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.
The Fiction of Jorge Luís Borges
Saturday 1:00pm
John Crowley, Jeffrey Ford, Lissanne Lake, Rachel Pollack, Mary A. Turzillo (mod)
Description: [no description given]
Estimated attendance: 40 people
Turzillo introduced herself by saying that she had won a Nebula in 1999, and that
part of her Ph.D. dissertation was on Borges. Crowley said that he had been reading
Borges since the mid-1960s (which is when Borges was first translated into English).
Turzillo asked if Borges was a magical realist, and whether Crowley had called
him "slipstream"? Crowley said that the term "slipstream" had never passed his
lips, and that Borges was not part of any movement, but sui generis. (He admitted,
though, that Borges's early works might fit into such categories as the gaucho
genre.)
Pollack though that Borges's fiction had a certain resemblance to midrash and
kabbalistic texts. Lake thought they were not really stories, but more blank verse
poems. (I can see this for the shorter ones, but I don't think it applies to "Death
and the Compass", for example.) Crowley pointed out that in Spanish, Borges is
known primarily as a poet. Ford just said, "I wouldn't try to apply any of these
terms."
Ford said that one characteristic of Borges's fiction is that his "sense of humor
is incredible." He said that authors are often told "show, don't tell," but Borges
told (as did Anton Chekhov and Rudyard Kipling) with great success. Crowley added
that Stanislaw Lem is "another teller, not a shower." Some stories of Lem's, he
said, have no characters at all. (He described one with an artificially constructed
universe, but did not mention the title. My Lem expert suggests it might be either
"Non Serviam" from A Perfect Vacuum, in which "beings simulated in a computer
discuss the creator". or "How Trurl's Perfection Led to No Good" from The Cyberiad,
in which "Trurl builds a simulated kingdom in a box for an exiled king. But since
he is such an excellent constructor, his simulation is no different from reality.
This story inspired the game 'SimCity'.") In fact, Crowley said that the best
part is often the idea itself, not the story. (I think that he was referring both
to Lem and to Borges.)
Ford said that Borges's stories have "idiosyncratic details to stick with you,"
but are really very spare. They are magical, but not magical realism. Ford later
said that according to Alberto Manguel, Borges did not like the writing of Gabriel
García Marquez (who is considered the major magical realist). Crowley observed
that English-language readers often think that Latin American writing is all one
thing. (He added that Eric Van seems to have coined the term "Anglolexic" to describe
readers in English.)
Turzillo said that another characteristic is that many of Borges's narrators are
malicious and deceitful. (This continues a trend Borges started earlier, when
he wrote pieces for A Universal History of Infamy which purported to be true,
but were in fact fictions. Pollack said that this carried through to having the
humor at the expense of the reader, though Ford noted that in "Borges and Me"
("Borges y yo", a.k.a. "Borges and Myself") it is at the expense of the author.
Crowley though it notable that Borges achieved such pathos in spite of the sparseness
of his writing, and compared him to Nabokov in this regard. (I find it hard to
think of someone who wrote five-hundred-page novels as a "sparse" writer.)
Pollack said that she had used Borges in a story (as "Luís the Blind Librarian").
(Other authors have done this as well, notably Poul Anderson in Harvest the Fire
and Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose.)
Lake said that one thing to notice about Borges's fiction is that the characters
are Spanish men, rather than Latin American ones.
In response to a question, Crowley said that the first Borges he read was "El
Aleph". Ford said that part of what makes the story so memorable is that access
to the Aleph is so idiosyncratic. Turzillo added that at first Borges makes the
rival poet despicable, but then he has the narrator act despicably as well. Pollack
said that this is the story with the deepest kabbalistic references. The letter
"aleph" is silent, she said, being merely an opening of the mouth. (I'm not sure
this is entirely true in the spoken language today.) "Aleph" is also the unknowable
God, and it is also the symbol chosen by Cantor to represent infinity.
Lake said of "The Aleph" and other stories by Borges, "His characters continuously
find the limitless and the unknowable, and reject it." Crowley observed that "strivers
toward mystic knowledge assume it is good," but in Borges's work it is bad.
Lake said that reading The Book of Sand is like surfing the Internet. (I had no
idea what this meant, so I reread the book - and I still have no idea what it
means.)
Ford described Borges as a "book nerd who wants to seem worldly." That is why,
he said, his early stories all have knife fights and other expressions of machismo.
(Borges supposedly liked "West Side Story" a lot because of the knife fights.)
Lake said that annotations made to Borges's historical fiction indicate that streets,
colors, etc., all have political overtones that most non-Argentinian readers will
miss.
Returning to Kipling, Ford said that in graduate school, people pooh-pooh Kipling,
Ray Bradbury, and others, but Borges loved them. Crowley said that Borges also
admired Chesterton, and liked sensational crime stories (as can be seen from Borges's
own book A Universal History of Infamy.
Crowley talked about "hoax erudition." For example, in The Book of Imaginary Beings,
he says that "Melanchthon in Hell" is from Swedenborg. Melanchthon cannot leave
his room after writing about being "saved by works," but gets worse, because he
cannot change his mind. Crowley does not believe that this was from Swedenborg.
(On the other hand, I cannot find it in The Book of Imaginary Beings, so either
my notes are wrong, or I am grossly misspelling the character's name, or Crowley
was indulging in his own hoax erudition here.) One sees the same false attributions
in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and other entries in The Book of Imaginary Beings.
Crowley said that in "The Precursors of Kafka", Borges even claims that Kafka's
existence created his precursors.
Pollack said that she found James Joyce's Finegans Wake "like Borges, but completely
opposite." Borges condenses everything into an Aleph, while Joyce expands everything.
Crowley claims that Finegans Wake is what the viewer in "The Aleph" sees.
Turzillo asked about translations, saying that Borges was such a citizen of the
world that there must be translations in many languages. On the other hand, she
said, James Joyce (to whom Borges was earlier compared) is not translatable. (My
observation is that I find Borges easier to read in Spanish than Joyce is in English.)
Someone in the audience said that Borges liked Ulysses but after he read Finegans
Wake he said that Lewis Carroll had done it better.
From the audience, Eric Van said it seemed symbolic that "Pierre Menard, Author
of the Quixote" was Borges's first published story, since it emphasized the connection
between writer and reader, and was also a funny parody of literary criticism.
