Kestrell

Readercon 31
https://www.readercon.org/
will be taking place August 13-15, and will be virtual.
The guests of honor are Ursula Vernon and Jeffrey Ford, with the Memorial Guest of Honor Vonda N. McIntyre.
YouTube will be used to view panels, talks, readings, performances, and events, via links shared in our members-only Discord server
Discord will be used to participate in Q&As, visit virtual fan tables, attend launch parties, chat in kaffeeklatsches, and otherwise interact with program participants and other attendees during and between sessions.

The program can be downloaded in several formats, including an accessible plain text file,
here
https://www.readercon.org/program

I'm on two panels:

Saturday - 2:00 PM
Main Track 1 - I'm In: Infiltration Techniques for Writers - Toni "Leigh Perry" Kelner, Catherynne M. Valente, Kestrell Verlager, Elizabeth Wein, Fran Wilde (mod)
How can characters get into spaces they aren't supposed to be, whether physical or virtual? What makes these scenes feel plausible? Panelists will analyze the literary possibilities in various infiltration techniques--including those that rely on technical skills (such as lockpicking or hacking) and those that rely on social engineering--and suggest useful reference works and successful fictional depictions.

Sunday - 10:00 AM
Main Track 1 - L'État, C'est Quoi? Social Organization in SF/F - Terri Bruce, Ian R. Macleod, Kathryn Morrow, Malka Older (mod), Kestrell Verlager
Let's talk about modes of social organization in science fiction and fantasy: nations, kingdoms, empires, anarcho-syndicalist communes, hives, necromantic capitalism, and more. How do shifts in real-world politics change how we read speculative fiction's use of both real and imagined forms of government? Why is it so hard to make up truly novel social systems, and what does that tell us about how we perceive human (and inhuman) nature?

Our guests of honor are Ursula Vernon and Jeffrey Ford, and our memorial guest of honor is Vonda N. McIntyre. We’ll also celebrate the careers of Carol Emshwiller and Rick Raphael, winners of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for 2019 and 2020 respectively.
Read the announcement and further details on the website:
http://www.readercon.org/RC31virtual.htm

Kes: I had made up more notes of material than I actually said during the panel, so some of this will be new.

Recommended book: _Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art_ by Lewis Hyde
Recommended story: Buffalo Girls Won't You Come Out Tonight by Ursula Le Guin - A must-read featuring a female coyote

My top 3 tricksters in speculative fiction:
1. Miles Vorkosigan in the series by Lois McMaster-Bujold, especially as Miles is disabled, but unstoppable: Miles was a real inspiration for me, be afraid, be very afraid.

2. "Repent Harlequin, Said the Tick-Tock Man" by Harlan Ellison
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpzRHX78TqE f

_Rainbowz End_ by Vernor Vinge - has a hacker character whose avatar is a white rabbit, rabbits also being a traditional trickster in the southwest and Louisiana Cajun culture


Gillian Daniels, the moderator, asked panelists to name their favorite trickster, but I never met a trickster I didn't like, so I really can't just name one, so
Hermes, because he is the god of language and technology, and because he travels between
Coyote, because he can get out of or into anything, plus, as a person with prosthetic eyes, coyote and his detachable body parts has to be in my personal pantheon, especially in the story "Coyote Juggles His Eyes" (lots of versions in text and video form all over the Web)
and Loki, because he is such an instigator, full of scathing language, a shapeshifter, and possesses definitely qualifies as queer

My other favorite tricksters:
Hermes' kids and grankids: Pan, Autolykus, Odysseus, and Iambe (see below)
Puck
pooka, puca - an Irish shapeshifter often appearing as a black horse (_Tamsin_ by Peter Beagle) or a black dog (_War for the Oaks_ by Emma Bull). "Harvey" (1950), Harvey is a six foot tall invisible rabbit that accompanies Jimmy Stewart's character around.
tanuki - Japanese racoon dog, a trickster and prankster associated with kitsune, shows up in manga, often shown as a fat jolly old man with ridiculously large testicles, statues of which are set outside Japanese sake bars
Tanuki at TV Tropes
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Tanuki
Tom Robbins wrote a novel, _Villa Incognito_, featuring Tanuki as its protagonist.

