Worldcon, Sunday

[tamaranth]

07/08/2005 | 10:00 | L(Lomond) | The Aesthetics of Fantasy: Writing the Fantastic | How do writers create a sense of the fantastic? What techniques work? What styles and voices bring reality crashing around the reader's ear? | Susanna Clarke, Greer Gilman, Jay Lake, Farah Mendlesohn, China Mieville, Ruth Nestvold
MS: The Iron Dragon's Daughter is an SF-flavoured fantasy. An SF story takes place in a normal, explicable universe. In fantasy the universe is unknowable.
Americans (he says) have a nerve writing fantasy at all -- Britons grow up in legendary landscapes.
FJM: the intimacy of the fantastic ...
SC: not interested in explaining how the magic works. Contrasting the fantastic and the mundane -- the latter very Jane Austen ...
FJM: "China, you've ditched the familiar at the taxi rank ..."
CM: You can't get away form what you know. Defamiliarisation is a parlour trick, simply looking at the familiar through a distorting glass.
The philistinism of 'not interested in style, I just want to read a good story' is anti-fantastic.
The sense of language as a Thing, not a transparent window. May as well accept that, and do things with the language.
GG: Fantasy isn't beyond the fields we know, not the new and alien, but upwelling from the familiar -- things bleeding up from the subconscious or generally Beneath.
If I'm doing it right, you should feel the linguistic history of a word.
CM: There should be a getting-rid-of-received-opinions . Reading non-fantastic novels with a fantastic eye -- removing assumptions.
SC: Her influences Austen, Dickens, E Nesbit, C S Lewis -- all very English, Establishment -- but she uses them to tell a story that they'd never have told.
FJM: the implicit fantastic in Jane Austen -- "she wrote as though there was something fantastic about her work". The sense of society and etiquette as Performance.
GG: Etiquette is a system of magic -- very formal and magicianly.
SC: putting something in the world that isn't there
CM: "There's nothing wrong with a book being hard to read." It's "philistine bullshit" to say that hard books are bad books. We don't always want to read Ulysses but we shouldn't rule out the Ulysses-es in the fantastic genre.
MS: trying for the immersive quality of a waking dream. Language that goes out and dances .. but there still needs to be a surface plot, otherwise there's a risk of style over substance. "the elegance you get by overwriting and then scraping down."
CM: over-writing of detail doesn't immerse: it only bores.
MS: You can never come to the end of description, so there's no point in over-describing something.
SC: GG's metaphor [see above, the Andersen panel] of warp and weft, language as cloth, is more useful than thinking of language as a window.
You don't need to know everything about your imagined world -- only what fascinates you. And you can combine anything with any other thing.
GG: if I supersaturate the solution and the conditions are right [see notes above re Landscape panel] plot and structure start to crystallise.
She starts with the sound and the rhythm of language and then builds plot and events around them. "Islands of story" start rising fro the language matrix.
Gerard Manly Hopkins as influence
MS: "great fantasists are those who read too much into everything."
Hopkins was an excellent example of a writer who comes at the world with no preconceptions.
GG: 'inscape' -- interior landscapes.
FJM: how much of the way the fantastic is written is about the sound of it?
MS: sound and metaphor
FJM: nothing throws me out of fantasy faster than a clunky line -- doesn't matter so much in other genres. E.g. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell -- the fantastic sounds as though it's at a slight distance
SC: it's a long book because she kept thinking "if I add a few more words, this'll read even better"
GG: one thing you can't do with language is polyphony
SC: you can do polyphony in comics
FJM: language may not be a window but it is a focus -- even the decision to leave something vague may be a deliberate act. I'd say should be a deliberate act
MS: he pinned a shot of the Sex Pistols next to his keyboard while writing The Iron Dragon's Daughter -- "a reminder that the orcs and demons had to be as scary as these guys"
Roz Kaveney (audience): what about creative synaesthesia -- pulling things from other arts as part of setting? What are the other arts that underpin you when you write?
GG: ballads and unpretty folk music. There is no one above the social class 'farmer' in her work. Goddesses!
SC: Fleetwood Mac! good for mood but quite unlike the tone of the book
GG: medieval barns. Vermeer.
CM: I don't deliberately rip off films -- well, occasionally -- mostly surrealist painters and collage artists.
SC: re synaesthesia -- desrcinbing one thing in terms of another, e.g. sounds as colours


