Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

8:00 PM    CR    The Games We Play. Erik Amundsen, Yoon Ha Lee, Alex Shvartsman, Romie Stott (leader), Gregory Wilson. Video games and tabletop games are an influential part of our imaginative lives. Are there times when you’re reading a book and feel the game mechanics too clearly beneath the prose? Or do you enjoy imagining what a character’s stats might look like? We’ll look at tie-in books (like R.A. Salvatore’s Chronicles of Drizzt and David Gaider’s Dragon Age prequels), book-based games (like The Black Cauldron, Lord of the Rings, and the Mists of Avalon–influenced Conquests of Camelot), and the pleasure of reading gaming sourcebooks.

3:00 PM    E    Autographs. Alex Shvartsman, Allen Steele.

4:30 PM    ENV    Reading. Alex Shvartsman. Alex Shvartsman reads an excerpt from “H. G. Wells, Secret Agent”.

1:00 PM    F    Making SF/F Careers Viable. Sandra Kasturi, Matt Kressel, Bart Leib, A. J. Odasso, Alex Shvartsman (leader). Writing, editing anthologies or magazines, running small presses, creating artwork… these pursuits demand a great deal of investment, and returns are unreliable. Few people can spend weeks writing a story on spec, wait months for a contract and longer for a check, or absorb financial losses for years while trying to make a business profitable. Let’s talk frankly about how low pay rates on all fronts affect the demographics of professional SF/F, and what we can do to make SF/F careers more accessible to people with limited tangible and intangible resources.