Readercon, Part 2: Friday I
Here are the first two panels I attended on Friday. It's going to take me a few days to get through all of this, holy good lord is there a lot of information. (In case it's not clear here, most of this is transcribed from notes and cobbled together; if something has my original ideas in it, it's probably in parentheses.)
The Literature of Things: A Panel.
This panel had a lot of Cyberpunk focus; I went partially because postrodent dragged me. I don't know much about cyberpunk, so I mostly just wrote things down to follow up on later. The opening statement is "Cyberpunk has many different objects that people interact with," which I guess I take on faith. DiFilippo starts Victoria with a crazy gadget, implying that steampunk may have this cyberpunk ethos wherein things, "revelatory of everything," are potent symbolic indicators. Clute says: Gibson offended people deeply when his books first appeared. Why were his texts so radically treasonous? It's possible in Gibson to read a trash can straight out of 20th century modernism that isn't loyal to SF relationships to things as usable by an engineer protagonist. Neuromancer has someone who is streetwise but does not have a noton as to what the street is. Things envelop us. It's no longer a legitimate part of the SF enterprise to advocate a particular instruments future; texts are now governet by recognition. Demonstrates a sens of a word we are trying to describe, decentered from the story.
I enjoyed a conversation about Pattern Recognition, which contains a character who is described primarily by the objects in his apartment in his absence. The panelists alleged that this was radically different from 30-50 years ago where a reader wouldn't have cared about the objects in the flat; it would have been glossed. The panel then compared "The Roads Must Roll," a story with a major tech advance that doesn't permeate people's lives very intimately, with later work in a "ghostly interzone between pressent and future." Technology like the iPhone does permeate people's lives very intimately, and more contemporary work has to address that. Someone called this a "Technologically mediated Borgesian experiment." Is this revolutionary? "The street finds its own uses for things, but so does capital," says Chris Nakashima-Brown. Revolutionary figures are doped up to the point of inaction. (How droll!)
DiFilippo talked about how Halting State is written "thirty seconds in the future." He talked about the difficulties of writing such a book when events that happened in real life in real time affected what he could and couldn't use in his plot. (This is one reason why I tend to set my work five or ten years ago. Yes it's dated, but it's actually dated.) The events in Halting State --- a virtual theft of virtual money that is then translated into actual money --- actually occurred, just recently, on EVE Online, and were actually within the terms of the EULA. Here's an interesting link about it.
The panel attempted to tackle the question of whether or not things could be reliable narrators. The counterargument, weirdly, was from Cosmo: "What should be on your bookshelf?" The magazine alleged that if you have more than one book by an author, it demonstrates commitment, and so you should purchase books as decorations in order to suggest that. (Ohmygodwowsobroken.) Do people construct their environments or vice versa? Clute's answer is that things may not be a reliable narrator, but they can be a narrator, and that in and itself is interesting. The "central calculus may be that [that] form of narration is how we begin to think we understand each other in this world."
Catharsis of Myth, Shock of Invention: Panel
The panel was all women and about fantasy; they noticed this right away and talked about creating a hard fantasy manifesto. What would hard fantasy even be? According to Wikipedia, it would be something like this, though I'm not sure that's what the panelists meant. Goss asked, early, if all literary genres had to reconcile the expected with the unexpected; the panel and I both seemed to think yes. The next question: Why do we like to read similar books? Why do we want the same thing over and over again, looking for books like the other books we've read previously? The panel talked about children and needing to be able to filter the world so that you can stay alive with it, but also about how children's brains are wired differently from adults' brains and reading See Spot Run a hundred times is doing something different for a five year old than it would for me. (Children's literature as mantra?) Writers are all about repetition too: patterns, ideas, and symbols that repeat over and over again in literature.
C. S. Lewis said that certain ideas qualified as myths and had lives of their own that could be explored in many different ways to many different ends. The story of Orpheus could be told thirty different ways and have many different nuances and meanings but it would still be Orpheus --- it has some extra-literary quality, a feeling of recognition. Lewis created Narnia; other writers, like Poe, actually created genres. How does that work? (This leaves me curious about what modern stories have this mythical quality. Frankenstein comes to mind; I've seen the Frankenstein story used many different ways for many different ends and it's always been Frankenstein. Thus demonstrating that despite The Last Man, Mary Shelley could write.)
Mythology and folklore exist to explain actual occurrences; we recognize the way that they reflect real life. We all have people who fail to take care of us and we all have thwarted desires --- we recognize real life in these stories because they reflect it. We keep rewriting them because there's an archetype we need to make reflect right now. Or maybe not right now, but instead just an expectation that there needs to be something new, modern, shocking? Is that legitimate, or unnecessary? There's the question "If it's not new, will it be boring?" No one wants to wear the same outfit day after day. (Some guy in the audience said "Well you would say that, you're all women." I think someone held me to keep me sitting down. The panelists told him off.)
