Panels. If you have ever attended a science fiction or fantasy convention you’ll be familiar with them. In an ideal world a panel is a discussion that lasts for 45 minutes to an hour during which a group of informed people circle around a topic of interest nominated by the convention programming committee.

Some panels, of course, are less than ideal. Some run too long; some suffer from lack of organisation or chemistry. Sometimes panellists don’t always gel or interact in an ideal manner. And there are other issues. Who should or should not be on a panel? What are good topics? Should panels have moderators? How long should a panel be? Should the list of panellists be gender-balanced? All of these are interesting and worthy of discussion, but they’re not what I’m interested in here.

I’m mostly interested in two things: one general and one specific: the first is whether individual panellists prepare for panels? Generally panellists are unpaid volunteers who offer up their time (usually very happily) in order to appear on panels. The amount of time they have to dedicate to prepare for their hour long discussion is usually small, and they often don’t know who they will be appearing with until quite close to the event. Nonetheless, and in contradiction to what an old friend once said to me about this, I’ve come to think prep is critical. Working out what you think on a subject, refreshing your knowledge so it’s current, considering what points you want to address: all of those things are valuable. It means you sit down at the beginning of the panel with something to offer, beyond just your ambient experience. I’ll also admit that I’m haunted by a panel I appeared on at the 2010 Melbourne WorldCon (home of most of my worst-ever panel experiences) when, at the end of the panel., my then 8 year-old daughter said to me as we left the panel room that “Dad, you could have prepared!”. Not a million dollar moment.

The second and more specific thing is a panel topic that I often get asked (or sometimes volunteer) to discuss. I became the reviews editor for Locus in 2002 and edited the first in my current string of “best of the year” anthologies in 2003. Starting with Con Jose in 2002 I have regularly been asked to appear on “Year in Review” panels. It’s my topic, the no-brainer, and my involvement is undoubtedly based on the perfectly reasonable assumption that I keep up with everything coming out for Locus and I read all of the short fiction for my annual anthology. I’ve done it more than a dozen times over the years at local Perth conventions, at National Australian conventions, at WorldCons and World Fantasy conventions. I’ve appeared on it with colleagues, with dear friends, and on one notable occasion pretty much with no-one else at all. It’s something I’m happy to do, and yet, it haunts me. Why?

Well, because all of the panellists come to it with different approaches and the audience comes to it with specific expectations. Most typically this is a “list panel”. A group of three to five people sit around and read out their lists of interesting books and stories from the preceding year, and the audience dutifully notes them down. Occasionally panellists will stop to agree with one another, and sometimes an audience member will volunteer a favourite work of theirs that they feel panellists have overlooked, but there isn’t often much discussion between the panellists, and typically not a lot of observations beyond “this is what I’ve read and liked this year” occur.

While I totally understand this might be of interest to the audience, I never find it especially interesting myself and I always wonder if the same gap wouldn’t be filled by simply distributing a printed listed to audience members and heading to the bar. There was one year, in Los Angeles I think, where panellists were asked to set their lists aside, and simply discuss the year they’d been involved in. What trends had they noted? What interesting things had happened? What were the possible ramifications of some event or another on the field? And a short list was provided at the end. It was the most interesting “best of the year” panel I’ve done.

And so, to my question to you, dear and patient reader. What do you expect from such a panel? Do you want lists read out? Do you want lists provided? Do you want broader discussion, or more detailed discussion? I sadly won’t be in San Antonio for WorldCon, where I’m sure this panel will take place, but I will be at one or more versions of it in the next six months and I’d love to hear your points of view. Comment!