4th Street Fantasy 2026 Programming Schedule
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Friday, June 19th
Tell Me About A Complicated Man
4:00 PM
Tim Boerger, Erik Grove, Ash Howell, Arkady Martine (M), Julia M. Perroni
We are, for various reasons, thinking a lot about liars this year – particularly the more attractive fictional kind. Shelves upon shelves are occupied by various flavors of tricksters and rogues, from mythological archetypes to dollar-store con artists (not that there’s much distance between them.) And, well, many of us love these lying little bastards; we find their antics pleasurable, we root for them to keep getting away with it, we cheer for behavior we would never put up with from the people in our personal lives. Is it simply the gap between fiction and reality, where we can enjoy the craft of a well-told lie without the unpleasant and sometimes devastating impacts of genuine dishonesty? Or is there a more complicated answer, one which dares to ask…can lying be good?
Like it or not, many spaces in fact and fiction are navigated with lies big and small. There can be romance and heroism in a grand deception, but there’s also something to be said for the little lies. What places can we find in a story for losing paperwork, deleting database tables, and earnestly telling the officer that no, you didn’t see anything? And how, in those same places, do we hold the real capacity for even a small and well-intentioned lie to go so terribly wrong?
Lords of Misrule (UNMASK! UNMASK!): Masquerades, Carnivals, and Masking
7:00 PM
Steen Comer, Meagan Kane, Alec J. Marsh, Aja McCullough, Maureen Zahn (M)
Disguises, masks, and masquerades – whether one-off balls or huge festivals – are a hallmark of heist stories, as well as showing up throughout both folklore and fantastic literature. The clothes a character wears (especially when they’re in disguise) tell us how they wish to be perceived … or how someone else would like them to be seen. Dressing a character up is a sort of mask – not the only one they’re wearing, perhaps, nor one recognizable as a mask, but a disguise all the same. Masks can reveal the true nature of a character through hiding their most obvious markers of identity – or reveal the nature of a whole society when the usual social order is turned upside down. How can fantasy make use of the power of masking – and unmasking – identities?
Saturday, June 20th
Please note that the first two pairs of panels, before and after lunch, will be separated by 15-minute breaks rather than the normal half-hour. Your 9:30 AM panelists, who might otherwise be 9:00 AM panelists, thank you for your flexibility in this matter.
Get Your Original Sin Outta My “Cursed” Artifact: Sources of Power in the Fantastic
9:30 AM
Kate Dane, Ash Howell, Benjamin C. Kinney, Marissa Lingen, Reuben Poling (M)
Dark power which corrupts and destroys, spells which break an all-important rule of magic, or cursed objects that seal the fate of a well-intentioned wielder … forbidden sources of power are a common motif throughout fantasy. One must wonder, though, just who is doing the forbidding and by what authority? That question becomes particularly fraught when forbidden sources of power overlap with another common fantastic trope: inheritable magic – a combination which might guide the careless author into declaring that some people are just born bad. Whether accessed through sorcerous blood, curséd phrase, or all-powerful artifact, fantasy is never going to stop meddling with forbidden power – so let’s do what we do best at 4th Street, and complicate it. Join us for a discussion of how to use this classic trope to excavate new and interesting questions about who wields power, who defines power, and who decides what is permissible and what is forbidden.
Heisenberg’s Monster: Uncertainty In Stories
10:45 AM
John Chu, Steen Comer, Marissa Lingen (M), Sunny Moraine, Wm. Henry Morris
As we continue to weave through a program rife with trickery, deceit, etc., one must inevitably consider the pleasure of being deceived. Let’s face it, none of us would be reading fiction if we didn’t like being lied to a little. But there’s a difference between a story that tricks you for pages and then shows you its hand, and the story that leaves the answers up to you. Uncertainty can be a very powerful element, especially when flavored with a grain of the absurd. Think of works where the structures are missing, the answers don’t add up, and the joke is on the reader for thinking there was an answer. How can you craft those stories without ending up with a book whose main purpose is being launched as a projectile? What does it mean to ask a reader to be alright not knowing, and with what can your story furnish them as a rewarding alternative to an answer?
Empty Spaces (I’ve Been Here Before)
1:45 PM
John Chu, Aimee Kuzenski (M), Arkady Martine, Jessie Roy, Amanda Saville
The flip side of our spinning coin of uncertainty, discussed earlier/above, is what these unanswered questions can themselves provide to a reader. While some styles and genres present an expectation of events being sewn up, details being fleshed out, and tricks being explained, others come with an inherent warning label that a reader might close the last page still wondering. Fantasy occupies a particularly interesting lane here given the expectations set by worldbuilding – a well-drawn secondary world may run first and foremost on vibes, but many readers will want to know about the blank spots on the map or the skipped pages of history. And of course, some will fill those spaces themselves, with the awesome and catastrophic power of fan fiction – or at least, headcanon.
Let’s think about this from both a reader’s and a writer’s perspective. Where do you like to see the details, and where do you like to fill them in yourselves? What is it in a story that sends your brain spinning off on grand journeys of invention, and what bits of lore or plot contrivances just make you glaze over and move on? And how can fantasists looking to draw the errant reader further into their trap learn to break the laws of thermodynamics and do more with less?
This Isn’t You!
