Fandom Celebration Thursday! Costumes welcome as we help launch Miriam Seidel's loving ode to fanfic, The Speed of Clouds.

"The Speed of Clouds" is a deep dive into fandom at the turn of the millennium, and the poignant story of one fan’s evolution toward her own new way of living on Earth.

Mindy Vogel may need a wheelchair to get around, and she may still live with her mother, but she travels easily between star systems as SkyLog officer Kat Wanderer, while carrying on a romance with a strangely compelling cyborg. And she runs a kickass fanzine. But after a split with her own fan club, Mindy starts to lose her bearings, and her mother’s affair with a sleazy comics dealer threatens her home. Faced with so many disruptions, Mindy must reimagine her life on Earth. Set at the moment when fandom went digital, this expansive novel finds room for Buckminster Fuller, the Ghost Dance of the Lakota, and cosmic-themed installation art alongside the fan fiction, Cons and cosplay of fan culture.

Miriam Seidel is a writer, curator, librettist, and longtime sci-fi fan. She wrote the libretto for an opera about the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla, performed in Belgrade, New York, and Philadelphia, and a sci-fi radio play for New American Radio. She’s written about visual arts and performance for Art in America, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications, and her writing has won fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. The Speed of Clouds is her first novel.