Scintillation, day three
Oct. 30th, 2018 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeI woke, walked briskly around a block, didn't find a breakfast place drawing me in and so bought bao again -- a queue -- and was late to the Joy of Reading session, where everyone had chosen five minutes of prose they liked and read it aloud. Wonderful idea! Very various, and everything was good. Upstairs then to 'Our real influences and why we lie',
Ada Palmer talking about making use of how Arthur Conan Doyle uses landscapes immediately prior to introducing his characters. (I want to work out how. And if it relates to how she brings in the character Sniper in Too Like the Lightning, because that was neat). There was discussion of the perceived pretentiousness of invoking the Great Names -- Shakespeare, Homer -- which can be cancelled out by listing something specific about them, a translator, an element of craft. I think that works as a pretentiousness-avoidance method for me, because the pretentious way to use Shakespeare seems to me to be the vague way, claiming status instead of any particular method. And someone said that part of what the question, "What are you influences?" means usually is, "What should I read that's like you?" or, "Give me information about whether I'll like your work," neither of which is quite the same question. Things people think are bad can be influences on them (whether because the bad thing had good or useful qualities at the time, or is a case of "I will try very hard to never ever do that"). And from the audience, Ruthanna Emrys suggested that some things are bigger than influences, they're what you're speaking to, with, against.
Down again to the Ursula Le Guin tribute reading session. The person up the front at the start said, "How many of you definitely want to read something?", and when no one's hand went up began to read the story 'Coming of Age in Karhide'. Badly, I thought. No sense of rhythm. I was very annoyed, and kicked myself for not having put my hand up, because the story was going to take up most of the hour. My mind drifted in annoyance over the initial bits, where setting and history are laid out. At some point, when the narrator has gone to a semi-monastic Fastness, I had begun sinking under the story. I kept on sinking. When somebody says to the narrator the ritual words, "In the act of creation, praise", a tingle ran over my skin (the way tingles will at emotional points in stories), and instead of vanishing in an instant kept on being there for what felt like about twenty seconds. This had never happened before. I was grinning and laughing and happy, and the rushed reading wasn't an irritant, it was a way to get the story quicker, which was nothing but a good thing...
Goodbye, Ursula Le Guin. This worked out to being a more powerful tribute than I could have chosen.
And it was lunch -- but no! it was Ada's secret unprogrammed reading, the one you could only attend if you'd read the first three Terra Ignota books, the beginning of the fourth. At least one person in the audience had read the third of them the night before, after the reading was announced, so they could go. Nothing of plot in the reading, but again, and as with 'Somebody Will', there was more emotional resonance than I'd looked for. The Terra Ignota books haven't always landed with me emotionally, because what she's doing in them is so intricate and so many things at once that I don't trust it to end right, and things I think are flaws might yet turn out not to be, while things I think aren't flaws might become ones. But she cares so much, and it comes through. I am going to carry some of that experience to the books next time I read them, a resonance in Utopia and the Great Conversation which I hadn't yet found on my own; and I'm glad.
And then upstairs to the panel on 'What we can learn from Shakespeare', which as I expected was my favourite panel and one I can use.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden,nineweaving, Ada Palmer, rushthatspeaks, Jo Walton moderating. More accurately attributed, this, but still mostly paraphrasing.
nineweaving: Words make worlds. Most of my writing uses sunk iambic pentameter. [Reference to a writer who makes their own company of players, using actors to play different characters in successive books. If I understood that right. Who was it? Elizabeth Knox does something rather like it, running variants on characters who have their roots in a childhood imaginary game she never stopped playing.] Moonwise is a festive comedy (ends with a wedding), Cloud & Ashes is a late romance.
rushthatspeaks: He demonstrates that you can get away with anything in metre if your audience is sufficiently invested. ('Rough winds do shake' is in one of the best sonnets). An important thing to learn about both poetry and plotting.
Ada: Well, for a start, "Too like the lighting which doth cease to be..." Iambic is native to English. My paragraphs tend to get more iambic toward a cadence, a perfect iambic pentameter line, if a thought is being wrapped up. [I don't have the books with me, but a glance at the Tor.com sample of Seven Surrenders finds a paragraph ending, "Let nothing obstruct this book and the Good it aims at."]
nineweaving: In English, the pleonastic 'do', used for rhythm but not meaning. (Rough winds do shake...)
