Reading

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Fernley, Nevada

Entry tags:

medical,
sleep

Slow Recovery

As is usually the case when I get into something that drains into my chest, it takes a while to recover. My voice is coming back. I went to Walgreens today and got some Mucinex to try and encourage the mucus to break up.

My sleep schedule is still a bit disrupted. It's as though I was just getting used to BST before being yanked back to PDT. It's not too awful, given how early I start work, but I'm shutting down earlier because I haven't paid off the sleep debt yet.

I'm glad this year's Worldcon is in the same time zone as I am.

concert review: Music@Menlo

I approached my first Menlo concert for review on Sunday with misgivings. A narrow slice of the repertoire, it consisted of four works all written during the same half-century (roughly 19C second half) from one small patch of central Europe. That's too default to be worth talking about - I don't like spending my limited review space complaining about the repertoire - while the only interesting thing the works had in common was in all being for three instruments, though not all the same three instruments.

But that seemed a rather esoteric theme to base my review on, so I was wondering how I'd do it.

I found my answer when we got to the third piece on the program, the Elegy by Josef Suk. Young violinist Jessica Lee simply ran circles around the two storied veterans she was playing with, so much so that if this was a meeting of the generations - as was suggested in the introduction to the concert - it was clearly the younger generation that had the goods.

And I realized that the same thing had been true of the second piece, Brahms's Clarinet Trio, which is basically a duet for clarinet and cello with piano accompaniment. Just with less vehemence. But the young cellist had played full of passion and color and a variety of tones and expressions, while the old clarinetist had been kind of bland by comparison. Bland, on a clarinet? The orchestral instrument with the most capacity for wild colorful expression? But yeah, he didn't exploit any of that.

So that was my theme, and while the other works on the program didn't show the same contrast, it was no trouble fitting them in to the theme. And here's the finished review.

Oz and the Emerald City

Apropos of Hugo Voters having access to Wicked (that is going away tomorrow as Hugo Voting ends), we've started watching it and will finish up later tomorrow.

And I'm reminded that

( cut for those who don't want spoilers for details of an incredibly popular multiply-dramatized story...that haven't actually made it into dramatized versions, which is my point )

Wednesday's Comic

Equivalent compensation!

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Plan Ahead

The week has turned complicated. Should I be surprised?

The short term result of all that is that Sam is back in town and we are going to go see the new Superman movie tomorrow night. I expect to like it, which is why I am going to see it, as opposed to "Man of Steel", which I was fairly convinced that I was *not* going to like. :)

Still haven't seen "Man of Steel"...

(no subject)

I am having a lovely evening with Austin!

We ate dinner outside in the nice weather, and then we began a cooking adventure, and we watched an episode of Leverage while the shortbread cooled (it was the Ho Ho Ho Job, which is...a little uneven (Parker being THAT enthusiastic only kinda rings true to characterization; Chaos is a complicated part of the plotline) but ultimately a stupid fun episode, as opposed to a clever fun episode. I like both, and Leverage does both well!).

Now I am doing words and Austin is making caramel to put on the shortbread.

I have lots of things I should write about here, but I am somehow out of the habit. I would like to start that again, and especially to start reading here again. (I have picked up a little bit of Tumblr again, and that feels marvelous --it appears to be in order, and doesn't insert people I don't follow now that I figured out what settings to turn off. And saving images is just...easy, unlike Facebook. So that's grand!)

I hope you're well, and I will write more soon.

~Sor

MOOP!

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cons: readercon: 2025

Readercon: Book Club: The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed

Book Club: The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Newly reprinted under the author's current name, The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed is a post-cyberpunk novel about brain modification, being queer in an oppressive society, the media, species extinction, and the possibility of changing human nature. In 2010, Jo Walton called it "one of the most important books of the last 20 years." We'll discuss what made this novel groundbreaking in 1996, what makes it still fresh and relevant today, our favorite lines that aren't the beginning and ending, and the throwaway worldbuilding detail that most caught our attention.
Kate Nepveu (moderator), Marianna Martin PhD

Last panel report! ... with so much extra.

The audience said they were okay with spoilers, so we included general spoilers for premise and worldbuilding from the beginning of the discussion. I will have a separate clicky arrow for ending spoilers. (Very gratifyingly, when we got to that point of the panel, someone in the audience got up and left, saying something like, "I decided I want to read it myself after all!")`

I gave a little summary of the premise for the couple of people who hadn't read the book, which I will try to recreate/improve upon now.

summary of the premise, with quotes

The book is set in Russia about 300 years in the future. Previously: America ("the Guardians") conquered most of the world [1], committing genocide through lowest-bidder concentration camps and ruling for 50 years. They were defeated probably 75 years ago, mostly by an army of ordinary people who were mind-controlled by a computer virus that erased itself from their minds once it detected victory. (Africa, which is now a walled-off technological paradise, took Egypt back from the Guardians without the virus.)

Maya is a camera, which means she broadcasts news as her senses experience it—except with a screener to filter out not just distracting bodily urges, but also forbidden topics, lest she attract the Weavers (immensely scary censors who live in the internet to prevent another mind-control virus). Screeners instantly know their cameras' minds in full. Cameras have no such reciprocal knowledge. As the book opens, Maya is broadcasting a series about why the reign of the Guardians is barely remembered, unlike the Holocaust and the Terror-Famine [2]. And she has a brand-new screener, Keishi.

footnotes

[1] North America, Eurasia, Egypt, and Japan, as far as we can tell. Hat tip to the Wizards versus Lesbians podcast for pointing out that the rest of Asia doesn't seem to exist; after I heard them say that, I looked and didn't see anything about South America either.

[2] No other information is ever given about this, just the way none is given about the Holocaust.

But actually, the book does not open there. It opens with Maya writing to her audience:

The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be—all this you know.

What a first line.

The prologue ends with another banger:

I will give you my thoughts since that time, but not on moistdisk. I will not let you explore the twining pathways of my thoughts as I explore them—not again. I will hide instead behind this wall of words, and I will conceal what I choose to conceal. I will tell you the story in order, as you’d tell a story to a stranger who knows nothing of it: for you are not my friend, and what you know is far less than you think you know. You will read my life in phosphors on a screen, or glowing letters scrolling up the inside of your eye. And when you reach the end, you will lie down again in your indifferent dark apartment, with the neon splashing watercolor blues across your face, and you will know a little less about me than you did before.

(In addition to the narration, it's useful to know that the book moves through different modes, and some people find the last half to be a jarring change, for expectation-setting purposes.)

panel notes, plus some more thoughts

With that background, we got into the discussion proper.

Marianna: ways in which book is about camera and editing reminded of Dziga Vertov, 1920s Russian cinema, had a manifesto about how in the future we would become cameras. Maya is a camera, constantly making decisions that are directing and editing her broadcasts: pan here, add background information there.

