"Fifteen hundred years ago people knew
the earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years
ago people knew the earth was flat. Fifteen minutes ago
you knew there were no space aliens living on the earth.
Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." [--J in Men in Black]
Readercon 9 was held on July 11-13 in Westborough, Massachusetts. If Boskone is hard to get to via public transit, Readercon is even worse, or maybe it's just that the directions given in the Progress Reports for public transit are vague. There is only one bus a day that stops at the Marriott, and it's in the mornings. An explanation of local bus service from Worcester to places within a reasonable taxi ride from the hotel would be nice.
However, we were driving so this didn't directly
affect us. What did affect us was our inability to leave work
before 4PM, so we didn't arrive until almost 9PM (we got to Registration
just under the wire). This meant we missed all the Friday night
panels.
Panels at Readercon seem more stable than at other conventions; that is, there are fewer panelists changes or no-shows. It's true that Boskone's winter schedule makes travel iffy, but I think it's also a more committed attitude towards Readercon. Many people seem to go to Boskone because they feel they should, but they go to Readercon because they want to.
For the panels, the panelists were in a semi-circle around a coffee table. Unfortunately, this meant there really wasn't any place convenient to put the name cards.
The Bookshop (what at other conventions would be called the Dealers Room) was basically Boskone's Dealers Room minus the non-book tables. However, the dealers did seem to stock a better quality of book. For example, I was able to find both Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland and John Clute's Look at the Evidence. Both are nominated for the Hugo for Best Non-Fiction, but both are also hard to find. (They also had the other three nominees available as well: The Face of Fantasy by Patti Perret, Silence of the Langford by Dave Langford, and Time & Chance by L. Sprague de Camp.)
There was apparently a serious overbooking problem at the hotel (and one party was effectively evicted from its space), and they put out an hors d'oeuvres buffet on Saturday afternoon and gave away two free nights at a free raffle at the Kirk Poland Contest as compensation.
The panel rooms were really cold in the morning (the
thermometer Sunday read 64 degrees!).
I guess parties are supposed to be more dimly lit, but given the dark-colored backgrounds of the badges, this made it very hard to read people's badges to see who they were.
We spent most of the time talking to Daniel Kimmel and Nomi Burstein about the rather abysmal choice for the Hugo Awards this year-in both the fiction and dramatic categories.
"There was a time when the Moon and Mars were both special settings for SF. But the recent resurgence of fictional interest in the Red Planet has not been matched by any similar boom in lunar fiction. Is there simply a 'been there, done that' element intrinsic to SF? Or has Mars proven to be a genuinely more interesting place? Will the recent discovery of frozen water at the moon's South Pole help even the score?"
In answer to the first question from the moderator, Burstein said that his name is pronounced "Bersteen." And it was pointed out that there was an editorial by the Guest of Honor Kim Stanley Robinson in today's New York Times.
Getting on to the actual topic of the panel, Burstein said that he disagreed with the implication that no one is writing lunar fiction any more, and pointed out that last year's Tony Daniels' "Life on the Moon" was nominated for a Hugo. And there is the Artemis Project to go back to the Moon which is being led by science fiction authors. It's not that stories about the moon are disappearing, Burstein said, but that we're seeing more stories about Mars. And also, he added, "There's been a recent spate of alternate history space programs."
Steele responded, "I'm guilty on all counts: I've written about the moon, I've written about Mars [Labyrinth of the Night], and I've written alternate history space programs [The Tranquillity Alternative]." What we're seeing now is what he had predicted: a "Martian land rush." For a long time, scientists who wanted to promote Mars had to work at "underground" conferences on "The Case for Mars." And Steele said that the recent big Mars books [Red Mars, Moving Mars, Mars, Mining the Oort] all drew on the proceedings of these conferences.
Several panelists mentioned The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin, about "Mars Direct," which is about why we don't need to go back to the moon.
Trudel said that he personally thinks "been there, done that" pertains more to Mars now, at least as far as the books go. At one point, they were both unknown globes on which one could set life. Then as realism came in, we started to see a more realistic look at Mars and the Moon. "Mars offers a wider variety of possible settings or possible stories." However, Trudel said, "If you're looking for ... the industrializat= ion of the solar system, the Moon deserves to be as much in the forefront as Mars." But most near-future stories are about exploration rather than industrialization.
Meskys said that there are four places in the solar system where we can have long-term settlements: the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and space habitats. Of these, Meskys said, "Mars is the exciting place." But he agreed that there is still lunar fiction. For example, he mentioned John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless as being set on the Moon. And he noted, "You don't hear much about asteroid mining any more."
Steele said that basically Mars is the current bandwagon that authors are jumping on, but not only do we see some lunar fiction coming, he is writing King of Infinite Space about asteroid mining and is working on the sequel to "The Death of Captain Future" which will involve Venus. He pointed out that almost all space exploration and colonization plans involve using lunar resources.
Cox said that John Kessel is also starting work on a novel set on the moon, and then asked if there is a better established genealogy for Mars than for the Moon. He said that Mars had Wells, Burroughs, Bradbury, and now Robinson (adding that there is no truth to rumor that they are renaming it "Stan's Planet"), while the Moon had Wells and Verne and then ...? Other people noted that the Moon had more older stuff: Kepler, de Bergerac (who, as Mark points out, was the first to suggest using rockets to get to the moon). In fact, lunar fiction is an older tradition, predating telescopes, because it was obviously a world even then. Trudel said, "science fiction is propelled by new discoveries."= ;
Burstein said again that he would argue with the statement that there is no lunar literature, adding Robert A. Heinle= in's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" to the list. (I pointed out that Burroughs also wrote lunar fiction. One of the panelists asked, wonderingly, "Why do we have to be reminded of Burroughs' lunar fiction?") All the panelists agreed that "The Man Who Sold the Moon" made them think of Ross Perot. Given the title of the panel, I would have to label it as astonishing that no one (including myself) thought to mention Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress!
Someone said that the moon is too close to be a good setting for a story. "That's our backyard. You can set stories there, but ..." Steele returned to the idea of "too much knowledge," saying that Mariner made a lot of old Martian stories obsolete, but then Burstein pointed out that The Martian Chronicles was obsolete when Bradbury wrote it, which didn't stop him from writing it. Burstein also pointed out that Ben Bova had written a lot of stories set on the moon before 1969.
Someone in the audience said that there were stories in other cultures about the moon as well, and claimed that there were "realistic" lunar stories in Scotland in the 1500s (using a cannon to reach the moon, etc.). I'm skeptical, and would want some definite proof rather than just this statement.
As people pointed out, almost all these stories are about voyages to the moon and later, "moon stories were about getting there," while Martian stories tend to be about living there. Alternate history space programs sort of get around this problem. Steele notes his "John Harper Wilson" was an attempt to write a post-1969 "first trip to the moon" story.
Cox made the claim (repeated by someone else later) that Pathfinder cost less than Waterworld. I think Pathfinder cost $225,000,000 and Waterworld was less than that, though I think Titanic will be more.
Cox said that one advantage the Moon has as a setting is the "potentiality for nationalistic conflict" because it is closer (or for corporate conflict, according to Steele). Cox said, "The moon has a metaphoric content that other barren rocks don't." Steele added, "The moon is like a lost continent of Earth; it just happens to be a quarter of a million miles away."
But why the excitement about space now?
Burstein said, "NASA has learned that they need a good PR person." Also, he noted, "Any time you announce the possibility of life, you're going to generate some excitement." This is because, he continued, "The possibility of life on Mars in the past implies the possibility of Mars supporting life in the future."
Steele attributed it more to the X-Files phenomenon, millennial fervor, and Roswell, though to me it isn't clear which are the causes and which the effects, assuming they are even separable. Cox ended by saying, "The X-Files does have its own logic, but it's not the logic of Greg Bear or Gregory Benford-it's the logic of Philip K. Dick."
Button seen: "Common sense is what tells you
that the earth is flat."
"We recently overheard someone opine that the awful warning satirically inherent in C. M. Kornbluth's 'The Marching Morons' had proven to be unwarranted. Funny, we had just been thinking exactly the opposite. And while there's no evidence that the average I.Q. has dropped significantly, something in Kornbluth's masterpiece rings true today. SF satire frequently lampoons things which haven't happened yet, and which may come 'true' in ways unforeseen by the writer and contemporary readers. Kornbluth anticipated the 'dumbing down' of America (i.e., the decline not in intelligence but in knowledge), but he got all the details wrong. Our panelists will discuss SF satire, beginning with this story."
This was my first panel and I noticed The setup was considerably less formal than usual. The panelists sat in rolling chairs, almost like office chairs around a small oval coffee table. This meant that the panelists at the ends were a fair distance from the table and it did them little good. This arrangement makes things look initially a little more friendly, but it is more trouble than it is worth. The panelists do not have tables directly in front of them so they do not have a good place to make notes for themselves or put down personal belongings and it was a long reach for the water pitcher. Putting the mikes on the coffee table did not make for very good acoustics with sound bouncing off the tops of the tables. The panels quickly learned that it helped to put the mikes on the floor. Since the chairs were up on a platform and most of the people had no table in front of them the women complained that if they wore short skirts the audience got a view of them from a Sharon Stone sort of angle.
The panel was a reconsideration of the story "The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth. The premise of the story, presented somewhat acidly, is that as time goes by, the public allows itself to become more stupid and more and more the willing dupes of Madison Avenue and the media.
Algis Budrys began the discussion by saying that there was a lot to the basic concept of the story that is coming true. He believes that the public is not yet to the state described in the story, but that the trends are in the wrong direction. He felt that the time was indeed coming but has not yet come when we would have a largely mindless and manipulated public.
