Virtual cons roundup (Flights of Foundry, Balticon) + character meme
I'm super fed up with work and beset by loquats, so to give my brain something else to think about, let's have a fannish post.
A meme, dredged up from the internets:
Give me a character, or several, and I'll tell you:
- favorite thing about them
- least favorite thing about them
- favorite line
- brOTP
- OTP
- nOTP
- random headcanon
- unpopular opinion
- favorite picture of them
For reference, fandoms of note: ASOIAF, AtLA/Korra, Babylon 5, Blake's 7, Buffy (through s6), Chronicles of Amber, Community, Curseworkers, Demon's Lexicon, Discworld, Dragaera/Vlad Taltos, Dresden Files, Farscape (2.5 seasons), Firefly, The Good Place (through s3), Harry Potter, Killjoys (first two seasons), Kingkiller Chronicles, Kushiel's Legacy, Lord of the Rings, Machineries of Empire, MCU, Rivers of London, Saga, Sherlock BBC (through s3), Temeraire, Vorkosigan Saga, Warchild, White Collar (through s4), and anything else you know I'm into.
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Right, the virtual cons that didn't fit in the other post (hey, that took me like two months, but they I got them posted before Worldcon, so let's call that a win.)
cyanshadow told me about Flights of Foundry, and I thought it would be a good practice run for Balticon, to determine if I could (a) attend, given all the distractions at home, and (b) enjoy a virtual con. But I actually ended up appreciating 'Flights' more than Balticon! They had a really nice variety in panels, so that during most 'normal' hours there was at least one panel I wanted to see, and sometimes more. And even the times when I just caught a fairly random panel -- followed a panelist I had enjoyed, or just kept watching the stream I was on, I think I ended up enjoying all of them. Partly it was that the panelists seemed to gel better in more cases? Like, these were still people who mostly didn't know each other, but they seemed to play off each other well, and almost everyone had something interesting and different to say. I keep thinking about why that would be, and maybe because (with some exceptions, of course) the panelists seemed to be pulled from a more similar population -- I mean, the younger cohort of SFF writers -- vs Balticon, which had a greater mix of ages and professional backgrounds, I felt like? I also wonder how much of my enjoyment of the panels had to do with technology choices: Balticon panels were all via Zoom, while Flights ran theirs on continuous streams that technical people (separate from the panel moderators) were in charge of, and I feel like the quality was better for me as a viewer and probably the panelists had to strain less to hear each other, too? (and as a side note, I quite enjoyed hanging out in the stream in the 10 minutes the panelists had to assemble and get to know each other before the presentation started.) Flights also made the choice to have questions submitted via Discord and read by the moderator, so there was no chat to distract the panelists, the way there was with Balticon. The Balticon panels had a lot more interaction from the audience this way, but I feel like the Flights way kept the panelists more focused on each other, more like a face-to-face panel -- with the side benefit (which several moderators commented on) that this way made it very easy to screen out "this is more a comment than a question" type of questions :)
And I think the last but very important part of why I enjoyed 'Flights' more than Balticon was that I had a virtual con buddy for 'Flights': cyanshadow ended up attending many of the same panels together, and live-blogging our impressions and having conversations about them in Best Chat -- actually, very much as we had done during the San Jose Worldcon we had attended in person, which was the genesis of Best Chat. I still liveblogged my Balticon panels to Best Chat, but it wasn't the same as having a conversation with someone who was also experiencing the panel in real time.
But let's go in order.
Flights of Foundry
I started my con on Saturday with the second half of the Martha Wells reading (from the novel, I think). It was fine, and she answered a few questions, but really my conclusion is that Murerbot is a canon that works much better read to myself than read aloud. And Martha Wells is not particularly dynamic in front of a camera, as on a panel -- which, she doesn't need to be, but it also means that I didn't necessarily prioritize making it to her other panels. Still, some interesting answers and tidbits she shared. Inspiration for Murderbot? "It was 2016. I ha a lot of anger. I had to put it somewhere." There was a question about how she keeps track of the shows Murerbot watches: apparently by having real-world analogues for them, like Sanctuary Moon ~ How to Get Away with Murder; Worldhoppers (the show ART likes) ~ Stargate: Atlantis XD Also, she shared that ART kind of ran away with Artificial Condition -- in the original plan, ART changing Murderbots appearance was a throwaway line! Well, I, for one, am real glad she let it! I also liked her answer about why Murderbot uses "it" as its pronoun: "It's a rejection of any attempt to impose a human-centere iea of what it is on itself."
Panel on combat with Fran Wilde, Henry Lien, Valerie Valdes, and a few other folks who didn't leave much of an impression on me. The panelists listed their favorite fight tropes, like non-weapon weapons (e.g. pasta noodles, rubber chicken), best friends fighting each other, the fake-fatal stab, and also their pet peeves (headbutts, backflips), and the difference between an injury that will take someone out of a fight vs an injury that will do permanent, long-term damage (not necessarily the same things). I was annoyed by Fran Wilde saying Milton was a jerk (I don't recall the context, but it was pretty random), and was a little conflicted about Henry Lien saying his favorite fight scenes were the ones he wrote -- but I liked his style enough to follow him to a few other panels -- he is certainly an entertaining panelist, whatever else!
I next listened to a panel on bringing international SF into English, and enjoyed Neil Clarke's insights ("We're a little bit of an invasive species" -- on English SF in translation often being a bigger deal / published more in non-English-speaking countries than local SF in its native language; the most widely read SFF magazine in the world today is in Chinese), but this was one of the weaker panels, I thought, as well as being plagued by technical difficulties . At one point one of the other panelists talked about Eastern European SF being "discovered" around now, but, like, my friends, it has existed for decades and was even translated into English -- I have seen the books at the library.
Next I moved on to the panel on opening lines, less because I cared about the suject and more because it had Mur Lafferty and Elsa Sjunnenson-Henry on it. Lafferty was the moderator, actually, and I thought she did a really good job of that. I actually ended up wandering away for most of it to have coffee with family members who had gotten up, but what I'd caught was fun enough. And I got to admire the rainbow tiled wall in K. Tempest Bradford's Zoom space, which it later turned out she made by collecting paint chip samples from various paint stores -- clever, and very pretty! And Elsa signed off with a plug for her upcoming work on Daredevil -- she's the first blind person to write Daredevil, which is pretty cool!
I really enjoyed the panel on engineering in fantasy with Ken Liu, Fran Wilde, and some other folks, one of whom was not a name I recognized from fiction (I think this was John Murphy?), but seemed like a fun kind of guy -- he had the tare weight of his cup written in sharpie on the cup for example, you have to respect that XD Liu talked about his pre-writing career, which seems to have been pretty colorful -- I knew he'd worked in tech, but not that he'd also been a lawyer. And Fran Wilde talked about proof-reading her family's engineering papers, because none of them can spell. This panel had some really nice discussion, though I had the quibble that one of the speakers was a lot less interesting to me than the others, and for some reason the moderator ept giving him first crack at the questions. But overall it was one of the more enjoyable panels, thanks largely to Wilde and Liu. I especially appreciated Fran's point about the iterative nature of engineering, with the failures being as interesting as successes, and Liu talking about how he enjoys exploring in SF the technology "paths not taken" and using old patents for inspiration. They talked about Roman concrete, which was cool, and Liu brought up engineering products aimed at conspicuous consumption ("gradual commodification of what used to be luxury"), with the example of rented pineapples, and how one hypothesis is that the wheel may have originated with toys. Also, "reading old papers of engineers you fin the engineers they were fighting with", which mademe LOL, because I bet! In addition to the historical examples, I like the range of SF literary examples they brought up -- Scott Lynch's Elderglass, the technology in The Goblin Emperor, a Discworld example from cup tare guy, Jemisin's orogeny from Fran, a shoutout to Jo Walton, as well as a non-fiction rec that sounded really cool (this one, I think) And then there were just cute moments of shared nerdery, like when Fran said, "I have an od love for tensile strength" and the cup tare guy started noding enthusiastically XD, and Fran's family texting her to say that she'd meant crossow not catapult in her example. And somebody asked the questions to talk aout their favorite manufacturing process in SFF XD Basically, despite one panelist who I really had no use for, this was a fantastic panel with cool historical facts, useful writing advice, examples from SF lit I wholeheartedly agreed with, a lot of personal anecdotes and general charm -- i.e. everything I could possil enjoy about a panel. And I'll happily attend any panel with Ken Liu, Fran Wilde, and (if I'm right) John Murphy, on the strength of this one -- that was great! And I haven't seen the panel recordings pop up as I thought they said they might do, but if they ever do, this is definitely one I'd happily rewatch again, both for the info and for the entertainment value.
I also really enjoyed my next panel, on YA worldbuiling, which, admittedly, I mainly went for because Rachel Hartman was on it (along with two others and a moderator I didn't recognize), and it was basically worth it just for Hartman, but the others made some nice points too, and had good panel chemistry. I'd listened to an interview with Hartman on one of the Hugo homework podcasts a year or two ago, so I had a pretty good idea that she would be a fun panelist, and she was -- insightful about craft, open with relevant personal details, delivering her points with a great blend of humour and sincerity -- just a really good balance of her personalit coming across and smart things to say -- and the thing I had known to expect: she uses a lot of facial expressions, which was very fun to watch. Even the moderator commented on it -- they got an audience question on, is there a difference between writing girl fantasy and boy fantasy, and all the panelists mutely assumed pained frowns, but Hartman's was the most eloquent, because the moderator said, "Rachel, you were making amazing faces there." "I make a lot of faces," said Hartman. Moderator: "No, no, it's perfect!" -- and it was. Another question they got was whether YA had to have romance, and the consensus was, "only if you want to", and Hartman mentioned that aromantic people exist -- and it turned out that the panelist next to her (Rosiee Thor), whom as far as I could tell the two of them had never met, was aromantic and weight in on that as well -- good panel chemistry like that is what I meant up above. There was a question about LGBT characters in YA, and Hartman's "Not including [LGBT] characters would be weird" came with the personal tidbit that she is bi and her mother and sister are gay, which I had not known. One of the other panelists (they were other panelists, contrary to what my write-up may suggest), Nafiza Azad, talked about writing Muslim characters, with a nice acknowlegement also that her own experience is not universal. Hartman talked about duologies (which she keeps writing) as having an interesting structure, where in the first book you can solve the protagonist's internal problem and in book 2 tackle a reflection of that problem in the world, which is pretty neat! (Hartman's description of Tess of the Road: "She goes on a quest, sort of by accident, with her friend, who is a lizard." -- which cracked me up.) This was one of several panels I caught with all women panelists, and it had a nice flow. At one point the moderator apologized: "Sorry, I keep calling you all guys" to which one of them replied, "Duuuudes" -- also cracking me up. So, fun panel; I don't know that I learned a lot of things, except for the duology comment from Hartman, but they were a very nice group to hang out with, and I fully enjoyed the hour and would've happily listened to more of the same. Randomly, there was a fun part to this, unique to virtual conferences, I would guess, where it was pretty clear that two of the panelists were calling in from very different climates: Hartman was basically wearing a tank top and the panelist next to hear a cozy sweater XD
Since I was already on the channel, I stuck around for the next panel, on adaptations and remix culture with SL Huang and some folks whose names I didn't recognize. The highlight, I think, ended up being Cislyn Smith's sparkly pink monster hat (not because the panel was boring, but it was a very fun hat), followed by the wall art behind Rebecca Slitt, which was a collage piece made by her grandmother (benefit of a virtual con like this is that we got to see all kinds of neat things along these lines, including Huang's Wonder Woman coffee mug, Becky Chambers's space-looking microphone, and Valerie Valdez's cats). The moderator was having technical trouble, so didn't join until partway in, but the panelists started without him and were doing just fine on their own just talking loosely about adaptation. The panel thus ended up being fun chatter and recs for cool sounding things -- collective geeking out about the Lizzie Bennet diaries (one of my favorite adaptations, too), finding out about things I've not watched but had on my radar that I hadn't realized were adaptations, like Gargoyles and O Brother Where Art Thou, recs for a video game Hamlet adaptation where you play as Ophelia stuck in a time loop and trying to fix Hamlet, and 80 Days, a game adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days that apparently actually engages with the colonialism. After the moderator joined, there was some more structured discussion about craft, like talking about re-examining the motivation for adapting a thing, and that trying to do a blow-by-blow retelling is an adaptation pitfall that tends to lose the spirit of the thing. Another common pitfall of adaptation = "adding kissing parts for no reason", which drew a laugh from everyone. Huang talked about adaptation in the context of accessibility to a wider audience, which may be experiencing the story for the first time via your adaptation, vs not over-explaining for those familiar with the story, which is not an earth-shattering point but was well made.
