Scintillation 6, Sunday panel notes
Jul. 25th, 2025 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeBelated travel posting continues!
The Underpinnings of the Future
Jon Evans, Zach Smirin, Alison Sinclair, Ruthanna Emrys (M), Su Sokol
Ruthanna guided the panel very well through a series of questions, giving it a structure like the bumps in a bean pod. First, panelists introduced themselves by saying what they had to do with infrastructure.
Sue Sokol: did not note what she said, was too busy noting 'oh you're the Scintillator I ran into on the train!'
Alison Sinclair: medicine. (Additional note: 'Oh, you're the Scintillator who was saying interesting things about epidemiology at a table in the lobby at Scintillation 1!')
Zachary: NY sanitation and budget.
John: Dredgefest geek.
[I assume Ruthanna's second question was, 'What's something s.f. tends to leave out/do badly?]
Zach: Kim Stanley Robinson spends no time on the look of cities and how they actually change. Soured me on Ministry for the Future. It is hard to describe garbage and transit futures because they need such [here my note ends. What did they need?]
Jon: Gibson's The Peripheral has no supply chains or infrastructure for its Future London. This was a conscious choice to separate that time period technologically from the book's other setting, but it failed for me.
Alison S: There's a lack of internal debate and uncertainty in future medicine. We often see outbreak narratives, [but only of certain stereotyped kinds.] We often see sewers, but not their maintenance. Slow River by Nicola Griffith. [Googling the book I think this was an example of a book showing sewer maintenance and sanitation.]
Alison: We often see infrastructure as eternal. It is what we lean on.
Jon: Infrastructure accretes in a non-sexy way. The most exciting thing in transit is often twenty years old.
Ruthanna: What handles infrastructure especially well?
Zac: In Terra Ignota, we see servicers actually cleaning the streets.
Jon: KSR's Mars Trilogy at least tries. It's not all accurate but he gives it a go. (Even if doing it tabula rasa is a bit cheating.)
Alison: Marge Piercy dramatises activism well.
Zac: Pratchett's Infrastructure trilogy/quartet.
Su: The Dispossessed (not detailed but the feeling of actually getting things done.)
Ruthanna: The Craft Sequence. A Memory Called Empire (Martine is an urban planner, [the book actually thinks about the waste heat requirements of a planet-spanning city.])
Jon: in films, Alien. Has shipping, gritty feel.
Ruthanna: Infomocracy. I have strong opinions about the political questions in this book, which is one of my criteria for good near-future s.f.
Ruthanna: What do you want to see more of?
Jon: Weird pedagogies.
Zac: Decision-making processes.
Su: Both of those, plus legal and criminal systems.
Alison: Science as a system and collective endeavor. Story often militates to few characters.
Ruthanna: Labs are a great story setting [for large casts.]
Ruthanna: We see taxes on Barrayar.
Su: Housing.
Zac: City workers who commute in don't have a stake in the polity which could help them build nearer houses.
Jon: You can sleep in a self-driving car while it moves itself between parking spots. Cities tend to want to stop people sleeping in carparks, but with self-driving, maybe they can't.
Alison: innovation infrastructure outside of corporate and university.
Ruthanna: There is a valley of death between prototype and field use in which many inventions fail. Luck or crisis often give us our innovations. Covid was a crisis so great we lifted the practical strictures. Governments promised to buy any developed covid vaccines that worked, bypassing the free market.
Jon: what about the fantasy of hyperinflation caused by solar stone? [I think I meant to write Philosopher's Stone, but was thinking about solar panels?] Terraforming California: cheap solar might allow the construction of a canal. (This is what Dredgefest was about.)
Alison: 'If you remove a constraint, what infrastructure needs arise?' is a good s.f. question.
Zach: wizard teleportation should make them people whose job is to move stuff. [Me: I'd love to see this as a conflict in a book where some people are trying to get wizards to do it. Who is the first of the old upper class to take a job as a courier?]
