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Readercon 17 report (Part 1 of 2)
01/11/2006 . Source: Evelyn C. Leeper 
A convention report by Evelyn C Leeper. Readercon 17 was held at the Burlington Marriott, July 7th-9th, 2006. Attendance was probably around 500 people. Readercon is a literary SFF convention, so there was no art show, masquerade, etc. However, there were panels or talks on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and King Kong. It appears that the guideline is "literary, and anything else the committee feels like doing." (And because it is literary, this report takes longer than usual. First, there are a lot of titles and authors to verify. And second, there are a lot of stories to read to try to figure out what the panellists meant by what they said.)
The "Dealers Room" is called the Bookshop and all the dealers sell books. This is a mixed blessing. There were several dealers selling old (1950-1980) paperbacks very cheaply (25 cents to a dollar). At the other end were dealers selling collectible books or small press editions at prices not exactly in everyone's budget. In the middle were dealers selling used paperbacks at standard used prices, or new mass market, trade paperback, or hardcover books. I bought a few old paperbacks at fifty cents each, but was fairly disappointed with the selection otherwise. Jorge Luís Borges was the featured author (and the reason I attended), yet in the Bookshop there were only a couple o copies of the latest biography of him (in hardcover, for $35 each), one used copy of The Book Of Fantasy (which he only edited), and one used copy of THE ALEPH. The latter was not even out on a table - only when I was chatting with the dealer and commented on the dearth of Borges books did he mention he had one. The other woman standing there immediately expressed and interest and he dug it out and sold it to her, but the notion that one would not even put Borges's books out at a convention where he is featured seems odd.
There was a Con Suite (a.k.a. Hospitality Suite). The first day they seemed a bit sparse on healthy snacks, but later some did appear. They had a large selection of hot beverages - various teas, coffees, etc. Unfortunately (for me), frequently the topic of conversation there seemed to be the World Cup in soccer, rather than books.
As far as programming goes, Readercon has far fewer tracks than other conventions of similar size. At any one time, there are generally two main panel items, a kaffeeklatsch, and a couple of readings, and that is about it. Most people do not find themselves without anything to do, and the audiences for the panels they do have are substantial, rather than the panellists outnumbering the audience. As a data point, my notes for the (basically) two-day Readercon took as many pages in my notebook as for the (basically) four-day Worldcon.
The acoustics in the rooms were fairly terrible. And people seem to be ignoring requests to turn off cell phones - at least one woman had her phone ring twice in a single panel.
The panels are held with the panellists in armchairs around a coffee table - a set-up that makes it harder for authors to prop up a lot of their books. (It used to be that authors would bring their latest book and hold it up as part of their introduction. Then they started leaving it standing on the table in front of them during the panel. Then they started brining their latest two books, and it snowballed from there. Not only do they bring half a dozen books, but if they are paperbacks, they bring special stands to hold them upright. The whole thing has gotten out of hand.)
Table of Contents:
General
The Willing Suspension of Dissed Beliefs
Libraries in Imaginative Literature
The Pre-History of SF, or, It Didn't All Start with Gernsback
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award
Meet the Pros(e) Party
Why the Choir Likes the Preacher: The Value of Satire
The Year in Short Fiction
The Fiction of Jorge Luís Borges
I Never Metafiction I Didn't Like
China Miéville Interviewed
James Morrow Interviewed
The 20th Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition
The Garden of Forking Borges Translations
Bad God! Bad God!
Why is the New Weird Weird?
Sense of Wonder in the New Hard SF
Miscellaneous
The Willing Suspension of Dissed Beliefs
Friday 3:00pm
Ellen Asher, R. Scott Bakker, James Morrow (mod), Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Ann Tonsor Zeddies
Description: "There are some novels that can seduce us with their worldviews despite our intellectual opposition to the deep authorial philosophies that inform them. One can argue that the secular humanist reading Gene Wolfe or the free-market conservative reading China Miéville becomes, for the duration of the novel, a Catholic or socialist in at least some small recess of their brain. What exactly is going on here between text and reader?"
Estimated attendance: 40 people
Nielsen Hayden began by observing, "If I only read books agreeing with me I would have very little to read and wouldn't learn very much." Two people that he named as authors he disagreed with but enjoyed reading were Poul Anderson and David Weber.
Zeddies said, "When I was a little girl, most science fiction was written by men." (This is not quite the same as disagreeing with their philosophy, at least to most people. Still, it has the notion of a different worldview.)
Asher asked, "How does this [panel topic] differ from any suspension of disbelief?" There was an era when children's books were supposed to be about the familiar world, she added, but she thought it was good that we had gotten away from this.
Bakker described himself as a "philosophy drop-out" and says that he has a "sense of how narrative tends to transcend theory. Every author brings some kind of ideological baggage," he added, but the narrative transcends it.
Nielsen Hayden pointed out that George Orwell was an extreme anti-feminist, but his novel A Clergyman's Daughter is nevertheless a feminist novel. In fact, Nielsen Hayden claimed, it happens frequently that conclusions actually violate an author's beliefs.
