imaginary world can’t be trusted?

THE MIDDLE OF THE STORY: 30 YEARS OF MIRROR DANCE

11:20 AM Sunday

Lois McMaster Bujold, Marissa Lingen (M)

4th Street Fantasy continues to celebrate the rich history of Minnesota fantasy and science fiction. This year, we’re very pleased to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold, a book that stands as both a singular success and a powerful middle chapter in the Vorkosigan saga. Lois will join Marissa Lingen for a conversation about Dance and about how she confronted the well-known Middle Book Problem – how to produce a story that stands on its own and encapsulates a beginning, middle, and end without being a beginning or end in and of itself.

Fourth Street! Be there or be somewhere else nice of your choosing!

The virtual Fourth Street Fantasy panels are up in podcast form! Please enjoy this audio panel on The Role of Hospitality in Stories, featuring Reuben Poling, Pamela Dean, Matt Doyle, and Max Gladstone!

And, uh, me. Your moderator.

Look, there’s no way I’m listening to this, I don’t listen to podcasts I’m not on, and I definitely do not want to hear my own voice for basically an hour, so…you enjoy, tell me about it.

Hurrah for advance planning! I am going to ConFusion in Novi, MI (Detroit suburban area) January 16-19, 2020, and here is the schedule of where you can find me there:

Managing and Overcoming Professional Burnout Friday 1:00PM Charlevoix The Mayo Clinic defines burnout as “a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.” It can affect people of all professions, but it presents particular dangers to creatives, whose work is often tied closely to personal identity. Our panel will discuss how to spot the signs of burnout, how to manage it, and how to overcome it. Marissa Lingen (m), Pablo Defendini, Ken Schrader, Kameron Hurley

Speculative Social Media in Science Fiction Saturday 5:00PM Charlevoix Thinly-veiled or even overt references to popular real-world social platforms are common in modern media–including in speculative stories like superhero tv shows and movies. But speculative worldbuilding often calls for a re-imagining of how humans interact–would the social media of the United Federation of Planets really look like ours? Or would a peaceful interstellar society be more likely to arise in a world where Google Reader never died? How can writers incorporate new visions of social media that reflect their speculative worldbuilding? Marissa Lingen (m), John Chu, Jennifer Mace, Annalee Flower Horne, Brandon O’Brien

Reading: Marissa Lingen, Tim Boerger, John Wiswell Sunday 10:00AM Saugatuck Marissa Lingen, John Wiswell, Tim Boerger

Great Lakes and Inland Seas In Secondary Worlds Sunday 12:00PM Isle Royale It’s hard to really get a sense of the scale of the American Great Lakes if you’ve never stood on one of their shores. Those of us used to thinking of lakes as more akin to very large ponds are often surprised by the dunes, the waves, the wind, the distant horizon. Writers who know the lakes offer advice on how to incorporate great lakes and inland seas into our fantasy worlds–as a narrative setting, what separates lakes from oceans? What unique or surprising storytelling opportunities do lakes provide? Anthony W. Eichenlaub (m), Marissa Lingen, Phoebe Barton, John Winkelman

I’m done with professional travel for this year, but I still have at least one more public appearance for fiction-related stuff: a week from today–that is, Thursday, November 21–at 7:00 p.m., I’ll be doing a reading at Magers & Quinn Booksellers, 3038 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, with Naomi Kritzer and Sue Burke.

Naomi and Sue and I each plan to read a short selection, and then we’ll have conversation and questions from the audience (if any). Should be a good time! Come on out if you’re around!

Like many other totally normal non-mutant human beings, I often choose to be in one place at one time, a superpower known as unilocation. In October I’ll be unilocating in various places in Montreal and New York! Here’s a guide to that.

At 7 p.m. on October 10, I will be doing a reading with several other authors at Argo Bookstore on 1915 Ste. Catherine St. W. in Montreal. It should be a lovely time and followed by a trip to Juliette et Chocolat for the eponymous chocolat. Mmm.

The weekend immediately following that I will be appearing on the panels and events at Scintillation convention in Montreal. Here are the four things for which I’m on program for that, Saturday October 12 and Sunday October 13.

Saturday 13:00, The Reading Room: Marissa Lingen and Tim Boerger Reading. I will read something different at this from what I will read at the Argo reading. What will it be? You’ll have to see it to believe it. Wait, no, I mean: you’ll have to be there to find out. (Or, I suppose, ask me nicely the day before.)

Sunday 11:15, The Big Room: Friends and Family in the Future: Ada Palmer, Marissa Lingen (M), Rosemary Kirstein, Karl Schroeder, Naomi Kritzer. We’re still going to have them, but the patterns will change. How might they change, and why don’t we see more of this?