Zac: We are seeing mass movements against what took massive work to put in place. (Such as pasteurized milk.)
Jon: We value less what's not scarce. Infrastructure is for making things become unremarkable.
Alison: We haven't talked yet about military and power infrastructure. S.f. shows a lot of the building, but seldom shows the decommission. Bujold is unusual in describing demilitarization instead of the reverse. A lot of our world's power budgets secretly end up on military books (i.e. dredging a harbor.)
Ruthanna: the military caused canning.
Ruthanna: nations use very different sources of legitimacy and infrastructure myths. Rome stood by its roads, and used them as a symbol. America doesn't stand by its food promises and network.
Zac: transit in America has so many veto points compared to highways. Slapping down another highway is so easy in comparison.
Jon: There's an economy of scale. It's cheaper to build subways in Korea, because they build lots of them.
Jon: 'We used to be able to build spaceships and now we can't' is largely unexplored.
[I think there was a question at some point here from either the audience or Ruthanna about how to actually use all this to tell stories.]
Su: All my beta readers hated my deeply-researched teachers' union meeting I put in a first draft. But it's good to do the research, then cut heavily!
Zac: The infrastructure drama could exist just like legal dramas do. Aramis, by Latour: an example.
Ruthanna: take notes on the plot bunnies not just the system. What will be coolest, what are the arguments, what will fail?
Emmet, from audience: Anne Conway's Material World is a great book, it traces the supply chains of six materials from production to use. Lots about corporate entities and how they work. Lots about lots of things. [Thank you Emmet, I have this book on order at the library as a result of rereading these notes.]
Delany
Eugene Fischer, Thomas Noriega, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Jo Walton (M), Lila Garrott
Discussion began with Thomas's unusual reading order, he went from Atheist in the Attic to Babel-17.
Lila: The third Neveryon book doesn't end up in lit classes on AIDS, but it's great.
Porn pacing is weird.
Patrick: horror, porn, and humor are the [body genres, is the term I've heard for this: Patrick said something I summarised as 'effect genres'] so can cross with anything easily.
Jo: snorts.
Lila (I think): The rap group 'clipping.' made a concept album of The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, the sequel Delany never wrote.
Joanna Russ's 'Feminist Utopias' essay made Triton make a big splash in the feminist utopia. [My note here makes weird use of the ditto sign but I think this is what I mean.] But Russ, with The Female Man, fell into transphobia that Delany in Triton had already thought his way around.
Jo: The Einstein Intersection doesn't have enough surface tension to hold me up.
[A cheerful sequence where everyone else on the panel who's read the book says that they also do not understand The Einstein Intersection but that they feel as though Delany is definitely doing something with it, and then audience members who've read it start raising their hands and there is a moment of hope that a solid theory will emerge but they describe feeling just the same way. The clearest stated theory was 'He is trying to do Dhalgren again in very few pages.']
Jo: EI is a drowning book. It's all stuff going on under the surface. There is no surface you can float on.
Lila: [Comment about the experience of reading Delany's close reading of Disch, The American Shore, after which I made the note: oh no I need to read The American Shore and it will be very hard.]
Jo: adaptation by clever people shows a thing in relief.
Someone from the audience said something about Goatsong, by Poul Anderson, a novel Jo loves that I have never heard of.
Poul read Jo's first novel and liked it on his literal deathbed.
Patrick [who had been saying little due to microphone trouble]: Chip is very unworldly. Floats through life.
[He said more about his connection to Delany, but sadly all I wrote down was 'Pat and Teresa and many poet mag' which at this distance, doesn't really speak its mind.]
Someone: Delany participates in cultures very different from the mainstream (gay kink) and this helps. [I think this was related to a thing Jo said about how without Delany she would have been in danger of thinking that her experience of the world was the default one.]