After, Cyan and I both stuck around for Marie Brennan's presentation on SF, Fantasy, and Folklore. I sadly don't actually enjoy the Marie Brennan books I've read, but I liked her as a panelist at Worldcon, so figured this presentation would be enjoyable, and it was. It was well structured as an academic presentation, which, honestly, I've missed good academic lectures about fun topics apparently, because I just enjoyed dipping back into that mindset? Brennan went over a lot of names I recognized from my folklore class -- Aarne-Thompson index of course -- haven't heard it called Aarne-Thompson-Uther before, 'cos I guess my class was before the latest revision by Uther -- and that TV Tropes is basically the modern version, Propp, Alan Dundes, and Bruno Bettelheim ("I know enough to say do not read this book" -- because he made up a bunch of the data, which I hadn't heard before). She talked about Tolkien / LotR becoming basically a tale type / motif for later fantasists to follow (though I would say Terry Brooks/Shannara goes beyond tale type and into plagiarism), Darkangel as a modern fairy tale, and fairy tales as stories in which characters don't react in normal-person ways and fairy tale objects function like objects in primitive video games -- they have a single purpose. Interestingly, this talk went over a similar point as the previous panel on adaptation, about writing an adaptation of a fairy tale that some of your audience may be encountering for the first time. There was a bit on folkloric analysis of superheroes, which I'd not thought to connect the two, but yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And an interesting tidbit: evil stepmothers in Grimm fairy tales were originally mothers, but admitting that the flower of motherhood could be bad was counter to the nationalistic feelings in German when the tales were being collected, so that got change to stepmothers.
I then stuck around for the panel on geography and maps, which was also with Marie Brennan, another Marie, Henry Lien (whom I was starting to look forward to as a panelist after the morning's panel on combat), and Jeremy TeGrotenhuis, whom I didn't know going into this panel, but whose contributions I enjoyed enough to tune into a reading of his later that night. Since the two Maries were being referred to as Marie B and Marie C to disambiguate them, he volunteered to be Marie TeG for the duration of the panel, which was pretty cute, and he was also very excited about JUST selling his first book, and generally made a very nice impression. The panel opened with "Why do we love maps? Is it just 'cos Tolkien did it?" This was the first panel I attended where the panelists also shared their screens in addition to just talking, and it actually worked very smoothly. Brennan showed the one map of her world that exists -- a thing where she had a geologist draw up a plate tectonics map XD Henry showed off the beautiful 3D map from his book, and talked about how he'd had to trouble-shoot the feng shui in the original drawing the artist had done (it's a story set in fantasy!Taiwan, so the feng shui is worldbuilding-relevant). In general I walked away with more info about Henry Lien than anything else, but it was fun info, like that he uses the Three Broomsticks at the Universal park as his writing cafe (he lives nearby and has a season pass), and that he has a theme song for his book (which he promised to sing at his reading, and you know what, it did get me to show up to his reading the next night, out of curiosity). They talked about the intersection of geographic and linguistic worldbuilding (which is something that's really important to me and that I think Tolkien does really well and not a lot of other people do), and Marie mentioned that one of her ooks has a place name that's a spoiler if one speaks Norse XD So this was another fun panel, which I was expecting from Brennan and coming to expect from Henry Lien, and like I said, I was also pleased by the unknown-to-me panelists on this one.
The next hour there were two readings I was loosely interested in scheduled against each other -- Becky Chambers and F.C.Yee (of the Epic Crush of Genie Lo). I didn't necessarily want to hear them read, because I don't actually enjoy readings as a thing, but I figured Chambers would be fun in answering questions -- I'd really liked her as a panelist when I saw her at Worldcon -- and I did personally have a question I wanted to ask Yee: whether Genie's school was based on a particular school, given how familiar it felt to me. The number of people registered for the Chambers reading was vastly larger than the ones for Yee's, so I decided I'd at least start out in the F.C. Yee reading. When I joined, I was one of two audience members (not counting Yee and the moderator), and of course I couldn't leave after that (a third and fourth person joined in over the course of the hour). Yee read from The Rise of Kyoshi, which until this point I had not realized he was the author of, or that it was a novel and not a comic -- his authorship makes me more interested in checking it out. He read a bit from that, and I think also from the first Genie Lo book, but really I was there for the questions. Apparently how he got to write the Kyoshi books is that his Genie Lo publisher ha a prior relationship with Nickelodeon and approached him like, "Hey, do you like Avatar?" -- and after he said yes, presented him with the opportunity to write these books. I asked my question about the high school, and the answer was no: not a specific place, a composite image, intentionally, but he said he hears "it reminds me of my school" a lot from people who grew up in heavily Asian areas :) He did say the town Genie lives in was meant to be something like Sunnyvale / San Carlos / East Palo Alto -- which, I'd already deduced Sunnyvale based on the length of Genie's Caltrain ride into SF :) And he seemed touched by my compliment about how well he'd gotten the feel of the Bay Area. So I was glad I'd picked his reading over Chambers (it must be rough being scheduled to read opposite a Hugo winner...)
At this point I'd sat through about 9 hours of video content with not a lot of breaks, so was planning on calling it a day, but was curious to check out Benjamin Kinney's presentation on neuroscience for writers, which ended up being fun enough and full enough of cool tidbits that I stayed for the whole thing. I learned things like that there's no color vision in peripheral vision (so your brain just kind of fills in the color of things there), and about saccadic suppression (you never see your eyes move in the mirror -- because when that eye movement occurs, your vision turns off so as not to disorient you), which are all the kind of neuroscience things I both love learning about and hate knowing because it's weeeeeird. Kinney was a fun lecturer, sharing maxims such as: "Humans are especially good at four things: grasping, language, sweating, and throwing" (especially = relative to the baseline of other animals -- "Chimps throw like 8-year-olds") -- and the brain has evolved for movement, which is really interesting and kind of an uncomfortable point! He also showed a version of the "invisible gorilla" video which was particularly cool: the problem statement is the same, you're supposed to count the basketball passes, and the guy in a gorilla suit comes out -- which I saw, of course, because I knew to watch for it -- but ALSO the curtain backdrop changes color, which I totally missed, because I was looking at the gorilla XD -- so as Kinney said, this is a version that works well both for total newbies and those who think they know what to expect!
Then I did take a break for dinner, but tuned in for Jeremy TeGrotenhuis's reading from his brand-newly-sold book, which I actually enjoyed a lot. It seems to be engaging with things I really like in my fantasy -- complicated cultural heritage, different systems of magic ("It's almost like the imperial magic system is Esperanto* and the others are natural languages" -- *in the sense of designed to be logical, easy to learn) -- you can see how this is very much my kind of thing. And I enjoyed the prose reasonably well, too, so am looking forward to being able to read the book, at some future point (I don't think there's either a title or a pub date at this point, but I should keep checking back on his Twitter).
Soooo, that was 12 hours of panels/readings/lectures, though probably only 11 hours that I actually watched, but still a lot. Day 2 was a little lighter on programming I wanted to catch, but I still attended a bunch of panels, starting with:
Building Characters with SL Huang, Ken Liu, and Rachel Hartman. This was I think the only panel where I knew all the panelists from previous things and expected they would be reall good, and they were. Liu talked aout writing a Star Wars story about a minor clerk on the imperial star destroyer, and reaches for his experience as a lawyer to remin himself that even boring characters have fascinating lives if you listen to them. Huang talked about writing "fanfic" of her own work -- scenes of non-POV characters fromtheir own POV, to make sure their motivations make sense, that kind of thing. To the question of likeability: Huang said her characters "kind of commit a little too much murder to be wholly likeable?" (which is an accurate assessment, heh). Liu's tip on building characters: look at what abstract words like loyalty, honor, etc. mean to them -- which is a cool tip! Hartman used to be a cartoonist (which I didn't know she'd done professionally) and will draw her characters to help her get a feel for them: "sometimes the lines will suggest something". Hartman also talked about how she enjoys revising much more than composing, and compared it to Renaissance tempera paintings -- by going over the same territory, you get a lovely, subtle effect that you couldn't get otherwise. The main take-away for me, though, was Hartman talking about Tess, both the character and the book: "Tess was originally going to be a happy go lucky road trip book, about her having adventures with her gender fluid road trip pal" -- but -- "There was a story I hadn't told. I didn't want her to have to go through this -- I wanted it to be fluffy! Sorry, it's as fluffy as I could make it." I hadn't realized the book was based on her own trauma, which is what it sounds like, and she talked about the emotional effects of confronting it after a long time. She also talked about how tough it was to hear readers dismiss Tess as unlikeable -- "you're right there with her! she doesn't like herself very much either". Huang (who I didn't realize was genderqueer) talked about writing characters different from herself: "It's not going to e a cabal of half Asian queer women saving the world every time" -- and also talked about how writing her first Asian character was the most stressful for her / the most research she felt she had to do, because it was so important not to get it "wrong". Liu: "Diversity is a collective quality, not a singular quality" -- so the only way to have real diversity is to have MORE authors writing more characters, not to be "the best" at writing X characters. This was another pretty memorable panel, not fun fun tibits and banter but because it went pretty deep. "And now we hang out awkwardly while we wait for [the facilitator] to kick us out" -- because the streams were always-on, the facilitator was the person with the controls, and to end a panel, they had to dismiss the previous panelists and allow in the new ones, so there was always this awkward couple of seconds while the "lame duck" panelists hung out as they winked out one by one.