Paul Di Filippo asked if the story really was all that original. He asked if this pessimism about the public intelligence perhaps hadn't been a trend in science fiction for a long time. He gave the example of the story "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster. Other examples might include some of Wells's future history or Huxley's Brave New World. Barry Malzberg asked what was Kornbluth's attitude in the story: was he amused by the lowering standards of intelligence or did it terrify him? There was a discussion of whether this was an admonition of the complicated city life. In several of his stories Kornbluth seemed to imply that a return to the soil might be the best thing for society. However, Kornbluth's own attempt at simple farming was a short one and quickly given up. Beyond the one short experience, Kornbluth never really lived the simple life and never understood it. Budrys added that he himself grew up on a farm and "it was the pits." =
Rich said that Kornbluth did not really trust the intelligentsia. There is a recurrent theme in his stories of the horror of the atomic bomb created by the intelligentsia. = There a lots of different interpretations of the "The Marching Morons." One writer-Lawlor in the fanzine Foundation-particul= arly hates the story. He call it "the ugliest 'fans are Slans' story." Here he refers to the A. E. Van Vogt novel in which there is a persecuted super-race living in hiding among the more normal people. The story represents what the elitist science fiction reader thinks of the population large. Lawlor thinks of the story as Kornbluth as a sort of self-styled Joseph Mengele. Di Filippo said Tom Easton said the world would be better if 90% of the population were gone. Nielsen Hayden said that she knew she would be in the 90%. Budrys suggested that might have been reading too much into his story. It will not be known because Kornbluth never talked much about his work. Budrys suspects even Kornbluth did not know about the deep meanings of the story.
=46rom there the conversation moved from the one story to satire in general, led mostly by Di Filippo. A career of satire does not last long, satirists either burn out or be mediocre. And what is popular satire varies with time. In the 50s Kornbluth and Fred Pohl were on top of satire and Robert A. Heinlein was more the backwater satirist, now that is reversed with Heinlein considered the better satirist.
Di Filippo asked if satire has to be funny. Rich evaded the question by saying that if you read Huxley's Ape and Essence, it certainly is. And Nielsen Hayden asked how much of modern satire actually comes from Warner Brothers cartoons.
Budrys brought the conversation back to the 50s, saying that at that time Astounding was no longer the "cock of the walk" of science fiction magazines and that that Galaxy got the authors who could not stand Astounding editor John W. Campbell. The result was stories like Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction," which has a hero in the Astounding tradition who turns out to be a simpering idiot, the exact opposite of Campbell. Astounding's grip on the field of the short story was finally broken when stories started coming out in paperback.
Di Filippo got some discussion going around a quote from Philip Roth saying that satire can no longer keep up with real world. Discussing styles of satire, Nielsen Hayden suggested that Piers Anthony is the literary descendent of Kornbluth while Douglas Adams is close to the tall tale tradition of story telling.
Nielsen Hayden suggested that America might actually
be getting smarter. Today CNN is on 24 hours a day. (I would
claim that is more because CNN has found ways to dumb down the
news to the level that it can afford to be on 24 hours a day.)
Children are learning more. Di Filippo disagrees, saying maneuvering
through our culture the most that is required these days is facility
with ATMs. [-mrl]
"John Crowley speaks on divers topics of interest to the assembly, and of the smaller worlds within the large."
According to Kate Pott, who attended this one, Crowley put the following list on the board and then proceeded to speak for an hour, connecting each to its successor and everything tying them all together:
"A lot of highly intelligent readers seem to get along without knowing any critical theory. Doesn't this suggest that knowing theory may not be necessary to understanding fiction? Do we practice critical theory because it makes us better readers, or just because we like to exercise our brains that way? How does knowing theory affect the experience of reading fiction?"
Olsen began by saying, "Theory is the kind of thing that students love to hate." Also, he said, "There is no such thing as a naive critical perspective [meaning that] you undermine the whole concept of innocent reading." On the other hand, "You revitalize your perspective of the text."
Delany said it wasn't just students, "Professors love to hate it too." He explained that it is not necessarily true that if you're in academia, you're pro-theory. "A lot of people [in academia] see theory as very threatening," because not only does it undermine the notion of an innocent reading, but also of a critical privileged reading as well. "We in the humanities department are an extension of the entertainment industry: we teach you how to get more out of your leisure time," he admitted. The most threatening part of theory, according to Delany, is its undermining of the authority structure of the university.
Lewitt said that any reaction to the text is a form of critical dialogue, but theory gives us a vocabulary so we can talk to each other. As she said, it's very easy to think about text without theory, but it's very difficult to discuss text without theory.
Hartwell agreed, but said what we end up with in this field is theories that get presented but not developed ("The Fantasy of Manners" that Donald G. Keller postulated, a.k.a. "Mannerpunk"). As Hartwell explained, "The science fiction field is a hotbed of unexamined preconceptions&= quot; which become unwritten laws; e.g., "science fiction should have good characterization" eliminates most of the classics of science fiction from consideration. (Houghton said later that Hartwell has been pointing to characterization for several years now, but "in science fiction, the character is the world around you.")
Olsen felt that "we're moving into a post-genre aesthetic." (A recent article in Interzone certainly agrees, listing an enormous number of books that are arguably science fiction but not marketed-or thought of-as such.)
Delany spoke at length, noting, "Theory doesn't mean just any old theory." He said that in 1968 Hopkins brought structuralism and post-modernism over from France and started the whole "literary theory" trend over here which he says is "now getting the shape of an orthodoxy." The problem, as he pointed out, is that "there's no way to talk about it without studying it." "Criticism can be that encounter of the seven-year-old with the text; theory is why was the response 'wow' and not 'yuck' and where does 'wow' come from?" And he added, "everyone talks about the definition of science fiction, [but] the more people use the term 'the definition of science fiction' the less aware they are of where it came from."
After Delany's long dissertation, all Lewitt could say was, "Exactly" and Olsen added, "That's what I meant to say, too." Lewitt did add, "You're not aware of the shape and expectations of your own culture. We have difficulty thinking out of these boxes. And theory can be a very limiting box" for both readers and writers.
Hartwell pointed out that theory was a very broad term, saying that "John W. Campbell's idea of science fiction was a theory of science fiction" and that in fact it became the dominant theory of SF. It wasn't until it stopped being dominant that the science fiction field was able to perceive the flaws in it, he continued.
Not counting Campbellian criticism, Hartwell listed Marxist criticism, Freudian criticism, and post-structuralist theory as methods that can be applied to everything. But, he asked, even if they are valid forms of discourse, are they interesting and useful when applied to science fiction?
Robinson said that at one point he worried, "If you know too much theory, will it gunk up the works?" But it turned out to be a false fear, he said. "It's when it's done wrong that it becomes a problem." He compared the two methods to "the Palefaces versus the Red Indians" (which he described as Henry James or T. S. Eliot versus Ernest Hemingway). This seems to me more a difference of style than a knowledge of theory (certainly there are many authors more of the James/Eliot style who did not know a lot of theory).
Robinson also compared Philip K. Dick and Marcel Proust: Dick avoided theory and was intermittently successful; Proust was very structured and very successful. He spoke about how his training in literary theory came from Frederic Jameson and said, "When we're talking theory we're really talking Marxism-it's a code word we use." But he concluded, "As a Marxist, as a science fiction writer, and as a California beach boy Red Indian, I find all these things reconcilable."
Delany disagreed with Hartwell, saying that it is not the case that any theory can be applied to everything. Post-structur= alist theory works wonderfully with philosophical texts, but not with fiction. Freudian criticism works well with texts that already have long critical traditions, but not with new works that lack a "sedimented tradition." But all of this is sort of an outgrowth of Marxism in that "theory" is the theory for a materialist practice, hence Marxism.
Delany said that theory could be carried too far. For example, some would say, "There are no living, breathing characters in books. Living, breathing characters do not inhabit books; words inhabit books." He continued this idea, saying that the notion of "living, breathing characters" is called "the tyranny of the subject," with all its pejorative connotations.
Robinson said that he learned that characters are bundles of "actants" (French, meaning people who do what is necessary for the book/plot/story to advance). That is, the characters are written to do things, not to be characters per se. (In passing, Robinson said that Virginia Woolf is the writer who has impacted him most in the past ten years.)
Delany said that one aspect of this "tyranny of the subject" is that all that students ever talked about in high school was characters, and that they needed to learn how to see other aspects. Lewitt said there is currently "an attempt to bring this genre into compliance with the general theoretical level" of everything else, particular what you read and analyze in high school. "Theory is a tool. It can be extremely useful. It can be destructive. You can do the same work without it but not as well. [But], in general, we have to stop worshipping our tools."
Olsen felt that the different theories were all valid, just as it is valid to render bodies in impressionism, X-rays, CAT-scan, etc. He quoted Jameson as having said, "Whenever you're writing something, know whom you're polemicizing against" and Thomas Mann's statement "Any philosophical position exists to remedy the evils of the opposite position." (To which Lewitt, replied, "How Hegelian!")
=46rom the audience Dave Shaw asked where the theory seemed to start, and where we should start. Someone mentioned Jonathan Color's work, Delany recommended his own "Politics of Paraliterary Criticism" (I think this appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction), as well as Frederic Jameson's Prison-House of Language and Marxism and Form, Terry Eagleton's On Literary Theory, and Raymond Williams's work.
But Delany warned again that most critical theory is for philosophy or classics. "Criticism," he said, "is what you do of the works; theory is analyzing why the criticism came out that way." Robinson added that theorists want to take on texts that fit with that theory (so novels with strong characters are examined vis-a-vis the tyranny of the subject and so forth). He pointed out that Triton includes the theory at the back of the book, "which tends to slow theoreticians down."
