a collection of book reviews

Wednesday, 23 July 2025 05:09 pm
philomytha: image of an old-fashioned bookcase (Bookshelf)
[personal profile] philomytha
I write up books when I read them and forget to post the actual review, so here's a collection of books I've read sometime in the past six months.

The Anatomy of Courage, Lord Moran
As recommended by [personal profile] black_bentley, a constant pusher of fantastic books, thank you! This is all about fear and courage in warfare and their relationship with shell-shock and other psychological traumas of war. The author was a trench doctor in WW1 and then later became Churchill's personal physician, though this book is almost entirely about his WW1 experiences, written in 1942. It was a really fantastic read.

Sometimes the biases of the era come through: Moran occasionally comes out with stuff about how 'good racial stock' is required for avoiding shell shock and cowardice, but it always feels like those are platitudes he's occasionally diverted by before getting into the practical, vivid and very sensible things he has to say about the causes of mental breakdown, based on his WW1 observations. He has a lot to say about the differences between a professional standing army and a citizen army of conscripts, about how men in a citizen army react to danger, how good morale and esprit du corps are protective against mental trauma, how fear operates and how to combat it, what courage looks like, what kind of leadership soldiers respond to and its impact on the mental wellbeing of the soldiers - he doesn't use modern jargon for any of this, but that's what a modern reader would take from it. He talks a bit about the different branches of the service and how the air force and navy and submarine service have different impacts on mental health both because of the different demands of the service - the group isolation of a ship vs the largely solo isolation of a fighter pilot - and because of the different traditions and beliefs these services held about themselves, and compares that to experience of the infantryman in the trenches.

In an odd way I found it a very relatable and reassuring book. It made me realise that I'm pretty confident I have the type of courage Moran talks about, to hold firm when horrifying things are happening because others are depending on you holding firm, and confident not in a sort of wishful-thinking I'm-sure-I-could-do-that way, but the same way I'm confident I can spell miscellaneous: I've done it, or something as like to it as a middle-aged woman in peacetime can get, lots of times before. I recogised a lot of the emotional dynamics he describes, the way you recover after a sudden shock of violence, the temporary unravelling and how your mind and body heal up again, and I also recognised the factors that protect, or in their absence damage, your ability to hold firm, both practical - food, sleep, rest breaks, humour, health - and moral - the belief in what you are doing and why, social support from others doing the same thing, the conviction that failure is not an option. A really good, insightful book.


Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans, Daniel Cowling
Apologies if the title causes you to get a song stuck in your head for the next week, I already had the song stuck in my head and then tripped over the book. This is a decent general overview of the British occupation of Germany 1945-9; Cowling doesn't go into anything in tremendous detail but gives a little bit of lots of things. I've read books that take a much deeper dive into certain aspects - the Berlin Airlift, the T-Force memoir and also the bonkers sigint book, plus a general book on the postwar atrocities across Europe - and so some of this was a bit top-down overview compared to that. The chapter on 'fratting', for instance, was interesting read against the memoir with its candid details about German women selling sex for food, and the relationship with the former owners when living in requisitioned property. Though, given the memoir's emphasis on partying and having fun and hiring one's friends, that certainly backed up Cowling's chapter on the ineptitude and bad behaviour of the military and civilian government. Cowling's argument comes across a bit incoherent at times - there's an awful lot of 'wow the occupiers were awful and incompetent and made a total mess' followed by a chapter on the rapid recovery, economic growth and stable democratic government in West Germany afterwards, so you're left wondering just how Cowling thinks these two accounts fit together.

There was quite a lot about the economics of the occupation, I did love the chapter on the black market and some of the unforeseen consequences. The 'money for old smokes' scandal was ridiculous: British soldiers and civilians stationed in Germany got a free ration of cigarettes, fifty a week. Cigarettes were the de facto currency of German civilians, the mark being essentially worthless in 1945-6, and so you could trade your cigarettes with German civilians for anything from accordions to dental care (though sex was usually paid for in chocolate or other food). And one thing you could trade them for was German marks, lots of them. But there was one place where German marks were used at their official exchange rate, and that was NAAFI shops. So you could take your free cigarettes, sell them for an awful lot of German marks, then take the German marks and exchange them in the NAAFI shops for whatever you wanted. Which included postal orders and savings bonds in sterling, which you could deposit in your nice British bank account. If you saved up your free cigarettes for a few months, with 500 cigarettes you could easily get £100, which was a tidy sum. And it seems that practically everyone stationed in Germany realised this at once, because this particular type of transaction led to a £50 million hole in the occupation's budget. Which is an argument for the incompetence of the British administration, certainly.

And as for the title, Cowling doesn't ever really engage with the question: were we beastly to the Germans, and should we have been. It's interesting to compare this book to Keith Lowe's Savage Continent, which is a much broader book in scope and yet also vastly more detailed and incisive: Lowe really engages with the question of human suffering on all levels and the historian's ethics, he talks about the lack of acknowledgement of the Holocaust in the immediate post-war attempts to prosecute war crimes and care for refugees, about the expulsion of ethnic Germans from much of eastern Europe and how the very real suffering this caused is used by historians of particular political bents who want to argue that the Germans were the real victims of WW2 and setting it in the context of what else was happening and to who... by contrast Cowling never really gets into the difficult questions. He quotes an awful lot of British newspapers and their opinions of how generous or harsh we should be to German civilians postwar - in many ways this is a British newspaper account of the occupation: how it was perceived at home in the context of what was happening politically in the UK, and that's about the level on which Cowling engages with the question. He gives brief snapshots of varying attitudes - a display in London of daily rations for German civilians which was designed to show how much worse off they were in 1946 than British civilians (whose food was rationed even more severely than in wartime) ended up with a lot of people thinking the Germans were still getting much too generous an allocation. On the other hand Cowling also includes stories of British soldiers routinely handing over their rations to famished German children. But he never really engages with it beyond this superficial skim of attitudes, and he also avoids exploring the German perspectives and what they thought about it. So, a good general overview of the occupation and introduction to it all, but go elsewhere for insight and detailed analysis.


Paid To Be Safe, Margaret Morrison & Pamela Tulk-Hart
The final of my IWM wartime novels, written together by two ATA ferry pilots about a fictional ATA ferry pilot. So not quite a memoir, but strongly based on real experiences and set at real airfields. I really enjoyed this, it's deftly written, captures the essense of the experience beautifully and is full of fascinating detail. And also death: this is a book in which a lot of the characters die, because it's wartime and that's what happens in wartime and I don't doubt that the main character's experience of multiple bereavements is both realistic and realistically written.

Our heroine is Susan Sandyman, who managed to escape Singapore before the Japanese arrive and has just arrived back in England, with husband and infant child both dead and desperately in need of something to think about that isn't that. And she learned to fly back when she lived in Malaya, and so she joins the ATA to become a ferry pilot, and we follow her adventures until the end of the war. There's a tremendous amount of fantastic detail about the training process, vivid descriptions of life in the training schools, the different people Susan meets and what the training is like, and all the things she learns about all the different aircraft and the process of learning how to cope with a job where you might fly five different types of aircraft in one day, compared to the normal RAF training where you might only ever fly one or two. There were some fantastic stories that must have been drawn from life like how a caterpillar in a pitot tube can very nearly make you crash.

The title, Paid To Be Safe, is what was drummed into the ferry pilots: their job is not to take any risks, their job is to transport the valuable and much-needed aircraft safely from A to B, their job is to keep themselves and their aircraft safe at all times and to know how to never get into dangerous situations in the first place. Despite this it is still a dangerous job, and ferry pilots die in training and in service - as I said, this is a book where sudden death can happen to anyone at any point, whether it's disease or bombs or airplane crashes, a very wartime book with this constant thread of trauma running underneath everything else.


The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
This was a really good Terror forced proximity AU readerfic that had an incoherent plot sellotaped to it. Loved the time travellers getting to know each other and the modern world, and their characters were drawn fairly well, but all the other characters were pretty bland, and the main character and narrator in particular was very much a generic-tumblr narrative voice. There was plenty of drama and excitement and events, I whizzed through the book waiting for the moment when it would all make sense, but it never did, the plot was just tacked on to try to explain to the non-fandom world why the author was writing Graham Gore/modern reader self insert. But despite that I'd have read another 100k of Time Travellers Have Adventures With Bikes And Spotify, especially if it had involved more about one of the secondary time travel characters, Captain Arthur Reginald Smyth, retrieved from the Somme about five minutes before his death and by far my favourite of the characters for highly predictable reasons. A fun but frustrating book.

presented without explanation

Wednesday, 23 July 2025 04:12 am
yhlee: a stylized fox's head and the Roman numeral IX (nine / 9) (hxx ninefox)
[personal profile] yhlee
story WIP in Novelist.app

(Novelist.app appears to be genuinely free.)

Leaf By Niggle Promo Post

Wednesday, 23 July 2025 10:03 am
elwinfortuna: (all shall fade)
[personal profile] elwinfortuna posting in [community profile] innumerable_stars
Summary

Have you ever really really wanted to just be working on your fanfiction or fanart but instead you have some mundane life stuff like working at a job and keeping on top of your housecleaning that you have to do, and you just absolutely resent it? Well, then you’ll know how Niggle feels. He’s always thinking about his art, but he’s got duties to attend to, a neighbour who needs help, and a Journey to go on.

Why Should I Check Out This Canon?

This short story, a rare attempt at allegory from professed allegory-hater JRR Tolkien, is a touching and heartfelt look at the way that inspiration and duty clash, finding friendship in unlikely places, the joy of creation, and the unknown impact that what a person makes can have. It’s very Catholic in some ways but is overall a heartwarming and beautiful little story with some very funny bits. There’s also shipping potential!

Where Can I Get This?

Available either on its own or as part of the compilations Tree and Leaf or Tales from the Perilous Realm wherever books are generally sold. It is also available as an audiobook narrated by Derek Jacobi. Leaf By Niggle can also be found in the Internet Archive’s copy of Tales from the Perilous Realm.

What Fanworks Already Exist?

There are 7 fanworks archived at AO3. I was only able to find a few pieces of fanart (such as this rendering of Leaf, by Niggle)when I looked around; this canon is about an artist, and has incredibly evocative imagery. As such, it definitely needs more fanart!
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

Book Club: The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Newly reprinted under the author's current name, The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed is a post-cyberpunk novel about brain modification, being queer in an oppressive society, the media, species extinction, and the possibility of changing human nature. In 2010, Jo Walton called it "one of the most important books of the last 20 years." We'll discuss what made this novel groundbreaking in 1996, what makes it still fresh and relevant today, our favorite lines that aren't the beginning and ending, and the throwaway worldbuilding detail that most caught our attention.
Kate Nepveu (moderator), Marianna Martin PhD

Last panel report! ... with so much extra.

The audience said they were okay with spoilers, so we included general spoilers for premise and worldbuilding from the beginning of the discussion. I will have a separate clicky arrow for ending spoilers. (Very gratifyingly, when we got to that point of the panel, someone in the audience got up and left, saying something like, "I decided I want to read it myself after all!")`

I gave a little summary of the premise for the couple of people who hadn't read the book, which I will try to recreate/improve upon now.

summary of the premise, with quotes

The book is set in Russia about 300 years in the future. Previously: America ("the Guardians") conquered most of the world [1], committing genocide through lowest-bidder concentration camps and ruling for 50 years. They were defeated probably 75 years ago, mostly by an army of ordinary people who were mind-controlled by a computer virus that erased itself from their minds once it detected victory. (Africa, which is now a walled-off technological paradise, took Egypt back from the Guardians without the virus.)

Maya is a camera, which means she broadcasts news as her senses experience it—except with a screener to filter out not just distracting bodily urges, but also forbidden topics, lest she attract the Weavers (immensely scary censors who live in the internet to prevent another mind-control virus). Screeners instantly know their cameras' minds in full. Cameras have no such reciprocal knowledge. As the book opens, Maya is broadcasting a series about why the reign of the Guardians is barely remembered, unlike the Holocaust and the Terror-Famine [2]. And she has a brand-new screener, Keishi.

footnotes

[1] North America, Eurasia, Egypt, and Japan, as far as we can tell. Hat tip to the Wizards versus Lesbians podcast for pointing out that the rest of Asia doesn't seem to exist; after I heard them say that, I looked and didn't see anything about South America either.

[2] No other information is ever given about this, just the way none is given about the Holocaust.

But actually, the book does not open there. It opens with Maya writing to her audience:

The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be—all this you know.

What a first line.

The prologue ends with another banger:

I will give you my thoughts since that time, but not on moistdisk. I will not let you explore the twining pathways of my thoughts as I explore them—not again. I will hide instead behind this wall of words, and I will conceal what I choose to conceal. I will tell you the story in order, as you’d tell a story to a stranger who knows nothing of it: for you are not my friend, and what you know is far less than you think you know. You will read my life in phosphors on a screen, or glowing letters scrolling up the inside of your eye. And when you reach the end, you will lie down again in your indifferent dark apartment, with the neon splashing watercolor blues across your face, and you will know a little less about me than you did before.

(In addition to the narration, it's useful to know that the book moves through different modes, and some people find the last half to be a jarring change, for expectation-setting purposes.)

panel notes, plus some more thoughts

With that background, we got into the discussion proper.

Marianna: ways in which book is about camera and editing reminded of Dziga Vertov, 1920s Russian cinema, had a manifesto about how in the future we would become cameras. Maya is a camera, constantly making decisions that are directing and editing her broadcasts: pan here, add background information there.

Marianna cont'd: anticipating current social media, when livecasting everything: are we actually seeing what they are? not only that, but the asymmetry in the screener-camera relationship predicted parasociality. as does Maya's relationship with her audience: she needs them, she's uneasy about their demands, they think they know her and they don't—they don't even know what she looks like, she uses a false userpic because she's older and scarred with old-fashioned sockets drilled into her head—and there's literal emotional feedback between them. (also, the camera is preemptive censorship like using euphemisms on TikTok.)

audience member: thought about "veil of Maya" in Hinduism, which is a false reality. me: oh, so that's what Keishi was referencing!

me: going back to Vertov, that reminded me of the book's terrible monomaniacal old man, Voskresenye, who had idea that true teleprescence, that is, what cameras broadcast, can save humanity: overcome the "sins of locality" that arise from being trapped in our own skulls and unable to achieve empathy.

