Panels will last approximately an hour, with a 30-minute break in between. Meal breaks for lunch and dinner will be 2 hours. View the full schedule →
Friday
Fear, Loathing, and Transcendence on the Great American Roadtrip
4:00 PM
Beth Cato, Marissa Lingen, Alec Marsh, Arkady Martine (M), Reuben Poling
Whether we like it or not, we are currently in the United States of America. The particular fantastic resonance of this country, and the continent it occupies, is often evoked by that great American literary tradition – the road novel. There’s an undeniable magic to traversing this huge landmass, with all its relatively open spaces. The brutal process of colonization that produced this country, and the unusually truncated history delineated by that process, add texture and horror to the magic of the open road.
Books like Max Gladstone’s Last Exit or Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning take the American road novel a step or ten further into the fantastic, including unflinching consideration of the bones beneath the highway. What other possibilities can fantasists encounter out on the interstate, and what can they throw in the trunk to bring along into other worlds than these?
The Last Word
7:00 PM
Steen Comer, Erik Grove, Avani Gadani (M), Mary Robinette Kowal, Catherine Lundoff
Let’s talk about death scenes in stories. Every person here can think of at least one farewell on page or screen that absolutely destroyed them – and maybe a few that delighted them, too. How do characters go out into that blank space beyond which we cannot see? And when is the right moment to show a death to the reader … or keep it off-camera? Even when a character’s death is in the service of the larger story, the moment of exit is a chance to put a spotlight on them. We discuss what makes for a good death (or an effectively bad one), and how to harness and process that impact in a way that serves the story.
Saturday
“We’ll Build Our Own Fantasy, With Indoor Plumbing and Telephones!”
9:30 AM
John Chu, Alison Davys, Ash Howell, Aimee Kuzenski (M), Vivian Shaw
Fantasy in the Anglosphere has a rich tradition of faux-medieval secondary worlds, whether Western or a theme park non-Western equivalent. Publishing’s recent bloom of diverse inspirations – and authors! – has expanded and enriched the map, but the temporal inspirations are often bounded by the pre-toilet era. Many urban fantasies and alternative histories explore fantasy in our own pre-modern and modern world, and science-fantasy is replete with space wizards, but full-on secondary world fantasy remains both tragically bereft of television and at high risk for Fantastic Cholera. What works avert these conventions, and what are the possibilities and pitfalls of updating the timeline to a setting that is both post-toilet and post-Enlightenment? That is: what happens when we write fantasy where the world knows more about itself?
This Machine Kills You
11:00 AM
John Appel, CD Covington, Scott Lynch (M), Sunny Moraine, Sloane Talest
For a genre so often focused on war and combat, fantasy can often struggle to line up its exciting narrative beats and heroic character tropes against the realities of any kind of military operation – a communal effort by cogs in a well-oiled machine, struggling as much against boredom, paperwork, and latrines as against the enemy. Even “grittier” works (the ones that talk about latrines) can fall into forms of black comedy that end up leaving a reader baffled as to why anyone could possibly participate in this whole thing. But this structural tension might speak to a broader truth; the contradictions underlying an institution made up of individual people, each with their own reason for being here, now more or less committed to supporting and performing organized violence.
This panel is not here to debate the ethics of military and paramilitary institutions, but rather to discuss how to depict them with honesty and clarity, how to read them at a manageable distance from the real-world horrors they evoke – and when you have no choice but to tell a latrine joke, how to make damn sure it lands.
I’m Only Happy When It Rains
2:00 PM
Elizabeth Bear, Anthony W. Eichenlaub, Marissa Lingen (M), Arkady Martine, Caroline Stevermer
The weather’s weirder lately. Or at least out here in the regular world it is – but the weather’s been weird in fantasy for a long time now. Sometimes it tries to kill you (like in McCaffery’s Pern novels or Elizabeth Bear’s The Steles of the Sky), sometimes it makes you really miserable and then it tries to kill you (CJ Cherryh’s 40,000 in Gehenna, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather), and sometimes you try to kill it and that doesn’t go so well (every story about terraforming or cloud seeding or propitiating the weather gods for mercy). Is the weather really just an excuse for an author’s indulgence in pathetic fallacy? Or can the environment become a live actor in fantasy storytelling?
