landingtree

Last time I travelled internationally I did not yet have a smartphone. I look back and am amazed it went as well as it did. (I know people travelled perfectly well before smartphones, and I guess some of those people were also full of blithe confidence and hadn't bothered to get any maps, so maybe amazed is too strong. Pleasantly surprised.) This trip was the full Google Maps experience, and one of the best fruit salads I've ever had was served to me when I was hot and sore-footed after a trip up The Mountain and typed 'fruit salad' into Google Maps with no particular hope.

(I would not go back again to find the same exact fruit salad. None of my nostalgic memories of Montreal food came through for me this time: the amazing custard buns had become normal, and perhaps the default NZ croissant has improved or perhaps I was simply less croissant-hungry. This trip has laid down an entirely new set of great food memories.)

My plan had been to reach Montreal days early, get over my jet lag, and then be fully alert for the convention. This did not work. I reached Montreal, proceeded to have three lovely days using magic travel energy dredged up out of my bone marrow, and hit the convention without having begun to be able to sleep more than five or six hours a night and with the travel energy used up. 'I should make time to go back to my Airbnb in the afternoon and nap,' I said to myself. There was so much good stuff to attend I didn't do this, and I regretted it. The convention was great, but also, as I wrote at the time, 'A great case study in social tasks and burning out of them.'

(The advanced next form of plan, if and when I go to Scintillation again, will involve arriving in North America weeks beforehand, doing all my travelling first, going to Scintillation, and then leaving before the weather gets hot. It will also involve having a location within five minutes' walk where I can nap.)

Oh, but one lovely part of the first three days was wandering the city, and sitting in a coffee shop near the Basilica, while a conversation about road trip stories took place on the Scintillation discord. The discord is a thriving online community. Usually I'm offset from it by between six and eight hours depending on daylight saving time; it was great to be participating in conversations on there in real time! I'd type up my notes on this conversation too, since it felt basically panel-sized, (what are the most interesting things about road trip stories? What best separates them from other types of travel narrative like quest and pilgrimage?) only it feels slightly less the done thing when it's reporting on semi-private conversation instead of semi-public panels.

Writing the Future
Ada Palmer (M), Jon Evans, Ruthanna Emrys, Naomi Kritzer, Alison Sinclair.

Ruthanna: We don't write a lot of s.f. about overhyped technologies that fail. 'What if this goes on?' is a classic question but 'What if this doesn't? is also interesting.

Ada: It takes many stages for a technology to reach saturation, and as it spreads it may have multiple sequential revolutionary impacts, even if it's not changing. Example: the printing press took from 1450 to 1720 to go from invention to cultural saturation. Savonarola's sermons stayed local while Luther's theses crossed Europe because a network of people riding rapidly between presses to spread news had come into being between the two.

[Someone]: Cellphones let farmers in the developing world easily check crop prices and avoid being defrauded by buyers in rural places where laying wires had never been practical. The technological 'stage' of landlines was skipped.

[Someone]: the war in Iraq was an influence on video-phones in order to let soldiers call home. Inciting incidents that lead to the uptake of a technology are worth thinking about and they go in multiple stages.

Photo culture is much easier without the long gap between taking the picture and seeing how you looked in it. Photo faces. Willingness to appear on Zoom without makeup.

Ada: exploring a technology with the whimsy and particularity of a particular person makes it easy to imagine a technology's stranger uses. Put a character inside a technology you've invented and they will begin testing what it can do.

[Someone]: New fields tend to fill up with women - or the otherwise marginalised - until the fields become fixtures. (Examples: crystallography, epidemiology.)

The acceptability of things should be in flux if a future is to feel fluid. Too many futures seem to be arguing about too few things.

Ada: Writing pasts, we often allow ourselves to write without a sense of the dynamic possibility of change.

There was never a 'killer app' moment for memory foam. It spread invisibly in a bunch of somewhat useful ways and now it's everywhere. Even when killer app moments do happen, like penicillin, it took 15 years to learn to grow that at scale.

rushthatspeaks from the audience: Disch invented credit cards and a credit card reader for a science fiction short story that no longer reads as speculative because he described the exact ways those things ended up working.

Gretchen from the audience: pervasive texting made video calls much more practical because you can easily check ahead with someone about whether they're ready to be called, you won't surprise someone who isn't yet ready to appear on video. Sometimes one technology can enable another quite different one.

Jon: Old rail line right of ways can be used for telegraph lines.