Marianna: Vertov was propagandist documentary maker, believed that if people just saw what was really happening, would get on board with the Russian Revolution. not only that but "Cine-Eye" technique would help improve/evolve humanity.

Marianna cont'd: thinks there are three themes that underpin SF in general: memory, identity, trauma. they all come together in this book so powerfully. but doesn't argue for universality in sense of uniformity, Voskresenye is also very angry about enforced homogeneity and exclusions.

(later on, we talked about the book's pondering of whether love results from, or is stifled by, intense mental intimacy.)

Marianna cont'd: all that and we haven't even mentioned the dead psychic whale yet!

so this may have been where I talked about Moby-Dick, which I re-read specifically so I could talk about how it relates to this book! it's name-checked by the text, given to Maya as a memory:

The novel seeped into my mind, like milk into a sponge. A man tattooed with frogs and labyrinths; a leg of polished whalebone; duodecimo, octavo, folio whales; a coffin bobbing among the waves; and in the blue distance a white mass rising, unknotting its suckered limbs, and sinking: unearthly, formless, chance-like mockery of life.

But it's a lot more in conversation with it than that quote may indicate.

  • They both have a central queer relationship. For those who haven't read Moby-Dick but have heard vaguely of Queequeg (the tattooed man), you may not know that Ishmael meets him because there is literally only one bed at the inn. The next day, Queequeg says that they are "married," and they go up to bed and talk, "in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair." This is text.

  • They both have terrible monomaniacal old men, as previously noted.

  • They are both narrated after the fact by narrators with specific agendas. Ishmael is desperately trying to understand what happened and to make us understand what happened. Maya is also trying to understand what happened, revisiting Keishi's actions and her own decisions; and she says she's trying to reduce our understanding, but I'm not so sure about that. Also, so much foreshadowing.

  • There is a whale, who is intelligent and filled with hate of humans, but only because humans keep bothering him or her.

  • They both are surprisingly funny. (I liked when Maya needs to insert a really gross public plug into her head—this is the very embodied kind of cyberpunk—but doesn't have anything to clean it: "I settled for wiping the plug on my shirt, to replace some of the unknown dirt with dirt I was on intimate terms with.")

My notes get a little sketchy here. I see that Marianna said that the novel is still frighteningly relevant, and there were times during this reread where she had to put it down. I'd previously noted on Bluesky that the Wizards vs. Lesbians podcast thought that the homophobia in the book seemed exaggerated, even though the book was set in Russia, because we'd come so far in overcoming that ... which was not an unreasonable thing to say, all the way back in 2021. Ouch. And as for the McGulags, well.

I mentioned that asexuality doesn't seem to be a concept that the characters have (again, published in 1996), so at least one of them treats the ability to feel love and desire as the same thing; this is extremely relevant and in-character but the conflation was noticeable to me and would be a good thing to note in recommending the book to people. (Significant trans themes, though.)

Someone mentioned the Richard Matheson short story "The Box," about whether you really know the person you married (originally "Button, Button").

(Also, I just realized that this Tumblr short story might be a riff off that.)

I think at this point, all that's left of the panel discussion is talking about the ending.

SPOILERS FOR THE LAST 30% OF THE BOOK

Marianna noted that the conflict between Keishi and Maya is, in addition to a fundamentally different understanding of love, very much a 1990s argument about coming out and whether people have an obligation to do so

audience: political dynamic of the decision, Keishi claiming that they will represent hope

me: the way Maya presents things throughout the book seems to me to trying to justify her distrust of Keishi and her decision to leave her, which results in her death. I'm not sure she convinces herself, based on those haunting last two paragraphs:

And if I could, I would freeze that instant forever. But it’s no use. I can trap the young rose in the hologram, but the rose is long since dust. And what I most want to conceal from you, you’ve always known:

That I went up into the world and left her there, in the prison camp beneath the ocean, with the ruined mind of the new Iscariot and the body of the whale.

(Emphasis added.) I think Maya has shame, or regret, or doubt, or all of the above.

and I don't know that I would do the same in her shoes. all through the book, Maya is highlighting how Keishi is lying to her and manipulating her—this is even clearer, more painful, and more infuriating on a reread, but is explicit on a first read nonetheless. On the other hand, at the very end, Keishi says that she was forced into all the pre-whale manipulation by Voskresenye, who does not deny it. On the third hand, it was Keishi who took over Maya's mouth—which she did before and Maya specifically told her to never do again—and forced her to recover her memories before she was ready. Even if she didn't know that Voskresenye was going to broadcast them, that is a huge violation of trust, on top of agreeing to let Voskresenye broadcast the memories that Maya was in.

and now, writing this, I've talked myself back around into thinking I would have done the same: because I don't think that I could trust Keishi to leave my brain, ever. or to stay quietly tucked away like she promised, because she said over and over that she doesn't want that, that she wants their minds to lie next to each other, and she shows over and over that she takes what she wants. including by controlling my body. and that is a very literal horror story, to the point that I may have just given myself nightmares.

Okay! I think that's about all the panel discussion, or discussion directly related to it.

additional SPOILER thoughts

I was going to do a really thorough dive into my many, many ebook bookmarks, but I must sleep. So here's just three things I already had prepared.

First: you start looking up one chapter title, you end up with a zillion links. My suggestions for your consideration:

  1. Ashes, Ashes: we all fall down.

  2. The Platypus: Oliver Herford?

  3. A Faster Cable: impossible to search; suggestions?

  4. To Make Much of Time: Robert Herrick.

  5. As a Wife Has a Cow: Gertrude Stein.

  6. The Word: was God.

  7. Khristos Voskrese: as the text says, "Christ is risen."

  8. A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves: E.E. Cummings.

  9. All the King's Horses: couldn't put Humpty together again.

  10. My Man Sunday: impossible to search; suggestions?

  11. A Property of Easiness: Hamlet, act 5, scene 1, lines 67-68.

  12. Immediate Touch: as quoted at the start of the section, Paradise Lost.

  13. Icarus: too close to the sun, etc.

  14. Tea and Sympathy: the Classical movie?

  15. Phaeton: as Wikipedia puts it: "See also: ... Icarus; Lucifer"

  16. Very Like a Whale: Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, line 382; possibly also Ogden Nash, though that would feel more appropriate for a later chapter to me?

  17. Fallen Like Lightning: Luke 10:18?

  18. You Must Remember This: Casablanca, of course.

  19. Orpheus: now you see why explaining the reference in the prior panel would have been impossible.

  20. Penelope: faithfully waiting, or not, for a spouse who came home twenty-odd years later. (edited because I got this totally backwards at first)

  21. Sorrow's Springs: Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Second: as I said on Bluesky, the contrast between Maya and Ishmael's last reported words is just brutal.

Ishmael:

"Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee."

Maya:

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Both the last things they said to the loves of their lives, but one is wholehearted affirmance that he means everything, and the other is equivocation and denial.

Third: a text to a friend after I finished rereading:

The Fortunate Fall shitpost:
one of the things it foresaw, in addition to going viral, McGulags, and the death of print,
is the meme about the mortifying ordeal of being known.

Two post-panel things:

Afterward, the person who recommended the book to the Wizards vs. Lesbians podcast came up and said hi, so that was very cool.

And I took a selfie of my white whale earrings, which I forgot to mention on the panel.

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The future has candy

Tuesday, 22 July 2025 08:35 pm
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


Back in the bygone days of last millennium, I would read a children's book series, and I think it was in Baby Sitter's Club that this happened but frankly I don't remember, where the characters would do something called sucking the filling out of a twinkie.

I had no idea what a twinkie was. The only candy I knew that was hollow and you could suck things out of was twizzlers, because we'd do things like bite the ends off of twizzlers and then use them as straws for ginger ale and then eat the twizzler. So I assumed twinkies were some kind of filled twizzlers.

Many years later -- I was about 16? -- I saw twinkies for the first time and discovered that they're nothing like twizzlers. The betrayal. The confusion. Etc.

Anyway turns out we're in the future and they now make twizzlers with a filling inside.

I haven't eaten them. They seem to be a different, softer formulation of twizzler to make it work, and I don't feel the need to explore this at this juncture.

But.

This is exactly what I thought twinkies were.

Readercon: The Next Great Gatsby?

Tuesday, 22 July 2025 03:50 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

The Next Great Gatsby?
At Readercon 33, Max Gladstone mentioned that The Great Gatsby flopped upon publication—and therefore was cheap to send to American soldiers abroad in WWII, which resulted its revival. He asked the audience to imagine how great a world would be in which, for some reason, copies of Sarah Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered were suddenly everywhere. What other books ought to be suddenly ubiquitous?
Ellen Kushner, Kate Nepveu, R.W.W. (Rob) Greene (moderator), Len Schiff

panel notes

Rob started the panel by talking about the reasons Gatsby was sent abroad, its canonization, and what that might mean for our panel. And, delightfully, he's put up a longer version of that in his newsletter, so that saves me so much typing right there.

Anyway, as Rob says over there, the first question was: "What book would create the most positive chaos if it suddenly appeared in every American household?"

Len: (who is a high school teacher, among other things): something Daniel Pinkwater, like Young Adults or The Education of Robert Nifkin

Ellen: mine! (Swordspoint, specifically.) because I've had a long time to collect reactions to it. remembers getting a negative reaction from Steven Brust, who said something like, "I didn't really like it, am I homophobic? No, everyone's just completely immoral and I couldn't handle it." Thinks some queer immorality would be good chaos. Also, even today still gets people remarking on how much of a difference the representation in it made to them

me: I don't know if it would be chaos exactly, but I had previously prepared the answer of Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison so I'm going to go with that, for the reasons in Amal el-Mohtar's essay: it's about a young girl who loses three homes and chooses the open road; it's beautiful, it's short, it's in conversation with other literature and a gateway into the author's other works.

Rob: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle, which is horror novel about gay conversion camp with demons.

(my notes are a bit of mess in terms of chronological order, I'm afraid, so I hope I haven't reconstructed things in a way that distorts)

me: I'm not sure how much I agree with the premise. when I was looking at just the text of this description and thinking about the panel—well, first I thought how great Thus Was Adonis Murdered is.

(we did talk about that, but for the sake of time and my hands, I'll refer you to my old booklog posts and move on. (Except that Ellen knew Caudwell! She met her on one of Caudwell's U.S. signing tours and then visited her in London. I was so starstruck.))

me cont'd: and I immediately started making rules for myself, because I'm like that, and one of the rules I made was that I could not use "this book could fix the world" as a criteria. partly because that's a hole I'd just never climb out of, and partly because it's just too unpredictable. books get misunderstood, they get taught to kids who aren't ready for them, people take away such personal things. of course books affect people, but maybe because I'm not a writer, my goal for this was much more humble: "wouldn't it be great if I could say to people, 'remember when Selena got super high at an orgy and ignored everyone in favor of reading Pride and Prejudice?', and they did."

me concluding: that said, when I eventually picked titles to write down, I deliberately chose all women authors. (I do not give myself a cookie, however, because they were all white.)

Ellen: I think a way to approach your objections is to think about ubiquity. everyone's read Gatsby (me: I haven't!); even if they haven't, it's part of assumed knowledge, the cultural conversation. (just to be clear: she was entirely correct about this and I was being a little bit silly.)

Ellen, a bit later: conversations about ubiquity have shifted to movies. Lord of the Rings has far more power/reach culturally now than it did except at its first wave of popularity in U.S. (where did massively influence environmental movement), and people always quote (Ian McKellen as) Gandalf saying, "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

Ellen and Len also defended Gatsby as a work against the negative effects that Rob laid at its feet (see his essay).

Rob: mentioned something about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn being the second-most-taught book in the U.S., but I didn't write down the context for that

I think this is when Rob asked what the first book was that changed our lives/opened our minds/showed us what books were capable of?

Ellen: "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," by Harlan Ellison, for anarchy and chaos.

Len: The Dispossessed. the utopian impulse is not a thing to be dismissed. dystopia is culturally determined; what we have now in the canon is because people were disappointed by Stalin. it confirms shitty things we believe about people and self-propagates. instead foreground utopia. that said, discovered the book in a counterculture used bookstore, and canonizing things risks losing a lot of their charm

Len, later: did teach The Dispossessed to high schoolers and it went over like a lead balloon, they were just not interested in it.

(I did not jump in on this, though I thought of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred D. Taylor, which I read like twenty times in fourth grade or so.)

me: asks Len about a passing mention he made of The Hunger Games being taught in high schools. that seems like a good thing? inequality is bad, and the revolution needs more than a single teenager?

Len: haven't taught it, but thinks that as long as make authority abstract, can depoliticize it. I'm sure there's a reading of The Hunger Games in which the Capitol are all SJWs.

Rob: Ender's Game is one of the most popular books to be taught. used to be (?) taught as leadership in Marine Corps University.

me: Some Desperate Glory is in conversation with Ender's Game and is very specific about the fascist nature of the leadership

someone: ideally read them together

Ellen: just found out about Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful, with regard to Gatsby

maybe in here is when Rob asked about dropping something else in place of Gatsby in high schools?

Len: refers back to Pinkwater

me: Piranesi, because Travel Light seems a little young for high school; Piranesi is also short, wonderfully written, has lots to chew on, is in conversation with other works (specifically The Magician's Nephew), and: "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite."

