I'm just back from
Readercon 27, the annual convention that I've been to more than any other, and for which (a while back) I served on the program committee for a few years. At this point, Readercon feels like a family reunion for me, and it's a delight.
Here, I simply want to riff on ideas from one of the panels I participated in.
Friday, I was on my first panel of the convention, "Nonfiction for Fiction Writers", with Jonathan Crowe, Keffy Kehrli, Tom Purdom, Rick Wilber. It was good fun. I'd taken lots of notes beforehand, because I wasn't really sure what direction the panel would go in and I wanted to be prepared and to not forget any particular favorites. Ultimately, and expectedly, I only got to mention a few of the items I was prepared to talk about.
However, since I still have my notes, I can expand on it all here...
First, I started thinking about useful reference books and tools. One of the things I talked about on the panel was the need I have to get some vocabulary before I begin to write anything involving history, professions I'm not highly familiar with, regions I don't know intimately, etc. I will make lists of words and phrases to have at hand. To create such a list, I spend lots of time with the Oxford English Dictionary, with specialized dictionaries (and old dictionaries —
Samuel Johnson's is invaluable, but I'm also fond of
the 1911 Concise Oxford Dictionary), with texts from the era or profession I'm trying to write about, and with a book I got years ago, the
Random House Word Menu, a highly useful book because it arranges words in a way reminiscent of the old
Roget's thesauruses (the ones not arranged alphabetically), but different enough to be uniquely useful. (For that matter, an old thesaurus is highly useful, too, as you'll find more archaic words in it. My preference is for one from the late 1940s.) Finally, I'm fond of
The People's Chronology by James Trager, which is a year-by-year chronology from the beginning of time to, in the most recent edition, the early 1990s. Being written by one person, it's obviously incomplete and biased toward what he thought was important, but what I find useful in it is the sense of scope that it provides. You can get something like it via Wikipedia's
year-specific entries, but it's nice to be able to flip through a book, and I find Trager's organization of material and summary of events interesting. Chronologies specific to particular people can be fascinating too, such as
The Poe Log.I'm also fond of old travel guides and atlases. I still have the
Rough Guide to New York City that I bought before I went to college there in 1994, and I treasure it, because it reminds me of a city now lost. I've got a couple editions of Kate Simon's
New York Places & Pleasures. (For London, I have a 1937 edition of
William Kent's Encyclopedia of London.) Similarly,
old atlases are a treasure trove; not only do they show lost places and borders long shifted, but they demonstrate the ways that people have thought about borders, geography, knowledge, and the world itself in the past. See Peter Turchi's
Maps of the Imagination for more on that.
That's it for the really useful reference stuff in general (individual projects often have their own specific needs for reference material). To see how I've put some of these things to use, check out the penultimate story in
Blood, "Lacuna". Now for some encounters with interesting nonfiction...
One of the greatest joys in nonfiction reading is to be reading something just for information and then to discover it's wonderfully written. On the panel, I said that when I was studying for my Ph.D. general exam, I decided to strengthen my knowledge of Victorian England by skimming some of
Peter Ackroyd's gigantic biography of Dickens. But once I started reading, I didn't want to skim. Ackroyd's sense of drama mixes perfectly with his passion for detail, and the book is unbelievably rich, eloquently written, and so compelling that it all but consumed my life for a couple of weeks.
Since Readercon is a science fiction, fantasy, and horror convention, I mostly thought about books to help such writers with their work. SF writers often obsess over "worldbuilding", which I put in quotation marks not only because I'm skeptical of the term, which I am, but more importantly because what such writers mean by "worldbuilding" varies. (For one quick overview, see
Rajan Khanna's 2012 piece for Lit Reactor.) My own feelings are at least in sympathy with statements from M. John Harrison, e.g. his controversial
2007 blog post on "worldbuilding" as a concept and his
brief note from 2012, wherein he writes: "Worldbuilt fantasy is over-engineered & under-designed. Whatever the term worldbuilding implies, it isn’t deftness or economy. A world can be built in a sentence, but epic fantasy doesn’t want that. At the same time, it isn’t really baggy or capacious, like Pynchon or Gunter Grass." The simplicities of SF are one of its great aesthetic and ethical limitations, even of the most celebrated and complex SF (see
my comments on Aurora for more on this; see Delany's
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and Pynchon's
Against the Day for exemplary models of how to make complex settings in the baggy style; for short fiction, see
Chekhov). Too often, SF writing seems to seek to replace the complexities of the real world with the simplicities of an imagined world. This is one of my
complaints about apocalyptic fiction as well: when the history of the world we live in provides all sorts of examples of apocalypse and dystopia at least as awful as the ones SF writers imagine, what does that suggest about your made-up world?
Anyway, that all got me thinking about books that might be useful for someone who wanted to think about "worldbuilding" as something more than just escape from the complexities of reality. There are countless historical books useful for such an endeavor — even mediocre history books have more complexity to them than most SF, and analyzing why that is could lead a writer to construct their settings more effectively.
I said on the panel that if I could recommend only one history book to SF writers, it would be Charles Mann's
1491, which other people on the panel also recommended. While I'm sure there's academic writing that is richer than Mann's popular history, the virtue of his book is that it's engagingly written and thus a good introduction to a subject that can, in fact, be mind-blowing for a reader raised on all sorts of myths about the Americas before Columbus — some of which seem to have informed a lot of SF. (Really, Mann's book should be paired with John Reider's essential
Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.)
