Draft Worldcon schedule

[ffutures]

Just got my draft schedule for Worldcon programme items. Can't see any problems so far:

Fanfiction Through The Decades - Friday 12:00 - 13:00

Fanfiction as it is broadly understood began with Kirk and Spock. In the first years it was relatively hard to come by unless you moved in the right circles; most people had no idea it even existed. Today it is not unusual for it to be discussed in the mainstream media. Over the decades not only has the ease and accessibility of fanfiction increased but so to has the variety of material that inspires it, the type of stories written, and the styles they are written in. In this drop-in session we will revisit long since forgotten fandoms and encounter new ones while exploring the literary changes in fanfiction. During the session you can try and guess when a story was written and from what fandom it came, discuss the evolution and changes in fanfiction with the experienced readers and writers of fanfiction or simply read some of the stories we will have on hand.

Erin Horakova, Jo Charman, Katherine Jay, Maree Pavletich, Marcus Rowland, Douglas Spencer, Katharine Woods, JY Yang

Lifecycles of Fans and Fandoms - Friday 19:00 - 20:00

When you first became a fan were you 10, 15, 20? Did you assume that 10, 20, 40 years later you would no longer be a fan or did you think that you would be a fan, just for different things or doing different kinds of fan activities? In this session we will ask these questions as well as explore the lifecycles of fandoms themselves. Do fandoms repeat the same patterns as they burst alive and fade out or is this a false impression? Why do fan groups like ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha stay so vibrant while others get forgotten? As well as exploring these questions we will consider the implications of the overlap between fans and fandoms at different life stages and the impact of fannish longevity on inter-generational relations.

Marcus Rowland, Karen Hellekson, Jean Lorrah, Douglas Spencer, Jennifer Zwahr-Castro PhD

Interplanetary Artillery - Saturday 21:00 - 22:00

Wells' aliens, Verne guns. How might they work?

Bill Higgins, Jordin Kare, Henry Spencer, Marcus Rowland, G. David Nordley

Writing Roleplaying Games - Sunday 12:00 - 13:30

Panel version - how to design an engaging TRPG.

Melinda Snodgrass, Colin Harvey, Helena Nash, Emma Newman, Marcus Rowland, Lauren M. Roy


Some familiar names there, and some I don't know at all, but they all look like panels I can actually take part in without looking too much of an idiot.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Didn't "Backstage Lensman" come out long before Star Trek was a gleam in Gene Roddenberry's eyes? Sure, it's parody, but I've seen a fair bit of parodic fanfic from time to time.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Of course - lots of others, e.g. you can make a good case for Sherlock Holmes being Arsene Lupin with the serial numbers filed off. And there were stories like Edison's Invasion of Mars (a 1900-ish followup to The War of the Worlds), The War of the Wenuses (also 1900, a parody of Wells) and so forth.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, if we're looking at fanfic by people who aren't in historical continuity with present-day SF fandom, I have two favorites: the post-Homeric bards who saw what a hit the Odyssey was and wrote their own series of Nostoi ("returns") about how all the other Greek heroes came home from Troy; and the French poets who really liked those British legends about King Arthur, but decided his best knight just had to be a Frenchman, and then put in a love story about him and Queen Guenevere, as well as contributing a big part of the other stuff that Malory later compiled.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Backstage Lensman was published in 1978. I remember reading it in Analog at the time. However, I see there was an earlier version of it dating from 1949 which was lost.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Good points - trust me, I will question this assumption!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see it, but unless someone has a copy somewhere it'll probably never happen.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Well, I still have the copy of Analog with it in, and it was in his collection Take-Off, which I also have.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've got Take-off, I meant the earlier version.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Ah, I was taking "lost" to mean no-one has a copy, therefore you couldn't have been talking about the earlier version.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Might be in an old fanzine somewhere.