Marianna cont'd: anticipating current social media, when livecasting everything: are we actually seeing what they are? not only that, but the asymmetry in the screener-camera relationship predicted parasociality. as does Maya's relationship with her audience: she needs them, she's uneasy about their demands, they think they know her and they don't—they don't even know what she looks like, she uses a false userpic because she's older and scarred with old-fashioned sockets drilled into her head—and there's literal emotional feedback between them. (also, the camera is preemptive censorship like using euphemisms on TikTok.)

audience member: thought about "veil of Maya" in Hinduism, which is a false reality. me: oh, so that's what Keishi was referencing!

me: going back to Vertov, that reminded me of the book's terrible monomaniacal old man, Voskresenye, who had idea that true teleprescence, that is, what cameras broadcast, can save humanity: overcome the "sins of locality" that arise from being trapped in our own skulls and unable to achieve empathy.

Marianna: Vertov was propagandist documentary maker, believed that if people just saw what was really happening, would get on board with the Russian Revolution. not only that but "Cine-Eye" technique would help improve/evolve humanity.

Marianna cont'd: thinks there are three themes that underpin SF in general: memory, identity, trauma. they all come together in this book so powerfully. but doesn't argue for universality in sense of uniformity, Voskresenye is also very angry about enforced homogeneity and exclusions.

(later on, we talked about the book's pondering of whether love results from, or is stifled by, intense mental intimacy.)

Marianna cont'd: all that and we haven't even mentioned the dead psychic whale yet!

so this may have been where I talked about Moby-Dick, which I re-read specifically so I could talk about how it relates to this book! it's name-checked by the text, given to Maya as a memory:

The novel seeped into my mind, like milk into a sponge. A man tattooed with frogs and labyrinths; a leg of polished whalebone; duodecimo, octavo, folio whales; a coffin bobbing among the waves; and in the blue distance a white mass rising, unknotting its suckered limbs, and sinking: unearthly, formless, chance-like mockery of life.

But it's a lot more in conversation with it than that quote may indicate.

They both have a central queer relationship. For those who haven't read Moby-Dick but have heard vaguely of Queequeg (the tattooed man), you may not know that Ishmael meets him because there is literally only one bed at the inn. The next day, Queequeg says that they are "married," and they go up to bed and talk, "in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair." This is text.
They both have terrible monomaniacal old men, as previously noted.
They are both narrated after the fact by narrators with specific agendas. Ishmael is desperately trying to understand what happened and to make us understand what happened. Maya is also trying to understand what happened, revisiting Keishi's actions and her own decisions; and she says she's trying to reduce our understanding, but I'm not so sure about that. Also, so much foreshadowing.
There is a whale, who is intelligent and filled with hate of humans, but only because humans keep bothering him or her.
They both are surprisingly funny. (I liked when Maya needs to insert a really gross public plug into her head—this is the very embodied kind of cyberpunk—but doesn't have anything to clean it: "I settled for wiping the plug on my shirt, to replace some of the unknown dirt with dirt I was on intimate terms with.")

My notes get a little sketchy here. I see that Marianna said that the novel is still frighteningly relevant, and there were times during this reread where she had to put it down. I'd previously noted on Bluesky that the Wizards vs. Lesbians podcast thought that the homophobia in the book seemed exaggerated, even though the book was set in Russia, because we'd come so far in overcoming that ... which was not an unreasonable thing to say, all the way back in 2021. Ouch. And as for the McGulags, well.

I mentioned that asexuality doesn't seem to be a concept that the characters have (again, published in 1996), so at least one of them treats the ability to feel love and desire as the same thing; this is extremely relevant and in-character but the conflation was noticeable to me and would be a good thing to note in recommending the book to people. (Significant trans themes, though.)

Someone mentioned the Richard Matheson short story "The Box," about whether you really know the person you married (originally "Button, Button").

(Also, I just realized that this Tumblr short story might be a riff off that.)

I think at this point, all that's left of the panel discussion is talking about the ending.

SPOILERS FOR THE LAST 30% OF THE BOOK

Marianna noted that the conflict between Keishi and Maya is, in addition to a fundamentally different understanding of love, very much a 1990s argument about coming out and whether people have an obligation to do so

audience: political dynamic of the decision, Keishi claiming that they will represent hope

me: the way Maya presents things throughout the book seems to me to trying to justify her distrust of Keishi and her decision to leave her, which results in her death. I'm not sure she convinces herself, based on those haunting last two paragraphs:

And if I could, I would freeze that instant forever. But it’s no use. I can trap the young rose in the hologram, but the rose is long since dust. And what I most want to conceal from you, you’ve always known:

That I went up into the world and left her there, in the prison camp beneath the ocean, with the ruined mind of the new Iscariot and the body of the whale.

(Emphasis added.) I think Maya has shame, or regret, or doubt, or all of the above.

and I don't know that I would do the same in her shoes. all through the book, Maya is highlighting how Keishi is lying to her and manipulating her—this is even clearer, more painful, and more infuriating on a reread, but is explicit on a first read nonetheless. On the other hand, at the very end, Keishi says that she was forced into all the pre-whale manipulation by Voskresenye, who does not deny it. On the third hand, it was Keishi who took over Maya's mouth—which she did before and Maya specifically told her to never do again—and forced her to recover her memories before she was ready. Even if she didn't know that Voskresenye was going to broadcast them, that is a huge violation of trust, on top of agreeing to let Voskresenye broadcast the memories that Maya was in.

and now, writing this, I've talked myself back around into thinking I would have done the same: because I don't think that I could trust Keishi to leave my brain, ever. or to stay quietly tucked away like she promised, because she said over and over that she doesn't want that, that she wants their minds to lie next to each other, and she shows over and over that she takes what she wants. including by controlling my body. and that is a very literal horror story, to the point that I may have just given myself nightmares.

Okay! I think that's about all the panel discussion, or discussion directly related to it.

additional SPOILER thoughts

I was going to do a really thorough dive into my many, many ebook bookmarks, but I must sleep. So here's just three things I already had prepared.