Turzillo said that much of the psychology of Pierre Menard seems to have become
standard these days, when plagiarizers say things like, "I could have written
it" or, "I channeled it."
Pollack said it also raises questions like "Do authors own their own names?" Crowley
related his experience, not with authors' names overlapping, but with duplicate
titles, when both he and Peter Benchley had books titled The Deep come out at
the same time. There was no intent to defraud, and you cannoy copyright a title,
so both books proceeded.
Turzillo said that another incident with Borgesian overtones is when Philip José
Farmer asked Kurt Vonnegut if he could write a novel using the pseudonym Kilgore
Trout (a character in one of Vonnegut's novels). Vonnegut thought Farmer was just
kidding, so he said yes, and was quite distressed to discover that Farmer had
benn serious.
Eric Van noted that "The Garden of Forking Paths" starts with a note from Borges
claiming that it was just a manuscript he had found, and that the first few pages
of the manuscript had been lost. Lake said it made writing the story so much easier
by not having to be careful to lay a good foundation for it. Pollack said that
Herman Melville's Pierre does the flip-side of this: Pierre finds a pamphlet which
is a satire on Ralph Waldo Emerson that claims to tell the reader how solve all
their problems, but when Pierre turns the page, he discovers that the last section
had been ripped out. Crowley gave another example, the Rosicrucian text "The Chemical
Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz", where the end was also missing.
Crowley said that it was notable that Borges's first publication in English was
not in a mainstream literary magazine, but in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science
Fiction ("The Circular Ruins"). (This is not quite accurate - it did not appear
in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but was published in Judith Merril's
The 11th Annual of the Year's Best S-F.)
Ford pointed out that for people who wanted more information, the English-language
The Aleph and Other Stories: 1933-1969 has a long autobiographical essay that
is not available anywhere else.
I Never Metafiction I Didn't Like
Saturday 3:00pm
John Crowley, Ron Drummond (mod), Scott Edelman, Barry Malzberg, Rachel Pollack
Description: "There's a lot to say about the nature and enterprise of writing
and reading fiction, and a long tradition of saying it within the text of fiction
itself. One need look no further than the works of Jorge Luís Borges to find a
surprisingly broad range of approaches and techniques for doing so (although there
are certainly other role models). Our authors talk about their motivations for
writing metafiction and for choosing their specific devices."
Estimated attendance: 50 people
Edelman said that fifteen or twenty stories out of his sixty stories were metafiction.
Whether that was considered a large percentage or a small one was unclear. Pollack
said that her non-fiction about the tarot is metafiction. (I do not think that
non-fiction can be metafiction.) Crowley said, "I'm John Crowley and I too am
a confessed metafictioner."
Drummond asked, "If God wrote the Bible, why did he make Shakespeare a better
writer than he is?" He also commented on the relationship between our lived lives
and the stories we tell each other.
Malzber said that this was "really deep stuff - am I on the right panel?"
Crowley said that in traditional fiction characters are not allowed to imagine
their authors - if they do, it is metafiction. On the other hand, we are encouraged
to imagine our author. And the whole gnostic conception adds another level of
author.
Pollack quoted a Hasidic saying: "God created human beings because God loves stories."
She gave the first example of metafiction: Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino,
which has a town populated by characters who have deserted their novels.
Edelman disputed some of this, saying "I don't see life as being story" until
you shape it and give it meaning. Drummond claimed, "We shape it when we remember
it."
Edelman said that in writing there are certain defaults: third person, no authorial
asides, and so on. (In theatrical terms, there is no breaking of the fourth wall.)
He gave If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino as an example of metafiction.
Calvino's reasoning was that since one always has high expectations at the start
of a book, he would include only starts. Later, he also suggested his own "The
Suicide Artist", which is written in the second person.
Pollack returned to the tarot, saying that in Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies
the characters tell stories with tarot cards. Pollack also made some comments
on deconstruction (which I did not completely understand), and that "we don't
know they are telling stories, or telling these stories."
Drummond talked about the oft-made claim by authors that "the characters take
over the story." Crowley noted he has never made this claim, and said that Vladimir
Nabokov also denied this ever happened to him. For one thing, Crowley said, "You
know they are characters in a novel, and they don't." They don't go to the bathroom,
or eat three meals, or sleep eight hours a day either. If the characters realized
this, it would be a gnostic realization. Edelman noted, however, that then the
character would know that the realization itself from the author. (Someone in
the audience said that Kurt Vonnegut set his characters free at the end of Breakfast
of Champions.)
Malzberg said that Alice in Wonderland is metafiction, but asked for a stronger
definition of metafiction. He said, "It's kind of like the Singularity" or Damon
Knight's definition of science fiction, which do not have real definitions. He
suggested, though, that "metafiction is fiction about fiction." One model he gave
was, "Am I dreaming of you or are you dreaming of me?"
Crowley said that probably more than half of all world fiction ("which I have
read") is self-aware that it is fiction. That is, one runs across phrases such
as "there are so few pages left for me." (In that sense, any first-person narrative
would be self-aware.) Drummond and Edelman both said they thought that was just
part of the story-telling style.
Pollack said that metafiction had to be about this, not just a casual use of it.
An audience member suggested that metafiction "had to include the reader in the
equation."
Crowley said that one problem is that modern fiction assumes a naive reader.
Someone in the audience suggested that books such as The Book of Imaginary Beings
and so on - non-fiction books about fictional places - might be considered meta-fiction.
Edelman said that books such as The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric
& Discredited Diseases by Jeff Vandermeer, Tim Lebbon, Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman
(nominated for a Hugo in 2004) might count. (He described this sort of book as
a "false artifact".)
Crowley said a different sort of metafiction would be George Perec's La Disparition,
which is an entire book written without the letter 'e'. Gilbert Adair's translation
into English is titled A Void and follows the same rule. A more recent example
of this would be Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. (These are called lipogrammatic
works, if you want to look for more.)
Pollack disagreed, saying that these were not metafiction, but masochism. The
authors are like people who enjoy being tied up "to push things to a higher level."
Speaking on the general issue of constraints on writing, Crowley said that the
only point of Avoid is the constraint, while the point of (say) a sonnet is not
the form itself.