[Me, now remembering: I went on the Scintillation tour of Habitat 67 the day before this, an architecturally interesting apartment complex, and one of its distinctive features is that all the wiring and plumbing for all the apartments run not through the building's walls, but through big external tubes. The point of this was to allow for the future installation of entirely new kinds of cable without knocking holes in everyone's walls, and when the time came to lay internet cable, this worked great. Successful future-proofing - though it does mean the building needs special plumbers and electricians who know its peculiarities.]

After lunch was a panel on How To Write Middle, where I took such scrabbly notes it's not worth typing them up, but it is immediately followed by some quick notes about how I could turn a random dream I had into a story, so it did its job re. giving impetus to go write things. This is also the panel during which William Alexander described the parlor game 'Smoke,' which I co-opted for use in a Starting Writers meetup later that day, so that was very useful and I was able to briefly tell him it had been - he seemed pleased! (The rules of Smoke are that it's twenty questions, where one person is thinking of a character and the others have to ask them questions to guess what it is. Except none of the questions can be factual. They all have to be sideways, poetical type questions. The first one is 'What kind of smoke would the person you're thinking of be?')

Not Saving the World: Stakes in Fantasy

Jo Walton (M), Naomi Kritzer, Victoria Goddard, Mal Frazier, Gretchen McCulloch

Jo launched this by saying that she hates the emerging genres of Cozy Fantasy and Romantasy, despite the fact that they answer a request she's been making for years and years: write fantasy with lower stakes. So what's up with that?

The panel became about how genres emerge and required Jo to describe in detail why she hates Cozy and Romantasy, which I'd been wondering about, having read a bunch of her Tor reviews that reference the fact.

Naomi: in cozy the world is often a facade like a Hollywood street.

Jo: Lifelode and Tehanu are both attempts at a fantasy that takes action plot off the table, and both fail.

[This is me paraphrasing, my note just says 'Lifelode - Tehanu - failures!' I myself think both Lifelode and Tehanu are more or less successes but I was in several conversations with Jo this Scintillation in which other people tried to defend Lifelode to her and she was glad they'd enjoyed it but she knows what she wanted to do with it and she didn't.]

China Court inspired Lifelode , a novel that combines five generations of a house's inhabitants at the same time. [I want to read this now.] The Sharing Knife was going for a blend of romance with fantasy and it also failed at it. Locke Lamora has a saving-the-world plot that's incidental but by being there, makes the heists it's centrally about less interesting.

Gretchen: Fairytale retellings are often about curses that work at an interpersonal scale. [Possibly still Gretchen:] Does Piranesi count? (Is the House a world that's being saved?]

Jo: There's a lot of stuff in lineages that aren't about saving the world. Comic fantasy; Faffrd and the Grey Mouser. A different family tree than Tolkien. What about things coming from epic fantasy but going away from saving the world?

Mal: Tamora Pierce.

Jo: There's genuine jeopardy in that: the first female knight totally could fail out of knight school and you'd still have a book, in a way that the world can't end and you'd still have a book. So there's actually something to fear.

Gretchen: Heyer; A Civil Campaign .

Mal: 'Is the author going to pull this off' is its own kind of tension, when a good writer's really going for something and it's a difficult something.

Jo: Postcolonial fantasies like To Shape A Dragon's Breath . A successor to the World War One-derived stakes of Tolkien.

Mal: Time to have the romantasy conversation. Ninety percent of everything is crap, and romantasy suffers the easy slander of taking a random bland book (like Fourth Wing ) and going 'Well that's bad so it's all bad.' But take Wooing the Witch Queen - Jo and I both like that one. Also: Cozy and Romantasy is often fantasy written by fanfic authors with romance worldbuilding logic. It becomes impossible to read the worldbuilding as an argument as opposed to something that furthers the romance.

Gretchen: When reading-injured, struggling to read much, Legends and Lattes went down easy. It was pleasurable in the way of a dentist waiting room magazine. Books billed to me as light have had characters so annoying it took me weeks to get through them. This didn't.

Jo: I will read bad mainstream romance! But not fluffy romantasy. What I like in genre romance is: 1) Italy. (It's my kicks.) but also 2) Daily life details I wouldn't have noticed, especially from a culture not known to me. And 3) Friend-groups, rare in s.f. but common in romance. And boy, the quotidian economic details in genre romance are solid! This makes Legends and Lattes not just fail for me when read as worldbuilt fantasy, but as genre romance too.

Mal: re. Legends and Lattes : I occasionally seek out a predictably mediocre experience. 'Complained about first then read four more.' (Sidenote: gay romantasy is not the same genre as straight romantasy.)

Jo: I liked Court of Thorns and Roses .

Gretchen: Is romantasy still finding its genre signals, making it harder to find one's own kicks like Jo can easily find Italy romance?

