EASTERCON, PART TWO OF TWO

[tamaranth]

Continued from here.

Sunday
Depictions of music in SF&F literature and dramatic features (12:30pm; Mike Cobley, Gary Lloyd, Tanya Brown)
In which we discussed how various SF (and, in theory but not really in practice, fantasy) authors had depicted The Future of Music. I was too busy enjoying the panel to take many notes ...

GL made the distinction between diagetic and non-diagetic music: diagetic music is the music that the characters can hear, e.g. what the car radio or John Sheppard's iPod is playing; non-diagetic music is the soundtrack, e.g. the OMG BAD STUFF crescendo.

- we talked about Silverberg quite a bit, lots of stories dealing with human and alien music
- and the classics which SF writers think will remain classics (Beethoven! Bach! Mozart! Nobody more modern ...)

Ian MacLeod's Song of Time features musical score that, with the aid of AI software, evolves:
Using artificial intelligence software, he’d created scores which evolved of their own volition. The middle section of Swann in Love, for example, which was once pitted with ironic interjections from the woodwind, was now filled with Proustian twilight.

That got us onto generative music; the Koan software program, and Brian Eno's involvement ...

GL talked about his musical collaborations with Iain M. Banks, especially the music for The Bridge -- he "broke one thread of the story down to a narrative poem and set it to music"; it's the music that's playing in John Hall's head on the Bridge, that he can never remember. "I didn't do anything glib." Also, apparently, the destruction of the Orbital in Look to Windward is choreographed to one of Gary Lloyd's compositions written for firework displays!

And forthcoming project ... the Frozen Gold Tribute Album, yay!

Also a lot about ring modulators and how they're used to warp the waveform of a sound -- think Kashmir, Cybermen, 99% of all known 50s SF soundtracks (Forbidden Planet was GL's example).
This panel did get me thinking about the democratisation of music: about how technology is making it easier than it's ever been to engage with, listen to, learn about, create and remix music.

I don't mean simply performing or listening to music, which in the wider sense has, historically, been more of a populist activity than it is now (barndances; Mr Bennett to Mary on her piano playing, "you have delighted us long enough"; family ensemble playing; church music ...) I mean that via Amazon-type sites, you can acquire a recording of almost anything that's ever been recorded, often overnight; via Amazon-clones, Wikipedia, Google etc you can discover the existence of music you wouldn't otherwise encounter; via ev0l firesharing and more wholesome online music sites (LastFM, The Hype Machine, the little samples on Amazon, YouTube -- which is especially good for classical music -- and a whole world of online radio stations) you can listen to music that may never be performed anywhere accessible to you; via mixing software you can create your own mashups, fan mixes etc from one or two or six or a dozen original tracks (and distribute them); you can acquire copyright-free sheet music for solo, orchestral or choral music; you can play along to rock classics (Guitar Hero) or form a band (Rock Band, as featured on Sunday night's programme) as a game ...

I think that's when we got onto opera karaoke, which I promised to research and am sorry to say does exist.

Anyway: where is this democratisation in fiction? I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I can't think of examples -- just as I can't think of a fictional future (past about 5 years ago) which showed people swapping cat photos on their phones personal communicators.

After which I located Gary Lloyd in the bar [☼] and persuaded him to play me some of his music. I liked it a lot and am very much looking forward to the release of his next project. You can hear samples of Gary Lloyd's work at his MySpace site, including extracts from works based on Banks' The Bridge (T: "that reminds me of Debussy". GL: "whole tones!") and on the works of Alan Moore. Fun Fact: Mr Lloyd believes fervently that Led Zeppelin's music is the Best Thing Ever. This prompted me to listen to Led Zep on the second half of my Monday drive, and he is so very very right.

But I knew this already.


Composers who write music for SF&F (3:30pm; Martin Kier Glover, Gary Lloyd, Tanya Brown)
Again, few notes on what was said due to engagement with actual panel. (This one was harder work as I struggle with Modern Serious Music -- e.g. post-1900, exceptions made for Rachmaninoff Golijov etc etc -- and that's where the innovation happens. "Help!" reads my notebook. "Am on panel with two Messaien fans!") I remember making the point that before the early 20th century, SF & fantasy themes in music were typically just another exotic setting; Offenbach's Voyage dans la Lune (after Verne), Haydn's Il Mondo della Luna, etc. None of us could remember if there was anything especially SFnal about Janacek's music in Mr Broucek or Makropolous Case. It's not til ?1950s that the music itself gets SFnal -- peculiar instrumentation (theremin etc), deliberate attempts to sound alien or use the imagined sounds of other worlds, etc.

Other notes: Martin Kier Glover asks whether the challenge of writing music for SF has led to any innovations. GL points out most film music is written in 19th century Romantic idiom: when it's not, as e.g. Alien3, results are amazing.
-- soundtrack of The Birds featuring subharmonics, Mixtur-Trautonium ...
-- Lisa Gerrard, formerly of Dead Can Dance, and her 'original language' in vocal pieces
-- Michael Tippett's 'New Year' features time travellers and quotes the soundtrack of Blake's Seven!
-- Simon Thorne's Neanderthal music and Alan Moore's experiment -- sitting on the ground, beating the earth with his hand, for hours: a sense of connection.