A very different approach to the complexities available in a single year is James Shapiro's
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, which I didn't get a chance to mention on the panel. It's one of my favorite books about Shakespeare for reasons well stated by Robert McCrum in an
Observer review when the book came out:
The story of 1599 ... is an enthralling one that includes the rebuilding of the Globe; the fall of Essex; the death of Spenser; a complicated publishing row about the Sonnets; the sensational opening of Julius Caesar; rumours of the Queen's death; the completion of a bestselling volume of poetry, The Passionate Pilgrim; and finally, the extraordinary imaginative shift represented by the first draft of Hamlet.
Partly, 1599 is a rediscovery of the worlds that shaped the poet's development and which, in his maturity, were becoming lost — the bloody Catholic past; the deforested landscape of Arden; a dying chivalric culture. Partly, it is a record of a writer reading, writing and revising to meet a succession of deadlines.
The writer and his world, as seen via the lens of a single year.
In my notes, I jotted down titles of a few other biographies that feel especially rich in the way they negotiate the connections between the individual consciousness and the wider world:
Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee and
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull by Barbara Goldsmith.
Then there is
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edward G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace, which is unbelievably rich. There are countless books to read if you want to think about how to imagine cities and their histories; this is one that has long fed my imagination.
While I've got New York on my mind, I must recommend also George Chauncey's classic
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. It's a marvelous portrait of a subculture and how that subculture interacts with the supraculture. Similarly, Graham Robb's
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century is a good challenge to a lot of assumptions about gay history.
Writers might find productive ways of working through the problems of history, subjectivity, and literary worlds by reading David Attwell's
J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time, which is one of the best explorations of an individual writer's process and manuscripts that I know, and one that offers numerous techniques for thinking your way out of the traps of "worldbuilding".
On another day, if someone were to say to me, "I want to write an immersive SF story in an imagined world, so what should I read?" I would be as likely to start with Noël Mostert's
Frontiers as I would be with
1491 or another book. I first learned about
Frontiers from Brian Slattery, and though I have read around in it rather than read it front-to-back, its range and depth are utterly apparent. It tells of the history of the Xhosa people in South Africa. It is particularly valuable for anyone interested in writing some sort of first-contact story.
A caution, though: It's important to read people's own chronicles and analyses of their experiences, not just the work of outsiders or people distant in time from the events they write about. For instance, don't miss the
Women Writing Africa anthologies from the Feminist Press. Be skeptical of distant experts, even the thoughtful and eloquent ones.
Along those lines, a nonfiction book I would recommend to any writer is Edward Said's
Culture and Imperialism, which I much prefer to his more famous
Orientalism. Among the highly influential writers of the theory era, Said is, I think, hands down the best stylist and the least in need of a vociferous editor, so reading
Culture and Imperialism is often simply an aesthetic pleasure. But more than that, it brings to fruition ideas he had been developing for decades. This is not to say I think he's always
right (what fun would that be?) -- his reading of Forster's
Passage to India seems to me especially wrong, as if he'd only seen David Lean's awful movie -- but that he provides tools for rearranging how we think about imagination, literature, and politics. If you want to contribute to the culture around you, you ought to know what that culture does in the world, and think about how it does it. If you want to create imaginary cultures, then you ought to spend serious time thinking about how real cultures work. There are countless other writers who can help along the way, including ones who stand in opposition to Said, but as a starting point,
Culture and Imperialism works well.
For US writers especially, I must also add Mark Rifkin's
Settler Common Sense, a book I read earlier this year, and which made me want to go back to a lot of 19th century American lit that I don't have time at the moment to go back to. It's a kind of intellectual sequel to Toni Morrison's
Playing in the Dark (another must-read), but it expands the scope beyond the black/white binary, which, as Rifkin notes, "tends to foreground citizenship, rights, and belonging to the nation, miscasting Indigenous self-representations and political aims in ways that make them illegible."
Also well worth reading are two books by Sven Lindqvist,
Exterminate All the Brutes and
A History of Bombing, both interesting at a formal level, but also for what they discuss. These are short books, but accomplish more both aesthetically and intellectually than most SF.
It's important to consider the ways our assumptions are constructed, and if your a writer, that includes assumptions about writing, culture, and how certain styles and techniques are valued. For that, you could do worse than read
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders,
The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl, and
Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett. The three books work well together, and draw on each other, creating a portrait of American literary institutions in the 20th century that are far from the objective tastemakers they sold themselves as being.
Most of the books I thought of and discussed on the panel were, in some way or another, about history, since the construction of history and memory is an obsession of mine. But I had one book about science on my list, though never got the chance to recommend it:
Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling, a book that will challenge a lot of what you probably think you know about biology and gender. (On the other hand, the book has been influential enough that the common sense about gender and biology has shifted since it was published, so who knows.) Even if you are familiar with some of what
Sexing the Body argues about biology, it's valuable for the stories it tells about science and scientists. Indeed, this is something that makes it hugely useful to science fiction writers, even if they're not especially interested in gender: it demonstrates some ways that science is made.
Any writer could also benefit from thinking about the ways knowledge and writing disappear, and for that Nicholson Baker's
Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper is a good, if depressing, start.
Finally, I see in my notes a list of essayists I am always happy to read: Virginia Woolf, Samuel Johnson (for the construction of his sentences), Guy Davenport, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Carole Maso, Barry Lopez, William H. Gass, and Samuel Delany.
There are, of course, many others, and on another day I would make completely different lists and different recommendations, but these are the books and writers that come to mind now.
Last week's
Readercon was among the best of the many I have attended, for me at least. Inevitably, there wasn't enough time for anything — time to see friends, time to go to all the various panels I had hoped to go to, time to mine the book dealers' wares... Nonetheless, it was a tremendous pleasure to see so many friends and acquaintances again, as well as to be immersed in such a vibrant community of people who love to talk about books.