Robinson closed with Michel Foucault's observation:
"All intellectual performances are a species of comedy."
"In past panels we've explored the influence of both our early reading and early life experiences on our fiction. We thought that covered it, but what about Astroboy, Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Legion of Superheroes, or Mr. Machine? For many of us, our first exposure to the genre came from cartoons, comic books, or even toys. A possibly nostalgic look back."
Each of the panelists was ask to list an influence on their writing. Friesner, claiming to be old, said that when she was young comics were ten cents. Sawyer said he was young and got interested in science fiction through television. Edelman listed Stan Lee comic books. Gardner when he was ten the Universal monster movies were on television at dinnertime. The Twilight Zone was on just after his bedtime and so he built it up in his mind as better than the series really was. He has gone through life thinking the real goodies are just out of reach. Gravel watched Irwin Allen science fiction series. Every week he was disappointed but expected the next week it would be great. Clough liked "Batman" and "Legion of Super-heroes" comics.
Asked what they learned from these early influences, Friesner talked about seeing The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and looking at the Cyclops and part of the fun was seeing zipper up the back. It taught her to always look for "the zipper." Edelman pointed out what I would have if I was on the panel. The Cyclops was a stop-motion animation figure and had no zipper up the back. (I would add that there is an embarrassing zipper in a Sinbad film, but it is in the 1977 Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. It could be, however, that Friesner is one of those people with a talent for finding "the zipper" where it is not.)
Sawyer talked about how it was bad plotting to have Smith in Lost in Space making stupid mistakes that got him into trouble and he learned not to plot this way. Seeing the same program Tuesday and Thursday nights taught him a great deal about story structure. He could see the story on an entertainment level, then the second viewing told him how the effect was achieved. Edelman, who grew up in New York, did him one better since the "Million Dollar Movie" would play a film like Mighty Joe Young again and again in a week, and he would watch it over and over. He also said that everything he learned about morals he learned from Stan Lee comic books. These remembrances started the panel talking about "altered" viewing conditions for films. Geary Gravel suggested that the whole watching experience was different before the days of VCRs. You could see a film only once. It was fleeting and if you missed something, you could not see it again. These days you have a film on tape and never have to watch it again. Gardner added that there was a sense of television community. Everybody would see a television show at the same time and could discuss it the next day.
Clough liked the fact that every super-hero had to have an origin in the comics. To him this demonstrated that things don't happen for no reason. We live in an orderly universe and if there was a super-hero there, something must have created the super-hero. Friesner took this thought a step further and pointed out that each super-hero had to have some weakness, that no power was absolute. Superman was the victim of kryptonite, Green Lantern could not control anything that was yellow. (Jeez, can you imagine what his bathroom smelled like? I wonder if even in antiquity super-heroes had Achilles Heels?)
Edelman has a bit of a problem looking at the films being heckled on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Often these are films that he thought were good at the time. (Side thought: just because a film is heckled does not mean that it is bad and worthy of getting heckled. Back when Boskone would show films they were very tolerant of heckling. It started with films like King Dinosaur being heckled and eventually even films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers were getting heckled by the audience. Those who saw the MST3K movie will remember that even This Island Earth became fodder for heckling. Even the supposedly mature Readercon has the Kirk Poland to heckle authors who do not meet the convention committee's high standards of literary merit. Can you spell "elitist"?)
Geary Gravel claimed that he was the fan of comic books nobody else ever saw. He found out only years later that the ones he liked were really obscure. He showed examples of "Brain Boy" and "Cosmo the Martian." Sawyer said that he liked that "Classics Illustrated" comics, especially horror and science fiction. Of course, the classic among classics was the comic book of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds.
Gravel mentioned liking the Fleischer Superman cartoons
which were delightfully dark. Friesner talked about Fleischer's
other cartoons that left an impression on her. In discussion
with the audience other influence listed included television shows
like the Japanese anime Starblazers, Tarzan, and
Captain Midnight. [-mrl]
"In the Jan. '91 New York Review of Science Fiction, John Clute posits that every SF text, regardless of the year it claims to be set in, has an underlying 'real year' which shines through, the secret point in time that gives the work its flavor. The closer the 'real year' is to the present, the more cutting-edge the fiction reads; but most authors have a characteristic real year, one often based upon key childhood or adolescent experience and concerns. Is it possible to forcibly update your real year, in order to write sharper fiction? Doesn't the real year actually have two different elements, a scientific/technolo= gical one and a social/cultural one, differently amenable to updating and requiring different revision techniques?"
Clute, ever the stickler for detail, noted that it was originally "real decade" and that it was a flip phrase; "It was not intended to be a serious entry in the sweepstakes of critical theory." Nor, he said, was it intended to be argued in this fashion. His polemical point was not that science fiction couldn't be set in the future, but that it often isn't. In his review of Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide, he said that it had a real year perilously close to 1990 (the year it was written), and hence had an immediacy to it.
The panelists agreed that Ray Bradbury's real year was almost always 1927, and the post-World War II Heinlein had a real year of 1940. Philip K. Dick had a real year of 1950.
All this may be partially due to "a readership increasingly inclined to confuse a sense of wonder with nostalgia" (Clute's phrase), or maybe that is the cause rather than the effect.
Cramer said, "Insofar as I buy the concept of real year, I don't buy the idea that fantasy is radically different."= ; She said that the real year depends on what books were "imprinted&q= uot; on the author (i.e., what they read when they were fourteen), what cultural trends were important when they were writing, and how we view the future at any given time. She left the latter is perhaps more specific to science fiction than to fantasy, but exists even in fantasy.
Crowley expressed the opinion that Cramer was throwing cold water on Clute's idea. "Since whatever you predict isn't going to happen, you need to predict something different from everyone else." But Crowley did say that his one book about the future (Beasts?) really did reflect the year in which he wrote it (1967) even though it didn't come out until much later.
Keller asked what the real year of Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head is, since it such a Joycean derived text. Crowley responded by asking, "Is real year determined by content or by style?" Clute diverged somewhat by saying that Aldiss's latest book, Somewhere East of Life, has the same Eastern European sensibility.
Clute also noted that Pathfinder is not the Mars story we were taught; writers were caught in the old story of large capsules and are now fossilized (this seems to connect to many of the issues at the first Panel I went to, "The Moon Is No One's Mistress Anymore"). Clute did say that he doesn't necessarily imply a pejorative meaning by using "dated," "archaic," or "fossilized," though one wonders why he uses such loaded words if he doesn't mean them.
=46rom the audience, Jennifer Stevenson said she thought that the panelists are saying this is more about memory than about history. Clute responded that all work is autobiographical ("Asking= an author if his work is autobiographical like asking a spider, 'Where do you get your silk?'") The importance of memory is used by Ray Bradbury in "Mars Is Heaven," according to Clute, where the Martians read people's minds to get material to trick them with, but are unable to trick the Holocaust survivor who has repressed memory syndrome.
Stevenson said, "We as scientists invalidate personal experience as opposed to replicable evidence." = But Clute said that people gave up on science as the obvious hope of the future around 1967 anyway. We can't write plausible yet publishable science fiction, he claimed. Cramer responded that the book The Truth Machine (by James L. Halperin) seemed to use the "megatrends" method of futurology and is very tiresome. Clute worried that science fiction is being used as a security blanket, but Cramer thought science fiction was being used as an antidote to boredom (or terror).
Crowley asked who was writing in the present as their real year. Clute named Douglas Coupland in Shampoo Planet and Jonathan Lethem. Crowley said that Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers is also written in the present. Someone in the audience said that fantasy is addressing current social issues.
Another audience member asked if cyberpunk made people update their real year. Someone else pointed out that some people didn't want to update their real years, and cited Robert Silverberg's recent column in Asimov's about this. Clute felt that Silverberg's works since Dying Inside don't seem to have a real year anyway. Clute did say that cyberpunk pushed things forward and also dislodged the basic story structure from one of being in control of the world to one of being streetwise about the world. In this regard, he said, "[William] Gibson is quintessentially Canadian in writing about not being in control of his world." Relating cyberpunk to the reality we are in, Clute added, "Everything is wrong with Net except the fact that it prefigures what is coming."
Carver said one problem is that cutting-edge is what is in a four-year "real-year" moving window, but when the window moves, it's no longer cutting-edge. Clute said that cutting-edge and retro are flip sides of the same card.
Someone in the audience (can someone tell me who?) said what became one of the catch-phrases of the convention: "Cyberp= unk dragged science fiction into the 1980s-and left it there."
Clute said part of the result was the "pathos of an author trying to write about characters fifty years younger than themselves, and it just feels wrong."
Candas Jane Dorsey said that she was disturbed by the thought that people have that the cyberpunks got ahead because of their advanced language and their advanced technology; Dorsey felt that the cyberpunks were more the "Neuromatics" with very retro ideas about women, race, etc. She gave as an example The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, which she said was the most popular of these novels because it puts the real year and story year together. Cramer agreed, saying that Gibson once claimed nothing interesting happened in the 1970s in science fiction; someone responded to him that feminism happened, and that his not recognizing that said something about him.
An audience member suggested that the reader also
had a real year, and that what makes a story scary is if the story's
real year is greater than reader's.
