Potlatch panels
Mar. 14th, 2007 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacwere good this year: topics with moral and critical juice to them that were not purely political. I attended four of the six. Full write-ups should be appearing on the convention site later; these are my impressions.
1) Ursula K. Le Guin gathered a group of women together to talk about subversive fiction. UKL herself was primarily interested in excluding (unnamed) authors who claim they're being oh so daringly subversive but in fact are beating over issues that were settled decades or a century ago. Her ideal subversive writers are people like Solzhenitsyn and Zamiatin (whom she did name), who could have - and in some cases did - go to prison for their work.
Others said such writers are more revolutionary than subversive, that subversion has to be under the radar, eating away from beneath the reader's expectations. But maybe the subversion can be so far underneath readerly awareness that it's beneath the writer's awareness too. So what about work that subverts without the author's intent? Uncertainty as to whether that qualified as subversive fiction.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spacecrab from the audience said that UKL's own later Earthsea and Hainish fiction subverted her earlier work in those settings. UKL: "I would just call it growing up."
Eileen Gunn asked what happens when everything has been subverted. Others seemed to find this question rather naive; UKL had in fact provided an answer earlier when she pointed out that subversion is not necessarily good: GWB is very subversive of the Constitution, international law, etc. I'd draw the conclusion that no matter what well-founded conclusion society may come to on some matter, someone will want to overturn it and go back to the bad old days. Bush and Cheney want to go back to the Imperial Presidency. So maybe even that is not as settled an issue as we all thought three decades ago.
2)wild_irises led a session on ethical issues in SF. Her panelists looked as if they'd be happier contemplating this topic in solitude for a few hours and writing carefully considered e-mails or blog posts rather than sitting in front of an audience in real time, forced to say something right now. Ethics was defined as "behavioral choices based on moral beliefs," and the ethics of both writing and reading were considered. On the latter a most interesting point was made, cautioning readers against blaming the author for giving them pain.
And yet, and yet ... however often authors say, "I am not my characters," at the same time there are stories which do try to commmunicate the author's ethical and moral beliefs, and can readers be blamed if they can't always tell the difference from stories in which the author is just trying to depict unethical behavior without explicitly denouncing it? I brought up Mike Resnick's "Kirinyaga", a portrait of self-righteous wilfulness leading to pretty objectionable ends. The story is actually a set-up, but the later installments in which the protagonist gets his comeuppance weren't published until years later. I wasn't fooled by it, but I don't think Resnick saying "I am not Koriba," or critics saying "Don't judge the story until the whole thing is published," are sufficient answer to those who were.
One objection made: to stories which depict characters getting unearned rewards.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
alanbostick from the audience protested this: he's had many unearned rewards in his life; is all that to be excluded from fiction? UKL (from audience): "You are not a book." Elaboration from others: nothing's wrong with depicting characters with unearned rewards (you can write about them grappling with this, for instance), just don't make their very acquisition the moral of the story. Fiction is selection and shaping of reality, and this is only one example.
In the same connectionspacecrab from the audience brought up the existence of stories which claim to be illustrating universal ethical principles but in fact are describing highly implausible specific conditions with no exterior lessons. Unfortunately, instead of illustrating this by citing didactic "If X then Y" Campbellian SF like "The Cold Equations", he torpedoed his own point by denouncing his regular bete noire Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and as usual completely misreading the show's ethical content.
3) The humor in SF panel rambled a bit - I didn't take any notes - but seemed to me to keep an excellent balance between itself being humorous and talking seriously about humor. One reader's hilarious is another's stone-faced, that's for sure.
4) The Sheckley panel, which I was on. I'd rather talk about his short stories than than his novels, as I find them much better. Damon Knight* said Sheckley was (especially in his early work) a "one-punch" writer, whose stories are very short and are designed to make just one point. Unlike Knight, I find this to be Sheckley's strength: to make his point briefly, he can set up simplistic or implausible situations that couldn't be sustained at novel length; and the points are strong enough that they tend to conflict when yoked together in a novel. Dimension of Miracles has some wonderful individual scenes, but reading a series of solipsistic entities yakking away loses its savor, and the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Re-reading Sheckley for the panel, I found his most striking feature to be his conscious mastery of cliche. He can make them roll over and do amusing tricks, especially cliches about male-female romantic relations, as in "Pilgrimage to Earth" (about a naive man seeking Romantic Love with capital letters) or "The People Trap" (a completely florid Thirties-style pulp romantic adventure story made wry by being set in a bleak hopeless future). These stories were written in the 1950s with a Fifties sensibility and viewpoint; can they still be read from that viewpoint today? What about "Seventh Victim", whose surprise depends on readers falling for a now-abandoned cliche? Audience to me: Sure, reading "Seventh Victim" for the first time today we can see the surprise coming, but it's still a good story. Me: Well, that makes sense, because I find Sheckley's stories quite re-readable; the joy is not in being surprised by the ending, but in watching the author's elegant way of setting it up.
