Worldcon
2019 was the reason for my being in Ireland this year. If you
don’t know about Worldcon, here is a teeny capsule summary: the
World Science Fiction Convention is a combination of panels on a wide
variety of topics of interest to fans and creators of science
fiction, fantasy, and horror (collectively known as speculative
fiction, or sometimes SFF to people who downplay the horror element),
plus events relevant to the hosting location, cosplay, and shopping
(largely books, which you can sometimes get a chance to have
autographed). Plus, the big item that’s relevant to fans who don’t
go: attendees and associate members vote on the Hugo awards, which are presented in a big
ceremony (on Sunday night this time).
Today
I went to four panels:
I
tried to get into Throwing
Grandma out the airlock, but by the time I got to the end of the
queue an back, Odeon 5 had filled up. The following summaries are
based on very brief notes – I didn’t want to take so long writing
that I missed something interesting – and the passage of time is
fuzzing my memory, so by now this is primarily my own reinterpretation of what was said.
Because
of overwhelming interest, the Dublin team had to split events between
two venues 850 metres apart: the Conference Centre Dublin, and the
Point Square complex (primarily the 6 Odeon theatres, but also some
meeting rooms at the adjacent hotel). I have had trouble walking long
distances in the past couple of years; a kilometer once per day
seemed to be my recent limit. This led me to buy a 1-week Leap pass,
which might have been overkill unless I make time to travel around
the city during gaps where there aren’t events I want to attend.
Getting the Leap pass was an adventure in itself, which I chronicled
on Facebook. One of the side effects was showing me that I could,
indeed, probably walk back and forth between the two, but by then I’d
bought my pass.
Crime and Punishment in the Age of Superheroes
My
first actual panel was Crime
and Punishment in the Age of Superheroes. One of the first points
made was that comics completely ignore some natural reactions of the
population: in the age of doxxing, secret identities would be the
instant target of significant numbers of people, and some people
would try to hunt superheroes down. Aliette de Bodard pointed out
that in France, masks are illegal, and people must be prepared to
present ID at any time; later she mentioned that citizen’s arrest
isn’t a thing in France, so a French Batman couldn’t capture
miscreants and hand them over to the police.
Regular
police don’t like people trying to do their jobs, but there is no
specific crime in the US for vigilantism; people have to be charged
with something like assault, kidnapping, excessive use of force, and
so on; a defence lawyer said that “vigilante” is a label police
apply to people they don’t like. In Britain, one novel suggested a
bureaucracy would grow up around superheroism; you might need a
licence, plus training in evidence handling (which apparently is
sufficiently sloppy in so many stories that the villains would get
off on technicalities). On the subject of evidence, someone asked
what would happen if Spiderman refused to show up at a criminal
trial, unmask, and testify? Others suggested that usually with
Spiderman there is a big enough crowd that there would be other
witnesses, cellphone recordings, CCTV, and so on.
There
was some discussion of inhumane treatment of captured villains, like
being consigned to Arkham Asylum, or imprisoned in the accelerator in
the TV version of the Flash. There are two issues: continuing to
treat criminals as human beings, versus finding ways to confine
villains with superpowers. Someone pointed out the imprisonment of
Magneto in a plastic cell as a humane way to keep locked up someone
who can manipulate the normal metal bars; he had comforts, visitors,
things that don’t happen in black sites (which is what the Flash’s
cells essentially were). They didn’t take quite enough precautions,
because he and his minions worked out something the jailors didn’t
think of, but I gather the panelist thought it was the right way to
treat Magneto anyway.
Someone
pointed out that having something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe’
Sokovia
Accords is a really neccessary idea, but they got passed
unbelievably quickly. International treaty negotiations take a very
long time and involve “horsetrading” and, sometimes, dishonest
negotiations. Someone gave the example of the likelihood of some
countries refusing to admit they had superheroes, if those heroes
were part of a secret government program (which, for example, the
Captain America supersoldier initiative originally was).
Someone
else suggested fighting crime might not be the best use of
superpowers; Thor could generate huge amounts of clean energy, as
could the Flash (by running in a giant hamster wheel). There was also
some discussion of how rehabilitation instead of imprisonment might
apply to various specific villains, but I didn’t record details.
During
the questions I did That Thing You Aren’t Supposed To Do: making a
statement instead of posing a question. In my case I wanted to point
to the book The
Law of Superheroes, which I misremembered as Superheroes and the
Law. It raises great questions like, if Commissioner Gordon summons
Batman with the Batsignal, does that make Batman a state actor
subject to restrictions like those on the police?
