Joan Slonczewski and Jo Walton's The Helix and the Hard Road

Every year, WisCon's guests of honor read at Madison's feminist bookstore, Room of One's Own, on Thursday evening. It's the event that officially kicks off the con, and it's always the scene of people who haven't seen one another for months (or even years) reconnecting. I wasn't really aware of those readings until a couple of years after I started attending WisCon. (But then I usually arrived last Friday afternoon.)

Five years ago, Aqueduct Press began its WisCon GoH series, in which collects work by each of the GoHs into a small trade paperback printed in a limited, numbered edition. That has become an annual tradition for Aqueduct.


This last WisCon, Joan Slonczewski and Jo Walton read, Joan from her novel Brain Plague and Jo The Helix and the Hard Road to celebrate Joan and Jo's work. The volume includes Slonczewski’s essay “I Have No Time, and I Must Write” and her short fiction “Tuberculosis Bacteria Joins the UN,” and a previously unpublished collection of Walton's poetry, “The River and the Road.” In addition, the authors talk at length with interviewers knowledgeable about their work: Walton with Lynne M. Thomas, and Slonczewski with Michael Levy.

from the novel she'd just started writing only days before the con. And Aqueduct published


We still have copies available. (These are the only books we don't reprint when the run sells out.) You can purchase them now at www.aqueductpress.com for a mere $12. 


I will say this about Jo's newly begun novel: I'm going to be watching feverishly for its appearance. Its biting hilarity promises joy for all of us.