Capclave, the Washington, DC, area science fiction convention, is getting a jump on the future, announcing their guests of honor for both 2011 and 2012. This year’s GoHs will be Carrie Vaughn and Catherynne Valente. The 2012 GoHs will be John Scalzi and Nick Mamatas.
Both iterations of the convention will be at the Washington DC North Hilton in Gaithersburg, Maryland. This year’s will be 14-16 October, and next year the dates will be 12-14 October.
Host club the Washington Science Fiction Association (WSFA), through its WSFA Press, will produce two signed, limited edition by Vaughn and Valente:
Straying from the Path by Carrie Vaughn: “Best known for her New York Times bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy novels, Carrie has also written dozens of short stories for Talebones, Realms of Fantasy, and many other magazines and anthologies. Collected here for the first time are ten of her favorite hard-to-classify stories covering the full range of speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, horror—sometimes all in the same story. Read about Emily Dickinson’s dog, women pilots in WWII, future Hollywood, a haunted Europa, and more! Acclaimed author and editor Jay Lake contributes an introduction to this unique collection.”
Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente: “Fantasist Catherynne M. Valente takes on the folklore of artificial intelligence in this brand new, original novella of technology, identity, and an uncertain mechanized future in which machine intellects are uneasy citizens of the post-human world, intimately bonded to parent-programmers and paralyzed by each new software update—obliterating their former selves and sinking the new user/machine symbiote into existential crisis. Struggling to come to terms with a world their designers never dreamed of, a new species will come out of its crippled childhood—if the AIs can break the cycle of planned death built into them by human custodians.”
These books will be limited to 500 signed copies, and will be available for $20 each at Capclave 2011. Members of the convention can pre-order the books for $20 from this page. After the convention, remaining books will be available to the general public for $25.