I've been on the Programming Committee for Readercon for the past two years now, which changes my experience a little bit, because I find myself paying closer attention than I did before to how the panels end up working in reality (after we on the committee have puzzled over their possibilities for a few months) and to how people on the panels and in the audiences respond to them. (Note: We're actively trying to expand the invitation list to Readercon. If you have any names to suggest [including yourself],
please see here for more info.)
I don't love being on panels myself, because I don't really have any confidence in my ability to say anything beyond the banal in an extemporaneous situation, but I was on a couple this time, and though I don't think my contributions were anything memorable, there were some good moments. (More thoughts on panels and the current discussion of gender parity on panels at cons below.)
The two panels I was on were both on Saturday morning, which turned out to be less than ideal for me because I hadn't gotten to sleep until sometime after 2am (having been part of a long and wonderful conversation with Eric Schaller, Jeff VanderMeer, and Michael Cisco), so I was pretty exhausted. The first panel was on John Reider's excellent book
Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, with the other panelists being Robert Killheffer, Darrell Schweitzer, Vandana Singh, and, as leader (that is, moderating participant), Andrea Hairston. I thank the gods of scheduling that Andrea was the leader, because her skills at moderating are a wonder to behold. I wouldn't have been leader of this panel for anything, because not only is there a potentially controversial topic, but it's the sort of topic that is wide open to unproductive tangents — for instance, it may bring out the history geek in participants or audience members to such an extent that they can't help demonstrating how much they know about exactly what happened in 322 BCE and how
that is what really explains the
Berlin Conference. There was a bit of this, and Andrea brilliantly brought the conversation back toward things that could be more effectively discussed in the hour we had without making the person who just couldn't help talking a lot about the Romans feel entirely squashed. (If he did, he didn't behave as if he'd been squashed.) I find it hard to stay on track during panels myself, so always appreciate a moderator who can moderate without humiliating.
I'm not sure we were able to really say anything beyond what the book itself already says, but we affirmed that its analysis is provocative, powerful, and generally convincing, and if we succeeded in sparking curiosity about the book in one or two other people, then it was a success. (Copies seemed to be selling well at the Wesleyan University Press table in the dealers' room.)
After the panel, Andrea
Readercon 21 was, for me, exciting and stimulating, though this year in particular it felt like I only had a few minutes to talk with everybody I wanted to talk with. I think part of this is a result of my now living in New Hampshire rather than New Jersey, so I just don't see a lot of folks from the writing, publishing, and reading worlds much anymore.
Before I get into some thoughts on some panels and discussions, some pictures: Ellen Datlow's and Tempest Bradford's. Tempest asked everybody to make a sad face for her, not because Readercon was a sad con (just the opposite!), but because it's fun to have people make sad faces. The iconic picture from the weekend for me, though, is Ellen's photo of Liz Hand's back. I covet Liz's shirt.
And now for some only vaguely coherent thoughts on some of the panels...
I actually missed my own first panel, "Interstitial Then, Genre Now", with John Clute, Michael Dirda, Peter Dube, and Dora Goss, because the battery in my car died because of absent-mindedness on my part the night before. Luckily, I have a car battery charger, but charging took just long enough to make it so there was no physical way I could get to Burlington, MA in time for the panel. (Andrew Liptak wrote a recap for Tor.com.)
My Saturday panel, "The Secret History of The Secret History of Science Fiction", with Kathryn Cramer, Alexander Jablokov, John Kessel, Jacob Weisman, and Gary K. Wolfe went pretty well, I thought, though as so often happens, it felt like it was just getting going when it was time to end. The panel allowed John to talk about the motivations for the book, some of what he thought it accomplished, etc. -- a lot of what he said parallels what he and Jim Kelly told me when I interviewed them about the anthology. Gary Wolfe offered probably the best line of the panel: "An anthology is, inevitably, a collection of the wrong stories." (This, of course, from the critic's point of view!)
I'm not very good at inserting myself into conversations, so I did a lot of observing during the panel, piping up only to offer a sort of counter viewpoint from Gary's -- where Gary was in some ways agreeing with Paul Witcover's assertion that writers like T.C. Boyle are just using science fiction as "a trip to the playground". I was hoping we'd be able to discuss this idea a bit more, but time didn't allow it. Had it, I suppose I would have tried to say that to me the resentment of writers not routinely identified with the marketing category of "science fiction" or the community of fans, writers, and publishers that congregates under the SF umbrella -- the resentment of these writers for using the props, tropes, and moves of SF is unappealing to me for a few reasons. It's a clubhouse mentality, one that lets folks inside the clubhouse determine what the secret password is and if anybody standing outside has the right pronunciation of that password. It is, in other words, a purity test: are the intentions in your soul the right ones, the approved ones? Had we had time, I would have tried to make some sort of connection between this attitude toward non-SF writers with an attitude I've seen within the field from people toward writers of a younger generation who haven't read, for instance, e
I'm just back from Readercon and too tired to write up all the various fun that was had -- some great panels, lots of wonderful conversations with more folks than I can possibly remember to mention, not nearly enough time with even more folks than I could ever mention, etc. Paolo Bacigalupi was so horrified that I had not yet read (or even procured a copy of!) his new novel Ship Breaker that he challenged me to Jell-o wrestle him to the death. (I like his work so much that I swallowed my pride and declined to wrestle him, because, of course, being the monster of human strength that I am, I would crush him within seconds, and he, being dead, would no longer be able to write.) Later, a young fan named Junot Diaz and I talked for a while. He seems like a smart kid, likely to accomplish something one day -- keep your eyes on him.
A more comprehensive Readercon post will appear soon, but for now, here are some of the items I came home with, either from the dealers' room, from friends, or from a used bookstore I visited with Eric Schaller, Liz Gorinsky, and Brian Slattery...
