Laugh, damn you, laugh at my amusing post-feminist warrior woman!

[cassiphone]

I've been asked (in a tentative, maybe kind of way) if I'm interested in being on a panel on humour and speculative fiction at an upcoming convention next year

Comments

[capnoblivious]

I'm trying to get a handle on what I consider humourous SF. These comments don't, therefore, follow necessarily from yours

[cassiphone]

I have a theory on this: if an SF/fantasy/horror book (or, in the case of ASIM, a magazine) doesn't actually market itself as a comedy, or look like a comedy, but turns out to be one, people tend to get happy and excited.

If it does, though, readers (and particularly reviewers) have trouble seeing it as anything else. That is, they read it/critique it as a comedy first, and a genre piece second.

Just about every review of my books felt the need to spell out whether or not they found it funny. Some were positive reviews, some negative. But they all gave a far greater focus to the comedy aspect than the fantasy.

[capnoblivious]

Yeah, that makes sense. So, a comedy/SF (like Red Dwarf) has the focus on the gags and not the SF - despite the first few seasons at least being genuinely SFnal - whereas a SF-with-funny-bits, like, say, Buffy, gets treated seriously while having its dialogue quoted. The humour's a bonus.

So people noticed that RD really suffered when it stopped being funny, but let Buffy go on and on with no actual joy. ;)

[cassiphone]

Buffy is a great example of this sort of thing. The humour in that was great because it pushed at the walls of the genre.

I'd like to see more of this in fantasy. One of my favourite humorous writers is Anne Bishop - her work is dark and scary and at times utterly horrific, but her dialogue is just fabulous, and her characters are strange and quirky and (even the evil sadistic ones) hilariously clever.

And I put together a great panel on horror and humour at Thylacon - asking why they go so well together. I put Anne Bishop & Robert Hood and Richard Harland on it. And then I entirely missed the damn thing!

Never Chair and Programme at the same time. That way leads to broken hearts.

[strangedave]

As one of the people who often is involved in convention programming, consider the point taken.

Interesting, there is an entire small convention coming up soon in perth about humour in SF/fantasy, fandomedia

[capnoblivious]

Gah. Gah! I only hope fandomedia goes well, so that there will be another one for me to go to next year!

[stephen_dedman]

But most of all, I'd like to see someone who is known for writing humorous fantasy (not necessarily me) successful enough to make it on to panels to chat about things like worldbuilding and women and warcraft and all that other fantasy stuff alongside Trudi Canavan and Jennifer Fallon and Kate Forsyth and Sean Williams.

At Worldcons I've been to, Terry Pratchett is usually treated as a master worldbuilder and prolific writer of an amazingly successful long-running series, and mostly talks about the Discworld books as though they were perfectly serious (ok, he throws in the occasional joke).

And this seems like a perfect excuse to plug fandomedia, which has the theme of humorous sf/fantasy, and Chuck McKenzie and Simon Haynes as guests.

[capnoblivious]

Yeah, but is that because Terry's now allowed to dictate the terms of discussion?

[cassiphone]

See, the trouble with Terry Pratchett is that he's very good. I mean it, the man is brilliant. I'd consider him to be in the top ten fiction writers ever, let alone within science fiction and fantasy. You can't have a dialogue about comic fantasy without mentioning him - and I don't believe there's any dialogue about the fantasy genre that wouldn't be richer for referring to him

[curufea]

If you write enough books in the same fictional setting - whether they are humour, horror, romance or any other genre - people will begin to take you seriously as a world builder.

Because your readers believe in your world enough to buy books based in it, there must be something to the world.