My ConZealand schedule (with time zone conversions)

It’s VIRTUAL WORLDCON TIME! Here’s where you can find me this year:

Infinite Entangled Futures: Indigenous Voices in Conversation
Programming – Programme Room 4 (Webinar)
Wednesday 15:00 NZST – 15:50 NZST | 50 minutes
(That’s 11:00 PM Tuesday, Eastern Time, USA)

Climate Change: Adaptation vs Resilience
Programming – Programme Room 4 (Webinar)
Thursday 9:00 NZST – 9:50 NZST | 50 minutes
(That’s 5 PM Wednesday, Eastern Time, USA)

Kaffeeklatsch: Darcie Little Badger
Signup required 7 spaces available
Programming – Kaffeklatch and Literary Beer Room
Friday 12:00 NZST – 12:50 NZST | 50 minutes
(That’s 8 PM Thursday, Eastern Time, USA)

Writing for Young Adults
Programming – Programme Room 3 (Webinar)
Saturday 12:00 NZST – 12:50 NZST | 50 minutes
(That’s 8 PM Friday, Eastern Time, USA)

Reading: Darcie Little Badger
Programming – Reading Room 2
Saturday 13:30 NZST – 13:55 NZST | 25 minutes
(That’s 9:30 PM Friday, Eastern Time, USA)

If you can, please say hello! 😀

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I am going to DUBLIN WORLDCON (and discussing SCIENCE and COMICS and OTHER FASCINATING TOPICS). Here’s my schedule!

 

Hello, everybody. In two weeks, I’m going to fly across the ocean and attend my first Worldcon in Dublin!!! What an adventure 😀 (I’m so winging this lol). Want to know where to find me? Here’s my panels and appearances. I’ll be the Darcie-shaped person in really big platform shoes.

 

THURSDAY (15 Aug)!

21:00 Making the asexual textual (CCD: Wicklow Hall-1)

In the past, many asexual and/or aromantic characters in science fiction and fantasy stories have not been overtly identified this way. Should writers be more explicit in stating asexual and aromantic characters’ identity? How do asexuality and aromanticness shape and change the way characters and their relationships with others
are perceived or written?

Darcie Little Badger (M), Wendy Metcalfe, Dr Edmund Schluessel, Jasmine Gower

 

FRIDAY (16 Aug)!

14:30 What we want to see: representation in comics (Point Square: Odeon 2)

While superhero comics have explored questions of identity from their inception, most main characters have traditionally been white, cishet, men. Although there have been exceptions, marginalised main characters existed, quite literally, in the margins. In recent years mainstream comics have become more inclusive, but still not everyone feels represented. Let’s talk about what’s there and what’s still needed.

Christopher Hwang (M), Darcie Little Badger, Maquel A. Jacob, Marieke Nijkamp

 

SATURDAY (17 Aug)!

15:00 Autographs (CCD: Level 4 Foyer)
Darcie Little Badger, Corinne Duyvis, Stark Holborn, Neil Clarke, Michael Swanwick

19:00 Science and politics of water (CCD: Wicklow Hall-1)
Water is life. Twisting a line from Frank Herbert: ‘He who controls the water controls the universe.’ Our planet is covered by 70% water, our bodies comprise 70% water, and most plants contain 90% water. What other roles does water play in our technologically savvy world? How has water shaped our political landscape, in a time of rising tides and warming oceans? What can we do to protect our most precious resource?

Sam Fleming (M), Darcie Little Badger, Dr Tad Daley, Paolo Bacigalupi

 

SUNDAY (18 Aug)!

11:00 Kaffeeklatsch: Darcie Little Badger (CCD: Level 3 Foyer)
(TALK TO MEEEEE)

13:30 Diverse voices, better science (Point Square: Odeon 1)
Many people regard science as an accurate and neutral view of the world – yet philosophers and historians of science argue that science is not objective. Biases occur in science such as choosing what to research, which data to collect, and how to share that knowledge. Panelists consider how diverse voices can improve science, for example by questioning existing approaches or proposing new ones.
Corry L. Lee Ph.D. (M), Prof Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Darcie Little Badger, Dr Stewart Hotston

My 2019 Readercon Schedule! Alternatively titled: WHOA! I’M MODERATING 2 PANELS?!

Readercon is THIS WEEK, and I hope you’re excited, ’cause I sure am! I’ll be moderating two panels this year, including “The Works of Stephen Graham Jones,” who is one of the guests of honor and a fantastic writer. I know Readercon isn’t big on costumes, but I’ll be cosplaying as a character from Stephen’s fiction this Saturday. It’s my sworn duty as a moderator. Five points* to anyone who guesses my identity.

Anyway, here’s my schedule! Can’t wait to see you there!

