Things I didn’t get around to saying at 4th St.

[mrissa]

One of the great joys of a good panel is that there’s always more to say about the topic than will fit in the panel slot. When I was moderating, I had probably twenty names on my “so-and-so has a comment, call on them next” list, and almost all of them were people I already knew, and all the people I already knew were people I knew to be smart and

Comments

[whswhs]

I'm thinking now about the way Firefly retells the story of the American West, but with the victorious central worlds, which obviously stand in for the Union in the Civil War, practicing slavery, which makes the defeated Browncoats romantic symbols of heroic defeat yet not defenders of slavery. Kind of a convenient wish-fulfillment reenactment of American history.

[mrissa]

Yes, exactly. Seriously problematic there.

[diatryma]

I may have mentioned before that I have a thing for fictional bassists. This makes sense in the music analogy.

[mrissa]

Yyyyyes.

[diatryma]

I was thinking a bit about Westerfeld's The Last Days, which features a band with two superpowerish people and two nonsuperpowerish people. Previous bands had been all superpowerish, and they fell apart under the strain.

[fadethecat]

Oh, huh. You know, I kept wanting the panel to be a bit more on justice-as-theme and a little less on reaction-to-empire, but the bit about the Civil War is a really great point and I wish it'd come up. (Possibly at the Empires and/as Corporations panel next year? What's the equivalent of trying to secede from a corporation?) The comment I don't think I ever quite got in was the bit where people kept discussing violent revolution as Inherently Doomed In Properly Complex Fantasy, Silly Dears and I just wanted to chew on how we interpret the American Revolution vs. the French Revolution and their relative justness, for a while.

[mrissa]

Oh yeah. Good stuff on the violent revolution point.

I think one of the things that will make the Empires and/as Corporations panel difficult to do well is that this year's commentary made it fairly clear that most people have no idea how corporations actually work. We have Arkady, so at least we will have someone shouting down the people who have no idea how empires work, but...I think both empires and corporations are homogenized, flattened, and stereotyped, and not always in the same ways, but one of the things about corporations is that people feel like they know because corporations are part of our modern lives in non-metaphorical ways. But often in very limited and/or unexamined/uninformed ways--people may feel like they know that Coca-Cola is an evil empire, but buying a Coke out of a vending machine is not really giving them much insight into its structure. Even the ubiquity of those vending machines is not

[fadethecat]

I feel like we may need a panel that's just Arkady and Max explaining how empires and corporations work (and intersect) for the sake of people trying to write the damn things. But that's not so much a Fourth Street panel as a two-part lecture...

[pameladean]

Thank you for preserving what Skyler said. I was sitting right next to her, but being on panels freaks me out sufficiently that I don't always remember what was said. That tension between her two remarks is so very illustrative of just about everything about writing.

P.

[mrissa]

It's hard to be doing the good panelist thing and also take notes. It really is.

[desperance]

Elizabeth Bear said, “The absolute hardest thing about writing is limiting your options.”

But that is the absolute thing about writing. Hard or not, that's what we do: every decision limits the next, takes other options out of the frame, until the ending is merely inevitable.