Asher said that she would make the somewhat radical statement that Ursula K. Le Guin is "so tendentious" in her later books that she is unreadable. (I would agree with this. I think it was of one of her recent books that I noted it is not that she has an agenda, but that she has only an agenda.)
Zeddies said that the real problem is when authors make characters do unlikely things for the sake of their ideologies.
Morrow asked if the panellists ever had the reaction of feeling disoriented by a convincing worldview that was contradictory to their own. Nielsen Hayden said that "fascism starts with knowing that valour is valuable," which sounds plausible but then carries this to extremes, so that the initial believer is left somewhat at a loss to explain what went wrong. In fact, he said, every ideology starts by knowing that something is true. Bakker added, "The cornerstone of dogmatism is certainty; the cornerstone of certainty is ignorance."
Asher suggested, "No ideology can be correct for everyone, because people are so varied." All ideologies have both good and bad, and "the bad are the negative things that the people who disagree can live with."
Morrow himself said that he "used to diss" Tolkien because of the Manichaeism in Tolkien's work. However, at some point he and his wife did a lesson plan for a course on Tolkien (at a later panel he said simply it was for the money) and he gained a greater appreciation for it even though he still disagreed with the basis of it. Morrow quoted Adam Gopnick's review of Wittgenstein's Poker, in which Gopnick said, "You write the book you aren't."
Morrow then asked the panellists whether any one of them had ever written anything that had offended himself. The panellists side-stepped this, though I suspect it is fairly rare.
Zeddies noted that she hated M. John Harrison's Light, but had to admit that it also had its virtues. She finds Robert A. Heinlein so ideological that she said he is "like a date so eager to seduce you that he has his tongue in your mouth before the hors d'ouevres arrive."
Nielsen Hayden said that a major complaint he has about ideologies in fiction is that authors often have no idea how politics works in the real world. For example, they will show two world leaders alone in a room together, with no support staff, security guards, or anyone else. (One author he mentioned whose work he generally likes but who has this problem is John Scalzi.) Also, "everybody [the authors] disagree with sounds like an idiot." Authors with this flaw include Heinlein and Ayn Rand. Ken MacLeod, he said, at least gives his villains some good lines. (This implies, I think, that villains are better when they are not total villains, but actually have some admirable traits.)
Regarding the complaint about politics, and about characterizations in general, Asher said that it is "better to have something plausible but impossible rather than something possible but implausible." However, bringing the panel back to reality, she added, "The truly mortal sin is to be unsaleable." She made the fairly important point that we do not in general agree with Shakespeare's world view (of powerful English monarchs, a strong hierarchy among the classes, and so on), yet we can still read and admire his works.
Zeddies asked if anyone had ever written a book that portrayed a happy future in which the Nazis win. The panellists agreed that if they had, it would almost definitely have to be set in the distant future, rather than the next generation or so after the war. (I think Daniel Quinn's After Dachau probably qualifies.) Asher said that she turned down a book whose premise was that paedophilia was good for the children. But Morrow noted that the Salem witch trials have become kitsch and almost humorous, a cause for tourism and festivities rather than something horrible. (I am reminded of the souvenir we saw at the Irish Famine Museum: a magnet which said "Been there, Done that, Loved it!" and then below it in a separate block, "Irish Famine Museum." Clearly these were made up in bulk and then the name of the site added after, but this was an unfortunate choice for this museum.)
Bakker asked, "Does genre fiction have a leg up in this [challenging of world views]" because people come to it prepared to suspend disbelief in general? Zeddies added that science fiction is specifically not the real world. Morrow noted, "There is a fundamental lie at the centre of most detective fiction," i.e., that justice will prevail.
Asher felt that science fiction fans in particular are used to the ideas of change, and of foreigners. Zeddies said that she wanted to agree, but sees fans migrating to what they are comfortable with in the genre rather than trying something different. Nielsen Hayden added, "The field is so big, you pretty much can read in your niche."
Morrow said, "C. S. Lewis is a writer I specifically detest." Lewis, he said, presents the opposition as complete fools, and falls into the trap of thinking, "Because my point of view enjoys the virtue of being correct, that's all I have to do." Later, Morrow added that Lewis's book The Problem of Pain "nauseated him" because Lewis was full of fatuous advice for an emotion he had not yet fully experienced. Then after his wife died of cancer, Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, which Morrow felt was a more honest book. (In fairness to Lewis, I will point out that his mother died while he was still a child, so he was not entirely untouched by pain and grief.)
Morrow said that his quintessential experience with "a suspension of dissed beliefs" was with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Nielsen Hayden said that for him it was Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun". (I suspect for others it might be Stephen Donaldson's "Thomas Covenant" books.) Nielsen Hayden said that the narrator of Bradley Denton's Blackburn is a serial killer who starts out killing despicable people, leading the reader to sympathize with him, but gradually becomes more and more detestable himself.
Asher mentioned Poul Anderson's Fire Time as a great example for this panel. The story involves two races fighting to the death, and alternating chapters have narrators from the opposing sides. And while you are reading each chapter, that side's actions seem perfectly reasonable. In fact, there are no villains; both sides are right. Morrow said that the same was true of Homer's Iliad; it also had no villains. (Well, I might claim that the gods were the villains, but that was a different panel.)
