Tag: readerccon.22

Readercon 22, Day 4 (Sunday): Saying goodbye (plus Neil Gaiman!)

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Sunday seems to be mostly about saying goodbye to all of the wonderful people I was priveledged to hang out with. It’s kind of a sad day at a convention, watching everyone check out of the hotel and not quite knowing if you’ll have to wait a full year before you see them again. For some, yes. For others, hopefully not.

I was up before 8am once again and headed down to the restaurant. While sitting there waiting for my food to be delivered, I ran into Mary Rodgers, another writer and Codex member and we ended up having a very nice breakfast together, chatting about writing habits and other things that you can really only discuss with another writer in the context of a writer’s convention.

From that breakfast I dashed off to meet Barry Malzberg and company for the morning walk around the parking lot. This time Scott Edelman and Paul Di Filippo didn’t make it, but instead Liz Hand went with us. We did the usual three or four loops around the parking lot, listening to Barry expound his wisdom, and listening to Liz ask him interesting questions. It was, as always, absolutely delightful.

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NPR: The best 100 science fiction & fantasy books

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NPR is asking people to vote for the best 100 science fiction & fantasy books ever written. SF&F people are encouraging everyone to go and vote; we are trying to top the 17,000 votes that thrillers got last year. I just finished posting my top 5. And just so that you don’t have to drill down into the thousands of comments to find what I voted for, I’ll list the books here, noting that NPR said it will accept well-established series as a single vote:

  1. Foundation series by Isaac Asimov
  2. Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg (why you should read this book)
  3. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  4. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
  5. Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (my reviews are here and here)

There are some interesting choices in the comments, and of course, many of the books are more recent because readers are younger and aren’t as aware of the older stuff. I think I’ve got a pretty good mix in my list. In fact, I’d guess that you could make demographic predictions (age-based) by looking at nothing but the lists of books people posted.