First: you start looking up one chapter title, you end up with a zillion links. My suggestions for your consideration:

Ashes, Ashes: we all fall down.
The Platypus: Oliver Herford?
A Faster Cable: impossible to search; suggestions?
To Make Much of Time: Robert Herrick.
As a Wife Has a Cow: Gertrude Stein.
The Word: was God.
Khristos Voskrese: as the text says, "Christ is risen."
A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves: E.E. Cummings.
All the King's Horses: couldn't put Humpty together again.
My Man Sunday: impossible to search; suggestions?
A Property of Easiness: Hamlet, act 5, scene 1, lines 67-68.
Immediate Touch: as quoted at the start of the section, Paradise Lost.
Icarus: too close to the sun, etc.
Tea and Sympathy: the Classical movie?
Phaeton: as Wikipedia puts it: "See also: ... Icarus; Lucifer"
Very Like a Whale: Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, line 382; possibly also Ogden Nash, though that would feel more appropriate for a later chapter to me?
Fallen Like Lightning: Luke 10:18?
You Must Remember This: Casablanca, of course.
Orpheus: now you see why explaining the reference in the prior panel would have been impossible.
Penelope: faithfully waiting, or not, for a spouse who came home twenty-odd years later. (edited because I got this totally backwards at first)
Sorrow's Springs: Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Second: as I said on Bluesky, the contrast between Maya and Ishmael's last reported words is just brutal.

Ishmael:

"Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee."

Maya:

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Both the last things they said to the loves of their lives, but one is wholehearted affirmance that he means everything, and the other is equivocation and denial.

Third: a text to a friend after I finished rereading:

The Fortunate Fall shitpost:
one of the things it foresaw, in addition to going viral, McGulags, and the death of print,
is the meme about the mortifying ordeal of being known.

Two post-panel things:

Afterward, the person who recommended the book to the Wizards vs. Lesbians podcast came up and said hi, so that was very cool.

And I took a selfie of my white whale earrings, which I forgot to mention on the panel.

Poll #33405

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Current Mood: okay
Current Location: Fernley, Nevada

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chiropractor

Back Cracking

I had my monthly chiropractic appointment today. To my surprise, except for my neck (which has been hurting for a while), there were not significant adjustments today.

Unlike yesterday's long trip to Reno, the chiropractor's office is only a few minutes away from my house. I could walk there if I wanted to do so. I did not do so today because I'm still very tired. It's going to take days to recover.

This week on FilkCast

Mike Whitaker, Tomboat, Jordin Kare, Summer Russell, Ju Honisch & Katy Droege-Macdonald, Bill and Gretchen Roper, Roberta Rogow, Brobdingnagian Bards, Debs & Errol, Anne McCaffrey Tania Opland Mike Freeman, Beth Kinderman & The Player Characters

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.blogspot.com

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more notes on the trip to London

In no particular order:

Mom wanted my cousin Janet to have two rings, and two specific books, and we couldn't find any of them, despite searching repeatedly. This doesn't make sense: if only the jewelry was missing, it might conceivably have been stolen, even though other appealing jewelry was in her bedroom closet, including the few items that are mentioned in the will. If it was just those two used books, maybe they were put away somewhere safe. But there's no reason the rings and books would have been in the same place, where we couldn't find them while going through things that thoroughly.

Mark was already planning to take all of Mom's unclaimed jewelry back to New Orleans, photograph it, and offer it to our cousins. Because the rings Mom promised Janet are missing, he's going to give Janet first pick. (He, Linza, and the three of us have already looked at it, and taken a few things.)

The whole process was very amicable. We weren't arguing over who could take something that wasn't specifically left to either me or my brother, but agreeing that Mom's crystal might be pretty, but wasn't worth trying to take home on the plane. Instead, Mark took a glass bowl that a friend of his made, and Andy took a small piece of cranberry glass. There were two envelopes of paper money; we split the pounds, and I told Mark to take all the euros, because he's probably going to visit the EU fairly soon.

There were more than enough good photos of Mom, her parents, and other relatives for me and Mark to take home, in some cases duplicate prints of the same picture. I labeled a few photos of people I wasn't sure I'd recognize if not, including a couple of pictures of my paternal grandparents, and one of Dad's older sister. I decided I wanted my mother's first US passport, from a trip to Europe in 1953, and her resident alien card (from before they were green).

Mark took some photos and documents home because he thought Janet would want them, and he was willing to schlep things for her. I'm not sure if that's because he's one of the executors of the will, or simple generosity.

As we were packing yesterday, we decided to take Mom's salt and pepper grinders: they have no sentimental value, but we've been unhappy with both our current pepper grinders and one of our salt shakers.

otter's comment reminded me that there also is, or may be, a gold charm bracelet that belonged to our grandmother. Janet asked to buy it from me and Mark, but we didn't find it either, only a different gold charm bracelet that belonged to Simon's first wife. The one we found is in the will as going to his daughter Liz, and after Mark took a picture, Liz confirmed that the bracelet we found was her mother's, and Janet didn't recognize it. We left that in the flat, because Liz will be in London in a few months. It's possible, though not likely, that my aunt Lea had the bracelet Janet wants, and that it's still in her and Dave's apartment. We asked Lea's daughter Anne, who doesn't have it but is going to ask Dave.

If Dave finds it, or if the bracelet turns up a few months from now at Mom's flat, we'll give it to Janet, not sell it, but we're waiting until the bracelet turns up before telling her that.

[I am adding to this as I think of other things that seem to belong here.]

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peregrinations

Trip Report: Quebec roadtrip

Not being involved with a show this summer, and not likely to go too many places but conventions and logistical forays to Buffalo, I needed somewhere new to go. (My father would have approved - he loved to travel, and encouraged it, so that being the first non-estate thing to apply the inheritance towards felt apropos.) But, every time my friends reported returns from their fabulous flights, they brought back covid, so I just couldn't. So, once again, a roadtrip. We've made a few in the past few years, largely to points South and West. How about Canada, spouse proposed? He'd never been to any part of it other than the bits of Ontario between Niagara Falls and Toronto.

As I usually do with road trips, I plotted a rough course and made notes, but didn't book hotels until fairly last minute, on the theory that we'd never quite know where we'd want to linger and what to shortcut until we get there.

( Wednesday / Thursday - Ottawa )

( Friday / Saturday: to Montreal )

( Sunday / Monday: Lakes and Fjords )

( Tuesday: Quebec City )

( Wednesday / Thursday / Friday: Eastern Townships and homeward (via Vermont) )

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cons: readercon: 2025

Readercon: The Next Great Gatsby?

The Next Great Gatsby?
At Readercon 33, Max Gladstone mentioned that The Great Gatsby flopped upon publication—and therefore was cheap to send to American soldiers abroad in WWII, which resulted its revival. He asked the audience to imagine how great a world would be in which, for some reason, copies of Sarah Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered were suddenly everywhere. What other books ought to be suddenly ubiquitous?
Ellen Kushner, Kate Nepveu, R.W.W. (Rob) Greene (moderator), Len Schiff

panel notes

Rob started the panel by talking about the reasons Gatsby was sent abroad, its canonization, and what that might mean for our panel. And, delightfully, he's put up a longer version of that in his newsletter, so that saves me so much typing right there.