Ada: Like the Greek word Gar, which means, 'I needed another syllable here for my line.'
Jo: Shakespeare is kind, compared to his contemporaries.
rushthatspeaks: Even his bad plays can make you cry, because the material is there.
Ada: Try comparing different versions of scenes which are hard to do well being staged. The scene in Terence's Eunuchus, in which a man gloats about sexually assaulting someone, cannot be fixed. I know, I ran a workshop where we tried to. It has jokes in it, and if you succeed in making them funny it just feels worse. Shakespeare's worst is fixable. He gives the other voice. Provides tools to work with.
nineweaving: He gives the soulless Ariel interiority. [harking back to the Good and Evil panel here.] Women, Jews, slaves, moors, torturers, in Shakespeare all have selves. You have to be in your characters, not moving them like barbie dolls.
rushthatspeaks: He's so culturally pervasive he's a great conversation-starter. Someone with whom you have nothing else obviously in common has probably seen or read Romeo and Juliet.
Jo: [about her next book which is highly Shakespeare-based] How many people in the room haven't seen The Tempest? [One or two hands raised.] How about Twelfth Night? [Four or five hands raised.]
nineweaving: But he was also new once, and he works when he's new. My brother, who is dyslexic, doesn't read a lot, isn't especially culturally learned. He came to a performance of Hamlet and got it, off the bat.
rushthatspeaks: Lessons in cutting stories. His plays are so often cut, you can see what changes between many versions.
Ada: Watch Jane Howell's Henriad. Then watch The Hollow Crown's second half. Look at the Duke of York. He is fridged. All his villainous speeches are cut, his worse actions are given to other characters, and he is made into his son's motive. Clearly they thought they were really onto something with this idea. It's how you turn complex character arcs standard.
[Play to find, referenced by someone: The Book of Will. About the people who put together the First Folio.]
Patrick: He was writing on the cusp of America's connection to Europe. 'New map' quote.
[Later in the day I went over some of my own prose to mark out its stresses, and wondered how much of what I've observed as my own improvement as a writer over the years falls under the single heading, 'Is getting better at rhythm'. This is useful to think about, in terms of making conscious changes to the process.]
And then at once the Linguistic Worldbuilding panel, which felt much less like a conversation that the last, more question and response. Unhelpfully, given that, my notes are disorderly, and my memory has largely faded away to what I made notes about.
Ada Palmer, Gretchen McCulloch,nineweaving, Tamara Vardomskaya, A.E. Prevost moderating.
Introductions. Gretchen has a linguistics podcast, Lingthusiasm. A.E. co-writes and directs videos for The Ling Space.
I think the first two questions from A.E. were, "How have you seen linguistics give tightness to fiction?" or something along those lines.
Either Tamara or Gretchen mentioned a book in which a character travels to a seaside city which is never described as being by the sea, and it's never relevant to the story -- except that its characters use sea-related idioms, so you pick up on the fact that it's there.
nineweaving mentioned the nuances of Shakespeare's use of 'you' versus 'thou' to convey information.
Ada talked about the character who in Too Like the Lightning is referred to with capital-letter He all the time, building up a sense that there's something intriguing and important about Him before He ever steps on stage.
I cannot remember exactly what the next question was. Responses to it, though: Tamara talked about the emotional associations of languages in multi-lingual cultures: with whom have you spoken a language? Do you like them? The language is going to take on the emotional qualities of how you've learned and used it.
Gretchen decided at a certain point (for a certain project that ought to be relevant in the long-term? Generally?) to make use of the closed forms of compound words, and decapitalise words currently capitalised, because that is the tendency of English over time, and doing those things now will make prose read more naturally in the future.
Someone (who by note-sequence may have been Tamara) referred to some books in which magic spells are cast using living idioms, and in which the wizard's school doesn't whisk students away to a distant castle to learn pseudo-Latin, but keeps them immersed in contemporary culture, because otherwise they won't be up with the magic.
And someone else described 'deixis an phantasmo'. If I remember rightly, this is language use that only makes sense in terms of the implied unreal, but I'm failing to find a description of it. The example given in the panel, "When I was on Mars..."