The Green Knight in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (proposes a "game" at Christmas, a traditional time for jokes and games, and can walk about with his head underneath his arm--again with the detachable body parts)

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I'm going to write an extended post on this subject in the near future, but for now:
Check out your public library's online ebook and audiobook offerings: many of these can be easily accessed online and read with your browser.
WeightlessBooks.com
offers many ebooks by Readercon authors, in addition to magazines.

My number one recommendation for people with vision or other disabilities which interfere with reading print books is
Bookshare.org

which is a subscription ($50/year +registration fee Website for people with disabilities. It has contracts with the government and publishers, including Small Beer Press so it has everything from bestsellers to textbooks. Authors and publishers can contact them to arrange to have their books made available.
Bookshare.org also serves as an information warehouse, as it explains almost everything you want to know about accessible ebooks, such as what formats, apps, and hardware devices are available. This site is partially supported by grants from the U.S. Dept of Education, and it is the major resource used by universities and institutions, including the U.S. government, for making ebooks available. This means, if you work for a government office or you are a student or faculty of a university, they may already have an institutional membership which will cover you.

Weightless Books, which offers a wide variety of SFF, slipstream, spec fic, insert your favorite name for it here, just added a bunch of
Aqueduct Press titles

http://weightlessbooks.com/category/publisher/aqueduct-press/
including
Distances
by Vandana Singh
http://weightlessbooks.com/genre/fiction/distances/
of which I bought a paper copy months ago, but it was subsequently swallowed up by the Closet of Mysteries, which I expect any day to spit out something quite startling, such as a very bad-tempered Fenris (because just imagine a very large dog going eons without walkies), but just stop and mull that one over for a minute: Fenris as my guide dog!!!

And speaking of wild beasties, I also had to buy a copy of
Bewere the Night
http://weightlessbooks.com/genre/fiction/bewere-the-night/
which is an anthology of shapeshifter stories, although I bought it solely on the fact that it contains a Richard Bowes story and an Elizabeth Hand story, which is good, because they are two of my favorite authors and it's been way too long since they hadnew books out, although it seems 2012 will do something about that, but frankly, sometimes I feel as grouchy as a Fenris who has gone eons without walkies.

And I never did mention the Twilight Zone moment I had at Readercon when I tried to go to a Small Beer Press reading of Mexican fantasy writers and instead seemed to have ended up at a reading which no one else remembers and which didn't show up on the program, but involved he Elder Gods returning to Earth, except they seemed to be large sharklike beings, so it was kind of like Cthulhu meets Jaws.

Did anyone else experience the parallel universe Readercon?

Panel: Book Design and Typography in the Digital Era.
Panelists:
Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld Magazine http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/
and author of the highly informative essay, "This is My Life on Ebooks" http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke_07_11/
Erin Kissane http://incisive.nu/about/
author of _Elements of Content Strategy_, available in both paper and ebook formats http://www.abookapart.com/products/the-elements-of-content-strategy
David G. Shaw, Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager
Edited later: Apologies for getting a panelist name wrong, the panelist was actually Ken Liu
http://kenliu.name/
who read from an article he wrote about the transition from codex to scroll
and the blog David recommended for more on ebooks and accessible Web design was Joe Clark's blog http://www.facebook.com/l/qAQD1rd19/blog.fawny.org/."

This panel is mostly a blur in my memory, although I remember David and others recommending a number of useful resources, such as A List Apart, and the book which Erin just published. David pointed out Cory Doctorow's collaborative publishing effort in his latest collection, with footnotes mentioning the names of readers who pointed out typos and other errata. We also encouraged the audience to be active consumers and producers by making complaints to publishers when the formats they need aren't available and, on the part of writers and editors trying to be part of the decisionmaking process as to in which formats the ebook versions of their books are being issued. This isn't always easy, as often authors and editors aren't kept in the loop of these decisions. An example of this surfaced when I mentioned to Ellen Datlow that I can find ebook versions of some of her anthologies at Baen Books, and she wasn't aware that the anthologies were available through that site.
Baen Books Webscriptions-New Arrivals page (includes link to Best Horror of the Year 3)
http://www.webscription.net/c-66-new-arrivals.aspx
Ellen Datlow page
http://www.webscription.net/s-196-ellen-datlow.aspx