Zeddies said that Heinlein and Lewis are authors who seem to be at war with themselves at times. Nielsen Hayden said that Heinlein is still interesting because "he is more interesting than his overt opinions."
Someone in the audience suggested a distinction between Apollonian novels such as Emila Zola wrote, and Dionysian novels such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick. I am not sure exactly how this ties in to the topic. Another audience member asked if anyone on the panel had ever felt "had" by a novel. This seemed to be the same question that Morrow asked earlier (about feeling disoriented by a convincing worldview that was contradictory to their own). This time around Bakker said he had that with Lolita.
Libraries in Imaginative Literature
Friday 5:00pm
David Louis Edelman, Greer Gilman, Fred Lerner (mod), Paul Levinson, Sandra McDonald, Yves Meynard
Description: "Borges' Library of Babel is perhaps the best known, but the repository of knowledge (especially the repository of all knowledge) is a common element in stories of the fantastic. They're obviously useful as plot devices, but they are attractive to writers and readers for many other reasons."
Estimated attendance: 40 people
McDonald began by saying, "My name is Sandra McDonald and I love libraries. Does anyone here not love libraries? If so, you're in the wrong room."
Edelman introduced himself by saying, "Expertise I have in libraries? I have no idea other than I frequent them." (His novel Infoquake, however, has an instantiation of the Library of Babel.)
The panel began with panellists reading their favourite excepts about libraries. While the excerpts were delightful, they probably should have been scheduled as a separate reading session, rather than taking a big chunk out of the time for the panel.
Gilman read, not too surprisingly, from Jorge Luís Borges's "The Library of Babel":
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast airshafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.
Like all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
(She chose the Yates & Irby translation, since she prefers that one. She particularly liked the image of the dead librarians falling through space: "humans are leaves falling through the mind of God.")
McDonald read from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:
We'll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can't last.
How many of you are there?
Thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn't planned, at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. Then, over a period of twenty years or so, we met each other, travelling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan. The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we are not important, we mustn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust-jackets for books, of no significance otherwise. Some of us live in small towns. Chapter One of Thoreau's Walden in Green River, Chapter Two in Willow Farm, Maine. Why, there's one town in Maryland, only twenty-seven people, no bomb'll ever touch that town, is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, so many pages to a person. And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we'll set it in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing. [Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, pages 136-137]
Lerner read from Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan:
The evening on which he sent Flay to have Titus brought to him found Lord Sepulchrave free at seven in the evening and sitting in the corner of his library, sunk in a deep reverie. The room was lit by a chandelier whose light, unable to reach the extremities of the room, lit only the spines of those volumes on the central shelves of the long walls. A stone gallery ran around the library at about fifteen feet above the floor, and the books that lined the walls of the main hall fifteen feet below were continued upon the high shelves of the gallery.
In the middle of the room, immediately under the light, stood a long table. It was carved from a single piece of the blackest marble, which reflected upon its surface three of the rarest volumes in his Lordship's collection. Upon his knees, drawn up together, was balanced a book of his grandfather's essays, but it had remained unopened. His arms lay limply at his side, and his head rested again the velvet of the chair back. He was dressed in the gray habit which it was his custom to wear in the library. From the full sleeves his sensitive hands emerged with the shadowy transparency of alabaster. For an hour he had remained thus; the deepest melancholy manifested itself in every line of his body.
The library appeared to spread outward from him as from a core. His dejection infected the air about him and diffused its illness upon every side. All things in the long room absorbed his melancholia. The shadowy galleries brooded with slow anguish; the books receding into the deep corners, tier upon tier, seemed each a separate tragic note in a monumental fugue of volumes. [Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake, pages 216-217]
Levinson read an except from his own book, The Plot to Save Socrates.
Edelman read from Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz:
From the vast store of human knowledge, only a few kegs of original books and a pitiful collection of hand-copied texts, rewritten from memory, had survived in the possession of the Order by the time the madness had ended.
Now, after six centuries of darkness, the monks still preserved this Memorabilia, studied it, copied it and recopied it, and patiently waited. At the beginning, in the time of Leibowitz, it had been hoped - and even anticipated as probably - that the fourth or fifth generation would begin to want its heritage back. But the monks of the earliest days had not counted on the human ability to generate a new cultural inheritance in a couple of generations if an old one is utterly destroyed, to generate it by virtue of lawgivers and prophets, geniuses or maniacs; through a Moses, or through a Hitler, or an ignorant by tyrannical grandfather, a cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as slave. The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wild-boy from the hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday - someday, or some century - an Interrogator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years, for they, though born in that darkest of ages, were still the very bookleggers and memorizers if the Beatus Leibowitz; and when they wandered abroad from their abbey, each of them, the professed of the Order - whether stablehand or Lord Abbot - carried as part of his habit a book, usually a Breviary these days, tied up in a bindlestiff. [A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr., pages 69-70]
Meynard read from Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer:
"We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations - books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.