3:00 PM
Wendy Gorman, Sunny Moraine, Jordan Shiveley, Merc Wolfmoor (M), Winifred Yost-Zahn
Body horror, possession, parasites, shapeshifters – all of these stock scares are variations on a theme. You are not you; your body is not yours. And it’s happening in a way you can’t control. Yet many writers have found something liberatory (to say nothing of outright erotic) in these fears. To many readers or viewers, the idea that you are not yourself can be as seductive as it is terrifying, depending on what and who you are instead. Many of our panels this year discuss a voluntary surrender of one’s identity in favor of various constructions, so let’s talk about the involuntary side of that, particularly through the lens of horror. And of course, let’s consider the overlap between the two – deliberately crafting a new you, and watching (with widely varying emotions) as the old one slips away.
Deal Me In: Expanding Your Reading Toolkit
4:30 PM
Beth Cato, Kate Dane, Erik Grove (M), Vivian Shaw, Sarah Sward
The concept of “the cards writers are dealt”, originating with Elizabeth Bear and Jay Lake on Livejournal in days of yore and oft referenced at 4th Street, refers to those skills that come naturally to a writer – finding early in your career that you just have an effortless ear for dialogue, or can structure a plot without really thinking about it. (Or perhaps, like Bear and Jay, you have a natural gift for illustrative analogies.) We’ve discussed before how to use those “cards” to fill out the hand you haven’t been dealt – how to use the parts of craft you find most natural to unlock the parts with which you struggle.
Following on this idea, what about cards for reading? What about people who pick up on plot twists at the slightest clue, or can happily picture the most abstruse and complex visuals that fantastic worlds have to offer? What sort of reading skills are called upon for different genres – for instance, fantasy readers’ long and studied practice at the suspension of disbelief? There is of course a very blurry borderland between writing skills and reading skills, so let’s just shuffle them into the same deck and talk about how to use the cards you ain’t been dealt on both sides of the page.
Nice Book, Asshole: 20 Years of The Lies of Locke Lamora
7:30 PM
The Usual Suspects, ft. Scott Lynch
4th Street Fantasy returns to our continuing celebration of homegrown Minnesota fantasy and science fiction, with a book near and dear to many of our hearts. 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, a book which inveigled its way into the brains of any number of 4th Street attendees and never left. Twenty years on, Scott will join our panel to talk about the works in and out of fantasy which inspired Lies, its impact on the genre and the genre’s impact on him, and pretty much any other topic we can cram into a heist-themed comedy roast. Just like you did 20 years ago, come for the rapid-fire quips, unexpected twists, and fantastic outfits, and leave with a broken heart and a growing certainty that writers, as a class of people, are not to be trusted.
Sunday, June 21st
And All the Pieces Matter
10:00 AM
John Appel, Elizabeth Bear (M), Kat Weaver, Paul Weimer, Patricia C. Wrede
Building a secondary world, even one much like our own, can be a grand task and one that lends itself easily to the epic scope. Thousands of years of imagined or alternate history, miles of terrain and generations of families…it’s all so very big. But much of what makes worldbuilding really click within a story can be found on a smaller scale, in the day-to-day details. Not the map of a continent, but the street on which your narrator lives; not the whole constructed language, but the word someone shouts when they stub their toe.
Of course, keeping these details straight and communicating them to a reader is no smaller or easier a job than the great big planetary endeavor. There’s any number of clever tricks a writer can use, from real-world touchpoints to the focus of POV narration to meta-narrative tools like glossaries. Let’s talk about some of these tricks, and the ideal level of detail to make a secondary world breathe without stuffing a bag of information over the reader’s head.
Don’t Feign the Reaper: How To (Fictionally) Cheat Death
11:30 AM
Catherine Lundoff, Scott Lynch (M), Phil Margolies, Merc Wolfmoor, Maureen Zahn
Reincarnations, resurrections, and outright retcons; identity swaps and confused narrators; convenient comas, handy misunderstandings, and when, all else fails, a big divine handwave. Killing a character and then taking it back might be quite literally the oldest trick in the book* and yet, to this date, it feels as if we still haven’t quite figured out how to do it right. A clumsy aversion of fate can leave readers feeling just as cheated as the guy with the robe and the scythe. And yet, a well-orchestrated escape from the noose, axe, or other instrument of death can be the most rewarding moment in a story. So let’s talk about how to cheat death, and how particularly to do it in fantastic fiction where characters faced with death may well indeed have the power to flip the chessboard and change the rules.
* It depends on if you count Tablet Twelve as part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, or an extra scene tacked on to explain things to the audience. Seriously, we’ve been doing that forever too.
…But That’s A Different Panel
2:30 PM
Featuring Five Convention Attendees Who Couldn’t Run Fast Enough
As with every convention, any number of digressions, sidebars, and complete non sequiturs will be scattered like caltrops throughout our listed programming. Unlike every convention, 4th Street maintains a tradition of retracing our steps and navigating the spiky little bastards to see if there’s anything good there. This will result in an eleventh panel, the brilliance and dynamism of which should not be impaired by the boring fact that we have no idea yet what it’s going to be about…nor, indeed, who the panelists are.
So throughout the preceding ten panels and the side conversations they spawn, take note of the diversions stashed for later and be careful about saying anything interesting, thoughtful, or challenging where anyone can hear you. Because if you’re not careful, it might be you up there in front of a microphone…