On Friday there were fewer panels I wanted to attend, which was good
because two weeks of travel were catching up with me. I managed to
get into all six.
10:00 Fantasy Warfare not Based on Medieval Methods with Alter
S. Reiss, Madeleine
E. Robins, Rebecca
Slitt, Arkady
Martine, and Angus
Watson. Our mental picture of medieval combat (huge national
armies) is wrong; a few thousand soldiers consisted of small groups
loyal to their feudal lord. Roman legions, however, were large and
highly organized (though often loyal to their general instead of to
Rome). Ancient warfare had a bit of a “prearranged” tone, where
armies met somewhere and fought, whereas modern warfare is constant
combat often in civilian-full environments. Our usual pictures are
Eurocentric. Swords and arrows are ancient, as are sieges (walled
cities go back 8,000 years). Book recommendations:
-
The Temeraire series (starting with Temeraire) by Naomi Novic was described as “Napoleon with dragons”
-
The Crown of Stars series (starting with King’s Dragon) by Kate Elliott.
-
The Eternal Sky series (starting with Range of Ghosts) by Elizabeth Bear.
-
The Videssos series (starting with The Time of Troubles I); Byzantine alternate history by Harry Turtledove.
-
Grunts by Mary Gentle
-
Lots by Glen Cook, particularly the Chronicles of the Black Company series (starting with The Black Company), which combines magic with mercenary-company combat.
11:00
Military SF: Pro-war or Anti-war? with Leon
Perniciaro, Robert
Corvus, i. Simes,
and Joe Haldeman.
Joe flat out said all military fiction is anti-war. One panelist
proposed to define military SF as taking place in a military setting,
with characters in closely militarily-related roles, facing a
military problem like “capture this city.” Soldiers generally
just want to survive the day and don’t care a lot about the issues
behind the combat; there has to be some political entity in the
background that set things in motion. Focusing on soldiers trying to
survive immediately gives the high stakes needed for reader
engagement with the characters. Suffering of one kind or another is
needed for a good story.
No recommendations
were given, but I’ll add The
Forever War by Joe
Haldeman.
12:00
Invented Religions with Jennifer
Udden, Meg
MacDonald, Maria
Turtschaninoff, and Kimmo
Lehtonen. This was in Hall 3, perhaps because for a brief time
the online program listed George R. R. Martin as a panelist. I’m
reasonably sure I saw it and other people told me they saw it too,
but by the time I was lining up, his name was gone.
Religion is an
interesting window into a world’s cultures, an essential building
block of society. You need to think about the people first; for
example, nomads might be more likely to be animists than to follow a
religion with holy books and complex theology. You need to
distinguish between orthodoxy (thinking) and orthopraxy (doing);
someone might follow all the rituals and not believe some of the
fundamental tenets. Making up a completely new religion is very hard
and possibly not desirable. There will always be politics and power
dynamics associated with a religion; it might be used for conformity
or might empower the dispossessed. There are many possible kinds of
religion, such as
-
A creator plus minions, as with Eru and the Valar in Middle Earth.
-
An ethics-based religion without a higher power.
-
Gods and Norns, the latter measuring out the lifespan even of the gods.
Someone asked, what
if the gods are real and interact with people? That gave the panel
pause, one saying it was complicated, another wondering whether the
mortals would “ask the right questions” when interacting with a
god, another suggesting that interacting with mortals should change
the gods and that dead gods might litter the landscape; I didn’t
really “get” many of their comments. Some book recommendations:
-
The Craft Sequence (starting with Three Parts Dead), by Max Gladstone.
14:00 Evolution
of Feminism in Science Fiction with John-Henri
Holmberg, Sarah
Gailey, Shawna
McCarthy, and Eileen
Gunn. This was almost entirely mentions of specific authors and
some of their work.
-
Alyssa Wong (short stories with contemporary well-developed characters)
-
Miriam Allen deFord, who was writing in the 1940’s
-
Joanna Russ, who they characterized as a mould-breaker who sought to upset the apple cart.
-
Becky Chambers
-
Samuel R. Delaney
An audience member
mentioned WisCon, the feminist
science fiction convention.
16:00 Economics
of SF Universes or 1001 Reasons this Could Never Work,
presentation by Yehuda
Porath. Once again my notes don’t do justice to this fairly
dense primer on economics. I took three terms of economics 45 years
ago so a little bit of it was familiar. He started with an amusing
analysis of the economics of the Death Stars, what a huge investment
they were, and how the second had an element of the “sunk cost
fallacy” (“throwing good money after bad”). He explained
utility: people supposedly have a “utility function” and act to
maximize it subject to scarcity constraints. He also pointed out that
such an unemotional and calculating approach was more characteristic
of sociopaths than regular folks. Once you try to combine utility
functions for multiple people there are all kinds of coordination
problems, called “market failures,” that require some form of
government and sanctions. But taxation causes “deadweight losses”
such as needing to pay for accountants and bureaucrats. He then
looked at a few examples from print and visual media:
-
The Foundation and Seldon’s Plan (psychohistory) can’t work because of unforeseen events (like the Mule), new technologies, unintended consequences, and other unpredictable variables.
-
Star Trek has a supposedly post-scarcity economy with replicators that can turn energy into anything but dilithium and latinum and living matter, so what do the Ferengi trade? Some people still seem to have regular jobs, so how are they paid and why do they work?
-
In Hunger Games the specialized districts make little sense. In particular District 12 (coal mining) is useless when all the necessary power seems to come from hydroelectric plants. The Capital’s specialty seems to be spying. District 13 doesn’t need anything from anyone else.
-
In Battlestar Galactica they have the last of everything, little or no new production, and spend more resources than they acquire.
18:00 Monsters
and the Monstrous with Natania
Barron, Julie
McGalliard, Scott
Edelman, and Magdalena
Hai. Someone mentioned the Forest Maiden – beauty in front,
emptiness in back. That prompted someone else to refer to
“existential beauty” so intense that the mind can’t contain it
and goes mad – similarly with what happens with existential horror
in Lovecraft. Monsters can be sympathetic if they don’t want to be
monsters, such as Lon Chaney’s version of the werewolf (unlike some
modern raging killing machines). Traditional pre-modern monster tales
were often warnings to children – I recalled the Inuit legend of
the Qualupiluit, a warning not to go out on the treacherous sea ice.
The Greek gods should be considered monsters by their behaviour.
Monsters can be metaphors, such as Godzilla representing the fear of
nuclear weapons. In Japan the mere possible existence of ghosts is
fearful, let alone seeing one. There were a few story references:
-
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
That evening was the
Hugo awards ceremony, which I had decided from the beginning not to
attend because I’d have had trouble sitting in a large crowd for
three hours. Several fellow Writing Excuses Retreat alumni tried
watching the video feed from a hotel room, but it apparently didn’t
work. Someone tweeted when Emma and Peter Newman won the Best Fancast
Hugo for Tea and
Jeopardy.
Posted from
Copenhagen Airport
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