P-Con is now less than 2 weeks away, so the panel schedules are starting to emerge. Here’s mine:
- 12:00 Sat – Room 1 – Genre Fifth Columnists: Champions for the cause, poachers, or merely writers with a broad imagination? A discussion on the topic of “mainstream” books with genre elements.
- 15:00 Sun – Room 2 – Genre fiction magazines: Genre fiction magazines are finding it more difficult to survive. What are the options for survival, or are they a “dead horse”?
Looks like that bumps the Toby Litt up the “to read” pile.
Neil (Clarke) – of there’s anything you want me to say about Clarkesworld, let me know.
It looks like about a third or more of the members at P-Con go by “badge names” that don’t sound like regular names. Is this standard procedure for P-Con? For such a small convention it seems odd to me that many of the members would not want to identify themselves to the others by their regular names.
Or are they mainly trying to protect their identities from the general public? I know that Kevin Standlee has written that in the UK, some people believe there is a stigma to attending SF cons that could endanger their jobs.
Joshua:
Dublin is not in the UK, and most of the attendees are, I think, locals. But it definitely true that some Eastercons have avoided making their membership lists public precisely because some members are genuinely concerned that being known as a science fiction fan could damage their careers. The situation in Ireland may be similar. But equally it could be that because they are all fairly local they all know each other by their badge names and don’t need to use real names.