And Sheckley doesn't pall because many of his stories aren't shockers anyway. There are completely upbeat, cheerful stories like "Specialist" (the one about the spaceship made of living creatures that form its walls, engine, etc.): the conceit couldn't be maintained at novel length, and the role of humans in the spaceship isn't credible, but for a short enough story this doesn't matter. It's a delightful little story and is Robert Conquest's favorite Sheckley.
*not in person (posthumously) on the panel, but in his 1950s reviews collected in In Search of Wonder, one of the first books you should turn to for discussion of 1940s-50s SF, along with James Blish's Issue at Hand volumes.
1) Ursula K. Le Guin gathered a group of women together to talk about subversive fiction. UKL herself was primarily interested in excluding (unnamed) authors who claim they're being oh so daringly subversive but in fact are beating over issues that were settled decades or a century ago. Her ideal subversive writers are people like Solzhenitsyn and Zamiatin (whom she did name), who could have - and in some cases did - go to prison for their work.
Others said such writers are more revolutionary than subversive, that subversion has to be under the radar, eating away from beneath the reader's expectations. But maybe the subversion can be so far underneath readerly awareness that it's beneath the writer's awareness too. So what about work that subverts without the author's intent? Uncertainty as to whether that qualified as subversive fiction.
spacecrab from the audience said that UKL's own later Earthsea and Hainish fiction subverted her earlier work in those settings. UKL: "I would just call it growing up."Eileen Gunn asked what happens when everything has been subverted. Others seemed to find this question rather naive; UKL had in fact provided an answer earlier when she pointed out that subversion is not necessarily good: GWB is very subversive of the Constitution, international law, etc. I'd draw the conclusion that no matter what well-founded conclusion society may come to on some matter, someone will want to overturn it and go back to the bad old days. Bush and Cheney want to go back to the Imperial Presidency. So maybe even that is not as settled an issue as we all thought three decades ago.
2)
wild_irises led a session on ethical issues in SF. Her panelists looked as if they'd be happier contemplating this topic in solitude for a few hours and writing carefully considered e-mails or blog posts rather than sitting in front of an audience in real time, forced to say something right now. Ethics was defined as "behavioral choices based on moral beliefs," and the ethics of both writing and reading were considered. On the latter a most interesting point was made, cautioning readers against blaming the author for giving them pain.And yet, and yet ... however often authors say, "I am not my characters," at the same time there are stories which do try to commmunicate the author's ethical and moral beliefs, and can readers be blamed if they can't always tell the difference from stories in which the author is just trying to depict unethical behavior without explicitly denouncing it? I brought up Mike Resnick's "Kirinyaga", a portrait of self-righteous wilfulness leading to pretty objectionable ends. The story is actually a set-up, but the later installments in which the protagonist gets his comeuppance weren't published until years later. I wasn't fooled by it, but I don't think Resnick saying "I am not Koriba," or critics saying "Don't judge the story until the whole thing is published," are sufficient answer to those who were.
One objection made: to stories which depict characters getting unearned rewards.
alanbostick from the audience protested this: he's had many unearned rewards in his life; is all that to be excluded from fiction? UKL (from audience): "You are not a book." Elaboration from others: nothing's wrong with depicting characters with unearned rewards (you can write about them grappling with this, for instance), just don't make their very acquisition the moral of the story. Fiction is selection and shaping of reality, and this is only one example.In the same connection
spacecrab from the audience brought up the existence of stories which claim to be illustrating universal ethical principles but in fact are describing highly implausible specific conditions with no exterior lessons. Unfortunately, instead of illustrating this by citing didactic "If X then Y" Campbellian SF like "The Cold Equations", he torpedoed his own point by denouncing his regular bete noire Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and as usual completely misreading the show's ethical content.3) The humor in SF panel rambled a bit - I didn't take any notes - but seemed to me to keep an excellent balance between itself being humorous and talking seriously about humor. One reader's hilarious is another's stone-faced, that's for sure.