Really important reworkings have changes that aren't arbitrary --- the change illuminates something that maybe you've neve thought about before. Maybe taking a different role. We're at fairytale retelling 2.0 now! Much more creative diversions. We want to make people feel invited in but also challenged: Here's the enchanted forest, but wait! Want to excite people into rediscovering story. Cat Valente says she has to watch out for "Not awesome enough." She's driven to do these retellings but doesn't want to just write another Wicked. She thinks most things sucks, and needs it to be way more awesome. (YES! This is the best attitude ever.) She tried doing a Cinderella just to see if she could, and ended up thinking about her relationship with her family and writing about cutting heels off. She wanted to resonate forward.
They then talked from the critic or reader's persepctive about how fantasy with patterns is not given critical respect but someone like Murakami is an absolute critical darling despite telling the same story over and over again. (I've only read Norwegian Wood, so I can't comment on that. Anyone read a lot of Murakami?) Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has a man sitting at the bottom of a well. Why does the bottom of the well feel so important? IT means something about the depths of depression but it's more than a metaphor, it's true. People resent genre but are open to this: It's an Underworld motif but because it's a guy in a well and not an actual underworld people don't have a knee-jerk reaction.
So, is there a gender bias in critical reception of mythic work? Well, Angela Carter's been dead for a while, but the best a woman can hope for is to be compared to Angela Carter. Men get called original when they do what women writers are already doing. Someone on the SFWA forums (I guess they must have been important if people remembered this) said that there are "penis stories and vagina stories. Vagina stories have characters and emotional arcs in them." There's a part of the critical apparatus that thinks this way. Valente: "The words that describe genre are sexist. There is no real logic to sexism. As soon as womenn start doing it, you can denigrate it."
Rose (I'm pretty sure that's rosefox) from the audience: "Fanfic, everyone knows how the story ends but people will write about parts in the middle and rigidly mange how they get surprised. Is this the most modern way of dealing with the unexpected?" In many cultures, you start stories with the ending and the excitement is in the process of telling. The twist ending is a recent Western obsession. Most fanfic comes out of movies and TV, which now people are watching when they feel like it and not just when it airs or never.
It's super-super-hard to tell stories from non-Western mythologies for a Western audience. You can't rely on the audience knowing anything, even the smallest thing; you have to do double duty in making it completely clear and also making it new. It's almost impossible without footnotes. Someone (Valente again?) called it a 9th-level spell to much laughter. Then someone brought up Joseph Campbell and Valente hates him and his ubiquity. Apparently he hates women and sees them as sexually available or unavailable and that's that; he's a dead white man being given preference in a conversation about living writing and she doesn't care. I'd never even heard of him, but apparently Valente wrote a paper about how he sucks. It's probably one of these although I have not done the research to figure out which one yet (this link is as much for me as for you).
The Literature of Things: A Panel.
This panel had a lot of Cyberpunk focus; I went partially because postrodent dragged me. I don't know much about cyberpunk, so I mostly just wrote things down to follow up on later. The opening statement is "Cyberpunk has many different objects that people interact with," which I guess I take on faith. DiFilippo starts Victoria with a crazy gadget, implying that steampunk may have this cyberpunk ethos wherein things, "revelatory of everything," are potent symbolic indicators. Clute says: Gibson offended people deeply when his books first appeared. Why were his texts so radically treasonous? It's possible in Gibson to read a trash can straight out of 20th century modernism that isn't loyal to SF relationships to things as usable by an engineer protagonist. Neuromancer has someone who is streetwise but does not have a noton as to what the street is. Things envelop us. It's no longer a legitimate part of the SF enterprise to advocate a particular instruments future; texts are now governet by recognition. Demonstrates a sens of a word we are trying to describe, decentered from the story.
I enjoyed a conversation about Pattern Recognition, which contains a character who is described primarily by the objects in his apartment in his absence. The panelists alleged that this was radically different from 30-50 years ago where a reader wouldn't have cared about the objects in the flat; it would have been glossed. The panel then compared "The Roads Must Roll," a story with a major tech advance that doesn't permeate people's lives very intimately, with later work in a "ghostly interzone between pressent and future." Technology like the iPhone does permeate people's lives very intimately, and more contemporary work has to address that. Someone called this a "Technologically mediated Borgesian experiment." Is this revolutionary? "The street finds its own uses for things, but so does capital," says Chris Nakashima-Brown. Revolutionary figures are doped up to the point of inaction. (How droll!)
DiFilippo talked about how Halting State is written "thirty seconds in the future." He talked about the difficulties of writing such a book when events that happened in real life in real time affected what he could and couldn't use in his plot. (This is one reason why I tend to set my work five or ten years ago. Yes it's dated, but it's actually dated.) The events in Halting State --- a virtual theft of virtual money that is then translated into actual money --- actually occurred, just recently, on EVE Online, and were actually within the terms of the EULA. Here's an interesting link about it.