Eugene: Delany does middle close stream of consciousness, between the Joycean cascade of fragments and pulling back the curtain fully on how a mind is working. You're watching a mind sort of understand itself, and sort of not. [Illustrative examples from Triton.] [I have someone in recent memory talking about how weird Ulysses is in its fragmented stream of thoughts, because of how much less it gives you than any actual stream of thoughts would, since thoughts always come with their own context and Joyce strips that away. This could equally likely be Eugene talking on this panel, or someone I read on the internet in the last three months.]
Lila: D.H. Lawrence came up with this middle stream of consciousness, says Delany in The American Shore.
Then after lunch, an outdoor noodle experience, I went to Lila Garrott interviewing Sherwood Smith.
I did not take notes for this. Partly this is because Sherwood told some personal memories which she would already have put online if she wanted them there. But then I was simply too slow a writer to take any kind of useful notes while also being present in the stories she was telling. I will only say that Lila's last question to Sherwood was "Have you ever considered writing an autobiography?" and I will not argue with any of the good reasons she said she wouldn't, except for the last one, which was that it would just be Hollywood gossip and no one would be interested in reading it. I think I am not the one one in that rapt audience who was sitting there thinking "I would be interested in reading it!"
Discovering Forgotten Writers
Rich Horton, Jo Walton (M), Lila Garrott, Sherwood Smith, Mal Frazier.
This panel more or less divided into comments on who and what gets lost, how the panelists found them again, and lists of the best obscure books they'd found. I'm afraid my notes consist mainly of scribbling down titles of things without the pitches for why they're interesting, but at least here are a lot of books endorsed by an interesting list of readers!
Lila: The adjacent-to-genre is often lost (Sylvia Townsend Warner, queer and s.f.-ish.)
Jo: Sumner Locke Elliott, my favourite lost queer writer, 2 s.f.-ish novels and the rest were mainstream. The Man Who Got Away.
Mal: Arsene Lupin, massively popular so I feel weird calling it lost, but it was fully stolen by Japan because it felt obscure enough that no one bothered about copyright.
Sherwood: Memoirs of Madame Junot. Napoleonic.
Jo: Lin Carter's pre-Tolkien weirdo books, where he went around trying to fill the appetite for Tolkien by finding the existing fantasy novels that people had lying around unpublished in trunks.
Mal: Tor Essentials is Patrick's baby, it's great. The not-yet-canonized modern classics hitherto seen only on shoddy paper. The Fortunate Fall is one of those. (Cameron Reed's next book is a response to The Left Hand of Darkness set in the high desert.)
Jo and Sherwood together: recommending Una Silberrad's The Good Comrade.
Rich: most Victoria writers with big, now mostly unread bibliographies wrote maybe one s.f. novel. Silberrad had The Affairs of John Bolsover. Bulwer Lytton had The Coming Race, about the oncoming phase of human evolution, and whose invented form of energy, vril, was widely known for a while and found its way into the brand name Bovril ('bovine power'.) [Other people must feel about Marmite the way I feel when I google Bovril.] It was sadly not a good book.
Sherwood: Lytton's first book, Pelham, is great.
A conversation about obscure books being found and scanned into Gutenberg.
Lila: Publishers Weekly does review these scanned books, it's a good place to find out about them.
Jo: Holiday home rentals always have a little slew of washed-up books. If there's a fiction hardcover where I haven't heard of the writer, I read it. This is how I found Ernest Jones's Second-hand Wife, which is surprisingly good: a hundred year old bestseller.
Sherwood: the bestseller lists of a hundred years ago are a good source in general.
Jo: Wikipedia has the American ones!
Another rec: Catherine Grace Gore's Pin-money. Very funny, Austen-influenced.
Jo: Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Home-maker. These bestsellers vanish.
Lila: The Plague and I, by Betty Macdonald: the last work I've found by someone cured of TB in a sanatorium, before penicillin came in.
Mal: All books fade. Sometimes you read a great book that will hit, like Dorley Hall. Other times they don't hit the culture. Even Dorley isn't selling that well.
Jo: You see books so innovative they get copied until everything interesting about them is evenly distributed, or you get books that hit the zeitgeist. My Among Others was odd at the time and has since become totally ordinary.