The next panel, Infinity and Beyond (stories in space) I joined for Becky Chambers, Emily Skrutskie (although I didn't end up thinking much of her contributions), and Valerie Valdes, whom I'd caught briefly as a moderator on some earlier panel and enjoyed her vibe. This time we got a good look at her cats, Wash and Inara (she also used to have a Zoe), and -- we didn't see him, but excellent cat naming -- an orange tabby named Captain Ironfounderson. Also, there was David D Levine (Arabella of Mars, I guess, but I had no interest in him before, and mostly he came across as self-aggrandizing -- showing off his Hugo and Nebula shelf, talking about how he lived on a Mars training base and experienced zero g -- so even less interest after, tbqh). Becky's spectrum of sci-fi realism: "The Martian on one end, Guardians of the Galaxy on the other" XD Becky quoting
yhlee: "How fast do our ships go? The move at the speed of plot" -- which is a really cool way of thinking about it, heh. How do you decide how much worldbuiling to do? Becky: "I always overshoot" (yes, but delightfully so) Emily's answer was, "the scope is limited by the character's eyes" -- which I do agree with. There was a question about how to keep track of the universe one is building; Becky and Valerie both use the codex entry model (video game terminology for like a Wiki article). Also there was an interesting range of responses to "do you use visual aids for worldbuilding", from Valerie using Pinterest boars for inspiration to keeping everything in his head except when referencing real historical things (David) to drawing their own specific visual aids (maps for Emily, spaceship schematics for Becky). About planet-building: David is an amateur planetologist and was geeking out for a while about Amalthea (Jupiter's moon); Emily shared that her parents are an astronomer and a planetary geologist, so she asks them for help. They listed a bunch of resources for help with sci-fi worldbuilding (JPL suite of websites, 9planets.org) and Valerie concluded, "You're doing none of this in a vacuum... Haha, planets! :D" which was very cute. Becky talked about how she loves writing alien subcultures, figuring out what the mainstream is and then who the radicals are, who the weirdos are -- I definitely think this is one of the strengths of her work. But I was genuinely shocked to hear her say that she's a character-first (rather than worldbuilding-first) writer, because her characters are... just not that memorable? And her wb is! (Also, Wayfarers 4 is coming out next year; I'm curious to see how Chambers's trajectory continues; so far I think every book in the series has been better/more worthwhile than the previous one.) There were some quick fun questions at the end, like, favorite sci-fi weapon? (Becky: Borg, Valeire and Emily both said lightsaber, Levine named something called "the curdler"). Favorite space ship? Moya for Becky, Serenity for Levine, and Emily named ART :D If you coul write in someone else's world? Becky predictably opted for Star Trek, Star Wars for Emily, Mass Effect for Valerie (she was wearing a Mass Effect T-shirt, so this wasn't a surprise either), and Levine said he'd like to *live* in the Culture, but write for one of Niven's worlds. And then, in the awkward bit after the panel was over ("I think we are just waiting for our facilitator to vanish us"), David asked Becky what the glowing orb in the middle of her desk was, which I'd been wondering, too. It turned out this was her fancy mic, but she joked that it was her power source, which prompted Levine to launch into the Green Lantern oath (ask me how I now what it was XD) So, actually, even though I only really enjoyed the participation of half the panelists, this ended up being another fun panel, I think in large part thanks to how well moderated it was by Rosiee Thor.
While I was waiting for Zoom Best Chat to be ready to start, I caught another panel I was only loosely interested in, on writing for established IPs -- mostly because F.C.Yee was on it (for his Avatar novel), but also because I was curious to see if Sarah Kuhn was any more interesting to me a a panelist than as a writer (maybe a little?) I enjoyed Yee sharing that he had attempted to pitch bonebending as an Earthbender analogue to bloodbending, and got a "ew, no, what's wrong with you!" response, which has by now reached running gag status with him and TPTB; amusingly, the other panelists were excited by that notion for fanfic. Also, on writing Kyoshi: "My get out of jail card was that she lived for a really long time. So if I contradicted something -- well, a lot could change in a hundred years!" Sarah Kuhn talked about writing Barbie comics an basically trying to write her as Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. The other person on the panel was Marieke Nijkamp, whom I knew nothing about, but she talked about being the first disabled person writing Barbara Gordon, and the pressure of not screwing it up, and I enjoyed her perspective as well (and it was cool to have a non-US, non-English-language-native person on a panel, too). And a cute moment from the end of the panel, as the facilitator was kicking people out in preparation for the next hour's panel: "I feel like I'm snapping my fingers."
After our Zoom Best Chat date, Cyan and I tuned into a panel about writing AI, mostly for Martha Wells. I actually don't remember much about this one, because Wells is a more engaging writer than she is a panelist, and the others were either people I'd not heard of at all before or someone I hadn't much liked on a previous panel (Laurence Brothers). There was an interesting point made about an AI narrator being able to be an almost omniscient POV, if their perception is enhanced by drones, feeds, multiple bodies, etc. Somebody (William Ledbetter, I think, who Cyan had found meh on a previous panel and after this one I came to agree) also made a point about scientific hubris that rubbed me the wrong way, talking about greed as the driver of progress and giving the example of the Manhattan Project of all things! Like, that was definitely not an unproblematic scientific development, but it was NOT just about money and prestige, there was also kind of a war! I did learn that Martha Wells used to be a programmer, and she answered a question about writing AI characters by saing "I can't take a question about AI characters lacking emotion. My AI characters have too much emotion!" N.R.M. Roshak made an interesting tangential point about abusers using smart houses to control their partners' environments in very gaslight-y ways, which I hadn't heard about before but is shudder-inducing, and she also had an interesting answer to when the singularity is coming -- probably it's not, because it requires too much energy, and universal free energy would need to be solved first -- which is not a take I've heard before. And there was a shoutout to You Look Like a Thing and I Love You -- and it turned out the author was in the webcast audience, which was kind of neat.
I took a break after this part, but followed Cyan's liveblogs of the maintaining creative practice while parenting panel (I actually probably should've called into that one, because I ended up enjoying one of the panelists, Karen Osborne, at a different thing, but that different thing came later, so I could not have known that at the time), and also it sounds to have been a cute panel, but I was out running errands at the time and couldn't just jump on.
The next one I did call into was one on #squadgoals: group dynamics in fiction, which was another case where it was a panel with three panelists I already knew I'd probably like: Becky Chambers, SL Huang, Valerie Valdes -- and K. Tempest Bradford as moderator -- and she was a really good one. The panel assembled early, so I got to hear some cute chatter, like Becky having hung a tapestry over the whiteboard behind her because it was full of spoilery notes, and sticking Post-It notes to obscure the spoilery labels on her binders. I also enjoyed the actual topical discussion, too, which connected in neat ways to the thing
tabacoychanel had been discussing about Steve/Tony vs Steve/Bucky dynamics -- that the "best buds" vs "conflict between people" dynamic is not just a pairing thing, it works for ensembles, too, and some people prefer one or that other -- a team coming together, with some internal conflict, or a team where everyone gets along and the conflict is some external threat. Unsurprisingly, Trekkie Chambers liked an established team of friends vs external threat, and Huang prefers the team coming together in conflict. There was some cute discussion of LotR squad dynamics, which I of course appreciated. And just general discussion from panelists I liked, like: Apparently next thing Huang is writing is a queer middle-aged recovering assassin Red Riding Hood, which sounds like fun, and as Cyan pointed out, the folktale aspect might help with her tendency towards pretty shallow action. Huang also got into some of her history as stuntwoman ("I caught fire, it sucked"). Also, there was a spider sighting (I think this was in Becky's room?), which prompted the following distracted comment: "Sorry, I'm distracted by the huge spier on the wall. It's fine. I like spiders. We're friends."
And then I finished the con by tuning into Henry Lien's reading. I'm still not sure I want to read the Peasprout Chen books myself -- although at least a little closer towards yes than I was before I saw Henry Lien speak and read from them (mostly it's just that they seem pitched a little young for my taste, and without the crossover parent appeal of something like DWJ or Ursula Vernon or Frances Hardinge) -- but the reading was a lot of fun: Henry does voices and gestures and pirouettes and all kinds of stuff. And he did sing the song -- two, actually! -- while wearing a shirt with his in-universe squad name on it. And he gave the reading with the map from his book as his Zoom background. He also was on a panel or gave a talk about, like, growing your brand as a writer, and I can definitely see why he'd be a good person to talk about that. I kept expecting all the self-promotion and hype to strike me as off-putting, but weirdly it never did. I think it was the genuine enthusiasm and, like, good humour? with which he delivered all the songs and pirouettes in front of his own giant map -- it felt genuine and kind of sweet? Like, the opposite of cynical self-promotion, more like, hey, I made this thing that I think is so cool, let me show you all of it! (I guess it could still be an act, but if this is an act, I'm impressed). The books are about a girl in ~fantasy!Taiwan who does karate figure skating -- a sport Henry Lien made up but that ended up flowing together well, he discovered, when he tried doing both (individually) -- and he said "New York Times described it as Hermione Granger meets Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon meets the Icecapades meets Mean Girls" -- and the snippet he read was kind of amusing, but mostly in a way that would play well to a late-elementary/early middle school crowd (and, in fact, I've recommended it to zvuv's daughter who is in that age range. He said the books are "a love letter to Taiwan and a thank-you letter to America" -- he was born in Taiwan but grew up in the US an said that "as a very self-inolved kid having to read books where no-one looked like him] was the best possible thing, and made my childhood infinitely richer" -- which was an unusual take, but one I appreciated (as another very self-involved kid, LOL) After the reading I went and poked around his website, and found the song he wrote for the Clarion class behind him and the anthem he wrote and led a performance of for the SFWA, and my verdict was, "overall, I'm torn between second-hand embarrassment and admiration for his commitment to, well, everything. But mostly the latter, because HE is clearly the opposite of embarrassed" -- which is pretty awesome, actually, even though it's a little bit too much Leo even for me XD
So, that was Flights of Foundry. 18 hours of stuff, 3 readings, 2 lectures, 13 panels (OK, more like 12.2). I really enjoyed most of it; there were maybe two panels that felt kind of lackluster, the SFF in translation and the writing AI one, I think both having to do with panelist balance, but even though I got something out of and didn't regret going to. I walked away with two, potentially three new-to-me authors to check out: Jeremy TeG, Valerie Valdes, and Henry Lien, info about upcoming things from authors I already know, and a lot of cool random knowledge. I was impressed by how well the technical aspects of the con were handled throughout (the registration process was pretty baroque, but I felt like it paid off). They said they're planning to run the con again next year, and I am definitely planning on attending again!
**
Balticon was the next weekend, which was slightly awkward timing because it was also the weekend of L's birthday, but actually the timing of the panels I really wanted to see worked out so they didn't interfere with anything we had planned for that.
Oh, I will say Balticon was better than Flights in one significant regard: they actually had all the panelists captioned with their names, and in many cases also their pronouns, which was very handy.
Since Balticon ran over a holiday weekend, starting the Friday before, I actually finished work an hour early and blocked my calendar so I could attend the first panel I was interested in:
me: Balticon panel in 8 minutes.