The old green Harvard Classics book (which is in good shape and cost $1!) is Emerson's
Essays and English Traits, which I got because I don't have a complete copy of
English Traits, and I've just been reading about it in
Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People. The book to the right of it is an advance copy of
The Wonderful Future That Never Was, which will be published sometime around October. The galleys are in black & white, though the finished book will be in color and include a poster. The layout is marvelous, the text a heckuva lot of fun, so this is one you'll want to order dozens of to give to your friends and family during the holidays. Here's a snapshot of one of the interiors, just to give a sense of some of the layout (some pages have much more text, but this one was photogenic):
I'm really looking forward to seeing a full-color finished copy. And now for some more books that pretty much speak for themselves...
This weekend is the one science fiction convention I attend regularly, Readercon, and I'm on a couple panels:
Friday 11:00 AM, Salon F: Panel
Interstitial Then, Genre Now. Matthew Cheney, John Clute, Michael Dirda, Peter Dube,
Theodora Goss (L).
Although new genres may seem to be created out of whole cloth, they are of course
stitched together from existing literary and cultural elements. Today we call fiction
which falls between or combines currently defined genres or subgenres "interstitial
literature." Can we therefore read Mary Shelly's _Frankenstein_ or Edgar Allan Poe's
detective fiction as interstitial at the time of their creation, even though they
now read like pure genre exemplars? What other innovations in literary genre can be
fruitfully regarded as originally interstitial?
Saturday 3:00 PM, Salon F: Panel
The Secret History of _The Secret History of Science Fiction_. Matthew Cheney,
Kathryn Cramer, Alexander Jablokov, John Kessel, Jacob Weisman (M), Gary K. Wolfe.
In their anthology _The Secret History of Science Fiction_, editors James Patrick Kelly
and John Kessel have selected stories from inside and outside the genre to demonstrate
that "the divide between mainstream and science fiction is more apparent than real,"
and that "outside of the public eye," writers on both sides of the supposed divide
have been producing work that, on the one hand, has the ambition and sophistication of
literary fiction, and, on the other, makes use of the tropes of speculative fiction,
though not necessarily labeled as such by writers, critics, or readers. But does
their story selection support their assertion? Or, as Paul Witcover maintains, does
it in fact demonstrate that there really are substantial differences between genre
speculative fiction of literary ambition and what is written outside the genre, even
if it contains speculative elements?
I find being on panels really strange and challenging, because I much prefer writing as a mode of discussing ideas to extemporaneous conversation, but interesting stuff sometimes comes out through the back and forth of discussion, so we shall see...
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 7/12/2009
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I was only able to be at Readercon for parts of Friday and Saturday this year, so I missed many good events and didn't get to spend much time with all sorts of people I would have liked to have spent time with, but what I did get to do and see was great, probably the best overall experience I've had at the one science fiction convention I try not to miss each year.
I arrived on Friday in time for the Interfictions reading -- twelve of us reading very small bits of our stories in less than an hour, which was a lively good time. There was even room for questions afterward! People had great fun with the format, and it provided a vivid picture of what the anthologies are trying to achieve -- a great diversity of structures and approaches to fiction united by a shared sense of play.
The next event I attended was a panel on people of color in science fiction and fantasy, a panel moderated by David Anthony Durham, with panelists Cecilia Tan, Anil Menon, Tempest Bradford, and Eileen Gunn. It's a topic I find particularly interesting, important, and challenging, and one Tempest and I have talked about a bunch with each other. I was pleased that when the topic of Nisi Shawl's Filter House
was raised in conjunction with a discussion of SF awards, Tempest (who was a member of the Tiptree Award jury that made Filter House a co-winner this year) was willing to bring up my review of the book as an example of how the stories can be misread and misunderstood. Tempest said that one of the things she so admired about the book is that it represents a black woman's concerns and experiences without making concessions to a perceived white readership. This then makes it, she posited, a particularly difficult book for somebody who is, for instance, a white guy, to appreciate, and especially to review. I didn't respond during the panel, because if my own inability to really appreciate the book is based on a blindness created by my identity, then I'm the last person who would be able to say that is the fact -- otherwise, it wouldn't be a blindness. Of course, I would like to think that is not the case, and that my struggle with the book is aesthetic, but I don't believe in the idea of a universal reader who is capable of disinterestedly evaluating every text (and even if I did believe in such a ridiculous idea, I would have a big problem with assuming that a white male was such a thing. White guys have gotten away for too long with thinking our experience is somehow the universal and important one). When I read the explanations by the Tiptree jury of their excitement about Filter House, I had a sharp sense of speaking a different sort of language -- I recognized the book they described, certainly, but I did not recognize the way of reading and evaluating that they offered as one that I am comfortable or even perhaps capable of for myself. That suggests to me that I am the wrong reader for the book ... but I'm not entirely sure what that means.
The difficulty I face in completely accepting Tempest's take on Filter House (and other books that similarly, and admirably, broaden the range of represented experience) is that I don't know what to do with it within the narrow and limited realm of critical evaluation. Such a view circumvents critical evaluation in a way that may, in fact, say more about the act of evaluation than anything else. The question is not only one of identity, either -- a review by someone who has little experience with science fiction of an SF novel has sometimes led me to think, "Wow, you just don't get it, do you?" Heck, I think that a lot of the time of reviews, even good ones... If a reviewer slams, or even just expresses reservations about, a book that we've found particularly affecting, is there anything that would make us think the reviewer was anything better than obtuse? At best, I feel pity for people who dislike books I really love, because they aren't able to experience the profound joy I have experienced with them. And I expect the same has, at best, been thought of me...
