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extrapenguin) wrote2017-08-17 09:07 pm
extrapenguin) wrote2017-08-17 09:07 pm
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Worldcon: Thursday
The early bird gets the worm, so I identified all the panels I Really Wanted to go to, then went to queue at least 40 minutes before they started. I mostly went to the science things, since I was at least partially there to get some writing mojo and inspiration, and also if I've already encountered an idea, re-encountering it later makes learning it then easier. Here are my notes on last Thursday beneath the cut. (Updated 18.8.)
Oh, and Worldcon has put up videos of some of the panels, plus the opening ceremonies.
10: In Defense of the Unlikeable Heroine (Thoraiya Dyer, Caroline Hooton, Kameron Hurley, Alex Acks, Neil Williamson)
There is a double standard of unlikeability: female characters are judged much more harshly for the same acts than male characters. Also, male characters are expected to be compelling; female characters must be likeable. (Occasionally, some of the compellingness comes from unlikeability.)
Often unlikeability is "compensated for" by making the female character hot and thus softening her for a male audience.
(Side note: I couldn't make out what Neil Williamson was saying at all. He was bad at talking into the microphone.)
Readers tend to cast characters to look like they would on TV, apparently, so even if a female character is described as homely, she'll be interpreted as a pretty.
Lots of female characters who are just being themselves are seen as unlikeable. Additionally, is the ability to be oneself whilst female a power fantasy?
Being beautiful allows actresses to play ice queens, unlikeable characters, and add realness.
(at 10:20 I left for the next room's queue)
11: Engineering in Fantasy & SF (Fran Wilde, Alan Stewart, Tan Gang, Kathleen Ann Goonan)
Engineering is invisible and thus often ignored
Sufficiently advanced engineering = magic, and thus disbelief is unsuspended.
The most common form of engineering is transport engineering.
The essence of sci-fi is pinned by verisimilitude
The perhaps most ignored form of engineering is sewer systems (and maintenance). Engineering is also
"Engineering is the way that science interacts with the world" –Fran Wilde
Magical engineering is also underrepresented! Magical engineering needs standards. Nautical fantasy does the most with this?
"Hold my beer, I wanna build this" –Fran Wilde on the essence of engineers (this one has my engineer's seal of approval)
Writing about the failure states of engineering is much more common in fantasy than science fiction
Engineering = iterative steps & failures towards the truth, and this process is not really represented.
(basically I have a huge crush on Fran Wilde, okay)
Currently, science fiction is in the "Space: we're already there!" state, which leaves fantasy as the literature of "getting there".
Hiding engineering in fantasy
The fantasy of waving a wand (vs years and years of study) is very appealing to engineering majors – trouble is, the wand is the years and years of study!
Quite often, the worldbuilding is such that the world is, well, built at the start already and there's no technical problem to solve
Engineering is collaborative, like science, and this is often forgotten
SF involves itself in the real world: how can it be changed? (And the fact that SF can be difficult to get into can, actually, be good – since if it were easy to get into, it wouldn't deal with the tough things.)
Many books are built on the ruins of the past because readers want to feel one step ahead of the characters. Even in disasters, some things last – traditions etc. Society is always made of layers, building one thing atop another.
At one point, SF was very much about near-future engineering, then it went out of fashion (60s new wave of feelings-centric authors, space race), now it's coming back into fashion – but as far-future engineering.
Mentioned/recommended books: The Goblin Emperor (Katherine Addison), The Man Who Bridged the Mist (Johnson), Ninefox Gambit (Yoon-ha Lee), Anathem (Stephenson)
12-14: Food, browsing the stores, faffing around
14: I went to Fran Wilde's signing session to chat with her EVEN MORE about engineering! And translated a text message for Karen Lorde, our Toastmistress. (It was a "ty for using our services" message, but hey, I was useful!)
15: Military SF by Women Authors (Jean Johnson, SJ Groenenwegen BEM, Walter John Williams)
In the 10-15 minutes it took for me to arrive, they ran out of examples and had moved on to MilSF in general.
One of the joys of MilSF is the tech and its use.
MilSF's greatest flaw is that it's very, very often the American Military In SPACE – topdown and centralized.
"If you can have your climax take place in the middle of a colossal volcanic eruption, why wouldn't you?"
