I’ll be attending Readercon next weekend (July 17-20). Here’s what I’ll be up to at the convention:

Friday 2:00 PM, Salon G: Panel

What Has It Got in Its Apocalypses?  John Joseph Adams, Jedediah Berry, Leah Bobet, Elizabeth Hand, Faye Ringel (L)
Cormac McCarthy’s _The Road_ never identifies the cataclysm that has destroyed society.  So the novel is clearly not at all about any specific Bad Thing that might happen to us; rather, it uses the post-apocalyptic setting as an amplifier of human nature.  To what degree has this always been true (if not quite so overtly) of the post-apocalyptic novel, whose history goes back to well before the Bomb?  Why have authors sometimes explained the Bad Thing in detail anyway?

Friday 9:00 PM, VT: Group Reading (60 min.)

Wastelands Group Reading.  John Joseph Adams (host) with Paolo Bacigalupi, Dale Bailey, Elizabeth Bear, John Langan, Jonathan Lethem.
Readings from the reprint anthology (subtitled Stories of the Apocalypse) edited by Adams and published by Night Shade Books in January.