I am torn by the idea that a person's lack of appreciation for a certain text suggests that they have not worked hard enough to appreciate it, or have the wrong experience (either of life or reading) to appreciate it, because on one hand I think this idea is obvious -- most eight-year-olds can't make much of James Joyce -- and on the other hand I think it dodges the possibility of critical evaluation by saying that any evaluation which is not fundamentally positive is invalid.
I'm too much of a postmodernist to believe there is such a thing as objective evaluation, but I am also a great fan of negative reviews, because even when they are of books I cherish (cue the soundtrack: "Wow, you don't get it, do you?"), I am suspicious of an environment of pure appreciation. Thus, there must be room within a discourse for negative evaluation if such discourse is to have any hope of being about the art at hand. And yet it's also self-evident that readers are extraordinarily different, even when they might seem similar in all sorts of ways -- one of the things that makes talking about books so addictive is that even when you know a certain reader's proclivities and history inside-out, there will be books that reader responds to in ways that seem surprising.
Accepting subjectivity and the immense variability of reading experiences is tough for a book reviewer, though, because the rhetoric of reviews requires an illusion of objectivity, or at least an appeal to certain traditions of aesthetic evaluation -- the ability to say, without irony, that something is "good" or "bad" according to a set of precedents and traditions. Yet all precedents and traditions are the product of people interacting with each other, and thus of systems and powers that can be historicized and analyzed.
Which brings in another big question -- that of power. (And yes, I adore Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power
and think anybody who doesn't is obtuse and judging from the wrong precedents and traditions!) A review is an assertion of authority and power: the authority and power to evaluate a book. Given the dynamics and history of power in the U.S. and in the literary world, I think it's foolish to pretend that a review by a white guy of a book by a black gal does not contain some potential problems, regardless of whether the review is on the whole positive or negative. Most reviewers, particularly of SF, are white males, and that's deeply limiting, because people from different backgrounds and experiences will better compensate each other's blindnesses and offer a more varied and interesting range of readings. Similarly, in referencing such white, mainstream writers as John Gardner and Flannery O'Connor in my review of Filter House, I may have reified power structures I profoundly disagree with: the examples that seemed to me to offer the clearest indication of the aesthetic criteria I was applying could perhaps even more easily be seen as valorizing the mainstream/genre dichotomy and, worse, the idea that white writers are superior to non-white writers. Yikes.
Anyway, I don't have settled thoughts on any of this, but the riffing I've done here on it shows one of the strengths of Readercon's panels and panelists -- every year, I've come away from at least one panel or discussion with lots to think about, and sometimes some really productive self-reflection. This year felt to me like the high-water mark for that.
On Friday night, I went out to eat with Liz Gorinsky, Michael Tax, and Eric Rosenfield, which gave Eric and me the opportunity to continue some of our endless discussion of genre, this time with good input and questions from Liz and Michael. Readercon was Eric's first SF convention, and it was fun to see him wrestle with how it compares (or doesn't) with non-SF get-togethers. I'm sure there will be some more posts on Wet Asphalt about all this as he continues to sift through his experiences. Eric was also one of the most prolific Tweeters of #Readercon (an amusing cult).
On Saturday, I started the day with Charlie Finlay's talk on "The Genre Roots of American Mainstream Fiction", which proved, I thought, how difficult it is to extend the idea of SF as a genre much before 1926, when Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories -- and especially 1927, when he began publishing readers' letters along with their mailing addresses, allowing fans to get in touch with each other (Delany offers 1911, when Gernsback published Ralph 124C 41+, but I'm even narrower and more conservative. For good discussion of the early letters columns of SF magazines, see Justine Larbalestier's essential The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction and the additional material on her website). What was wonderful about Charlie's lecture -- aside from his lively delivery -- was the range of his references, and the marvelous writers and books he discovered in his research for the Traitor to the Crown trilogy. We're going to do an interview about this soon, so I'm not going to say anything more about it right now.....
Chip Delany and I got to have lunch together, which was great fun, because we had never met in person when he knew who I was (I had met him first in 2006, I think, at Readercon, when I talked to him briefly at the Wesleyan University Press table and told him his book The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
had had a tremendous effect on me at an early age. He nodded politely and clearly thought I was a weirdo.)
A few hours later, Chip and I were on a panel with Dennis Danvers, David Hartwell, Fred Lerner, and Veronica Schanoes about "Academic Attention: Good, Bad, or Ugly". We began by naming our academic affiliations, and I began by saying I have a master's degree from Dartmouth College in Samuel R. Delany. The panel really got going once we were able to discuss some of the different experiences we'd had with science fiction in the academy in terms of how the subject has been seen within different disciplines, our particular experiences at certain institutions, and the changes in reception to the idea of SF as worthy of academic attention over the last 50 years or so. One of the strengths of the panel, I thought, was the diversity of ages -- Veronica and I have had quite different experiences from folks who tried to do academic work on SF in previous decades. At the end of the discussion, I said that in my experience, though, there is a real difference between how SF is viewed by literature professors vs. writing professors. We didn't have time to really explore this idea, which was a disappointment, because I'm very curious what other people's experiences have been with regard to such a split. The only times I've ever been told I could not do something related to SF in an academic setting was in certain writing workshops. I think, perhaps optimistically, that this is changing, though.
After the panel, I spent time in the bookshop and hanging out with various folks, including the great and glorious Victoria Blake of Underland Press, the newly generic Adam Golaski of New Genre, the wise and worldly Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld, the fantastic and science fictional Gordon van Gelder of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the small-ly beerish Jedediah Berry of Small Beer Press. Because finances are a little perilous at the moment, I worked hard not to go crazy in the bookshop, though I could not resist buying a copy of Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes, a book I have been anticipating for years -- I have a copy of the issue of the Century magazine with "Jack Daw's Pack" in it, and "A Crowd of Bone" is one of the most linguistically astonishing stories I know. To have those included now alongside the previously unpublished, novel-length story "Unleaving" in a book of breathtakingly beautiful design was simply irresistible.