Ellen: wants to keep all the old difficult books being assigned in high school, because that's the only time get help reading them! know someone who was assigned Dan Brown in high school, come on

me: I had two books on my list that I thought were too dense and complicated, maybe I should put them back on! (Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh, and—of course, are you surprised by this point?—The Fortunate Fall, Cameron Reed) but also, some things seem like high school is just too early; shudder at idea Moby-Dick in high school, it's so long and I can't imagine the teachers would like explaining the chapter that's just a dick joke

Rob: Parable of the Sower

Rob to audience (copied from his essay): If you were designing a new book-distribution program for today’s challenges — climate change, polarization, technological disruption, nationalism — what would be your first five titles?

responses:

  • never know what's going to speak to you, needs to be lots of titles (like the original)

  • almost anything by Terry Pratchett (this was from Delia Sherman, and she and I discovered that we read Night Watch very differently in terms of what Pratchett, or more fairly the text, thinks of the revolutionaries in that book, which was delightful)

  • Le Guin

  • The Mahabharata! "it covers it all"

  • of course books can change the world, Costa Rico has no standing army because a key figure there read Aldous Huxley. (I would love if someone could suggest more reading on this! Wikipedia is pretty bare-bones, and this article I found might be from a somewhat conservative-leaning publication?)

Anyway, that was very fun and juicy.

The final book on my list, which I did not get around to mentioning, is The Interior Life by Katherine Blake/Dorothy Heydt, which Jo Walton reviews usefully and which is free to download.)

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Readercon: Take Your Novel to Work

Tuesday, 22 July 2025 11:00 am
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

Take Your Novel to Work
In the genre of fanfic known as "take your fandom to work," favorite characters are placed in the author's work environment, often resulting in delightfully concrete and minute details about ecological field research or running a bodega or being a summer camp counselor. How do stories of everyday vocation enhance the experience of reading and writing fiction, and what works of speculative fiction take best advantage of the granular details of work life? What can bringing characters to work tell us about both the characters and the work itself?
Ken Schneyer (moderator), Marianna Martin PhD, Melissa Bobe, Sarah Pinsker

panel notes

Ken, who writes short fiction, amended the title of the panel to "Take Your Story to Work." And asked the panelists to talk about their work in their introductions.

Melissa: children's librarian

Sarah: writing professor, have been many other things including camp counselor, working with horses, nonprofit administrator, SAT tutor, singer/songwriter

Marianna: currently academic. formerly development executive for film and TV production, administrative assistant, film projectionist, IT, bartending training but not experience

Sarah: bartending experience but no training!

Ken: currently professor of humanities. previously IT project manager, ad hoc computer programmer, clerk typist, judicial clerk, lawyer in corporate law firm, dishwasher at deli, actor, director. several of those have found way into stories. asks: particularly good examples you've read, yours and/or not?

Marianne: caveat did not read novel Discovery of Witches, but TV really got minutia of academia right. Stross, Laundry Files, vibe of working in IT. le Carré, sounds very plausible!

(anyone interested in academia and/or Discovery of Witches must, must read this fic in which the author's note reads, "i'm not so much taking this fandom to work as i am meeting it next to the dumpster behind my workplace and engaging it in hand-to-hand combat for the honor of the field of human genetics"

pachytene phase (9096 words) by magneticwave
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Diana Bishop/Matthew Clairmont
Characters: Christopher "Chris" Roberts, Matthew Clairmont
Additional Tags: Epistolary

Summary: The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics is pleased to invite you to the annual Clarence Berrigan Lecture. This year’s speaker is Matthew Clairmont, DPhil, who is giving a talk entitled: “Interspecies compatibility, meiotic flexibility, and the end of the infertility myth: insights from the southern red muntjac.” Please join us after Dr. Clairmont’s talk for a reception in the McNeil Family atrium at 5pm. Refreshments will be provided!

you don't need to know the fandom and it is hilarious)

Sarah: office vibes: Jeff Vandermeer, Authority (second one in trilogy that began with Annihilation); Several People Are Typing, Calvin Kasulke, someone gets uploaded into work Slack

Sarah cont'd: music: Randee Dawn's new one, The Only Song Worth Singing; really picky about those, good details about gritty. Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

Melissa: read T. Kingfisher, A House with Good Bones, obsessed with research and entomology. own profession: Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, Bruce Coville (alas no dragons at their library), probably led to becoming librarian

Ken: moments where certain details ticked off

Sarah: curse of being immersed something, is when encountering books where author learned by research. some do well: Dick Francis, glassblowers and meteorologists, seems like got it, at least from outside those professions. it's things that don't think to research that grate. music, people can only picture what rock star is like, not what slugging through every day. also categories where if write thing, prepare to get letters: guns, horses (I'm the one writing the letters), sailing, U.S. Civil War (and if you've done primary source research, often letters you get are wrong)

Melissa: authors try to get librarians right because know we'll buy the book

Melissa cont'd: remembered work meant to mention: The Public, movie, Emilio Estevez, made after watching interactions at LA public library. only thing not believable: entire staff but one person were all men (so much laughter)

Marianna: try to condense rant of many years. authors are like: I went to school, I know what faculty do, I don't need to look that up. get overly focused on research (academic conduct thereof). nothing about hiring, tenure, career track, which is what academics mostly care about: I don't care how in love you are, you are not leaving MIT to follow your lover and teach at an Arizona community college.

Ken: bias toward academia in mainstream novels, so think lot is accurate there. re: law: people view procedure through mainstream TV, movies, think understand. part is that day to day of law work is exceptionally boring. sitting for 12 hours a day in a library (me, to myself: Ken is showing his age: I sit for 12 hours a day in front of Lexis => ). almost threw book across room: passage in Orson Scott Card novel, character obtains divorce AND the arrangement of bifurcated child custody WITHOUT spouse's knowledge (caveat, not set in US and in future, suppose could imagine, but)

Ken cont'd: flip around other way: examples of juicy details re: something otherwise unfamiliar, what did that do for you as a reader?

Marianna: le Carré, spoiler alert I'm definitely not a spy, not just telling you that to throw you off scent. made me want to write spy novels, so good at lot of details but not overwhelming with. particularly love when get book like Perfect Spy: how does this person spend their time on an average day? what is the macro running in the back of their head? everyday stuff that you might not think about.

(le Carré came up so much at the con and every time I have to google his name to remind myself of the capitalization and also copy the accented e)

Ken: and we know that he had experience in British intelligence. can you remember particular detail?

Marianna: how much time he spent with radio when holed up in safehouse, had code keys, sitting around waiting to hear message

Melissa: because in hotel, thinking about Kate Stayman-London's Fang Fiction

—at this point, I very rudely interrupted to ask for a repeat of the title, which caused her to completely lose her train of thought. I apologized then and also after. wait until people are done talking to ask for repeats of titles, self!

anyway the publisher's page on Fang Fiction indicates that the main character is a hotel manager, and also it sounds fun.

Sarah: talking about a lot of jobs that do exist, but made think of jobs that don't but believe that do: Peter Beagle, I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, about dragon exterminator, like mice in the walls. hates his job because loves dragons, makes reader believe in this guy who knows he has to do, emotions resonant. mild spoiler for early part: protagonist tries to save some, sneaks away as pets.

Ken: The Martian, the book. main character has master's in botany and engineering conveniently. remember being struck by the thought process. no idea what experience author has, not point: I do know enough about electrical circuits to know that you need to know what gauge of wire, so completely sold that character knew what talking about, and did make me feel like I was there.

Melissa: A Magical Girl Retires, Park Seolyeon, very short, characters are all working as magical girls of X or Y, get sent on jobs, very much feels like 9-5 in hilarious way

Ken: more completely imaginary jobs?

Marianna: Stross' Laundry Files. wonderful balance between grounding familiar IT work but for government agency dealing with paranormal stuff

Sarah: all those little jobs in Terry Pratchett novels, e.g., candle snuffer. looks at Melissa: the Librarian though

Melissa: look, we take all representation

Ken: even the witches, does mundane detail so well, yeah, a real witch has to do that, more of a human interaction than anything else

(me, to myself: also, research witches.)

Ken: 15 years ago, talking with Elizabeth Hand, who said how in Glimmering, included nitty-gritty details of boat building which made real effort to research, surprised by great number of positive responses to that part specifically, not necessarily by boat builders, people who just really enjoyed. readers in general, American in particular, love to know how stuff is done, procedural details

(me, to myself: which is the joke in the Field and Stream review of Lady's Chatterley's Lover)

Ken cont'd: is detail good in and of itself, or does it have to advance plot/character/theme to be worthwhile?

Sarah: love granular detail and think is a danger of too much, either "I've suffered for my research and so must you", or because genuinely love the subject—haven't written horse novel because of risk get too in weeds. new novella Haunt Sweet Home, protagonist is working at reality show as production assistant (PA), very bottom of ladder. got lots of feedback from ex-PAs, used to live from someone who was a set dresser got some flavor from her. the things sometimes skip between big plot moments, are what make the job and character pop, so that when get to plot, believe in fully rounded character and ability/inability to do thing

Ken: remember in your A Song for a New Day, early on, step by step to get into venue and set up, played really real to me, felt like there and put me on her side

Sarah: makes it really hard to read those in public readings, not most dynamic

Marianna: just crystallized, what really sells me on details being necessary, is when feels like answering question already had, or didn't know needed until got. joy of discovery for reader, not only having fun but just learned something. can get away with a lot

Melissa: always comes back to how well written. joke never want to represent someone going to toilet, but that's first story in Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, really works. as writer, always worry that losing audience when writing library

Ken: been moments where you as reader has been lost?

Melissa: hard to lose me, find a lot of things interesting

Sarah: if I do one good thing this con, it's getting people to go read Molly Gloss, in particular The Hearts of Horses, horse trainer novel; sequel of sorts, Falling from Horses, Hollywood stuntman. details ARE the story. not SFF, basically Westerns. nobody does it better than her.

Ken: granular details about occupations as tool of worldbuilding. thinking about economy of language, classic example "the door dilated"

(me, to myself, once again: can I tell you about The Fortunate Fall????)

Melissa: Evil, CBS series, investigating Catholic Church, which everyone gets wrong (never heard priests complain, think happy to have people talking about). does get details wrong of church, but climbing and motherhood details were really interesting and well done (in the same character)

Sarah: from writer's perspective, stuff make sure to show to beta reader, especially someone who knows field really well if not your area, or if your area, to someone who doesn't know

Marianna: one of best pieces of advice ever seen, if in situation where danger of infodump but exposition needs to happen: get two characters having intense emotions, maybe even conflict, about information. can get away with so much more and also tell readers about stakes

Ken: decades ago, reading SFF story about lawyer, remember character bemoaning that his pleading-generating software was so outdated and running so slowly; opened up entire world of, what does law practice look like when there's genuinely good AI that can generate pleadings. no big commentary on that in the story, just one little detail

Sarah: going back to annoys: music related: describing music in way that music critic would. stories that do music right, talk about emotions of playing, hearing. Lewis Shiner always gets right, also LaShawn M. Wanak

Ken: reminds of TV show M*A*S*H. there are lots of doctors shows, almost always have consultant on set to ask questions of. one for M*A*S*H said, usually actors ask how to hold this instrument, they always asked how would it feel. showed in series

Ken: asks Marianna about mundane occupations in fantastical setting

Marianna: always fascinated by genre as magnifier, makes things bigger. only way to do that is to ground in mundane in one way or another. PhD dissertation about Whedon in Buffy would have outrageous situations but mundane jobs like bartending at demon bar, or inverse, to really push contrast

Ken: reminded of very short story, 15 years ago, "Accounting for Dragons" by Eric James Stone, very tongue in cheek, also satire. when look at fantastical through lens of mundane, casts light both ways

Melissa: ongoing manga, Kowloon Generic Romance, about realtors: feels very grounded but in a fictional city where things shift and disappear

(me, to myself: is manga particularly good at this? or do I just happen to hear about examples there?)

audience: reality is stranger than fiction. experience is that weird shit happens more often in real life than is written out. sparks some of my best ideas. any of that that forms heart of why you write?

Sarah: hard thing is that because so much stranger, sometimes don't read as true; wife works for liquor board, her stories are so weird (snakes falling out of ceiling onto fire marshal who was trying to figure out what rustling noise was), haven't found way to make fiction

audience: Snow Crash opening: the Deliverator was speculation, but sheer terror and anxiety is all of our delivery services now

Marianna: genre wonderful tool for laundering these things

In the rush to get notes out, I haven't been saying, "this panel was great," but if I didn't say something, they were. however, it's worth saying, and it's true: this panel was great.

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Farmer Giles of Ham Promo Post

Tuesday, 22 July 2025 10:08 am
elwinfortuna: (one ring you know you want it)
[personal profile] elwinfortuna posting in [community profile] innumerable_stars
Summary

Farmer Giles is a simple soul in a world of clever dragons, arrogant kings, fancy knights, and massive giants. He has his blunderbuss and he has his dog, and that’s good enough for him. This is the story of how an unlikely farmer becomes the Darling of the Land, complete with wordplay, an overabundance of names, and a legendary sword.

Why Should I Check Out This Canon?

Farmer Giles of Ham is a very funny and witty short story with a dragon to rival Smaug in Chrysophylax Dives, a very silly dog named Garm, and a pun to cap the whole thing off. If you’ve ever wondered why the river Thames is spelled like that but pronounced like Tames, this story provides one explanation for you!

There is potential for some fun stories involving worldbuilding, gapfillers, or further adventures, or art depicting the dragon, the dog, Farmer Giles himself, or the landscapes.

Where Can I Get This?

Farmer Giles of Ham is available for purchase as a book on its own, or as part of Tales from the Perilous Realm or The Tolkien Reader. It is also online as part of the Internet Archive’s copy of Tales from the Perilous Realm.

What Fanworks Already Exist?

There are currently 4 fanworks available on AO3. There is also some fanart to be found, such as this one of the Mock Dragon's Tail at the Christmas Feast.
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
In an article of the same name, Elizabeth Minkel discussed how "2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides." Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?
Claire Houck/Nina Waters, Kate Nepveu (moderator), Laura Antoniou, Victoria Janssen

This was my last panel of Saturday and I was so much more tired than I realized. At one point, maybe halfway through, I went looking for my next thought and found only an empty brain. So I took basically no notes beyond the setup, my apologies. I will see what I can reconstruct now, and invite anyone else who was there to chime in!

panel notes

I started by saying that I read the article in question, thought it was interesting and Readercon-ish, and dropped it in the panel suggestion box. Then I started outlining it as panel prep and wasn't sure that I agreed with it! and I knew that at least some of the panel also did not, so I hoped for a lively discussion.

