Worldcon 2019: Day 2
Aug. 21st, 2019 07:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This is my second post recapping my experiences of attending my first ever Worldcon. As before, I will post panel descriptions in plain text, and a few sentences summarising my own impressions in italics afterwards.
Space opera: boldly going where no genre has gone before! with panelists Rivers Solomon, Bo Balder, and Martha Wells, moderated by Adam Whitehead.
Space opera, science fiction’s beloved subgenre, has changed a lot since the Golden Age. Some predicted it wouldn’t survive long into the 21st century, but space opera has not only survived: it’s thriving, with a new generation of writers boldly taking it in new directions. The panel will discuss current trends in space opera and how they see it evolving in the future.
This was a good panel, with a lot of drilling down into the definition of 'space opera' (does it need battles? does it need to be on an epic scale involving movement between planets and galaxies? is it important that characters have no memory of Earth?) and an emphasis on works in which the social and personal intersected with the political and military. The panel could have done with better moderating, however, as when it came time for audience questions, these were mostly 'more of a comment than a question' from older men.
Reading by Kate Elliott.
She read from her forthcoming genderbent Alexander the Great space opera, and it sounded great. Something else wonderful happened in this reading, which I will discuss below.
Fountain pen meetup hosted by Aliette de Bodard.
This was good fun — I got to meet lots of new people, and try out a lot of new inks (especially sparkly ones!). Unfortunately the organisers (not Aliette, but the convention organisers) had got their wires crossed, and so the room wasn't well set up for the activities, with not enough table space and lecture-style chairs laid out.
Grappling with the post-colonial in SFF, with panelists Brandon O'Brien, Likhain, and Kat Tanaka Okopnik, moderated by Prof. Fiona Moore.
Over the last 500 years, cultures and histories have been forever altered by colonial expansion. Although many former colonies have gained independence, their peoples still grapple with the effects of colonisation. Can post-colonial SFF help to heal the past? How do post-colonial SFF authors reconcile the many facets of their identities in their work, and what do they want their audiences to know?
All the panelists agreed that 'post-colonial' is something of a misnomer. Colonial empires may officially have ended, but their effects, and their mindsets, and colonialism in everything but name still remain. All three also talked about the pain of being expected to perform acts of translation (in every sense of the word) to make their work more palatable to those of dominant cultures. I really liked that this panel felt like a conversation between the three panelists (the moderator basically asked one question to set them off, and they took things from there) that we in the audience were invited to witness.
Not beyond Tolkien, with panelists Justin Call, Amal El-Mohtar, and Sultana Raza, moderated by Dr Nick Hubble.
There has been much discussion of how elements of Tolkien’s work have become staples in fantasy and how certain tropes are Tolkienesque, but what about the things Tolkien did that have become rare or unusual? ‘Tolkienesque’ has become shorthand for general high fantasy, but the panel will discuss the aspects of his work that did not spread widely beyond him.
I have to admit it was the prospect of listening to Amal El-Mohtar talk about books which were deeply formative to her that tempted me into attending a panel at 10pm! She's such a good speaker, and is able to convey why things are important on a personal and genre level in an intellectual and emotional sense. Honestly, I could listen to her talk about anything! The premise of the panel also intrigued me, although I think all panelists shied away from the obvious answer, which is that a lot of things in Tolkien which didn't become mainstream are staples of medieval storytelling, which has very different conventions to the modern epic fantasy novel.
I promised to mention the thing with Kate Elliott. She and I have known each other for a long time online, chatting occasionally on Twitter, where we are mutual followers, but I never take that as a guarantee that authors know who I am or think of me as a friend. However, when I was queuing to go into her reading, she saw my name badge, and immediately told me how much a book review I had written more than ten years ago meant to her. She told me it was one of the few reviews she'd read that got what she was trying to do with the book/series in question, and one of the few that ever applied a higher level of depth and complexity to its analysis of her work. She still remembered it, and that I was the one who wrote it, years later. I have to admit that this made me quite emotional and overwhelmed! I wrote a Twitter thread about the whole thing here.
Space opera: boldly going where no genre has gone before! with panelists Rivers Solomon, Bo Balder, and Martha Wells, moderated by Adam Whitehead.
