At noon on Sunday, July 14, 2013, Elizabeth Bear, John Benson, Andrea Hairston, Elizabeth Hand, Robert Killheffer and Scott Lynch came together at Readercon for the panel, “Pining for the Fnords: The New Nostalgia.”

What does that mean exactly? According to the program guide:

Well-received novels like John Scalzi’s Redshirts, Jo Walton’s Among Others, and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One pointedly allude to the SF of decades past. In a controversial review in the Los Angeles Review of Science Fiction, Paul Kincaid suggested that contemporary SF is suffering from a feeling of exhaustion; “the genre is now afraid to engage with what once made it novel, instead turning back to what was there before” or reverting “to older, more familiar futures.” Others view this type of SF as celebrating its heritage. What’s driving this backward-looking urge, and to what extent is it positive or problematic?

If you’re wondering why it’s taken this long for me to share this video, blame the bandwidth of my home Internet. Most people complain about the Internet speed they get at hotels, but not me—it’s rare that I’ll be at a hotel which has slower speeds than I experience at home. And so this video, which would have taken around two hours to upload at the Readercon hotel, would supposedly take 16 at home, and I couldn’t spare the bandwidth. So I had to wait until the following weekend, when I was once more at a hotel for a convention, to upload.

And now, after an explanation you probably neither wanted nor needed … enjoy!