Swancon 2018: Foz Meadows Reading and "Beyond the Binary"
Foz Meadows Reading:
She read a key scene from An Accident of Stars. She has a good reading voice and it was a pretty involving scene.
She created the character of Saffron at 14 as a self insert: she had the same green eyes and blonde hair Foz had at the time, and fell through a portal into a fantasy world and saved the day. But she could never figure out what plot to do after that.
As an adult Foz realised she needed to make Saffron's life much more difficult: she's not treated as anything special, and her colouring marks her as part of a specific ethnic group with expectations she knows nothing about. This made sense to me in broad strokes but I found the way people from that world described her as "white" jarring (the concept of 'whiteness' is so rooted in very specific history to me), and the "blonde hair has special religious meaning" thing felt a bit weird, even if the consequences were largely negative for Saffron.
The poly worldbuilding sounded interesting, as did the plot where Saffron returns to Australia and is treated like a Traumatised Teen Girl with no agency.
Then Foz read a short story called "Curiosity" about a POC coded bird alien experiencing fetishising microaggressions from humans. I found it a bit uncomfortable, the depiction wasn't inaccurate afaict but went on so long it felt a bit misery porn-ish, and the alien never really gains much agency.
So I'd be curious to hear what POC think of her writing. She's obviously trying very hard to be diverse and anti racist, and I'm not really qualified to say if she's succeeding. It got me thinking very hard about my own writing as a Well Meaning White Person.
Foz then read an excerpt from her upcoming scifi book "The Janus Game", it was entertaining space opera and quite funny.
Her theory of internet social spaces is that we need established spaces that last long enough to build up workable etiquette for that specific environment. I'm still deciding if I agree but it's an interesting idea and I don't think I've encountered it before. She also had some cool things to say in...
Beyond the Binary:
I slept through the start of this, but what I saw was good!
Billions: an example of a non-genre show with canon non binary representation.
The Imperial Radch is not an ideal to aspire to for multiple reasons. Having no social gender, or a set non-binary role, doesn't make everyone happy with how society treats their gender. If society changes to make the current group of gender diverse people happy, people who grow up in the changed society will be different than us and have new and different needs.
The internet makes it much easier to compare ones own society with others, including how they treat gender.
You can't make a "perfect" society and freeze it, eg China, the golden era of the Caliphate. Must allow change. Our utopia is not our children's utopia.
Panelists in their 40s/50s talked about the strangeness of seeing their teen kids/students be far more comfortable with transness/being nb, both for themselves and others.
All we can do is try to be less shitty and accept that everyone screws up.
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