"We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too who leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here - though I can no longer tell you where - no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other." [The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe, pages 60-61]
(These readings triggered memories of other libraries and books. The passage from A Canticle for Leibowitz called to mind Hari Seldon's plan to shorten the galactic Dark Ages with his "Encyclopedia" (really a complete library in itself) in Isaac Asimov's Foundation. And the descriptions of books by Wolfe reminded me of the books in Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books. And the idea of libraries itself reminded me of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and scenes from Arturo P&eactue;rez-Reverte's The Club Dumas. In fact, Eco has not only a library, but a blind librarian named Jorge de Burgos.)
Gilman said that libraries evoke the themes of eternity, vulnerability, and the preciousness of knowledge. She also mentioned Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden as having a memorable library.
McDonald talked about the role of people in libraries. Without them, libraries would be meaningless: "Some has to be there to observe it." She also noted that biblio-mysteries are an entire sub-genre (though she implied that they always involve libraries and librarians, ignoring the ones involving book dealers or authors).
Lerner talked about Peake's "portrayal of the dead hand of tradition" and described the library in Titus Groan as "the monument of the Old Weird."
Edelman said that Miller demonstrates that the knowledge preserved in libraries is not necessarily the real knowledge. And it conveys a combination of hopefulness and hopelessness. Lerner later observed that historians would rather have shopping lists, etc., than more histories than merely repeat what other books say. (Josephine Tey illustrates this quite nicely in her mystery, The Daughter of Time.)
Meynard said that Wolfe's Citadel library extends indefinitely, much as Borges's Library of Babel does. The Citadel library also has a blind librarian, another reference to Borges. (The books with drugged paper reminded me of Eco.) Talking of the Library of Babel, Meynard said that because you can find everything - any combination of letters - then nothing meaningful can be found. Lerner modified this, saying, "You can't find anything in the Library of Babel, but you can encounter anything." Meynard's own book L'heritage de Lorann has a library as well.
Levinson was also reminded of Asimov's "Foundation" series, but of the library on Trantor, which he said made him realize that you can find the answer to anything in a big enough library. Lerner agreed, but pointed out that all libraries (not just the Library of Babel) contain a lot of wrong information.
Gilman related a description of trying to recover severely damaged books as investigating a "briccalage (sp?) of pages mixed together." She suggested that she was put on this panel out of "sheer perversity," saying, "I seem to write [mostly] about oral cultures." But she does admit to being obsessed with the image of the Sybil's leaves. (I assume she means the Sybylline Books.) She said that "[Terry] Pratchett does a damn good monstrous library - the books are always trying to make a break for it."
Lerner said, "If I could have one book from an alien culture, it would be there library classification system." I assume he thought the topics would tell him something about the culture, but what if they classification system was that of most ancient libraries here - chronological by acquisition date?
An audience member said that when she visited the Long Room (and the Book of Kells) in Trinity College in Dublin, she concluded that most of the tourists there were as clueless about what they were looking at as the monks in A Canticle for Leibowitz.
[And I will add one more fictional library description, from Montesquieu's Persian Letters (letters 133 to 137 are all about the library):
I returned at the appointed time; and my friend led me to the very spot we had left. "Here," he said, "are the grammarians, the glossers, and the commentators." "Father," said I, "have not all these people been able to dispense with common sense?" "Yes," said he, "they have; and yet it does not appear, and their works are not a penny the worse, which is very convenient for them." "True," said I; "and I know plenty of philosophers who would do well to occupy themselves with sciences of this kind."
"There," continued he, "are the orators who can convince people without employing reason; and the geometers, who compel a man to be convinced in spite of himself, and conquer him by sheer force.
"Here are metaphysical books, which deal with very lofty concerns indeed, and in which the infinite meets one at every turning; books of physics, which detect nothing more marvellous in the economy of the vast universe, than in the simplest machine of our craftsmen.
"Books of medicine, those monuments of the frailty of nature and of the power of art, which when they treat even of the slightest disorders make us tremble by bringing the idea of death home to us; but which when they discuss the power of remedies make us feel secure as if we were immortal.
"Near these are the books of anatomy, which do not so much contain descriptions of the parts of the human body, as the barbarous names which have been given them - neither likely to cure the patient of his disease nor the physician of his ignorance.
"Here are the alchemists, who inhabit now the hospital, now the madhouse, dwellings equally suitable for them.
"Here are the books of science, or rather of occult ignorance; of such are those which contain any kind of sorcery - execrable according to most people; in my opinion contemptible. Such also are the books of judicial astrology." "What do you say, father? The books of judicial astrology!" I cried with enthusiasm. "These are the books we make most of in Persia. They rule all the actions of our lives, and determine us in all our undertakings: in fact, the astrologers are our spiritual fathers, and more, for they take part in the government of the state." "If that is so," said he, "you live under a yoke much heavier than that of reason. Yours must be the strangest of all governments: I pity from my heart a family, and above all a nation, which permits the planets to have such ascendancy over them." "We make use of astrology," replied I, "just as you make use of algebra. Every nation has its proper science, according to which it guides its policy. All the astrologers together have never committed so many follies in Persia, as a single algebraist has done here. Do you think that the fortuitous concourse of the stars is not as sure a guide as all the fine reasoning of your system-monger? If the votes on that subject were counted in France and in Persia, astrology would have good reason to triumph; you would see the schemers properly humbled, from which how disastrous a corollary might be deduced against them!" [Persian Letters, Montequieu, Letter 135]
The Pre-History of SF, or, It Didn't All Start with Gernsback
Friday 8:00pm
Ellen Asher, James L. Cambias, John Costello, Darrell Schweitzer (mod), Allen Steele, Jean-Louis Trudel
Description: "We know that SF as a distinct publishing genre started in 1926 with the introduction of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing. But Amazing began as a reprint magazine. What did it reprint? How many of our familiar tropes and clichés were already present, at least in embryonic form?"
