Charlie Jane Anders Panels Day Start End Title Description Location Panelists Friday 6:00 PM 6:50 PM Reading: Sarah Gailey, Mur Lafferty, and Charlie Jane Anders PETOSKEY Charlie Jane Anders, Mur Lafferty, Sarah Gailey Saturday 2:00 PM 2:50 PM Any Sufficiently Detailed Magic System is Indistinguishable From Science The influence of tabletop roleplaying games is widely felt in fantasy. Many stories make a ‘science’ out of their magic that reflects the carefully-balanced rules of a tabletop sourcebook. What are the trade-offs between creating magic systems with strict rules and leaving magic as a mysterious and unknown force? How do we balance the sense of wonder and magic against the desire to give readers a stable hook from which to suspend their disbelief? What makes a well-defined magic system work in a story, and when are we showing the reader too much of the machinery behind the curtain? BIG TOP Brandon Crilly, Charlie Jane Anders, David Anthony Durham, Kate Elliott, Shweta Adhyam, Jim Butcher Saturday 4:00 PM 4:50 PM You Got Magic In My Science Fiction! We’ve developed a variety of labels for works that mix fantastical elements like dragons or magic into science fiction settings like spaceships and sprawling futuristic cities. Does Star Wars’s use of The Force place it in a different part of the Science Fiction canon than Mass Effect’s use of biotics? From a storytelling and world-building perspective, what separates elements with magical trappings from those with science fictional trappings? Should fantasy vs scientific explanations be a purely aesthetic consideration, or does putting magical elements in science fiction meet a specific storytelling need that handwavy science cannot? LEELANAW Dan Moren, John Chu, Lucy A. Snyder, Marie Bilodeau, Ryan Van Loan, Charlie Jane Anders Saturday 5:00 PM 5:50 PM Autograph Session (5 PM) Come meet your favorite authors, artists and musicians and have them sign things! (Please limit your signing requests to 3 items per person.) ST. CLAIR A. T. Greenblatt, Addie J. King, Andrea Phillips, Angus Watson, Benjamin C. Kinney, Brandon Crilly, Charlie Jane Anders, Cherie M. Priest, Dan Moren, David D. Levine, Dyrk Ashton, Izzy Wasserstein, John Chu, John Scalzi, Kate Elliott, Lucy A. Snyder, Marie Bilodeau, Marissa Lingen, Max Gladstone, Merrie Haskell, Mishell Baker, Navah Wolfe, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Ryan Van Loan, Shweta Adhyam, Stephanie Morris, Teresa Nielsen Hayden