Readercon

The brand new Readercon website has been launched, with the same familiar URL but a great new design:

http://www.readercon.org

Our webmaster, David Shaw, redesigned the site to use adaptive design, which means it will look great on any device: desktop, laptop, tablet, even your phone. No separate mobile site needed. Check it out on every device you have!

The site has also been updated with all the information about Readercon 24. We're delighted to announce that GOHs Maureen F. McHugh and Patricia A. McKillip will be "joined" by memorial GOH Roger Zelazny. Our registration rate structure now has three simple tiers: now through mid-February (until Boskone, for those of you in the Boston area), mid-February to mid-June, and at the door. You can also find this year's hotel rates, a fully updated list of board and committee members, and everything else you need to know about the upcoming Readercon.

We'd love to know more about who's coming to Readercon in 2013. Are you a regular coming back, a first-timer, or a long-ago attendee wondering how it's changed? Are you interested in being on the program or running a table in the Bookshop? Will you be on your own, having a romantic book-filled long weekend with your literary-minded SO, or dragging all your friends along? Why are you interested in attending Readercon? Leave a comment and let us know!

I'm delighted to announce that Gardner Dozois and Geoff Ryman have accepted our invitations to be the guests of honor for Readercon 22, taking place in Burlington, MA from July 14 to 17, 2011.

Gardner Dozois's twenty-year stint as the editor of Asimov's is one of the great editorial projects in our field. Year after year, he published some truly fine short fiction, including numerous award winners. Thanks to these achievements and his superlative annual anthologies, he has received a record-holding 15 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor. Though his writing career is sometimes overshadowed by his editorial work, his fiction has won two Nebula Awards and a Sidewise Award. He has also served as a judge for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, a project dear to many Readercon attendees.

Geoff Ryman is a teacher and actor, and the author of seven novels, including the groundbreaking Was... and Air: Or, Have not Have. His work is often cited as embodying "Readercon-ness", as it explores and extends the dialogue between experience and imagination, between history and fantasy, between identity and society. His novels and short stories have won the World Fantasy Award, British Science Fiction Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, induction into the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame, and so many other honors and nominations that they have their own Wikipedia entry. He last attended Readercon in 2008, where he spoke on panels such as "Rival Revolutionary Movements in the Arts" and "Reading Aloud for Writers."

We're working with Gardner and Geoff to select a memorial guest of honor and will have that announcement for you shortly.

In the meantime, I'm issuing a call for program item ideas. Please submit your suggestions one of three ways:

1) In the comments to this entry or its companion entry on LiveJournal.

2) On the Readercon Forums.

3) In an email to program@readercon.org.

Lively discussion is encouraged. This "brainstorm" period will close November 14th, so please send us your ideas soon!