Mal: My generation had Borges and magic realism.
Pitch from audience: William M. Lee's A Message from Charity and Sea Home.
Rich: Tisab Ting, or The Electrical Kiss. First female Canadian S.F. writer. [Google has this as by Fergus, no full name. In the panel I got confused and made the note 'by Zap Ting?'] [See comments: Ida May Ferguson! Thank youkore!] A bad book, but of historical interest.
Vicki, from audience: The longrunning 'Backlisted' podcast is about books like these. Also a recommendation: Dark Hester by Anne Douglas Sedgwick.
Rich: the blog 'Furrowed Middlebrow' is also goof for ebooks of these.
I think someone in the audience asked for help locating a book called Proud Man, and someone found it on Gateway under Mary Constantine. [Correction from comments: I misheard this. It was written by Katharine Burdekin as Murray Constantine.]
Why We Need Hopepunk More Than Ever
Ada Palmer (M), Ruthanna Emrys, William Alexander, Naomi Kritzer, Su Sokol
Few notes on this one. I was running on fumes by this point in the day, and should probably have gone to Greer Gilman's reading instead, since I feel like I have been in perhaps sufficient conversations for the moment about the value of hope and what Hopepunk is or isn't. But what notes I did make:
Someone recommended C. Thi Nguyen's Games - Agency As Art, which has been on my radar as a thing I should read.
People discussed the mechanics of the game Daybreak, how they separate 'world region' from 'government now in power in that region,' systematising the fact that a leader cannot in fact turn off all ecological efforts unilaterally.
William: it's important not to be Denethor.
Someone: preppers have a narrative of 'I will be the protagonist of my own life once the apocalypse comes.' And when Covid came, and they found a disaster not actually working like that, they were hoovered up by fascists in droves, who provided another version of the narrative they wanted and an explanation for why the first apocalypse had failed them.
Ruthanna: Shin Godzilla is a film about disaster response working. It's about successfully planning for Godzilla attacks.
And that was paneling! Raffle followed it. The table had been building up all weekend with beautiful and interesting things, and each winning ticket-holder could come up and choose something. I was minding someone else's tickets as well as my own, and while I turned out to be tired enough that comparing the called numbers against two lists of numbers instead of just one was like some imp's special project in hell, I was very pleased to get G. two of the things she most wanted! And she was taking me to the airport the next morning, which made for a very convenient exchange. Then there was low-key and restorative dinner, and enjoyable picnic, and that was Scintillation.
The Underpinnings of the Future
Jon Evans, Zach Smirin, Alison Sinclair, Ruthanna Emrys (M), Su Sokol
Ruthanna guided the panel very well through a series of questions, giving it a structure like the bumps in a bean pod. First, panelists introduced themselves by saying what they had to do with infrastructure.
Sue Sokol: did not note what she said, was too busy noting 'oh you're the Scintillator I ran into on the train!'
Alison Sinclair: medicine. (Additional note: 'Oh, you're the Scintillator who was saying interesting things about epidemiology at a table in the lobby at Scintillation 1!')
Zachary: NY sanitation and budget.
John: Dredgefest geek.
[I assume Ruthanna's second question was, 'What's something s.f. tends to leave out/do badly?]
Zach: Kim Stanley Robinson spends no time on the look of cities and how they actually change. Soured me on Ministry for the Future. It is hard to describe garbage and transit futures because they need such [here my note ends. What did they need?]
Jon: Gibson's The Peripheral has no supply chains or infrastructure for its Future London. This was a conscious choice to separate that time period technologically from the book's other setting, but it failed for me.
Alison S: There's a lack of internal debate and uncertainty in future medicine. We often see outbreak narratives, [but only of certain stereotyped kinds.] We often see sewers, but not their maintenance. Slow River by Nicola Griffith. [Googling the book I think this was an example of a book showing sewer maintenance and sanitation.]
Alison: We often see infrastructure as eternal. It is what we lean on.