Cyan: What on?
me: Ada :)
me: (I Read for the Worldbuilding)
me: And some other people, I guess
So, I Read for the Worldbuilding -- I didn't know anyone else on the panel except Ada Palmer, and I don't know that I got much out of it from anyone else's comments. I did really enjoy looking at Palmer's bookshelves (as epic as I would expect them to be), and was only said that the very cool SF example she recommended was a manga (Captain Ken), which is not my genre, and I think even Ada Palmer probably can't serve as my gateway into manga... (I noticed throughout the con that most of the examples she was recommending, the ones that weren't Renaissance Lit, were all manga/anime -- which I'm sure was a conscious choice, but alas, earwax.) Ada's historian tips for worldbuilding: ask yourself about your society: 1) What has to go wrong for a person to die in a gutter? 2) What portion of society can kill what other portion of society with impunity? 3) What luxury good (or attributes) work as ostentatious displays of wealth? (another panelist chimed in with, What are the leading causes of death?) She also made a really cool point about reading worlduiling-heavy books being a particular skill, which is why it's rare for adults to start reading wb-heavy SFF: SFF readers retain the reading habits of a kid reading above their age range -- reading a thing where a bunch of stuff is going to not make sense right away, but they have to be able to "retain loose puzzle pieces" until they start dropping into place. I'd never thought of it that way, but it makes a lot of sense, actually, and 100% reflects my own reading habits. Neat! Also Ada, on the Tolkien vs Asaro spectrum of worldbuilding: hard astrophysics vs "Tolkien has gorgeous historical and linguistic worldbuilding, but his mountain ranges are bunk". Somebody (possibly still Ada? but presumably other people also did some talking?) made the point that Buffy has very shallow wb, which basically resets to "real earth" after almost every episode -- which is why the episode with the death of Buffy's mother still works powerfully as a realistic examination of grief even though the characters were JUST in the afterlife like two episodes ago. Ada: "You sometimes have to remove things that are accurate because they get in the way of the reader believing it's real"; he example (which she also brought up in a later discussion) was Vikings wearing bright fuschia clothes, because a lichen they used as a dye gave that color -- but fuschia Vikings are not plausible to a modern reader. Also, Ada mentioned that she's a fan of Cherryh, which I'm zero surprised about (but also, that does make me wonder if set-sets are in conversation with azi...)
I had an hour to kill after this, so I tuned into the write what you know panel, mostly for Catherine Asaro. This continued the trend of panels having only one person I know (and with Asaro, I only know the name, I haven't actually read any of her work at this point), but I did really enjoy another panelist, actually more than Asaro: Stephanie Burke, who was a really engaging and very charming panelist (though I'm not sure I'd be interested in reading her work; I HAD hoped to catch her on another panel, but it didn't work out). Asaro mentioned that sometimes you end up writing what you know without even realizing what it is you know; she thought she had written "Romeo and Juliet in space" and her editor said, "Oh good, were looking for hard sci-fi!"
The next panel I attended was on galactic empires, with Arkady Martine (so, attending it was a bit of an exercise in scab-picking yes) and the panelist I ended up liking the most, Karen Osborne. This ended up being a rather weird panel for me, because they would bring up a topic and then... not mention the genre books I was thinking of as the perfect examples of the thing? And not, like, in the Ada Palmer "let me give this example from the 17th century" way, but just, like, as if it wasn't a thing? Like they were talking about having an empire without a bureaucracy, and Martine mentioned that the only way to make that work is if you have a single hive mind in charge -- and I was like, ooh, like Anaander Mianaai in the Radch books! -- but nobody said it. And then they spent some time talking about supply lines and what reasons planets would have to join an empire and what happnes without FTL -- and these are all LITERALLY the basis of Scalzi's Interdependency books -- you know, the ones that were on the Hugo ballot for the last two years -- and no-one mentioned them either (no-one on the panel I mean; somebody did mention them in chat). And Machineries of Empire would've been another really interesting example for why one might join an empire, and that didn't get mentioned either. "Do they... not read books?" I texted plaintively at Best Chat (but then they mentioned the Infomocracy books, so I had to admit that apparently they did read SOME books at least). So, anyway, it was a very odd panel for me, like, the opposite of the satisfaction I had with my favorite Flights of Foundry panels, where authors I liked kept bringing up examples of books I like right after I thought of them. There was one cute moment, though, where Karen said, "I like Stargate" and Arkady replied, "I forgive you" -- apparently she has a long, Farscape-related grudge against the show :) That was one of the highlights of the panel (yeah :P), and the other was when someone in chat asked for a very specific rec: something with sentient stars, and one of the panelists, a retired librarian, had a book in mind but sheepishly admitted he was being a very bad library person because all he remembered was that the author's first name was Paul -- but then he spent some time poking around in his computer, and came back with the title before the end of the panel. That was very cute!
And that was it for Friday. Well, not counting the dream I had where I was taking a class from Ada Palmer, which I think I already wrote about at some point. Saturday was L's birthday, so I was a bit limited in my panel attendance, but I made it to all the ones I cared about. The only things I was interested in Saturday morning was a reading with Sarah Pinsker and Karen Osborne, but it was way too early (7 a.m. my time), so I sipped that. I had vaguely hoped to wake up in time for the Ada Palmer (and some other people I guess) panel on religion, but nope, I actually managed to sleep in, and can't really regret it.
So actually the first thing I tuned into was the Sassafrass concert (Ada Palmers a capella group), which hour also included Jo Walton reading her poems. I liked the poems especially Iceland (Day 2) with its line "And (like something Walter Jon Williams or Max Gladstone would come up with)\They are using the bound god to generate electricity.\Of course they are." The music was less my thing; I don't actually like a capella, but by this point I was just following Ada Palmer around, and that's where she was. Still it was kind of cool to experience it "up close" without being rude when I'd had enough and tuned out. And I did enjoy the rendition of "Somebody Will"; I'd watched it on YouTube as an at-con recording before, but this was quite a bit better. It's way too Utopian to appeal to me directly, but I still found myself moved by parts of it. And I also found it cool that Jo Walton was either mouthing the words along with the singer or singing on mute.
I followed Ada Palmer to the panel SF Has Always Been Political, with bonus Sarah Pinsker and Arkady Martine. Moderator: What is a science fiction story with a political topic that you really like? Ada: (paraphrasing, obviously) Well, there's this novelette by Voltaire... Sarah Pinsker followed up with an obscure story from the 1960s, which I wish I'd taken down the name of, because it sounded cool (I tried to google for it later but haven't been able to find it). Arkady Martine progressed towards modernity with EBear's Ancestral Night. Mar Fan, who was the fourth panelist: "I'm going to sound so unlearned, but: Star Wars." -- and the moderator threw in Gargoyles. This ended up being my favorite Balticon panel, I think probably because it was the only one with two panelists I like going in, and another one I was interested in because I was trying to figure her out. Sarah Pinsker railed about Hydra!Cap ("There's something inherently wrong with some of those subversions, IMO"), which was good to hear. They shared at the end that apparently the genesis of this panel was that somebody claimed that they write apolitical sci-fi, and one of the chat questions was: What do you want to say to that person? Ada Palmer's extremely on-brand answer: Read some SF that's more than 80 years old. If it seems weird to you, it's because it was political, intentionally or not, and politics has moved on. I was happy to learn that Pinsker has another novella coming out from Tor, and Palmer has an essay on censorship in an upcoming (maybe already-published) Uncanny issue. I was less happy to learn that Perhaps the Stars will be coming out in June 2021 (but I want it NOW!), but at least it's twice as long as the other books. Even Mary Fan whom I had never heard of before, had something upcoming that is potentially relevant to my interests: an anthology about badass moms. So, pretty good panel overall!
Next I attempted to watch the virtual maskerade, but it was short and not very interesting. Like, there were about 5 entries total, only one of which was a costume I liked/could appreciate (a space pirate in a really cool coat); the rest were memes or characters I didn't know. And by that point it was time for me to go deal with L's birthday take-out and ice cream and stuff, so that was my last Balticon thing for the day.
On Sunday I actually did wake up early enough to call into the how much worldbuilding is too much panel with Melissa Scott and some other folks, but this just served to help me reach the conclusion that panels with Ada Palmer about stuff I don't care about >> panels without Ada Palmer about stuff I do care about (at least at this con). Because my only worthwhile take-away from the panel was that the hyphen in Melissa-Scott.com "is really important, otherwise you get a televangelist."
I put my new theory into practice by calling into the Music & Myth panel with Ada Palmer (which I'd originally not been planning on). The panel was pretty fun, in terms of what people had to say, but it had a weird flow: people kept talking over each other, in a way where I think two of the panelists were from the "NY Jewish" school of talking (cutting in when they had something to say); Ada (as I've obsered at other panels) waits for a lull to speak up but is unstoppable once she gets going; and the poor fourth panelist (an older gentleman) kept trying to say something and getting bulldozed. For some reason Homestuck came up and Ada(who was not the one to bring it up) said, "Also, it's on a scale that it's not a book recommendation, it's a hobby." Speaking of recs for odd things, Ada brought up this 18th c burlesque translation of The Iliad, which is a thing I'm richer for knowing exists, whereupon Batya Wittenberg demonstrated that the opening lines of Paradise Lost can be sung to The Flinstones' theme song. Culture! XD
My next panel was about The Good Place, which I chose because I like the show and because Sarah Pinsker was on it (and also Ada Palmer was not doing a panel that hour). It was reasonably fun, and I especially enjoyed the point someone made about Jason spoilers for s1! being very much like the Holy Fool archetype -- which then means his pretending to be a holy man in the beginning isn't really a pretense. That got Pinsker trying to map the characters to the Four Children of the seder table (although if she got as far as "sorting" the characters, I didn't catch it, and I don't know this 'taxonomy' well enough to do it myself :P
The next chunk of my afternoon was given over to Zoom Best Chat, and then I called into the bad transportation math or the speed of plot panel (Cyan, utilizing K's taxonomy, after I posted a screenshot to Best Chat: "0/10 Ada Palmers, I see", which was true, but I got some small enjoyment out of it anyway. This was another panel where they complained about Tolkien's mountains (his cold east wind is meteorologically improbable, apparently XD)
Next was the Ada Palmer reading (me to Best Chat: "nearly perfect programming; Ada and some other dude). I actually did not stick around for the other dude's reading because it didn't seem like anything I'd be interested in, but I enjoyed the Perhaps the Stars excerpt, which was Mycroft musing poetically on the Greek pantheon, in near-perfect iambic pentameter. Palmer was moderating a panel afterwards, so she couldn't stick around, but she did share that book 4 is about "what happens when the things you count on fall apart", and that her betas say that no-one will believe her that she finished the book before Covid hit.
And then I went to my last panel of the con, the one moderated by Ada Palmer, on Choosing Your Perspective, with Jo Walton and some other people. I actually wish it had gelled a little better between panelists -- they seemed to be talking at cross-purposes for a while. But I did get out of it an interesting discussion about what Walton was calling "first person omniscient" (like Jane Austen, where it's omniscient but you can hear the voice of the author and that voice has clear personality) and "third person omniscient", where you don't sense the person behind the omniscient narrator (her example was Dickens, to contrast with Austen). I'm not sure calling it "first person omniscient" makes sense to me, but it's a real and interesting distinction I hadn't thought of before.