Victoria: People are genre-ing Legends and Lattes as we speak, spinning what they want off it. It'll be really interesting to read its successors.

Jo: Because of the speed of publishing, lots of this genre is in the publishing pipe right now.

Naomi: Lots of cozy now is retail-based. The coffee shop AU fanfic spawned this. What the format needs is a mingling centre: shop, but also library, theatre group, etc.

Mal: Many plots can't be cozies because the stakes are, i.e., cancer.

Jo: Believably stressful is the opposite of cozy. Yet cozy mystery is about violent death. And crumpets! It's dealt with in a way that keeps it totally unreal.

Gretchen: death is often of someone you don't know yet. They're a corpse by the time you meet them.

Jo: And I used this to write about fascism in Farthing .

Victoria: So what's the fantasy panel that's a bit serious, like the Sayers level of mystery?

Jo: 10-15 years ago there were no cozies.

rushthatspeaks from the audience: Sharon Shin!

Jo: Yes you're right! She's been writing it for decades! No cozies except for Sharon Shin. The Goblin Emperor was a dividing line on this. (I didn't blurb it because I thought it was just an okay Sharon-Shin-ish thing and you can't put "Jo Walton: This book is just okay" on the cover.)

Gretchen: In linguistics, 'enregisterment' is a the word for when a feature of a group rises to the level of recognition where it's a shorthand for the group, where it's mockable. [I forget the example she used: I think of safety pins for Punk.] The enregisterment of genre features.

Mal: Lots of this is coming from self-publishing, thus arose in books where the author had to hire their own cover artist. Now that it's becoming big, publishing houses are now aping the styles of self-published book covers. Kimberly Lemming typifies this: mock oils, bright - or very type-focused with no image. Decorated big type, like for A [Bowl] of [Mac] and [Cheese.] Or Harper L. Woods typifies dark romantasy.

Jo: You can tell how much sex is in a romance by how curly the font is!

Mal: Tor opened a romance department, and the cover designers had a real learning curve to get signals like the font-curliness right for really fine-sliced genres.

Audience question: Why not just read contemporary fiction if it's already doing all the stakes stuff you want?

Jo: Well, if it's got boring dragons I would rather just have Toronto. But I do love good dragons!

Gretchen: The silos are coming down, there are fewer readers of only one or the other. But sometimes I want the distance of fantasy.

Naomi: If I must read about rich assholes, they should at least be wizards.

Jo: Byatt's Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye : A mainstream novella which has a djinn in it. It's purpose in the story is to underline sexism in academia and ageism. This was Byatt, a mainstream writer, using a fantasy entity as an underscore. Also: you can surprise readers in fantasy. It's hard to surprise with the real Holocaust because readers know.

Mal: the primary audience for cozy and romantasy isn't us. [Gestures to room full of people who read enough s.f. to go to a convention about it.] It's people who've only read The Hobbit . 'People lacking antibodies.' The T. Kingfisher Paladin books such as romances, yet fans of fantasy keep recommending them to me as good romance because they have no antibodies against the things they're doing.

Gretchen: The second and third order consequences of what we're seeing now are going to be interesting over the next ten to fifteen years.

Other things that happened on Saturday: nice lunch-stroll with

ambyr. Frantic Fanfic session which was fun, although revealing of how much the website does for you: writing as much as you can in three minutes gets the added concern of shuffling paper! (I only realised partway through that the website would shuffle everyone's virtual papers up thoroughly, whereas we were passing papers in a circle and thus always writing in the same order. Not bad, but different. Next time I might shuffle in the middle of the table.)

Starting Writers meetup. I was organising this, and had been very blithe about it until day of, when I suddenly remembered to be stressed at organising a group of people. It went well enough, if I was doing it again I would do it totally differently. Following this, I joined

rushthatspeaks for dinner and helped generate The Incident With The Soup That Could Not Be Opened, which was stressful for all concerned - it was good to see him, and

sartorias and

nineweaving, but I am glad I could catch up with all three of them at less stressed times when there was no unopenable takeaway soup.

Then there was a panel on Education for which I had little remaining energy, though I was introduced to a Scintillator who will be moving to Wellington soon (this will be very nice, the only downside was that the introduction foiled my original plan of lying down on the floor right in back and hearing the panel that way). And then there was Beowulf reading, and home. Pleasantly, my Airbnb, though at a not-ideal distance from the hotel, was also in the same general direction as Gretchen and her friend S were heading, so I could talk more with them on the way about linguistics and Beowulf and things. (She lent me the charming Bea Wolf.)