Jon: Infrastructure accretes in a non-sexy way. The most exciting thing in transit is often twenty years old.
Ruthanna: What handles infrastructure especially well?
Zac: In Terra Ignota, we see servicers actually cleaning the streets.
Jon: KSR's Mars Trilogy at least tries. It's not all accurate but he gives it a go. (Even if doing it tabula rasa is a bit cheating.)
Alison: Marge Piercy dramatises activism well.
Zac: Pratchett's Infrastructure trilogy/quartet.
Su: The Dispossessed (not detailed but the feeling of actually getting things done.)
Ruthanna: The Craft Sequence. A Memory Called Empire (Martine is an urban planner, [the book actually thinks about the waste heat requirements of a planet-spanning city.])
Jon: in films, Alien. Has shipping, gritty feel.
Ruthanna: Infomocracy. I have strong opinions about the political questions in this book, which is one of my criteria for good near-future s.f.
Ruthanna: What do you want to see more of?
Jon: Weird pedagogies.
Zac: Decision-making processes.
Su: Both of those, plus legal and criminal systems.
Alison: Science as a system and collective endeavor. Story often militates to few characters.
Ruthanna: Labs are a great story setting [for large casts.]
Ruthanna: We see taxes on Barrayar.
Su: Housing.
Zac: City workers who commute in don't have a stake in the polity which could help them build nearer houses.
Jon: You can sleep in a self-driving car while it moves itself between parking spots. Cities tend to want to stop people sleeping in carparks, but with self-driving, maybe they can't.
Alison: innovation infrastructure outside of corporate and university.
Ruthanna: There is a valley of death between prototype and field use in which many inventions fail. Luck or crisis often give us our innovations. Covid was a crisis so great we lifted the practical strictures. Governments promised to buy any developed covid vaccines that worked, bypassing the free market.
Jon: what about the fantasy of hyperinflation caused by solar stone? [I think I meant to write Philosopher's Stone, but was thinking about solar panels?] Terraforming California: cheap solar might allow the construction of a canal. (This is what Dredgefest was about.)
Alison: 'If you remove a constraint, what infrastructure needs arise?' is a good s.f. question.
Zach: wizard teleportation should make them people whose job is to move stuff. [Me: I'd love to see this as a conflict in a book where some people are trying to get wizards to do it. Who is the first of the old upper class to take a job as a courier?]
Zac: We are seeing mass movements against what took massive work to put in place. (Such as pasteurized milk.)
Jon: We value less what's not scarce. Infrastructure is for making things become unremarkable.
Alison: We haven't talked yet about military and power infrastructure. S.f. shows a lot of the building, but seldom shows the decommission. Bujold is unusual in describing demilitarization instead of the reverse. A lot of our world's power budgets secretly end up on military books (i.e. dredging a harbor.)
Ruthanna: the military caused canning.
Ruthanna: nations use very different sources of legitimacy and infrastructure myths. Rome stood by its roads, and used them as a symbol. America doesn't stand by its food promises and network.
Zac: transit in America has so many veto points compared to highways. Slapping down another highway is so easy in comparison.
Jon: There's an economy of scale. It's cheaper to build subways in Korea, because they build lots of them.
Jon: 'We used to be able to build spaceships and now we can't' is largely unexplored.
[I think there was a question at some point here from either the audience or Ruthanna about how to actually use all this to tell stories.]
Su: All my beta readers hated my deeply-researched teachers' union meeting I put in a first draft. But it's good to do the research, then cut heavily!
Zac: The infrastructure drama could exist just like legal dramas do. Aramis, by Latour: an example.
Ruthanna: take notes on the plot bunnies not just the system. What will be coolest, what are the arguments, what will fail?
Emmet, from audience: Anne Conway's Material World is a great book, it traces the supply chains of six materials from production to use. Lots about corporate entities and how they work. Lots about lots of things. [Thank you Emmet, I have this book on order at the library as a result of rereading these notes.]
