Special Guest: Spinneret

Spinneret is an award-winning Indianapolis cosplayer whose work combines attention to historical detail with high-tech embellishment – anchoring an imaginary future in a real past. In addition to sewing, dyeing, and beadwork, she programs LEDs and computerized embroidery machines, and incorporates materials from thermoplastics and magnets to floor mats and PVC pipes. When she realized what you could make out of aluminum automotive fuel line tubing, she invested in a blowtorch.

She’s especially fascinated by the traditional clothing of Japan, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe, and many of her cosplays re-imagine famous fictional characters in other times and places … like the notorious Batvillain Poison Ivy as an elegant but deadly Meiji-era geisha, or the cantankerous trolls from the comic Homestuck as Cossack cavalry. (Her cosplay name "Spinneret" was inspired by her love for textiles, spiders … and Cossack-style sword spinning.) She often gives how-to presentations and emcees and runs cosplay events, where cosplayers at every level can learn new skills and get a spotlight to show the world what they’ve done.

In her secret identity as SF author Tracy Canfield, she wrote and programmed the computer game I, Cyborg for Choice of Games, an interactive novel where you play as a cyborg starpilot searching for a spare part to keep your obsolescent body running. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Analog, Fantasy Magazine, and Strange Horizons. Her PhD is in computational linguistics, with a focus on the sound systems of human languages. She’s especially fond of "conlangs" such as Esperanto or Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin. Canfield is one of the voices on LingQ.com’s Esperanto course, and when Australia’s Jenolan Caves needed a voice for their Klingon audio tour, they flew her to Sydney to record it – leading CNN to call her a "Klingon scholar.""