Seeing Like A City-State
3:30 PM
Erik Grove, Aimee Kuzenski, Macey (M), Paul Weimer, Maureen Zahn
There is a stratum of secondary-world fantasy that takes place in a single city, often an independent entity with a character of its own. We might call this sort of story a City-State Fantasy: neither pastoral nor continent-spanning epic, but instead a focused, tightly-bounded setting in which a singular place acts as a lens to frame the action in – and acts upon the people within it. What are the challenges and opportunities of working in such a setting and how can we design characters suited to its milieu, whether they be genius loci, urban(e) city-dwellers, or visitors who will leave profoundly changed, if they leave at all?
What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Like
5:00 PM
Jake Casella Brookins, Ash Howell (M), Mary Robinette Kowal, Sherwood Smith, Samuel T. Weston
Critique is where writing and reading intersect. When we get together in Minneapolis to talk about stories, to say that makes me feel X or did you see what Y did there? – we are engaging in critique. Writers are forever responding, explicitly or subconsciously, to what we read: whether it came out last year, or 20 years ago, or back in 1932 but we only just got around to reading it. Readers, too, bring all their experience of other stories and other storytelling techniques to each new reading experience. We all perform literary criticism whether we mean to or not … and here at this convention, we mostly mean to. So how can we get better at it?
After The End: Structure and the Scouring of the Shire
8:00 PM
John Appel (M), Phil Margolies, Aja McCullough, Jo Miles, Julia M. Perroni
Many epic fantasy tales end not long after the defeat of the load-bearing Big Bad, with or without homecomings, medals, and/or weddings. But we know that the world is longer than one enemy, and has a distinct tendency to continue. Even that most-referenced epic fantasy – The Lord of the Rings – ends with several codas after the final battle is won. The Scouring of the Shire is clearly a depiction of the world putting itself back together. Other works take a different tack, like Alex Marshall’s A Crown For Cold Silver dragging the victors (and villains) of a former epic revolution back into the fray, or Walter John Williams’ City On Fire picking up after a successful revolution put a nice neat bow on the story to ask: what’s next?
So, what is next? How do you write a book that’s about picking up the pieces? How do you write an ending when the story keeps going after the last page (or when the ending isn’t the last page?) What structural elements in fantasy storytelling (epic or not) allow for endings that aren’t the end?
Sunday
Speculative Masculinities, or, Happy Father’s Day to the Bad Dads of Fantasy
10:00 AM
John Chu, Phil Margolies, Alec Marsh, Reuben Poling (M), Matt Doyle
From Darth Vader to Tywin Lannister to Christopher Hensley, and all stops in between, fantasy fiction is redolent with truly appalling father figures. There’s something particularly telling about how many of these lousy men provide a foil to their heroic (or at least anti-heroic) offspring, who struggle in turn against the warped morality imposed on them by their nearest model for masculinity.
And speaking more broadly, fantasy can be a great framework for examining the cruelties and hypocrisies embedded in patriarchal structure. When you’re telling a story where “the sins of the father” can have a concrete, supernatural effect on the children, or where “manhood” can be a concept with more than symbolic power, how can you avoid both harmful reflections and dishonestly simple answers? And how can a good fantasy story explore not only fatherhood, but a more complex and fluid concept of masculinity writ large?
Feeling Fantastic (The Vibe Check Remix)
11:30 AM
Chelsea Counsell, Kate Dane, Devin Miller, Sherwood Smith (M), LaShawn M. Wanak
Regardless of what this convention might have previously led you to believe, fantasy fiction is not just a vibe – but when listing the reasons to which one turns to reading fantasy, a certain vibe-shaped something is unavoidable. So what other genres can contain the thematic space that signals ‘the fantastic’?
Works of historical fiction like Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, Nicola Griffith’s Hild, or Emma Donnoghue’s The Pull of the Stars all convey an undeniable sense of kinship with the fantastic as a literary space, whether through theme, plot convention, or aesthetic or cultural touchstones. What other genres besides historical fiction can pull this trick, and what can we take away from stories with this capacity to evoke fantasy without technically… being it?
…But That’s A Different Panel
2:30 PM
Featuring Five Lucky Volunteers!
As is traditional, near the end of every Fourth Street we consult a group of mystic oracles* possessed of great divine inspiration**. Guided by their prophecies, and using the sidebars, unexpected parallels, and roads not taken in our previous discussions, we then sculpt a suitably astonishing panel topic to wrap up the convention and shock, amaze, and edify all who witness.
What’s more, we don’t even know who the panelists are! So be careful how much insight, erudition, and competence you display throughout the weekend…because the programming team is watching, and one of those panelists could be YOU.
*The 4th Street convention committee
**a rough 3-day average of 8 hours of sleep and 12 gallons of caffeine per person