Anyway, as Rob says over there, the first question was: "What book would create the most positive chaos if it suddenly appeared in every American household?"

Len: (who is a high school teacher, among other things): something Daniel Pinkwater, like Young Adults or The Education of Robert Nifkin

Ellen: mine! (Swordspoint, specifically.) because I've had a long time to collect reactions to it. remembers getting a negative reaction from Steven Brust, who said something like, "I didn't really like it, am I homophobic? No, everyone's just completely immoral and I couldn't handle it." Thinks some queer immorality would be good chaos. Also, even today still gets people remarking on how much of a difference the representation in it made to them

me: I don't know if it would be chaos exactly, but I had previously prepared the answer of Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison so I'm going to go with that, for the reasons in Amal el-Mohtar's essay: it's about a young girl who loses three homes and chooses the open road; it's beautiful, it's short, it's in conversation with other literature and a gateway into the author's other works.

Rob: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle, which is horror novel about gay conversion camp with demons.

(my notes are a bit of mess in terms of chronological order, I'm afraid, so I hope I haven't reconstructed things in a way that distorts)

me: I'm not sure how much I agree with the premise. when I was looking at just the text of this description and thinking about the panel—well, first I thought how great Thus Was Adonis Murdered is.

(we did talk about that, but for the sake of time and my hands, I'll refer you to my old booklog posts and move on. (Except that Ellen knew Caudwell! She met her on one of Caudwell's U.S. signing tours and then visited her in London. I was so starstruck.))

me cont'd: and I immediately started making rules for myself, because I'm like that, and one of the rules I made was that I could not use "this book could fix the world" as a criteria. partly because that's a hole I'd just never climb out of, and partly because it's just too unpredictable. books get misunderstood, they get taught to kids who aren't ready for them, people take away such personal things. of course books affect people, but maybe because I'm not a writer, my goal for this was much more humble: "wouldn't it be great if I could say to people, 'remember when Selena got super high at an orgy and ignored everyone in favor of reading Pride and Prejudice?', and they did."

me concluding: that said, when I eventually picked titles to write down, I deliberately chose all women authors. (I do not give myself a cookie, however, because they were all white.)

Ellen: I think a way to approach your objections is to think about ubiquity. everyone's read Gatsby (me: I haven't!); even if they haven't, it's part of assumed knowledge, the cultural conversation. (just to be clear: she was entirely correct about this and I was being a little bit silly.)

Ellen, a bit later: conversations about ubiquity have shifted to movies. Lord of the Rings has far more power/reach culturally now than it did except at its first wave of popularity in U.S. (where did massively influence environmental movement), and people always quote (Ian McKellen as) Gandalf saying, "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

Ellen and Len also defended Gatsby as a work against the negative effects that Rob laid at its feet (see his essay).

Rob: mentioned something about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn being the second-most-taught book in the U.S., but I didn't write down the context for that

I think this is when Rob asked what the first book was that changed our lives/opened our minds/showed us what books were capable of?

Ellen: "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," by Harlan Ellison, for anarchy and chaos.

Len: The Dispossessed. the utopian impulse is not a thing to be dismissed. dystopia is culturally determined; what we have now in the canon is because people were disappointed by Stalin. it confirms shitty things we believe about people and self-propagates. instead foreground utopia. that said, discovered the book in a counterculture used bookstore, and canonizing things risks losing a lot of their charm

Len, later: did teach The Dispossessed to high schoolers and it went over like a lead balloon, they were just not interested in it.

(I did not jump in on this, though I thought of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred D. Taylor, which I read like twenty times in fourth grade or so.)

me: asks Len about a passing mention he made of The Hunger Games being taught in high schools. that seems like a good thing? inequality is bad, and the revolution needs more than a single teenager?

Len: haven't taught it, but thinks that as long as make authority abstract, can depoliticize it. I'm sure there's a reading of The Hunger Games in which the Capitol are all SJWs.

Rob: Ender's Game is one of the most popular books to be taught. used to be (?) taught as leadership in Marine Corps University.

me: Some Desperate Glory is in conversation with Ender's Game and is very specific about the fascist nature of the leadership

someone: ideally read them together

Ellen: just found out about Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful, with regard to Gatsby

maybe in here is when Rob asked about dropping something else in place of Gatsby in high schools?

Len: refers back to Pinkwater

me: Piranesi, because Travel Light seems a little young for high school; Piranesi is also short, wonderfully written, has lots to chew on, is in conversation with other works (specifically The Magician's Nephew), and: "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite."

Ellen: wants to keep all the old difficult books being assigned in high school, because that's the only time get help reading them! know someone who was assigned Dan Brown in high school, come on

me: I had two books on my list that I thought were too dense and complicated, maybe I should put them back on! (Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh, and—of course, are you surprised by this point?—The Fortunate Fall, Cameron Reed) but also, some things seem like high school is just too early; shudder at idea Moby-Dick in high school, it's so long and I can't imagine the teachers would like explaining the chapter that's just a dick joke

Rob: Parable of the Sower

Rob to audience (copied from his essay): If you were designing a new book-distribution program for today’s challenges — climate change, polarization, technological disruption, nationalism — what would be your first five titles?

responses:

never know what's going to speak to you, needs to be lots of titles (like the original)
almost anything by Terry Pratchett (this was from Delia Sherman, and she and I discovered that we read Night Watch very differently in terms of what Pratchett, or more fairly the text, thinks of the revolutionaries in that book, which was delightful)
Le Guin
The Mahabharata! "it covers it all"
of course books can change the world, Costa Rico has no standing army because a key figure there read Aldous Huxley. (I would love if someone could suggest more reading on this! Wikipedia is pretty bare-bones, and this article I found might be from a somewhat conservative-leaning publication?)

Anyway, that was very fun and juicy.

The final book on my list, which I did not get around to mentioning, is The Interior Life by Katherine Blake/Dorothy Heydt, which Jo Walton reviews usefully and which is free to download.)

Poll #33403

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art,
vanity

Grunge elf photoshoot

Did a photoshoot recently with Cari as taken by my favorite photographer, Mark, and here's the first image from it. I really like the vibe-- the theme was "grunge elf" and I love how this image is kinda earthy, kind of ethereal as that theme might suggest.

Interesting to me how there's a heaviness around my eyes I feel like I don't usually see in myself, and a lightness around my jawline. (Mark, did you work any editing magic there? Just curious!) I really think it helps with the vibe, like as an elf I am ancient and ageless at the same time.

I also tried to spruce up my plastic elf ears for the shoot. One advantage of watching so many doll customization videos since the pandemic is that I've learned a few things about working with plastic. I primed mine (admittedly pretty cheap) with Mister Super Clear, blushed some more realistic shadows and color variation into them with chalk pastels, and sealed them again to finish them off.

