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Readercon 21 was, for me, exciting and stimulating, though this year in particular it felt like I only had a few minutes to talk with everybody I wanted to talk with.  I think part of this is a result of my now living in New Hampshire rather than New Jersey, so I just don't see a lot of folks from the writing, publishing, and reading worlds much anymore.

Before I get into some thoughts on some panels and discussions, some pictures: Ellen Datlow's and Tempest Bradford's.  Tempest asked everybody to make a sad face for her, not because Readercon was a sad con (just the opposite!), but because it's fun to have people make sad faces.  The iconic picture from the weekend for me, though, is Ellen's photo of Liz Hand's back.  I covet Liz's shirt.

And now for some only vaguely coherent thoughts on some of the panels...

I actually missed my own first panel, "Interstitial Then, Genre Now", with John Clute, Michael Dirda, Peter Dube, and Dora Goss, because the battery in my car died because of absent-mindedness on my part the night before.  Luckily, I have a car battery charger, but charging took just long enough to make it so there was no physical way I could get to Burlington, MA in time for the panel.  (Andrew Liptak wrote a recap for Tor.com.)


My Saturday panel, "The Secret History of The Secret History of Science Fiction", with Kathryn Cramer, Alexander Jablokov, John Kessel, Jacob Weisman, and Gary K. Wolfe went pretty well, I thought, though as so often happens, it felt like it was just getting going when it was time to end.  The panel allowed John to talk about the motivations for the book, some of what he thought it accomplished, etc. -- a lot of what he said parallels what he and Jim Kelly told me when I interviewed them about the anthology.  Gary Wolfe offered probably the best line of the panel: "An anthology is, inevitably, a collection of the wrong stories."  (This, of course, from the critic's point of view!)

I'm not very good at inserting myself into conversations, so I did a lot of observing during the panel, piping up only to offer a sort of counter viewpoint from Gary's -- where Gary was in some ways agreeing with Paul Witcover's assertion that writers like T.C. Boyle are just using science fiction as "a trip to the playground".  I was hoping we'd be able to discuss this idea a bit more, but time didn't allow it.  Had it, I suppose I would have tried to say that to me the resentment of writers not routinely identified with the marketing category of "science fiction" or the community of fans, writers, and publishers that congregates under the SF umbrella -- the resentment of these writers for using the props, tropes, and moves of SF is unappealing to me for a few reasons.  It's a clubhouse mentality, one that lets folks inside the clubhouse determine what the secret password is and if anybody standing outside has the right pronunciation of that password.  It is, in other words, a purity test: are the intentions in your soul the right ones, the approved ones?  Had we had time, I would have tried to make some sort of connection between this attitude toward non-SF writers with an attitude I've seen within the field from people toward writers of a younger generation who haven't read, for instance, e

Author John Crowley is interviewed by Ed Halter in the new issue of The Believer, on newsstands now.

"Crowley’s skill at transcending genre has had its pitfalls, too, as illustrated in the publishing saga of the Ægypt cycle, his four-volume opus that navigates through both the intricate romantic affairs of an Aquarian-age cluster of upstate New Yorkers and an occult re-reading of Western history. Though the original books were slowly released over two decades by various publishing houses—some parts marketed as fantasy novels, others more as literary fiction—a complete, definitive edition of the series was finally published between 2007 and 2009 by Overlook Press."


THE BELIEVER: Your novels exist somewhere between fantasy and science fiction and naturalistic fiction. Do you have any interest in the way the term slipstream has been circulating in the last few years to describe this kind of moving among genres? Would you ever think of yourself as a slipstream writer?


JOHN CROWLEY: I think this is something for critics to determine rather than for writers to do. I mean, I just write books. If they have names for them, the names can seem more or less convincing to me. I think the difficulty with slipstream and interstitial fiction and all those kinds of terms is that they tend to be used only by people who are in one of those sub-branches of fiction. They’re used by genre writers who are interested in adopting mainstream techniques or adopting mainstream values or getting mainstream readers to read their books. You will notice that it’s mostly genre writers who even use the word mainstream. Mainstream writers don’t use the word mainstream—they don’t know there’s a mainstream and these tributaries or whatever they are.

New in paperback is Endless Things, the fourth novel—the much anticipated conclusion—in John Crowley’s astonishing and lauded Ægypt cycle: a dense, lyrical meditation on history, alchemy, and memory. Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffitt, the Ægypt sequence is an epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other.

Love & Sleep, the second volume in John Crowley's acclaimed Ægypt cycle, is now available in a new paperback edition from The Overlook Press. Finally reissued after years out of print, and rewritten to be the novel that Crowley always intended, Love & Sleep is a modern masterpiece, both extraordinary and literary. Love & Sleep will be followed in Summer 2008 by the third volume in the Ægypt cycle, Dæmonomania, and in Fall 2008 by the paperback release of book four, Endless Things.