07/08/2005 | 11:00 | L(Dochart) | Lost and Found: Children's Books We Miss | A chance to rediscover all those life-shaping children's books that you and everyone else, publishers included, had forgotten up 'til now. | Greer Gilman, Janet McNaughton, Terry Pratchett, Francis Spufford
The books suggested on this panel, along with others, should appear on a list on this site
Each panellist did 2 or 3 books at a time. This particular room was long and flat, so I couldn't actually see the panellists, only hear them!
JM: Kenneth Opal (Canadian): Airborne, The Live-for-ever machine.
Arthur Slade's Dust. Acceleration -- Graham McNamee
FS: The Blue Hawk -- Peter Dickinson
Charlotte Sometimes -- Penelope Farmer
The Magic City -- E Nesbit
The Guardians -- John Christopher
TP: The Moomintroll books -- Tove Jansson (Finnish doom!)
Mistress Masham's Repose -- T H White
Nathaniel Drinkwater
The MIdnight Folk -- John Masefield
The Star in the Hand -- Elizabeth Stucley
The Little Grey Men -- Dennis Watkins (under a pseudonym)
GG: Mary Poppins (including discussion of MP as an incarnation of Artemis, the Bear Mother ...)
Lion -- William Penn Dubois
Hitty: her first hundred years -- Rachel Field


07/08/2005 | 13:00 | M(Orkney) | Waiting for the Fantastic: What is Known but Never Stated | In some stories, the strange things hide in the spaces between pages. Why do we like this, and how do we write it? | John Clute, Graham Joyce, Kelly Link, Graham Sleight
This panel was in a room several sizes too small for anything except an intimate tete-a-tete. I ended up sitting on the floor: the room was very crowded: people kept trying to come in, even after a sign had been put up to say that the room was full: several of the panellists were annoyed by the cramped venue and the difficulty in doing a panel with constant attempted interruptions.
GS: invites panel to suggest stories that meet their criterion, where the fantastic is not overt
JC: Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast -- every word is implicit with the possibility of the fantastic. Fantasy is not in the props, but a certain 'taking literally' of the words.
GS: John Crowley, 'The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines'. Nothing fantastic happens in the story but it suggests that the possibilities of the fantastic may be available -- the tragedy of the story is that it ends in a world where possibilities are limited and there is no fantastic.
GJ: the ambivalent position that doesn't state anything explicitly ... Robert Ackman
JC: the insistence on meaning and resolution is anti-fantastic. JC's word equipoise -- that moment of indecision.
KL: there are readers who are squeamish about the moment of suspension
Mentions Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto .. Peter Straub story in magazine Conjunctions
GS: horror that derives its effect from uncertainty about what's going on
stories that may just have an unreliable narrator ...
JC: but the 'madness' trope is narrowing, it's a failure of nerve.
On of the powers of the modern fantastic is translation -- the slingshot ending, where there are multiple readings of events, there is more than one story of the world. sounds more like scattershot
The old forms of stories have become less and less useful as descriptions of an increasingly complex world. Old-fasioned stories have a single ending, and that's no longer valid.
GS: we're less comfortable with the notion of equipoise. Rationality is undermined by it.
GJ: stories want to resolve themselves: that must be fought
GS: marriages are the plot shaking hands with itself (a Clute phrase!) -- a refusal to be indeterminate.
JC to KL: there are three or four readings of your stories, if you believe every word that's written
KL: she starts from multiple stories that could have been written seperately, but worked better merged. Not the pleasure of the straight line well-drawn -- "I yearn for stories that encompass more."
Audience: there's a third way between equipoise and resolution -- multiple endings with different probabilities, e.g. Gene Wolfe.
GS: different readers will be differently valenced.
JC: Wolfe presents a hierarchy of understandings, not equipoise. He wants a resolution.
Audience (Geneva): is equipoise in the writer or the reader?
JC: in the text.
Wolfe honours your obedience -- you have to pay attention but the rewards for attention to detail are worthwhile.
If equipoise is entirely 'choose your own story' it might as well be hypertext -- which represented a loss, not an opportunity, in story-telling terms
Choosing your own story is breaking the author-reader contract. It's no longer story-telling.
GS: Harry Potter! Fan fiction! The first is templatised and almost remix, not original -- the second is readers turned writers -- how collaborative is the latter as a way of recreating and reshaping narrative? (e.g. when fanfic writers write alternate endings). but this point is never addressed, as far as I can tell -- a shame!
JC: hypertext leads to more simplistic stories -- no equipoise -- a gamelike simplification
Expansion of choice turned out to be claustrophobic
GS: what kind of meaning are we avid for when we read fantasy? stories without resolution and explanation?
Audience: no explanation, or multiple explanations?
KL: telling truths in such a way that they feel like lies
Suggesting gaps and dark places
GJ: you leave the reader to interpret everything for themselves.
JC: classic fantasy doesn't always tell the truth.
KL: also a trope in classic mystery novels -- multiple versions of events, mostly false, each successive one a little nearer the truth
Geneva: is equipoise multiple possibilities, or uncertainty?
JC: the latter -- our stories need to be more certain than our perceptions.