I suggested that the problems in the article could be put into two groups: problems of intellectual property (IP), and problems of scale.

Problems of IP: scraping fic sites, for text and also AI-generated audiobooks. selling bound copies of fic. these are problems caused by design of fic sites but more importantly, fic authors having much less power to protect their own works.

Problems of scale: the greatly increased number of readers means that readers come to fic as fiction rather than fan fiction. this ties into ongoing conversations, as the article notes, about fracturing of fandom communities and shortening of fandom life cycles, and about distance between authors and readers.

I asked the panel what they thought about these problems, and what problems they saw that weren't addressed by the article.

Victoria: is really very mad that fan and pro fic has been scraped. really can't do much about it, just feels worse.

Claire: interesting that article didn't mention plagiarism of fic by the kind of author who releases a new novel every two weeks to flood the market in a romance subgenre. many of those are legit, they're house names or groups of authors. but many are plagiarizing and filing off the serial numbers, and romance novels are so trope-based already that it's hard to definitively identify the plagiarism. happened to friend, was only able to demonstrate because had very distinctive setup. and that author just keeps reinventing self.

Laura: have had professional work plagiarized. giggled manically about AI scraping pro erotica and fic: poisoning the data set! maybe reaction is too muted but it's capitalism. can't really protect fanfic.

Claire: harassment of fic authors. started Duck Prints Press because wanted to publish fic authors, knew could be the firewall between authors and harassers. (aside: theory was that fic readers would like reading fic-style stories without fandom characters, and turns out no: people want those characters. they're making it work nonetheless.)

lots and lots of discussion about this; see anti-shippers on Fanlore for a primer.

we generally agreed that we had not heard of any writers modifying their own writing in hopes of being plucked out of the fic websites for professional publishing, as suggested in the article.

I mentioned seeing efforts to educate new fic readers on Tumblr, where I spend a lot of time, but it's hard to tell what effect they have.

I asked people how they've connected in fandoms, or maintained connections, or seen people fostering connection.

Claire: people need to understand that it takes work and time. built up community around small fandom, by creating fandom events, setting up references for the fandom's fanartists and writers, creating a Discord. have to find people who seem cool and interact with them regularly and in a chill fashion over time: find a fanartist, comment on their stuff. may not get immediate response, but will eventually become familiar to them as a person who is not going to be weird.

Victoria: used to be active in Blake's 7 fandom, dormant for long time, participation revived recently because discovered (or was invited to?) a Discord for it, and was even meeting people from it this weekend.

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Readercon: Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies

Monday, 21 July 2025 10:55 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies
In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?
J.M. Sidorova, Laurence Raphael Brothers, Shiv Ramdas, Steven Popkes, Victoria Janssen (moderator)

panel notes

intros: say if bureaucrats and what kind

J.M. (Julia): born and raised in then-USSR, example of autocratic bureaucracy. immigrated over 30 years ago, USian bureaucracy in immigration. is opposite of bureaucrat, day job as academic scientist, pride self on being unruly

Laurence: R&D background, joined US Patent and Trademark Office as patent examiner last year, in feat of amazing timing

Victoria: day job, bureaucrat for 28 years at major research university. currently helping with grant applications, require great deal of finicky attention to detail. before that, a lot of university policies about purchasing and reimbursement

Shiv: first novel was cyberpunk bureaucracy (Domechild). bureaucracy experience in two separate countries. government of India in professional capacity, used to make ads for them; then immigration to US

Steve: career working with what people call bureaucracy, big government agencies. never really had to deal with Kafkaesque ever. really like the bureaucrats that has worked with, far-thinking and well-intentioned, hobbled by bad legislation and insufficient finances

Victoria: bureaucracy can be used for good or bad, don't really want to argue about its existence. organizing principle for any large human endeavor is basically bureaucracy. panel: have you read anything with fresh approaches, or suggest ways that bureaucracies can make good fiction

Laurence: bureaucracy implies stability in a way, even if malicious or oppressive, can hopefully find way to adapt to it.

Steve: bureaucracies have to handle issue of scale. organizations helping thousands of people, then bureaucratic structure starts to appear. Star Wars, "fear will keep the local stations in line," doesn't really work

Shiv: bureaucracy is model that is designed to only work at scale, which is unusual, can't scale down. useful to remember that was original meritocracy as envisioned, China created exams to select (and then ignored results for centuries). really cool moment in human history, did not previously have concept of best person for job gets job.

J.M.: bureaucracies are based on rules and order. range of perceptions about how fair rules are (also transparent). ideal cozy bureaucracy is heaven, also hell: rules are fixed, no arbitrariness. so many TV examples. Korean shows or Chinese, have a structure that's bureaucratic in essence, but at top is a deity: great turtle or ox that holds the world. innate sense of fairness comes from that non-human entity. reflects distrust of human, ideal of fairness. Nobody's Looking, Brazil: character figures out that little hamster in wheel powers the whole fair structure

Laurence: Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss are chaotic opposites

Victoria: comfort of predictability: in fiction, can make case for subverting that.

Shiv: challenge that predictability is one of core functions for bureaucracy. what about bureaucrats working within or against. Winston Smith in 1984 is one way

Steven: Miracle Workers: god decides to flush whole universe down toilet, two bureaucrats trying to save it

J.M.: absolutely, love it; god is not malevolent but absentee landlord, played by Steve Buscemi

Victoria: can be benevolent, non-benevolent, indifferent

Shiv: another reason challenging for story, bureaucrats are quintessential middle management.

Victoria: idea that bureaucrats go mad with power, even over really small stakes

Shiv: post-independence, India had bureaucratic system that was called License Raj, called that because was so fiendish like British still there. wanted car? go through government, takes years to be assigned one. takes years more to be assigned color ... even though there are only white cars

Laurence: bureaucrat has flexibility in interpreting the rules. once he has rejected application, can write examiner's note with advice, or suggest to attorney that have an interview so can explain conditions. some examiners like that, some don't. some green card interviewers like being kind, some get out of bed on wrong side. gives room to portray individual characters: what is their experience

J.M.: therein lies narrative tension, long for ideal bureaucracy that would be helpful and just, but only human. two problems: middle management is human, don't apply rules uniformly or at all; other side: cannot write the rules that are good enough. trying to cover all contingencies, becomes barriers

Shiv: private sector bureaucracy: try to file insurance claim. interesting, public bureaucracy designed to prevent worst-case scenario, private to prevent best-case

Steve: all worst experiences have been with private sector. (admits maybe sample is biased.)

Victoria: in private sector, people aren't rewarded for staying for long time in same job: leads to people doing things their way because institutional knowledge isn't there

V: fantasies of bureaucracy, affect how people think about government (treating government and bureaucracy as interchangeable for these purposes). how use them for positive effects?

Laurence: 20th century stories almost exclusively negative, lead to cynical and negative responses (which is not to say that not deserved). chicken and egg, Catch-22 or Kafka as responses to experiences maybe, but still cycle

V: showing bureaucrat going through daily lives and trying to do things well, goes along with seeing self in fiction. felt connection to people in Arkady Martine duology, also Murderbot experiencing different types of bureaucracy

J.M.: Star Trek itself, huge organization that works

Laurence: Iain Banks' Culture, see in interfacing with non-Culture

Shiv: Star Trek really good example, what matters is not that good, but least worse option available to you.

Steve: also Known Space, Niven, when successful, invisible. no narrative tension until fails. could do positive bureaucracy in untenable situation, e.g. natural disaster.

Shiv: how set baseline opinion of bureaucracy is during moments of non-crisis, which is difficult because stories are about overcoming obstacles. in a non-crisis, the obvious obstacle to overcome is bureaucracy itself, which is not message want to send

Victoria: trying to write post-conflict fiction, would be one way of doing it. Goblin Emperor, Hands of Emperor, consider both aspirational fantasies of bureaucracy: none of us have power of emperor, but what would I do with the power, especially since Maia (in Goblin) is so shy, downtrodden

Laurence: love Goblin Emperor, not sure best example since he is at top, many problems are because hasn't had chance to find feet. Witness for the Dead trilogy is maybe better example, very conventional church bureaucracy, protagonist working within that system; aspirational in that way too, because things do work out

Victoria: bureaucracy is background to and part of mystery plots in that trilogy

Shiv: Goblin Emperor: about to ruin, cover ears. at some point if don't draw line between politics and bureaucracy, going to have argue that Game of Thrones is bureaucracy novel. really about courtly politics

J.M.: Memory Called Empire also mostly court politics

Steve: respectfully disagree: Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings are failed systems because don't have bureaucracy, whole purpose of which to prevent what happened. "Sauron should never have gotten a building permit." medieval delegation in Europe is start of bureaucracy there, limits power of kings/emperors

Victoria: Hands of Emperor, another imperial novel but POV character is career bureaucrat. same issue of having imperial power, but mostly looking at what things this single bureaucrat puts into motion, because emperor gives instructions but bureaucrat must implement. we see that change takes time. has been working on what's effectively universal basic income, see played out in different people's lives. odd novel, massive, kind of circles back on self, but very much about civil service

audience: friend who writes legislation read it, was furious: person who writes legislation shouldn't also be implementing! can you have fantasies of bureaucracy where protagonist is not limited or collective in some way? is that necessary feature? or can we indulge in fantasy of purely good bureaucrat

Laurence: fantasy of bureaucracy, to my mind, should be much more egalitarian, focused on middle management

J.M.: the classical Western narrative with a lot of agency, is kind of at odds with this

(me, to myself: Saiyuki Gaiden features very corrupt heavenly bureaucracy and is about failing to prevail over it)

Shiv: lot of pushback about personal anonymity for specific bureaucrats. as species we really don't like not knowing who said so

Laurence: in US Patent and Trademark Office, my name is on all the rejections and allowances

Victoria: federal grant agencies: applicants know reviewers, can request not-that-one

audience: short story about alien bureaucracy gone wrong, title of which I didn't get; what would look like for alien bureaucracy to go right?

Laurence: aliens often stand for mysterious unknown powers, so bureaucracy can be monster

Shiv: weirdly, really functional bureaucracy is in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, appoint President for everyone to yell at while others do work; works at so many levels. also, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is one-person bureaucracy, developed immortality and is very mad about it, has list to personally insult every person in universe

Victoria: probably somewhere in C.J. Cherryh

audience: comment on Laundry novels, Charlie Stross?

Laurence: fun, mockery of system that deserves to be mocked

Victoria: Going Postal is a good example of good bureaucracy. obligated to mention Andor, examples of bad bureaucracy

Laurence: Too Like the Lightning, only decent people are UN functionaries

audience: Alastair Reynolds Prefect series, whole system based on voting

(me, to myself: Kagan, Hellspark; whole apparatus to determine if species is sapient)

Victoria: Rivers of London, regular cop trying to get magic police bureau and other bureaus to work together

Steve: Jasper Fforde

(I can't believe I didn't think of the Witness for the Dead books instead of Goblin Emperor! My panel idea submission even joked about how there were probably books about this that didn't have "Emperor" in the title!)

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Readercon: Let's Do the Time Loop Again

Monday, 21 July 2025 10:00 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

Let's Do the Time Loop Again
The time loop is a favorite premise in science fiction, fantasy, and, increasingly, romance. What is the nature of its appeal, and has it been growing over time or does it only feel that way? What are the different fun variations on the theme, what does the fascination with going over and over until you get it right say about our society, and how many times have you read this description now? Are you sure?
Alexander Jablokov, Andrea Kriz, Andrea Martinez Corbin (moderator), Ann LeBlanc, Carl Engle-Laird, David R. DeGraff, John Chu

panel notes

many jokes about timelines collapsing based on number of people on the panel, fact that it also ran on Thursday night

Andrea Martinez Corbin: introduce self and give one example

John: "The House that Made the Sixteen Loops of Time", Tamsyn Muir

Andrea Kriz: has collection (Learning To Hate Yourself As A Self-Defense Mechanism) with several time loop stories. other example: anime: Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Alexander: Life After Life, Kate Atkinson

David: YouTube, One-Minute Time Machine

Carl: Edge of Tomorrow, watch Tom Cruise suffer as much as he deserves

Andrea Martinez Corbin: late episode of The Magicians, things they did that expanded characters, world, delighted completely.

Andrea Martinez Corbin cont'd: Readercon loves a taxonomy. broad types of time loops?

David: went to first time loop panel to make sure did loop properly. discussed stories were not time loops and ones that were, and they were wrong. said Heinlein, "'—All You Zombies—,'" was not, but it's same character living through same events three times. also Heinlein, "By His Bootstraps," same events at different stages of life.

Alexander: is the whole world repeating or just someone's life?

David: yes, distinction in physics: 3 different kinds of time. calendar, personal, "the third kind is weird" (the space-time interval). time-travel paradoxes go away if calendar time understood as only happening once, immutable

(the resident physicist, who has written literal books on these questions, is traveling at the moment, so I have not asked him to weigh in)

Andrea Kriz: taxonomy based on number of loops. 3 times? amateurs. Puella Magi Madoka Magica has hundreds or thousands, characters suffer psychological trauma from number of loops and nature of events. also: more comedic nature, Groundhog Day. more fan of time loops where characters are: we have to try killing. Re:Zero, isekai anime/light novel where reset if "failed"

Carl: don't tend to think of a lot of Western deployments of time loops as dramatic rather than comedic. like to think about it as what time loop does to character. a lot of Eastern media, trying to achieve mastery of impossible task. Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, are intended to be instructive: going to do this again until you stop being a jerk.

someone: until you address your trauma in Russian Doll

Carl: Eastern time loops are not interested in making characters less traumatized or better. frame-perfect 100% completion speedrunners of life, or give up and become catatonic

Alexander: On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, 7 book series, hot in literary circles. no visible goal of the time loop in first book. also, things don't repeat exactly, which is another taxonomic split

John: every Western SFF TV show at some point does Rashomon and a time loop, latter which tends to be literally "until you get it right"

Carl: would put that closer to frame-perfect speedrun. no-one could do this right the first time, but it's going to get done

John: determining/testing cause and effect, each iteration figuring faster and faster

(me, to myself: how many people in the loop is another taxonomic split)

Carl: tying into questing whether more popular now. globally, yes, very common structure in webtoons, one of fastest growing media forms. regressor (who dies and returns) as common as "farm boy fantasy". thinks less prevalent in West because fewer sci-fi trope of the week shows than ever been. if Star Trek: Strange New Worlds were 20 episodes we'd have a lot more

(me, to myself: yes, so they had to leave it to Ryan North to do in a Lower Decks graphic novel)

John: Doctor Who has done multiple

Andrea Kriz: video games, especially more text-heavy ones and in indie fields, since when reset the game, that's what you are doing anyway. Undertale, Deltarune, Slay the Princess

Andrea Martinez Corbin: very short indie game, Dark Queen of Mortholme. takes final boss battle and inverts it so that you're the boss. both you and hero who keeps coming in are aware of the loop, developing relationship with hero.

