The Readercon committee has just circulated the first draft of this year’s programming—not counting solo talks, readings, kaffeeklatsches, autograph sessions, and the like, which are still to come—and these are the panels I’m pencilled in for, along with my co-panelists as well as the descriptions which will clue you in on what I let myself in for when I signed on.

I look forward to seeing you all in Burlington!

Friday, July 10 at 11:00 AM
Egocentrism and Creativity
with Eileen Gunn, James Patrick Kelly, John Shirley, Catherynne M. Valente, and Gene Wolfe
“I’m Michael Swanwick, and with the possible exception of Gene Wolfe, I’m the best writer present today.” This introduction at Readercon 1 (at the Wolfe appreciation panel!) drew big laughs for its nerve (and apparent self-delusion), but in retrospect it seems to be merely precognitive (Nabokov observes that “there is no more pure love in the world than the love a young writer has for the old writer he will someday become”). Swanwick now maintains that “modesty and a reasonable awareness of [one’s] limitations have no place in a writing career.”

Friday, July 10 at 2:00 PM
Hacks Anonymous vs. The Art Police
with Elizabeth Hand, Kit Reed, David G. Shaw, and John Shirley
Admitted ‘hacks’ (okay, ‘commercial writers’) tell us of their lives while those who can’t conceive of doing that gawk and gape and ask questions that would be rude if they weren’t so naive.

Sunday, July 12 at 10:00 AM
After the Cover’s Closed
with Lev Grossman, Karen Heuler, Walter H. Hunt, Luc Reid, and Michaela Roessner
The amount of closure that any story can have varies widely; there are endings that clap shut like a trap and endings (like “The Lady and the Tiger”) that force the reader to decide what happened next. Presumably the writer has a sense of how much closure the ending should provide, and thus how much they want the reader to think about the characters afterwards (and even what those thoughts might be). And yet there’s no question that the reader brings as much or more to the ending of a story than the writer. Different readers not only have different tastes in degree of closure, they have different propensities to wonder what happens next (from the reader who doesn’t care whether the lady or tiger gets chosen, to the reader who can’t help wondering what happens after the end of On the Beach.) When the closure a reader experiences matches the writer’s intention, the result can be very powerful. But it may be the mismatches that tell us more about the nature of fiction.