Estimated attendance: 20 people
One problem with this panel was that the panelists did not seem to agree on what period they were covering - one wanted to talk about 17th century works, while another focused on 1920s pulps.
Cambias said he had a background in the history of science. Asher said that she has been the "editor of the Science Fiction Book Club since some time in the Cretaceous." Schweitzer said he was currently writing a series of articles about science fiction a generation before Hugo Gernsback.
As noted, Trudel began by saying he has been looking at 16th and 17th century science fiction, but then moved to a more recent period. He noted that 1920s Amazings had a lot of reprints of earlier authors: twenty-nine pieces by H. G. Wells, sixteen by Jules Verne, five by Edgar Allan Poe. (A "piece" here is either a short story, or a chapter of a serialized novel.) All the themes of science fiction appear: mad scientists, alien invasions, would-be masters of the world, etc.
Steele said that one difference was that a story was not called science fiction, but a "fantastic", a "scientific romance", or even a "different story". Another difference was that before Edmond Hamilton and E. E. Smith, most science fiction was contemporary in setting (although someone from the then-present might find themselves in their future through suspended animation or some such.) Cambias disagreed, giving Poe's "Melonta Tauta" as a counter-example, and Steele himself gave the counter-example of Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail". Trudel mentioned Verne's "A Day in the Life of a Journalist in 2087", and even a 1657 story, "Epigon", which is primarily utopian rather than science fictional. but seems to have a late 18th century setting. However, the claim of contemporary settings was true for the vast majority of the early science fiction.
Schweitzer pointed out that a contemporary protagonist or narrator provides an expository basis, whereas a futuristic setting would require a lot of explanation. He also described "With the Night Mail" as a "Heinlein story written by Geoffrey Chaucer."
Cambias said that we see the same phenomenon today with the "techno-thriller", which is science fiction with a contemporary setting. Asher said that Stephen King writes in this mode, and Steele added Michael Crichton's name to the list.
Schweitzer said the techno-thriller dates back to Morgan Robertson's book Futility, an amazing prescient book about a gigantic ocean liner named "Titan" which hits an iceberg in the month of April and sinks, killing many because of an insufficient number of lifeboats. Steele said that in Germany after World War I there was a lot of science fiction written in which Germany rises from its defeat in that war. Thea Von Harbou and Fritz Lang are perhaps the best-known names from this period.
One notable sub-genre of the science fiction of those early years, according to Steele, was that of a comet passing by the earth. (I wonder if this was not inspired by the recent passage of Halley's Comet.)
Schweitzer said that many, if not most, of the early authors are forgotten. William Wallace Clark, for example, was the leading science fiction author of a hundred years ago.
Schweitzer said that Gernsback printed a lot of translations, but that successful science fiction authors of the time wrote for Argosy, not for Gernsback. Asher said that Gernsback's real contribution was the creation of fandom, brought about when he decided to publish a letters column (which I suppose is a good reason to call the awards voted by fans "Hugos").
Schweitzer mentioned another "pre-science-fiction" author of that early period, Ray Cummings.
Someone in the audience asked whether something or other was good, to which Steele said that in this area, "'good' is often beside the point." But Schweitzer said that, for example, "Finis" by Frank L. Pollack (in Science Fiction by Gaslight edited by Sam Moskowitz) is good.
Inevitably, someone in the audience asked when science fiction started. Cambias said 1634, with "The Man in the Moone" by Francis Godwin. Schweitzer said that it was commonplace by the second half of the 19th century. Trudel said that Johannes Kepler and other wrote science fiction of a sort, but they did not have substantive differences. The period for 1840 through 1860 is when progress, technological change, etc., start to show up.
Schweitzer said that there was even a "19th century Douglas Adams" (unfortunately anonymous), who wrote a story in the July 1853 issue of Knickerbocker with a table of contents entry as "The Planet. Found in the portfolio of a lunatic", and the title on the actual story as "THE PLANET. How I Was Induced to Leave the Earth and Become One."
Other notable early works include Mark Twain's "From the London Times, 1904", Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens", E. M. Forester's "When the Machine Stops", Robert H. Goddard's "The Last Generation", and George Eliot's "Shadows of the Coming Race".
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award
Friday 10:00pm
Description: "The Smith Award, honoring a writer worthy of being rediscovered by today's readers, is selected annually by a panel of judges that include longtime Readercon stalwarts John Clute and Scott Edelman (together with Gardner Dozois and Robert Silverberg.) Past winners include Olaf Stapledon, R. A. Lafferty, Edgar Pangborn, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, and Leigh Brackett."