Budrys was not officially part of the panel but as he was sitting right there on the stage, it was clear that he would hear everything that was said. Luckily it just turned out to be entirely positive. No disrespect intended to Budrys, but his presence may well have had a stultifying effect. In any case, the discussion went from low-key to no-key. So that may or may not have been a good idea. The panel was monotonously positive with a little bit of substance about his background and a lot of praise. The praise was about his writing style which was likened to that of Theodore Sturgeon and his review style which was likened to James Blish. No disrespect to Budrys, but I would say that he has his own style. David Hartwell was very positive on Budrys's Hard Landing of a few years ago, and I am told he had previously named it the best of its year. Hartwell, who used to show up to science fiction conventions well dressed with a flamboyant tie has now changed his style. He wears clothing that is obviously intended to make him one-man fashion Kirk Poland contest.
Budrys said that Richard Matheson's I Am Legend was a terrible novel but that the film The Omega Man is not bad. (I disagree on both.) Budrys ended by talking about his career.
Anecdotes included:
His parents were very restrictive and would not let him see science fiction. When someone-decidedly not his parents-let him see the Sunday comics he especially liked the science fiction comics. That inspired him to write science fiction for himself.
When Who? was published his father saw a copy. His Lithuanian-born father was particularly impressed with the Russian (Azarin was his name, I think) who was a particularly ruthless sort. The elder Budrys was surprised Azarin was so well-charact= erized when, as he said, young Budrys knew nobody like that. What Budrys did not tell his father is that the father was the model. In any case, his father learned to respect him on the basis of that.
When that father decided he could not break up his son's announced wedding to an American woman, he told Algis's mother when Algis was getting married, "It's you and me against the universe."
In another anecdote Galaxy magazine ran a contest for the best amateur writer, but got nothing of value so awarded the prize to Fred Pohl and Lester Del Rey who wrote as a team under a pen name.
Budrys resents A Canticle for Leibowitz because
it was not really supposed to be eligible the year it beat Rogue
Moon. It was beaten by They'd Rather Be Right and
when the fans realized that it was a good novel they extended
its eligibility. They made it eligible for another year, enabling
it to beat Rogue Moon. Budrys is still unhappy about that.
[-mrl]
"Certain things in fiction are, by convention and for good reason, not strictly realistic---dialogue, for instance, is a highly edited version of real speech. Is history one of these things? When we devise a fictional history (either an alternate past or a history of the future), can and should it represent the way history really works (choose your own theory), or is doing so antithetical to good fiction? Isn't the dramatic structure we look for in most novels absent from real history?"
Jablokov began by saying that Thucydides, Herodotus, and for that matter, the author of Samuel I and II used fictional techniques to write history, while Sir Walter Scott influenced historians such as Macaulay. In science fiction, he particularly likes the history theorist on the Space Beagle, but only because he (or rather his purpose in the plot) is so ridiculous. He then said to the panelists, "Make a policy statement: history, for or against."
Crowley began a continuing thread by mentioning that ten years ago Francis Fukiyama came up with the idea of "the end of history," meaning we recognize that there is no method to history, not Spengler's, Hegel's, not Marx's. Fukiyama thought that the arrival of capitalism meant that nothing would change any more. The panelists were asked which of them had read The End of History and the Last Man (Fukiyama's book). None of them actually had, and Crowley said, "It's not a book you read; you read about it." (Robinson browsed through it in a bookstore.)
Crowley said there seems to be a current belief that history no longer has to make sense, but is "one damn thing after another." He, however, is not completely convinced of this. In any case, he said, authors propose a form on history because that's what authors do. Crowley admitted imposing a very arbitrary form in Love & Sleep by saying that all of history could change, even the past, for ludic (sp?) reasons ("just for the hell of it").
Crowley also said in passing that post-modernists reject the very idea that history can be divided into pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. Robinson responded that we try to comprehend the past by breaking it up into periods (pre-modern being before 1815, modern being from 1815 to 1970, and post-modern from dates variously set between 1950 and 1973). The notion of historiography comes from Marx (more echoes of why literary theory is Marxist in nature). Robinson felt that Fukiyama decided this was "the end of history" because he likes what we have now and doesn't want it to change.
Robinson recommended Olaf Stapledon's novels as the greatest histories of the science fiction field, saying that every paragraph had enough ideas for a novel.
By this point, Asher said that she felt as if she should have prepared a thesis but she hadn't. But she felt that history is not one damn thing after another, because human life is not just one damn thing after another. (This seems to reflect the modern idea that one progresses through life, rather than the medieval idea of a more static state. That is, we-at least in the United States-have a feeling that if one works hard, one can better oneself. In earlier times, though, people thought that their station in life was fixed. The best they could hope for was to achieve success in the afterlife.)
Asher also said, "If you're writing historical fiction, it's much more important to have verisimilitude than to have accuracy." For example, if you're setting a novel in France, you don't write the dialogue in French. That would be more accurate, but hardly conducive to understanding-at least outside France, Quebec, and assorted other Francophone areas.
Sherman gave her view: "I tend to think that history is chaos in the macrocosm." Not everything happens in the same way each time. She also added, "It doesn't matter whether you're writing about the past or the future: your task is very similar. You are of the 20th Century," and you need to convey a different time.
Grossman felt that when reading older novels, one problem is that humor is very contextual. Jablokov said that erotica is also very contextual. "There's a weird specificity to the transgressions" of 18th century erotica (e.g., scenes of people whipping nuns and such).
Asher said that she once read all of Shakespeare's plays in a single semester and by the end was so immersed that she started thinking like the characters. "If you immerse yourself in a period with a reasonably open mind, you can come to understand [the people of that people] them even if you don't agree with them."
Robinson felt that history is an attempt to understand a flow leading to the present (synchronic) rather than a cross-section of time (diachronic). Crowley observed that the events in every novel are over when you're reading it and you're therefore reading it as the past. (I'm not sure this completely applies to novels written in the present tense.) And Sherman said, "History doesn't have a beginning, a middle, and an end; it just has a middle."
Crowley mentioned that he does writing for historical documentaries for television (including The Liberators). "People want to believe that there is an actuality in history [even though it] may be concealed or revealed." He seemed to feel this was unreasonable, and the producers' asking him whether the black troops did or did not liberate the camps was meaningless. He claimed that as oral history it was true that they said it, but that was all that could be determined (or possibly all that mattered). Asher took issue with this, saying, "This attitude that facts don't matter has been enormously destructive. The interpretation is important but you have to have facts to interpret."= ; Yes, people's perceptions are important, but the actuality is important too.
Robinson said that the original "Foundation" trilogy is 1940s Spenglerian history. "Science fiction is so historical in its working principles, even more than mainstream,"= he claimed.
Crowley observed that historians have the same "broken coastline" theory of history as chaos theoreticians. That is, look at any level and it's equally complex, from the Stapledonian range to a single day or less. Jablokov agreed, saying he had just read 1587: A Year of No Importance by Ray Huang about the Ming Dynasty and found it full of detail about a basically unimportant year. Grossman said that A. J. P. Taylor says we think what we know what ancient Greece was like because we know so little about it.
Grossman also said, "Civilizations try to define everything in their own terms" but she didn't agree with someone's claim along these lines that everyone tried to renumber the years to start with their period.
Jablokov observed that it takes newer events to shed light on older ones: "Kafka is not Kafka-esque until Borges writes."
Crowley asked, "What makes the pasts of the futures that we write convincing or unconvincing?" Jablokov said that expository lumps made it unconvincing: "In normal life people do not sit you down and tell you the history of the past fifty years." (Maybe he's just traveling with the wrong set of people.) He felt that what was important was the suggestion that you know the whole history and could tell it if you chose. Jablokov said this was like painting gold braid in a painting: you hint at it, but if the viewer looks closely s/he will see that the tiny details are not all there. Jablokov felt that encyclopedia= entries work best when the supposed author of the entry is clearly tendentious.
Robinson closed by saying that secret histories are
really interesting in that they are the desire that history make
sense.
"Readership of speculative fiction is in decline. Actually, readership of just about everything is in decline. Is SF suffering more, because its special appeal is being uniquely met by the media? If this is so, does it also provide unique opportunities to reverse the trend? How could we do this?"
Hartwell started by saying, "My readership has been declining for years." (Actually, he meant his reading-not a good start for an editor.) Ryan said his readership was declining as well (he may have actually meant readership).
Nielsen Hayden took issue with the premise, saying that he doesn't see readership in decline. He claimed that most "evidence" along these lines is anecdotal, and also tends not to count science fiction that the claimant feels is "garbage." He did claim that the mass market distribution system has collapsed ("You know, your fifty-cent, dollar-and-a-quart= er, four-fifty, seven-ninety-nine book"). (Perhaps, but I still see a lot of mass-market paperbacks floating around.)
Ryan said that he felt one should not count media tie-ins when determining science fiction readership. He also felt you could definitely say that readership of short fiction is down (because you can point to circulation figures for the magazines being down).
Nielsen Hayden thought that the naysayers come from a group of people who are grumpy for some reason. Hartwell said that fifteen years ago, the claim was that fantasy was taking over. Now it's that media is taking over.
Nielsen Hayden said that Tor publishes 170 books per year. Malzberg asked him approximately how many copies the average one of those sold, but Nielsen Hayden wouldn't give details. Malzberg pressed him-since after all, without some statistics, his claims are also merely anecdotal-but Nielsen Hayden interpreted this as Malzberg questioning his integrity. Finally, Ellen Asher in the audience said that the Science Fiction Book Club expects a new book as an alternate selection to sell between 2000 and 4000 copies.
Hartwell gave some other figures. In 1970, mass market books printed about 60,000 to 70,000 each and expected to sell half, and there were thirty books a month. In 1980s, the print run was 30,000 to 35,000 with 60 to 70 books a month. (One presumes sell-through was still 50%.) Now, print runs are under 25,000 per title, but there are more than 100 books a month. So the number of volumes is relatively constant, but there are fewer copies of each of more titles.