Delany
Eugene Fischer, Thomas Noriega, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Jo Walton (M), Lila Garrott
Discussion began with Thomas's unusual reading order, he went from Atheist in the Attic to Babel-17.
Lila: The third Neveryon book doesn't end up in lit classes on AIDS, but it's great.
Porn pacing is weird.
Patrick: horror, porn, and humor are the [body genres, is the term I've heard for this: Patrick said something I summarised as 'effect genres'] so can cross with anything easily.
Jo: snorts.
Lila (I think): The rap group 'clipping.' made a concept album of The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, the sequel Delany never wrote.
Joanna Russ's 'Feminist Utopias' essay made Triton make a big splash in the feminist utopia. [My note here makes weird use of the ditto sign but I think this is what I mean.] But Russ, with The Female Man, fell into transphobia that Delany in Triton had already thought his way around.
Jo: The Einstein Intersection doesn't have enough surface tension to hold me up.
[A cheerful sequence where everyone else on the panel who's read the book says that they also do not understand The Einstein Intersection but that they feel as though Delany is definitely doing something with it, and then audience members who've read it start raising their hands and there is a moment of hope that a solid theory will emerge but they describe feeling just the same way. The clearest stated theory was 'He is trying to do Dhalgren again in very few pages.']
Jo: EI is a drowning book. It's all stuff going on under the surface. There is no surface you can float on.
Lila: [Comment about the experience of reading Delany's close reading of Disch, The American Shore, after which I made the note: oh no I need to read The American Shore and it will be very hard.]
Jo: adaptation by clever people shows a thing in relief.
Someone from the audience said something about Goatsong, by Poul Anderson, a novel Jo loves that I have never heard of.
Poul read Jo's first novel and liked it on his literal deathbed.
Patrick [who had been saying little due to microphone trouble]: Chip is very unworldly. Floats through life.
[He said more about his connection to Delany, but sadly all I wrote down was 'Pat and Teresa and many poet mag' which at this distance, doesn't really speak its mind.]
Someone: Delany participates in cultures very different from the mainstream (gay kink) and this helps. [I think this was related to a thing Jo said about how without Delany she would have been in danger of thinking that her experience of the world was the default one.]
Eugene: Delany does middle close stream of consciousness, between the Joycean cascade of fragments and pulling back the curtain fully on how a mind is working. You're watching a mind sort of understand itself, and sort of not. [Illustrative examples from Triton.] [I have someone in recent memory talking about how weird Ulysses is in its fragmented stream of thoughts, because of how much less it gives you than any actual stream of thoughts would, since thoughts always come with their own context and Joyce strips that away. This could equally likely be Eugene talking on this panel, or someone I read on the internet in the last three months.]
Lila: D.H. Lawrence came up with this middle stream of consciousness, says Delany in The American Shore.
Then after lunch, an outdoor noodle experience, I went to Lila Garrott interviewing Sherwood Smith.
I did not take notes for this. Partly this is because Sherwood told some personal memories which she would already have put online if she wanted them there. But then I was simply too slow a writer to take any kind of useful notes while also being present in the stories she was telling. I will only say that Lila's last question to Sherwood was "Have you ever considered writing an autobiography?" and I will not argue with any of the good reasons she said she wouldn't, except for the last one, which was that it would just be Hollywood gossip and no one would be interested in reading it. I think I am not the one one in that rapt audience who was sitting there thinking "I would be interested in reading it!"
Discovering Forgotten Writers
Rich Horton, Jo Walton (M), Lila Garrott, Sherwood Smith, Mal Frazier.
This panel more or less divided into comments on who and what gets lost, how the panelists found them again, and lists of the best obscure books they'd found. I'm afraid my notes consist mainly of scribbling down titles of things without the pitches for why they're interesting, but at least here are a lot of books endorsed by an interesting list of readers!
Lila: The adjacent-to-genre is often lost (Sylvia Townsend Warner, queer and s.f.-ish.)