The panel attempted to tackle the question of whether or not things could be reliable narrators. The counterargument, weirdly, was from Cosmo: "What should be on your bookshelf?" The magazine alleged that if you have more than one book by an author, it demonstrates commitment, and so you should purchase books as decorations in order to suggest that. (Ohmygodwowsobroken.) Do people construct their environments or vice versa? Clute's answer is that things may not be a reliable narrator, but they can be a narrator, and that in and itself is interesting. The "central calculus may be that [that] form of narration is how we begin to think we understand each other in this world."
Catharsis of Myth, Shock of Invention: Panel
The panel was all women and about fantasy; they noticed this right away and talked about creating a hard fantasy manifesto. What would hard fantasy even be? According to Wikipedia, it would be something like this, though I'm not sure that's what the panelists meant. Goss asked, early, if all literary genres had to reconcile the expected with the unexpected; the panel and I both seemed to think yes. The next question: Why do we like to read similar books? Why do we want the same thing over and over again, looking for books like the other books we've read previously? The panel talked about children and needing to be able to filter the world so that you can stay alive with it, but also about how children's brains are wired differently from adults' brains and reading See Spot Run a hundred times is doing something different for a five year old than it would for me. (Children's literature as mantra?) Writers are all about repetition too: patterns, ideas, and symbols that repeat over and over again in literature.
C. S. Lewis said that certain ideas qualified as myths and had lives of their own that could be explored in many different ways to many different ends. The story of Orpheus could be told thirty different ways and have many different nuances and meanings but it would still be Orpheus --- it has some extra-literary quality, a feeling of recognition. Lewis created Narnia; other writers, like Poe, actually created genres. How does that work? (This leaves me curious about what modern stories have this mythical quality. Frankenstein comes to mind; I've seen the Frankenstein story used many different ways for many different ends and it's always been Frankenstein. Thus demonstrating that despite The Last Man, Mary Shelley could write.)
Mythology and folklore exist to explain actual occurrences; we recognize the way that they reflect real life. We all have people who fail to take care of us and we all have thwarted desires --- we recognize real life in these stories because they reflect it. We keep rewriting them because there's an archetype we need to make reflect right now. Or maybe not right now, but instead just an expectation that there needs to be something new, modern, shocking? Is that legitimate, or unnecessary? There's the question "If it's not new, will it be boring?" No one wants to wear the same outfit day after day. (Some guy in the audience said "Well you would say that, you're all women." I think someone held me to keep me sitting down. The panelists told him off.)
Really important reworkings have changes that aren't arbitrary --- the change illuminates something that maybe you've neve thought about before. Maybe taking a different role. We're at fairytale retelling 2.0 now! Much more creative diversions. We want to make people feel invited in but also challenged: Here's the enchanted forest, but wait! Want to excite people into rediscovering story. Cat Valente says she has to watch out for "Not awesome enough." She's driven to do these retellings but doesn't want to just write another Wicked. She thinks most things sucks, and needs it to be way more awesome. (YES! This is the best attitude ever.) She tried doing a Cinderella just to see if she could, and ended up thinking about her relationship with her family and writing about cutting heels off. She wanted to resonate forward.
They then talked from the critic or reader's persepctive about how fantasy with patterns is not given critical respect but someone like Murakami is an absolute critical darling despite telling the same story over and over again. (I've only read Norwegian Wood, so I can't comment on that. Anyone read a lot of Murakami?) Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has a man sitting at the bottom of a well. Why does the bottom of the well feel so important? IT means something about the depths of depression but it's more than a metaphor, it's true. People resent genre but are open to this: It's an Underworld motif but because it's a guy in a well and not an actual underworld people don't have a knee-jerk reaction.
So, is there a gender bias in critical reception of mythic work? Well, Angela Carter's been dead for a while, but the best a woman can hope for is to be compared to Angela Carter. Men get called original when they do what women writers are already doing. Someone on the SFWA forums (I guess they must have been important if people remembered this) said that there are "penis stories and vagina stories. Vagina stories have characters and emotional arcs in them." There's a part of the critical apparatus that thinks this way. Valente: "The words that describe genre are sexist. There is no real logic to sexism. As soon as womenn start doing it, you can denigrate it."
Rose (I'm pretty sure that's rosefox) from the audience: "Fanfic, everyone knows how the story ends but people will write about parts in the middle and rigidly mange how they get surprised. Is this the most modern way of dealing with the unexpected?" In many cultures, you start stories with the ending and the excitement is in the process of telling. The twist ending is a recent Western obsession. Most fanfic comes out of movies and TV, which now people are watching when they feel like it and not just when it airs or never.
It's super-super-hard to tell stories from non-Western mythologies for a Western audience. You can't rely on the audience knowing anything, even the smallest thing; you have to do double duty in making it completely clear and also making it new. It's almost impossible without footnotes. Someone (Valente again?) called it a 9th-level spell to much laughter. Then someone brought up Joseph Campbell and Valente hates him and his ubiquity. Apparently he hates women and sees them as sexually available or unavailable and that's that; he's a dead white man being given preference in a conversation about living writing and she doesn't care. I'd never even heard of him, but apparently Valente wrote a paper about how he sucks. It's probably one of these although I have not done the research to figure out which one yet (this link is as much for me as for you).