This year's choice was William Hope Hodgson (chosen by judges John Clute, Gardner Dozois, Scott Edelman, and Robert Silverberg). As part of this, next year's Readercon will have panels and readings featuring Hodgson's work. The judges for next year's choice will be David Hartwell, Martin H. Greenberg, Mike Resnick, and Van Gelder.
I will point out that there has been one film based on a William Hope Hodgson story: Matango: The Attack of the Mushroom People was based on Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night".
Meet the Pros(e) Party
Friday 10:15pm
Description: "Each writer at the party has selected a short, pithy quotation from his or her own work and is armed with a sheet of 30 printed labels, the quote replicated on each. As attendees mingle and meet each pro, they obtain one of his or her labels, collecting them on the wax paper provided. Atheists, agnostics, and the lazy can leave them in the order they acquire them, resulting in one of at least nine billion Random Prose Poems. Those who believe in the reversal of entropy can rearrange them to make a Statement. Wearing labels as apparel is also popular. The total number of possibilities (linguistic and sartorial) is thought to exceed the number of bytes of data in George W. Bush's brain which correspond to objective reality."
I was too tired to last through this, but I did want to mention that Eric Van put his heart's blood into planning this. Literally. When he was getting the supplies for this, he tried to open one of those awful hard plastic shells, but it slashed his hand and he had to go to the hospital for a large number of stitches. As a result, there was no waxed paper, but the party went on without it.
Why the Choir Likes the Preacher: The Value of Satire
Saturday 10:00am
Paul Di Filippo, Barry Malzberg, James Morrow (mod), Jim Munroe, Kit Reed
Description: "While every satirist likes to think that his work will change the minds of the wrong-thinkers by exposing the limitations of their views, the fact is that the vast majority of the audience for any successful satire is people who already agree with the argument. It's also true that we value great satire as art, above and beyond its ability to entertain us with grim laughter. So what exactly do the already-converted get out of great satire? There seems to be something about the nature of a satirical argument that connects to us in a way that a straightforward one doesn't."
Estimated attendance: 50 people
Morrow began with the famous definition by George S. Kaufman: "Satire is what closes on Saturday night."
Malzberg said of writers in general what Sigmund Freud said is true of psychotherapists: "Our job is to convert human misery into ordinary unhappiness."
Di Filippo mentioned his satiric work Ciphers: A Post-Shannon Rock 'N' Roll Mystery , which Morrow described as "Pynchonesque". Reed said the satire that she is best known for is "The Attack of the Giant Baby". Her current novel The Baby Merchant is being reviewed as satire, but was intended to be serious.
Morrow said that "in the grand tradition of Readercon," he would attack the premise of the panel rather than support it, and asked panelists whether they thought that they might change people's minds.
Malzberg talked about writing the "Lone Wolf" series for Berkley books in 1972. (He wrote them under the pseudonym "Mike Barry".) They were about a vigilante New York City cop, and he said that even though he spilled outside the expected audience, "I have reached that audience. It hasn't done much good."
Morrow said his satire arose when "Voltaire spoke to me - my inverse 'Road to Damascus' moment - [saying] 'James Morrow, there is no God.'"
Munroe said, "I think it's important to preach to the choir." Morrow added, "Readers expect you to reinforce their world view." If you do not, he said, you are not keeping up your end of the bargain."
Speaking of satirists with whom he disagrees, Di Filippo said that P. J. O'Rourke is still funny even though Di Filippo wants to say to him, "Your main thesis is still crap." Morrow said that Walker Percy was a staunch conservative, but his satire was still worth reading.
Reed said (of the premise of the panel), "I have a serious problem with the verb 'preaching'." She said that in her novel Thinner Than Thou (about diet culture replacing religion), she found herself "an accidental satirist." "Evelyn Waugh taught me how to write," she added. She also said that many authors looked down on satire. For example, she said, John Gardner claimed, "A work like Gulliver's Travels is not fit to kiss the hem of a garment like King Lear."
Di Filippo said that Woody Allen expressed many people's attitude as, "When you're writing comedy, you're not sitting at the grown-up table."
Malzberg talked about whether his satire has had any lasting effect. He pointed out that the Kirk Poland competition at Readercon took its name from a character in his novel Herovit's World, and that "this may be the only large-scale effect my work has had." Herovit's World is about an unsuccessful writer, though, and Malzberg added that Harlan Ellison reported that of the five hopeful writers-to-be that read it at Ellison's house, four quit the field. However, Malzberg seemed discouraged by the lack of effect his works had: "I wrote these books to change the world, or at least Teaneck, New Jersey, but they couldn't even change me." On the other hand, he later said that he was heartened that his novel The Remaking of Sigmund Freud could be published at all.
On the other hand, Munroe pointed out that George Orwell's 1984 was really effective. In part this was because Orwell knew how to have a visceral effect, he said, giving as an example, "'All-pervasive database' is not that scary, but 'Big Brother' is."
Di Filippo cited Horace Walpole's statement, "Life's a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think."
Reed said that it is true that her books seem to reach mostly a specific audience (people who are overweight for Thinner Than Thou; people who are infertile for The Baby Merchant).