Jo: Sumner Locke Elliott, my favourite lost queer writer, 2 s.f.-ish novels and the rest were mainstream. The Man Who Got Away.
Mal: Arsene Lupin, massively popular so I feel weird calling it lost, but it was fully stolen by Japan because it felt obscure enough that no one bothered about copyright.
Sherwood: Memoirs of Madame Junot. Napoleonic.
Jo: Lin Carter's pre-Tolkien weirdo books, where he went around trying to fill the appetite for Tolkien by finding the existing fantasy novels that people had lying around unpublished in trunks.
Mal: Tor Essentials is Patrick's baby, it's great. The not-yet-canonized modern classics hitherto seen only on shoddy paper. The Fortunate Fall is one of those. (Cameron Reed's next book is a response to The Left Hand of Darkness set in the high desert.)
Jo and Sherwood together: recommending Una Silberrad's The Good Comrade.
Rich: most Victoria writers with big, now mostly unread bibliographies wrote maybe one s.f. novel. Silberrad had The Affairs of John Bolsover. Bulwer Lytton had The Coming Race, about the oncoming phase of human evolution, and whose invented form of energy, vril, was widely known for a while and found its way into the brand name Bovril ('bovine power'.) [Other people must feel about Marmite the way I feel when I google Bovril.] It was sadly not a good book.
Sherwood: Lytton's first book, Pelham, is great.
A conversation about obscure books being found and scanned into Gutenberg.
Lila: Publishers Weekly does review these scanned books, it's a good place to find out about them.
Jo: Holiday home rentals always have a little slew of washed-up books. If there's a fiction hardcover where I haven't heard of the writer, I read it. This is how I found Ernest Jones's Second-hand Wife, which is surprisingly good: a hundred year old bestseller.
Sherwood: the bestseller lists of a hundred years ago are a good source in general.
Jo: Wikipedia has the American ones!
Another rec: Catherine Grace Gore's Pin-money. Very funny, Austen-influenced.
Jo: Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Home-maker. These bestsellers vanish.
Lila: The Plague and I, by Betty Macdonald: the last work I've found by someone cured of TB in a sanatorium, before penicillin came in.
Mal: All books fade. Sometimes you read a great book that will hit, like Dorley Hall. Other times they don't hit the culture. Even Dorley isn't selling that well.
Jo: You see books so innovative they get copied until everything interesting about them is evenly distributed, or you get books that hit the zeitgeist. My Among Others was odd at the time and has since become totally ordinary.
Mal: My generation had Borges and magic realism.
Pitch from audience: William M. Lee's A Message from Charity and Sea Home.
Rich: Tisab Ting, or The Electrical Kiss. First female Canadian S.F. writer. [Google has this as by Fergus, no full name. In the panel I got confused and made the note 'by Zap Ting?'] [See comments: Ida May Ferguson! Thank you
kore!] A bad book, but of historical interest. Vicki, from audience: The longrunning 'Backlisted' podcast is about books like these. Also a recommendation: Dark Hester by Anne Douglas Sedgwick.
Rich: the blog 'Furrowed Middlebrow' is also goof for ebooks of these.
I think someone in the audience asked for help locating a book called Proud Man, and someone found it on Gateway under Mary Constantine. [Correction from comments: I misheard this. It was written by Katharine Burdekin as Murray Constantine.]
Why We Need Hopepunk More Than Ever
Ada Palmer (M), Ruthanna Emrys, William Alexander, Naomi Kritzer, Su Sokol
Few notes on this one. I was running on fumes by this point in the day, and should probably have gone to Greer Gilman's reading instead, since I feel like I have been in perhaps sufficient conversations for the moment about the value of hope and what Hopepunk is or isn't. But what notes I did make:
Someone recommended C. Thi Nguyen's Games - Agency As Art, which has been on my radar as a thing I should read.
People discussed the mechanics of the game Daybreak, how they separate 'world region' from 'government now in power in that region,' systematising the fact that a leader cannot in fact turn off all ecological efforts unilaterally.