Michael Dirda considers the "four-work masterwork" of John Crowley in a lengthy feature article in The American Scholar. Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, notes: "With Little, Big, Crowley established himself as America’s greatest living writer of fantasy. Aegypt confirms that he is one of our finest living writers, period." The first volume in the Aegypt cycle, The Solitudes has just been published in a stand-alone trade paperback edition; Love and Sleep will follow in February. The third volume in the Ægypt cycle, Dæmonomania will be released in the summer, followed by the Fall 2008 release of book four, Endless Things.

Study fiction with the legendary author of The Aegypt Cycle at the Richard Hugo House as part of their NW Media Arts Writing Fantastic Fiction Workshop Series. The Solitudes is due to hit stores this October, followed by Love And Sleep in January. The Overlook Press is honored to be restoring The Aegypt Cycle to print and reissuing it in the volumes that the master intended. Sign up for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about narrative & time from John Crowley!

Francesca reads today's final haiku winner. Tune in next Monday for an entirely new Galley Give-Away! And keep your eyes peeled for The Solitudes, Aegypt Cycle Book One in a store near you!

Alex, fresh back from Morocco, offers today's winner of the Haiku Galley Give-Away. Only one more day and one more galley left! Tune in tomorrow for our final installment, and our next Galley Give-away!

Chris reads today's haiku from today's haiku winner. With only three galleys left to give away, the competition is getting fierce. Watch to see if you'll be receiving a copy of John Crowley's The Solitudes!

Who's today's winner?
If Marina is reading
your haiku, then *you*.

Are you the first winner of the Great Haiku Give-Away? It's possible. Olivia reads the first haiku winner of a reader's copy of The Solitudes, The Aegypt Cycle Book One, due out in September. Tune in tomorrow for another installment.

In honor of Summer Friday you have until Monday morning to get your haiku on and win a galley of The Solitudes by John Crowley. Every day next week we'll be giving one away. Prepare for glory. These peeps serve as a handy haiku-writing reminder (cheers to frybooks for the image). Rock that 5-7-5. And have a great weekend.

Announcing our first ever Great Haiku Galley Give-Away, featuring John Crowley's legendary Book One of the Aegypt Cycle THE SOLITUDES! Write a brief, witty and polished haiku about why you are worthy to receive an early reader's edition of this beloved title. The Overlook Press is re-issuing all of the Aegypt Cycle in collectible and smart-looking paperback format. Deadline for entries is Friday 6/22! Get your 5-7-5 on! And you could be a winner. Many will enter, 5 people will win. Winning haikus shall be posted and much glory shall be had. Send to theoverlookpress at gmail dot com.

Lots to write about as soon as I get my head above the current pile of mostly proofreading-and-copyediting. (If writing fiction is dessert, then copy-editing is eating all your vegetables. Blogging is snacking between meals. Yes, I'm still on diet*, why do you ask?)

In the meantime, a few odd tidbits...

Ever since catching a Radio 4 documentary last year (no longer available), I've become intrigued recently by Bert Williams, and have been buying lots of books about him and recordings of his, which meant that I discovered Archeophone Records (http://www.archeophone.com/index.php) -- an amazing resource for anyone interested in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century music. (I wasn't, but I am now.) This includes Yearbooks -- the hits of each year. And listening to their 1922 CD I stumbled over the Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean act, which I'd known about (mostly through parodies, TV commercials, and an obscene version quoted in Gershon Legman's Rationale of the Dirty Joke) but never heard. Mister Shean was Groucho Marx's uncle, and a few clicks later I was watching Groucho Marx and Jackie Gleason doing their own Gallagher and Shean tribute on YouTube (it's at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpl-JGLbwwQ). (I played once with the idea of doing a "Mister Vandemar and Mister Croup" song but it never went beyond the playing stage.)

Archeophone put up a recording of the month, with a little information about each act, at http://www.archeophone.com/features/recordings/index.php -- there's a lot to listen to.

John Crowley (an amazing writer and a lovely man) is putting up a reading list of books for writers , especially would be writers of Fantasy and SF, at his livejournal, http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/. I've read about half the books on the list, and given that two of them are two of my favourite books in the world I'm looking forward to reading the rest. (This is the original request for a reading list -- http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/38533.html -- and this is the result is at http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/38862.html. This is, as he says to "shame them [his students] out of concocting another pseudo-medieval non-society peopled by folks like themselves (and a few dragons and vampires, also much like themselves). " I think it should apply to all writers...

Susan Henderson has a contest which has a) already been won and b) if you're coming there from here you'll guess the answer immediately. But it's at ... http://litpark.com/2007/01/19/contest-time/


* It's working just fine, thank you. I call it The Don't Eat So Bloody Much and Would It Kill You To Take A Walk Now And Again Diet.