Nielsen Hayden admitted that it was now harder to make a start in science fiction, but said again that it's not because of a decline of the number of readers. Hartwell wanted to distinguish between regular readership versus occasional readership (but didn't).
Nielsen Hayden pointed out that science fiction spawns off other genres like the techno-thriller and the near-future thriller, which are science fiction but don't get counted that way.
Ryan thought that the total numbers are up but what they're reading is declining, and other media are competing for new readers. "What we're suffering from is our wish coming true," at least in terms of having a lot of choices.
In regard to competing for new (young) readers, Nielsen Hayden said that writers are no longer getting a lot of ego-boo from other writers for writing for twelve-year-olds, so they don't. This means that books are more "adult" (in theme, etc.) than they used to be. Malzberg disagreed somewhat, saying that writers were always looking for approval from other writers. = (However, I think there may have been more of it for "juvenile"= literature before. Of course now "juvenile" or "young adult" fiction is a whole separate genre.)
Malzberg said that actual readership hasn't expanded since the 1960s, but books and authors have, meaning there is less audience for each author. He feels there is an audience of 500,000 (plus or minus 50,000) for genre fiction. (I have no idea where this comes from.) "Science fiction is boom and bust because new publishers misunderstand the expandability of the audience," he continued. Hartwell thinks there are 30,000,000 potential readers (based on what? the ticket sales for Star Wars?), but they won't become regular readers. Still, science fiction needs a large pool of occasional readers to replace loss of regular readers.
Hartwell also thought that science fiction is suffering from the fact that there hasn't been a major bust in the last thirty years. The last great influx was in 1968, when Star Trek fans started reading science fiction in desperation when the series was canceled.
Someone asked, "What can be done to increase science fiction readership?" Malzberg responded by asking if we did want to expand the readership. It has already expanded for some areas. "One gets the kind of readership one deserves."= ; Hartwell said if we said we wanted to expand the readership, the next question (argument) was about whose readership we want to expand. Asher said her concern at this point was that the core readership of science fiction is overwhelmingly white. (One notes that this is a declining market, at least percentage-wise.)
The "summary" seemed to come from Stephen
Kelner in the audience, who asked, "Where is the Heinlein
of yesteryear?" The panelists' answer was that we have abandoned
the audience of Heinlein to media fiction.
I didn't attend most of this, but was there toward the end. When I came it, Budrys had just been asked what he disliked in story submissions. He dislikes folded-over manuscripts; manuscripts with no name or with unnumbered pages; stories where hero wakes up with amnesia for ten or twelve pages; where the hero runs, jumps, dives off ridges, or swarms up trees with no purpose; stories with a plethora of made-up things or names; and stories with backwoods planets filled with natural philosophers.
Asked why Tomorrow magazine went electronic, he said it was because the hard-copy distributors went belly-up. As for Tomorrow SF's future, he said simply, "I don't know."
Tomorrow SF can be found
on the Web at http://www.tomorrowsf.com.
Robinson started with some biographical information. He grew up in Orange County, went to the University of California at San Diego for his bachelor's degree, then to Boston University and Clarion, then back to UCSD for his doctorate. He said he didn't read much science fiction because he was a methodical reader-start= ing with A and working his way through-and the science fiction was after the Z's. When he read Asimov he liked it, but he knew that Asimov was a big name. So he read another science fiction book he picked at random: Clifford Simak's Goblin Reservation. Then, he said, he decided that if he could read a "random unknown author" like Simak and find something that good, he should read more science fiction.
In college he wrote mostly poetry. "One thing about lyric poetry is that you can finish one even if it is dreadful.&quo= t; But this inspired him to try to write something better. He tried writing science fiction once and gave up, but had better success second time trying to write science fiction.
But he still hadn't made contact with the field. "I didn't know conventions existed because the books don't tell you about that." He went to a Harlan Ellison reading, and on the advice of a practical joker, asked for the address of Clarion. Ellison gave him a hard time, but also gave him the address and said, "Here, kid, I hope you make it." = All Robinson could think driving home was, "Wow, this is quite the community."
His fellow students at Clarion included Michael Talbot, Gregory Frost, and Michael Armstrong. He said he found Clarion one long party. He also said that he experimented with first person variable, present tense, etc., but Clarion hammered on him for this. Because of this sort of thing, he doesn't automatically recommend Clarion-he said it has too much of a "shooting gallery" atmosphere which doesn't reflect real readers. = And, as he put it, too many editors are "children of a dysfunctional= workshop" and believe that honesty means brutality. (And Ellison is part of this problem, he noted.)
Asked about his first sale, he said that his submission story to Clarion in 1974 was shown to Damon Knight for Orbit. Robinson was driving across the country at the time, and called home from a truck stop in Rawlings, Wyoming, only to have his mother tell him there was a letter from a Damon Knight. When he asked her to open it, she told him that Knight wanted to buy his story for $200. He said it was a very strange experience, capped by his sleeping in a rest stop under a fifty-foot statue of Lincoln's head.
When he was in graduate school, he said, he treated his graduate work as a job to be done in twenty hours a week to leave him time to write. His academic performance suffered, but he did sell several stories. He said he kept sending stories to Knight and that Knight would buy some of them. He also sent to Robert Silverberg's New Dimensions. "At the end of reading it, Knight might look up and say, 'Can I buy this?' That's great criticism."
Frederic Jameson at UCSD said one day that Philip K. Dick was the greatest living American writer ("not the greatest living American science fiction writer, but the greatest living American writer"). Robinson decided to try Dick, and read Galactic Pot-Healer (which he called Galactic Pot-Boiler). This novel didn't seem to support Jameson's statement, but other novels by Dick did.
After Knight's Orbit series went out of business, Robinson went a couple of years without selling, then sold "Venice Drowned" to Terry Carr for Universe. Based on submissions for that series, Carr then decided to do a first-novel series. Robinson sent him three chapters of The Wild Shore, and got $7000. When Carr told him about the contract, he explained it was a good contract and to be happy with it, but Robinson was happy just selling it for any amount and didn't need convincing.
Hartwell asked if Earth Abides was a source for The Wild Shore. Robinson said yes, and also that he included sentences from all the post-holocaust novels he read as sources. From Earth Abides he included "I am the last American." From Dr. Blooodmoney he included something about a DJ stuck in space.
Robinson said that he was unhappy about what had happened to Orange County, with people cutting down the orange groves and building housing developments and urban areas, and so bombed it back not to the Stone Age, but more to Hannibal, Missouri. (But see Kathryn Cramer's comment on the "Science Fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson" for another perspective on this.)
Because The Wild Shore was the first of a new line by a major editor, it got lots of attention, so Robinson thought that whenever you publish a book, you get fifty reviews. He therefore had to get used to the "normality of science fiction life" (as he put it) for his subsequent books.
Asked about the 1980s, he said there were no high points he wants to discuss. "The 80s were the 80s; let's get past them as soon as possible."
Robinson said he was frustrated by The Pacific Edge, because he wanted to write a Utopian novel but also a working novel. The Utopia requires a complete description of how you achieve Utopia; the novel requires that you focus on characters. Writing Red Mars, he said, gave him the opportunity to do both. When he finished Red Mars, it looked like it had too many expository lumps, but he found that liked it that way. Without expository lumps, he said, you can't write science. But he approached the Mars trilogy more as Utopian than as hard science fiction. "Hard SF isn't doing what it claims to do. The hardness is a hardness of attitude."
Robinson said that he found himself pegged as literary science fiction author. This was bad both in a marketing sense and in an aesthetic sense.
Hartwell asked him, why Mars? Robinson said that he wanted to do Mars, and was interested in wilderness, and wanted to do Utopian, and they fit all together.
Cramer (who was co-interviewing with Hartwell) asked about how Mars seemed to move from a scarcity economy to a post-scarcity economy without any intermediate step of a middle class. Robinson felt this was justified and that we could, if we wanted to, switch to a twenty-hour work week. (I have a lot of questions about this, but this isn't the place for them.) He said, "The capitalist world order wants to looks massive and permanent, but in a hundred years we won't be working in the same economic system."=
Cramer asked about other socio-political aspects of the series. For example, Robinson spent a lot of time documenting the necessity of political conventions. Robinson responded that he realized "exposition could be interesting if you made it interesting." He agreed, however, that political exposition is harder to make interesting than scientific exposition. Most novels try to fudge how the political system works or whether it works. He decided to try to avoid this. The result, he noted, was that the review of Red Mars by Michael Bishop said it had "a brutal overload of information." Robinson said he wished that had been one of the reviews cited on the back cover!
Cramer also asked about Robinson's view of extended longevity as opposed to that of Bruce Sterling. She noted, "Blue= Mars is heavily involved with these older characters beginning to lose their memory." True, but Robinson still thought people would remember more than Sterling seemed to. (Sterling's characters forget they had been married to each other, for example.)
Cramer also asked about the classic debate between the Great Man vs. the Tide of History theories, saying that when John Boone and Hiroko vanish., some other characters think that they would make a difference if they were around, but the books seem to deny this. Robinson wouldn't say, claiming he tried to avoid taking sides in the book as well. (Hartwell noted that it is uncommon in science fiction for writers to avoid taking sides on this issue.)
Hartwell asked, "Who of contemporary science fiction authors do you feel most in sympathy with?" Robinson replied, "My friends." "Who are your friends?" "Well, it's big crowd. ...." He did name Carter Sholtz, Jonathan Lethem, Karen Joy Fowler, Paul Park, Michael Swanwick, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and Terry Bisson.