Sunday 15:15, The Reading Room: Sherwood Smith and Marissa Lingen in Conversation.

Sunday 16:30, The Big Room: Futures Worth Having: Maria Farrell, Ada Palmer (M), Karl Schroeder, Ruthanna Emrys, William Alexander, Marissa Lingen. What kind of future do we want to live in?

Then I will get on a plane to New York! Because life is full of complication and interest. The NYRSF sponsors a reading at the Brooklyn Commons Cafe, 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, at 6:45 on Monday October 14. It will also appear on Hour of the Wolf on 99.5 FM, hosted by Jim Freund. This reading is authors from Reckoning magazine, hosted by editor Michael J. DeLuca, featuring myself and several others.

I have not listed the full complement of authors for either non-convention reading because I’m not sure whether everyone who’s doing it has been arranged, and I don’t want to leave anybody out. But there are lovely awesome people, not just me, and it will be a good time.

Classic Nonfiction Essay Club: “Estrangement and Cognition” by Darko Suvin
Meg Elison (mod), Tom Greene, Alexander Jablokov, Marissa Lingen, Graham Sleight
Fri 1:00 PM, Salon B
Darko Suvin’s preferred edition of his essay “Estrangement and Cognition,” coining the oft-repeated statement that SF is the literature of cognitive estrangement, first appeared in 1979. (Strange Horizons later reprinted it online.) It was a decade in the making, and the world and SF both changed quite a bit from 1969 to 1979. We’ll consider “Estrangement and Cognition” in the context of SF’s New Wave, the political upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, and the subsequent shifts in speculative genres.

17776 and All That: The Crumbling of the Jock-Nerd Divide
Susan Bigelow, Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Robert Killheffer, Marissa Lingen (mod), Cecilia Tan
Fri 6:00 PM, Salon B
Jon Bois’s wild digital narrative “17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future” appeared on SB Nation, a sports news website, and aimed straight at the commonalities of sports and SF fandoms: rules and ways around the rules, glorious absurdity, tragedy alongside heroism. The jock-nerd divide has crumbled. What does that mean for nerd lit? Will cerebral SF embrace sweaty physicality? Will epic hockey games replace epic battlefields? This panel of sports-fan fans will discuss these possibilities and more.

Reading: Marissa Lingen
Sat 11:00 AM, Salon C

You Know, It Kinda Grows on You
James Patrick Kelly (mod), Marissa Lingen, Arkady Martine, Eric Schaller, David G. Shaw
Sat 3:00 PM, Salon B
Spaceships that are giant plants, humans whose brains rival supercomputers, lizards bred to function as flying flamethrowers—these are just a few science-fictional examples of how humans might manipulate their bodies and environments to support the human race’s spread throughout the universe. This panel will examine imagined technology that lives and breathes, and how human life might change and grow alongside it.

Lloyd Alexander, Existentialist
C.S.E. Cooney, Andrea Martinez Corbin, Chris Gerwel, Marissa Lingen (mod), Sonya Taaffe
Sun 11:00 AM, Salon 3
Lloyd Alexander, translator of Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote an existentialist epic fantasy series. As Jesse Schotter writes on Full Stop, “The end of The High King, and Taran’s choice to remain in Prydain… salvage[s] the idea of free will within the deterministic framework of the genre.” How did existentialism influence Alexander’s other work (Time Cat, the Westmark trilogy)? What are other examples of existentialist speculative fiction epics? With the present deconstruction of prophecy-driven epics, how can writers learn from Alexander’s work?

You already know that I am one of the workshop leaders for this year, and if that is relevant to your life, you have signed up for it already!

In addition, I am on one panel this single-track convention, and that is:

Saturday 8:00 PM – The Role of Narratology in Adaptation

Casey Blair, Kent Davis, Seth Dickinson, Marissa Lingen, Arkady Martine (M)

All art is in conversation with other art, and nowhere is that more clear than in adaptation. Transforming works of art is a fundamentally creative process that, done well, keeps core pieces of the story familiar while also shifting the narrative focus to appeal and make sense to new audiences with different perspectives. Fanfiction and the act of retelling tales are as old as stories and equally worthy creative pursuits, giving us opportunities to center the experiences of other identities, to explore issues previous story iterations didn’t. Applying concepts of narratology as they pertain to how we transform stories so their meaning makes sense to a different audience, this panel will discuss the artistic challenges and pitfalls in adapting stories as well as why this kind of narrative iteration is culturally critical.

Looking forward to seeing so many people there!