An audience member suggested John Barnes's One for the Morning Glory as a story
in which the characters seem aware they are characters. For example, at one point
Barnes writes, "Boniface was delighted again, for if the Twisted Man was not a
hero but knew some of their ways, it was likely that the fairy tale, if it were
a fairy tale they were in, would reveal someone already introduced as a hero -
perhaps [the prince]." Or when at one point the king observes that the applicants
for a post have turned up a year and a day after the last holder's death, and
another character says, "Why, yes, Your Majesty, it is. And you are right. It's
the sort of time that turns up in a fairy tale. I think we are about to see something
remarkable."
Pollack returned to Crowley's earlier comment on gnosticism and said, "Metafiction
has its roots in gnosticism, questioning the roots of reality." (This would seem
to apply primarily to works with self-aware characters, rather than some of the
other types suggested here.) Crowley added that in gnosticism matter is unreal,
emotions are real, and metaphysical speculations are the most real - and that
the same is precisely true of fiction.
Malzberg said that a different sort of unreliable reality would be Jack Vance's
"The Men Return", in which physical laws change as the story progresses. ("Then
came the terrible hour, when Earth swam into a pocket of non-causality, and all
the ordered tensions of case-effect dissolved.") Crowley compared this to his
own Aegypt, of which he said, "I changed the physical laws, and now they are different
- and they always were." (A similar notion can be found in some alternate histories,
such as Mary Gentle's The Book of Ash.)
Some discussion ensued on films which "break the fourth wall" in a metafictional
way: Sherlock, Jr., The Purple Rose of Cairo, Being John Malkovich, Pleasantville,
and the final scene of Blazing Saddles. Pollack say that The Truman Show is the
great gnostic myth, and a parable of metafiction. It incorporated, she added,
Philip K. Dick's dilemma of a created universe. (For that matter, one could see
Flatland as a parable of metafiction, in which characters break the third-dimensional
wall.) Crowley added The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles. Someone in
the audience suggested "Built Up Logically" (a.k.a. "The Universal Panacea") by
Howard Schoenfeld. (Well, the audience member mentioned the story; Malzberg provided
the author, and doubtless could have told us the magazine where it firs appeared,
down to year and month, and quite possibly the page numbers for all I know, had
he been asked. His memory for this sort of thing is amazing.) The story is about
an author and his characters and their interaction. Someone else added At Swim-Two-Birds
by Flann O'Brien, which Crowley also recommended.
In some context, Malzberg quoted a line from his own metafictional novel Galaxies:
"Our youth and hope will be taken from us, but our failure will remain whole and
pure forever." (Actually, the line is "our youth and possibility may be stripped
from us, but our failure can remain shining and constant forever.")
China Miéville Interviewed
Saturday 4:00pm
Description: [no description given]
Estimated attendance: 200 people
Asked about his early experiences with literature, Miéville said he as "a case
of arrested development - in the best way." He was encouraged to read books like
The Little House on the Prairie, but complained, "There was just a distinct lack
of monsters." However, he added, "My mum was always very good about books." And
there were school book clubs, which he said made him think of the "notion of an
emergency airdrop of books." He said he even liked the colours of the books that
had monsters. Now there is a crisis in libraries in the United Kingdom, but there
is also more widespread ownership of books.
Miéville said he started writing earlier, but finally decided to become a writer
in his mid-teens. He said he was not particularly conscious of the craft of writing
at first. His academic background is in law and anthropology. He cannot say whether
his books came from his studies or pre-dated them, but that some elements certainly
came out of his studies.
Miéville had said in an earlier interview that he just tried to write "a ripping
yarn that is socially avante-garde and stylistically serious." "What an insufferable
twerp I was!" he added. However, people reading genre fiction tend to pooh-pooh
experimentation, saying things like, "I'm not interested in language; I just want
to read the story."
An experimentalist needs to locate oneself among surrealism, high modernism, ulipo,
dada, and so on, Miéville said. But as you get better, writing gets harder, because
you are more aware. "Like Beckett, you fail, then you fail better."
Miéville recommended Thomas Ligotti and Michael Cisco as two authors whose writing
is pulps merged with avante-garde. And though Lovecraft was not consciously a
stylistic high modernist, the result was the same.
The interview turned to politics. Miéville said that he wrote "Foundation" in
response to an incident in Gulf War I. He said it is claimed that "any polemic
makes bad art," but while this is mostly true, it is not always. He feels that
his stories "Foundation" and "An End to Hunger" are counter-examples. Fiction,
he said, must have more than "isn't this terrible?" And he admitted that "'Tis
the Season" is a polemic, but pleaded, "All right, ... I occasionally write things
that are not polemics." He added, "Mostly when I think politically I tend to get
very angry."
Regarding "'Tis the Season", Miéville said he was approached by the "Socialist
Review" for a Christmas story, and was tickled by the idea. "It's only a short
piece," he said. He considers himself a novelist, though he has a volume of short
stories out, Looking for Jake, which contains all his professionally published
short stories. He explains this by saying, "Discipline doesn't come naturally
to me." However, his books are getting shorter. He is still stunned when authors
commit to writing a story for an original anthology. He is in awe of their confidence
- "What if it sucks?"
His next book, by the way, is not in the same world as Perdido Street Station,
Scar, and Iron Council (New Corbizon, Baslag). He also has a young adult book
coming out in London next year. He said it is exciting and nerve-wracking when
one's writing style changes. People want writers to stretch, but dislike when
the new book is not like the last.
Miéville said that his political views and his fiction are both expressions of
the same worldview. ÝMiéville ran for Parliament as a member of the Socialist
Alliance.) He said that he felt that Tony Blair's move to the right disenfranchised
an entire group, leaving "only one position in two-and-a-half flavors." The Socialist
Alliance never thought they could win, he added, but they were distressed by the
continued insistence that there is no alternative. He decried the campaign asking,
"Vote for us because we're not as bad as them."
Regarding the counter-argument that a third party will "split the vote," he pointed
out that the Labour Party split the anti-Tory vote in the early 20th century several
times before it finally became a major player. He said, "I will not take the idea
that the Democrats own the progressive vote in this country." He then went into
a long rant on this, ending with "this is my opinion."
(My observation is that if he does not think that votes for Nader were wasted
- or worse - then he should not complain that Bush got elected.)