John Donne moved poetry from 'a flea', or 'the flea', to 'this flea'. Which makes a huge difference.
nineweaving: Imagine a culture of different linguistic immersion. Where you call here there, and I you.
It's been suggested that the problem of referring to multiple people in sentences when you don't have different pronouns for them is one reason languages tend to do gender. 'The gay fanfiction pronoun problem'.
There is a great immediacy to, "This bowl of peas."
Ada said she got so much into the mindset of writing characters in the society of Terra Ignota, whose narrator keeps referring to the characters using different genders and whose society doesn't technically admit of gender at all, that she'd begun to get emails back from readers of her academic papers saying, "Why have you started using 'she' for Jean Jacques Rousseau?"
And then at the end of the panel, when some questions had been asked and the moderator, as usual, turned to the panellists for final thoughts or comments, there were a few seconds of silence.nineweaving gestured for the microphone. "Remember," she intoned. "Swivel is the frequentative of swive."
After that I had been sitting down listening to things for almost longer than I could deal with, so I wandered outside and went walking. I got back to the second half of 'Where are the books like Pandemic?' No notes at all. But I remember the panellists dividing up the qualities of the Pandemic boardgame (cooperative, no villain, extremely tense) and finding very few books that matched them all, but a lot of books that had one or another of those qualities; 'people versus nature' turned up a lot, but even those stories have a tendency to have villains in the form of the evil executive who decided not to take forest fire precautions or something. The idea was discussed that Pandemic only looks like a villain-free game because of its scale, and that in reality a pandemic like that would have its fair share of human error, foolishness, small-mindedness, people not understanding that something really big had just happened and so attempting to profit from it as though the status quo were just around the next corner. But there was so much more in this than I'm currently remembering!
And then the last panel of the convention, 'How to imagine the future.' About which the same, and I wish I'd made coherent notes here, because it was one of the most intense panels I went to, and the only fractious one.
Dennis Clark, Jim Cambias, Maria Farrell, Yves Meynard, Ada Palmer, Marissa Lingen moderating.
This felt like a bookend for me with the Good and Evil panel. During the weekend of Scintillation I had almost no internet access, I wasn't getting any news. I heard about what Trump was doing (and aren't those dreary words to say again) sideways, by references from panellists to how bad it was. With that as the context, these were the two panels about optimism, pessimism, and the qualities of humans and the world on which those things have to be based. I've thoroughly mingled Dennis Clark and Jim Cambias in memory; one of them was involved in forecasting, and came at the panel from the perspective less of what the future might be, more of what futures people can be sold. My memory gives me a gendered split, Ada and Maria and Marissa as optimists, and Yves and Jim and Dennis as pessimists sometimes dismissive of optimism. Some of what everyone said was interesting, some of what the men said was annoying, and this is enough of an oversimplification that I wish I'd written more down. However, notes as they are:
The Xprize advisory board, on which Ada sits, helps determine what technical goals to put money in front of. One of its sessions was discussing the goal of revolutionising architecture by 2030, and Ada made the point that this actually requires something non-architectural, because most of 2030's buildings have already been built. (Wearable temperature control was her suggestion).
Denis-or-Jim: The myopic forecast is the easiest one to convince people of. 'Things will remain the same.'
Yves: Each very new technology is meant to usher in an age of wonders, and doesn't. It somehow suppresses freedoms and is used to sell stuff.
Maria: To get people helping with what is essentially a programme to limit losses, you must scare them enough, but not too much. Too much or too little fear both produce inaction.
Ada: Optimism is currently marketed as a rebellion against pessimism.
The diaspora that is temporal experience.
We have learned how hard things are, and thus how slow. Sexism, racism, space travel. It turns out unconscious bias exists, and bones degenerate. We are in mourning for a lost notion of future.
[Someone referenced Kim Tallbear, describing if I remember rightly why she doesn't read postapocalyptic fiction: The apocalypse is unevenly distributed. For indigenous communities it has in many cases already happened.]
We must accept discomfort. [Possibly it was Teresa Nielsen Hayden saying this from the audience? She made a comment at some point about how she is not in mourning for a lost dream of the future, because that dream had always been based on a ridiculously cheap energy supply, and we are living with its consequences].
[If I'm remembering this correctly] A friend of Ada's works with the team that runs post-mortems on attempts to restore the internet after disasters, earthquakes, coups. And is hungry for fiction in which teams solve problems [see Pandemic panel].
