prusik | My Readercon schedule (Reply)

Obviously, I don't blog nearly enough. I may fix this some day. For now, here is my Readercon schedule:
[I'm especially thrilled that "Sociolinguistics and SF/F" made it onto the program.]

Thursday July 11

9:00 PM G The Nuances of POV. John Chu, Eileen Gunn, James Patrick Kelly (moderator), Darrell Schweitzer, John Stevens. When writing genre fiction, many authors begin with the approach that first-person point of view (POV) is useful for horror and heroic quests to bring immediacy to the story; third-person is necessary for epic world-building; and second-person is too confusing and best avoided. But POV is not so cut-and-dried. How can we deepen and expand our ideas of what constitutes POV to better understand and apply it in fiction? How can we broaden the discussion of POV to employ a more granular approach?

Suggested by John E.O. Stevens and Meriah Crawford.

Friday July 12

4:00 PM G Race as a Social Construct in Speculative Fiction. John Chu, Andrea Hairston (leader), Alaya Dawn Johnson, Daniel José Older, Vandana Singh. Race in speculative literature is often treated as a non-issue or grossly oversimplified: the Other is mapped onto elves and dwarves and aliens while all the human characters are white as milk, or human/Other hybrids inherit magical traits and boatloads of angst from their non-human parents in ways that parallel stereotypes about mixed-race people. How can we develop fantasy and science fiction that addresses race as a social construct (rather than a sub-species category), with all the messy complexities inherent in that?

Suggested by Gillian Daniels.

7:00 PM ME Sociolinguistics and SF/F. John Chu, Rose Lemberg (leader), Alex Dally MacFarlane, Anil Menon, Sabrina Vourvoulias. Sociolinguistics studies the ways in which language intersects with society. It looks at issues such as interactions of language with power, prestige, gender, hegemony, and literacy, bilingualism and multilingualism, translation, language birth, and language death to name but a few. We will look specifically at the kinds of tensions that are created in societies where people speak different languages or dialects depending on social and racial/ethnic status. We will also discuss genre books in which those topics have been explored, and consider sociolinguistics tools and concepts that may be useful to writers.

Proposed by Rose Lemberg.