Getting back to his writing, someone in the audience said that one aspect of Miéville
was that he does not explain the strangeness in his books. Miéville explained,
"I really like culture shock." He added that a local London person who is not
a trained guide will skip Trafalgar Square, but point the best butcher shop in
town. He will show you things you may not be interested in, and skip what you
are.
Miéville described himself as a child of 'Doctor Who' and 'Blake's 7'." In fact,
he said, "One of the key plot points [in Perdido Street Station] was completely
lifted from ['Doctor Who's'] 'The Mask of Mandragora'." There is also an influence
from role-playing games and world-buildings, leading to the fantastic, dreamlike,
and visionary. There is a "geeky mania for systemization," he said, that means
that while the main ideas behind Cthulhu are that Cthulhu is unthinkable, unknowable,
etc., games like "The Call of Cthulhu" declare things like "Strength: 100". However,
it is true that an author must know the details to write the story.
Asked about music, he said that his favourite, drum and electronic bass, "has
sort of, kind of, sort of died. [But] its creaking zombie shuffles on." His favourite
composers are Benjamin Britten, Arthur Schoenberg, Carl Maria von Weber, and Johannes
Bach.
James Morrow Interviewed
Saturday 5:00pm
Description: [no description given]
Estimated attendance: 100 people
Morrow began by putting up a big poster from Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and
saying it illustrated his talk, "Why We Still Need the Enlightenment, or Frankenstein
Meets the Wolfman".
Regarding the blurb on Jonathen Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music. "That was
back in 1991 when I didn't know what the word postmodernism meant. Now it's 2006,
and I don't know what the word postmodernism means."
Of his latest book, he said, "Triumphalist narrative is the case." It is about
the clash between medieval and Renaissance/scientific thinking (the former represented
by the Wolfman and the latter by Frankenstein). Before Newton, the moon had mystical
meanings, but "what we now regard as incompatibility was not manifest" to the
participants. He recommended Masks of the Universe for scientific history. He
said, "In matters of creation God is marvellous, but in a rational argument you
want Newton."
Harking back to the panel on satire, Morrow said, "Satirists always have to worry
about whether they are merely mocking the topical."
He also said that his daughter Kathy is Holly in This Is the Way the World Ends,
but in general, "the characters don't map onto people in my life in an easy way."
Morrow asked, "Why do we pay religion such deference? And such unearned deference,
it seems to me."
He said that he had "friends who went out to Hollywood and didn't come to a good
end." But he had dabbled in film, with an 8mm adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's
"The Telltale Heart" and a science fiction film called "The Futurians". (It was
so long ago, he did the sound on an open-reel deck and used a variable-speed camera.)
"An artist's best friends are his limitations," he explained. "I love the minimalism
of theatre."
Asked whether his works were fantasy, science fiction, or something else, he said,
"[Towing Jehovah] got the World Fantasy Award and I'm not about to return it."
According to Locus, his first three novels (The Wine of Violence, The Continent
of Lies, and This Is the Way the World Ends) were science fiction, and the rest
are fantasy or satire.
Morrow says that when people talk about this being "the best of all possible worlds,"
the emphasis should be on "possible": "the best of all possible worlds."
Blameless in Abaddon is his favourite novel, written as a riposte to C. S. Lewis's
The Problem of Pain. Lewis (according to Morrow) insisted that animals do no feel
pain, that it is only a simulacrum of what we feel. Lewis assumes we suffer because
we learn from it, so he could not admit that animals felt pain. "He writes this
stupid, glib book. Then life kicks in, as it does even for Oxford dons." After
this Lewis "writes a very different theodicy, A Grief Observed," which he again
described as a cri de couer.
Morrow said was "dissing" J. R. R. Tolkien a lot, then he married a Tolkien armchair
scholar. He had a background in curriculum development, and so when they were
asked to create a Tolkien curriculum, they did, because, as he said, "We needed
the money."
In Tolkien, he felt there was Manichaeism, which he described as "the single worst
idea humanity has come up with." He also disliked the idea that "blood will tell",
the notion of the rapaciousness of technology, and so on. He did say that "the
character Sam is some kind of achievement." The question was raised as to why
someone does not organize a Hobbit Socialist Party. "But Sam is not just a 'happy
darkie'," Morrow said.
Regarding the success of The Last Witchfinder, he was asked, "Do you feel vindicated
now?" "You bet!" What he thought was interesting was the success of that book
after Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich rejected. "I don't know why I'm doing the
atheist thing," he mused. "Someone is obviously watching out for me."
He also commented on the featured author, saying "[Borges] does stuff I wouldn't
dare to do, like write stories without plots or characters."
The 20th Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition
Saturday 8:00pm
Craig Shaw Gardner (mod), Yves Meynard (champion), Glenn Grant (ex-champion),
Cecilia Tan, Eric M. Van (mod)
Description: "Our traditional evening entertainment, named in memory of the pseudonym
and alter ego of Jonathan Herovit of Barry Malzberg's Herovit's World. Ringleader
Craig Shaw Gardner reads a passage of unidentified but genuine, published, bad
sf, fantasy, or horror prose, which has been truncated in mid-sentence. Each of
our panelists - Craig and his co-moderator Eric M. Van, champion Yves Meynard,
ex-champion Glenn Grant, and returning challenger Tan - then reads an ending for
the passage. One ending is the real one; the others are imposters concocted by
our contestants (including Craig) ahead of time. None of the players knows who
wrote any passage other than their own, except for Eric, who gets to play God
as a reward for the truly onerous duty of unearthing these gems. Craig then asks
for the audience vote on the authenticity of each passage (recapping each in turn
by quoting a pithy phrase or three from them), and the Ace Readercon Joint Census
Team counts up each show of hands faster than you can say "Bambi pranced." Eric
then reveals the truth. Each contestant receives a point for each audience member
they fooled, while the audience collectively scores a point for everyone who spots
the real answer. As a rule, the audience finishes third or fourth. Warning: the
Sturgeon General has determined that this trash is hazardous to your health; i.e.,
if it hurts to laugh, you're in big trouble."
Estimated attendance: way too many people
We have never liked this, but people said it had improved, so we figured we would
give it a try. But the excerpts read dragged on s-o-o-o l-o-o-o-n-g that we bailed
out after the first one. (I think there were supposed to be five.) I did find
out that at least one professional editor does not like it either.
