We are interrupting your regularly scheduled Hugo drama for a con announcement. There'll be more of those in the days to come, because I'm planning to attend four cons - three physical and one virtual - over the next months and I'm on programming at three of them.
We'll start off with SpiralCon 3, a virtual con focussed on sword and sorcery, cosmic horror, space opera and adjacent fields, put on by the good people of Spiral Tower Press, home of Whetstone, Witch House and Waystation magazines.
SpiralCon takes place on Saturday, July 27, 2024, i.e. tomorrow (yes, I know I'm late with this announcement), it's virtual and it's free, i.e. everybody can attend.
The full program schedule is here.
I'm on two panels:
The Appeal of Contemporary S&S,
Saturday, July 27, 2024, 11:00 to 11:50 am EST
The panel description should be here, though at the moment there's only a list of panelists and a bio. But then the title is pretty self-explanatory.
Moderator: Sean CW Korsgaard is a United States Army veteran, an award-winning photojournalist, and a freelance reporter with articles published in titles such as The New York Times, VFW Magazine, and Analog. He served as an assistant editor and media relations manager at Baen Books until 2023 and is recognized for his contributions to science fiction and fantasy, including co-editing the anthology Worlds Long Lost. His most recent project orbits his love of sword and sorcery fiction as he is founding a new magazine, Battleborn. Korsgaard holds a degree in mass communications and history from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Panelists: Matt Holder, Cora Buhlert, and Dr. John "Cal" Baldari
Barbarians at the Gates: The Second Sword and Sorcery Boom and the Birth of the Modern Fantasy Genre.
Saturday, July 27t, 2024, 01:30 to 02:20 pm EST
Panel Description: In the mid 1960s, fantasy exploded into the mainstream, when Ace (illegally) published Lord of the Rings in paperback and Lancer began reprinting the Conan stories with Frank Frazetta covers and new material added. Both were huge successes and opened the floodgates for a Barbarian boom that lasted into the early 1980s. However, the sword and sorcery revival had been simmering under the radar since around 1960, when Cele Goldsmith began publishing sword and sorcery in the pages of Fantastic and John Carnell did the same in the UK in Science Fantasy. Fritz Leiber returned to Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, new writers like Michael Moorcock, Lin Carter, Joanna Russ and Roger Zelazny entered the genre and the fanzine Amra provided a place for fans and writers of the still nameless genre to get together. This panel will explore how the 1960s sword and sorcery boom came to be and how it continues to influence the fantasy genre until this day.
Moderator: Cora Buhlert: Buhlert is a Hugo Award-winning author based in Bremen, Germany. She holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen. Buhlert has published a wide array of stories, articles, and poetry in various international magazines. Her literary works span multiple genres, including pulp-style thrillers, space opera series, and the Thurvok and Kurval sword and sorcery series. Buhlert won the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer and the 2021 Space Cowboy Award. She also works as a professional translator and has experience teaching English and German as a foreign language.
Panelists: Cora Buhlert, Paul Weimer, Brian Collins, and Kris Vyas-Myall.
ETA: Shownotes with links to the panelists websites, social media, etc... are now online.
So what are you waiting for? Come and see us at SpiralCon tomorrow.
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