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Back in 2015, Mary Anne edited (and Aqueduct Press published) The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 9: Intersections and Alliances, focused loosely on WisCon 38 (in 2014).

I just finally got around to reading it, and liked it quite a lot. It’s fascinating to look back at the concerns and discussions of ten years ago, and to see some things that have changed and some that haven’t.

The book includes the following:

• The two Guest of Honor speeches, one by N. K. Jemisin and one by Hiromi Goto.
• “Navigating Masculinity: A Roundtable,” moderated by Mary Anne, featuring Elliott Mason, Jim Hines, Na’amen Gobert Tilahun, David Moles, Ben Rosenbaum, and me.
• A roundtable about writing reviews (especially about “reviewing the Other”), featuring Nisi Shawl, Chip Delany, Timmi Duchamp, Fábio Fernandes, Andrea Hairston, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Sofia Samatar, and Aishwarya Subramanian.
• A roundtable about being on the WisCon convention committee, featuring people who were relatively new to that committee: Jackie Mierzwa, Elliott Mason, Lenore Jean Jones, Bronwyn M. Bjorkman, s.e. smith, Chris Wallish, and Alexandra Erin.
• Essays on a wide variety of WisCon-related topics, by lots of people:
  • Alexandra Erin
  • Arrate Hidalgo
  • Carrie Sessarego
  • Debbie Notkin
  • Eileen Gunn
  • Elliott Mason
  • Haddayr Copley-Woods
  • Isabel Schechter
  • Janet Lafler
  • Jed Hartman
  • Kat Tanaka Okopnik
  • Keyan Bowes
  • Made of Moxie
  • Mary Anne Mohanraj
  • Mathew Murakami
  • Michi Trota
  • Nalo Hopkinson
  • Neile Graham
  • Nick Wood
  • Nisi Shawl
  • Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
  • Sheree Renée Thomas
  • Sigrid Ellis
  • Tobias S. Buckell
  • Vandana Singh
• Two fiction stories, one by Kelley Eskridge and one by Mimi Mondal.

I want to comment further on nearly everything in the book—there’s a lot of great material here, and a lot of lines that made me want to quote them—but I’m going to limit myself to brief notes about two of those pieces:

• The masculinity roundtable was created in a fascinating way (I think it was Mary Anne who came up with this approach): in a shared Google Doc, where we could comment on each other’s contributions, and those comments could then be interjected into the final text. The result reads to me more like a conversation than any other written interview or roundtable that I’ve encountered. (The other roundtables included in this book also include some parts where participants comment on and refer to each other’s contributions, but I feel like not quite in the same way.) For all I know, this approach has become widespread in the years since then, but I don’t think I’ve seen other instances of it. I thought it worked really well.
• Janet Lafler’s essay “Solutions to the Problem of Susan: Reading Susan Fic” is a great overview of fanfic that responds to the Problem of Susan. I was thinking recently about putting together a page listing such responses, along the lines of my Omelas and Cold Equations response pages, but Janet’s essay makes clear to me that there are way too many such responses for me to easily list.

…But those two notes are just what happened to be top of mind as I wrote this post; I don’t mean to suggest that those two pieces are the best things in the book. I would be hard put to choose only a few of the pieces in this book as the “best.”

A lot of the pieces in the book are available for free online; many of them started out as social-media posts (and in some cases were edited for book publication). But a lot of the other pieces aren’t available online, and anyway I like having all of these pieces together in one place.

You can buy the book directly from Aqueduct: $15 for the paperback, or $7.50 for the ebook. The ebook includes 16 pieces that are mentioned in the paper book but not included in it; the paper book includes a code that you can send to Aqueduct to get a free copy of the ebook.