| DAY | START | END | LOCATION | TITLE | DESCRIPTION | PANELISTS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Friday | 5:00 PM | 5:50 PM | Interlochen | World-building Culture Beyond Aesthetics | Many authors take care to ground readers in the aesthetic details of their secondary-world cultures, using clothing, architecture, food, and language to give readers a ‘feel’ for what a culture is like. Often, these details are drawn from stereotypes of real regions of the world, leaving us with the generic “”middle easternness”” of Narnia’s Calormen , or the “”future Chinese empire with no Chinese people”” of Joss Whedon’s Firefly. Let’s talk about how to go beyond aesthetics to build original cultures with their own philosophies, biases, social orders, and worldviews. How can we build distinct cultures in our work without using medieval Europe as the cultureless default against which other societies are compared? What are our favorite fictional cultures, and our favorite stories that use distinct original cultures to add more to their world than appropriated aesthetics? | David Anthony Durham, Max Gladstone, Michael R. Underwood, Scott H. Andrews, Shweta Adhyam |
| Friday | 6:00 PM | 6:50 PM | Interlochen | Spoilers and the Mechanics of Surprise | JJ Abrams famously hates spoilers so much that he threatened to ruin the career of any member of the Star Wars cast or crew who leaked to the press. Many authors and readers/viewers agree that it’s best to go into a work unspoiled, but some readers love spoilers. Some rely on spoilers as content warnings that tell them if they’ll be able to enjoy a work, while others simply don’t view surprise as a necessary element to their enjoyment. When is relying on surprise the right choice for a work, and when is it more flash than substance? | Christine Knight, Dan Moren, -E, Jon Skovron, Tracy Townsend |
| Saturday | 12:00 PM | 12:50 PM | Interlochen | Game Boards in Stories | From Through the Looking Glass to The Hunger Games to Karuna Riazi’s The Gauntlet, genre fiction has long been intrigued with the concept of game boards as settings for stories. Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass contains multiple references to how the characters would move in in chess–the game that forms the world’s setting. What are our favorite stories centered around games? What real world board games (aside from RPGs) would make for interesting story settings? | Andrea J, Amy Sundberg, K. Andrea Phillips, Lynne O’Connor, Monica Valentinelli |
| Saturday | 1:00 PM | 1:50 PM | Interlochen | The Do’s and Don’ts of Fandom | Supporting one another is always important, especially in small communities. What is the best way to support others? How do we keep ourselves from hurting other fandoms? | Dessa Lux, Natalie Luhrs, Sarah Hans, Sunny Moraine, Vanessa Ricci-Thode |
| Saturday | 3:00 PM | 3:50 PM | Interlochen | Reflecting on Reboots and Reinterpretations | Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass have been adapted countless times–sometimes in ways that are faithful to the source material, and sometimes with new interpretations (such as Tad Williams’s Otherland and Micheline Hess’s Malice in Ovenland). How do writers balance familiarity with novelty when rebooting or adapting classic stories? What makes a good retelling work for readers, and what are our favorite examples? | Dominik Parisien, Jessi Cole Jackson, Julia Rios, Sarah E. Gibbons |
| Saturday | 4:00 PM | 4:50 PM | Interlochen | Examining Whiteness in Speculative Fiction | When speculative fiction is so often addressing the human condition–and what it means to be human–it’s vital that we acknowledge that life on Earth isn’t the same for all of us. Many speculative works portray the experience of being white as if it is a universal human experience, without stopping to examine what whiteness means now or what it will mean in the future. How does (and how should) science fiction address whiteness as a specific, rather than universal, experience? | Mishell Baker, Natalie Luhrs, Pablo Defendini, Stephanie Morris |
| Saturday | 5:00 PM | 5:50 PM | Interlochen | Social Media for the Creative Community | So you’re an artist with 25,000 FB friends and a killer Deviant Art gallery. Is that enough? What works and what doesn’t in getting fans engaged in your creative work? What new approaches look good to you? | James Breakwell, Rachel Quinlan, Matt Feazell |
| Sunday | 12:00 PM | 12:50 PM | Interlochen | The Setting As Character | In Science Fiction and Fantasy , settings can literally come alive–be it via the talking flowers of Through The Looking Glass or the rage of Peter Quill’s creepy dad-planet in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. In Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch universe where ships have minds, main characters can be both people and places at the same time. Are living settings a science fiction/fantasy extension of the classic “Hero Vs. Nature” story? How do they exist in conversation with real-world beliefs about whether the world around us has a will of its own? | A. T. Greenblatt, Cassandra Morgan, David John Baker, Ferrett Steinmetz, Suzanne Church |
| Sunday | 1:00 PM | 1:50 PM | Interlochen | Hopepunk in the Age Of Resistance | Author Alexandra Rowland defines hopepunk as the opposite of grimdark: “Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion. Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength.” What are the stories that inspire us to reject cynicism and fight for the good in this broken world? | Brandon Crilly, Izzy Wasserstein, Michael J. DeLuca, Nisi Shawl, Stacey Filak |