Again Mark probably applied some photo editing magic, but I think they look better. Definitely, when you compare the before on the left and after on the right, it's an improvement.

(no subject)

This is a public post of Debra Messing's comments.

I may come
Back and put more commentary later.

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cons: readercon: 2025

Readercon: Take Your Novel to Work

Take Your Novel to Work
In the genre of fanfic known as "take your fandom to work," favorite characters are placed in the author's work environment, often resulting in delightfully concrete and minute details about ecological field research or running a bodega or being a summer camp counselor. How do stories of everyday vocation enhance the experience of reading and writing fiction, and what works of speculative fiction take best advantage of the granular details of work life? What can bringing characters to work tell us about both the characters and the work itself?
Ken Schneyer (moderator), Marianna Martin PhD, Melissa Bobe, Sarah Pinsker

panel notes

Ken, who writes short fiction, amended the title of the panel to "Take Your Story to Work." And asked the panelists to talk about their work in their introductions.

Melissa: children's librarian

Sarah: writing professor, have been many other things including camp counselor, working with horses, nonprofit administrator, SAT tutor, singer/songwriter

Marianna: currently academic. formerly development executive for film and TV production, administrative assistant, film projectionist, IT, bartending training but not experience

Sarah: bartending experience but no training!

Ken: currently professor of humanities. previously IT project manager, ad hoc computer programmer, clerk typist, judicial clerk, lawyer in corporate law firm, dishwasher at deli, actor, director. several of those have found way into stories. asks: particularly good examples you've read, yours and/or not?

Marianne: caveat did not read novel Discovery of Witches, but TV really got minutia of academia right. Stross, Laundry Files, vibe of working in IT. le Carré, sounds very plausible!

(anyone interested in academia and/or Discovery of Witches must, must read this fic in which the author's note reads, "i'm not so much taking this fandom to work as i am meeting it next to the dumpster behind my workplace and engaging it in hand-to-hand combat for the honor of the field of human genetics"

pachytene phase (9096 words) by magneticwave
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Diana Bishop/Matthew Clairmont
Characters: Christopher "Chris" Roberts, Matthew Clairmont
Additional Tags: Epistolary

Summary: The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics is pleased to invite you to the annual Clarence Berrigan Lecture. This year’s speaker is Matthew Clairmont, DPhil, who is giving a talk entitled: “Interspecies compatibility, meiotic flexibility, and the end of the infertility myth: insights from the southern red muntjac.” Please join us after Dr. Clairmont’s talk for a reception in the McNeil Family atrium at 5pm. Refreshments will be provided!

you don't need to know the fandom and it is hilarious)

Sarah: office vibes: Jeff Vandermeer, Authority (second one in trilogy that began with Annihilation); Several People Are Typing, Calvin Kasulke, someone gets uploaded into work Slack

Sarah cont'd: music: Randee Dawn's new one, The Only Song Worth Singing; really picky about those, good details about gritty. Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

Melissa: read T. Kingfisher, A House with Good Bones, obsessed with research and entomology. own profession: Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, Bruce Coville (alas no dragons at their library), probably led to becoming librarian

Ken: moments where certain details ticked off

Sarah: curse of being immersed something, is when encountering books where author learned by research. some do well: Dick Francis, glassblowers and meteorologists, seems like got it, at least from outside those professions. it's things that don't think to research that grate. music, people can only picture what rock star is like, not what slugging through every day. also categories where if write thing, prepare to get letters: guns, horses (I'm the one writing the letters), sailing, U.S. Civil War (and if you've done primary source research, often letters you get are wrong)

Melissa: authors try to get librarians right because know we'll buy the book

Melissa cont'd: remembered work meant to mention: The Public, movie, Emilio Estevez, made after watching interactions at LA public library. only thing not believable: entire staff but one person were all men (so much laughter)

Marianna: try to condense rant of many years. authors are like: I went to school, I know what faculty do, I don't need to look that up. get overly focused on research (academic conduct thereof). nothing about hiring, tenure, career track, which is what academics mostly care about: I don't care how in love you are, you are not leaving MIT to follow your lover and teach at an Arizona community college.

Ken: bias toward academia in mainstream novels, so think lot is accurate there. re: law: people view procedure through mainstream TV, movies, think understand. part is that day to day of law work is exceptionally boring. sitting for 12 hours a day in a library (me, to myself: Ken is showing his age: I sit for 12 hours a day in front of Lexis => ). almost threw book across room: passage in Orson Scott Card novel, character obtains divorce AND the arrangement of bifurcated child custody WITHOUT spouse's knowledge (caveat, not set in US and in future, suppose could imagine, but)

Ken cont'd: flip around other way: examples of juicy details re: something otherwise unfamiliar, what did that do for you as a reader?

Marianna: le Carré, spoiler alert I'm definitely not a spy, not just telling you that to throw you off scent. made me want to write spy novels, so good at lot of details but not overwhelming with. particularly love when get book like Perfect Spy: how does this person spend their time on an average day? what is the macro running in the back of their head? everyday stuff that you might not think about.

(le Carré came up so much at the con and every time I have to google his name to remind myself of the capitalization and also copy the accented e)

Ken: and we know that he had experience in British intelligence. can you remember particular detail?

Marianna: how much time he spent with radio when holed up in safehouse, had code keys, sitting around waiting to hear message

Melissa: because in hotel, thinking about Kate Stayman-London's Fang Fiction—

—at this point, I very rudely interrupted to ask for a repeat of the title, which caused her to completely lose her train of thought. I apologized then and also after. wait until people are done talking to ask for repeats of titles, self!

anyway the publisher's page on Fang Fiction indicates that the main character is a hotel manager, and also it sounds fun.

Sarah: talking about a lot of jobs that do exist, but made think of jobs that don't but believe that do: Peter Beagle, I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, about dragon exterminator, like mice in the walls. hates his job because loves dragons, makes reader believe in this guy who knows he has to do, emotions resonant. mild spoiler for early part: protagonist tries to save some, sneaks away as pets.

Ken: The Martian, the book. main character has master's in botany and engineering conveniently. remember being struck by the thought process. no idea what experience author has, not point: I do know enough about electrical circuits to know that you need to know what gauge of wire, so completely sold that character knew what talking about, and did make me feel like I was there.

Melissa: A Magical Girl Retires, Park Seolyeon, very short, characters are all working as magical girls of X or Y, get sent on jobs, very much feels like 9-5 in hilarious way

Ken: more completely imaginary jobs?

Marianna: Stross' Laundry Files. wonderful balance between grounding familiar IT work but for government agency dealing with paranormal stuff

Sarah: all those little jobs in Terry Pratchett novels, e.g., candle snuffer. looks at Melissa: the Librarian though

Melissa: look, we take all representation

Ken: even the witches, does mundane detail so well, yeah, a real witch has to do that, more of a human interaction than anything else

(me, to myself: also, research witches.)