4) The Sheckley panel, which I was on. I'd rather talk about his short stories than than his novels, as I find them much better. Damon Knight* said Sheckley was (especially in his early work) a "one-punch" writer, whose stories are very short and are designed to make just one point. Unlike Knight, I find this to be Sheckley's strength: to make his point briefly, he can set up simplistic or implausible situations that couldn't be sustained at novel length; and the points are strong enough that they tend to conflict when yoked together in a novel. Dimension of Miracles has some wonderful individual scenes, but reading a series of solipsistic entities yakking away loses its savor, and the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Re-reading Sheckley for the panel, I found his most striking feature to be his conscious mastery of cliche. He can make them roll over and do amusing tricks, especially cliches about male-female romantic relations, as in "Pilgrimage to Earth" (about a naive man seeking Romantic Love with capital letters) or "The People Trap" (a completely florid Thirties-style pulp romantic adventure story made wry by being set in a bleak hopeless future). These stories were written in the 1950s with a Fifties sensibility and viewpoint; can they still be read from that viewpoint today? What about "Seventh Victim", whose surprise depends on readers falling for a now-abandoned cliche? Audience to me: Sure, reading "Seventh Victim" for the first time today we can see the surprise coming, but it's still a good story. Me: Well, that makes sense, because I find Sheckley's stories quite re-readable; the joy is not in being surprised by the ending, but in watching the author's elegant way of setting it up.
And Sheckley doesn't pall because many of his stories aren't shockers anyway. There are completely upbeat, cheerful stories like "Specialist" (the one about the spaceship made of living creatures that form its walls, engine, etc.): the conceit couldn't be maintained at novel length, and the role of humans in the spaceship isn't credible, but for a short enough story this doesn't matter. It's a delightful little story and is Robert Conquest's favorite Sheckley.
*not in person (posthumously) on the panel, but in his 1950s reviews collected in In Search of Wonder, one of the first books you should turn to for discussion of 1940s-50s SF, along with James Blish's Issue at Hand volumes.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-15 04:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-15 05:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-15 06:51 am (UTC)>Vampire Slayer, and as usual completely misreading the show's ethical
>content
Your opinion. My opinion, still, is that some BTVS episodes suggest choices made by protagonists are reasonable or "righteous" -- when the choices are only "righteous" in the context of the rigged universe created by the scriptwriters. In the example I cited at the panel, I made the point that it's no wonder Buffy preferred jumping out a window to fight monsters to taking a school test. Her school and her world are hell, all the teachers are clueless or evil (excepting Jenny Calendar, diehard fans always point out). The reply to this from another audience member was that Buffy later had to pay for her decision to jump out the window. Her choice had consequences, therefore the writers were playing fair and showing how the world really works.
My feeling is that the Buffy writers often glamorized impulsive actions that are kind of unglamorous in the world we actually live in. Mileage varies. Some fans may argue that "seemingly glamorous" actions of Buffy protagonists (things we think about doing in our world and discard as wrong or unwise) are later shown to be sordid or unwise in the Buffy world, too. My feeling is that the Buffyverse is rigged to make some unwise (and immoral) actions look like they make sense. Some viewers see through this and consider the distortion to be a deliberate, artful component of the show. I feel like the writers are trying to jerk me around. I don't enjoy seeing moral dilemmas distorted in the Buffyverse to make impulsive responses look more attractive or reasonable than they actually are in the real world.
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Date: 2007-03-15 07:44 am (UTC)The claim that Buffy's actions are depicted as unqualifiably "righteous" is completely alien to the show as it actually exists. I'm speaking in general here, and of the conflicts Buffy faces at the time, not of the later consequences of a particular action. In the high-school seasons, Buffy is constantly torn between her schooling, her personal life and family, and her slaying, and nothing is the one and only right thing to do. That is what makes the artificial situation feel real, because it could be anybody facing any kind of real-life conflict. The kind of viewer-goosing "I know this is wrong, but it feels so good, and it's really the right thing" that so disfigures, say, Kindergarten Cop is not a feature of the heroes in BTVS.
And there's much more - to describe the teachers in the early BTVS as "clueless", for instance, suggests that you've totally missed the point of the early seasons and have conflated it with the later show where the premise has changed - but you're probably not interested. Remarks like "clueless or evil" and "the writers are trying to jerk me around" suggest to me that your complaint is not really with BTVS at all, but with some basic conventions of postmodern storytelling. It's fair enough not to like that, but I think you should just accept that this kind of writing is not for you, and drop it.