The Garden of Forking Borges Translations
Sunday 10:00am
Eric Van (mod), Evelyn C. Leeper, Charles Oberndorf, Jean-Louis Trudel
Description: "Is the best translation always the most faithful? Our panelists
have a sufficient reading knowledge of Spanish and will compare the very different
Donald A. Yates (from Labyrinths) and Andrew Hurley (from Collected Fictions)
translations of the final paragraph of Borges' classic "The Garden of Forking
Paths" (attendees can follow along with a handout). Which do they prefer? Which
is more literal? Which is more faithful, and is that the same thing? What can
we learn about the nature of translation?"
Estimated attendance: 30 people
(What would have been very useful for me to have read before this panel was the
lecture by Borges on translation included in Borges on Writing edited by Norman
Thomas di Gionvanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane. Instead I read it about
a month later.)
To the Yates and Hurley translations cited in the original description, we also
added the Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd one, included in Ficciones.
Trudel said that we had to realize that the notion of perfection in translation
is deceptive. (He has done translations of his own work, and so should know. Ironically,
he said he was not even sure he had been paid for one of his translations, because
he did it at 3AM after a long party.) One problem is the practicality of finding
translators.
The question arose as to whether it is better for a translator to be working to
or from his first language. There was no definite answer, but everyone agreed
that it is important to translate from the original language. Apparently the Portuguese
translations of Borges were done from the English translations! Andrew Hurley
tried hard to avoid this in his recent translation of The Book of Imaginary Beings
by seeking out the original sources that Borges cites when these are not originally
in Spanish, and translating from them.
Oberndorf said that another problem was that there are different words in Spanish
based on region, as well as authorial style. For example, Borges places the adjective
before the noun far more often than "traditional" Spanish would do. (I wonder
if his early exposure to English has something to do with this.) Borges also uses
"street language" or slang rather than upper-class language.
We then started analyzing the translations a sentence at a time. So first I will
give you the original, and the three translations:
Original Spanish [Ficciones, Emecé Editores]:
"Lo demás is irreal, insignificante. Madden irrumpió, me arrestó. He sido contenado
a la horca. Abominablemente ha vencido: he communicado a Berlín el secreto nombre
de la ciudad que deben atacar. Ayer la bombardearon; lo leí en los mismos periódicos
que propusieron a Inglaterra el enigma de que el sabio sinólogo Stephen Albert
muriera asesinado por un desconocido, Yu Tsun. El Jefe ha descifrado ese enigma.
Sabe que mi problema era indicar (a través del estrépito de la guerra) la ciudad
que se llama Albert y que no hallé otro medio que matar a una persona de ese nombre.
No sabe (nadie puede sabir) mi innumerable contrición y cansancio."
Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd [from Ficciones, New Directions]:
"What remains is unreal and unimportant. Madden broke in and arrested me. I have
been condemned to hang. Abominably, I have triumphed! The secret name of the city
to be attacked got through to Berlin. Yesterday it was bombed. I read the news
in the same English newspapers which were trying to solve the riddle of the murder
of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert by the unknown Yu Tsun. The Chief, however,
had already solved this mystery. He knew that my problem was to shout, with my
feeble voice, above the tumult of war, the name of the city called Albert, and
that I had no other course open to me than to kill someone of that name. He does
not know, for no one can, of my infinite penitence and sickness of the heart."
Donald A. Yates [from Labyrinths, Grove]:
"The rest is unreal, insignificant. Madden broke in, arrested me. I have been
condemned to the gallows. I have won out abominably; I have communicated to Berlin
the secret name of the city they must attack. They bombed it yesterday; I read
it in the same papers that offered to England the mystery of the learned Sinologist
Stephen Albert who was murdered by a stranger, one Yu Tsun. The Chief had deciphered
this mystery. He knew my problem was to indicate (through the uproar of war) the
city called Albert, and that I had found no other means to do so than to kill
a man of that name. He does not know (no one can know) my innumerable contrition
and weariness."
Andrew Hurley [Collected Fictions, Viking]:
"The rest is unreal, insignificant. Madden burst into the room and arrested me.
I have been sentenced to hang. I have most abhorrently triumphed. I have communicated
to Berlin the secret name of the city to be attacked. Yesterday it was bombed
- I read about it in the same newspapers that posed to all of England the enigma
of the murder of the eminent Sinologist Stephen Albert by a stranger, Yu Tsun.
The Leader solved the riddle. He knew that my problem was how to report (over
the deafening noise of the war) the name of the city named Albert, and that the
only way I could find was murdering a person of that name. He does not know (no
one can know) my endless contrition, and my weariness."
(I took some notes, but most of what follows will be my comments, because I actually
have the best notes on that.)
Of the first sentence, Oberndorf thought Temple & Todd's "what remains" too poetic.
My objection was that if Borges had wanted a conjunction, he would have used one.
The same is true for the second sentence. and here Hurley also makes changes that
eliminate Borges's staccato rhythm. Trudel said, however, that Hurley is more
accurate, because "irrumpio" means "burst into," not "broke into."
There was much discussion of whether it was better that Yates kept the term "gallows".
From the audience, Fred Lerner said that one decision a translator has to make
is whether to use modern English (or whatever the destination language is) or
the English of the era of the author. He thought that since Borges was a fan and
a contemporary of G. K. Chesterton, using Chestertonian English would be appropriate.
I also argued that changing "condenado" from "condemned" to "sentenced" was presumptuous,
since there was a Spanish verb "sentenciar."
I thought translating Borges's "abominablemente" as "abhorrently" did not make
it any less awkward, but Oberndorf said that "abhorrently" is stronger, as is
"abominablemente" in Spanish.
I wondered why Temple & Todd, and Hurley also, changed "he communicado a Berlín
el secreto nombre de la ciudad que deben atacar" and "ayer la bombardearon" into
the passive voice. Oberndorf pointed out that the passive voice keeps the word
"bombed" at the end of the sentence ("yesterday it was bombed"), where it is much
more emphasized than in Yates's "they bombed it yesterday." Someone in the audience
said that in fact both the words "yesterday" and "bombed" are both emphasized
in the Spanish, and also in the passive construction.
I disagreed with Temple & Todd's implication that the newspapers were trying to
solve the enigma. Also, I felt that Yu Tsun was a stranger to Albert, but not
necessarily "an unknown."
