One thing that sets Boskone apart from many conventions is the mingling of professionals and fans. There’s no green room for the pros and many programming items, such as Kaffeeklatsches encourage these interactions. Also important is that professionals are also fans. Take a look at what some of our participants are looking forward to seeing/reading.

Jo Walton

Jo Walton is the Hugo and Nebula award winning author of Among Others and many other SF and Fantasy novels. Her new novel My Real Children will be out in May. She blogs about older books on Tor.com. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied. Visit Jo’s website, find her on Livejournal or follow her on Twitter @BluejoWalton.

From a fan perspective, what new book, film, TV show, or comic are you most looking forward to seeing/reading?

I’m looking forward to reading so many things. Rosemary Kirstein’s next Steerswoman book. The new Cherryh Atevi book. But probably what I’m looking forward to most is Ada Palmer’s _Dogs of Peace_ being published next year. It’s the first in a series of four books, philosophical science fiction. I’ve been fortunate enough to read the first three, and I’m looking forward eagerly to the fourth one being finished, I can’t wait to read it. But even more, I am looking forward to everyone else reading these, because I am longing to talk about them. You know the way when you were fifteen youi’d read SF and it would make your head explode with all the new ideas and things you’d never thought about before, all packed into a great story? You don’t get that experience so often when you’re fifty, but these books have given me that. I’m longing to talk about them — and of course, they’re not out yet, so I can’t!

What are you working on now? What excites or challenges you about this project?

I’m working on the third and final book in my Thessaly sequence. All my work is informed by history, but these books use it directly and let me play with it in different ways. The premise is that various philosophers and classicists through time prayed to Athene to let them help set up Plato’s Reopublic, and she granted that prayer for reeasons of her own. So in the first book, _The Just City_ I have those people from all of time, and of course they’re mostly real people. In this final volume, _Necessity_, I am grappling even more with real history and also various problems with time travel, even time travel via divine intervention. The biggest problem is the science fictional one of writing about the future. I can look up the past — I can’t research the future! Still, it’s fun — mostly! This is also the first time I’ve written something that will be published before I’m finished with it, which is an odd feeling. _The Just City_ will be out in January, and I’m still writing _Necessity_. I know this happens to writers all the time, but it hasn’t happened to me before.

What is it that you enjoy most about Boskone?
Boskone is a con with a remarkabkly high proportion of my friends — it’s in Boston but it attracts people I know and want to hang out with from all over the world. I don’t know why this is, maybe because everyone needs something cheering by February, or maybe because it has consistrently good program. But fandom is made of people, and Boskone has congenial people, and what I am looking forward to is spending time with them.

James Cambias

James L. Cambias is a science fiction writer and game designer. A New Orleans native, he lives in western Massachusetts. He published a dozen stories in FSF and other magazines, and wrote or coauthored ten RPG sourcebooks. His novel A Darkling Sea comes out in Fall 2013 from Tor. Visit James’s website or follow him on Facebook.

From a fan perspective, what new book, film, TV show, or comic are you most looking forward to seeing/reading?

The book I’m most eagerly anticipating is James Blaylock’s _Beneath London_. As a movie fan my tastes are unabashedly lowbrow; I’m looking forward to the next Avengers movie.

What are you working on now? What excites or challenges you about this project?
At present I’m writing a novel with the working title _Arkad’s World_. It’s a coming-of-age story about a boy growing up on a remote alien world with no other humans. It has been a challenge for me because I’ve never written that kind of story before.

What is it that you enjoy most about Boskone?

Boskone has become more of a social event for me than a professional one. I attend in order to see old friends. It also has one of the better dealer rooms for a bookhound like myself.

Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo and Sturgeon award winning author of over twenty science fiction and fantasy novels and one hundred short stories, most recently including the Eternal Sky trilogy: Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars, and Steles of the Sky. Photo by Kyle Cassidy

From a fan perspective, what new book, film, TV show, or comic are you most looking forward to seeing/reading?

I’m totally hooked on Max Gladstone’s Craft series right now. The first three books are out, and I’m loving them. I have a copy of the fourth (industry privilege–we get all the new books early and then don’t have time to read them!) and I can’t wait until I have time for it. I also was fortunate enough to get my hands on Fran Wilde’s first novel, UPDRAFT, in advance copy. It’s super-good, I don’t mind saying.

What are you working on now? What excites or challenges you about this project?

I just handed in the final work on KAREN MEMORY, a wild West steampunk novel that’s coming out from Tor the week before Boskone. (I’m actually doing a book launch at Panedmonium in Cambridge on Thursday the 12th, before I report to the con.) It’s bordello girls versus disaster capitalists, and it’s no secret whose side I’m on. I’m also about to start work on two things simultaneously in 2015. One is the first book of an epic fantasy set in an alternate Asia-inspire world. It’s called THE STONE IN THE SKULL, and it’s in the same world as RANGE OF GHOSTS. The other is a big-idea space opera called Ancestral Night, which is intrigue and politics and sweeping interstellar civilizations.

What are you looking forward to at Boskone?

Boskone! One of the best-organized, most interesting conventions around. The science panels in particular, I love. (And the proximity to some of my favorite restaurants.)