Then I spent an hour saying goodbye to people and headed north, back to the Great State of New Hampshire, where we've had 40 days of rain, but where the sun is currently shining, hopefully as a harbinger of good things to come...
It's the 20th year of Readercon, and I'll be there on Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. I'll be on a panel Saturday afternoon titled "Academic Attention: Good, Bad, or Ugly?", a topic that premiered at Readercon 1. My fellow panelists are Dennis Danvers, Samuel Delany, David Hartwell, Fred Lerner, and Veronica Schanoes. I'll also be at the Interfictions reading on Friday afternoon. Otherwise, I'm keeping my schedule open so I can go see panels and such things at a whim, or just hang out in the bookstore or bar. It will be fun to catch up with old friends and meet some new folks, too, I hope. I'm not a big convention person, but Readercon is one I always hate to miss.
I didn't intend to disappear from this blog for quite as long as I did, but I got busy with work on the manuscript of Best American Fantasy 3 (the contents of which we'll finally be able to announce next week!) and I've been teaching an online course for Plymouth State University, an interesting experience, since I've never taught classes entirely online before (nor am I all that sure it's a way I like teaching, but that's another story...)
I probably owe you an email.*
Readercon is coming up -- July 9-12. I'll be there Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. The great and glorious Liz Hand and Greer Gilman are guests of honor. The other guests ain't too shabby neither. Except for that Cheney guy. He's a putz.
Some things I've noticed out on the internets:
- Hal Duncan wrote a little post at his blog about ethics, reviewing, criticism, etc. A few people commented. Hal wrote another little post responding in particular to comments by Abigail Nussbaum and me. Then another related post on "The Absence of the Abject". And then two posts on "The Assumption of Authority" (one, two). They're wonderfully provocative and wide-ranging essays, but as the whole is now over 20,000 words long, I haven't been able to keep up with it. But I shall return to it over the course of the summer...
- Jeff VanderMeer has been working for what sounds to me like one of the coolest teen camps in the world, Shared Worlds, and as part of that asked a bunch of writers and other creative-type people, "What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"
- I accompanied Eric Schaller and family to a magnificent concert by David Byrne a few weeks ago. Byrne's earnest dorkiness has been a balm to my soul since I was a kid. He's been on The Colbert Report a couple of times in support of his tour -- here, performing one of my favorite of his new songs, "Life is Long", and here performing "One Fine Day" (in which everybody seems a bit tired). The Colbert studio isn't quite Radio City Music Hall, but still...
- Tor.com has, in less than a year, become one of the best science fiction sites, and they've now launched a store that includes "special picks" from their great array of bloggers. (And, interestingly, though the site is allied with Tor Books, it's striven to be, as they say, "publisher agnostic", so it's not just about Tor's books.)
- Speaking of major SF sites, I enjoyed Charlie Jane Anders's post at io9 titled "4 Authors We Wish Would Return to Science Fiction" because it includes new comments from each of the four writers discussed: Mary Doria Russell, Nicola Griffith, Karen Joy Fowler, and Samuel R. Delany.
- I really loved Jeff Ford's post on the books he survived in primary and secondary school English classes.
- I seem to have written yet another Strange Horizons column.
Meanwhile, I've been reading a bunch of books I haven't written about. Some just for fun -- I went on a bit of an alternative history kick, reading
C.C. Finlay's The Patriot Witch
(available as an authorized PDF download
here) and L. Sprague de Camp's
Lest Darkness Fall.
The Patriot Witch attracted me because I've read some of Charlie Finlay's short stories and enjoyed them, and the book is set during the American Revolution, a time period about which I will read almost anything. The fantasy elements seemed a bit bland to me, but the scenes of the battles of Lexington and Concord were well done, reminding me of Howard Fast's
April Morning
, a book that, along with
Johnny Tremain
, was a favorite of mine when I was young. I'll probably read the next book in the "Traitor to the Crown" series because now I'm curious to see if the fantasy element develops in less familiar ways.
Lest Darkness Fall is, as many people through the decades have said, great fun, a kind of
Connectic Yankee for readers who want their protagonists to be endlessly resourceful, optimistic, and lucky.
Somewhere in there, I also fit in Jack Vance's
Emphyrio
, an engaging example of a certain sort of classic ethnographic science fiction, something halfway between
Lloyd Biggle and
Ursula Le Guin.
I did a bunch of that fun, light reading because on the side I've been delving deeply into various books about British and American colonialism and imperialism for a story I keep telling myself I'm going to write: a steampunk alternate history about a mad scientist, a U.S. and British fight over Nicaragua at the beginning of the 20th century, and the atrocities it all leads to. Among the various books I've been dipping into for my researches are
Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction
by John Rieder,
The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
by Daniel Headrick,
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900
by David Edgerton,
Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule
by Michel Gobat,
The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, 1895-1956
by Anne Orde,
The Sleep of Reason: Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War
by Derek Jarrett,
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
by Anne McClintock, as well as such books of their time as Winston Churchill's
My African Journey
(pointed out to me by Njihia Mbitiru, who's been a big help in goading me on to write this story that I keep talking about) and
The Ethiopian: A Narrative of the Society of Human Leopards. Also a couple of books I've been familiar with for a while,
Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
by David Anderson and
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
by Caroline Elkins.
Clearly, I don't want to write a story -- I want to write an annotated bibliography!
Now, though, it's time to stop procrastinating and get back to work...