Andrea Martinez Corbin cont'd: what about written things? challenges about doing it in writing, why less common?

Andrea Kriz: own story "The Leviathan and the Fury" in Asimov's, about French WWII resistance. in short format, hard to show a lot of loops. see only 1 loop in story but lot of memories, flashbacks, comparisons

Carl: had time loops on manuscript wish list for a while. wasn't seeing any. what would a novel be like that's serious about doing that, how would it satisfy what I like about it? conclusion, though glad to be proven wrong: novels want to move forward. reading words off a page is a laborious process (obviously we've all dedicated entire life to it), don't want same paragraph over and over again. novels do not control rate of reading, or whether skip explanations, so easily accessible failure modes

David: opening sequences of Edge of Tomorrow: why don't like playing video games

Alexander: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton: murder mystery, talks to different person every time

Carl: that's what you do in video game

Alexander: Life After Life is full life time loop, like evolving to get past barriers that kill her; she doesn't know that it's loop

Andrea Martinez Corbin: time loop with only one person: psychological impacts?

Carl: in isekai family of stories, protagonist is suddenly given tremendous power: time loop literally makes you only person with agency. almost all genres have very dehumanizing effect on main character, stripping personhood from everyone else. pretty misanthropic genre at moment. thinking SSS Class Revival Hunter, main character first gets power to take power from anyone who kills him, but he still dies; then is murdered by someone who can go back in time one day if they are killed. main character realizes cannot let murderer know, therefore decides to kill self 4,000 times to get back before murderer awakens to power. ultimately dedicates self to achieving happiest possible result for every person, including villain. becomes more empathetic. (and runs into someone who is looping on different cadence, 10 days, and her death erases his memories too)

Alexander: we're a mixed marriage.

Alexander cont'd (I think): if you are looping, can see the variety of others' emotional reactions in way could not in regular life, know more about them than they about themselves.

Carl: touched on in Palm Springs: woman realizes he's done the math on how to pick her up.

Andrea Kriz: ethical conundrum would like to see get covered more, of optimizing. what happens in failed loops. Re:Zero implies that failed still exist

Carl: if you're in story with someone else looping, that's horror. there's no ethical way to be the one person the universe cares about

(me to myself: AHEM, STEPHEN KING (yes, I will always and forever be mad about that))

Alexander: Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence: (interprets as) about life you want to live

Andrea Martinez Corbin: The Good Place. using time loops for different purposes than anything been talking about

John: comedic effect, speed-run first season ever faster

Andrea Martinez Corbin: Russian Doll: Western example, funny but not comedic, trauma

Russian Doll spoilers

Carl: has a really metaphysically interesting thing where two people are looping, either of whom are triggering the loop and BOTH of whom are maintaining knowledge (one of whom has been doing best to have same day every day)

Andrea Martinez Corbin: past five years, significantly, have had conversation how time feels weird and hasn't gone back to feeling normal. any relationship between personal distortion of time and interest in time loop stories, or specific types of, or is your interest broader

Alexander: to some extent think time loop stories derive from modern workplace

Carl: very much agree. time created to make factory work successfully

Alexander: thinks (effect of pandemic) would show up only slowly

John: speaking personally, idea of being able to get right, very appealing. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, musical about democracies in peril: all Presidents and First Ladies are effectively same person. first number is called "Rehearse!"

Carl: Hadestown

John: people gasped. not everyone knows the ending!

Andrea Martinez Corbin: people who do still get invested!

Andrea Kriz: think there's real hunger for time loop stories in my generation, even in my field, which is researcher in academia. isekai type work, power fulfillment genre. wondering if popularity of webtoons is from that

audience: time loop in opposition to forward motion structure of novel. finds that in model (as in, model story in Eastern media, I think) goes deeper (rather than forward, I think), so repetition gets to central truth. what can this structure tell us in Western publishing?

Carl: instructive that one of Western genre, Evelyn Hardcastle, is a mystery: each loop, drawing closer to truth that will free you

Alexander: through suffering gain knowledge, that's the hope anyway

me: surprised to find so many romance novels that are time loops. I haven't read any and doesn't seem like the panel has, so just wanted to flag that as a thing that exists

audience: Western time loops have exploded in written web serial fiction, one in particular, Mother of Learning very popular and influential. has lots of loopers working at cross purposes, trying to figure out why loop is happening and also optimize their outcomes. web serial fiction includes sites like Royal Road but also quests on forums, where readers vote on what writers should do next.

Carl: not surprised because webtoons are all adaptations of webnovels. very hard to turn into traditionally published fiction, but seeing some success. litrpg is 1:1 with isekai

audience: read time loop story that's horror, inspired by Groundhog Day with Andie MacDowell's character as protagonist. does anyone know title or venue?

panel does not, hopes that someone will find it or write it

audience: taxonomy: classify 50 First Dates: who is looping and why?

panel: has not seen, alas

audience: what are stakes for this? talk about it being dehumanizing. just the puzzle?

Alexander: motivation for a lot of the stories is to get out of the time loop

Carl: if don't figure out why, never get to experience anything else ever, infinitely

David: Spanish movie that takes slightly different way, each loop gets shorter, she realizes all going to end in another x hours and no idea what's going to happen after that. screen actually gets narrower. The Incredible Shrinking Wknd.

(the decisions I make on what I hyperlink get more and more arbitrary the further I go in these...)

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kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

The Molotov Cocktail Approach to Plotting Stories
On The Good Place, the character Jason Mendoza famously advocated Molotov cocktails as the solution to problems: "I'm telling you, Molotov cocktails work. Any time I had a problem, and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem." What other speculative fiction characters take this approach to life? What are the benefits to using the Molotov cocktail approach as a method of plotting? And what characters would we really like to hand a Molotov cocktail to, just this once?
Caitlin Rozakis, Charles (Charlie) Allison (moderator), Robert V.S. Redick, Shariann Lewitt, Sophia Babai

I did not have a great view for this panel, so I apologize if I misattribute any comments.

panel notes

Charlie: characters with this approach?

Caitlin: apologizes for inherent spoilers, because involves taking plot inherently different direction. Joffrey in Game of Thrones is legendary one (presumably this is Ned being executed)

Robert: choosing example is a little hard, because from writer's side of fence, want to create surprise yet inevitability. ones that stay with me don't feel like someone just said, we gotta shake this up, more organic

Shariann: once was given advice, when get stuck, blow something up: really very effective. but then have to put in a little foreshadowing (or might find that it was actually there all along and hadn't noticed). thinks shouldn't be as much a surprise on reader's side because not doing job

Sophia: back to initial question: as plotting and as character choice, very differently. character who realistically does that, can result in interesting plots. fascinating ones are who build up to that explosion: Stephen Graham Jones has done several times very effectively. Indian Lake series, series building to one direction, character that reader knew was going to break, does, though surprise to other characters. still, character just blowing things up can be fun, terrifying, both

Caitlin: Jason Mendoza is hot sauce, not main course

Sophia: yes, love him, but would be very different genre if he were the main character

Robert: The Scar by Sergey Dyachenko and Marina Dyachenko. lovely book. seductively awful self-absorbed rake kills boyfriend of next seduction target, target looks at him with completely indifference, which is perfect reader Molotov cocktail because all expectations upended

Charlie: is writing Jason Mendozas unique?

Sophia: had a manuscript that was very long, lot of stuff happening, each new development through new character being introduced. also had ghost character who definitionally had no sense of consequences, pure impulse. every time my agent said, this character feels a bit extraneous, decided, just going to throw ghost at it, figure out how she can get to the same end result. made it feel much less chaotic and tighter, also much funnier. that said, this was revision not plotting. if have this kind of character initially, helps have some sense of where story going, what is about, or accept that going to be messy first draft.

Caitlin: what percentage of process is plotter versus pantser (writing by the seat of your pants), since seems like would be pretty relevant?

Shariann: every writer has a unique process and can change over time, plotter and pantser is continuum. am far on pantser end, have to write to find out where it's going. so that's where blowing up comes in useful: things started to literally jam up, did not know where in plot to move next. looked to character who it would make sense to blow things up: said to character, sure, go ahead. took whole story in different direction and worked wonderfully well.

Robert: plans a lot at start, then departs; metaphorically working toward mountain seen in distance, but no satellite maps, have to find way

Sophia: generally need to have sense for arcs and themes, but doesn't frequently know plot.

Caitlin: very similar. has hideously wasteful process, can't tell whether detailed outline is right until written substantial chunk of it. example: realized climax needed to be at 1/3 point of book

Robert: Sophia re: Molotov cocktail as character versus approach to plotting, both have equally caught me by surprise as a writer

Caitlin: suddenly struck by metaphor that Molotov cocktail is literally fuel.

someone: use pitch to make stick to tanks

Caitlin: yes otherwise could just brush them away (as author)

Charlie: initially thought this was a trickster panel. can you have a stolid character who throws

Sophia: character who is very stolid isn't going to be throwing Molotov cocktail, but from plot POV can throw a lot of stuff at them

(me, to myself: Jason isn't stolid but he is very predictable, in that he always wants to throw Molotov cocktails!)

someone: character who starts showing crack in their stolidity

Sophia: love that

Caitlin: believe that can have character who's very stolid/solid and knows their mind, wants, limits: see them make actual decision to explode because intolerable line crossed. don't need to be inherently chaotic or unstable. throwing part of who they are

general agreement

Caitlin cont'd: setting up situation with unattainable goal, do reasonable things in the moment to reach, results in cascading consequences. example: Iron Widow: joins military to avenge sister, which accomplishes pretty early, but that shifts goals. at 2/3 mark, pushed to decide between survival and massively reshaping society, not goal but things escalated so fast. changes what problem of book is and what series is about.

brief shitposting and spoilers for Some Desperate Glory

(at this point, I texted a pal: "Kyr as Jason Mendoza throwing Molotov cocktail at the 55% mark, in a comparison that has never been made before ever")

Charlie: moving goalposts one entire field at time

Caitlin: and on reader too

Robert: as much as in love with surprise (don't think would be able to finish anything if not wondering what going to happen in next chapter [I think that this was, finish writing, rather than reading, but I'm not sure]), satisfying rug-pull on reader expectations needs balancing own indulgence with a lot of planning. just a set of encounters is not satisfying

Caitlin: Jason Mendoza not very intelligent, but definitely changes substantially over course of series. perpetual chaos muppet will eventually become tiring to reader

Sophia: keep in mind that stories are always about something. Jason is fundamentally important to theme of show, is kind caring person who does a lot of dumb and destructive things. he breaks not just plot but ideas of what goodness means. chaos so meaningful in broader sweep of story

Caitlin: writers are not being chaotic

Sophia: single most "and then THINGS HAPPEN" is Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, which is also most intentional book ever read. need to build trust and rapport with reader. easy way to do that is tropes, much harder to say, don't know where going with this but trust me.

audience: Sophia mentioned teaching Molotov cocktail method, is that more than Chandler's "and then someone burst in shooting"

Sophia: working with burnout or writer's block people, one of goals is to make writing feel as fun and low-stakes as possible, especially since lots are writing about trauma. method: first know driving force of scene. what is the weirdest, funniest, most frustrating, etc. etc.—pick superlative, actually has a checklist—way could possibly achieve. then do that. not necessarily what final draft will be, but goal is enjoying process. which is something that Jason really has!

audience: example of Molotov cocktail compounding is Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. main character treated like walking time bomb for 12 books, 13th goes off in way he didn't expect, readers either. permanently changed dialogue between readers, author. do you consider that?

(me to myself: this is tangential but I will always remember "The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault." as a first book line (to Blood Rites))

Robert: any time telling story, it's about raising of expectations and then what do with them. can't pretend that haven't been raised. to subvert, have to have planted seeds that really wanted other thing all along

Shariann: relationship between author, reader, character, and the arc of character. reader buy-in mostly through identification with character. if arc is compelling, well, people are changing all the time, which is what makes story interesting. psychologist once said that change in belief happens quickly but was building all along.

Caitlin: as author, have duty to not pretend to naive about impact on reader.

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Readercon: The Allure of Orpheus and Eurydice

Monday, 21 July 2025 07:29 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

The Allure of Orpheus and Eurydice
The tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice — the lover who visits Hades to rescue his love, only to falter at the end — has inspired artists for millennia. We'll look at why the story has resonated for so long, favorite adaptations and whether Orpheus could ever NOT look back.
Constance Fay, Greer Gilman, Kate Nepveu, Tom Doyle (moderator), Sophia Babai

panel notes

In my introduction, I described this Tumblr poll which was then at the top of my Bluesky account.

someone's introduction talked about the story as when unshakeable faith is required and when it can't be maintained.

We started by Tom asking Greer whether Orpheus could ever not look back.

Greer: tells story of Sir Orfeo, upshot of which is that Orfeo has no conditions placed on his recovery of his wife, Heurodis, and gets everything back. Feels like Shakespeare in Winter's Tale, tired of tragedy

(this telling involved Heurodis being replaced by a gray stone, and suddenly I realized that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell probably is related to this or some related myth in some way)

Tom: is this the same story?

