Readercon panel: "My Secret (or Not-So-Secret) Story Structure"

[kate_nepveu]

Description:

Michael A. Burstein (M), John Crowley, Thomas M. Disch, Greer Gilman, Pamela Zoline

There's a small group of novels with overt organizing structures, like Thomas M. Disch's 334, John Brunner's The Squares of the City, John Crowley's Ægypt, and (most famously outside the genre) Ulysses. We suspect that this is the tip of the iceberg

Comments

[jonquil]

The musical is "Merrily We Roll Along", and the play of the same name was by Kaufman and Hart.

alienatory

[jonquil]

Probably "aleatory", which means chance-based -- John Cage was famous for it.

And thanks for the intelligent reporting!

Re: alienatory

[kate_nepveu]

Thank you muchly for all that.

titles and names, persons places things

[coffeeandink]

First, thank you so much for writing this up again!

A few corrections & additions: the Disch novel is 334, the Sondheim musical is Merrily We Roll Along, and I am pretty sure the philosopher cited by Crowley is Giordano Bruno.

Re: titles and names, persons places things

[kate_nepveu]

Ack invisible typos, yes, and yes. (No wonder Google wasn't helping on the last one!) Thanks!

[kate_nepveu]

You did! And it was cool.

I can do that, but my shoulders are complaining so it will be tomorrow. Poke me if I don't--it won't take long.

[dsgood]

'm fairly sure the word used to describe The Man in the High Castle was:

Aleatory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aleatory means "pertaining to luck", and derives from the Latin word alea, ... The French literary group Oulipo for example saw no merit in aleatory work ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatory - 14k - Cached - Similar pages

There's been at least one sf story (in F&SF, quite a while back) which started at the end and went to the beginning. There's at least one (by Damon Knight, if I recall correctly) set in a world where time runs backword. And there's Martin Amis's Time's Arrow.

[kate_nepveu]

There's also _Einstein's Dreams_, of course, but what was the Knight story like?

[dsgood]

The protagonist is born from the grave, after a while is employed in academia, then goes backward (from our point of view) through a rather ordinary life.

[kate_nepveu]

Huh. I have to say that doesn't sound very interesting.

[ckd]

Of the cited works, I've read Brunner's The Squares of the City. And, er, the Brunner again.

Now I'm wondering if I'm too intimidated to write anything about this panel except "go read kate_nepveu's post".

[kate_nepveu]

No no, write it! I'm an unreliable narrator, after all.