*Speaking of email, I've severely neglected the email address once associated with this blog (themumpsimus at gmail) because it became massively overloaded with spam (partly because I had redirected some ancient addresses at it) and sometime at the beginning of this year I made a resolution to clean it out, find real messages I'd missed, etc. I removed the link to it from this site so that people wouldn't inadvertently use it, but I expected to get it back up and working within a week. Then I kind of kept procrastinating. Every time I thought about it I suffered trauma. Now cleaning out and organizing the inbox is such a Herculean task that I may just give up and start over with a new, clean address. I don't know. I will fight through my anxieties and figure it out soon, though.
A grand time was had by all at Readercon this year, and it was a great thrill for me to get to see one of my oldest friends in the writing world, James Patrick Kelly, as guest of honor -- honored so well and appropriately.
The two panels I was on seemed to go well, though I arrived at the con only half an hour before I was on the "Triumphing Over Competence" panel and hadn't quite adjusted yet, so my contributions were few. Adam Golaski did a fine job of moderating, but it was a tough topic to focus in on in a way that would lead to real insights. Saturday's "The Career of James Patrick Kelly" panel felt much more successful to me, and one of its strengths was the diversity in the backgrounds of the panelists -- we had all discovered Jim's writings (and Jim himself) at different times and in different ways. Of course, afterward I thought of many things I should have said instead of what I did, in fact say, but I probably talked too much anyway, so it's good I didn't think of them. Mostly, they would have been elaborations on my (nascent) ideas about Jim as a regional writer, particularly with relationship to Burn, a story that nicely meshes two of the primary types of stories Jim writes: tales rooted in a sense of place (with that place often redolent of northern New England) and tales that are set way out in the universe. In some ways, the earlier novel Look Into the Sun brought the universe to New Hampshire, while Burn brings New Hampshire out into the universe.
I didn't attend too many panels, because after seeing a few, I began to get immensely frustrated with people who didn't know when to shut up. Panels are almost always unbalanced, since it's difficult for everybody to speak for equal amounts of time, but it wasn't unbalance that bothered me -- it was hijacking. In one case, it involved an insufferable moderator who thought the entire point of being moderator was to pose questions to himself.
The conversation between Jonathan Lethem and Gordon van Gelder, though, was well worth attending. The goal of the discussion was to explore the similarities and differences between the worlds of (for lack of better terms) genre fiction and literary fiction by using the two men's careers and experiences as lenses, since, as van Gelder pointed out, they began at similar spots and ended up at very different places, with Gordon starting out as a book editor and then becoming editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lethem beginning with stories in Aboriginal SF and Asimov's and F&SF, then becoming, well, Jonathan Lethem. I didn't have a notebook with me, so didn't take notes (Scott Edelman did take a few), but what stuck with me were such moments as Gordon wondering if there are ways to talk about the differences between types of writing without feeling the need to valorize one type over the other and Lethem saying that what has changed in his writing as it has developed is not his interest in questioning and subverting core genre values, which has been there from the beginning, but rather his ability to let his fiction absorb a genre exoskeleton rather than wear it. The genre-as-exoskeleton image was one he played with for a bit, saying that his earlier work wore the exoskeleton and let the body underneath it be something else, while now he feels like he doesn't need to wear it anymore, that there is a more organic or internalized sense of the fantastic (or mysterious) in his work. He said people sometimes see him as moving away from genre fiction and Michael Chabon as moving toward it, while he doesn't feel that way at all -- he still feels like the influences on his work are the same, and the genre writers who interest him remain the ones who complexify and question the traditions they inherit -- he could not, he said, write a sword-and-sorcery novel, as Chabon recently did, and he noted that Chabon has long been a much bigger fanboy than he, Lethem, ever was -- Chabon wrote (unpublished) science fiction novels before he wrote Mysteries of Pittsburgh
, Lethem noted. What I liked about these distinctions was that they countered the simple narrative of moving toward or away from the SF field, and instead suggested that a writer's relationship to the texts and social environment of SF can be a complex one, and the results in the writer's work (and life) can be unpredictable.
One of the ideas that could have used a bit more time for exploration and explanation was the idea of the difference between the worlds of genre fiction and literary fiction being substantially one of class, with class anxiety explaining some of the tendency toward belittling different types of writing that Gordon brought up. Lethem also pointed out that people deeply committed to one type or writing rather than another often have tremendous misconceptions about the world of the other type of writing, and this idea, too, deserves a lot more exploration. I sometimes wish we could have the writing equivalent of a take-your-child-to-work day -- we could initiate Take a Litfic Writer to a Science Fiction Convention Day and Take a Science Fiction Writer to Bread Loaf Day (heck, Asimov went to Bread Loaf a couple times).
I refrained from buying too many books in the bookroom, though I did pick up JPK's new collection, The Wreck of the Godspeed
and David Schwartz's novella The Sun Inside.
Ultimately, and as always, the best thing about the con was getting to see folks I seldom see, or, in some cases, have only met via email before -- it was great finally to get to meet Christopher Rowe (whose reading from a novel-in-progress is among the best readings I've ever been to), John Kessel, and Brian Slattery, and to at least wave to all sorts of people who I wish lived within easy walking distance of my house. But if they did, I would not need to go to Readercon, and the joy of renewed acquaintances would be lost.
For my stalkers, here are the panels I will be on at Readercon:
Friday 2:00 PM, Salon F: Panel
Triumphing Over Competence. Matthew Cheney, Carl Frederick, Adam Golaski (L), Theodora Goss, Claude Lalumiere, Cecilia Tan
Jeff VanderMeer created an online ruckus with the assertion that today's short fiction market has been overwhelmed by "the triumph of competence." We can think of nothing less useful than a debate between those who agree with VanderMeer and others who feel we are in a Golden Age of short fiction, since the presence of both camps argues convincingly that any response to today's short fiction market is subjective. Instead, let's ask: what practical things can we do to make things better, regardless of how good we think they are now? What can we do to promulgate the writing of more (or "even more") great stories? And what can we do to help readers find stories they'll love, especially if they've been burnt out by over-exposure to the merely good?