Where Borges says, "El Jefe ha descifrado ese enigma," none of the translators
retained the word "enigma". The translation of "Jefe" is more correctly "Chief",
because "Caudillo" would be "Leader", though the panelists seemed to feel there
was little difference. However, Hurley also changes the tense from past perfect
to simple past.
"Indicar" seemed to give all the translators problems. Temple & Todd translate
it as "shout", but that would be "gritar". Hurley makes it into a larger concept
- a whole report rather than a pointing out a single item.
Temple & Todd again go for a passive implication in "I had no other course" rather
than "I found no other course". Hurley restructures the whole sentence and recasts
a negative ("no other course") as a positive ("the only way")`
As for the final sentence, Van says that Borges uses the word "innumerable" three
times, and it would best be translated as "uncountable", which would imply many
worlds, and many forking paths. Yates's "innumerable" is close, Temple & Todd's
"infinite" further away, and Hurley's "endless" misses it entirely.
Bad God! Bad God!
Sunday 11:00am
Alex Jablokov, James Morrow, Patrick O'Leary (mod), Paul Park, Diane Weinstein
Description: "'The Deathbird' by Harlan Ellison and 'Faith of Our Fathers' by
Philip K. Dick are only two of many classic sf stories that posit the existence
of a God who is malign, deranged, or incompetent; James Morrow devoted an entire
trilogy to the theme. Why the need to explain the existence of evil with such
a God, rather than no God at all?"
Estimated attendance: 50 people
Weinstein began with the example of the Cthulhu Mythos. (Someone later claimed
that H. P. Lovecraft was an atheist.) Park added the (obvious) recent one of the
God envisioned by Phillip Pullman in the "His Dark Materials" series. Jablokov
said of the latter, "I had just read that to . . . my Catholic-raised, Catholic
son." He added that non-monotheistic religions often have malign gods (which is
probably why the description specified "God" rather than "god"). And of course,
a malign God is defined as one who is "not acting in my best interest."
O'Leary wondered why people postulate a malign God rather than just an absent
one. Park said that are certainly structural reasons when writing a book: "It
gives significance to bad events if you establish a will behind them." Weinstein
thought it was because "we are hard-wired to want order," even if it is an order
dictated by a malign God. "Most people are upset with the notion that there is
nobody at the wheel."
Park said that often non-religious authors manufacture a malign God in their works.
The other alternative is to decide that suffering is meaningless. But Morrow added,
"We don't say there are no causes of misfortune other than the Divine." His novel
This Is the Way the World Ends, for example, has misfortune without a malign God.
Jablokov said that every book has a deity - the author - and this deity is usually
malign to the characters in the book.
Morrow again talked about C. S. Lewis and how Lewis does not take pain seriously
in The Problem of Pain. O'Leary talked about our general outrage at innocent suffering,
and said that to him the impulse to ask the question is proof of another realm.
Morrow said that he was an atheist ("a word I don't care for at all"). He said
that his reaction to Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey was not to try
to analyze why God chose to kill those people on it, but "let's build better bridges
in the future." In fact, he pointed out that even believers say this. (After the
death caused by falling concrete in the Big Dig, believers did not try to figure
out why that person was chosen to die - they tried to figure out whom to blame
for building a defective tunnel.)
Morrow also said that if suffering has meaning, as believers often claim, why
avoid it? He seemed to agree more with Elie Wiesel, whom he quoted as saying that
we are doing the Devil's work when we justify suffering. And Morrow reminded the
audience that Wiesel's writing came out of an experience of evil, not an intellectual
contemplation of evil.
Jablokov said that he thought the panel should be more focused on the literary
aspects, not the theological ones. He did say that one could consider Freudian
psychology as a subset of literary criticism, and that no one writes about a dream
that has nothing to do with the story, so the other aspects impinge on the literary.
O'Leary said, "As authors we are tempted to create a coherence that doesn't exist
in real life." Park said that authors provide the trouble and authors provide
the explanation. Someone in the audience suggested that maybe God just thinks
of us as characters with no real existence. (This sounds like Philip K. Dick territory
to me.)
Morrow claimed, "My playing God is more in the way or mode of being a parent."
He said that people often put forward the ontological/aesthetic defense that most
of what we see is ordered, and is not suffering. Some theologian he was reading
described this as, "This is not a Lovecraftian world."
O'Leary compared the yearning for God with an analogy from the "Dog Whisperer",
who says that dogs need a dominant male. O'Leary called this the "anxiety of emptiness."
Jablokov disputed this somewhat, noting that Buddhists have no God, and wondering
if writers raised as Buddhists feel the need to create a God in their fiction.
(Kim Stanley Robinson is the only Buddhist science fiction author I can think
of off-hand, but I do not think he was raised that way.)
O'Leary suggested that the (monotheistic) believers often say, "Everything is
for a purpose." (But then the Buddhists say that suffering is punishment for sin
in a previous life, so eliminating a deity does not negate this claim.)
Someone in the audience asked if there are satisfying "bad God" characters. Morrow
said that in his novel Blameless in Abaddon, God provides his own counter-argument.
Someone else wondered whether the idea of a good (benevolent) God is just a modern
idea, observing that the Roman gods (for example) were not beneficent. Morrow
said that there is much more dualism in the Old Testament, particularly in the
book of Job. He said that God has great lines, but never actually addresses Job's
questions. As Morrow said, "'Where were you when I made the earth?' is massively
beside the point" as a response to Ob's question about why God is allowing Job
to suffer.
(I am reminded of the time Mark Leeper said something negative about "Star Trek"
and someone took him to task, asking, "Who are you to criticize 'Star Trek'?"
Mark's response was, "Who do I have to be?")
Returning to authorship, Jablokov said, "The question of the ontological reality
of our fictional characters [doesn't affect me]."
Someone in the audience suggested that such disparate works as Dogma and "The
Gospel of Judas" were gnostic works dealing with a malign deity. Jablokov said,
"I always found the modern popularity of gnosticism perplexing," since the notion
of the "saved" (or the "elect", or whatever) seemed more like a high school clique
than a religion. He (or someone) quoted Robert A. Heinlein as saying, "Most gods
have the manners of a spoiled child."
Jablokov made the comparison to Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" - they are not
absolute truth, but rather a narrative generation system. And other authors use
that same system as well. In fact, he said that one reason that Christianity was
so successful was that it was able to spin off different franchises (in the form
of denominations as well as various major divisions).