And that was my Balticon. I'd thought about poking around Discord and even clicked on the Second Life link for the con, and maybe I wouldn't tried to participate if not for the birthday conflict, but with the timing being what it was, it was just the nine panels, concert and half a reading for me -- spread out over 4 days instead of two, like Flights, so it was much less concentrated/intense. But also, only one of those panels was particularly memorable in a good way (SF has always been political); the others were sort of middle-of-the-road / nothing I would've been particularly upset to have missed. But probably two very intense con weekends back-to-back would've been too much, even with virtual cons, so it's probably just as well.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1130571.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
A meme, dredged up from the internets:
Give me a character, or several, and I'll tell you:
- favorite thing about them
- least favorite thing about them
- favorite line
- brOTP
- OTP
- nOTP
- random headcanon
- unpopular opinion
- favorite picture of them
For reference, fandoms of note: ASOIAF, AtLA/Korra, Babylon 5, Blake's 7, Buffy (through s6), Chronicles of Amber, Community, Curseworkers, Demon's Lexicon, Discworld, Dragaera/Vlad Taltos, Dresden Files, Farscape (2.5 seasons), Firefly, The Good Place (through s3), Harry Potter, Killjoys (first two seasons), Kingkiller Chronicles, Kushiel's Legacy, Lord of the Rings, Machineries of Empire, MCU, Rivers of London, Saga, Sherlock BBC (through s3), Temeraire, Vorkosigan Saga, Warchild, White Collar (through s4), and anything else you know I'm into.
*
Right, the virtual cons that didn't fit in the other post (hey, that took me like two months, but they I got them posted before Worldcon, so let's call that a win.)
cyanshadow told me about Flights of Foundry, and I thought it would be a good practice run for Balticon, to determine if I could (a) attend, given all the distractions at home, and (b) enjoy a virtual con. But I actually ended up appreciating 'Flights' more than Balticon! They had a really nice variety in panels, so that during most 'normal' hours there was at least one panel I wanted to see, and sometimes more. And even the times when I just caught a fairly random panel -- followed a panelist I had enjoyed, or just kept watching the stream I was on, I think I ended up enjoying all of them. Partly it was that the panelists seemed to gel better in more cases? Like, these were still people who mostly didn't know each other, but they seemed to play off each other well, and almost everyone had something interesting and different to say. I keep thinking about why that would be, and maybe because (with some exceptions, of course) the panelists seemed to be pulled from a more similar population -- I mean, the younger cohort of SFF writers -- vs Balticon, which had a greater mix of ages and professional backgrounds, I felt like? I also wonder how much of my enjoyment of the panels had to do with technology choices: Balticon panels were all via Zoom, while Flights ran theirs on continuous streams that technical people (separate from the panel moderators) were in charge of, and I feel like the quality was better for me as a viewer and probably the panelists had to strain less to hear each other, too? (and as a side note, I quite enjoyed hanging out in the stream in the 10 minutes the panelists had to assemble and get to know each other before the presentation started.) Flights also made the choice to have questions submitted via Discord and read by the moderator, so there was no chat to distract the panelists, the way there was with Balticon. The Balticon panels had a lot more interaction from the audience this way, but I feel like the Flights way kept the panelists more focused on each other, more like a face-to-face panel -- with the side benefit (which several moderators commented on) that this way made it very easy to screen out "this is more a comment than a question" type of questions :)
And I think the last but very important part of why I enjoyed 'Flights' more than Balticon was that I had a virtual con buddy for 'Flights': cyanshadow ended up attending many of the same panels together, and live-blogging our impressions and having conversations about them in Best Chat -- actually, very much as we had done during the San Jose Worldcon we had attended in person, which was the genesis of Best Chat. I still liveblogged my Balticon panels to Best Chat, but it wasn't the same as having a conversation with someone who was also experiencing the panel in real time.
But let's go in order.
Flights of Foundry
I started my con on Saturday with the second half of the Martha Wells reading (from the novel, I think). It was fine, and she answered a few questions, but really my conclusion is that Murerbot is a canon that works much better read to myself than read aloud. And Martha Wells is not particularly dynamic in front of a camera, as on a panel -- which, she doesn't need to be, but it also means that I didn't necessarily prioritize making it to her other panels. Still, some interesting answers and tidbits she shared. Inspiration for Murderbot? "It was 2016. I ha a lot of anger. I had to put it somewhere." There was a question about how she keeps track of the shows Murerbot watches: apparently by having real-world analogues for them, like Sanctuary Moon ~ How to Get Away with Murder; Worldhoppers (the show ART likes) ~ Stargate: Atlantis XD Also, she shared that ART kind of ran away with Artificial Condition -- in the original plan, ART changing Murderbots appearance was a throwaway line! Well, I, for one, am real glad she let it! I also liked her answer about why Murderbot uses "it" as its pronoun: "It's a rejection of any attempt to impose a human-centere iea of what it is on itself."
Panel on combat with Fran Wilde, Henry Lien, Valerie Valdes, and a few other folks who didn't leave much of an impression on me. The panelists listed their favorite fight tropes, like non-weapon weapons (e.g. pasta noodles, rubber chicken), best friends fighting each other, the fake-fatal stab, and also their pet peeves (headbutts, backflips), and the difference between an injury that will take someone out of a fight vs an injury that will do permanent, long-term damage (not necessarily the same things). I was annoyed by Fran Wilde saying Milton was a jerk (I don't recall the context, but it was pretty random), and was a little conflicted about Henry Lien saying his favorite fight scenes were the ones he wrote -- but I liked his style enough to follow him to a few other panels -- he is certainly an entertaining panelist, whatever else!
I next listened to a panel on bringing international SF into English, and enjoyed Neil Clarke's insights ("We're a little bit of an invasive species" -- on English SF in translation often being a bigger deal / published more in non-English-speaking countries than local SF in its native language; the most widely read SFF magazine in the world today is in Chinese), but this was one of the weaker panels, I thought, as well as being plagued by technical difficulties . At one point one of the other panelists talked about Eastern European SF being "discovered" around now, but, like, my friends, it has existed for decades and was even translated into English -- I have seen the books at the library.
Next I moved on to the panel on opening lines, less because I cared about the suject and more because it had Mur Lafferty and Elsa Sjunnenson-Henry on it. Lafferty was the moderator, actually, and I thought she did a really good job of that. I actually ended up wandering away for most of it to have coffee with family members who had gotten up, but what I'd caught was fun enough. And I got to admire the rainbow tiled wall in K. Tempest Bradford's Zoom space, which it later turned out she made by collecting paint chip samples from various paint stores -- clever, and very pretty! And Elsa signed off with a plug for her upcoming work on Daredevil -- she's the first blind person to write Daredevil, which is pretty cool!
I really enjoyed the panel on engineering in fantasy with Ken Liu, Fran Wilde, and some other folks, one of whom was not a name I recognized from fiction (I think this was John Murphy?), but seemed like a fun kind of guy -- he had the tare weight of his cup written in sharpie on the cup for example, you have to respect that XD Liu talked about his pre-writing career, which seems to have been pretty colorful -- I knew he'd worked in tech, but not that he'd also been a lawyer. And Fran Wilde talked about proof-reading her family's engineering papers, because none of them can spell. This panel had some really nice discussion, though I had the quibble that one of the speakers was a lot less interesting to me than the others, and for some reason the moderator ept giving him first crack at the questions. But overall it was one of the more enjoyable panels, thanks largely to Wilde and Liu. I especially appreciated Fran's point about the iterative nature of engineering, with the failures being as interesting as successes, and Liu talking about how he enjoys exploring in SF the technology "paths not taken" and using old patents for inspiration. They talked about Roman concrete, which was cool, and Liu brought up engineering products aimed at conspicuous consumption ("gradual commodification of what used to be luxury"), with the example of rented pineapples, and how one hypothesis is that the wheel may have originated with toys. Also, "reading old papers of engineers you fin the engineers they were fighting with", which mademe LOL, because I bet! In addition to the historical examples, I like the range of SF literary examples they brought up -- Scott Lynch's Elderglass, the technology in The Goblin Emperor, a Discworld example from cup tare guy, Jemisin's orogeny from Fran, a shoutout to Jo Walton, as well as a non-fiction rec that sounded really cool (this one, I think) And then there were just cute moments of shared nerdery, like when Fran said, "I have an od love for tensile strength" and the cup tare guy started noding enthusiastically XD, and Fran's family texting her to say that she'd meant crossow not catapult in her example. And somebody asked the questions to talk aout their favorite manufacturing process in SFF XD Basically, despite one panelist who I really had no use for, this was a fantastic panel with cool historical facts, useful writing advice, examples from SF lit I wholeheartedly agreed with, a lot of personal anecdotes and general charm -- i.e. everything I could possil enjoy about a panel. And I'll happily attend any panel with Ken Liu, Fran Wilde, and (if I'm right) John Murphy, on the strength of this one -- that was great! And I haven't seen the panel recordings pop up as I thought they said they might do, but if they ever do, this is definitely one I'd happily rewatch again, both for the info and for the entertainment value.
I also really enjoyed my next panel, on YA worldbuiling, which, admittedly, I mainly went for because Rachel Hartman was on it (along with two others and a moderator I didn't recognize), and it was basically worth it just for Hartman, but the others made some nice points too, and had good panel chemistry. I'd listened to an interview with Hartman on one of the Hugo homework podcasts a year or two ago, so I had a pretty good idea that she would be a fun panelist, and she was -- insightful about craft, open with relevant personal details, delivering her points with a great blend of humour and sincerity -- just a really good balance of her personalit coming across and smart things to say -- and the thing I had known to expect: she uses a lot of facial expressions, which was very fun to watch. Even the moderator commented on it -- they got an audience question on, is there a difference between writing girl fantasy and boy fantasy, and all the panelists mutely assumed pained frowns, but Hartman's was the most eloquent, because the moderator said, "Rachel, you were making amazing faces there." "I make a lot of faces," said Hartman. Moderator: "No, no, it's perfect!" -- and it was. Another question they got was whether YA had to have romance, and the consensus was, "only if you want to", and Hartman mentioned that aromantic people exist -- and it turned out that the panelist next to her (Rosiee Thor), whom as far as I could tell the two of them had never met, was aromantic and weight in on that as well -- good panel chemistry like that is what I meant up above. There was a question about LGBT characters in YA, and Hartman's "Not including [LGBT] characters would be weird" came with the personal tidbit that she is bi and her mother and sister are gay, which I had not known. One of the other panelists (they were other panelists, contrary to what my write-up may suggest), Nafiza Azad, talked about writing Muslim characters, with a nice acknowlegement also that her own experience is not universal. Hartman talked about duologies (which she keeps writing) as having an interesting structure, where in the first book you can solve the protagonist's internal problem and in book 2 tackle a reflection of that problem in the world, which is pretty neat! (Hartman's description of Tess of the Road: "She goes on a quest, sort of by accident, with her friend, who is a lizard." -- which cracked me up.) This was one of several panels I caught with all women panelists, and it had a nice flow. At one point the moderator apologized: "Sorry, I keep calling you all guys" to which one of them replied, "Duuuudes" -- also cracking me up. So, fun panel; I don't know that I learned a lot of things, except for the duology comment from Hartman, but they were a very nice group to hang out with, and I fully enjoyed the hour and would've happily listened to more of the same. Randomly, there was a fun part to this, unique to virtual conferences, I would guess, where it was pretty clear that two of the panelists were calling in from very different climates: Hartman was basically wearing a tank top and the panelist next to hear a cozy sweater XD
Since I was already on the channel, I stuck around for the next panel, on adaptations and remix culture with SL Huang and some folks whose names I didn't recognize. The highlight, I think, ended up being Cislyn Smith's sparkly pink monster hat (not because the panel was boring, but it was a very fun hat), followed by the wall art behind Rebecca Slitt, which was a collage piece made by her grandmother (benefit of a virtual con like this is that we got to see all kinds of neat things along these lines, including Huang's Wonder Woman coffee mug, Becky Chambers's space-looking microphone, and Valerie Valdez's cats). The moderator was having technical trouble, so didn't join until partway in, but the panelists started without him and were doing just fine on their own just talking loosely about adaptation. The panel thus ended up being fun chatter and recs for cool sounding things -- collective geeking out about the Lizzie Bennet diaries (one of my favorite adaptations, too), finding out about things I've not watched but had on my radar that I hadn't realized were adaptations, like Gargoyles and O Brother Where Art Thou, recs for a video game Hamlet adaptation where you play as Ophelia stuck in a time loop and trying to fix Hamlet, and 80 Days, a game adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days that apparently actually engages with the colonialism. After the moderator joined, there was some more structured discussion about craft, like talking about re-examining the motivation for adapting a thing, and that trying to do a blow-by-blow retelling is an adaptation pitfall that tends to lose the spirit of the thing. Another common pitfall of adaptation = "adding kissing parts for no reason", which drew a laugh from everyone. Huang talked about adaptation in the context of accessibility to a wider audience, which may be experiencing the story for the first time via your adaptation, vs not over-explaining for those familiar with the story, which is not an earth-shattering point but was well made.