Ken: 15 years ago, talking with Elizabeth Hand, who said how in Glimmering, included nitty-gritty details of boat building which made real effort to research, surprised by great number of positive responses to that part specifically, not necessarily by boat builders, people who just really enjoyed. readers in general, American in particular, love to know how stuff is done, procedural details

(me, to myself: which is the joke in the Field and Stream review of Lady's Chatterley's Lover)

Ken cont'd: is detail good in and of itself, or does it have to advance plot/character/theme to be worthwhile?

Sarah: love granular detail and think is a danger of too much, either "I've suffered for my research and so must you", or because genuinely love the subject—haven't written horse novel because of risk get too in weeds. new novella Haunt Sweet Home, protagonist is working at reality show as production assistant (PA), very bottom of ladder. got lots of feedback from ex-PAs, used to live from someone who was a set dresser got some flavor from her. the things sometimes skip between big plot moments, are what make the job and character pop, so that when get to plot, believe in fully rounded character and ability/inability to do thing

Ken: remember in your A Song for a New Day, early on, step by step to get into venue and set up, played really real to me, felt like there and put me on her side

Sarah: makes it really hard to read those in public readings, not most dynamic

Marianna: just crystallized, what really sells me on details being necessary, is when feels like answering question already had, or didn't know needed until got. joy of discovery for reader, not only having fun but just learned something. can get away with a lot

Melissa: always comes back to how well written. joke never want to represent someone going to toilet, but that's first story in Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, really works. as writer, always worry that losing audience when writing library

Ken: been moments where you as reader has been lost?

Melissa: hard to lose me, find a lot of things interesting

Sarah: if I do one good thing this con, it's getting people to go read Molly Gloss, in particular The Hearts of Horses, horse trainer novel; sequel of sorts, Falling from Horses, Hollywood stuntman. details ARE the story. not SFF, basically Westerns. nobody does it better than her.

Ken: granular details about occupations as tool of worldbuilding. thinking about economy of language, classic example "the door dilated"

(me, to myself, once again: can I tell you about The Fortunate Fall????)

Melissa: Evil, CBS series, investigating Catholic Church, which everyone gets wrong (never heard priests complain, think happy to have people talking about). does get details wrong of church, but climbing and motherhood details were really interesting and well done (in the same character)

Sarah: from writer's perspective, stuff make sure to show to beta reader, especially someone who knows field really well if not your area, or if your area, to someone who doesn't know

Marianna: one of best pieces of advice ever seen, if in situation where danger of infodump but exposition needs to happen: get two characters having intense emotions, maybe even conflict, about information. can get away with so much more and also tell readers about stakes

Ken: decades ago, reading SFF story about lawyer, remember character bemoaning that his pleading-generating software was so outdated and running so slowly; opened up entire world of, what does law practice look like when there's genuinely good AI that can generate pleadings. no big commentary on that in the story, just one little detail

Sarah: going back to annoys: music related: describing music in way that music critic would. stories that do music right, talk about emotions of playing, hearing. Lewis Shiner always gets right, also LaShawn M. Wanak

Ken: reminds of TV show M*A*S*H. there are lots of doctors shows, almost always have consultant on set to ask questions of. one for M*A*S*H said, usually actors ask how to hold this instrument, they always asked how would it feel. showed in series

Ken: asks Marianna about mundane occupations in fantastical setting

Marianna: always fascinated by genre as magnifier, makes things bigger. only way to do that is to ground in mundane in one way or another. PhD dissertation about Whedon in Buffy would have outrageous situations but mundane jobs like bartending at demon bar, or inverse, to really push contrast

Ken: reminded of very short story, 15 years ago, "Accounting for Dragons" by Eric James Stone, very tongue in cheek, also satire. when look at fantastical through lens of mundane, casts light both ways

Melissa: ongoing manga, Kowloon Generic Romance, about realtors: feels very grounded but in a fictional city where things shift and disappear

(me, to myself: is manga particularly good at this? or do I just happen to hear about examples there?)

audience: reality is stranger than fiction. experience is that weird shit happens more often in real life than is written out. sparks some of my best ideas. any of that that forms heart of why you write?

Sarah: hard thing is that because so much stranger, sometimes don't read as true; wife works for liquor board, her stories are so weird (snakes falling out of ceiling onto fire marshal who was trying to figure out what rustling noise was), haven't found way to make fiction

audience: Snow Crash opening: the Deliverator was speculation, but sheer terror and anxiety is all of our delivery services now

Marianna: genre wonderful tool for laundering these things

In the rush to get notes out, I haven't been saying, "this panel was great," but if I didn't say something, they were. however, it's worth saying, and it's true: this panel was great.

Poll #33401

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Well, I'm home

We got home last night, very late in terms of the time zone we woke up in yesterday morning, then spent some time petting and playing with the cats, eating chocolate and ice cream, and unpacking a few things that I needed or wanted right away (slippers, toothbrush, and prescription drugs). I washed a few dishes, because I walked into the kitchen for chocolate and saw that we were almost out of clean mugs in the size we'd want for tea and coffee in the morning.

The trip home was OK as these things go: I ordered a cab to take us to Heathrow, using the service Mom always used, and paid in cash using my half of the British money she'd had in an envelope, including a generous tip for the driver. We had time to finish things like washing our dishes and clearing Mom's data off her computer before leaving, and enough time at the airport to be at the gate before boarding started, but not enough to get bored. I arranged the cab, and got us all aisle seats for the flight home, on Sunday, and then turned everything over to Cattitude and Adrian once we got to Heathrow. By the time we got off the plane, I was so worn out that I was stopping occasionally to lean on the walls in the airport, but fortunately doing better once we got home.

I woke up this morning at 7:30 Boston time, which seemed good--about 7.5 hours sleep, and back on my home time zone. The milk from before we left was iffy but the cut of tea tasted OK. The igniters for the stove burners didn't work when I turned them on, but I remembered both that we have long matches for just this purpose, and where we keep them, so that was OK for the moment, and we can investigate that further when Adrian and Cattitude are also awake.

We plan to do very little today: order groceries, unpack, and I might inject the about-monthly dose of my current MS medication, which I take every 4-6 weeks, and would have taken Saturday if we'd been home). Some balance PT would also be a good idea.

choral celebration

B. doesn't sing much any more - medical reasons have put paid to it - but she dusted off her voice for a special occasion on Saturday. A concert was being held at San Jose State to celebrate the 90th birthday of Dr. Charlene Archibeque, long-time choral director in the music dept. About a hundred of her grateful former students - some local, some from across the country - were gathering to form an ad hoc choir for the occasion, and B. was perforce among them. She's long talked about how much she learned from being in a chorus under Dr. A., and this was the opportunity to show her respects.