*Sorry, you can’t exchange points for cash.

Being Vague to Make Space for Horror
Stephen Graham Jones, Darcie Little Badger (mod), Sonya Taaffe, teri.zin, Paul Tremblay
Thu 8:00 PM, Salon B
In a 2016 blog post, Peter MacDonald argued that many creepypasta stories—unsettling urban legends that have been copied and pasted around the Internet—undermine their effectiveness as works of horror by providing overly concrete answers in the final stretch. Panelists will discuss whether this can be generalized to other horror stories—ones that less obviously blur the line between fiction and reality—and consider the importance to horror of ambiguity around the fantastic and supernatural.

Recent Nonfiction Essay Club: “Decolonizing the Imagination” by Zetta Elliott
John Chu, Darcie Little Badger, Kate Nepveu (mod), Vandana Singh, Cadwell Turnbull
Fri 12:00 PM, Salon A
In her essay “Decolonizing the Imagination,” published in Horn Book Magazine and on their website, Zetta Elliott wrote of the challenge in crafting portal fantasies and time travel stories that partook as much of her heritage as of the colonial literature she grew up reading as a mixed-race girl in Canada. This discussion will consider the questions raised by her essay, including, “Can time and space be shaped by an author to satisfy needs left unfulfilled by an unjust reality?”

Writing While Chronically Ill or Disabled
Lisa Bradley (mod), Jack Haringa, Vylar Kaftan, Darcie Little Badger, Sheila Williams
Sat 1:00 PM, Salon 3
There are myriad ways in which disabilities and chronic illnesses can make a writer’s life harder: chronic pain makes it hard to focus on writing, inaccessible venues diminish opportunities for networking, and speech difficulties can interfere with readings, to name just a few. What adaptation strategies can help a disabled or ill writer function? How can a writer who becomes disabled mid-career learn to adjust to the new status quo?

The Works of Stephen Graham Jones
Jack Haringa, John Langan, Darcie Little Badger (mod), teri.zin, Paul Tremblay
Sat 3:00 PM, Salon 3
Stephen Graham Jones is a Piikáni (Blackfeet) author of cutting-edge fiction, ranging from the crime, horror, and science fiction genres to the purely experimental. His work has been multiply nominated for the Shirley Jackson, Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards, with Mapping the Interior (2017) winning the Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction. He has also won the Texas Institute of Letters Award and been the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in fiction. Playful, inventive, sincere, imaginative, touching, and horrifying, Jones’s work spans genres and defies the cynicism and alienation of postmodern literature. Please join us in welcoming him to Readercon and exploring his fiction.

Another Year, Another Readercon! (My panel schedule for 2018).

Wow, time sure flies! It seems like just 360 days ago since my last Readercon post. Guess what – TIME FOR ANOTHER ONE YEEEEAAAA! I’ll be on several panels at Readercon 29 this year. So excited! Be sure to ask for a business card (they have badgers on ’em, designed by yours truly).

Here’s a rundown:

SATURDAY!

10:00 AM • Defying Colonial Notions of Authenticity • Phenderson
Djèlí Clark, Pablo Defendini, José Pablo Iriarte, Darcie Little Badger,
Ken Liu

In an interview for the blog Dive into Worldbuilding, GOH Ken Liu
discussed specifically wanting to go outside Western expectations
in writing a fantasy novel that uses Chinese foundational narratives
without writing a “magical China” novel, which he says often leads to
problematic and Orientalist misunderstandings. On Tor.com, Tochi
Onyebuchi says GOH Nisi Shawl’s novel Everfair is an Afrofuturistic
masterpiece even though it is historical fiction. How do these and
other narratives point the way toward decolonizing the future by challenging
and complicating conceptions of the past?

 

SUNDAY!

10:00 AM • Writing About Research and Discovery • Judith
Berman, Jeff Hecht, Kathy Kitts, Darcie Little Badger, Eric Schaller

Science fiction frequently features scientists and academics who are
doing and publishing original research—and sometimes gets it hilariously
wrong. Panelists who have done original academic and scientific
research will explain how to accurately represent researchers and their
processes and challenges.

12:00 PM • Solarpunk for Everyone • Michael J. DeLuca, Tom
Greene, Marissa Lingen, Darcie Little Badger, T.X. Watson
Solarpunk has become established as a progressive, proactive, optimistic,
climate-aware, politically aware field of speculative fiction. As
solarpunk authors imagine the future, how can they make sure that
future includes everyone? How can solarpunk develop and showcase
remedies not only the climatological errors of the present and past but
the social flaws of oppression, bias, and exclusion?