Sophia: fundamentally not. the condition is key, it's like Lot's wife

Constance: (my notes here say, "character or moral? Orpheus' lack [of faith, I think] = character. story not the myth." this is much less illuminating than I would like at this point and this panel was only two days ago, on Saturday morning! apologies)

Tom: find core of story incredibly frustrating, it's an unavoidable trap and I hate it. it's not cathartic, why can't I shake sense into Orpheus

Tom: asks Sophia about Hadestown.

Sophia: gives premise, including that about miners. notes that audience gasps every. time. he turns around. about cycles, perseverance in activism.

Tom: asks about adding the miners to the story.

me: I did not listen to Hadestown all the way through before I went to see it. two things really surprised me: first, that Eurydice chose to go to Hadestown because she and Orpheus were starving and he was too wrapped up in composing to help. Second, when Orpheus discovers this, he despairs and asks "If It's True" ... and the workers, who to this point had been the chorus, respond and ask, why can't we stand with him? And then it becomes about Orpheus, Eurydice, and the workers: Eurydice is going to follow Orpheus, and they are going to follow Eurydice.

Sophia: the gods are having very normal marital problems, but because of the power they have, it's destroying the world, and the workers are caught in it. so apt.

Greer: interesting that hell is pervading the upper world here, parallel to Oberon and Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream

Tom: asks Constance about Kaos on Netflix

Constance: Riddy (Eurydice) is not as into Orpheus as he is into her. she goes to Underworld and falls in love with someone else, finding herself in death. crux of Orpheus & Eurydice is that the stakes are very unbalanced: him, possession and loss; her, life and death. Does Eurydice really want to leave or is she "song-roofied"? in Kaos do come to terms with differing desires.

(me, sotto voce to Tom: now would be a great time to ask me about Harrow the Ninth!)

Tom: asks me about Harrow the Ninth =>

SPOILERS for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth

me: apologies for spoilers. at the end of Gideon the Ninth, Gideon kills herself to save Harrow. when Harrow opens, there's a thread that's Harrow after the first book, and there's a thread that's a retelling of Gideon ... except without Gideon. and it's because Harrow cannot accept Gideon's death, so has literally excised Gideon's existence from her brain, which for magical reasons means that Gideon is not truly dead yet. and Gideon's big mad about it: she wanted to give Harrow her death! Harrow won't take it! they are all kind of messed up and I love them for it.

me cont'd: but to me, the three interesting things about Orpheus and Eurydice stories are: why does Eurydice die? why can't Orpheus look back? and why does he fail? and Hadestown and Harrow both give answers to the first and second, and Hadestown also to the third (he's removed from community as well as from Eurydice).

Constance: like Buffy, was also happy being dead. Orpheus always has to look back, but maybe Eurydice isn't always following.

Tom: L’Esprit de L’Escalier, by Catherynne M. Valente; I Never Liked You Anyway, by Jordan Kurella

Greer: The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

Sophia: where you have consistent weather patterns, water, less war: stories about gods are primarily benevolent tricksters. inverse: stories about gods are, why is the world like this. inexplicablity is the point.

audience: is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead an Orpheus and Eurydice story? also has cycles, inevitability, author's choice of hell (this was clearly a reference to something from early on that I failed to note down, sorry)

Sophia: feels much more Hadestown than Orpheus and Eurydice, the point of Orpheus and Eurydice is that it's a one-time thing. but Shakespeare may be like myth in terms of the audience's sense of knowledge and thus sense of repetition.

Greer: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have no choice from the beginning.

audience: re: choice of hell, do Orpheus and Eurydice retellings land differently when they're from a Christian-pervasive society where it's Hell, rather than an Underworld that everyone goes to?

Constance: Moulin Rouge, the "underworld" is the seedy music scene, but it's all about perspective, if you're not dying from consumption it's much less bad (possibly even welcoming?). also Kaos is much more Greek and has a whole society in the Underworld

Sophia: "other" doesn't have to be "under" in the place you go, refers to Greer's mention of Faerie in Sir Orfeo. also Christianity also gets into ideas of cleanliness re: the "other" place, and that almost fits better with the woods. See also the rescue of Sita

Constance: Farscape, Aeryn Sun, can't go back because been exposed to other worlds/peoples

Greer: Scandinavian versions where Eurydice goes under the sea based on who stole her

audience: Severance, Underworld self has no awareness of other

spoilers for Severance S2

Constance: Mark is both Orpheus and Eurydice: rescues and doesn't, stays and goes

audience: always thought the story was about the denial of death, not the loss of faith: the understanding that it's never going to work. therefore always liked versions that took on that question, that are about grief and not getting life back after a death. recommendations?

me: Harrow

Sophia: this is awful and I apologize, but: my work-in-progress

Greer: interested in stories that complete the myth and have Orpheus torn to pieces (I know this happens in the Sandman)

Edit: forgot to add the other thing I linked to on Bluesky: the last show with Reeve Carney (who originated Orpheus on Broadway), in which, after the bows and speeches, he gets to take Eurydice home.

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yhlee: a stylized fox's head and the Roman numeral IX (nine / 9) (hxx ninefox)
[personal profile] yhlee
Poll #33394 best format for continued hobby mode Ninefox AU/reboot shenanigans
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Ninefox MUD
0 (0.0%)

Ninefox text-only browser-based chapter-based adventure (Inkle Studios' Ink)
10 (55.6%)

Ninefox VN
4 (22.2%)

Ninefox comic (this one is happening regardless)
9 (50.0%)

Ninefox animation (Candle Arc is happening regardless because MFA project)
4 (22.2%)

Ninefox reboot/AU serialized novel (prose) [1]
7 (38.9%)

None of these! Something else I will explain in comments.
0 (0.0%)



In terms of sustainable effort:

MUD: medium-high bar if using existing codebase.

Ink serialized web-based text adventure: medium-low bar. Probably chapter by chapter releases.

ETA #1: Wait a second! You can compile Inform 7 to release for playing on the web! Either this didn't exist ca. 2007 or I suck at reading documentation. That's my choice, then. I enjoy writing parser IF (interactive fiction / text adventures) more than choice-based formats. Yay!

VN: high bar.

comic: I'm doing this for myself so it really doesn't matter what anyone thinks, but maybe people prefer this.

2D animated short (we're talking 5-10 minutes): SLOWEST. VERY SLOW. 2D hand-drawn animation is just slow. But I've proposed this for my final major project starting in 2028, so I'm doing this no matter what anyone else thinks.

[1] serialized reboot/AU novel (prose): This would require negotiating with my publisher, which has an option on further prose works. I control the relevant rights for other formats.

Discussion with Solaris suggested they would be happy to talk about a different Machineries trilogy with a new plot and a new set of characters but the two ideas I have aren't trilogy-length and I don't have a sense that any reader wants this! It's theoretically possible Solaris might let me play with a newsletter (etc) serialization if it's something they wouldn't have an interest in offering for and they are assuming zero risk since I doubt anything I do here would tank sales of the existing books. However, there are negotiation complications here that may make this Not Possible rights-wise so I'm hoping no one wants this and I can stop thinking about it with a clear conscience.

I'm sitting on something like 100,000+ words of disorganized prose bits (not a coherent single narrative, it's a bunch of different POVs) and I want to write about that crashhawk unit and Gödel's incompleteness theorems in hexarchate numerology. I have an outline.

But also. For health and family reasons, I'm not signing a book contract in the near future; any prose-format writing is going to be on spec or similar if at all, and if the answer is that it's just noodling that stays on my hard drive, it is what it is. Meanwhile, I have orchestration homework to do, ta!
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

The Joys (and Perils?) of Reading Deeply
In general, people are more likely to read widely (some books by many authors) than deeply (many books by one author). Panelists will discuss the joys, rewards, and even downsides of going deep with a particular author, series, or subgenre — and what led them to it.
Barbara Krasnoff, Gregory A. Wilson, Lark Morgan Lu (moderator), Rebecca Fraimow

panel notes

Barbara asked for the panelists' deep read with their intros.

Rebecca: Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones podcast.

Barbara: tend to deep read a lot of 19th century lit repeatedly, or SF dense enough that resembles

(me, in my notes: have you heard about The Fortunate Fall??? (I will come back and link when I make the post about that panel, but it was in the last slot of the con, so it'll be a little bit.)

Gregory: podcast began with deep dives. current: Murderbot; repeated: Lord of the Rings (and now teaches) and everything surrounding, taught importance of seeing layers even decades later

Lark: how exactly do you deep read?

Rebecca: hard to do on first read, can't see shape of whole book, so has to be on second read. have page of notes or Google Docs with quotes, end up with kind of red string theory about book as whole

Barbara: Dickens fan. when first read as young, for plot, skipped over boring parts. now every time read very prose-heavy books, find something new. naturally quick reader, will force self to sound out each word to slow down. Aubrey-Maturin, do need secondary sources for ship terms etc. but usually just rereading

Gregory: very similar. in academic work, obviously, eye toward teaching. when doing deep reading "on my own," not doing that: like waves passing over at beach, absorb something new every time. recently starting teaching [one of this year's Readercon Guests of Honor] P. Djèlí Clark: initially read because interested, before started teaching started picking up inter-book connections, which are either intentional or designed to make it appear so: valuable for own writing

Rebecca: yes, valuable to deep read into not just book or author's work, but broader context; really helpful for themes and ideas within the work itself

Lark: so downsides?

Barbara: two offhand: not spending time finding new authors; hit book 5 or 6 and suddenly realize that you don't like it.

Gregory: that's the bargaining stage. risk of tunnel vision. if after Murderbot, go to another series where voice is not as prominent, "this would be awesome if it were Murderbot!" though sometimes breath of fresh air; example of Dune and then the Witcher series, much different prose speeds. wants to downplay slightly risks of this, because value: get one of greatest joys, understanding of how sausage is made, which can be not just valuable but moving

Rebecca: doing Eight Days means has to put a "nickel in the Diana Wynne Jones jar" every time refers to. but another peril, become glutted with it: read bunch of Guy Gavriel Kay in row, started feeling like could finish sentences for him. haven't tried to push through that feeling, probably possible but ...

Lark: disagree slightly with Gregory: John Wiswell's talk on "How I Wrote Someone You Can Build a Nest In," mentioned that had very minimal edits: would like to have not know that, remain furious that book love so much just came out that way (Lark later made super-extra clear that this was a joke)

Rebecca: things wish I didn't know about favorite books: reading deeply can lead to realizing that don't like as much. Witch Week: DWJ essay explaining it as metaphor for racial bullying, reaction: oh this doesn't work. think a different way about book and now have more complicated enjoyment

Barbara: had that with Dickens, Oliver Twist: Fagin, okay going to pass by problems with character because love book so much. then reading more, learned that friend of Dickens' pointed out problems, wrote Our Mutual Friend with "good" Jewish character (Rebecca: he was doing his best)

Gregory: this is why biographical criticism is dangerous. authors are not accurate always about impact of work on wide audience. Tolkien was wrong about Lord of the Rings not being about WWI. also sometimes write beyond what they as people are like (Shakespeare being able to write more nuanced characters than his personal prejudices likely would have indicated)

Rebecca: sometimes have to read as deeply what authors are saying about own work, as read the work itself

Lark: what's difference between being a deep reader and being a Trekkie or Swiftie for whatever you're reading? just being a huge fan?

Gregory: very dangerous question to answer. couple of responses. being a huge fan is extraordinarily valuable because reflects passion and identification. not minor, important. largely come to reading for emotional impact first. that said, can be uncritical acceptance, thinking everything from artist is equally good. deep reading is trying to really engage on own terms, not just author's, which often means critical in analytic sense. nuance: doesn't invalidate deep love of the work. and can be both at different times.

(me: life is a rich tapestry, my brain is always being analytical, cannot make it stop even when I want to)

Rebecca: part of deep reading is looking at it past your own emotional response, maybe that's the difference.

Barbara: somewhat disagree with Gregory, Trek fans can wildly disagree, not uncritical. may disagree with self in half hour, but not sure that so much different

Gregory: does this happen even within an individual book? my father always thought that Twain suffered failure of nerve in Huck Finn when Tom Sawyer reentered narrative. engaged with it as a fan because so good until that point: hit speedbump, thrown off; deep reader asks, why did he do that.

Rebecca: hard to become a deep reader if not already a fan!

Gregory: no hate deep reads?

Rebecca: not done hate deep reads, but "I didn't quite get this" deep reads, come back a year-ish later, other people liked and I don't see it

Gregory: Fargo, watched 4 times, can't stand it

Barbara: next year's panel, things everyone likes but you

(it's now in my list of things to send in!)

Rebecca: brainwashed self into liking Frankenstein by reading 4 times, now very protective of (the monster, I think)

Gregory: book that rewards deep reading

Rebecca: a book that you can have an interesting fight with will always reward deep reading

Lark: would you want someone to deep read you??

Gregory: yes please! if was intending layers, nice that noticed; if not, emotionally invested that want to engage in process, amazing. what authors don't want is apathy

Barbara: what he said. one of favorite memories is someone saying, you meant to do x, y, z; no, didn't, but great that brought own experiences

Rebecca: huge compliment to be thought worth fighting with. would love it as authors if our attitude were, yes come fight with me

Lark: but not fistfight! we at Readercon do not condone physical violence on-site!

Rebecca: once dreamed that Madeleine L'Engle was coming to punch me in face

Gregory: of all authors, least surprised

audience: professional deep reading versus that might do as "ordinary" "fan", "just a reader" (quotation marks are mine)

Gregory: "professional" involves going through for targeted reasons, particular elements to bring up in class and so forth. when fully invested in work and rereading—example of his father's books, where he annotated emotional reactions (meet Gollum in The Hobbit, "don't trust him," answering riddles ahead of time). but also making connections to other works etc.