Why is the New Weird, Weird?
Sunday 1:00pm
Judith Berman, Michael Cisco, Nick Mamatas, Sarah Smith (mod), Sonya Taaffe
Description: "In an essay written for The Third Alternative and reprinted in Locus,
China Miéville described the literary movement known as "the New Weird." The New
Weird renunciates hackneyed fantasy by taking its clichés and inverting, subverting,
and converting them in order to return to the truly fantastic. It is secular and
political, reacting against "religious moralism and consolatory mythicism," and
hence feels real and messy. And it trusts the reader and the genre in two important
ways: it avoids post-modern self-reference, and it avoids didacticism, instead
letting meaning emerge naturally from metaphor. Given such a broad agenda, it
naturally has heterogeneous role models. What strikes us most about this very
able description is that nowhere is any weirdness prescribed. It seems that any
writer who observes this agenda ends up creating a world that is somehow off-kilter
and evokes cognitive estrangement. Is this a comment on the nature of reality?
Or is it more a comment on the clichés of fantasy and what's left over when you
avoid them all? Is reality truly weird at some deep level, or is weird the only
thing left that isn't hackneyed?"
Estimated attendance: 30 people
Berman began by saying that she did not believe in the New Weird at first, and
in fact Miéville has since retracted the description. However, there does seem
to be one group of writers of the weird working towards "consolation" and re-doing
the familiar, while the writers of the New Weird are not. The New Weird, she said,
emphasized the "relationship between the beautiful and the grotesque." You need
the grotesque to counterpoint the beautiful.
Cisco thought the category was largely in terms of the market. Now, for example,
long epic fantasies are in, so if you are not writing long epic fantasies, you
need a label for what you are writing. "It's not just about avoiding influence."
Mamatas thought that Miéville's perspective was strongly influenced by the "Battle
of Seattle" and the Socialist Labour Party, and that Miéville had also called
the New Weird "Post-Seattle fiction". (The Socialist Labour Party saw it as an
anti-capitalist movement.) However, the description of the New Weird as given
would also apply to H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Aickman. (Mamatas also noted that
no one had done introductions, and said he supposed that they were considered
too bourgeois.")
Berman said she had written a standard quest novel and found it reviewed as "more
alien than 'Star Trek'", as though "Star Trek" was the ultimate in alien.
Taaffe said there was a differentiation between traditional fantasy and the New
Weird. When did traditional fantasy become just a kid with a sword, etc.?, she
asked. Those who quested in The Lord of the Rings cannot stay in the world because
they have been so affected by their experiences. However, if the New Weird is
a reaction against traditional fantasy, she said, "I can understand why people
would want to react against Terry Brooks."
Berman observed that the political and social aspects of fiction are important
to Miéville, and that Michael Swanwick's "hard fantasy" has similar goals to the
New Weird.
Taaffe wondered, "Where did this idea of the fantastic as comforting come from?"
Owl Service by Alan Garner, for example, is not comforting. It has myth and epic,
and is a young adult novel, but it is not reassuring.
Cisco said that "doing the opposite [of something] often becomes a mere exercise,"
but that Miéville's use of the political distinguishes his work. He writes, Cisco
said, "fictions about the realities of human imaginings."
Smith talked about the "limitations of what the world is about." That is, religion
is not interesting as a focus, but politics is. Cisco said that Jorge Luis Borges
talks about stories being something not necessarily true, but plausible.
Mamatas said that to him Miéville's books seem similar to the "Dragonlance" novels,
and are nothing new or amazing. (Later he described what Miéville writes as "post-revolutionary
Dragonlance novels.") All the large publishers are creating sausages, and treating
books as products or commodities. Berman asked, "Is the New Weird anything different?"
and Taaffle wondered if the New Weird had to be fantastic.
Someone said that "weird" is an affect, Mamatas said that it has to do with the
writing, and Berman said it has to do with content. Mamatas said that Miéville
has said that the New Weird is not about an unreliable narrator, and it is not
interstitial diction. Smith thought that "interstitial" is more multi-media.
Someone in the audience asked who is writing the New Weird, and Cisco listed Miéville,
M. John Harrison, and Thomas Ligotti. Mamatas said that people use the term "New
Weird" to mean "recent and unusual", which made me wonder if there are any authors
who would be the New Weird if they were writing now. (I guess that Lovecraft and
Aickman were already mentioned.)
Mamatas said that Jeff Vandermeer is called a writer of the New Weird. He says
he is not, but he accepts the label for marketing purposes. Someone in the audience
said a lot of these labels seem to mean "me and my friends" or "me and people
I want to be my friends."
Berman noted there was now a "mundane science fiction" manifesto, proving that
just about anything can become a category. Mamatas said that one could define
a category of "books with people being eaten", but it is not a useful category.
Someone repeated the claim that "cyberpunk" really meant "works of Gibsonian sensibility."
Someone in the audience noted that the writing of Lovecraft and Mervyn Peake was
different from J. R. R. Tolkien, and this was part of the notion of the New Weird.
Berman said the New Weird often relied on "the city as a source of endless fascination
and grotesqueries." Taaffe gave examples of P. C. Hodgell's Godstalk, Fritz Leiber
(the "Lankhmar" series), and Walter Jon Williams's (?) City on Fire. Berman named
Ysabeau Wilce; Smith suggested Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
Cisco said this all indicated "an interest in more surreal writing." Smith said
some of this applied to Latin American writing as well. Taaffe, ignoring Miéville's
statement otherwise, said that Vandermeer's unstable text and unreliable narrator
was part of the New Weird, along with Vladimir Nabokov and Kaitlin Kiernan. (If
all it takes is an unreliable narrator, then Christopher Priest is part of the
New Weird.) Cisco added T. S. Eliot's fragmentation, mis-matching, and incompletion
in "The Waste Land" as a precursor to the New Weird. Taaffle said that this fragmentation
sounds like Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Somehow everyone then got into a discussion of the Third World, and how Zunis
believe their problem are due to their gods being taken away to museums, and that
insanity was due to possession by dead people, and how "all this makes sense,
but not to you." This seemed to have little, if anything, to do with the New Weird.