Saturday 10:00 AM, Salon G: Panel
The Career of James Patrick Kelly. Matthew Cheney, F. Brett Cox (L), Matthew Jarpe, Michaela Roessner, Sarah Smith
The program guide is now online as a
PDF, and it's full of interesting stuff. Two films are worth noting: the Thursday night (10pm) showing of
The Polymath, or The Life & Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman and this item Friday night:
9:00 ME Tom Disch’s “Winter Journey.” (40 min.) Almost exactly a year after the death of his longtime partner Charles Naylor in September 2004, Tom Disch began writing a sequence of poems, which he shared on his blog. Eventually there were 31 of them. He titled the sequence “Winter Journey” after Schubert’s lieder cycle “Winterreise” (a work Naylor loved). Elizabeth Hand calls the sequence “an extraordinary efflorescence of grief ... tragic, bitter, bleakly funny, romantic, heart-rending—and also accessible. I can imagine, by some divine fluke, the book becoming a surprise, posthumous bestseller—an irony Disch would have appreciated.” When the sequence was completed, Disch contacted friend and filmmaker Eric Solstein, and asked if a reading of the work might be videotaped to serve as a suicide note. At its conclusion, he said, he would kill himself, the attendant publicity hopefully contributing to the success of the recording. A deal was struck between Tom and Eric—the taping would proceed if the suicide were postponed for some indefinite period of time. This will be the first public showing of “Winter Journey.” The poems are to be published later this year, by Payseur and Schmidt, with a DVD of the reading included.
(Disch's suicide on July 4 has been on my mind ever since I learned about it. The best obituaries I've read so far are by
John Clute and
Liz Hand.)
By: Matthew Cheney,
on 5/8/2008
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Barring a catastrophe, I'm going to be at Readercon this summer, partly because I haven't been to a science fiction convention in a while, and especially because James Patrick Kelly and Jonathan Lethem are the guests of honor. (I'm going to book a hotel room soon ... if anybody's looking for a roommate, let me know.)
An essay I wrote about Jim Kelly will be appearing in the souvenir book, since Jim and I go way, way back. I'm able to write with authority about his years as a miner in New Hampshire's granite quarries, his conversion to a strange form of neo-paganism predicated on the worship of lawn ornaments, his ill-fated campaign for the governorship (he lost to his more liberal opponent, Mel Thomson), and his years as a writer for the Union Leader's editorial page. I also share my memories of acting in one of Jim's least successful plays, On Godot Pond, which was a somewhat uneven mix of Beckett and down-home Yankee humor.
OK! First things first!
The October Issue of The Edge of the Forest is up. There are a TON of YA reviews and some great articles.
I personally review The Hollywood Sisters: Caught on Tape by Mary Wilcox and Keeping Corner by Kashmira Sheth.
Also, nominations are still open for the Cybils. I always like to wait until the end, because I can't figure out what to nominate (really? only one?!) so I wait and hope that most of my list is nominated by the time I get around to it. BUT! Time is running out. I've already nominated in some categories. You should too!
But, now onto some very old books for book reviews. Both of these titles are ones I read when I was a child and remembered fondly, so picked them up. Both of them were books that haunted me, as I remembered only the scantest of details and nothing as useful as, say, a title. But I tracked them both down...
The song of the day is Charlotte Sometimes by The Cure, because it's about the first book I'm talking about,
Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer
On that bleak track
(See the sun is gone again)
The tears were pouring down her face
She was crying and crying for a girl
Who died so many years before...
It's always dangerous to reread a childhood favorite. I've been burned in the past, but... I'm so glad I reread this one.
Charlotte goes to boarding school in mid-century England. The second day there, she wakes up to find she's gone back in time 50 years and changed places with a girl called Clare. Charlotte and Clare spend one day in their own time, one day in each other's, and then one day back in their own time and on and on until...
Charlotte is moved off campus, stuck in Clare's time. Trapped at the end of WWI, with a growing flu epidemic, she grows conflicted. Charlotte wonders where she ends and where Clare begins, and as memories of her real life fade, she wonders if she ever will go back, or even if she wants to.
This book was even better than I remembered it. Farmer really delves into some deep issues and she treats them well, but, at the same time, so light-handed that they're just left as a little niggling thought in the back of your head.
Now, the book I've pictured and linked to is a re-release, and I've heard they CHANGED THE ENDING. The book I just reread and reviewed is the original. I'm trying to get my hands on a copy of the new version. I'll let you know what I find out.
I am less glad I reread
Little Witch by Anna Elizabeth Bennett.
I remembered this book as a mischievous little witch who invites her friends over to make cool potions.
Sigh. I know this is the book I was thinking of, I remember the cover exactly and when I re-read it, I was like, oh yeah, ok. Still, I think maybe I'll just write the story I remember as it's so much cooler.
Instead, we have a little girl who's mother is a witch and very mean. The little girl sneaks out to go to school and finally makes some friends. All she wants to do is a see a fairy, and, while her evil mother is off being evil, she and her friends sneak into the potion cupboard to try and make a fairy potion or something.
This book was originally written in the early 50s and smacks of the same overly cloying sentimentality of Dick and Jane readers. Puke.
That said, I don't know how many times I read this book in elementary school. I remember going to the library, picking all my books, and, while waiting for the rest of the family to finish up, pulling this book off the shelf and just randomly opening it up and re-reading until everyone else was ready. So... kids might still like it, but I'm not so sure about adults...
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