Everyone ready for the last day of Can-Con? What’s Can-Con? Well, if you’ve not been around the last couple of days, it’s the Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature (see why we call it “Can-Con”?), and it’s fabulous. Also, not only am I taking part in Can-Con, but also myself, Christian Baines, and Stephen Graham King have been manning a table in the dealer room with queer Canadian SF titles from Bold Strokes Books, and today is your last shot!
The full schedule for Can-Con is here, but if you’re looking for me today here’s where I’ll be, trying to be a grown-up moderating some people who are flipping amazing:
All Your Genre Faves Are Actually The Worst
Sunday October 14th, 2018; Salon-E; 10:00 am. Many of us love characters like Commander Riker, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace or Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, but if we’re honest with ourselves, our 80s and 90s faves wouldn’t pass muster today. How do we still appreciate characters that are problematic and a product of their time period? Timothy Carter, Jennifer Carole Lewis, Kelsi Morris, K.W. Ramsey, ‘Nathan Burgoine (Moderator)
Urban Fantasy in the 21st Century
Sunday, October 14th, 2018; Salon-E; 1:00 pm. What is left to explore in urban fantasy? What authors are doing surprising and new things in the genre today? What areas still need to be covered, or could be improved upon? Charles de Lint, Jennifer Carole Lewis, Evan May, Linda Poitevin, ‘Nathan Burgoine (Moderator)
One Last Day for the Bold Strokes Books Table!
The Bold Strokes Books table—and the entire Dealer room at Can-Con—is open to the public, but today is the last day, so if you’re coming by, be aware the hours are:
Sunday: 10 AM — 2 PM
Bold Strokes helped us bring you some Canuck science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and horror! I’m bringing all my spec-fic offerings, which means Light, Triad Blood, Triad Soul, Of Echoes Born and—for the first time, ahead of its release anywhere else—I even have copies of Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks. So if you want to be one of the first to read my queer gay YA kid with a teleportation problem, now’s your chance.
At all times, either myself, Stephen Graham King, or Christian Baines will be there.
If you don’t know Stephen Graham King yet, allow me to squee about how much you need to read the Maverick Heart Cycle books, Soul’s Blood and Gatecrasher, and how they’re basically Killjoys-meets-Firefly-only-Queer. You want to get squishy, trust me. King’s world-building is beyond awesome, and reading his books means finally finding space opera inclusive of people like me.
And Christian Baines brings the dark in such a brilliant way—and we all know how I feel about dark usually, so from me this is all the more praise, lemme tellya—and his Arcadia Trust novels (The Beast Without and The Orchard of Flesh) are two of the most vividly crafted urban fantasies I’ve ever read (and also one of the most viscerally crafted ones, too). His vampires—sorry, Blood shades—are not gonna sparkle, trust me.
Even better? We managed to make sure our other Canadian authors at Bold Strokes Books who dabbled in the science fiction sides of things would be there in spirit, so we have copies of both Lambda Literary winning Jessica L. Webb‘s first two novels in her Dr. Kate Morrison thrillers, Trigger and Pathogen, as well as C.J. Birch‘s first two books in her New Horizon series, Unknown Horizons and Savage Horizons.
'Nathan Burgoine 