Someone [Yves? It fits with what I recall being the tone of his pessimism] said that the internet is not a clean mirror of humanity, it reflects the worst parts of us. And someone else [Ada?] said that no, it reflects the sticky-out bits. Which is why it has so many cats on it.
I forget quite who was saying what about the internet's virtues and advantages, right at the end -- perhaps, that the internet allows the collection and direction of small wants and generosities into the funding of things like Scintillation, -- when Ada added, which was the last thing said at Scintillation proper,
"...and helps us cross various diasporas."
The other two days had been days of meeting people and eating food with people and having fascinating conversations. This was a day of dashing about between (very good) panels and readings, and I landed out of it trying to resist sadness. "Oh. It's over." There was the house party to come; I didn't know how to get there, and feeling very tired just then, lay on my bed for half an hour longer than would plausibly let me arrive on time, inclined to remember that my usual response to even well-constructed house parties is to become a silent and mildly offputting satellite and eventually escape. But I said to myself, "You are not not going to this party, you came a long way to be in its hemisphere." I wandered downstairs, got metro directions from the reception desk, and was about to try putting them into practice whenrushthatspeaks and nineweaving and Ruthanna Emrys came back from dinner, about to head on to the party, and I asked if their ride had a space, which it did. A gift.
And the party was good. I did my share of orbiting, because if I'm ever going to learn to mingle gracefully the day has not yet come, but so many good conversations, good food, bookshelves to gaze at; and stories told me. And room after room! As I was leaving with a group of uberers I discovered two rooms that I hadn't known the house had.
At the hotel, floor by floor, we left the lift. Goodnight, Scintillation. See you another morning, maybe.
The next day I realised that the con had had a con suite, which I glanced into once and then forgot about completely. Room after room! There was boardgaming going all the time, and I count sixteen programming items I chose not to go to that I'd have liked to. One of the unexpected things for me about Scintillation was how little we talked about books. We did talk about books, but eighty percent of the conversations I had were about something else, with no sense of lack in that. I'm so glad Worldcon is coming to Wellington, because I want to see what one of these things is like when it's actually large. Might it feel smaller? This one felt practically infinite.
Ada Palmer talking about making use of how Arthur Conan Doyle uses landscapes immediately prior to introducing his characters. (I want to work out how. And if it relates to how she brings in the character Sniper in Too Like the Lightning, because that was neat). There was discussion of the perceived pretentiousness of invoking the Great Names -- Shakespeare, Homer -- which can be cancelled out by listing something specific about them, a translator, an element of craft. I think that works as a pretentiousness-avoidance method for me, because the pretentious way to use Shakespeare seems to me to be the vague way, claiming status instead of any particular method. And someone said that part of what the question, "What are you influences?" means usually is, "What should I read that's like you?" or, "Give me information about whether I'll like your work," neither of which is quite the same question. Things people think are bad can be influences on them (whether because the bad thing had good or useful qualities at the time, or is a case of "I will try very hard to never ever do that"). And from the audience, Ruthanna Emrys suggested that some things are bigger than influences, they're what you're speaking to, with, against.
Down again to the Ursula Le Guin tribute reading session. The person up the front at the start said, "How many of you definitely want to read something?", and when no one's hand went up began to read the story 'Coming of Age in Karhide'. Badly, I thought. No sense of rhythm. I was very annoyed, and kicked myself for not having put my hand up, because the story was going to take up most of the hour. My mind drifted in annoyance over the initial bits, where setting and history are laid out. At some point, when the narrator has gone to a semi-monastic Fastness, I had begun sinking under the story. I kept on sinking. When somebody says to the narrator the ritual words, "In the act of creation, praise", a tingle ran over my skin (the way tingles will at emotional points in stories), and instead of vanishing in an instant kept on being there for what felt like about twenty seconds. This had never happened before. I was grinning and laughing and happy, and the rushed reading wasn't an irritant, it was a way to get the story quicker, which was nothing but a good thing...
Goodbye, Ursula Le Guin. This worked out to being a more powerful tribute than I could have chosen.