Di Filippo asked, "What makes science fiction such a rich medium for satire?" Reed thought it was because science fiction writers "push everything just a little bit harder." Morrow said, "Satire is about world-building, as is science fiction." Some works that are thought of as satire do not quite qualify in his opinion. For example, he said, "'Monty Python' is not interested in creating a consistent global world view." He added that in terms of changing the world, his British agent mailed copies of his novel This is the Way the World Ends to Margaret Thatcher and the members of Parliament. (It does not seem to have had much effect.)
Someone in the audience mentioned the problem with satire of the "number of people who don't get it, who have no real sense of irony." (As in Steve Martin's line from Roxanne, "Oh, Irony! We don't get that here. No, the last time we had irony was '82, when I was the sole practitioner of it and I got tired of being stared at.")
Munroe said that when one sees satire on television shows owned by conglomerates who actually oppose the views espoused, one is reminded of the position of court jester in royal courts, who was the only person allowed to criticize the king. Di Filippo saw it as a way of co-opting the comedian into the institution.
As for specific satires, Di Filippo mentioned a Charles Stross novel where they re-create the twentieth century based on records that do not give an accurate picture. (I had thought maybe he was thinking of Alastair Reynolds's Century Rain, but then I read a review of Stross's Glasshouse and realized that was the book to which he was referring.)
Reed mentioned Galaxy Quest as a popular satire. Morrow suggested Walker Percy's "The Last Phil Donohue Show". Someone in the audience mentioned "Futurama", but said that with this and other satires, there is a real "risk of the work becoming instantly dated." Morrow said, he would love to know what "Futurama" looked like to our descendants' descendants. However, he pointed out that a lot of satire does age well, noting that Jane Austen was a satirist. Di Filippo said, "Satire often has the connotation of topicality." He gave the example of Stephen Leacock, some of whose work is dated, and some is not. Morrow said it becomes like the people that Dante stick in Hell that you now need footnotes to identify.
An audience member claimed, "Satirists are cultural critics." Someone (Morrow's wife?) was quoted as saying that that is why historians love them.
Morrow said that even when the details change, the big picture is the same. To outsiders, he said, the dispute between the Shiites and the Sunnis resembles the one between the Big-Enders and the Little-Enders of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
Someone in the audience said that satirists such as Gilbert and Sullivan endure more, but Malzberg noted, "Sullivan's music had a bit to do with it."
Reed suddenly asked why she was the only woman on the panel. This led to a list of woman satirists: Jane Austen, Maragret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, Connie Willis, Evelyn E. Smith, and Margaret St. Clair, among others. Reed, however, was the only one at Readercon.
An audience member asked, "Does irony ever die?" Di Filippo said this question seemed to come from the claim that "post-9/11, the culture of irony is dead." He disputed this, and particularly the implication that the ironists brought on 9/11.
Morrow closed with a mention of Di Filippo's semi-regular satirical column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, "Plumage from Pegasus", of which he said, "Plumage from Pegasus - that's horsefeathers!"
The Year in Short Fiction
Saturday 12:00pm
Adam Golaski, David G. Hartwell, Sean Wallace, Gary K. Wolfe (mod), Brian Youmans
Description: [no description given]
Estimated attendance: 25 people
Youmans edits an anthology called The Best of the Rest, consisting of works which appeared in small press publications. Hartwell edits a "best-of-the-year" anthology. Wolfe reviews short fiction for Locus. Wallace is an editor at Wildside Press (among others).
Wolfe started by saying it seemed that there are more "best-of-the-year" anthologies than there are professional publishing venues. (This is true, I think, only if you exclude original anthologies.)
Hartwell noted that he is both the oldest editor (at sixty-five) and the one with the most Hugo nominations (thirty-one, with no wins). (He also said he was the one with the most years editing, but I think he forgot Ellen Asher.)
[For most of the panel, the panelists seemed to be talking about hot new writers, instead of the best writers.]
Hartwell mentioned Darryl Gregory ("Second Person, Present Tense" in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine) as the most interesting new writer. Wolfe added that Gregory seemed to be writing in the tradition of Daniel Keyes, but Hartwell thought he was more directly in the tradition of Greg Egan.
Youmans recommended Holly Phillips's collection In the Palace of Repose, Sandra McDonald (in The Best of the Rest and elsewhere), and Constance Cooper.
Golaski asked about magazines. Youmans had a long list of recommendations (some of which are on-line subscription magazines: Aeon (http://www.aeonmagazine.com/), Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine (Australian, http://www.andromedaspaceways.com/), Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (http://www.lcrw.net/lcrw/), Electric Velocipede (http://members.aol.com/evzine/), Say ... (with different continuations each issue), Tales of the Unanticipated (http://www.totu-ink.com/), Not One of Us (http://not-one-of-us.com/), On Spec (http://www.onspec.ca/), Lone Star Stories (http://literary.erictmarin.com/), and Lenox Avenue.
Hartwell said that he was surprised that Postscripts (from PS Publishing) was included in The Best of the Rest, as he did not think of that as small press. Youmans said that it was similar to Interzone. Hartwell asked whether Youmans recommended staying away from "big" webzines that seemed to publish an enormous amount of material. Youmans said that these did not seem to exercise any sort of editorial control or judgement, and of one site he finally concluded, "I'll eat my shorts if they ever put up anything good." Any site putting up ten stories a month, he said, is using their slush pile.