Space opera, science fiction’s beloved subgenre, has changed a lot since the Golden Age. Some predicted it wouldn’t survive long into the 21st century, but space opera has not only survived: it’s thriving, with a new generation of writers boldly taking it in new directions. The panel will discuss current trends in space opera and how they see it evolving in the future.
This was a good panel, with a lot of drilling down into the definition of 'space opera' (does it need battles? does it need to be on an epic scale involving movement between planets and galaxies? is it important that characters have no memory of Earth?) and an emphasis on works in which the social and personal intersected with the political and military. The panel could have done with better moderating, however, as when it came time for audience questions, these were mostly 'more of a comment than a question' from older men.
Reading by Kate Elliott.
She read from her forthcoming genderbent Alexander the Great space opera, and it sounded great. Something else wonderful happened in this reading, which I will discuss below.
Fountain pen meetup hosted by Aliette de Bodard.
This was good fun — I got to meet lots of new people, and try out a lot of new inks (especially sparkly ones!). Unfortunately the organisers (not Aliette, but the convention organisers) had got their wires crossed, and so the room wasn't well set up for the activities, with not enough table space and lecture-style chairs laid out.
Grappling with the post-colonial in SFF, with panelists Brandon O'Brien, Likhain, and Kat Tanaka Okopnik, moderated by Prof. Fiona Moore.
Over the last 500 years, cultures and histories have been forever altered by colonial expansion. Although many former colonies have gained independence, their peoples still grapple with the effects of colonisation. Can post-colonial SFF help to heal the past? How do post-colonial SFF authors reconcile the many facets of their identities in their work, and what do they want their audiences to know?
All the panelists agreed that 'post-colonial' is something of a misnomer. Colonial empires may officially have ended, but their effects, and their mindsets, and colonialism in everything but name still remain. All three also talked about the pain of being expected to perform acts of translation (in every sense of the word) to make their work more palatable to those of dominant cultures. I really liked that this panel felt like a conversation between the three panelists (the moderator basically asked one question to set them off, and they took things from there) that we in the audience were invited to witness.
Not beyond Tolkien, with panelists Justin Call, Amal El-Mohtar, and Sultana Raza, moderated by Dr Nick Hubble.
There has been much discussion of how elements of Tolkien’s work have become staples in fantasy and how certain tropes are Tolkienesque, but what about the things Tolkien did that have become rare or unusual? ‘Tolkienesque’ has become shorthand for general high fantasy, but the panel will discuss the aspects of his work that did not spread widely beyond him.
I have to admit it was the prospect of listening to Amal El-Mohtar talk about books which were deeply formative to her that tempted me into attending a panel at 10pm! She's such a good speaker, and is able to convey why things are important on a personal and genre level in an intellectual and emotional sense. Honestly, I could listen to her talk about anything! The premise of the panel also intrigued me, although I think all panelists shied away from the obvious answer, which is that a lot of things in Tolkien which didn't become mainstream are staples of medieval storytelling, which has very different conventions to the modern epic fantasy novel.
I promised to mention the thing with Kate Elliott. She and I have known each other for a long time online, chatting occasionally on Twitter, where we are mutual followers, but I never take that as a guarantee that authors know who I am or think of me as a friend. However, when I was queuing to go into her reading, she saw my name badge, and immediately told me how much a book review I had written more than ten years ago meant to her. She told me it was one of the few reviews she'd read that got what she was trying to do with the book/series in question, and one of the few that ever applied a higher level of depth and complexity to its analysis of her work. She still remembered it, and that I was the one who wrote it, years later. I have to admit that this made me quite emotional and overwhelmed! I wrote a Twitter thread about the whole thing here.
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Date: 2019-08-22 08:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-22 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-23 01:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-24 09:40 am (UTC)I had been planning to go to your 'feudal mistakes' panel, but I got a message from my husband about fifteen minutes beforehand saying it was packed full and there was no space left in the room, which certainly speaks well of you and your fellow panelists. He really liked that panel, and I'm very sorry to have missed it.
Do let me know if you ever want to meet up closer to home!
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Date: 2019-08-25 01:56 pm (UTC)I'm glad he liked the panel: that was the one that got rather technical.
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Date: 2019-09-21 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 10:14 am (UTC)And I'm glad you enjoyed the write-ups.