07/08/2005 | 17:00 | L(Boisdale-1) | Great Europeans as Fictional Characters: Dee, Wellington, Engels. | History offers some wonderfully colourful personages, but if they are to be more than cardboard cutouts you have to go beyond what is known. Is that legitimate and what are the consequences? | Susanna Clarke, Diana Pharaoh Francis, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Liz Williams
SC: there are two types of historical characters in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell -- those who actually affect the action (Duke of Wellington, George III) and those who have a role but don't need to be 3D -- e.g. the Cabinet
Once you have a sense of someone's personality, writing a historical character is little different to writing a fictional character
LW: you extrapolate from your own assumptions about periods and persons
John Dee's life needed desensationalising!
MKS: tension between putting ordinary people in fantastic settings, and the need to have a faithful representation
SC: trying to be true to C19 history but also to include additional historical elements, e.g. when JS rescues Wellington's spy, who in reality continued as POW
What you can change depends on the focus of the story
"The closer I could get to actual history, the more comfortable I felt"
LW: I'd have a problem writing about Anais Nin, who obsessively chronicled every aspect of [her] life
MKS: the 'ticky box' use of famous people -- metaphors and allegories rather than representations of actual individuals. No effort made to explore charafcter, no chance to walk behind them. E.g the crop of stories featuring Fidel Castro as baseball player ...
DPW: writing about Emily Eden, C19 woman traveller, and wants to contact the family and acquire more info / papers etc
Audience, quoting Greg Bear: some characters are like gods, they don't change or evolve and the plot progresses by the protagonist interacting with them. They don't change the way a fictional character does.
SC: it's perfectly legitimate to change history in fiction. "I felt I owed it to the soldiers [at Waterloo] to make the victory theirs, to give them credit -- not to change history so that the magicians won the war"
MKS: need to maintain a character's historical persona, not use a shell with a name and a distinguishing characteristic -- this approach lacks integrity
DPW: one reason to use named characters is that you can expect the audience to know things about that character -- but does infer the responsibility to be true to the known facts. But sometimes the author's research throws up facts that aren't common knowledge and may be challenged by the reader
SC: using real people as icons -- or using versions of them, e.g. Neil Gaiman's story about an Andy Warhol clone ...
MKS: fiction about celebrities is often stylised, symbols not actual people -- celebrities as shorthand. (Real-person slash, etc, 'deeply irresponsible', LW raises fanfiction as possible 'halfway house' between original characters and historical characters)
LW: unfair to make people like Monroe into archetypes
Audience: historical fiction can be propaganda
LW: alt history shows the terrifying contingency of the historical process. Extrapolating a life after the character's death is fair game, but making them into another character jars
DPW: Zelazny's Roadmarks -- history as constellation
LW: look at the actual person, not the public perception
SC: you can play with public images -- Byron as self-publicist -- "what a poser!"

Also went to the Hugo Award ceremony, but wasn't feeling great and exited before the last few awards were presented. Congratulations to those winners reading this!