After, Cyan and I both stuck around for Marie Brennan's presentation on SF, Fantasy, and Folklore. I sadly don't actually enjoy the Marie Brennan books I've read, but I liked her as a panelist at Worldcon, so figured this presentation would be enjoyable, and it was. It was well structured as an academic presentation, which, honestly, I've missed good academic lectures about fun topics apparently, because I just enjoyed dipping back into that mindset? Brennan went over a lot of names I recognized from my folklore class -- Aarne-Thompson index of course -- haven't heard it called Aarne-Thompson-Uther before, 'cos I guess my class was before the latest revision by Uther -- and that TV Tropes is basically the modern version, Propp, Alan Dundes, and Bruno Bettelheim ("I know enough to say do not read this book" -- because he made up a bunch of the data, which I hadn't heard before). She talked about Tolkien / LotR becoming basically a tale type / motif for later fantasists to follow (though I would say Terry Brooks/Shannara goes beyond tale type and into plagiarism), Darkangel as a modern fairy tale, and fairy tales as stories in which characters don't react in normal-person ways and fairy tale objects function like objects in primitive video games -- they have a single purpose. Interestingly, this talk went over a similar point as the previous panel on adaptation, about writing an adaptation of a fairy tale that some of your audience may be encountering for the first time. There was a bit on folkloric analysis of superheroes, which I'd not thought to connect the two, but yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And an interesting tidbit: evil stepmothers in Grimm fairy tales were originally mothers, but admitting that the flower of motherhood could be bad was counter to the nationalistic feelings in German when the tales were being collected, so that got change to stepmothers.
I then stuck around for the panel on geography and maps, which was also with Marie Brennan, another Marie, Henry Lien (whom I was starting to look forward to as a panelist after the morning's panel on combat), and Jeremy TeGrotenhuis, whom I didn't know going into this panel, but whose contributions I enjoyed enough to tune into a reading of his later that night. Since the two Maries were being referred to as Marie B and Marie C to disambiguate them, he volunteered to be Marie TeG for the duration of the panel, which was pretty cute, and he was also very excited about JUST selling his first book, and generally made a very nice impression. The panel opened with "Why do we love maps? Is it just 'cos Tolkien did it?" This was the first panel I attended where the panelists also shared their screens in addition to just talking, and it actually worked very smoothly. Brennan showed the one map of her world that exists -- a thing where she had a geologist draw up a plate tectonics map XD Henry showed off the beautiful 3D map from his book, and talked about how he'd had to trouble-shoot the feng shui in the original drawing the artist had done (it's a story set in fantasy!Taiwan, so the feng shui is worldbuilding-relevant). In general I walked away with more info about Henry Lien than anything else, but it was fun info, like that he uses the Three Broomsticks at the Universal park as his writing cafe (he lives nearby and has a season pass), and that he has a theme song for his book (which he promised to sing at his reading, and you know what, it did get me to show up to his reading the next night, out of curiosity). They talked about the intersection of geographic and linguistic worldbuilding (which is something that's really important to me and that I think Tolkien does really well and not a lot of other people do), and Marie mentioned that one of her ooks has a place name that's a spoiler if one speaks Norse XD So this was another fun panel, which I was expecting from Brennan and coming to expect from Henry Lien, and like I said, I was also pleased by the unknown-to-me panelists on this one.
The next hour there were two readings I was loosely interested in scheduled against each other -- Becky Chambers and F.C.Yee (of the Epic Crush of Genie Lo). I didn't necessarily want to hear them read, because I don't actually enjoy readings as a thing, but I figured Chambers would be fun in answering questions -- I'd really liked her as a panelist when I saw her at Worldcon -- and I did personally have a question I wanted to ask Yee: whether Genie's school was based on a particular school, given how familiar it felt to me. The number of people registered for the Chambers reading was vastly larger than the ones for Yee's, so I decided I'd at least start out in the F.C. Yee reading. When I joined, I was one of two audience members (not counting Yee and the moderator), and of course I couldn't leave after that (a third and fourth person joined in over the course of the hour). Yee read from The Rise of Kyoshi, which until this point I had not realized he was the author of, or that it was a novel and not a comic -- his authorship makes me more interested in checking it out. He read a bit from that, and I think also from the first Genie Lo book, but really I was there for the questions. Apparently how he got to write the Kyoshi books is that his Genie Lo publisher ha a prior relationship with Nickelodeon and approached him like, "Hey, do you like Avatar?" -- and after he said yes, presented him with the opportunity to write these books. I asked my question about the high school, and the answer was no: not a specific place, a composite image, intentionally, but he said he hears "it reminds me of my school" a lot from people who grew up in heavily Asian areas :) He did say the town Genie lives in was meant to be something like Sunnyvale / San Carlos / East Palo Alto -- which, I'd already deduced Sunnyvale based on the length of Genie's Caltrain ride into SF :) And he seemed touched by my compliment about how well he'd gotten the feel of the Bay Area. So I was glad I'd picked his reading over Chambers (it must be rough being scheduled to read opposite a Hugo winner...)
At this point I'd sat through about 9 hours of video content with not a lot of breaks, so was planning on calling it a day, but was curious to check out Benjamin Kinney's presentation on neuroscience for writers, which ended up being fun enough and full enough of cool tidbits that I stayed for the whole thing. I learned things like that there's no color vision in peripheral vision (so your brain just kind of fills in the color of things there), and about saccadic suppression (you never see your eyes move in the mirror -- because when that eye movement occurs, your vision turns off so as not to disorient you), which are all the kind of neuroscience things I both love learning about and hate knowing because it's weeeeeird. Kinney was a fun lecturer, sharing maxims such as: "Humans are especially good at four things: grasping, language, sweating, and throwing" (especially = relative to the baseline of other animals -- "Chimps throw like 8-year-olds") -- and the brain has evolved for movement, which is really interesting and kind of an uncomfortable point! He also showed a version of the "invisible gorilla" video which was particularly cool: the problem statement is the same, you're supposed to count the basketball passes, and the guy in a gorilla suit comes out -- which I saw, of course, because I knew to watch for it -- but ALSO the curtain backdrop changes color, which I totally missed, because I was looking at the gorilla XD -- so as Kinney said, this is a version that works well both for total newbies and those who think they know what to expect!
Then I did take a break for dinner, but tuned in for Jeremy TeGrotenhuis's reading from his brand-newly-sold book, which I actually enjoyed a lot. It seems to be engaging with things I really like in my fantasy -- complicated cultural heritage, different systems of magic ("It's almost like the imperial magic system is Esperanto* and the others are natural languages" -- *in the sense of designed to be logical, easy to learn) -- you can see how this is very much my kind of thing. And I enjoyed the prose reasonably well, too, so am looking forward to being able to read the book, at some future point (I don't think there's either a title or a pub date at this point, but I should keep checking back on his Twitter).
Soooo, that was 12 hours of panels/readings/lectures, though probably only 11 hours that I actually watched, but still a lot. Day 2 was a little lighter on programming I wanted to catch, but I still attended a bunch of panels, starting with:
Building Characters with SL Huang, Ken Liu, and Rachel Hartman. This was I think the only panel where I knew all the panelists from previous things and expected they would be reall good, and they were. Liu talked aout writing a Star Wars story about a minor clerk on the imperial star destroyer, and reaches for his experience as a lawyer to remin himself that even boring characters have fascinating lives if you listen to them. Huang talked about writing "fanfic" of her own work -- scenes of non-POV characters fromtheir own POV, to make sure their motivations make sense, that kind of thing. To the question of likeability: Huang said her characters "kind of commit a little too much murder to be wholly likeable?" (which is an accurate assessment, heh). Liu's tip on building characters: look at what abstract words like loyalty, honor, etc. mean to them -- which is a cool tip! Hartman used to be a cartoonist (which I didn't know she'd done professionally) and will draw her characters to help her get a feel for them: "sometimes the lines will suggest something". Hartman also talked about how she enjoys revising much more than composing, and compared it to Renaissance tempera paintings -- by going over the same territory, you get a lovely, subtle effect that you couldn't get otherwise. The main take-away for me, though, was Hartman talking about Tess, both the character and the book: "Tess was originally going to be a happy go lucky road trip book, about her having adventures with her gender fluid road trip pal" -- but -- "There was a story I hadn't told. I didn't want her to have to go through this -- I wanted it to be fluffy! Sorry, it's as fluffy as I could make it." I hadn't realized the book was based on her own trauma, which is what it sounds like, and she talked about the emotional effects of confronting it after a long time. She also talked about how tough it was to hear readers dismiss Tess as unlikeable -- "you're right there with her! she doesn't like herself very much either". Huang (who I didn't realize was genderqueer) talked about writing characters different from herself: "It's not going to e a cabal of half Asian queer women saving the world every time" -- and also talked about how writing her first Asian character was the most stressful for her / the most research she felt she had to do, because it was so important not to get it "wrong". Liu: "Diversity is a collective quality, not a singular quality" -- so the only way to have real diversity is to have MORE authors writing more characters, not to be "the best" at writing X characters. This was another pretty memorable panel, not fun fun tibits and banter but because it went pretty deep. "And now we hang out awkwardly while we wait for [the facilitator] to kick us out" -- because the streams were always-on, the facilitator was the person with the controls, and to end a panel, they had to dismiss the previous panelists and allow in the new ones, so there was always this awkward couple of seconds while the "lame duck" panelists hung out as they winked out one by one.
