My Appearance Schedule Through The Kaiju Preservation Society’s Release Date

Posted on November 21, 2021    Posted by John Scalzi      9 Comments

Hey, remember back when people used to go to science fiction conventions and hang out, and go to panels and get autographs and do all those things? Well, I do! And it turns out I’ll be doing that again, actually sooner than later. Attending DragonCon over Labor Day weekend convinced me it was possible to make conventions work so long as the conventions had and followed appropriate “mask and vaxx” policies, and also, I just got my vaccine booster shot so my immunological response to the COVID virus is topped up (I also recently got my flu shot, too, because flu sucks). So I went ahead and booked a series of conventions and events leading up to the release of The Kaiju Preservation Society in March. What are they? I’m glad you asked!

December 3-5: Emerald City Comic Con. I have a few panels and signings — here is the exact schedule. We may also have a few ARCs of Kaiju to give away, but we’re still working on that so don’t quote me as confirming that. It’s been several years since I’ve attended ECCC so I’m looking forward to seeing folks in the Seattle area again.

December 15 – 19: Discon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention — This year marks the very first time Worldcon has happened in December (you can thank COVID, of course), and I’ll be there because, among other things, my Interdependency series of books is nominated for a Hugo. Will it win? I have no idea! At this point my feeling is “Cool if I win, cool if I don’t,” because winning Hugos is fun and all, but all the other finalists for Best Series are pretty great, so if one of them wins, that’ll be just fine. Also, as I remind people, if I win, I’ll be “Hugo winner John Scalzi,” and if I don’t win, I’ll be “Hugo winner John Scalzi,” so. I will say that if I do win, the chances are very high I will accept wearing a Christmas elf suit, so if you want to see that, you should probably hope people voted for me (the Hugo voting is now closed). I’ll be on a few panels and doing some autographing and DJing a dance.

January 21 – 23, 2022: Rising Confusion — this Detroit-area event is my “home” convention and I’ve attended in person every year since 2005, not counting this year when they didn’t have it because, you know, plague and all. At this very moment I have not been scheduled for any programming (and as a general rule I keep my programming schedule pretty light for this one), but there’s a pretty good chance I’ll be doing some sort of thing whilst I am there other than just sitting in the bar. Stay tuned.

February 3 -6, 2022: Capricon 42 — This is in downtown Chicago, one of my favorite cities in the world. Rumor has it I may be DJing a dance, and who knows, I might do some other stuff, too. More as we go along.

March 5 – 12, 2022: JoCo Cruise — There has been no official announcement at this moment regarding performers, etc, and I’m not going to get ahead of those announcements in any way. But I can confirm that I will be on the boat, if for no other reason than I enjoy nerdery on the high seas, and I miss seeing friends there.

The Kaiju Preservation Society launches on March 15, 2022, and Tor’s PR folks are working on if/how/where promotional events will happen after that — well, “if” is already a foregone conclusion; we’re totally going to have events. It’s the “how” and “when” they’re working on.

Basically, the next few months look… almost pre-COVID in terms of me being busy with events! Which I am not going to complain about today. I like the idea that I, and we, are starting to go back into the world.

That said, you’ll notice (if you visit the sites of all of these conventions), that they all have pretty rigorous masking and vaxxing/testing policies, and indeed nearly all events in the science fiction/nerd world at this point have these policies. So if you want to go to conventions and nerd events: Go get that shot and mask up, okay? It would be lovely to see you out in the world.

— JS