Also, after the panel Alexx and I went to the book room and I sought out the table for the university press which published the newest edition of Samuel R. Delany's nonfiction essay collection, _The Jewel-Hinged Jaw_, with an introduction by Matthew Cheney, and the rep was glad to find out that the publisher could donate the electronic files for books to Bookshare.org, which works with many publishers to make books, including textbooks and literary criticism, accessible to visually impaired students and readers. Small Beer Press and ChiZine Press were there selling both paper books and ebooks, as they have done for a number of years now, and there was also a magazine called Crossed Genres which offered an ebook bundle for $20, which included two novels, two anthologies, and a year's subscription to Crossed Genres http://crossedgenres.com
. The works come in a variety of DRM-free formats, and the co-publishers who were there said I could contact hem if none of those formats turned out to be accessible, and they would send HTML files.

It was a pretty awesome experience to know that I would have ebooks waiting for me whenever I wanted to read them, as opposed to having a pile of books which I would have to scan by hand (not that I didn't indulge in some paper books also, mostly because Alexx found me a book about books).

went, I think, extremely well, as all the panelists were extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the subject. I'll probably write a bit more about this panel at some later point when I have more info at hand, as opposed to being kind of burned out and waiting for Chinese food to arrive, but after the panel I went to the Book Shop, where a number of publishers were advertising that they sold ebooks, also (go Crossed Genres! go ChiZine!), and I managed to provide a university press with the info that Bookshare.org is the perfect way for university presses to distribute their books to students with disabilities.
Alexx mentioned after we had left the panel that it looked as if some people might have wanted to ask me questions: if you are someone who wanted to ask a question or know osmeone who wanted to ask a question, feel free to post here or e-mail me privately through LJ.

Dear fandom,

I've been trying to find a way to contact the author N. K. Jemisin but the Word Press interface keeps giving me error messages when I try to post to her blog. Best way to contact me is through my livejournal account kestrell at livejournal dot com. Thank you fandom.

Edited mere moments later: Mission accomplished--thank you to the incredibly efficient avatar of fandom, you know who you are.

Some forms of fiction seem particularly prone to inscribing meaning upon the physical body;
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by Kestrell Alicia Verlager
Talk/discussion delivered at Readercon on July 09, 2010

To begin with, I wanted to mention how I came to propose this discussion. I graduated from MIT's Comparative Media Studies master's program a number of years ago, and my thesis was _Decloaking Disability: Images of Disability and Technology in Science Fiction Media.
http://www.blindbookworm.org/decloakingdisabilitycomplete.rtf .

One of the reasons I love speculative fiction in general and science fiction specifically is it's many characters with non-normative bodies and modes of perception. However, when it comes to fictional blind characters, I often find myself shaking my head and wishing I could talk to writers about what they have gotten wrong in regard to the experience of being a real blind person. So, when I received an invitation to submit ideas for Readercon programming, I thought, Here is the perfect audience! And the Readercon programming committee was kind enough to encourage me.

Because my goal is to discuss specific representations of blindness and blind people, I am going to use concrete examples from specific works. I don't wish for this to be interpreted as personal attacks upon the writers who wrote these works; I specifically mention in the title of this talk that these are all goodwriters, really, the best writers. The problem, I believe, is that there is so much mythologizing and misinformation about blindness and blind people that it is difficult for even the best authors to always distinguish fact from fiction, reality from stereotype.

My hope in presenting this talk is to supply some ideas and questions which people can employ in order to be more critical as writers, readers, and reviewers, for--I'm going to use a quote here from Samuel Delany's introduction to _Uranian Worlds_:--
"If we want to change the way we read, we have to change the way we write."

In considering representations of blind people in narrative, one becomes aware of how deeply woven together story and blindness are as represented by the mythic figure of the blind storyteller. Borges, Carolan, Milton, Homer--their blindness seems not merely a matter of biographical detail but something of more significance. My use of the word "significance" is intentional, for I wil repeatedly be returning to the question of what blindness signifies or means within the context of the stories I will be discussing.
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