The aftermath of war is underexplored (and perhaps not traditional MilSF, unless exploring the aftermath of War A when War B starts, or doing the afterbattles of War A)
"I cannot do everything" is a rare message from the protagonists given great power and responsibility in MilSF
Doing research and listening is as good as serving in the military
Recs were wanted for stuff where women are part of the occupying force. The only rec given was Saga, which IMO wouldn't quite fit the bill. Please take note of the underexplored market corner!
Recs given: The Stars are Legion, Ninefox Gambit, Praxis. (The first two were recced ludicrously often during the week, and I've given in and ordered them from Amazon now.)
17: Tech Questions You Can't Ask (Joe Haldeman, Daniel Dern, TJ Berg, Ian Stewart)
Stuff that can't be asked vs stuff that shouldn't?
In response to "what if we gave everyone the education to do something bad": "Anyone who could learn to do that, wouldn't" –Daniel Dern.
Bad things typically are the consequences of actions oriented in different directions, rather than direct desires. Consequence-oriented vs decision-oriented worldview (Joe Haldeman)
The list was very America-centric...
Child sex robots for pedophiles encourage societal permission & thus affect society.
Discomfort with asking uncomfortable questions means less benefit to society
With limited resources, what healthcare should be available and to whom?
The Anarchist's Cookbook is a false flag operation by an US multi-letter agency. Many/all of the instructions are wrong in such a way that would kill the user.
Carelessness vs malice – "the price of carelessness keeps going up" –Daniel Dern
"Do you do a cost-benefit analysis of health?" –Joe Haldeman
"Who is allowed to change the structure of society, to the benefit of whom?" –Joe Haldeman
Is it ethical to sacrifice a large number of people for a greater good? – cf the Salk polio vaccine
19: What Science Can Tell Us About Alien Minds (Robert Biegler)
Works that deal with this are thin on the ground: The Scapegoat (Cherryh), Blindsight (Peter Watts), Solaris, Glory Season (David Brin). Everything else is humans + latex, using aliens to reflect on humanity some way.
Do aliens have minds or are they merely philosophical zombies?
If minds are what brains do, and we have similar brains, do we have similar experiences?
Damacio: Combine two first-order maps (e.g. body temp, sensory nerves) into a second-order map – is that then a mind?
Alternatively, the mind is in the midbrain – ability to integrate other stuff into a sense of self in space = mind?
Crows have a narrative self, so the narrative self must've evolved twice independently, so it's easy to evolve.
Life on Mars probably has similar origins to life on Earth, due to asteroid exchange, so life on Mars would be a more boring discovery than, say, life on Europa.
Mind: nociception vs pain? (Pain is experienced frex if an injured animal takes offered painkillers or favors the injured side.) Of the arthropods, crabs feel pain, but insects don't. However, insects have a "core self" of the second-order map, so, something gives.
Eric Schwitzgebel: "If materialism is true, the US is probably conscious."
If an Alzheimer's patient replaces all their dead neurons with well-trained demons, does that person lose their sense of self? What if the demons want to play a prank and give the patient an uncontrolled sexual desire towards a cactus?
The brain ticks via patterns of connections and activation
Hive minds aren't here, because the bees and fish in hives and swarms don't communicate. The units are interchangeable, unlike neurons.
The food supply affects the social group, which affects the social forms of violence, which is why chimps, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutangs have such different social structures and different expressions of violence. See also: fission-fusion society, caused by unreliable food supplies, which causes a certain type of violence. Chimps have such a society, humans don't. Using the bonobos as an example, a peaceful great ape society could be produced by 3 million years of feminism and lots of gay sex. (I'm in!)
Altruism is very much explicable from an evolutionary perspective. Direct reciprocity: emotion can help achieve, but also can be achieved via calculation. The longterm benefits of direct reciprocity evolve via others knowing of others' reputations.
The benefits of cheating are short-term. Humans' discounting functions (essentially, "100€ in the future or X € now; which do you choose?" and the point where X € now is chosen equally as often as the 100€, plotted vs the delay in getting the 100€) are really kinda terribly biased for instant payoffs, and steeper than is "good"/"optimal", so an emotional commitment to honesty is a patch on that.
We do ratio comparisons (essentially, 2€ vs 5€ is not an equivalent comparison to 1002€ vs 1005€) because we have logarithmic perceptions of time etc.
Aliens probably have emotions we can't understand.