The next panel, Infinity and Beyond (stories in space) I joined for Becky Chambers, Emily Skrutskie (although I didn't end up thinking much of her contributions), and Valerie Valdes, whom I'd caught briefly as a moderator on some earlier panel and enjoyed her vibe. This time we got a good look at her cats, Wash and Inara (she also used to have a Zoe), and -- we didn't see him, but excellent cat naming -- an orange tabby named Captain Ironfounderson. Also, there was David D Levine (Arabella of Mars, I guess, but I had no interest in him before, and mostly he came across as self-aggrandizing -- showing off his Hugo and Nebula shelf, talking about how he lived on a Mars training base and experienced zero g -- so even less interest after, tbqh). Becky's spectrum of sci-fi realism: "The Martian on one end, Guardians of the Galaxy on the other" XD Becky quoting
yhlee: "How fast do our ships go? The move at the speed of plot" -- which is a really cool way of thinking about it, heh. How do you decide how much worldbuiling to do? Becky: "I always overshoot" (yes, but delightfully so) Emily's answer was, "the scope is limited by the character's eyes" -- which I do agree with. There was a question about how to keep track of the universe one is building; Becky and Valerie both use the codex entry model (video game terminology for like a Wiki article). Also there was an interesting range of responses to "do you use visual aids for worldbuilding", from Valerie using Pinterest boars for inspiration to keeping everything in his head except when referencing real historical things (David) to drawing their own specific visual aids (maps for Emily, spaceship schematics for Becky). About planet-building: David is an amateur planetologist and was geeking out for a while about Amalthea (Jupiter's moon); Emily shared that her parents are an astronomer and a planetary geologist, so she asks them for help. They listed a bunch of resources for help with sci-fi worldbuilding (JPL suite of websites, 9planets.org) and Valerie concluded, "You're doing none of this in a vacuum... Haha, planets! :D" which was very cute. Becky talked about how she loves writing alien subcultures, figuring out what the mainstream is and then who the radicals are, who the weirdos are -- I definitely think this is one of the strengths of her work. But I was genuinely shocked to hear her say that she's a character-first (rather than worldbuilding-first) writer, because her characters are... just not that memorable? And her wb is! (Also, Wayfarers 4 is coming out next year; I'm curious to see how Chambers's trajectory continues; so far I think every book in the series has been better/more worthwhile than the previous one.) There were some quick fun questions at the end, like, favorite sci-fi weapon? (Becky: Borg, Valeire and Emily both said lightsaber, Levine named something called "the curdler"). Favorite space ship? Moya for Becky, Serenity for Levine, and Emily named ART :D If you coul write in someone else's world? Becky predictably opted for Star Trek, Star Wars for Emily, Mass Effect for Valerie (she was wearing a Mass Effect T-shirt, so this wasn't a surprise either), and Levine said he'd like to *live* in the Culture, but write for one of Niven's worlds. And then, in the awkward bit after the panel was over ("I think we are just waiting for our facilitator to vanish us"), David asked Becky what the glowing orb in the middle of her desk was, which I'd been wondering, too. It turned out this was her fancy mic, but she joked that it was her power source, which prompted Levine to launch into the Green Lantern oath (ask me how I now what it was XD) So, actually, even though I only really enjoyed the participation of half the panelists, this ended up being another fun panel, I think in large part thanks to how well moderated it was by Rosiee Thor.
While I was waiting for Zoom Best Chat to be ready to start, I caught another panel I was only loosely interested in, on writing for established IPs -- mostly because F.C.Yee was on it (for his Avatar novel), but also because I was curious to see if Sarah Kuhn was any more interesting to me a a panelist than as a writer (maybe a little?) I enjoyed Yee sharing that he had attempted to pitch bonebending as an Earthbender analogue to bloodbending, and got a "ew, no, what's wrong with you!" response, which has by now reached running gag status with him and TPTB; amusingly, the other panelists were excited by that notion for fanfic. Also, on writing Kyoshi: "My get out of jail card was that she lived for a really long time. So if I contradicted something -- well, a lot could change in a hundred years!" Sarah Kuhn talked about writing Barbie comics an basically trying to write her as Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. The other person on the panel was Marieke Nijkamp, whom I knew nothing about, but she talked about being the first disabled person writing Barbara Gordon, and the pressure of not screwing it up, and I enjoyed her perspective as well (and it was cool to have a non-US, non-English-language-native person on a panel, too). And a cute moment from the end of the panel, as the facilitator was kicking people out in preparation for the next hour's panel: "I feel like I'm snapping my fingers."
After our Zoom Best Chat date, Cyan and I tuned into a panel about writing AI, mostly for Martha Wells. I actually don't remember much about this one, because Wells is a more engaging writer than she is a panelist, and the others were either people I'd not heard of at all before or someone I hadn't much liked on a previous panel (Laurence Brothers). There was an interesting point made about an AI narrator being able to be an almost omniscient POV, if their perception is enhanced by drones, feeds, multiple bodies, etc. Somebody (William Ledbetter, I think, who Cyan had found meh on a previous panel and after this one I came to agree) also made a point about scientific hubris that rubbed me the wrong way, talking about greed as the driver of progress and giving the example of the Manhattan Project of all things! Like, that was definitely not an unproblematic scientific development, but it was NOT just about money and prestige, there was also kind of a war! I did learn that Martha Wells used to be a programmer, and she answered a question about writing AI characters by saing "I can't take a question about AI characters lacking emotion. My AI characters have too much emotion!" N.R.M. Roshak made an interesting tangential point about abusers using smart houses to control their partners' environments in very gaslight-y ways, which I hadn't heard about before but is shudder-inducing, and she also had an interesting answer to when the singularity is coming -- probably it's not, because it requires too much energy, and universal free energy would need to be solved first -- which is not a take I've heard before. And there was a shoutout to You Look Like a Thing and I Love You -- and it turned out the author was in the webcast audience, which was kind of neat.
I took a break after this part, but followed Cyan's liveblogs of the maintaining creative practice while parenting panel (I actually probably should've called into that one, because I ended up enjoying one of the panelists, Karen Osborne, at a different thing, but that different thing came later, so I could not have known that at the time), and also it sounds to have been a cute panel, but I was out running errands at the time and couldn't just jump on.
The next one I did call into was one on #squadgoals: group dynamics in fiction, which was another case where it was a panel with three panelists I already knew I'd probably like: Becky Chambers, SL Huang, Valerie Valdes -- and K. Tempest Bradford as moderator -- and she was a really good one. The panel assembled early, so I got to hear some cute chatter, like Becky having hung a tapestry over the whiteboard behind her because it was full of spoilery notes, and sticking Post-It notes to obscure the spoilery labels on her binders. I also enjoyed the actual topical discussion, too, which connected in neat ways to the thing
tabacoychanel had been discussing about Steve/Tony vs Steve/Bucky dynamics -- that the "best buds" vs "conflict between people" dynamic is not just a pairing thing, it works for ensembles, too, and some people prefer one or that other -- a team coming together, with some internal conflict, or a team where everyone gets along and the conflict is some external threat. Unsurprisingly, Trekkie Chambers liked an established team of friends vs external threat, and Huang prefers the team coming together in conflict. There was some cute discussion of LotR squad dynamics, which I of course appreciated. And just general discussion from panelists I liked, like: Apparently next thing Huang is writing is a queer middle-aged recovering assassin Red Riding Hood, which sounds like fun, and as Cyan pointed out, the folktale aspect might help with her tendency towards pretty shallow action. Huang also got into some of her history as stuntwoman ("I caught fire, it sucked"). Also, there was a spider sighting (I think this was in Becky's room?), which prompted the following distracted comment: "Sorry, I'm distracted by the huge spier on the wall. It's fine. I like spiders. We're friends."
And then I finished the con by tuning into Henry Lien's reading. I'm still not sure I want to read the Peasprout Chen books myself -- although at least a little closer towards yes than I was before I saw Henry Lien speak and read from them (mostly it's just that they seem pitched a little young for my taste, and without the crossover parent appeal of something like DWJ or Ursula Vernon or Frances Hardinge) -- but the reading was a lot of fun: Henry does voices and gestures and pirouettes and all kinds of stuff. And he did sing the song -- two, actually! -- while wearing a shirt with his in-universe squad name on it. And he gave the reading with the map from his book as his Zoom background. He also was on a panel or gave a talk about, like, growing your brand as a writer, and I can definitely see why he'd be a good person to talk about that. I kept expecting all the self-promotion and hype to strike me as off-putting, but weirdly it never did. I think it was the genuine enthusiasm and, like, good humour? with which he delivered all the songs and pirouettes in front of his own giant map -- it felt genuine and kind of sweet? Like, the opposite of cynical self-promotion, more like, hey, I made this thing that I think is so cool, let me show you all of it! (I guess it could still be an act, but if this is an act, I'm impressed). The books are about a girl in ~fantasy!Taiwan who does karate figure skating -- a sport Henry Lien made up but that ended up flowing together well, he discovered, when he tried doing both (individually) -- and he said "New York Times described it as Hermione Granger meets Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon meets the Icecapades meets Mean Girls" -- and the snippet he read was kind of amusing, but mostly in a way that would play well to a late-elementary/early middle school crowd (and, in fact, I've recommended it to zvuv's daughter who is in that age range. He said the books are "a love letter to Taiwan and a thank-you letter to America" -- he was born in Taiwan but grew up in the US an said that "as a very self-inolved kid having to read books where no-one looked like him] was the best possible thing, and made my childhood infinitely richer" -- which was an unusual take, but one I appreciated (as another very self-involved kid, LOL) After the reading I went and poked around his website, and found the song he wrote for the Clarion class behind him and the anthem he wrote and led a performance of for the SFWA, and my verdict was, "overall, I'm torn between second-hand embarrassment and admiration for his commitment to, well, everything. But mostly the latter, because HE is clearly the opposite of embarrassed" -- which is pretty awesome, actually, even though it's a little bit too much Leo even for me XD
So, that was Flights of Foundry. 18 hours of stuff, 3 readings, 2 lectures, 13 panels (OK, more like 12.2). I really enjoyed most of it; there were maybe two panels that felt kind of lackluster, the SFF in translation and the writing AI one, I think both having to do with panelist balance, but even though I got something out of and didn't regret going to. I walked away with two, potentially three new-to-me authors to check out: Jeremy TeG, Valerie Valdes, and Henry Lien, info about upcoming things from authors I already know, and a lot of cool random knowledge. I was impressed by how well the technical aspects of the con were handled throughout (the registration process was pretty baroque, but I felt like it paid off). They said they're planning to run the con again next year, and I am definitely planning on attending again!
**
Balticon was the next weekend, which was slightly awkward timing because it was also the weekend of L's birthday, but actually the timing of the panels I really wanted to see worked out so they didn't interfere with anything we had planned for that.
Oh, I will say Balticon was better than Flights in one significant regard: they actually had all the panelists captioned with their names, and in many cases also their pronouns, which was very handy.
Since Balticon ran over a holiday weekend, starting the Friday before, I actually finished work an hour early and blocked my calendar so I could attend the first panel I was interested in:
me: Balticon panel in 8 minutes.