2:00 PM • Researching the Other • Rose Fox, Darcie Little Badger,
Mimi Mondal, Nisi Shawl, Kestrell Verlager
With Writing the Other, GOH Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward established
that writers have permission to write what they don’t know, as long as they do it with forethought and care. But when is it enough to check out
a library book, and when is it time to hire a sensitivity reader? This panel
will go beyond 101 to discuss the different types of research required by
different aspects of writing outside of one’s experiences.

 

As you can see, this year will be packed full of SCIENCE, so be sure to bring your lab coat!

Little Badger’s Readercon Schedule!

I’ll be at Readercon 28 this year! In addition to a live reading of my wendigo-themed story, The Famine King, I’ll discuss horror, #ownvoices, terrific myths, and the politics of villains. Interested? Of course! You’ve never heard a Ph.D.-possessing badger talk about these matters before! Here’s my schedule:

THURSDAY, July 12th

8:00 PM, 6, Footsteps in the Dark: The Sensory Range of Horror.
F. Brett Cox (leader), John Langan, Darcie Little Badger, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Paul Tremblay.
Horror is frequently thought of as a visual medium, and is often adapted for film and television. However, other senses are vitally important to the development of horror stories, and the experience of fear for the reader. Consider Josh Malerman’s Bird Box, which erased sight for the main characters, or the pounding in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Consider also the recent uptick in films with disabled characters, such as the Deaf writer in Hush and the blind antagonist in Don’t Breathe. This panel will explore these and other works of multisensory horror, and address how writers can create vivid horror experiences for readers.

9:30 PM, A, The Famine King
Darcie Little Badger reads “The Famine King.” Published by Mythic Delirium (spring 2017), this short story is a piece of weird spec fiction with a Native, mentally ill protagonist. It was recently highlighted in the Outer Dark podcast and A.C. Wise’s “Women to Read” blog series.

FRIDAY, July 14th

11:00 AM, 5, The Politics of Villains
Maria Dahvana Headley (leader), Darcie Little Badger, Naomi Novik, Cameron Roberson, Terence Taylor, Gregory Wilson
The villains of speculative fiction (and fiction in general) often reflect the biases of their times. Race, sexuality, disability, and gender have all been and continue to be used as shorthand for evil; some supposedly villainous physical traits, such as hooked noses on witches, have been around for so long that many modern authors don’t even realize they’re rooted in bigoted stereotypes. In response, some authors have deliberately created villains who stand in for oppressive power structures. This panel will dig into the concept of a villain, a person who embodies evil or wrongness, and discuss whether it can ever really be separated from the writer’s culture-influenced understanding of which categories of people are most likely to be villainous.

3:00 PM, 6, Horror Fiction Is Where I Put My Fear (and Lust, and…)
Teri Clarke, Gwynne Garfinkle, J.D. Horn, Darcie Little Badger, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
When we peel back the monsters in horror, a wealth of social and psychological complexities lie beneath. Tananarive Due writes in her essay “The H Word: On Writing Horror,” “Horror fiction is where I put my fear that harm will come to my son because his skin is brown. Horror fiction is where I put my fear of my own mortality.” Kristi DeMeester, in “What Horror Taught Me About Being a Woman,” discusses her delight in discovering forbidden, gory sex scenes in Anne Rice’s work. Our panelists will discuss how women, people of color, and others whose concerns get little mainstream airtime can use horror as a way to examine and explore cultural and personal anxieties and longings.

5:00 PM, 6, The Global Roots of Speculative Literature
S.A. Chakraborty, Haris Durrani, Robert Killheffer, Darcie Little Badger, Susan Matthews (leader)
Discussions of “genre classics” tend to focus mainly on modern Western works. This panel will discuss proto-genre narratives from antiquity and the pre-modern and early modern era in the world beyond Western Europe, including not only myths and legends but early authored works such as the Hamzanama (The Adventures of Amir Hamza), the Baital Pachisi (Vikram and the Vampire), and Fengshen Yanyi (The Creation of the Gods).

SUNDAY, July 16th

10:00 AM, 5, #Ownvoices Without Limiting Diverse Creators
Steve Berman, Tom Greene, Darcie Little Badger, Hillary Monahan, Mark Oshiro (leader), Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
Corinne Duyvis created the #ownvoices hashtag to celebrate stories of marginalization told by those with direct personal experience of it. But well-meaning editors and agents focusing on acquiring #ownvoices work, at a time when marginalized authors are still dramatically underrepresented on the shelves, have left some writers wondering whether their only path to publication is writing #ownvoices stories. How can those with power in the industry support marginalized creators in telling stories of all kinds, in ways that increase their options rather than setting up new hurdles and limitations, and dismantle the system that forces marginalized writers to compete with one another for a few spots on a publisher’s list while those with the most privilege still get most of the contracts, funds, and promotion?

I made some sweet business cards for the event. Hope they arrive in time. Ooooh shiny.