And it was lunch -- but no! it was Ada's secret unprogrammed reading, the one you could only attend if you'd read the first three Terra Ignota books, the beginning of the fourth. At least one person in the audience had read the third of them the night before, after the reading was announced, so they could go. Nothing of plot in the reading, but again, and as with 'Somebody Will', there was more emotional resonance than I'd looked for. The Terra Ignota books haven't always landed with me emotionally, because what she's doing in them is so intricate and so many things at once that I don't trust it to end right, and things I think are flaws might yet turn out not to be, while things I think aren't flaws might become ones. But she cares so much, and it comes through. I am going to carry some of that experience to the books next time I read them, a resonance in Utopia and the Great Conversation which I hadn't yet found on my own; and I'm glad.
And then upstairs to the panel on 'What we can learn from Shakespeare', which as I expected was my favourite panel and one I can use.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden,
nineweaving, Ada Palmer, rushthatspeaks, Jo Walton moderating. More accurately attributed, this, but still mostly paraphrasing.nineweaving: Words make worlds. Most of my writing uses sunk iambic pentameter. [Reference to a writer who makes their own company of players, using actors to play different characters in successive books. If I understood that right. Who was it? Elizabeth Knox does something rather like it, running variants on characters who have their roots in a childhood imaginary game she never stopped playing.] Moonwise is a festive comedy (ends with a wedding), Cloud & Ashes is a late romance. rushthatspeaks: He demonstrates that you can get away with anything in metre if your audience is sufficiently invested. ('Rough winds do shake' is in one of the best sonnets). An important thing to learn about both poetry and plotting.Ada: Well, for a start, "Too like the lighting which doth cease to be..." Iambic is native to English. My paragraphs tend to get more iambic toward a cadence, a perfect iambic pentameter line, if a thought is being wrapped up. [I don't have the books with me, but a glance at the Tor.com sample of Seven Surrenders finds a paragraph ending, "Let nothing obstruct this book and the Good it aims at."]
nineweaving: In English, the pleonastic 'do', used for rhythm but not meaning. (Rough winds do shake...)Ada: Like the Greek word Gar, which means, 'I needed another syllable here for my line.'
Jo: Shakespeare is kind, compared to his contemporaries.
rushthatspeaks: Even his bad plays can make you cry, because the material is there. Ada: Try comparing different versions of scenes which are hard to do well being staged. The scene in Terence's Eunuchus, in which a man gloats about sexually assaulting someone, cannot be fixed. I know, I ran a workshop where we tried to. It has jokes in it, and if you succeed in making them funny it just feels worse. Shakespeare's worst is fixable. He gives the other voice. Provides tools to work with.
nineweaving: He gives the soulless Ariel interiority. [harking back to the Good and Evil panel here.] Women, Jews, slaves, moors, torturers, in Shakespeare all have selves. You have to be in your characters, not moving them like barbie dolls. rushthatspeaks: He's so culturally pervasive he's a great conversation-starter. Someone with whom you have nothing else obviously in common has probably seen or read Romeo and Juliet. Jo: [about her next book which is highly Shakespeare-based] How many people in the room haven't seen The Tempest? [One or two hands raised.] How about Twelfth Night? [Four or five hands raised.]
nineweaving: But he was also new once, and he works when he's new. My brother, who is dyslexic, doesn't read a lot, isn't especially culturally learned. He came to a performance of Hamlet and got it, off the bat.rushthatspeaks: Lessons in cutting stories. His plays are so often cut, you can see what changes between many versions. Ada: Watch Jane Howell's Henriad. Then watch The Hollow Crown's second half. Look at the Duke of York. He is fridged. All his villainous speeches are cut, his worse actions are given to other characters, and he is made into his son's motive. Clearly they thought they were really onto something with this idea. It's how you turn complex character arcs standard.
[Play to find, referenced by someone: The Book of Will. About the people who put together the First Folio.]
Patrick: He was writing on the cusp of America's connection to Europe. 'New map' quote.
[Later in the day I went over some of my own prose to mark out its stresses, and wondered how much of what I've observed as my own improvement as a writer over the years falls under the single heading, 'Is getting better at rhythm'. This is useful to think about, in terms of making conscious changes to the process.]
And then at once the Linguistic Worldbuilding panel, which felt much less like a conversation that the last, more question and response. Unhelpfully, given that, my notes are disorderly, and my memory has largely faded away to what I made notes about.