Wallace suggested Strange Horizons as a good small-press zine, but Youmans said he considered it professional. Wallace also mentioned Fly Trap.
Golaski recommended Tim Pratt ("Impossible Dreams" in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, a story I recommend as well). I think he said that Pratt was also the editor of Lenox Avenue.
Wallace recommended Chizine (http://chizine.com/), but also collections by Joe Hill (Twentieth Century Ghosts), Holly Phillips, and Margo Lanagan. He said that Hill will have several stories in various "best-of-the-year" anthologies, and noted in passing that editors try to avoid overlap in these anthologies.
Hartwell said there are many constraints on "best-of-the-year" anthologies. Length is one; usually there is room for (at most) one novella. So if one includes Connie Willis's "Inside Job" or Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners", no one else's novella has a chance in that anthology. Wolfe said that another notable novella of the last year was Ian McDonald's "The Little Goddess". Another limitation on novellas is (ironically) the small-press market: Wolfe said that if an author has a novella published as a small-press volume, their contract generally rule out any appearances in anthologies for some period of time. Subterranean Press, for example, buys exclusivity, so Willis's Inside Job will not be in any "best-of-the-year" anthologies. (Thank Ghu my library buys Subterranean Press books!)
Wolfe said that by Mark Kelly's count in Locus there were three thousand short fiction pieces in 2005, meaning that there is a huge range to look at for anthologies. He also said, "The 'Year's Best' are not the year's best; they are the year's better-than-most, or the year's not bad, or the year's pretty good."
Getting back to specific recommendations, Golaski named Glen Hirshberg ("The Devil's Smile" and others in American Morons). He said that he finds the various "best-of-the-year" anthologies a good way to keep track of good small press collections.
As for original anthologies, Hartwell said that the best ones were Nova Scotia: An Anthology of Scottish Speculative Fiction (edited by Andrew J. Wilson) and Constellations (edited by Peter Crowther). The latter, he said, did not get the notice it deserved because it was lost in the flood of monthly DAW original anthologies. (Oddly, though DAW usually sends these to me as review copies, they did not send this one, so one wonders if it had less distribution as well.)
Hartwell also mentioned Adventure #1 (from MonkeyBrain Books), edited by Chris Roberson. Youmans mentioned an anthology he had seen called Daikaiju (edited by Robert Hood and Robin Pen) about Japanese monsters that he said was not that good, but Hartwell thought that the Garth Nix story in it ("Read It In the News!") was good enough that Hartwell chose it for his "best-of-the-yesr" anthology.
Youmans suggested another collection, Jay Lake's Tel: Stories.
Golaski recommended Brian Everson's collection The Wavering Knife and Mary Caponegro's collection (The Star Cafe. He also recommended the magazine Conjunctions in general. Wallace recommended Stephen King's "The Things We Left Behind" (in Transgressions edited by Ed McBain).
Hartwell said that another good anthology was the Canadian annual, Tesseracts.
Wallace said that there were no good or excellent horror or fantasy anthologies in 2005, but Wolfe suggested The Fair Folk edited by Marvin Kaye.
Wallace named some more recommendations: Theodora Goss's "Pip and the Fairies" (in Strange Horizons), Gavin J. Grant's "Heads Down, Thumbs Up" (at scifi.com), M. Rickert, Yoon Ha Lee, Jay Lake (again), Tim Pratt (again), and Chris Barzak. Wolfe added Paolo Bacigalupi. (Ironically, this is one of the names that I can spell without having to check later. For many authors, my hearing is just not up to interpreting the sounds.)
Golaski recommended Jan Wilt (who writes what Golaski called "long short fiction"), Don Tumasonis (from the Netherlands), Christopher Harman, and Peter Bell.
Hartwell said that we should not forget the people who were not new writers, but were still turning out excellent work: Robert Reed, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Baxter, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, Vonda McIntyre, Joe Haldeman, R. Garcia y Robertson, Ted Chiang, Bud Sparhawk, and Cory Doctorow.
Wolfe seconded this, saying, "The presence of a familiar name does not mean a familiar story."
Youmans added the name of Sarah Monette to the list. He also made what he described as a provocative comment - that this was "the beginning of a bright new era of short fiction, because science fiction is very appropriate for on-line, for the Internet." The only problem is that people need to get used to paying for it.
Hartwell noted that in this regard, the highest paying market for authors on- or off-line is the weekly magazine Nature, which pays $130 for 800 words (their standard length). Subscriptions to this are $200 a year, which means that no one subscribes for the one story per issue. (I wonder if I can get these through inter-library loan from my library.) [About a month after this, Nature announced they were no longer taking submissions - the 800-word stories were a one-year experiment and they had filled all the remaining slots.]
Wallace said that in his opinion webzines are not sustainable business models; original anthologies or collections are the new thing. (Maybe so, but the same was true in the 1970s, until the glut killed them for three decades.)
Click here to read the second part of Evelyn's event report
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