Cyan: What on?
me: Ada :)
me: (I Read for the Worldbuilding)
me: And some other people, I guess
So, I Read for the Worldbuilding -- I didn't know anyone else on the panel except Ada Palmer, and I don't know that I got much out of it from anyone else's comments. I did really enjoy looking at Palmer's bookshelves (as epic as I would expect them to be), and was only said that the very cool SF example she recommended was a manga (Captain Ken), which is not my genre, and I think even Ada Palmer probably can't serve as my gateway into manga... (I noticed throughout the con that most of the examples she was recommending, the ones that weren't Renaissance Lit, were all manga/anime -- which I'm sure was a conscious choice, but alas, earwax.) Ada's historian tips for worldbuilding: ask yourself about your society: 1) What has to go wrong for a person to die in a gutter? 2) What portion of society can kill what other portion of society with impunity? 3) What luxury good (or attributes) work as ostentatious displays of wealth? (another panelist chimed in with, What are the leading causes of death?) She also made a really cool point about reading worlduiling-heavy books being a particular skill, which is why it's rare for adults to start reading wb-heavy SFF: SFF readers retain the reading habits of a kid reading above their age range -- reading a thing where a bunch of stuff is going to not make sense right away, but they have to be able to "retain loose puzzle pieces" until they start dropping into place. I'd never thought of it that way, but it makes a lot of sense, actually, and 100% reflects my own reading habits. Neat! Also Ada, on the Tolkien vs Asaro spectrum of worldbuilding: hard astrophysics vs "Tolkien has gorgeous historical and linguistic worldbuilding, but his mountain ranges are bunk". Somebody (possibly still Ada? but presumably other people also did some talking?) made the point that Buffy has very shallow wb, which basically resets to "real earth" after almost every episode -- which is why the episode with the death of Buffy's mother still works powerfully as a realistic examination of grief even though the characters were JUST in the afterlife like two episodes ago. Ada: "You sometimes have to remove things that are accurate because they get in the way of the reader believing it's real"; he example (which she also brought up in a later discussion) was Vikings wearing bright fuschia clothes, because a lichen they used as a dye gave that color -- but fuschia Vikings are not plausible to a modern reader. Also, Ada mentioned that she's a fan of Cherryh, which I'm zero surprised about (but also, that does make me wonder if set-sets are in conversation with azi...)
I had an hour to kill after this, so I tuned into the write what you know panel, mostly for Catherine Asaro. This continued the trend of panels having only one person I know (and with Asaro, I only know the name, I haven't actually read any of her work at this point), but I did really enjoy another panelist, actually more than Asaro: Stephanie Burke, who was a really engaging and very charming panelist (though I'm not sure I'd be interested in reading her work; I HAD hoped to catch her on another panel, but it didn't work out). Asaro mentioned that sometimes you end up writing what you know without even realizing what it is you know; she thought she had written "Romeo and Juliet in space" and her editor said, "Oh good, were looking for hard sci-fi!"
The next panel I attended was on galactic empires, with Arkady Martine (so, attending it was a bit of an exercise in scab-picking yes) and the panelist I ended up liking the most, Karen Osborne. This ended up being a rather weird panel for me, because they would bring up a topic and then... not mention the genre books I was thinking of as the perfect examples of the thing? And not, like, in the Ada Palmer "let me give this example from the 17th century" way, but just, like, as if it wasn't a thing? Like they were talking about having an empire without a bureaucracy, and Martine mentioned that the only way to make that work is if you have a single hive mind in charge -- and I was like, ooh, like Anaander Mianaai in the Radch books! -- but nobody said it. And then they spent some time talking about supply lines and what reasons planets would have to join an empire and what happnes without FTL -- and these are all LITERALLY the basis of Scalzi's Interdependency books -- you know, the ones that were on the Hugo ballot for the last two years -- and no-one mentioned them either (no-one on the panel I mean; somebody did mention them in chat). And Machineries of Empire would've been another really interesting example for why one might join an empire, and that didn't get mentioned either. "Do they... not read books?" I texted plaintively at Best Chat (but then they mentioned the Infomocracy books, so I had to admit that apparently they did read SOME books at least). So, anyway, it was a very odd panel for me, like, the opposite of the satisfaction I had with my favorite Flights of Foundry panels, where authors I liked kept bringing up examples of books I like right after I thought of them. There was one cute moment, though, where Karen said, "I like Stargate" and Arkady replied, "I forgive you" -- apparently she has a long, Farscape-related grudge against the show :) That was one of the highlights of the panel (yeah :P), and the other was when someone in chat asked for a very specific rec: something with sentient stars, and one of the panelists, a retired librarian, had a book in mind but sheepishly admitted he was being a very bad library person because all he remembered was that the author's first name was Paul -- but then he spent some time poking around in his computer, and came back with the title before the end of the panel. That was very cute!
And that was it for Friday. Well, not counting the dream I had where I was taking a class from Ada Palmer, which I think I already wrote about at some point. Saturday was L's birthday, so I was a bit limited in my panel attendance, but I made it to all the ones I cared about. The only things I was interested in Saturday morning was a reading with Sarah Pinsker and Karen Osborne, but it was way too early (7 a.m. my time), so I sipped that. I had vaguely hoped to wake up in time for the Ada Palmer (and some other people I guess) panel on religion, but nope, I actually managed to sleep in, and can't really regret it.
So actually the first thing I tuned into was the Sassafrass concert (Ada Palmers a capella group), which hour also included Jo Walton reading her poems. I liked the poems especially Iceland (Day 2) with its line "And (like something Walter Jon Williams or Max Gladstone would come up with)\They are using the bound god to generate electricity.\Of course they are." The music was less my thing; I don't actually like a capella, but by this point I was just following Ada Palmer around, and that's where she was. Still it was kind of cool to experience it "up close" without being rude when I'd had enough and tuned out. And I did enjoy the rendition of "Somebody Will"; I'd watched it on YouTube as an at-con recording before, but this was quite a bit better. It's way too Utopian to appeal to me directly, but I still found myself moved by parts of it. And I also found it cool that Jo Walton was either mouthing the words along with the singer or singing on mute.
I followed Ada Palmer to the panel SF Has Always Been Political, with bonus Sarah Pinsker and Arkady Martine. Moderator: What is a science fiction story with a political topic that you really like? Ada: (paraphrasing, obviously) Well, there's this novelette by Voltaire... Sarah Pinsker followed up with an obscure story from the 1960s, which I wish I'd taken down the name of, because it sounded cool (I tried to google for it later but haven't been able to find it). Arkady Martine progressed towards modernity with EBear's Ancestral Night. Mar Fan, who was the fourth panelist: "I'm going to sound so unlearned, but: Star Wars." -- and the moderator threw in Gargoyles. This ended up being my favorite Balticon panel, I think probably because it was the only one with two panelists I like going in, and another one I was interested in because I was trying to figure her out. Sarah Pinsker railed about Hydra!Cap ("There's something inherently wrong with some of those subversions, IMO"), which was good to hear. They shared at the end that apparently the genesis of this panel was that somebody claimed that they write apolitical sci-fi, and one of the chat questions was: What do you want to say to that person? Ada Palmer's extremely on-brand answer: Read some SF that's more than 80 years old. If it seems weird to you, it's because it was political, intentionally or not, and politics has moved on. I was happy to learn that Pinsker has another novella coming out from Tor, and Palmer has an essay on censorship in an upcoming (maybe already-published) Uncanny issue. I was less happy to learn that Perhaps the Stars will be coming out in June 2021 (but I want it NOW!), but at least it's twice as long as the other books. Even Mary Fan whom I had never heard of before, had something upcoming that is potentially relevant to my interests: an anthology about badass moms. So, pretty good panel overall!
Next I attempted to watch the virtual maskerade, but it was short and not very interesting. Like, there were about 5 entries total, only one of which was a costume I liked/could appreciate (a space pirate in a really cool coat); the rest were memes or characters I didn't know. And by that point it was time for me to go deal with L's birthday take-out and ice cream and stuff, so that was my last Balticon thing for the day.
On Sunday I actually did wake up early enough to call into the how much worldbuilding is too much panel with Melissa Scott and some other folks, but this just served to help me reach the conclusion that panels with Ada Palmer about stuff I don't care about >> panels without Ada Palmer about stuff I do care about (at least at this con). Because my only worthwhile take-away from the panel was that the hyphen in Melissa-Scott.com "is really important, otherwise you get a televangelist."
I put my new theory into practice by calling into the Music & Myth panel with Ada Palmer (which I'd originally not been planning on). The panel was pretty fun, in terms of what people had to say, but it had a weird flow: people kept talking over each other, in a way where I think two of the panelists were from the "NY Jewish" school of talking (cutting in when they had something to say); Ada (as I've obsered at other panels) waits for a lull to speak up but is unstoppable once she gets going; and the poor fourth panelist (an older gentleman) kept trying to say something and getting bulldozed. For some reason Homestuck came up and Ada(who was not the one to bring it up) said, "Also, it's on a scale that it's not a book recommendation, it's a hobby." Speaking of recs for odd things, Ada brought up this 18th c burlesque translation of The Iliad, which is a thing I'm richer for knowing exists, whereupon Batya Wittenberg demonstrated that the opening lines of Paradise Lost can be sung to The Flinstones' theme song. Culture! XD
My next panel was about The Good Place, which I chose because I like the show and because Sarah Pinsker was on it (and also Ada Palmer was not doing a panel that hour). It was reasonably fun, and I especially enjoyed the point someone made about Jason spoilers for s1! being very much like the Holy Fool archetype -- which then means his pretending to be a holy man in the beginning isn't really a pretense. That got Pinsker trying to map the characters to the Four Children of the seder table (although if she got as far as "sorting" the characters, I didn't catch it, and I don't know this 'taxonomy' well enough to do it myself :P
The next chunk of my afternoon was given over to Zoom Best Chat, and then I called into the bad transportation math or the speed of plot panel (Cyan, utilizing K's taxonomy, after I posted a screenshot to Best Chat: "0/10 Ada Palmers, I see", which was true, but I got some small enjoyment out of it anyway. This was another panel where they complained about Tolkien's mountains (his cold east wind is meteorologically improbable, apparently XD)
Next was the Ada Palmer reading (me to Best Chat: "nearly perfect programming; Ada and some other dude). I actually did not stick around for the other dude's reading because it didn't seem like anything I'd be interested in, but I enjoyed the Perhaps the Stars excerpt, which was Mycroft musing poetically on the Greek pantheon, in near-perfect iambic pentameter. Palmer was moderating a panel afterwards, so she couldn't stick around, but she did share that book 4 is about "what happens when the things you count on fall apart", and that her betas say that no-one will believe her that she finished the book before Covid hit.
And then I went to my last panel of the con, the one moderated by Ada Palmer, on Choosing Your Perspective, with Jo Walton and some other people. I actually wish it had gelled a little better between panelists -- they seemed to be talking at cross-purposes for a while. But I did get out of it an interesting discussion about what Walton was calling "first person omniscient" (like Jane Austen, where it's omniscient but you can hear the voice of the author and that voice has clear personality) and "third person omniscient", where you don't sense the person behind the omniscient narrator (her example was Dickens, to contrast with Austen). I'm not sure calling it "first person omniscient" makes sense to me, but it's a real and interesting distinction I hadn't thought of before.
And that was my Balticon. I'd thought about poking around Discord and even clicked on the Second Life link for the con, and maybe I wouldn't tried to participate if not for the birthday conflict, but with the timing being what it was, it was just the nine panels, concert and half a reading for me -- spread out over 4 days instead of two, like Flights, so it was much less concentrated/intense. But also, only one of those panels was particularly memorable in a good way (SF has always been political); the others were sort of middle-of-the-road / nothing I would've been particularly upset to have missed. But probably two very intense con weekends back-to-back would've been too much, even with virtual cons, so it's probably just as well.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1130571.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).