Sense of Wonder in the New Hard SF
Sunday 2:00pm
Jeffrey A. Carver, Daniel P. Dern (mod), Geoffrey Landis, Teresa Nielsen Hayden,
Ian Randal Strock
Description: "'Sense of wonder,' it seems to us, is what happens in our brains
when a writer shows us something we hadn't conceived of that strikes us as remarkable.
Much of the SOW in classic hard sf was evoked in stories of space flight, where
it seemed to come relatively easy and naturally. The SOW we get from the nanotech
and man/machine interactions in Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide, the genetic
and cybernetic enhancements in Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist stories, or the
biology in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy seems both harder earned and very
different in flavor. Is SOW still central to the subgenre?"
Estimated attendance: 35 people
Landis looked at Carver and suggested a panel on "Fiction by People Named Geoffrey/Jeffrey".
(It worked better in spoken form.) Well, I guess the panel could talk about Carver
and Landis, but also about Geoffrey Chaucer and even Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Carver said emphatically, "I do believe that sense of wonder [is essential for
the sub-genre]." And he added, "For me, outer space is still an important part
of that."
Nielsen Hayden said that science fiction and fantasy are descended from the Romantics,
who talked about a sense of the sublime. This led, among other things, she said,
to lots of tourism to the Alps
Landis said, "Modern science fiction has been strip-mining the sense of wonder,"
and it is now being used as 'throwaways'. And pop culture is strip-mining the
sense of wonder from science fiction. The example he gave was a video game that
has ringworlds . . . as a mere background element.
Strock felt that the real space programs have never had the sense of wonder that
science fiction had; the most exciting parts were the unexpected. (It does seem
to be true that there is more sense of wonder in the Apollo 13 story than in hitting
golf balls on the moon.) Dern responded that there had been a speech on "West
Wing" that brought back the sense of wonder in the space program.
Going further, Strock said that the sense of wonder is the unexpected, "not knowing
what was going to happen." Nielsen Hayden disagreed somewhat, saying, "Some of
us get our sense of wonder without a sense of surprise." She said that there was
a sense of wonder in how pachinko balls form a bell curve, or in Fibonacci spirals.
(Mark Leeper would undoubtedly agree with this.)
Dern said that this sense of wonder seemed harder to achieve in nanotechnology,
biotechnology, and other hot topics in the new hard science fiction, and said
in particularly, "The Singularity leaves me cold." Landis responded that the Singularity
by definition is something we cannot write about because the premise is that we
will be so changed that we cannot understand the result. Stock thought it was
a factor of size: space is big, but biotechnoloy, and especially nanotechnology,
is small.
Nielsen Hayden said that making the readers understand the science is key to a
sense of wonder.
Carver suggested that the science fiction field has gotten darker, and Nielsen
Hayden agreed that there are now more hard-boiled detective science fiction stories,
or ones set in worlds where nothing is new. Pulp science fiction had "no kinks,
no back alleys, no despair." Both types saw something true, though. It is just
that science fiction needed to recognize the dark side.
As for some of the new hard science fiction that does have a sense of wonder,
Landis mentioned Greg Egan, specifically "Wang's Carpets" but all of Egan's work
in general. Landis warned, however, that even though he has a Ph.D. in physics,
Egan sometimes goes over his head.
Carvwer confessed to spending more time lately raising kids rather than reading
science fiction, but named Vernor Vinge. Nielsen Hayden agreed about Vinge, particularly
A Fire upon the Deep, and added J. M. Ford ("Erase, Record, Play"), And Kim Stanley
Robinson's "Mars" series. Strock suggested Michael Flynn's "Firestar" series.
Carver said that the audience for science fiction seems to be contracting, but
Nielsen Hayden disagreed. She said that you do not get bestsellers the way you
do in fantasy, but the total readership (in all categories) is growing, and the
science fiction percentage is at least stable.
Picking up perhaps on Landis's claim that pop culture is strip-mining the sense
of wonder from science fiction, an audience member asked whether modern movie-craft
hyperrealism is making things more mundane. Carver responded that more "stuff"
did not make subsequent "Star Wars" films more wonderful, implying that sense
of wonder is not derived from amazing special effects. (Let's face it, the Cantina
scene was a real sense-of-wonder moment, and it was really very low-tech.) Strock
noted that the later trilogy of films were "bad guy wins", and not triumphal at
all. The same, he said, was true of "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica".
From the audience, Bobbi Fox suggested that maybe the readers need to be more
educated to understand the sense of wonder in, for example, the bell curve or
the Fibonacci sequence. Strock said that the term "flying car" generates an instant
response, but "nanotech" requires a lot of thinking about. Jeff Hecht suggested
that "our view of science grew darker" in the 1950s and 1960s and that this is
just reflected in science fiction. Landis disputed this, saying that science was
dark in the nineteenth century. Nielsen Hayden noted that the Columbia Exposition
of 1893 started the technocracy movement that was so popular in early twentieth
century science fiction.
One audience member noted wryly that people dislike current technology, but are
still attracted to new technology. Carver said that so much has become commonplace:
lasers, CD players, etc. (My brother wrote in a column five years ago or so that
when someone asks him if he has bought a CD, he thinks of the bank first, not
the music store.) Nielsen Hayden said there was a continuum - Sopwith also helped
design the harrier jet. But cell phones have broken about two-thirds of the thriller
plots. As she noted, "We live in an amazing universe."
Landis said, "That's why I read science fiction, for the sense of wonder. But
I want the sense of wonder to be earned." He said there is also such a thing as
an "anti-sense-of-wonder", and gave as the example the current spate of books
about Mars. They all end, he said, with either us discovering alien intelligence
or terraforming Mars. None of them accept the inherent wonder of Mars as it is.
Carver said that the panel on the solar system was "just reeking with a sense
of wonder."
Landis concluded that "a sense of wonder is still there in the new hard science
fiction." In fact, he said, "It's what the new hard science fiction is about."
Carver said, "The sense of wonder is in your willingness to experience a sense
of wonder." Nielsen Hayden said that the early sense-of-wonder writers grew up
in poverty and despair during the Depression and a sense of wonder was all they
had, but it is better to live in a world where a sense of wonder trickles down.
Suggested panels for future conventions:
Religion in SF - but the entire panel is made up of representatives of non-monotheistic
religions
Fiction by People Named Geoffrey/Jeffrey.
Copyright 2006 by Evelyn C. Leeper
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