And so to the bar, the pool and some dinner.


Why do Fans Love Cats and How Can We Get Them to Stop? (9pm; Sue Mason, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Farah Mendlesohn, Tanya Brown)
Answers: (a) because they are storyable; (b) we can't, so don't bother trying.

Not so much a panel as a collection of anecdotes, some apparently distressing to members of the audience. We determined that cats and their owners come to resemble one another (cue Farah's tale of Miss P, who has all the cats in the neighbourhood firmly under her paw -- save for one tom ...); that Jon Courtenay Grimwood's cat presents a serial work; that dogs are noisy and smell bad; that cats make grand companions for writers (apparently Tim Powers has 'eighteen or twenty, we haven't counted lately': but we were unable to acquire him for the panel) but that they can be as despotic as small children when it comes to interrupting the writing process; that none of us could beat Sue's account of how her darling little kitty-cat hospitalised her within hours of moving in ...

Perhaps fandom is disproportionately made up of the 10% of (Western European) humans who are infected with the toxoplasmosis parasite, resident mostly in felines. Not all fans, JCG reminded us, love cats: "someone in the bar said he was fine with cats, slowly casseroled". I do have a recipe. And possibly an anecdote.
Hence to bar [☼] and cava [☼]

Monday

How to Plot a Novel (11am; Tim Powers)
I was pleased to make it to a Tim Powers item, and this was a stunner: a one-man show on his techniques ("my own prejudices and idiosyncratic stuff") for plotting a novel.

"Every time I undertake a novel or a short story, I'm at a loss."
"Things that happen in real life ... might lead to an interesting situation but won't wind up to be a plot."

Plots don't just happen on their own. Characters having a life of their own don't generate plot. (Karen Joy Fowler sits her characters down and gets them talking, discovering as she goes: but then the exploratory first draft has to be cut, and Powers hates editing, never mind cutting, what he's written.)

He spoke of writing his first novel, in parallel / competition with James Morrow James Blaylock, and "we kept thinking a plot would happen as inevitably as a 10-car pile-up on the freeway".

A plot: a somersault. Desperately hard choices with consequences that must be lived with.

At least one character should be in a position to say, "That which I greatly fear has come upon me."

Dig down through characters' bios -- what is X very good at that they don't do any more? (Which is like a promise that X'll do it again by the end of the novel.) What does A really want? What does A really not want? (This shouldn't be just the opposite of what they want.)

Making a calendar to keep the timeline straight -- worth doing to see the arc even if you don't do it in advance. And telling the story out of sequence is often more effective, as long as there is a sequence.

"The first draft is sipposed to be stupid and pedestrian -- if you write brilliant first drafts, there's something wrong with you."

Audience question: what if your research contradicts your plot?
TP: look for bits too cool not to use. He does research to get the story, not to support a story he's already built.
Q: How do you make yourself write the book once you know what's going to happen?
A: The outline is like writing a play script; writing is like the actual performance of that play.


Figures from History (2pm; Kate Bodley, Edward James, Tim Powers, David Lloyd, John Selmes)
EJ: medieval historians are as much novelists as historians. "Writing history is a species of fanfiction -- fixing things ..."
KB: fanfiction audiences not like readers of historical fiction: you expect fanfic readers to know the exact same set of facts -- canon -- about the characters.
EJ reporting on Guy Gavriel Kay at ICFA discussing fictionalised portrayals of the death of Marilyn Monroe -- GGK not convinced of the morality of using real characters ... he reimagines El Cid in The Lions of Al-Rassan.
KB: does it make a difference if you put those characters in a different world, subject them to different stimuli?
DL: the original V for Vendetta referenced the Sharon Tate murders -- too close to contemporary, it was felt then (1982-1985) but Jack the Ripper was fair game
TP: "don't take your 20th century perspective back in time with you"

Audience: How much can you expect people to know about the historical period, characters etc you choose to depict in fiction?
TP: err on the side of caution -- give plenty of info

Closing Ceremony (3:30pm) -- including classic Bugs Bunny The Rabbit of Seville, and finally la_marquise_de_ receiving the Doc Weir Award for unsung services to fandom. [☼]

And so home: Bradford -> ☼ -> Cambridge -> Tonbridge -> ☼ -> Cambridge -> CAT.

Overall, fabulous convention, just the way conventions should be. (Tho' I wasn't in the mood to dress up much, and hadn't got my act together.)

Gripes: the overflow hotel was much too far for short breaks away from the convention (and yes, I did book early). There was nowhere obvious at the con to get some peace and quiet and recharge: that would really have helped.
- a plethora of programme. Yess, yes, this is the sort of problem that many con-goers wish for: but I missed Guest of Honour items because I was on items programmed against them; I missed items in the music stream because I was on other items in the music stream; at one point there were four different items I wanted to go to, and couldn't because I was on a fifth. I loved the programme -- it was full of new and innovative ideas -- but there was just too much, and I did occasionally get stressed about what I was missing!

Thought: perhaps this is the first convention programmed with time travel in mind: perhaps we will all be zipping back from the future to Bradford, April 2009, to catch those items we missed ...

bonus links:
- Ken MacLeod's write-up with the bit of the Powers talk that I missed out
- Inversion Layer on the making of the BSFA Awards