Worldcon: Panels
I was on thirteen program items, which is a lot.

Some people said that some people were over-programmed, and others under-used, but I thought the program was terrific. I didn't manage to get to any of it except what I was on -- I tried, but the one time I tried, Greer Gilman and I tried to go to malkingrey's Anglo-Saxon item only to find that Debra had thought it was a panel, not a talk, and drafted us to be panel. I managed to talk about the Saxon elegaic fairly coherently, but I didn't dare risk any more after that.

I didn't take any notes and I'm not going to attempt to write proper reports, these are just some things I want to remember.


There were three things which I thought and said on panels which I want to maybe write about more coherently. The first was on the Princess panel where I talked about the weight and momentum story has. fairmer has a really good report on this panel here.

Story is a force of nature and when you try to take it somewhere it doesn't naturally want to go, momentum is against you. I know this and I need to remember it, this is what caused my main-plot balance problem in T&C. (Writing about Sher and Selendra was much easier because that's the channel the story expected to take.)

On the Fantasy of Manners panel, of which lots of people have good detailed reports, I talked about the way story is often in the cracks -- I meant between social expectations or one code and another coming into conflict. The more I think about this, the more I think this is part of how I "plot", I find the cracks in the social structures (or the physical constraints for that matter) and story just emerges from the fact they're there. If you tell me about a world where everyone has six parents, my immediate thought is what it would be like to be an orphan there, that sort of thing. When I'm starting something, it's the cracks I'm looking at.

In my dialogue with Michael Swanwick, which other people seem to have enjoyed, and which was very interesting when we were talking in detail about Hope Mirlees (who was a close friend of T.S. Eliot -- who knew? Can you imagine him reading Lud in the Mist?) we were talking about the undefended frontier between SF and F, where Anderson's "The Queen of Air and Darkness" and "Semley's Necklace" are. We also talked about how SF tends to be embarrassing when it approaches the numinous, whereas that's what Fantasy is trying to do, and can do well. He thinks Stations of the Tide is fantasy and The Iron Dragon's Daughter is SF -- and people think I'm weird because I don't think T&C is entirely FoM! I need to think more about that undefended frontier, because the other one is heavily defended with giant robots on one side and wizards on the other.

I cited quite a few of you on panels, I quoted coffeeandink on the FoM panel, and calanthe_b on the Gods one, and truepenny several times.

On the Gods panel, which was packed, with all the superstars appearing on it, I was interested to see that everyone else except Lois Bujold seemed to see having gods in the text, gods as characters, as opposed to part of religion, as far more of a problem than I do. I don't know why this is. Nine and sixty ways, I suppose.

The character panel went better than I was expecting, mainly because the moderator was much happier with answers like "Lots" to the question "How many characters are in your story" than I was expecting. I tried not to admit to anything like hearing them talk in my head.

The rejection letter panel went well, though it was really a reprise of Teresa's Slushkiller thread.

I was on two Tolkien panels, one at the beginning and one near the end. The first one included a guy called Daniel Grotta, who thought Tolkien was a manichean. I don't often get to say "balderdash". I was very good and resisted all little jhereg voices asking if we could kill him, now, boss... when it came to the summing up, I said "Let Daniel go first, so I can just disagree with him", but it was all very civilized really. The other one was when we were all tired and a little silly, but went quite well anyway. The interesting point was that in order to have real loss, real grief, you need real joy too. I think this is why I don't like Donaldson -- and the reverse is why I don't like, don't read, a lot of fantasy.

My reading was terrific, everyone liked it, the timing was right, there were quite a lot of people -- I didn't count, but the room was quite well filled -- the questions were intelligent and nobody demanded more dragons instead. I read chapter 2 of Farthing, now tentatively scheduled for the end of 2005.

My kaffeeklatch only had three people, though they were all interesting so it didn't matter. Next time, I don't think I'll bother. When another author was telling me he only had five people for his reading, I consoled him with my three for kaffeeklatch story and he said "But one of the five at my reading fell asleep!"