Ada Palmer, Gretchen McCulloch,
nineweaving, Tamara Vardomskaya, A.E. Prevost moderating.Introductions. Gretchen has a linguistics podcast, Lingthusiasm. A.E. co-writes and directs videos for The Ling Space.
I think the first two questions from A.E. were, "How have you seen linguistics give tightness to fiction?" or something along those lines.
Either Tamara or Gretchen mentioned a book in which a character travels to a seaside city which is never described as being by the sea, and it's never relevant to the story -- except that its characters use sea-related idioms, so you pick up on the fact that it's there.
nineweaving mentioned the nuances of Shakespeare's use of 'you' versus 'thou' to convey information. Ada talked about the character who in Too Like the Lightning is referred to with capital-letter He all the time, building up a sense that there's something intriguing and important about Him before He ever steps on stage.
I cannot remember exactly what the next question was. Responses to it, though: Tamara talked about the emotional associations of languages in multi-lingual cultures: with whom have you spoken a language? Do you like them? The language is going to take on the emotional qualities of how you've learned and used it.
Gretchen decided at a certain point (for a certain project that ought to be relevant in the long-term? Generally?) to make use of the closed forms of compound words, and decapitalise words currently capitalised, because that is the tendency of English over time, and doing those things now will make prose read more naturally in the future.
Someone (who by note-sequence may have been Tamara) referred to some books in which magic spells are cast using living idioms, and in which the wizard's school doesn't whisk students away to a distant castle to learn pseudo-Latin, but keeps them immersed in contemporary culture, because otherwise they won't be up with the magic.
And someone else described 'deixis an phantasmo'. If I remember rightly, this is language use that only makes sense in terms of the implied unreal, but I'm failing to find a description of it. The example given in the panel, "When I was on Mars..."
John Donne moved poetry from 'a flea', or 'the flea', to 'this flea'. Which makes a huge difference.
nineweaving: Imagine a culture of different linguistic immersion. Where you call here there, and I you.It's been suggested that the problem of referring to multiple people in sentences when you don't have different pronouns for them is one reason languages tend to do gender. 'The gay fanfiction pronoun problem'.
There is a great immediacy to, "This bowl of peas."
Ada said she got so much into the mindset of writing characters in the society of Terra Ignota, whose narrator keeps referring to the characters using different genders and whose society doesn't technically admit of gender at all, that she'd begun to get emails back from readers of her academic papers saying, "Why have you started using 'she' for Jean Jacques Rousseau?"
And then at the end of the panel, when some questions had been asked and the moderator, as usual, turned to the panellists for final thoughts or comments, there were a few seconds of silence.
nineweaving gestured for the microphone. "Remember," she intoned. "Swivel is the frequentative of swive."After that I had been sitting down listening to things for almost longer than I could deal with, so I wandered outside and went walking. I got back to the second half of 'Where are the books like Pandemic?' No notes at all. But I remember the panellists dividing up the qualities of the Pandemic boardgame (cooperative, no villain, extremely tense) and finding very few books that matched them all, but a lot of books that had one or another of those qualities; 'people versus nature' turned up a lot, but even those stories have a tendency to have villains in the form of the evil executive who decided not to take forest fire precautions or something. The idea was discussed that Pandemic only looks like a villain-free game because of its scale, and that in reality a pandemic like that would have its fair share of human error, foolishness, small-mindedness, people not understanding that something really big had just happened and so attempting to profit from it as though the status quo were just around the next corner. But there was so much more in this than I'm currently remembering!
And then the last panel of the convention, 'How to imagine the future.' About which the same, and I wish I'd made coherent notes here, because it was one of the most intense panels I went to, and the only fractious one.
Dennis Clark, Jim Cambias, Maria Farrell, Yves Meynard, Ada Palmer, Marissa Lingen moderating.