How to Build an Evil Empire
To
get to the second panel, How
to Build an Evil Empire, I took the Luas tram to Point Square,
where the panels are in a collection of movie theatres. Odeon 1 was
the largest, and didn’t quite fill up for this panel.
A
recurring theme is Diane Duane’s statement (which I think was a
quote from someone else) that “I am blameless” is the default
existential self-view of almost everyone. I’ve heard something
similar about writing villains: “Everyone is the hero of their own
story.”
Emperors
need minions, who might commit “bureaucratic excesses” since a
hypothetical good emperor can’t monitor everyone. Could an empire
just be “evil at the top?” One answer was that accepting evil
orders makes the minions evil – but someone else asked whether they
had a realistic choice; they might have been in the position of “do
this or face some nasty consequences.”
Suggested
examples of evil overlords who know they are evil: the villain from
the old Worm Ourobouros novel; Duquesne from E.E. “Doc” Smith’s
stories; Voldemort (at which place someone pointed out it was dumb of
him not to monitor his horcruxes). Someone wanted to list successful
real-world evil empires, and the three main suggestions were North
Korea (which I’d call a regime rather than an empire), old Assyria,
and the British empire (which saw itself as good and justified, but
for which the colonized peoples have a different opinion). A
successful empire has to exploit resources effectively and be
ruthless.
Several
people’s other short observations where I didn’t record much
discussion.
-
One panelist asserted that “empire” is inherently evil since it must have involved conquering someone.
-
An evil empire can’t abide a free press.
-
A Fascist regime needs an enemy to blame things on, so needs a constant war; if it “wins” it has to find a new enemy.
-
We don’t usually see the propaganda that convinces a population to go along with what the evil empire is doing.
-
An evil technological empire needs enough education to maintain and use the technology, but not the kind of education that leads to self-awareness and reflection.
The
moderator recommended searching for the Evil
Overlord List; I think the TV
Tropes page is also valuable (though there’s no such thing as a
quick trip to that site; it’s a black hole that sucks down huge
amounts of time if you aren’t disciplined enough).
Creating wonderful new worlds
The panel on Creating wonderful new worlds was a little less on track than some others, allowing a diversion at the start into discussing Dr. Who, and a couple of other minor diversion later, but there were several interesting suggestions, the first of which was that all the worldbuilding is useless if the reader doesn’t care about the characters.One idea was to take some real-world element and ask a “what if” question. Asimov’s Foundation series was inspired by the fall of the Roman empire. Tolkein’s work was inspired by celtic and anglo-saxon mythology and culture. It matters a lot that the world be internally consistent, with implications of the differences from our reality being well thought through. Some of the panelists alluded to stories where they got part way through and though “that can’t work, given this other thing that happened.”
Quite a bit of time was spent on talking about how worldbuilding details make it into the story. The iceberg analogy came up: the author may understand a huge amount about the background, but only a small part of it should be revealed to the reader: just what is important to the viewpoint character in the moment. Infodumps almost always lose the reader; it’s very hard to do well; the same was said about long passages of description.
More than one panelist had the experience of putting in some detail where they weren’t initially sure of why it was important. Writers needs to trust their subconscious, that they will eventually realize why the detail will matter.
Other points:
-
If
you discover that “the problem” is too easy for the character,
it’s better to change the problem than the story.
-
In
a panel where some authors enthused over the value of maps in their
books, China Mieville asked “Have you considered what we lose by
having a map?”
-
The
Windup Girl was
highly recommended
Making the asexual textual
By this point in the day (9pm local) I was getting tired so not taking as many notes as I had with some previous panels which I’m sad about because one of my ace friends especially wanted to know what was said.The issue at the heart of Making the asexual textual was that an asexual and/or aromantic character often isn’t identified as such because in many kinds of novels, sexual attraction and romance aren’t issues that comes up for every character, so an ace or aro character isn’t naturally labeled as such if they are just going on with their life or their career. How much would an asexual character even think about their asexuality?
One panelist writes secondary world fantasy where queer identities were never medicalized (as abnormal in some way), so the cultures wouldn’t use the same terminology we do (asexual means “without sexuality” which suggests something is lacking). So she uses constructed language (conlang), or describes rather than labeling. Terminology might also be awkward in fiction about futures that are better than our current society. One panelist pointed out that asexual and aromantic are independent attributes; one can be either or both or neither.
I found the moderator Darcie Little Badger especially fascinating because she is Apache, and in her native language there is no word for romance. There is however the concept of a “special other”.
They listed some harmful tropes: asexuality as inhuman; asexuals as ignorant of biology; the idea that they’re “just waiting for the right person.” Someone suggested that pressure to label might be tokenism, but it seemed to me that clearly identifying a character as ace and/or aro is important for readers who want to see themselves in the story.
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