Oh, and Worldcon has put up videos of some of the panels, plus the opening ceremonies.
10: In Defense of the Unlikeable Heroine (Thoraiya Dyer, Caroline Hooton, Kameron Hurley, Alex Acks, Neil Williamson)
There is a double standard of unlikeability: female characters are judged much more harshly for the same acts than male characters. Also, male characters are expected to be compelling; female characters must be likeable. (Occasionally, some of the compellingness comes from unlikeability.)
Often unlikeability is "compensated for" by making the female character hot and thus softening her for a male audience.
(Side note: I couldn't make out what Neil Williamson was saying at all. He was bad at talking into the microphone.)
Readers tend to cast characters to look like they would on TV, apparently, so even if a female character is described as homely, she'll be interpreted as a pretty.
Lots of female characters who are just being themselves are seen as unlikeable. Additionally, is the ability to be oneself whilst female a power fantasy?
Being beautiful allows actresses to play ice queens, unlikeable characters, and add realness.
(at 10:20 I left for the next room's queue)
11: Engineering in Fantasy & SF (Fran Wilde, Alan Stewart, Tan Gang, Kathleen Ann Goonan)
Engineering is invisible and thus often ignored
Sufficiently advanced engineering = magic, and thus disbelief is unsuspended.
The most common form of engineering is transport engineering.
The essence of sci-fi is pinned by verisimilitude
The perhaps most ignored form of engineering is sewer systems (and maintenance). Engineering is also
"Engineering is the way that science interacts with the world" –Fran Wilde
Magical engineering is also underrepresented! Magical engineering needs standards. Nautical fantasy does the most with this?
"Hold my beer, I wanna build this" –Fran Wilde on the essence of engineers (this one has my engineer's seal of approval)
Writing about the failure states of engineering is much more common in fantasy than science fiction
Engineering = iterative steps & failures towards the truth, and this process is not really represented.
(basically I have a huge crush on Fran Wilde, okay)
Currently, science fiction is in the "Space: we're already there!" state, which leaves fantasy as the literature of "getting there".
Hiding engineering in fantasy
The fantasy of waving a wand (vs years and years of study) is very appealing to engineering majors – trouble is, the wand is the years and years of study!
Quite often, the worldbuilding is such that the world is, well, built at the start already and there's no technical problem to solve
Engineering is collaborative, like science, and this is often forgotten
SF involves itself in the real world: how can it be changed? (And the fact that SF can be difficult to get into can, actually, be good – since if it were easy to get into, it wouldn't deal with the tough things.)
Many books are built on the ruins of the past because readers want to feel one step ahead of the characters. Even in disasters, some things last – traditions etc. Society is always made of layers, building one thing atop another.
At one point, SF was very much about near-future engineering, then it went out of fashion (60s new wave of feelings-centric authors, space race), now it's coming back into fashion – but as far-future engineering.
Mentioned/recommended books: The Goblin Emperor (Katherine Addison), The Man Who Bridged the Mist (Johnson), Ninefox Gambit (Yoon-ha Lee), Anathem (Stephenson)
12-14: Food, browsing the stores, faffing around
14: I went to Fran Wilde's signing session to chat with her EVEN MORE about engineering! And translated a text message for Karen Lorde, our Toastmistress. (It was a "ty for using our services" message, but hey, I was useful!)
15: Military SF by Women Authors (Jean Johnson, SJ Groenenwegen BEM, Walter John Williams)
In the 10-15 minutes it took for me to arrive, they ran out of examples and had moved on to MilSF in general.
One of the joys of MilSF is the tech and its use.
MilSF's greatest flaw is that it's very, very often the American Military In SPACE – topdown and centralized.
"If you can have your climax take place in the middle of a colossal volcanic eruption, why wouldn't you?"
The aftermath of war is underexplored (and perhaps not traditional MilSF, unless exploring the aftermath of War A when War B starts, or doing the afterbattles of War A)
"I cannot do everything" is a rare message from the protagonists given great power and responsibility in MilSF
Doing research and listening is as good as serving in the military
Recs were wanted for stuff where women are part of the occupying force. The only rec given was Saga, which IMO wouldn't quite fit the bill. Please take note of the underexplored market corner!
Recs given: The Stars are Legion, Ninefox Gambit, Praxis. (The first two were recced ludicrously often during the week, and I've given in and ordered them from Amazon now.)