Hartwell also asked, "Are there any particular trends in science fiction that you wish to deplore?" Robinson started by saying, "No, not really. It's going great as far as I can tell," but then went on to deplore sharecropping and media tie-ins.
Hartwell asked Robinson his favorite recreations or work outside of writing. Robinson said first of all was parenting his eight-year-old and his two-year-old. He thinks one of the evils of our economic system is that it drives fathers out of the house and away from parenting. He also gardens, does sports, and goes up in the mountains. "My time above 10,000 feet is golden time," he said. "I'm a hiker mostly. I've tried a little bit of climbing but I'm scared of it. ... I feel high when I'm up high."
Hartwell asked, "Is ecology the most salient political cause you have espoused?" Robinson said that he was trying to work out a leftist ecology. He describes himself as a leftist, but admits that leftists (that is, socialists and the Eastern bloc) are not ecologists. (The Eastern bloc has pretty much crippled the ecology of that area.) But "right-wingers&= quot; are definitely not ecologists either. "To capitalists, people are the bio-infrastructure. I'm trying to live some version of what I'm theorizing. Otherwise it gets too weird." But he said there were problems. "The economic and physical structure [we have] make it harder to build community."
Someone in the audience said that Daniel Quinn's
"Great Forgetting" (in Ishmael) had the idea
that our whole culture is based on totalitarian agriculture, but
Robinson felt this was attacking the wrong thing. "It's
hard to curse agribusiness after you've tried to grow your own
food," he explained, saying that we needed agribusiness to
feed the current world population, and referenced the book Full
House: Reassessing the Earth's Population Carrying Capacity
by Lester Russell Brown.
The Kirk Poland Competition consists in large part of making fun of "bad writing," though of course never any of the writing of the convention's guests. Many people complain it's mean-spirited (among them Mark Leeper and Elizabeth Carey); I would add that it's not even funny.
They say they keep it because it's a tradition. =
I thought the Readercon Small Press Awards were a tradition too,
and a much better and positive one. Those don't seem to exist
any more.
"Why do we reread some books but not others? How is the rereading experience different from the initial one? How does it differ depending on how thoroughly we remember the text? Why do we want to revisit specific stories?"
Delany began by quoting Roland Barthe: "Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere." Delany added that while you may be able to write a book in such a way as to make people want to read it, "There is nothing you can do in your book to make someone who not picked it up, read it" for the first time.
Delany also asked himself, "Why do I read?" and immediately answered, "I don't know; I've got nothing else to do."
Crowley felt it is easier to reread books than to read new books. So when you don't feel like picking up a new book, you can still reread an old book. Drifting somewhat afield, he added that there are two types of authors: those with tremendous appetite for what else is being written, and those without. He said he is in the latter category; he reads other people's novels, but finds himself saying, "This is made up. I know how this is done; I can do this."
Willey writes for amazon.com and gets to choose what she wants to review. Lately she said she had read a whole lot of recent King Arthur novels, and that it could be described as the "pound of Turkish delight" problem and it seemed as though she was rereading the same book over and over. She actually reread only two or three books for pleasure that she had reviewed last year for duty (one was Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey).
D'Ammassa (who reads an average of a book a day) said that he gives up on more books these days, because life is too short to read bad books. (His reading and collecting is legendary; apparently it is well-known that he was recently trapped for four hours under a pile of fallen books.) Twenty per cent of this is rereading, to which he takes a conscious-or perhaps conscientious-appr= oach: he chooses an author and then rereads everything that author has written, chronologically. His latest project was/is Murray Leinster. He says that David R. Bunch improves each time he reads him, Edmond Hamilton does not, and Murray Leinster had mixed results. Books he rereads often include Walter M. Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz (he has read the upcoming sequel, St. Leibowitz= and the Wild Horse Woman) and says it's very good, E R. Edd= ison's Worm Ouroboros, John Wyndham's Rebirth, Samuel R. Dela= ny's Jewels Of Aptor, and Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human.
Delany admitted that he doesn't read easily. He hears people talk about reading for pleasure and they sound as if they're from another planet. And he reads more non-fiction than fiction. (He did later say that he had reread Joanna Russ's Souls seven or eight times.) Crowley agreed somewhat, saying "The number of books I haven't read would astonish people who think I'm erudite." (He later talked about a game of English professors at a conference which involves each person naming a book s/he hasn't read that s/he could be expected to have read. The conflict is between wanting to win the game and wanting to maintain your image.) On the other hand, Crowley does remember one book he reread early: a book of questions about animals by Allen Devoe (?).
Delany said that he is hooked by style originally, but needs structure or plot to sustain that interest. He enjoys reading/rereading authors such as Guy Davenport, Ethan Canaan, and William Gass. And he has reread Juna Barnes's Nightwood eighteen or nineteen times. (He talked of her "literally pushing the envelope." Unless she is propelling a piece of paper across her desktop, this is an astonishing misuse of the word "literally" by an author who should know better. This, of course, would never should up in a Kirk Poland competition.)
Rereading may be a misnomer, Delany implied, when he said, "Not only can you not step into the same river twice, you can't read the same book twice." Someone had said, "Every time you read Proust it's different because you're skimming at different places each time."
Willey, on the other hand, was an addictive rereader as a child, and would read the same books over and over. (That's me. I reread my father's copy of Jules Verne's Mysterious Island so many times that the covers fell off. I also read and reread Franz Werfel's Star of the Unborn several times while I was in junior high school.)
Crowley said that some books seem to have a time or age limit. He thought that the Pooh books were the height of wit and delight at age ten, but now they seem snotty and arch to him. Delany said he had the reverse reaction to Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows. Crowley said that he had an even stronger negative reaction to that than to the Pooh books. He was reading about the Rat saying that they don't go into the "Wild Wood" because the people there are "different from us." (In fact, he was reading this to a black friend and her response was immediately, "Right; spics and niggers.")
D'Ammassa read Zane Gray and other Westerns before first grade, because that was what his mother had in the house, but read no other fiction until age fourteen. Rereading Westerns now, he said that Max Brand is still pretty good, but the others don't fare well.
Delany said in response to a question about whether knowing theory affects rereading, "A lot of theory you can't even swallow unless you reread the theory."
Delany said that getting people to read the first time is difficult. He said that when he asks his class who killed one of the characters in Joanna Russ's Picnic on Paradise, eighty per cent give the wrong answer, based on their expectations of who kills whom in various situations. So Delany said that the first time you read you're reading for what is the same as other stories.
Eisenberg asked the panelists if they will reread a book after they've been taken in once by something unexpected in it. (I would say yes, and that those are often the books that I am compelled to reread. The latest example would be The Prestige by Christopher Priest. 'Nuff said.) Crowley said that he sometimes rereads to see how authors write. He also reread The Lord of the Rings for no reason he can explain; he didn't even like it.
Willey suggested, "There is a ritualistic aspect to rereading; you have to be an initiate to understand the journey."= She also said that she can understand people in a room full of books saying "There's nothing to read" just as someone with a full closet can say "There's nothing to wear" or someone can look into a full refrigerator and say "There's nothing to eat."
Greer Gilman (in the audience) said that W. H. Auden talked about how each rereading was affected by the conditions under which you reread the work. Eisenberg said there are other factors as well. For example, the Nancy Drew novels are constantly being rewritten, usually just to change roadsters to cars, get rid of running boards and hair bobs, etc., but one had a completely different story. It seems that the original story had to do with the Ku Klux Klan, so they dropped that and added a phantom horse.
Willey said she recommends rereading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth.
Crowley said, "Reading pop novels is like chewing
my way through wet cardboard," but admitted a liking for
Anthony Burgess. Delany said he recommended rereading John Crowley's
Little, Big.
This panel should probably have been called "The Mars Books of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a slight mention of other works," since so little of his other works were discussed.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden noted that although he has packaged some of Robinson's reissues, he has not edited any of his books.
Oberndorf asked the panelists how they would convince someone to read Robinson and which book they should start with. Patrick Nielsen Hayden said that he would suggest The Wild Shore and The Gold Coast, especially to Californians, because they got the whole Sun Belt area right. (I though the Sun Belt was more in the South than in California.) Cramer said, "I don't encounter a whole lot of people who need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the works of Kim Stanley Robinson these days."
Teresa Nielsen Hayden said, "I feel at this point that the Mars books are one of the great works of science fiction." She quoted Jim Mann as having said, "Stan Robinson has done for Mars what Tolkien has down for Middle Earth." Cramer said that she read these in reverse order and had no problem. Patrick Nielsen Hayden added, "I have not experienced any boring passages" regarding the expositionary passages. Van Gelder thought that "part of the reason that readers don't get into these books is that readers are getting lazier." And Patrick Nielsen Hayden seemed to agree when he said that the books are full of everything people say they want: "optimistic, upbeat, full of science, full of scientists doing heroic things," yet people are still dissatisfied. "It's science fiction about the world, not science fiction about science fiction."
Cramer said that for her, "The characters most like Stan are the most believable, the characters least like Stan are the least believable." Patrick Nielsen Hayden added, "Robinson's fiction lacks irony and remove. He is very unashamedly earnest." Patrick Nielsen Hayden felt that too much science fiction is like Fallen Angels: "full of heroic posturing, but mostly grumblings about the failings of liberals," while Robinson seems to feel that life is real and life is earnest, and has a fresh "morning-of-the-world" feel.
Talking about one of Robinson's other books, Teresa Nielsen Hayden said that Icehenge starts with an extremely unreliable narrator.
The panelists returned to the Mars books with a long discussion of John Boone.
Van Gelder thought that Robinson's best stories are those where he plays around with form (e.g., "A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions"). Teresa Nielsen Hayden likes his use of settings: "He gives really good rock."