William: it's important not to be Denethor.
Someone: preppers have a narrative of 'I will be the protagonist of my own life once the apocalypse comes.' And when Covid came, and they found a disaster not actually working like that, they were hoovered up by fascists in droves, who provided another version of the narrative they wanted and an explanation for why the first apocalypse had failed them.
Ruthanna: Shin Godzilla is a film about disaster response working. It's about successfully planning for Godzilla attacks.
And that was paneling! Raffle followed it. The table had been building up all weekend with beautiful and interesting things, and each winning ticket-holder could come up and choose something. I was minding someone else's tickets as well as my own, and while I turned out to be tired enough that comparing the called numbers against two lists of numbers instead of just one was like some imp's special project in hell, I was very pleased to get G. two of the things she most wanted! And she was taking me to the airport the next morning, which made for a very convenient exchange. Then there was low-key and restorative dinner, and enjoyable picnic, and that was Scintillation.
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Date: 2025-07-25 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-25 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-25 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-25 03:24 am (UTC)Thank you for the panel write-ups!
A couple of name correction: the rap group 'clicks' is clipping. (stylized lower-case with period) and Selma Locke Eliot is Sumner Locke Elliott.
Proud Man is by Katharine Burdekin as Murray Constantine,who is probably most famous for feminist anti-fascist dystopia Swastika Night.
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Date: 2025-07-25 03:36 am (UTC)Fixed, thank you. I did think I should perhaps have checked spelling on more names. [edited to add: this also prompts me to give Silberrad a first name and the correct number of rs.
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Date: 2025-07-25 02:48 pm (UTC)I have not read The Good Comrade yet, but Silberrad's novel Desire is really interesting.
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Date: 2025-07-26 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-25 04:07 am (UTC)Lol, maybe I got programmed by Delany to read it, bc I read his memoir before that one and he stresses how it's the Orpheus myth and how much he was into the poetry and the evolving event-garde of the mid to late sixties. So I happily read it, as a myth-ridden adolescent, as a reinterpretation of myths, probably missing about at least ten other levels, but Delany forcing you to level up like that is the great fun of reading him. I haven't reread it in a VERY long time tho.
Huh.
Backlisted is great! And Dorley Hall sounds amazing. I think Tisab Ting is referring to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tisab_Ting
No idea who Ida May Ferguson of New Brunswick AKA pseudonym Dyjan Ferg is, tho, which is sad, bc id love to know more. Furrowed Middlebrow is also great.
I think the panel was dead on the money about Joyce and SoC (tired fingers rn). Woolf and Jean Rhys both provide trains of thought that seen fragmented but have much more coherence and depth. The panels sound so fun and with lots of background!
....oof American Shore is hard going. It's even denser than most of his critical essays (as opposed to his more general nonfiction. Which is still pretty fucking dense). I think I managed five whole pages. Trying to gnaw through Jewel-Hinged Jaw as a teenager was an Experience.
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Date: 2025-07-25 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-26 02:02 am (UTC)Though, as with many of these writers I find singular and amazing, I haven't actually caught up with their back catalogues. Transported by him sometimes - but still never read Dhalgren.
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Date: 2025-07-26 01:58 am (UTC)I think the other thing Patrick said about Delany was how much he relied on a circle of friends looking out for him, but at that point I was paraphrasing enough not to record it confidently.
Dorley Hall is on my to-read list! In fact I would have started it yesterday if I knew where in the house my library copy had gone.
Jean Rhys was not really on my radar and now I am interested.
Adding in the name Ida May Ferguson, thank you!
I don't know if I ever do read American Shore. I don't think I could do it just as though I was reading a book. It would have to be a Project. With time and budget for supplemental reading. I read the Jewel-hinged Jaw, but part of what I learned was that I could skim over the top of some of his denser argument and still get things out of it. Somehow I think this would cause me to skim from one end of American Shore to the other if I tried it.
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Date: 2025-07-25 11:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-26 01:59 am (UTC)