17: Tech Questions You Can't Ask (Joe Haldeman, Daniel Dern, TJ Berg, Ian Stewart)
Stuff that can't be asked vs stuff that shouldn't?
In response to "what if we gave everyone the education to do something bad": "Anyone who could learn to do that, wouldn't" –Daniel Dern.
Bad things typically are the consequences of actions oriented in different directions, rather than direct desires. Consequence-oriented vs decision-oriented worldview (Joe Haldeman)
The list was very America-centric...
Child sex robots for pedophiles encourage societal permission & thus affect society.
Discomfort with asking uncomfortable questions means less benefit to society
With limited resources, what healthcare should be available and to whom?
The Anarchist's Cookbook is a false flag operation by an US multi-letter agency. Many/all of the instructions are wrong in such a way that would kill the user.
Carelessness vs malice – "the price of carelessness keeps going up" –Daniel Dern
"Do you do a cost-benefit analysis of health?" –Joe Haldeman
"Who is allowed to change the structure of society, to the benefit of whom?" –Joe Haldeman
Is it ethical to sacrifice a large number of people for a greater good? – cf the Salk polio vaccine
19: What Science Can Tell Us About Alien Minds (Robert Biegler)
Works that deal with this are thin on the ground: The Scapegoat (Cherryh), Blindsight (Peter Watts), Solaris, Glory Season (David Brin). Everything else is humans + latex, using aliens to reflect on humanity some way.
Do aliens have minds or are they merely philosophical zombies?
If minds are what brains do, and we have similar brains, do we have similar experiences?
Damacio: Combine two first-order maps (e.g. body temp, sensory nerves) into a second-order map – is that then a mind?
Alternatively, the mind is in the midbrain – ability to integrate other stuff into a sense of self in space = mind?
Crows have a narrative self, so the narrative self must've evolved twice independently, so it's easy to evolve.
Life on Mars probably has similar origins to life on Earth, due to asteroid exchange, so life on Mars would be a more boring discovery than, say, life on Europa.
Mind: nociception vs pain? (Pain is experienced frex if an injured animal takes offered painkillers or favors the injured side.) Of the arthropods, crabs feel pain, but insects don't. However, insects have a "core self" of the second-order map, so, something gives.
Eric Schwitzgebel: "If materialism is true, the US is probably conscious."
If an Alzheimer's patient replaces all their dead neurons with well-trained demons, does that person lose their sense of self? What if the demons want to play a prank and give the patient an uncontrolled sexual desire towards a cactus?
The brain ticks via patterns of connections and activation
Hive minds aren't here, because the bees and fish in hives and swarms don't communicate. The units are interchangeable, unlike neurons.
The food supply affects the social group, which affects the social forms of violence, which is why chimps, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutangs have such different social structures and different expressions of violence. See also: fission-fusion society, caused by unreliable food supplies, which causes a certain type of violence. Chimps have such a society, humans don't. Using the bonobos as an example, a peaceful great ape society could be produced by 3 million years of feminism and lots of gay sex. (I'm in!)
Altruism is very much explicable from an evolutionary perspective. Direct reciprocity: emotion can help achieve, but also can be achieved via calculation. The longterm benefits of direct reciprocity evolve via others knowing of others' reputations.
The benefits of cheating are short-term. Humans' discounting functions (essentially, "100€ in the future or X € now; which do you choose?" and the point where X € now is chosen equally as often as the 100€, plotted vs the delay in getting the 100€) are really kinda terribly biased for instant payoffs, and steeper than is "good"/"optimal", so an emotional commitment to honesty is a patch on that.
We do ratio comparisons (essentially, 2€ vs 5€ is not an equivalent comparison to 1002€ vs 1005€) because we have logarithmic perceptions of time etc.
Aliens probably have emotions we can't understand.
no subject
I hope you enjoy Ninefox Gambit -- it's been one of my favorite books this year, and I can't wait for the third of the trilogy (sadly, no pub date yet...)
no subject
Ninefox Gambit, along with a stack of books including Fran Wilde's Updraft, should be arriving at my doorstep by 18. September. It and Stars Are Legion have been recced at me prior to Worldcon by friends and acquaintances, so, uh, I suppose I'll start with one of those, and then move on to the other books in the pile.