{"id":380,"date":"2006-07-11T11:59:00","date_gmt":"2006-07-11T11:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/11\/readercon-embracing-the-uncomf\/"},"modified":"2006-07-11T11:59:00","modified_gmt":"2006-07-11T11:59:00","slug":"readercon-embracing-the-uncomf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/11\/readercon-embracing-the-uncomf\/","title":{"rendered":"Readercon: Embracing the Uncomfortable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having spent the weekend at Readercon<\/a>, I feel like I should talk about it a little. For those who have never been to a SF convention, it’s not all people dressing up like space aliens and fairy princesses– in fact, the cons Kate and I go to tend not to have all that much of the dress-up thing going on. Instead, they’re run more like an academic conference, with lots of panel discussions on different topics relating to stuff in the genre. Why this happens is somewhat mystifying, when I stop to think about it, but it’s entertaining enough in its way.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I went to a handful of panels that had elements worth commenting on, and I will proceed to comment on them here. I can’t type as fast as Kate does, so I won’t even try to make these posts comprehensive, but I’ll throw out a few comments on things I thought were particularly noteworthy. These comments are entirely based on my own impressions and opinions, and may or may not match with what other people at the same panel thought, but that should at least provide something to discuss.<\/p>\n

Panel the First (description here, my comments below the fold):<\/p>\n

\n

Embracing the Uncomfortable<\/strong>
\nR. Scott Bakker, David G. Hartwell (+M), Ellen Kushner, Kelly Link, China Mi\u00c3\u00a9ville, Paul Park<\/i><\/p>\n

According to Tolkien, a formally ideal fantasy tale ends in “consolation” and may provide “escape” (not from reality but from metaphoric jail). John Clute does not disagree, calling the final stage of a fantasy story “healing.” It follows that such a fantasy story provides at least some comfort to the reader. Yet this notion has been recently challenged by works of fiction designed to make the reader uncomfortable (and by authors championing this as a proper task of fantasy). Is this an interesting variation on the classic structure, or something fundamentally different?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

As is somewhat traditional, the panel opened with an opportunity for each panelist to present a little rant of their own, before settling into a more directed question-and-answer sort of format. Mi\u00c3\u00a9ville opened by saying (as he had at an earlier panel on beginnings and endings (that Kate will write up later)) that any work of fiction that is at all consolatory is fundamentally dishonest. Kelly Link observed that what counts as consolation sort of depends on the reader, to general nods of agreement.<\/p>\n

Taken together, these two comments pretty much explain why I gave up a hundred pages into Perdido Street Station<\/cite>— everything is incredibly grimy and unpleasant because Mi\u00c3\u00a9ville is working very hard to minimize the possibility that anyone<\/strong> reading it will find any note of consolation. He can’t drive the probability all the way to zero (I think it was Emmett O’Brien who listed The Wasp Factory<\/cite> as a “comfort read”), but he gives it a good try.<\/p>\n

Mi\u00c3\u00a9ville sort of hammered on the importance of shaking things up on a formal or structural level, praising M. John Harrison for using different names for the same city at different points in the Viriconium books, and suggesting things like putting in maps that are just wrong, to thwart the expectation fantasy readers have that the story will visit all the countries shown on any map. It occurs to me that Rosemary Kirstein has sort of done this, albeit in more of a character-appropriate way, and less of a I-want-to-fuck-with-my-readers sort of way– in the third Steerswoman book, they visit a bunch of territory that is marked “unknown” on the map provided, and in the fourth book, those regions are sketched in. I thought that was a nice touch, though it’s not really the sort of thing Mi\u00c3\u00a9ville is pushing for, I don’t think.<\/p>\n

In contrast to Mi\u00c3\u00a9ville, Bakker insisted on the importance of respecting or following the established forms of genre fiction, while attempting to shake people up via the content. He was sort of vague on exactly what he had in mind, and Link eventually asked him to clarify what he meant by “form” and “content” in this context. This still failed to produce really concrete examples of what he meant by all this. He did seem to be the only one on the panel concerned with being able to sell books, as opposed to making a Point of some sort about Art– he mentioned several times that he wanted to be able to appeal to readers of what people on rec.arts.sf.written used to call Extruded Fantasy Product, and open their minds to new ideas via his disturbing content. I haven’t read his books, so I can’t tell you whether they’re likely to succeed at that, but it was nice to have at least one person talk about the desires of the readers.<\/p>\n

Ellen Kushner and Paul Park mostly said sensible and moderate things, which means they have mostly slipped my mind. David Hartwell is the sort of moderator who really doesn’t inject himself into the conversation, so he mostly just directed traffic. They never did open the panel up for questions from the audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having spent the weekend at Readercon, I feel like I should talk about it a little. For those who have never been to a SF convention, it’s not all people dressing up like space aliens and fairy princesses– in fact, the cons Kate and I go to tend not to have all that much of… Continue reading Readercon: Embracing the Uncomfortable<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}