Barbara: only kind of deep reading I do is personal

Rebecca: if just for myself, not podcast or book review, tend to hyperfocus on what interests me: running list of all best insults in Iliad just to share with friends

audience (me): risk that will have opinions about author as person? I have Diana Wynne Jones opinions just from listening to the podcast

Rebecca: high. risk that hearing the ghost of author standing next to you saying things, not just work itself. not sure that mastered that challenge

Barbara: depends on author. it's my problem. Dickens: then found out how treated wife, relatively recently, but couldn't stop enjoying, so invested in literature: will use to reinterpret but not stop reading. other authors, would not enjoy works if found that were problematic. some Heinlein books "make me absolutely insane." not very consistent

Gregory: probably true for me too. okay to understand that going to form opinions, as long as doesn't substitute for work you're reading. can struggle to get back into work for author because still around. doesn't teach Gaiman any more. but important for students to understand that can write beyond self, that individual circumstances are not predictive of work can produce.

Rebecca: death of author is so much easier when author is literally dead.

audience: just done 4th reread of Terry Pratchett, love spending time with him. have discovered that certain books don't wear as well as others. when done deep read of favorite writers, ever say "I loved, past tense, this"

Rebecca: that's called the Suck Fairy (see A Visit from the Suck Fairy and A Visit from the Context Fairy). every book is created between reader and text

Barbara: find most often re: children's literature that read as child, especially 19th century. sometimes think should not go back and reread

Gregory: conversely, delight when things hold up. but: Dragonlance, don't hold up. however, when read, mattered to you in the way that they did, spoke to you: don't cringe, did best could at time

Rebecca: even if book itself doesn't hold up, understand what about yourself at that age that spoke to you

audience: apply this to poetry?

Gregory: don't know why this has become a my father panel, but he ran a small poetry press. most moving poems are ones that revisit, and engage with in similar way

Barbara: don't tend to deep read poetry, totally emotionally thing

Rebecca: feel intimidated by prospect, think doesn't understand way constructed in same way as fiction, but having conversations with poet who has same feelings has been very useful.

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Readercon: "Nice Review You've Got There..."

Monday, 21 July 2025 04:44 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

"Nice Review You've Got There..."
On the Hugo-winning blog Lady Business, book blogger Renay noted that negative and even mixed reviews of books have become rare, thanks in large part to the potential unpleasantness and dogpiling that can ensue when authors and fans become upset by negative reviews. Can the revival of blogs and newsletters foster a comeback of critical commentary, or has our social media culture doomed us to "good vibes only" book reviews from here on out? What can fandom do to encourage critical work that's occasionally, you know, critical?
Andrea Martinez Corbin (moderator), Gregory A. Wilson, Ian Muneshwar, Michael Dirda, Sacha Lamb

panel notes

Ian: fiction writer, also criticism; Strange Horizons essay on Poe and gun violence. interested in this question especially contrasted to literary ecosystem

Sacha: active on Tumblr and was before published, and keeping same blog during that requires renegotiation of boundaries. also worked as reviewer in very small literary space, never more than 2 degrees separation

Michael: book reviewing and criticism most of adult life. as editor, founded Washington Post's SFF coverage, with help from friend Joanna Russ.

Gregory: professor and author. for about 15 years, reviewed for then-largest theater review website.

Andrea: love criticism and having ecosystem that talks about books in critical way

Andrea: let's start with: what are we actually even talking about? what is criticism, negative review, bad review? think all different things, and panel description kind of switches between them

Michael: distinction between criticism and reviewing, though fairly porous. reviewer to introduce book to world, must be aware of spoilers; critic talking about book out in world and in much more open way. context and medium: write for newspaper, addressing general audience, be in some fashion entertaining so people will read it. essence of review not judgment or evaluation but description actually (which can convey your impressions as well). avoid superlatives, will date you like nothing else.

Ian: review as reaction to particular piece, either description or opinion about whether successful. criticism offers lens on how piece functions, maybe historical, literary, philosophy; assessing in relation to a tradition

Sacha: as authors, tempting to get feelings very hurt by "a bad review," which is very subjective thing. critical, not necessarily bad, to have pointed out that tried to do a thing and failed. likes reading critical review where someone has given thought to book, why might and might not be interested in reading, should have level of objectivity in review that lets reader determine

Michael: always distinction between bad—poorly written or thought out—and negative—where book is criticized severely

Gregory: what critics ultimately have to provide is context, how fits relative to other things in the field. best criticism rises to art itself because taking meta view of field.

Michael: important for reviewers to know earlier works by author, field in general, so book can be located in larger context. slogan as critic from Henry James: "be one on whom nothing is lost."

Andrea: shifting to ecosystem, structures, places where can find or make room for criticism. read a lot of criticism recreationally but almost all litfic because can find it in standalone venues. are there spec-fic venues dedicated to, as opposed to having column, that don't know about. if not, why so few and far between compared to litfic? (which has NY Review of Books, Book Forum, etc.)

Michael: magazines, newspapers, gatekeepers, focused on mainstream. does social media and blogs etc. take up all energy (that would otherwise go into creating a dedicated venue, I think)? doesn't look at it. (emphasis added) [hypothesizes that] all becomes conversation and therefore personal. drawback of lack of gatekeeper, screening for conflict of interest/relationship re: reviewer. tells anecdote about gleefully trashing Judith Krantz in print (at Wayback Machine), so easy to do, gets a lot of attention online. Clute can be very negative but people are grateful because so thoughtful and analytic (though also hard to read).

(from context, I think that the Krantz anecdote was supposed to be cautionary, but I didn't really get that vibe)

Sacha: point about everything conversation once social media involved, important: tempts reviewer to have snappy shareable things that gets people involved, but can take away from honest assessment of the work. then snowballs because readers have feelings about mean reactions, etc. at some point have to say, maybe not worst thing in world if someone's writing is kind of cringe. but very difficult to say to big group that everyone has to set own boundaries

Gregory: snarky one-liner is inversion of the critic's job versus the author, critic isn't supposed to be noticed for cleverness. if critic doesn't want to be fished for pull quotes, don't provide them. criticism is a service, but needs context

Ian: to return to Andrea's question re: SFF specifically: proximity of critic to author, do think that needs to be some amount of distance. litfic in some ways much larger community able to support critics publishing books of critics. are too many potential critics too close to objects?

(me, in my notes: fascinated by the focus on reviewers not audiences or authors)

Andrea: panel description re: blogs and newsletters: is fracturing of media support structures (editors, legal team, feedback before publishing) a problem?

Gregory: don't know if they're answer but may gesture toward that direction. game world, TTRPG journalists and critics, Rascal, cooperative or collective, think doing interesting work but difficult to sustain. blogs started were, I've got stuff to share, not criticism. can we set a tone of something that's more serious and people who are checking each other?

(me: there is the Hugo-awarding-winning Abigail Nussbaum)

Michael: can panelists name a critic or three that particularly admire?

Andrea: Strange Horizons, not only for long-running review column, but podcast.

Ian: Andrea Long Chu (litfic critic), not only because fascinated by way looks at things, but way writes expands own conception of writing

Sacha: only thinking of litfic, Elif Batuman (I think) re: Russian masters. in children's literature, have anonymous trade reviewers, thinks some benefit to that, though does need to have people choosing and overseeing

Gregory: Paul Weimer and others on Skiffy and Fanty podcast. Amal El-Mohtar at NY Times, very gifted at teasing out emotional resonances of piece, countering tendency to be very academic. re: anonymous thing: here there by dragons. major issues have with, can be misused.

Sacha: whole peer review issue, can tell who everyone is because such small field

Michael: where did you as critics and reviewers learn your principles?

(I don't know if no-one answered this or if I just didn't hear, but usually I note to myself when I give my hands a break or I know I missed something, and I didn't here.)

Andrea: what can fandom, readers and writers, do to foster where criticism taken seriously? encourage longer view?

Gregory: publicly advocate for it, support works already out there, point to it and give them money

Ian: work on knowing how to love something and be critical of something at same time, that being critical can expand your love

Michael: build trust through familiarity in reviewer

Gregory: critic's obligation not to get you to agree but to show working of mind to get there

Sacha: one star review gives as much as information as five star

audience: opinion on extreme author reactions to reviews? got two books cancelled

Sacha: half-serious answer is that authors should stop going on Goodreads, it's not for us. some friends can find constructive critique there, but you have to know if you're the kind of person who will take offense at 4 star review. relies on each individual author so not great solution

Gregory: hyperreactivity not good idea, but a little bit of asymmetry if reviewers/critics with certain amount of vested authority are not responsible and misrepresent, and authors are supposed to just ignore

Sacha: editors and agents need to support authors through that and take point on reaching out re: factual errors

audience: used to be New York Review of Science Fiction, don't we think it's time to revive that

Gregory: was David Hartwell's. needs funding, resources, group of people pushing for it

audience: was there a time when saw critical review of own work and learned something from it?

Sacha: Kirkus had some problems with my last book, didn't understand what I was doing, but I didn't convey that to them, so next time write sarcastic narrator, will make clearer the distinction

I found this panel frustrating, as you may have been able to tell.

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kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

Tragic Endings and the Catharsis of a Bad Time
The protagonist has no mouth and must scream, Othello believes Iago, and some days we can't—or don't want to—imagine Sisyphus happy. Why do stories that end in despair have such enduring appeal? How can writers of deeply unhappy endings achieve their goals, given that readers usually expect happy endings? And what stories are so bleak that they wrap around to being comforting?
Delia Sherman, Emmett Nahil, John Clute, Shariann Lewitt, Tom Doyle (moderator)

panel notes

Tom: in 1960s, 1970s seems like more tolerance, or joy, for really bad ending. why that and why feel like it's changed?

John: easy answer, resistance to being told certain kinds of truths from stories when want something else, can get bad endings anywhere in 2025 (I'm not sure I followed this)

Emmett: sees polarization rather than general preference

Shariann: society changed, then was more economically egalitarian, so idea of everything falling apart was titillating rather than terrifying, or just momentarily terrifying. now, can be satisfying but as reflective of way have to deal with lives. sometimes want something that takes away from what have to face, looks at world from different direction (even if still bad)

Delia: depends on what kind of book, written for so many different reasons. trained by Disney to think fairy tales/folklore ought to have happy ending; expect romance and children's books to have happy endings as well. [me: that's definitional for one of those examples] have seen SFF that's very dark all the way through, reaction: satisfaction, it's an arc and finishes the way supposed to. been like that in 1960s too, always been sad endings. that said, tragedy is narrower, person you can see making consistently bad decisions and bringing upon self

Shariann: Greek tragedy very different definition, choice between two right things that can't be reconciled. find that fascinating challenge, way to delve into character.

John: got distracted, but talking about different kinds of Shakespeare tragedies, inward-facing like Othello, or world-facing where world kills us like in Lear (I think). SFF proclaims itself to be interested in stories where world changes

Tom: asks Emmett about horror.

Emmett: by proclaiming itself as genre about tragedy, self-selecting audience. emotional catharsis comes from sole survivor's redemption, or that there will be a kernel of something that remains. but also all stripes of endings in genre.

Tom: unremittingly grim stories. any favorites among? how explain where no optimism at all? haunted by end of 1984.

Emmett: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, one of most grim and nihilistic movies, love it, something about acknowledgment of anxiety and worst-case scenario, seeing that played out, was emotional catharsis.

Tom: Hadestown explicitly asks, why the sad stories?

Delia: tremendously human. should think about choices, shouldn't make promises can't deliver on. repeating story, keeps idea of hope and frustration of hope alive. gives empathy which deepens understanding of means to be human.

Tom: marketing aspect: Shariann was told could sell more if had happier endings. also thinks of Peter Watts.

Shariann: I'm not in control. if built world right and characters are truly the characters, can't push them into doing something else.

Emmett: matter of making juice worth the squeeze, journey feel worthwhile.

John: writers hoping to attract and please audience are necessarily becoming skilled in art of counterfactual. people don't want unrealistic, but don't want depressing, but world is so complicated don't know where we are let alone in a story. (I think that's what he was saying.) very difficult to know how to read any story we encounter, have to give great praise to any writer who tries

Tom: protagonists are commoners now unlike classical tragedies, good examples?

John: character in Cities in Space (I think I must have mis-typed this for the Cities in Flight series by James Blish), what happens to him?

Delia: maybe strange example, but Lord of the Rings ending is not exactly what might call a jokefest. one of things about, is persistence in face of despair. experience never leaves Frodo, but world has possibility of healing.

John: what makes us feel that world is going to be better?

Delia: the Shire, we're shown it. also appendices.

(I was not sure what this exchange was about, as it hardly seems possible that John Clute does not know the ending of LotR)

audience: black comedy, The Day of the Locust for example, satire. can something be truly tragic if find it funny?

Tom: "A Boy and His Dog," Harlan Ellison.

audience: Gilliam's Brazil.

John: when get into satire, very likely to be transgressing genre expectations; Handful of Dust (I presume this is the Evelyn Waugh novel?)

audience: "Hell Is the Absence of God," Ted Chiang

audience: fascinated by bad endings that anticipate and come true: Shute, On the Beach. then, Night of Living Dead, where bad ending is surprise, doesn't seem deserved, yet fantastic movie because of that ending.

John: generic (genre-ic) thing. Beach: pleasure of having expectations fulfilled very well.

Emmett: sudden abrupt ending serves to jolt audience out of complacency. Night of Living Dead, signposts social commentary that had been throughout story.

Tom: historical fiction, tension of foreknowledge

audience: as readers, what are elements in tragic endings that keep thinking about or make you come back—your reader patterns

Tom: Beneath the Planet of Apes when blow up planet, can't stop fighting each other even though causes it

John: King Lear, doing everything possible to make the world that the play faces absolutely real, terrible, completed rather than gestured at

Emmett: endings in which brought to care so deeply in main character. Alien.

Shariann: Antigone. might have been in part because it was a girl. but still held own power and held true to herself.

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Readercon: Empire and Complicity

Monday, 21 July 2025 02:01 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

Empire and Complicity
On an episode of the Coode Street Podcast, Emily Tesh discussed how recent authors (including herself, [Ann Leckie], Yoon Ha Lee, Arkady Martine, and Tamsyn Muir) have turned the space opera into an exploration not merely of classic themes of empire and rebellion, but of much more complex questions of complicity. We see characters who not only revolt against the evil empires they inhabit, but also contend with their own roles in building and maintaining empire, and the ways in which the evil empire has benefited them personally. What works have best threaded this needle, and what does this trend in storytelling tell us about our current literary moment?
Alexander Jablokov (moderator), Carl Engle-Laird, Constance Fay, Kate Nepveu, Tom Greene

I took a lot more notes on this one because I wasn't moderating.

panel notes

I noted in my introduction that Ann Leckie was very definitely mentioned on the podcast.