Oberndorf said that someone claimed that The Wild Shore was "anti-science-fiction" and that in general what Robinson was writing wasn't really science fiction. Van Gelder thought the label "'anti-SF' comes from the way [Robinson] favors nature over technology." Patrick Nielsen Hayden conceded this, but pointed out that Robinson is also a science geek. Teresa Nielsen Hayden added, "A lot of hard SF is largely composed of attitude" without any real technology. Patrick Nielsen Hayden pointed out that Robinson thinks the cable in the Mars books is cool and that terraforming is cool. From the audience, John MacLeod suggested that The Memory of Whiteness and Icehenge had some commonality of technology and futurity with the Mars books.
Cramer asked (again, in regard to the Mars books), "We believe the science for the purposes of the book, but do we believe the politics?" Patrick Nielsen Hayden said, "The social organization in the Mars books is the least believable [aspect] but it's more believable than in most science fiction."
Cramer continued, asking, "Isn't it cruel to tell people that the order of things doesn't have to be this way, and can be different, given that it's very hard for people to change their beliefs?" The consensus was that people should play with ideas worth thinking about even if they're not believable and that there aren't enough writers playing with ideas. (The panelists named Bruce Sterling and Gwyneth Jones as people who play with ideas. I would add Greg Egan.)
Cramer, in a rare negative comment on another guest's writings, said that she disliked "The Blind Geometer," which started as science fiction and ended as how hard a man could throw a ball. This led to the other panelists naming their least favorite Robinson story. Patrick Nielsen Hayden disliked The Memory of Whiteness, saying that non-musicians shouldn't write about music. Van Gelder disliked The Pacific Edge. Oberndorf, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Teresa Nielsen Hayden really liked all the "Gold Coast" stories, but Cramer said she knew someone who came from that area and wanted to bomb it back to the Stone Age before they tore down the orange groves and built suburbia (in reference to the earlier comment that Robinson disliked the fact that people had cut down the orange groves and build suburbia there). Cramer did not say who this person was, but I got the impression she might have been a farm worker, and as Cramer said, any Utopian novel begs the question of whose Utopia it is. It would probably be interesting to compare these Utopian novels to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.
Just for the record, Robinson's Hugo and Nebula nominations are:
"Some readers adopt a single critical approach to literature and then apply it to everything they read. But one can argue that Darko Suvin's Marxist analysis of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' is just plain wrong---in fact, really stupid. This implies that different books are variously subject to analysis by different approaches or theories. Is it possible to learn a variety of approaches, and to use the right one with each new book? Or are we better off mastering a single approach, and risking the occasional misprision?"
Keller suggested, "It's a matter of reading protocols. Every work you read needs a different theory," and quoted Delany as saying, "You should read a work against its ideal form." But then Delany said that reading non-contemporary= works against their own ideal forms is somewhat useless and difficult. He felt that we needed to ask, "What is the text we have here in front of us doing?" and then discuss that.
Cox said he was "skeptical of any theoretic perspective that presents itself as some sort of magic bullet approach." Cramer thought that you need a basic familiarity with the motifs used in science fiction, particularly if you are trying to write in it. (On the other hand, Olaf Stapledon didn't know really know much about science fiction when he was writing it.)
Cramer said, "Theory is a set of systems of analysis that are of various use in various circumstances. Giving it the name theory gives it a testability and verifiability ... = ;that it does not deserve." She also said, "As you learn how to read better, you build up your own systems of analysis" and learn to use other people's systems as well.
Kandel works for the editorial department of the Modern Language Association and said, "Criticism answers the question of what is this book or this poem or this work." Criticism also uses the work to shed truth on ourselves or on society.
Olsen asked if there is a right approach and a wrong approach to take to a given book. Are there approaches that are specific to science fiction? Keller said that even more than that, you can't even read Nova the same way you can read Dhalgren. "If you try and read it [Dhalgren] as a space opera you're not going to get very much out of it."
Delany pointed out, "We read poetry differently than the way we read fiction." In science fiction, the landscape is heavier (more important), but this doesn't come under the rubric of theory. Delany said that he has never seen someone write a deconstruction of a science fiction text. (He said that The American Shore is just a very close reading.) He also said, "I've never seen a serious psychoanalytic analysis of a science fiction story," but Kandel claimed that Ketterer wrote one of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. In any case, Delany said, this tells us something about the nature of science fiction, and also about the nature of theory.
Delany repeated something he said on an earlier panel, that psychoanalytic criticism is usually of texts with large amounts of accumulated criticism.
Cox felt that criticism needed to distinguish between "could it be?" and "is it likely?" For example, he had a student who claimed that J. Alfred Prufrock was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome after his experiences in Vietnam. The fact that the poem was written decades before the Vietnam War makes this very unlikely. (I would say that not only was it unlikely, but it couldn't be, either, unless you accept the notion of prescience.) Cramer said there also seem to be many more ways to do it wrong. For example, one critic claimed LeGuin's Tehanu was strongly influenced by LeGuin's abortion in college, but Cramer felt that this was not likely after fifty years.
Delany said that the first critics were readers, then writers, and now there are critics per se. Keller felt that it was still true that "critics should be readers."
Cramer thought that outside science fiction people have a negative reaction to the history of motifs because it seems too much like the Finnish School (?) method of categorizing everything down to folk tales as supporting motifs.
Returning to psychoanalytic criticism, Kandel talked about Lem's Fiasco being easy to psychoanalyze, leading Delany to suggest that the goal of a good deal of theory seems to be to take texts that seem very simple and to "problematize"= the text. That is, these works become teachable for a longer period. Cox said another problem was that he has to connect the science fiction he teaches to other fiction. (E.g., Arthur C. Clark= e's "The Star" is about a man who has his world-view shaken by a surprising discovery, like Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation"= ; and Raymond Carver's "Cathedral.") Cramer suggested, "The Wizard Of Oz and Sister Carrie are a lot more similar than you would think." (My immediate thought is that they couldn't help but be.)
Kandel said that a lot of this discussion is about what goes on in the classroom, leading me to wonder if movie criticism more populist than literary criticism? And by this I mean not just reviewers like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, but also critics like Pauline Kael and others.
In any case, Cramer suggested, "What generates controversy in the field is anxiety about the marketplace and disagreements about who the audience ought to be." Delany felt that fandom is a counter-institution to the teaching institution providing some balance. The problem with teaching students is that the exciting books are those which are different from a whole lot of other books, but most students haven't read the whole lot of books that they are different from. This is the prime example of his claim that in the schools, it's the non-readers (students) that determine the books to be pushed (that is, the books that are teachable).
There is more criticism of science fiction these days, but still of relatively few people (LeGuin, Dick, Gibson, Tepper). Cox said that there is a Norton Anthology Of Science Fiction, but he is waiting for a trade paperback edition because no one is going to assign it if the students have to buy the hardcover.
(I asked about the Suvin article; it was probably
in Science Fiction Studies in the late 1970s. I guess
Eric Van didn't footnote his blurbs properly!)
Robinson read two excerpts from his upcoming novel,
Antarctica, a book which seems to deal even more overtly
with politics and class than the Mars novels. It's due out in
Britain in September, and in the United States next June.
"When Arthur C. Clarke wrote that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,' he anticipated by thirty or forty years the explosion of stories using nanotechnology. To what extent has nanotechnology become a catch-all explanation for devices that border on the magical? What techniques can be used to maintain a hard-SF feel in a story with such miraculous gizmos? " =
Glenn Grant, the moderator, has had fiction appearing in Interzone, and has co-edited an anthology with David Hartwell. He also writes reviews and other non-fiction. Michael A. Burstein has been published in Analog, and though he has only four stories in print he is up for the John W. Campbell Award. Catherine Asaro is a theoretical physicist. Daniel Hatch writes hard science fiction stories for Analog. Daniel P. Dern has written science fiction but these day he writes about Internet.
Most attendees probably knew (Arthur C.) Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Of course I thought that the really scary panel would be Nanotechnology and Sturgeon's Law.)
Grant started by asking the panel how many stories are really about nanotechnology versus how many just use it as a gimmick, indistinguishable from magic. Some of the panelists said that the problem with nanotechnology is that after authors read K. Eric Drexler's seminal book Engines Of Creation that take one or two aspects out, but do not see that the whole society will have changed. They may use the machines for creating devices, but they do not have people in society with elongated life spans. If nanotechnology becomes commonplace, it will change almost all aspects of society. Burstein agreed and said that there were two types of nanotechnology stories: those whose authors have thought through the subject and have a valid extrapolation, and those that by Clarke's law put in some impossible device and explain it away with nanotechnology. Grant talked about the sort of bad story in which people are living on ceiling through the use of nanotechnology. Burstein said that authors have to think what a small machine really can and cannot do. You can have it clean the floor. But you don't want to have someone thrown from a window hitting the ground and splattering only to have nano-machines reconstruct the person complete with his memories a few minutes later. Grant gave the whimsical example of a Hogan story in which a bullet wound could be easily and quickly healed and the victim reconstructed. As a result it legal to use guns. In fact, people are told to go ahead and kill someone if it makes them feel better. It is healthy for the emotions and the hospitals can quickly fix the damage.
Asaro said that she did not like the hand-waving sort of science fiction. She used to read slush piles, and a new writer better have the science right, or be really good. = Dern thought that Blood Music is a good example, of a case where technology becomes magic. Bear's book is one of the few where the plot hangs on nanotechnology. Of course, it is not called nanotechnology in the book, just because it was written before nanotechnology came to the public consciousness.