I drove her down to the SJS music building that morning (having previously ferreted out the secret back alleyway in so that she didn't have to walk far) to drop her off for the chorus's one and only in-person rehearsal, and then came back for the concert in the afternoon. Dr. A. herself and several former students who've gone into choral conducting led a total of 16 items, most of them unaccompanied, a few with piano. They included pieces that Dr. A. had composed or arranged herself, mostly for her doctoral dissertation; a few classical standards including Anton Bruckner's supremely beautiful "Locus iste"; and several folksongs and spirituals, including this really striking arrangement of "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho."

The chorus sound was rich, full, and powerful throughout, and not just because it was a large group. Even after many years in most cases, these were good students who had been well-taught.

Afterwards, most of the chorus members and a few sundry like myself adjourned to a function room at a local hotel that had no available parking, for a reception/buffet and a lot of schmoozing among old fellow students. A small cake was presented to Dr. A. and everybody sang "Happy Birthday" at 7:15, because that was the date of her birthday.

Entry tags:

cons: readercon: 2025

Readercon: The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction

The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
In an article of the same name, Elizabeth Minkel discussed how "2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides." Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?
Claire Houck/Nina Waters, Kate Nepveu (moderator), Laura Antoniou, Victoria Janssen

This was my last panel of Saturday and I was so much more tired than I realized. At one point, maybe halfway through, I went looking for my next thought and found only an empty brain. So I took basically no notes beyond the setup, my apologies. I will see what I can reconstruct now, and invite anyone else who was there to chime in!

panel notes

I started by saying that I read the article in question, thought it was interesting and Readercon-ish, and dropped it in the panel suggestion box. Then I started outlining it as panel prep and wasn't sure that I agreed with it! and I knew that at least some of the panel also did not, so I hoped for a lively discussion.

I suggested that the problems in the article could be put into two groups: problems of intellectual property (IP), and problems of scale.

Problems of IP: scraping fic sites, for text and also AI-generated audiobooks. selling bound copies of fic. these are problems caused by design of fic sites but more importantly, fic authors having much less power to protect their own works.

Problems of scale: the greatly increased number of readers means that readers come to fic as fiction rather than fan fiction. this ties into ongoing conversations, as the article notes, about fracturing of fandom communities and shortening of fandom life cycles, and about distance between authors and readers.

I asked the panel what they thought about these problems, and what problems they saw that weren't addressed by the article.

Victoria: is really very mad that fan and pro fic has been scraped. really can't do much about it, just feels worse.

Claire: interesting that article didn't mention plagiarism of fic by the kind of author who releases a new novel every two weeks to flood the market in a romance subgenre. many of those are legit, they're house names or groups of authors. but many are plagiarizing and filing off the serial numbers, and romance novels are so trope-based already that it's hard to definitively identify the plagiarism. happened to friend, was only able to demonstrate because had very distinctive setup. and that author just keeps reinventing self.

Laura: have had professional work plagiarized. giggled manically about AI scraping pro erotica and fic: poisoning the data set! maybe reaction is too muted but it's capitalism. can't really protect fanfic.

Claire: harassment of fic authors. started Duck Prints Press because wanted to publish fic authors, knew could be the firewall between authors and harassers. (aside: theory was that fic readers would like reading fic-style stories without fandom characters, and turns out no: people want those characters. they're making it work nonetheless.)

lots and lots of discussion about this; see anti-shippers on Fanlore for a primer.

we generally agreed that we had not heard of any writers modifying their own writing in hopes of being plucked out of the fic websites for professional publishing, as suggested in the article.

I mentioned seeing efforts to educate new fic readers on Tumblr, where I spend a lot of time, but it's hard to tell what effect they have.

I asked people how they've connected in fandoms, or maintained connections, or seen people fostering connection.

Claire: people need to understand that it takes work and time. built up community around small fandom, by creating fandom events, setting up references for the fandom's fanartists and writers, creating a Discord. have to find people who seem cool and interact with them regularly and in a chill fashion over time: find a fanartist, comment on their stuff. may not get immediate response, but will eventually become familiar to them as a person who is not going to be weird.

Victoria: used to be active in Blake's 7 fandom, dormant for long time, participation revived recently because discovered (or was invited to?) a Discord for it, and was even meeting people from it this weekend.

Poll #33400

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So Much To Do, So Little Time

I am juggling work and home right now, as we have less than a month before K leaves for college and the list of things that needs to be done is large and seems larger. Work is in a similar condition, although it is *not* planning to leave for college that I know of...

Entry tags:

cons: readercon: 2025

Readercon: Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies

Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies
In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?
J.M. Sidorova, Laurence Raphael Brothers, Shiv Ramdas, Steven Popkes, Victoria Janssen (moderator)

panel notes

intros: say if bureaucrats and what kind

J.M. (Julia): born and raised in then-USSR, example of autocratic bureaucracy. immigrated over 30 years ago, USian bureaucracy in immigration. is opposite of bureaucrat, day job as academic scientist, pride self on being unruly

Laurence: R&D background, joined US Patent and Trademark Office as patent examiner last year, in feat of amazing timing

Victoria: day job, bureaucrat for 28 years at major research university. currently helping with grant applications, require great deal of finicky attention to detail. before that, a lot of university policies about purchasing and reimbursement

Shiv: first novel was cyberpunk bureaucracy (Domechild). bureaucracy experience in two separate countries. government of India in professional capacity, used to make ads for them; then immigration to US

Steve: career working with what people call bureaucracy, big government agencies. never really had to deal with Kafkaesque ever. really like the bureaucrats that has worked with, far-thinking and well-intentioned, hobbled by bad legislation and insufficient finances

Victoria: bureaucracy can be used for good or bad, don't really want to argue about its existence. organizing principle for any large human endeavor is basically bureaucracy. panel: have you read anything with fresh approaches, or suggest ways that bureaucracies can make good fiction

Laurence: bureaucracy implies stability in a way, even if malicious or oppressive, can hopefully find way to adapt to it.

Steve: bureaucracies have to handle issue of scale. organizations helping thousands of people, then bureaucratic structure starts to appear. Star Wars, "fear will keep the local stations in line," doesn't really work

Shiv: bureaucracy is model that is designed to only work at scale, which is unusual, can't scale down. useful to remember that was original meritocracy as envisioned, China created exams to select (and then ignored results for centuries). really cool moment in human history, did not previously have concept of best person for job gets job.

