Souvenir Book Edited by Ellen Brody and Richard Duffy
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fSfEADERCOR 22 SOUVENIR. BOOK Readercon 22 Souvenir Book Edited by Ellen Brody and Richard Duffy. Layout and design by Nevenah Smith. Cover art by Rachel Silber. Ad wrangling by Bill Sherman. Titles are set in P22 Johnston Underground, developed by Edward Johnston for the London Underground system in 1916. Body text is Minion Pro. Space Garden, original mixed-media artwork by Rachel Silber, created for the Readercon Souvenir Book cover, June 2011. Readercon chose this theme to honor Geoff Ryman’s outreach on behalf of the Poppy Project, an effort to aid and protect women who have been trafficked into prostitution or domestic servitude. After drugs and weapons, this is now organized crime’s biggest money-maker. Help ease the Lives of its victims: http://eaves4women.co.uk/POPPY_Project/POPPY_Project.php Readercon 22 Souvenir Book copyright 2011 by Readercon Inc.; all rights revert to individual authors on publication, except as noted below. "SF: Mapping the Territory’’ copyright 1981 by NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Reproduced with permission of NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW via Copyright Clearance Center, Danvers, MA. CONTENTS GUEST OF HONOR GUEST OF HONOR MEMORIAL GUEST OF HONOR GARDNER DOZOIS GEOFF RYMAN MARK TWAIN Sitting in the Sun in the Waist-High Review of The Child Garden: A Low Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn Grass: "The Last Day of July" by Comedy {John Clute}.................................55 Gardner Dozois {M. J. Engh}................................... 32 {Michael Bishop}............................ 4 Everything I Knew Was Wrong Time, Memory, Love, {F. Brett Cox}...............................57 Appreciation Transcendence {Eliot Fintushel}............................ 9 {Joan Gordon}.............................34 A River Pilot We Can Still Follow {Samuel R. Delany}...................... 58 Everybody in Science Fiction On Geoff Ryman Knows Gardner Dozois. Or Thinks {Gavin J. Grant}...........................35 He Didn’t Want to Be a Writer They Do. {Bradley Denton}........................ 59 {Eileen Gunn}..................................9 The Angel, Everywhere {Veronica Hollinger}....................36 That Startling, Blue Middle: The Gardner-Beaters of Milford Reading Mark Twain (and Other True Dozois Stories) For Geoff {John Langan}............................... 61 {Joe Haldeman}.............................. II {Roz Kaveney}.............................. 37 Mark Twain, an Appreciation The Multiple Dozois The Writer Who Created Fiction: {M. Rickert}...................................63 {Nancy Kress}.................................12 Thoughts on Geoff Ryman {Claude Lalumiere}.......................38 Mark Twain’s Diaries of Adam and Some Words About Gardner Eve. An Appreciation {Sonia Lyris}................................. 12 What Does Geoff Ryman Stand {Eric Schaller}.............................. 64 For? (And What Do You Stand For?) A Philadelphia Reminiscence {Chris Moriarty}...........................39 A Visit From His Confidant {Mike Resnick}............................. 14 {Gene Wolfe}.............................. 65 Two Notes on Geoff Ryman Gardner Dozois in a Nutshell {Rachel Pollack}........................... 41 Selected Mark Twain Bibliography {Michael Swanwick}.....................14 {Ellen Brody 8c Richard Duffy}.. .67 The Joy of Grapefruit, or: Disorder The Hagiography of Saint Dozois and Early Sorrow CORDWAINER SMITH {Michael Swanwick}.....................16 {Kit Reed}...................................... 42 REDISCOVERY AWARD WINNER MARK CLIFTON Appreciation A Conversation: Geoff Ryman and He’d Rather Be Right; They Wanted {Jeff VanderMeer}........................ 18 Kit Reed Him Wrong ....................................................44 {Barry N. Malzberg}..................... 71 Dah Zeus {Howard Waldrop}........................ 19 Geoff Ryman Mark Clifton {Gordon Van Gelder}.................. 47 {Thomas J. Remington}................72 Chapter One of an unfinished sequel to Strangers The Storyteller Mark Clifton Bibliography {Gardner Dozois}...........................20 {Geoff Ryman}.............................48 {Ellen Brody 8c Richard Duffy}.. .73 Gardner Dozois Bibliography Geoff Ryman Bibliography {Ellen Brody 8c Richard Duffy}.. .26 {Ellen Brody 8c Richard Duffy}.. .52 Committee Bios 74 The Oldest Science Fiction / Fantasy convention in the New York City area! March 16 -18,2012 At the Hilton Rye Town in Rye Brook, NY Writer Guest of Honor John Ringo Artist Guest of Honor Howard Tayler YA Writer Guest of Honor Tamora Pierce Gaming Guests of Honor Andy & Kristin Looney Membership Rates: See our website for discount rates. Adults Lunacon will Feature: Until August 31, 2011 $40 Sept. 1, 2011 - Feb. 20, 2012 $50 Anime! dealers' Room! February 21,2012-At the door $60 Art Show! Filk! Child (ages 6 -12) Con Suite! Until February 20, 2012 $20 Caming - Bringing back your February 21,2012-At the door $30 favorite games as well as tons of Mail check or money order to: Lunacon 2012 new games every year! PO Box 432, Throggs Neck Station Bronx, NY 10465 Membership rates good through dates www.lunacon.org listed. Memberships mailed in must be [email protected] postmarked by February 20, 2012. Lunacon is hosted by the New York Science Fiction Society, a 501 (c)3 non-profit corporation. Datlow} Ellen by {Photo 7* m D O Z O I S SITTING IN THE SUN IN THE WAIST-HIGH GRASS: “THE LAST DAY OF JULY" BY GARDNER DOZOIS {Michael Bishop} First published in the New York Review of Science Fiction pairs on the house, John goes into the yard to read his #159 (November 2001); collected in A Reverie for Mister Ray: “notes.” Dozois describes this mundane safari and its fol Reflections on Life, Death, and Speculative Fiction (Pulphouse low-up in acute off-hand detail: Publishing, 2005). Part ii originally published in Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois (NESFA Press, 2001).] John wades to the center of the lawn with his notebook, and sits down determinedly, in i. a memory the sun. Sitting, the grass comes up above his waist, and he has the illusion that he has just A s an aspiring SF writer, I first read the hair-raising lowered himself into a tub of sun-warmed ./^.speculative fiction of “hot young Turk” Gardner green water. For the first time, he notices how Dozois in the early 1970s while serving at the United overgrown the grounds actually are. Weeds and States Air Force Academy Preparatory School in Colorado wildflowers have sprung up and proliferated Springs, Colorado, as an English instructor. I encoun everywhere, and John is submerged in an ocean tered Gardners dense, evocative, intensely felt stories pri of growth... marily in the most exciting original anthologies of that To distract himself, John opens his note time, Damon Knights Orbit and Robert Silverbergs New book... The shadows of the tall grass can be Dimensions. seen on the lined paper—one scheme of order Of all Gardners early work, the disquieting Vietnam imposed over another—and he watches them... War story “A Dream at Noonday” from Orbit 7 and the in bemused fascination. The calligraphy of the beautiful off-planet adventure-meditation “A Special Kind shadows is exquisite; they look like actual brush of Morning” from New Dimensions 1 probably had the strokes on the page, clean-bordered black lines. most impact on me, but “The Last Day of July”—an enig The sun also casts the silhouette of an insect matic novelette set in 1939!—from the third number of onto the page—a shadow spider crawling Silverbergs series sent chills spiraling down my spine and along a blade of shadow grass, a reflection of snvy rushing through my bloodstream. some negative and polar universe. He lifts his The entire story takes place in a dilapidated country gaze slightly to locate the real spider, and then louse in Pennsylvania, and most of the “action” occurs be manages to watch both it and its doppelganger tween the ears of its writer protagonist, a troubled young at once... He tries to touch the silhouettes of man named John. Early on, too weary to accomplish re grass and spider. He cannot—there is nothing {4} DOZOIS but feel of paper under his fingers, and the much as past-tense storytelling, and his stories often sub shadow spider now clambers distortedly over jugated action to interior monologue and upsetting psy his knuckles. Neither can he feel the ink that chological effects. “The Last Day of July” fit into this box forms the words on the page, though he knows so snugly that it certainly fed the myth of its author—and that it, too, is there. some of his fellow contributors to Orbit, in particular—as As he watches, a word pulls itself up out of elitist pessimists. Some critics held, or strongly implied, the paper and scurries away. that Dozois’s work was defeatist, that he preferred fine writing to narrative substance, and that reading his work, I shivered. Other young writers shivered, too. Although especially if you cared more for story than for style, would little happens here in the story’s outer narrative, John’s inevitably plunge you into ulcerous depression. self-involved perplexity grows architecturally in Dozois’s Complete balderdash, these charges. Dozois always prose. Meanwhile, the lineaments of a potentially re put his style at the service of content. Early stories like markable career had also begun to take shape. As Robert “A Special Kind of Morning,” “Chains of the Sea,” “The Silverberg noted in his Introduction to 77?e Visible Man Visible Man,” and, yes, even “The Last Day of July”—as (Berkley Medallion, 1975), Dozois’s first collection, “The