Carl: complicity one of two threads saw in SFF from 2010s until very recently; the other is empire perpetrated against people and fighting back from outside. very generally, these were split on racial lines. Neon Yang's Tensorate series is example of one that's both

me: thank you for not making me be the first person to mention race. I was willing to have that be my role, but. (edit: I see on looking at con bios, while looking for Bluesky handles, that Tom Greene is biracial)

Constance: offered two authors more on romance side, who I believe were Jessie Mihalik and Jennifer Estep.

Alexander: what is it about space opera as a background for stories of complicity?

Carl: equivalent to epic fantasy; scale makes it hard to avoid empire; larger organization leads to little cogs in machine struggling

Constance: the remove makes it easier to absorb the message

me: one of failure modes for me of general stories about systemic oppression: take a real-world problem, make a very clear magical/science fictional analogue for it, and then solve that problem by fictional means. feels trivializing and frustrating. space opera doesn't give me that problem because it's an extrapolation of our world, not a parallel to or set in ours.

spoilers for Naomi Novik's Scholomance series

(I can't remember if I said this on this panel or somewhere else, but I've read Novik's most recent trilogy multiple times because it's very entertaining but taking the Omelas child, literalizing that into a magical device, and then fixing it is so not the point)

Tom: All Quiet at the Western Front and Dune are really subversive of their structure

Carl: Dune is revolution not complicity

Alexander: is this about edge versus center?

Carl: fantasy examples: The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson: Baru tries to take down system by becoming expert in the master's tools (paraphrased). Robert Jackson Bennett, Divine Cities Trilogy, core-periphery recently swapped, journeying between. can do that swap faster in genre because of implausibilities.

me: Some Desperate Glory: tiny space station of the few humans who didn't surrender after Earth destroyed by aliens, fascist leadership dangling return to their birthright of being in command

someone: and Ancillary Justice definitely starts at core

someone: says something about "critical theory-ish space opera" and asks whether the same audience is there for it

me: gets irked, says reductive to call it that, all example works are bangers. not only that but Locked Tomb is somehow New York Times bestseller, Leckie and Tesh are Hugo winners, etc.

Carl: cynical business take is that really commercially successful works get most of their success from their non-core audience anyway through snowball effect. also thinks on downswing of (idea that? books that?) think can do something about empire by writing about it. trend now for cozy and escaping. still some: a little in very popular Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros

me: thread in Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson, which is new book getting a lot of buzz around my circles

Constance, Tom: discussing Andor and how it shows why people cooperate with empire, how it starts out, the tendency of technical people to find purported technological solutions to problems and "order" appealing

me: other failure mode of complicity stories is too much about appeal of empire and guilt/helplessness for being part of it; which I don't think applies to examples, which I all like very much, but others can disagree. I look for genuine change at end to reassure self that not "just dazzled by the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism" (tm Bujold)

Carl: historically empires don't tend to fall to individuals (increasing inefficiency, slow degradation), which is problem for our genre with individualistic focus

me: yes; Imperial Radch, changes around edges, but still matter (which got me drive-by calligraphy!); Machineries of Empire, last book shows a lot of group work being done

audience: can't have enough tension if don't deal with both sides of complicity equation?

(I did not understand this question, but Carl appeared to)

Carl: is that: emotional tension by investing in oppressors and oppressed? sure. can go a long way by mechanisms that are non-personified or notional. Empire exists inside your head.

audience: does space opera require an empire? cites more anarchic seen in Delany.

Tom: also Le Guin, but environment naturally selects for it

Constance: space opera is about (? I think) expansion, so if you don't see an empire, maybe it's you ...

Carl: maybe no-true-Scotsman here, because there's no Platonic ideal of space opera And Yet ... also, on epic scale, expect to see ideology clashes.

me: I haven't read any of the Star Wars novel set during the High Republic, so I don't know whether Republic is actually not empire, but they exist. also C.J. Cherryh.

Constance: Farscape.

And that was time.

I'm not entirely sure what I was hoping for from this panel, but (though entirely consistent with the description) I didn't feel like this was it, and at the time, I didn't know how to get it into something more satisfying to me. Now, I'm still not sure; maybe more about how specific characters/stories portray complicity, what brings characters out of it, what the journey is like? Talk to me, do.

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Readercon: All Stories Are Really About _____

Monday, 21 July 2025 01:10 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

All Stories Are Really About _____
Conflict, change, love, consumption, human nature, and so on: commentators throughout history and across the internet have argued that All Stories are Really About (this one thing they spend all their free time thinking about). Surely one of them must be right, and in this panel our panelists will sort out which one it is, once and for all.
John Clute, Karen Heuler, LJ Cohen, Stephanie Feldman (moderator), W.B.J. (Walter) Williams

panel notes

John: not going to come to conclusion unless decide that all stories are one story. thinks distinguishing characteristics of stories: "stories really really desperately want to get told." "next, they want to be twice told. no story wants to be a story that sits alone."

Karen: simple: conflict and resolution, but that's not very personal warm cozy explanation. sometimes think all stories are about death because ultimately progress to an end, what's at the end? horror, death; mysteries, death; a lot of things that can (be related to?) concept of death in stories

LJ: relationships. character's with other, place, idea, self, desire.

Walter: an exploration of mystery. mystery may be death, sex, relationship: but looks into great unknown and attempt to make sense of it.

Stephanie: also had idea that all stories are really mysteries in prior essay. answer for today: all stories about confrontation. not necessarily resolution, sometimes can end on unresolved note, just raises: confronting secret, truth. when do workshops, so often react that this story is about capitalism, which is another way of talking about power, hierarchy of relationships.

Stephanie: hearing: talking about story on craft/mechanical level, thematic level. is there any kind of craft thing necessary to make it a story instead of some other kind of work?

John: feel like a fox in coop here, find each of these interesting and appropriate in different contexts. each story is about something, seems to be second-order observation after what decide in heart what story is. story is grammar, which is amoral. until realize that raw undefinable circle in grass that is (something) about consciousness, not going to be able to come to answer (as probably comes across, I did not understand what John was saying here)

Karen: had been talking about tools. what story really requires is emotional investment from the reader.

LJ: what is purpose of story? why humans drawn to? impulse and absolute necessity of social communication and fact that we are meaning-makers, how we're wired. investment (I think, emotional investment), can have in a poem and don't think that is a story; other kinds of artistic expression, are they all story?

Walter: flip on head, recognize that all are questioning creatures, basis of how we learn. all true but ignores fundamental curiosity that brings reader to work, which is another form of exploration. allows works that don't have satisfying endings to bring you into deeper thinking.

Stephanie: do answers change depending on length of piece?

John: do seem to be talking about contemporary written or oral stories. but? almost every story that is told, is a retelling. deep itch that is being scratched may be that it's been retold. Kim Stanley Robinson talking about slingshot ending, which has two or three different endings and leads in multiple directions: that's a 20th century artifact. (then something, didn't quite get, about needing background to communicate against)

Walter: Jungian, ancient stories about historical figures turning into (I think) myth. all of us are too educated to create something truly original. (though Naked Lunch is)

Karen: fairy tales, very often retold: most are lessons on how to survive in society. is a story a lesson of some kind?

LJ: went through period of time where reading nonfiction books of the pattern, here is the story of world as told through salt, sand, dogs. could make argument that same with story, all of answers are correct, depends on lens viewing it

Stephanie: how do we choose lens at any given time, all said "well my answer today is". do you have a lens gravitated to at point in career, or chose for specific reasons?

Walter: need to have a deep theme

LJ: ideas are everywhere and cheap, but if story is only idea, doesn't go far, unless has character and relationship

John: in end what I see is rewriting, retelling, managed to get story partly told before. cannot think of successful story that close to that hasn't been birthed out of itself

Karen: but that's a good thing, been told before gives it more weight, recognizability, authority

LJ: like sourdough starter

Stephanie: fairy tales, relationships: are all stories really about our relationship with society? do answers shift depending on genre?

LJ: don't think stories differ based on, genre is window-dressing

Walter: ditto

John: as far as reading concerned, always looking for story in which final word is full recognition of what story is about. (self-described boast: contrived to do that in one novel that wrote)

Stephanie: any examples of stories that changed mind about what stories can do?

Walter: yes, if read a lot of Japanese stories discover not driven by conflict. Kafka on the Shore (by Haruki Murakami), very typical of 4-act kind.

John: anyone remember Seiun Awards, ceremony would present awards and then second half was rehearsal in reverse. works that have temporal movement spiraling to different place.

LJ: not sure exactly answer to question, book comes to mind was frustrating, Life of Pi (by Yann Martel): loved until last chapter which enraged because will go anywhere with author if they believe in story, "really all a dream". lack of trust in audience by author.

Karen: Steppenwolf (by Herman Hesse), during reading it, decided had to have sex for first time, and did.

Walter: ... another good answer to what stories are about, sex.

audience: sounded like answers from Western tradition, other than Walt's answer, any additional?

John: didn't have room to make cartoon of what story does for human beings

Walter: why useful to go back to very very early pieces like Gilgamesh because where Western stories began to develop from

John: Gilgamesh, may have been written by first woman writer, also really fragments of it, but our instinct to intuit story highly relevant

Stephanie: answer in a negative form, reading Craft in the Real World (by Matthew Salesses), one of big critiques of The Workshop is its focus on individual triumph and individual versus world, very Western way of looking at world

audience: since story is so malleable, any thoughts on what is story's antithesis or definitively not

other audience: "This Is Not A Story," Denis Diderot

John: very hard, like vampires, can't stop seeing stories everywhere

LJ: our minds are good at holographical process, seeing little piece and filling in whole

Walter: only way nonfiction can succeed is as story

audience: thinking of own answer, which would ideally be correct across all genres and medium: pursuit of wants versus needs. then: does that make it a good story? new thought is depends on reader, what want to get out of. so question: what is one thing you are looking for, needs to be there, to find satisfying?

LJ: emotional journey

John: kind of always, when reading first time, looking for point where beginning to read it for the second, where feel like starting to get it.

Karen: opposite, if story stops surprising me probably going to put it down

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Readercon: Coherency in Storytelling

Monday, 21 July 2025 12:45 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

The first report from a panel I was on. I bring handwritten notes to my own panels and take notes likewise; but when I'm moderating, this unfortunately and inevitably means my notes are biased toward what I said, because I've got less opportunity for making notes on what others say. So while I always welcome corrections and expansions, I especially do for posts about my own panels—and especially this one, wow, my notes are almost nonexistent.

(Also, let's talk about it even, or especially, if you weren't there!)

Coherency in Storytelling
When Alison Bechdel sent her mother a copy of her frank memoir, Are You My Mother?, her mother's summary judgement was, "Well, it coheres." Most writing advice is based on the assumption that coherence of narrative is a paramount value in storytelling, but is that assumption borne out? Are there works of fiction that don't cohere, but in ways that still satisfy?
Kate Nepveu (moderator), Ken Schneyer, Richard Butner, W.B.J. (Walter) Williams

panel notes

I began the panel saying that I'd submitted the idea because I'd seen this Tumblr post and been enormously struck by it, but I didn't really have a strong feeling about the questions posed by the description as revised by the lovely program team ... until I got emails from the other participants that were—to exaggerate for effect—generally "coherence! who needs it!"

This led me to suspect that other people had a different definition of coherence, of something cohering, than I did. So I started by asking the panel their definitions.

Walter: people expect stories to have cause and effect. most recent work, Johnny Talon and the Goddess of Love and War, is deliberately Surrealist, exploration of subconscious as a way of detective work (compare Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective).

Richard: lacks coherence is different than, "this makes no sense." matter of writer and reader expectations. dream logic, e.g., David Lynch (my notes here are particularly unhelpful, sorry Richard)

Ken: all parts somehow fit together and are related. however, mind creates coherence because humans are pattern making animals, very hard to avoid it. impossible for work not to have coherence because coherence is something reader imposes.

me: like a ball of dough: may have different ingredients in it, but comes together into a single Thing. the Thing may be Surrealist or deliberately messy, but can point to various elements and say, I can see what this is contributing to the overall effect. however, I had a weirdly difficult time thinking of examples of a work whose problem was that it didn't cohere.

I believe at some point, possibly here, I asked for examples of works that didn't cohere

Walter: Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, in light of its nesting frame stories and frustration of the reader, based on definition that is narrower than mine

someone I can't make out from my notes, possibly in the audience: works that can't cohere because creator never really finished making them, like Orson Welles' movies

there were almost certainly more but I don't have them in my notes.

some ideas I had for ways a work might not cohere under my definition, which were basically structural:

  • unwarrantedly large shift in tone, topic, etc. (some readers have this reaction to the second half of The Fortunate Fall)
  • too many balls in the air, some get dropped
  • amount of attention paid to different elements is unbalanced (e.g., we get certain details about the world; their logical implications are much different than the story suggests, but the story doesn't focus there)
  • this X seems like it's from a completely different book and I can't figure out why
  • (suggested to me by someone pre-panel) structure collapses on itself

(as a result, I disagreed with Ken about his idea that lack of coherence is impossible because coherence is inevitably created by the reader. I believe we eventually agreed that any given reader might not find coherence in a work?)

at some point someone mentioned Naked Lunch, which Richard noted depended in part on the author's public persona.

we had audience questions about how this varies by genre; how you find readers; and if there's an genre that gets its energy from asking questions rather than answering them. Walter suggested Haruki Murakami for the last one.

It seemed like a lot of audience members walked out of this one in the first half, so I felt pretty unsure about how it was going; and by the end, I was worried that I'd browbeaten the rest of the panel more than a little. One or two people did say nice things to me about over the weekend, so ... I just don't know.

(I do genuinely want honest, though not intentionally mean, feedback, on any of my panels!)

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15


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