J.M.: bureaucracies are based on rules and order. range of perceptions about how fair rules are (also transparent). ideal cozy bureaucracy is heaven, also hell: rules are fixed, no arbitrariness. so many TV examples. Korean shows or Chinese, have a structure that's bureaucratic in essence, but at top is a deity: great turtle or ox that holds the world. innate sense of fairness comes from that non-human entity. reflects distrust of human, ideal of fairness. Nobody's Looking, Brazil: character figures out that little hamster in wheel powers the whole fair structure

Laurence: Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss are chaotic opposites

Victoria: comfort of predictability: in fiction, can make case for subverting that.

Shiv: challenge that predictability is one of core functions for bureaucracy. what about bureaucrats working within or against. Winston Smith in 1984 is one way

Steven: Miracle Workers: god decides to flush whole universe down toilet, two bureaucrats trying to save it

J.M.: absolutely, love it; god is not malevolent but absentee landlord, played by Steve Buscemi

Victoria: can be benevolent, non-benevolent, indifferent

Shiv: another reason challenging for story, bureaucrats are quintessential middle management.

Victoria: idea that bureaucrats go mad with power, even over really small stakes

Shiv: post-independence, India had bureaucratic system that was called License Raj, called that because was so fiendish like British still there. wanted car? go through government, takes years to be assigned one. takes years more to be assigned color ... even though there are only white cars

Laurence: bureaucrat has flexibility in interpreting the rules. once he has rejected application, can write examiner's note with advice, or suggest to attorney that have an interview so can explain conditions. some examiners like that, some don't. some green card interviewers like being kind, some get out of bed on wrong side. gives room to portray individual characters: what is their experience

J.M.: therein lies narrative tension, long for ideal bureaucracy that would be helpful and just, but only human. two problems: middle management is human, don't apply rules uniformly or at all; other side: cannot write the rules that are good enough. trying to cover all contingencies, becomes barriers

Shiv: private sector bureaucracy: try to file insurance claim. interesting, public bureaucracy designed to prevent worst-case scenario, private to prevent best-case

Steve: all worst experiences have been with private sector. (admits maybe sample is biased.)

Victoria: in private sector, people aren't rewarded for staying for long time in same job: leads to people doing things their way because institutional knowledge isn't there

V: fantasies of bureaucracy, affect how people think about government (treating government and bureaucracy as interchangeable for these purposes). how use them for positive effects?

Laurence: 20th century stories almost exclusively negative, lead to cynical and negative responses (which is not to say that not deserved). chicken and egg, Catch-22 or Kafka as responses to experiences maybe, but still cycle

V: showing bureaucrat going through daily lives and trying to do things well, goes along with seeing self in fiction. felt connection to people in Arkady Martine duology, also Murderbot experiencing different types of bureaucracy

J.M.: Star Trek itself, huge organization that works

Laurence: Iain Banks' Culture, see in interfacing with non-Culture

Shiv: Star Trek really good example, what matters is not that good, but least worse option available to you.

Steve: also Known Space, Niven, when successful, invisible. no narrative tension until fails. could do positive bureaucracy in untenable situation, e.g. natural disaster.

Shiv: how set baseline opinion of bureaucracy is during moments of non-crisis, which is difficult because stories are about overcoming obstacles. in a non-crisis, the obvious obstacle to overcome is bureaucracy itself, which is not message want to send

Victoria: trying to write post-conflict fiction, would be one way of doing it. Goblin Emperor, Hands of Emperor, consider both aspirational fantasies of bureaucracy: none of us have power of emperor, but what would I do with the power, especially since Maia (in Goblin) is so shy, downtrodden

Laurence: love Goblin Emperor, not sure best example since he is at top, many problems are because hasn't had chance to find feet. Witness for the Dead trilogy is maybe better example, very conventional church bureaucracy, protagonist working within that system; aspirational in that way too, because things do work out

Victoria: bureaucracy is background to and part of mystery plots in that trilogy

Shiv: Goblin Emperor: about to ruin, cover ears. at some point if don't draw line between politics and bureaucracy, going to have argue that Game of Thrones is bureaucracy novel. really about courtly politics

J.M.: Memory Called Empire also mostly court politics

Steve: respectfully disagree: Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings are failed systems because don't have bureaucracy, whole purpose of which to prevent what happened. "Sauron should never have gotten a building permit." medieval delegation in Europe is start of bureaucracy there, limits power of kings/emperors

Victoria: Hands of Emperor, another imperial novel but POV character is career bureaucrat. same issue of having imperial power, but mostly looking at what things this single bureaucrat puts into motion, because emperor gives instructions but bureaucrat must implement. we see that change takes time. has been working on what's effectively universal basic income, see played out in different people's lives. odd novel, massive, kind of circles back on self, but very much about civil service

audience: friend who writes legislation read it, was furious: person who writes legislation shouldn't also be implementing! can you have fantasies of bureaucracy where protagonist is not limited or collective in some way? is that necessary feature? or can we indulge in fantasy of purely good bureaucrat

Laurence: fantasy of bureaucracy, to my mind, should be much more egalitarian, focused on middle management

J.M.: the classical Western narrative with a lot of agency, is kind of at odds with this

(me, to myself: Saiyuki Gaiden features very corrupt heavenly bureaucracy and is about failing to prevail over it)

Shiv: lot of pushback about personal anonymity for specific bureaucrats. as species we really don't like not knowing who said so

Laurence: in US Patent and Trademark Office, my name is on all the rejections and allowances

Victoria: federal grant agencies: applicants know reviewers, can request not-that-one

audience: short story about alien bureaucracy gone wrong, title of which I didn't get; what would look like for alien bureaucracy to go right?

Laurence: aliens often stand for mysterious unknown powers, so bureaucracy can be monster

Shiv: weirdly, really functional bureaucracy is in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, appoint President for everyone to yell at while others do work; works at so many levels. also, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is one-person bureaucracy, developed immortality and is very mad about it, has list to personally insult every person in universe

Victoria: probably somewhere in C.J. Cherryh

audience: comment on Laundry novels, Charlie Stross?

Laurence: fun, mockery of system that deserves to be mocked

Victoria: Going Postal is a good example of good bureaucracy. obligated to mention Andor, examples of bad bureaucracy

Laurence: Too Like the Lightning, only decent people are UN functionaries

audience: Alastair Reynolds Prefect series, whole system based on voting

(me, to myself: Kagan, Hellspark; whole apparatus to determine if species is sapient)

Victoria: Rivers of London, regular cop trying to get magic police bureau and other bureaus to work together

Steve: Jasper Fforde

(I can't believe I didn't think of the Witness for the Dead books instead of Goblin Emperor! My panel idea submission even joked about how there were probably books about this that didn't have "Emperor" in the title!)

Poll #33399

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22

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+1 (thumbs-up, I see you, etc.)?

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+1
22 (100.0%)