Mar. 27th, 2017

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Mar. 27th, 2017 05:55 am
supergee: (ICFA)
We loved the ICFA. What did we miss?
supergee: (baseball)
The World Baseball Championships were just concluded. USA Today reports:
US Win Helps Secure Event’s Future
supergee: (mourning)
RIP, George Weinberg, who shook things up in the 70s by writing a book whose title seemed to many to be a contradiction in terms: Society and the Healthy Homosexual
supergee: (sado)
Capitalism is so bad it creates populism.

Thanx to [livejournal.com profile] andrewducker

ICFA

Mar. 27th, 2017 08:45 am
supergee: (ICFA)
The concept of Fakefan originated when people who didn’t really like to read sf decided that they liked the people who like to read sf & wanted to hang out with them. This year the ICFA, which I have now attended for 35 years, was devoted to Epic Fantasy. I felt like a fakefan.

There were a few problems: I forgot to pack a couple of meds, but Kevin heroically arranged for them to be shipped. The day before I left, my hearing aid company thoughtfully broke the hearing aid for my less dysfunctional ear, and I had to use an old, less good one, so I heard very little. And the airline behaved the way airlines often do (6 hours late, one of our bags shipped to wherever the plane was going next. The airlines warn us to take everything essential because they do that frequently. It reminds me of something Dan Jenkins said about a football player with a bad rep: “Rooming with him ain’t so bad if you don’t mind taking a shower with all your money in your hand.” Then they wonder why we passengers crowd the plane with large carry-ons. Anyway, it worked for us.) And the conference dealt with Epic Fantasy. Nevertheless, I had a good time.

Good parts version: These were some of the good parts.

Bernadette appeared on the program three times: She read some of her poems, then reported on Margaret St. Clair and C.L. Moore as exemplars of women writing horror back in the day, then joined Kevin for a panel on epic fantasy in comics. All excellent, of course.

Edward James was the Scholar GoH and delivered a typically knowledgeable speech.

There was a serious paper on Chuck Tingle.

Andy Duncan, Max Gladstone, Ellen Klages, and Jeffrey Ford did a panel on Humor in the Fantastic. You could tell they knew how to do it even if you hadn’t read them.

Our invasion of the Library of America continues. There will be more volumes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Gary Wolfe is following up his delightful anthology of the best short sf novels of the 50s with a similar one for the 60s, and Lisa Yaszek is doing an anthology of women’s short sf 1870-1970.

Amanda Firestone did a nifty paper on Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown.

Like me, Isiah Lavender III thinks that Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist is what we read speculative fiction for, despite its literary respectability.

I’m not even going to try to list all the people I enjoyed hanging out with.


I know what I left out: DELTA Airlines. Always name the malefactors.

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Arthur D. Hlavaty

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