Eastercon, Part 2

Following on from this post…

Sunday

Overslept on the Sunday, missing a panel about books, writing and the internet. Still, after a 17 hour Saturday, the prospect of additional sleep was more than welcome. Oh, and it was snowing. Go figure.

Keynote: Charles Stross

What happened to the future we were promised? Where are the flying cars and domestic robots? Stross suggested that the authors of Golden Age sci-fi didn’t do the maths. As it turns out, flying cars don’t mix with joyriders, alcohol, or traffic systems.

Stross didn’t shy away from the jargon and for the first ten minutes or so, I thought that most of the talk would go right over my head. Turned out, I speak the lingo a lot more fluently than anticipated. Moore’s Law, sentient spam, RFID, and a peculiar tangent on aviation. Good stuff.

Politics in Young Adult Fiction

For me, this was probably the most interesting panel of the weekend. China Miéville and Cory Doctorow were both on top form, and the topic area was something I’d never really had to think about.

*thoughtful face*

When the opportunity presents itself, I really need to lay my hands on the Mortal Engines books. Miéville held them up as a critique of Social Darwinism, and I do remember reading a significant chunk of the first book while lurking in Borders a couple of years back.

It also gave me a Debord quote, which resonated nicely: “Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.” So, while it may be dangerous to think of children and ‘young adults’ as inherently … well, anything, it’s important to take them seriously and keep them engaged with literature. Also, as a writer, targeting the youth market gives you a little more room to play with convention, genre and subtext.

Keynote: Neil Gaiman

While navigating the geek-bureacracy that stood between me and admission on the Saturday morning, I noticed a laminated weekend pass with the Gaiman surname lying, unattended, on a table. It wasn’t his. In fact, it belonged to his daughter. But that was a definite ‘woah’ moment, in which I realized that this man was a real person, and not just a gestalt aggregation of blog posts, photographs, and well-thumbed paperbacks.

He then switched into full-on anecdote mode. Talking about his first Eastercon, and the experience of “finding his tribe“, which was quite thought-provoking. More about that later.

And it’s not even so much that Gaiman is a genius in the traditional sense (although that point could probably be answered), but the man’s got the reading-to-an-audience thing down to a fine art. First chapter (or however much we heard) of The Graveyard Book was awesome. We’re talking arm hairs and gooseflesh.

Writing the Near Future

After the first 10-15 minutes, this panel could have gone one or two ways. It could have collapsed like an inadequately prepared soufflé. As it was, the faint awkwardness somehow managed to shift into something endearingly tangential. Plenty of awkward silences, but the audience was on top form, and – as compère – Paul McAuley managed to keep on top of things.

The panel seemed to agree that this wasn’t a particularly healthy trend – accurate predictions should be a matter for futurists and think-tanks, not SF authors. This kind of fiction needs to be plausible, not accurate. So, when writing the near future, it’s all about complexity. New technologies don’t – on the whole – replace existing technologies. Be specific, layer the details, and ramp up the unintended consequences.

The consensus seemed to be that, in stark contrast to the satire and humour of early SF, we’re looking at a persistent, and probably unhealthy, anxiety about getting things right. Think about William Gibson’s recent-past SF, and the recent proliferation in alternate history. In the face of an uncertain future, SF authors seem to have recoiled from engaging with that which is yet to come.

The Appeal of Lovecraft

Mmm … tentacular.

Fascinating stuff.

In comparison to the genial drift on the preceding panel, this analysis of Lovecraft was precisely targeted and unexpectedly academic. Roz Kaveney was an excellent facilitator, balancing contributions from Charles Stross, China Miéville, Marcus Rowland, and a young horror author, whose name escapes me.

A literary reaction to the horrors of the First World War, Lovecraft’s style may have been backward looking, but this did nothing to temper its modern nature, both in style and form. Cloaked in the language of a kitsch antiquarianism, the pretence to factuality has provided the mythos-as-meme with a fertile compost in which to thrive.

China aruged that Lovecraft’s conception of the monstrous was a significant break from that which had come before. His decision to draw on the tentacular, the octopoid, and the insectile must be seen as part of an attempt to move away from the monster-as-allegory. Here, we’re looking at creatures with no established meaning or subtext in the existing oral and folkloric traditions. Floating signifiers. And ultimately, it may have been this meaninglessness that lodged the mythos in our cultural psyche. The unknowable endures.

On a structural level, most of the stories are based on the weird as a “sublime backwash”, in which the door, once opened, cannot be closed. As the monstrous and the weird seem back into the world of the everyday, it is this juxtaposition of the mundane physical universe with the awesome that provides the true horror.

Everyone’s a Critic

Highly intimidating. Basically, as far as I understand it, the internet came along and (to some extent) threw all the established structures of writing, publishing, and reviewing up in the air. Now, everyone’s waiting for the dust to settle, in the vague hope that they’ll be able to figure out the new state of affairs as they go along.

And this was probably an overarching theme for the whole weekend. From Neil Gaiman discussing the logic for his decision to release American Gods onto the interweb to roam free, through the ambient intimacy of Neil, Gareth, and Paul’s real-time thoughts on the panels, and arguably exemplified in the whole Illuminations enterprise – orchestrated entirely through the medium of social networking. Thought-provoking stuff, which kind of makes me regret not being up and about for the Books on the Web panel.

Having readjusted to the real world, my memories of the weekend seem to have taken on a faintly dream-like quality. Good company, plenty mental stimulation, and a much-needed kick up the arse on the writing front.

Roll on 2010.