The conversation turned to just how good the predictions of Drexler's book are. Hatch said he was not that impressed by Drexler. Particularly, he does not trust Drexler's prediction that we would be protected from the most dangerous excesses of nanotechnology by the media, science, and courts. Grant said that Drexler has since publication pulled back from a lot of the claims in the book.
Asaro returned to the fiction, saying that the stories don't take into account that all technology has problems. What happens if there is some failure in the design of nano-machines? Dern suggested that there also would deliberate tinkering. He said that nanotechnology in fiction has the same problem as the Batman utility belt problem. It simply does too much. There is no problem it will not solve and no problem in the design that you cannot get around. Grant suggested you have to find ways to deal with problems like thermal noise. It will limit the value of nanotechnology if it works only at minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Asaro said that things don't work like machines on the microscopic level. How do you handle supplying energy to these tiny machines and how do you dissipate their heat?
The conversation went to the social effects of the new technology. Asaro said that if we have a technology that can extend life span then right away you have a problem. If everyone has it we become overpopulated. Otherwise it creates conflicts of haves against have-nots. Grant said what he liked about The Diamond Age is that it showed that if you can suddenly produce enough for everyone it just makes social class warfare worse, not better. Burstein liked extrapolation that people would go back to considering hand crafting as the ultimate status symbol. Asaro that is already happening and now baking your own bread is thought to be the thing to do. Dern said that nanotechnology would create a world like in The Stars My Destination, where the accent was on conspicuous consumption. He said the other problem is that the odds are that nanotechnology can be owned and controlled are zero. It will become a home-brew technology. Grant responded that depends on your assumptions. Specifically, can it be done on the desktop? Asaro said that computers started huge, a whole wall of switches, but now anyone can have one. = The technology will become available and probably individuals will be able to work with it.
Grant said that Drexler expects nanotechnology to do the actual testing of nanotechnology developed, but that we will have as much trouble debugging nanotechnology as fixing a person. Dern said that in predicting a future with nanotechnology you have to assume it has already pervaded society. That society will probably be beyond the understanding of us today. Hatch pointed out all this plays into Vinge's Singularity. Asaro added that we have seeds of nanotechnology in all tech things and they will change everywhere. Grant said that this is perhaps not good. We cannot see where society is going. He can extrapolate twenty or thirty years, but past that is a wall of incomprehensibility. But Asaro countered that the basic urges of people are the same today as 10,000 years ago.
The rapid change of technology is making it harder for science fiction writers. Asaro said it used to be you had thirty or forty years to be proved wrong in your assumptions in a story. That is no more. She had a story that was based on good science when it was written and was out of date by the time it was published. Grant thinks that our impression of nanotechnology will look silly to the future. Are we going to look back on nanotechnolo= gy like we do on atomic energy predictions in of the 50s? We once claimed that atomic energy would transform the world and give us electricity too cheap to meter. Will we look back and say Drexler was overly optimistic about the potential of nanotechnology?
Burstein discussed the idea of having something like waldos that would allow us to do things on the micro-level with controls on the macro-level. Grant did not think this was really the potential of nanotechnology. If a human has to do it, it is a handicraft. What you want is for the machines to operate automatically.
Asaro said, "One factor we have not talked about is augmenting thought process." What will happen when we can augment brains? Grant responded that that is why we can't talk about past the Singularity. There will be people, but we won't understand them.
The panel recommended Greg Egan as an author who
is good at making stories of the current technology. He gets
into multiple levels of the questions that arise. [-mrl]
For reasons best known to the convention planners, this lecture by the Guest of Honor, guaranteed to draw a large crowd, was held in one of the smallest rooms. I suppose they may have figured that people would start leaving by this time, but the room was still filled to overflowing.
Robinson opened by saying that the lack of science in science fiction is not a moral disgrace; it is because the genre is misnamed. The name "science fiction" is an artifact of Hugo Gernsback rather than a well-thought-out term. On the other hand, the definition of "science fiction" is something we argue about in a theological way, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Even so, Robinson said, he would propose a new definition.
It is not science that is the subject of science fiction, Robinson said, but the future. He drew a timeline on the board, with anything set between 3000 B.C.E. and 1900 C.E. labeled as historical novels, anything 1900 to the present as realistic novels, and anything after the present as science fiction.. Pre-3000 B.C.E. are pre-historic fiction. Pre-historic fiction, science fiction, and alternate histories all have dotted-line relationships with the historical timeline. Fantasy sits away from our timeline entirely. Realizing that this immediately raises questions, Robinson asked, "What about fantasies that exist within our timeline (e.g., Tim Powers) and such?" But he didn't answer that at this time. In response to my question, science fiction set in the future that doesn't come true becomes alternate history by this definition.
Robinson then gave his definition: "Science fiction is the history that we cannot know."
=46rom the audience, Fred Lerner suggested that science fiction is based specifically on the notion of historical evolution and progress, but Robinson felt that this was too confining, and that every science fiction contains its own historiography (historical theory).
Robinson then looked at the "science" part of "science fiction." Science is out to discuss what can be known. Science does not discuss metaphysics. (Robinson is married to a chemist and noted as an aside, "The origin of Sax Russell [in the Mars books] is not mysterious if you know my home situation.") Now novelists take ideas and run them through thought experiments. But many of the sciences have the same problem in that they have no reproducibility.
Robinson also took as a given that there is no way to change the name "science fiction" at this point. He really dislikes "speculative fiction" or "fabulism,&qu= ot; though he didn't say why. He did say that the combination of the words "science" and "fiction" is very powerful. He felt that science is a determining factor in our culture. And science is in the realm of facts and creating facts out of data. Almost all facts are established by ferocious battles until one side wins, then they are "black-boxed" (according to Gerard LaTour (?)). On the other hand, fiction is in the realm of values: all stories express some values. So we have the fact-value dichotomy. (David Hume called it the "is-ought" problem.)
Now, the hard sociobiological view is that there are no values: altruism is just a way of protecting your genes, etc. And some people say there are no such things as facts (post-moderni= sts, leftists, etc., mostly in literature departments). Robinson says his answer to them (his "Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley") is, "If reality is nothing but human illusion, why are my data so good?" (Or even better, he suggests, "If reality is nothing but human illusion, why are my data so bad?")
Of course, Robinson notes, from the same facts (e.g., a million people dying of famine, or abortion) people derive different values. So "science fiction" is "fact values." (Robinson then added, "Of course, if you look at the face-out section of Waldenbooks you don't see the genre living up to this".) As for trying to broaden the audience by getting rid of the name, he says that people are making their own mistake if they don't read science fiction; why chase after them? Also, he observed, people who say they want to be marketed as non-science-fiction usually mean just that they want more money.
Yes, there is bad stuff, he admits, but Sturgeon's Law applies, and science fiction is culturally dominant. This is because it is fun, and Robinson says of his home state: "In California, fun is not just fun; fun is a state religion."
Given all this, however, it is still sad that there isn't more science fiction about science. Why isn't there? "There'= s something very resistant to narration in the process of science itself." Robinson's example was a post-doctoral paper that takes a year of ridiculous work and bureaucratic problems. When it's finished, hardly anyone understands it, but it is cited thirty-four times, which makes it a success. Robinson claims that you can't tell this story in a novel. You could, he suggests, write "Murder in the Lab" with a dead advisor, but that's a different story.
People tried to suggest counter-examples: John Cramer's Twistor (in which someone's thesis disappears), a couple of novels by Carl Jurassi (inventor of the Pill), novels by C. P.&nb= sp;Snow. (The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey also uses a novelistic technique, and has no punch ending.) Fred Lerner thought the story as basically that of the prince who has to slay dragons, etc., in other words, a rite-of-passage story.
Someone suggesting having the discovery be the focus, not the scientist. Robinson said that technical papers do try to do this; they use the passive voice a lot. Lerner suggested that George R. Stewart had used this technique of having a non-animate protagonist.
Robinson also observed, "If hard SF is playing with the net up (to use Ben Bova's analogy), then it's also playing with a super-scientific device to shrink the ball so that it can pass through the net." For example, the classic hard science fiction story is Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" (which I will assume you have read, or at least know of). Yet Damon Knight made a long list of all the items actually mentioned-not just implied-that could have been jettisoned instead of the girl. As he said earlier, Robinson's opinion is that hard science fiction has a hardness of attitude ("we're hard guys") and a rightwingedness that he finds disturbing.
Someone mentioned Bruno LaTour's Artemis and Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The Life of High-Energy Physicists by Sharon Traweek about high-energy physicists. Fred Lerner suggested that it was philology rather than Wagner's "Ring Cycle" that drove The Lord of the Rings, but I don't think this makes it a scientific novel. Someone gave the chapter in Gregory Benford's Timescape that is the orals exam as one example. George R. Stewart's Doctor's Oral was another.
Scientific conferences would seem like a good setting for a novel, but aren't much used. Connie Willis did a satire of one, but it was more a science fiction convention than a scientific conference.
The one example Robinson gave was that Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is good at describing solaristics. Still, "only 1% of SF novels are attempting to grapple with the problem of presenting science."
Robinson then introduced a graph that he attributed to Charles Sheffield but which seemed straight out of Dead Poets Society: literary quality versus scientific accuracy and inventiveness. Someone in the audience claimed, "It doesn't matter if it's accurate because it's just a trope," but Robinson said that if Analog was going to claim to be emphasizing accuracy, it should be held to that. Of course, he said, it doesn't even do that.
Delany ended the hour by saying that the graph suggests
not a deconstruction of the dichotomy between the two axes but
a Hegelian synthesis.
This year's attendance was 470. Next year's Readercon
will be July 10-12, 1998; will have Lisa Goldstein and Bruce Sterling
as the Guests of Honor; and will be at the Westborough Marriott
again.