This felt like a bookend for me with the Good and Evil panel. During the weekend of Scintillation I had almost no internet access, I wasn't getting any news. I heard about what Trump was doing (and aren't those dreary words to say again) sideways, by references from panellists to how bad it was. With that as the context, these were the two panels about optimism, pessimism, and the qualities of humans and the world on which those things have to be based. I've thoroughly mingled Dennis Clark and Jim Cambias in memory; one of them was involved in forecasting, and came at the panel from the perspective less of what the future might be, more of what futures people can be sold. My memory gives me a gendered split, Ada and Maria and Marissa as optimists, and Yves and Jim and Dennis as pessimists sometimes dismissive of optimism. Some of what everyone said was interesting, some of what the men said was annoying, and this is enough of an oversimplification that I wish I'd written more down. However, notes as they are:
The Xprize advisory board, on which Ada sits, helps determine what technical goals to put money in front of. One of its sessions was discussing the goal of revolutionising architecture by 2030, and Ada made the point that this actually requires something non-architectural, because most of 2030's buildings have already been built. (Wearable temperature control was her suggestion).
Denis-or-Jim: The myopic forecast is the easiest one to convince people of. 'Things will remain the same.'
Yves: Each very new technology is meant to usher in an age of wonders, and doesn't. It somehow suppresses freedoms and is used to sell stuff.
Maria: To get people helping with what is essentially a programme to limit losses, you must scare them enough, but not too much. Too much or too little fear both produce inaction.
Ada: Optimism is currently marketed as a rebellion against pessimism.
The diaspora that is temporal experience.
We have learned how hard things are, and thus how slow. Sexism, racism, space travel. It turns out unconscious bias exists, and bones degenerate. We are in mourning for a lost notion of future.
[Someone referenced Kim Tallbear, describing if I remember rightly why she doesn't read postapocalyptic fiction: The apocalypse is unevenly distributed. For indigenous communities it has in many cases already happened.]
We must accept discomfort. [Possibly it was Teresa Nielsen Hayden saying this from the audience? She made a comment at some point about how she is not in mourning for a lost dream of the future, because that dream had always been based on a ridiculously cheap energy supply, and we are living with its consequences].
[If I'm remembering this correctly] A friend of Ada's works with the team that runs post-mortems on attempts to restore the internet after disasters, earthquakes, coups. And is hungry for fiction in which teams solve problems [see Pandemic panel].
Someone [Yves? It fits with what I recall being the tone of his pessimism] said that the internet is not a clean mirror of humanity, it reflects the worst parts of us. And someone else [Ada?] said that no, it reflects the sticky-out bits. Which is why it has so many cats on it.
I forget quite who was saying what about the internet's virtues and advantages, right at the end -- perhaps, that the internet allows the collection and direction of small wants and generosities into the funding of things like Scintillation, -- when Ada added, which was the last thing said at Scintillation proper,
"...and helps us cross various diasporas."
The other two days had been days of meeting people and eating food with people and having fascinating conversations. This was a day of dashing about between (very good) panels and readings, and I landed out of it trying to resist sadness. "Oh. It's over." There was the house party to come; I didn't know how to get there, and feeling very tired just then, lay on my bed for half an hour longer than would plausibly let me arrive on time, inclined to remember that my usual response to even well-constructed house parties is to become a silent and mildly offputting satellite and eventually escape. But I said to myself, "You are not not going to this party, you came a long way to be in its hemisphere." I wandered downstairs, got metro directions from the reception desk, and was about to try putting them into practice when
rushthatspeaks and nineweaving and Ruthanna Emrys came back from dinner, about to head on to the party, and I asked if their ride had a space, which it did. A gift.And the party was good. I did my share of orbiting, because if I'm ever going to learn to mingle gracefully the day has not yet come, but so many good conversations, good food, bookshelves to gaze at; and stories told me. And room after room! As I was leaving with a group of uberers I discovered two rooms that I hadn't known the house had.
At the hotel, floor by floor, we left the lift. Goodnight, Scintillation. See you another morning, maybe.
The next day I realised that the con had had a con suite, which I glanced into once and then forgot about completely. Room after room! There was boardgaming going all the time, and I count sixteen programming items I chose not to go to that I'd have liked to. One of the unexpected things for me about Scintillation was how little we talked about books. We did talk about books, but eighty percent of the conversations I had were about something else, with no sense of lack in that. I'm so glad Worldcon is coming to Wellington, because I want to see what one of these things is like when it's actually large. Might it feel smaller? This one felt practically infinite.
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Date: 2018-10-30 03:43 pm (UTC)This is a much more polite way of describing the gendered divide than I managed!
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Date: 2018-10-30 11:42 pm (UTC)