one day of WFC panels
Nov. 1st, 2009 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThe Academic Treatment of Fantasy and Horror. First panel, at the crack of dawn, a.k.a 10 AM, which passes for the crack of dawn at a convention. I had to be there, because I was on this one. Said that there is still plenty of prejudice against the academic study of fantasy, but it's slowly melting away, mostly from underneath, as students who love fantasy slowly rise into professorships, mostly at lower-tier institutions, but many of them do excellent work there. It's also occurring outside of traditional lit studies, especially in cultural studies. This does offer a "back door" into literary consideration of fantasy. But the principle of cultural studies, that any old fan fiction is of equal value to great works of art as objects of study, is fine for their purposes but becomes pernicious when imported back into literature.
The Role of Religion in Contemporary Fantasy. Bob Silverberg is endlessly amusing describing religion as logically incomprehensible, considering it as merely an anthropological phenomenon and including it in his fiction only from a desire to be diligent in his world-creation, but all the citations of venal church bureaucracies in the world can't hide that this means he has no idea of what humans' religion-seeking impulse is or feels like. Wouldn't that make his invented religions artificial and superimposed rather than organic? The point wasn't discussed. Randy Smith, the actual pastor on the panel, gently cited Paul Tillich describing religion as the object of a person's "ultimate concern," but that's as far as we got.
When People Confuse the Author with Their Work. Thankfully, this did not turn into an indictment of foolish readers, because considering the number of authors who put their autobiographies in fiction or express their deep moral concerns in their stories, it's not a foolish assumption to think that the work expresses the author's ideas, even when the conclusion is in fact wrong. Instead, this was a thoughtful panel on how authors go about the task of expressing fictional characters who are emphatically not them, whom they disagree with or even find repellent.
Urban Fantasy as Alternate History. Really good thoughts on how the public existence of vampires, werewolves, etc. would affect our legal system, social behavior, etc. If you could achieve immortality by becoming a vampire, would you do it? What would this do to a Christian's chance of achieving Heaven? For that matter, would a verifiable Hell make people clean up their acts? (I doubt it: it doesn't seem to have much effect on all of those who do believe in Hell; and many people seem unable to believe in their own deaths, despite that being pretty verifiable.) Someone claimed that humans wiggle out of pacts with the devil, but that "The Devil Always Keeps His End of the Bargain" (L.E. Modesitt: "That would make a great story title.") I thought of one obvious counter-example and offered it after the panel: Bedazzled, which is all about the devil repeatedly wiggling out of bargains. He doesn't technically cheat, but he does so by intent. And that's what humans do in these stories also: they don't technically cheat either, having no power to do so. They find loopholes.
Coarse Dialogue and Graceful Description: The Balancing Act. Became the copy-editing panel. "Copy-editing is like bathing: nobody notices unless you don't do it." Much discussion of having characters talk ungrammatically as expressions of their personalities, and how this differs from narrative. Blatant anachronisms in The Once and Future King. How does White get away with it? Because he's good enough: he maintains the tone, and integrates the dialogue into the narrative. (Nobody mentioned the weasely "this is only a translation" caveat in OFK, absent from the original Sword in the Stone, where White just did it, and more wittily too.)
F&SF Turns Sixty. Panel on the history of the magazine. Fought off efforts by wanna-be authors in the audience to turn it into the "How to sell to F&SF" panel. Enjoyable anecdotes from long-memoried Dick Lupoff and Grania Davis, but I sure hope Gordon Van Gelder is a better editor than he was a panel moderator, or else the magazine is doomed.
What Makes a Good Monster. I missed part of this, having decided I had to get something to eat eventually. One of several panels in which horror drove the boat, and "non-horrific fantasy" was the awkward term used to describe everything else, even that with monsters in it.
Multi-Author Reading of "The Raven". Just what it sounds like. Three authors in turn each read out the entire text of Poe's poem, each in their own individual and inimitable style. Just enormously enjoyable, at least for those of us who enjoy re-reading favorites. All good, but Donald Sidney-Fryer's mournful and terrified rendition was the best. Garth Nix also offered an Australian translation: "G'day, nevermore, mate."
The Role of Religion in Contemporary Fantasy. Bob Silverberg is endlessly amusing describing religion as logically incomprehensible, considering it as merely an anthropological phenomenon and including it in his fiction only from a desire to be diligent in his world-creation, but all the citations of venal church bureaucracies in the world can't hide that this means he has no idea of what humans' religion-seeking impulse is or feels like. Wouldn't that make his invented religions artificial and superimposed rather than organic? The point wasn't discussed. Randy Smith, the actual pastor on the panel, gently cited Paul Tillich describing religion as the object of a person's "ultimate concern," but that's as far as we got.
When People Confuse the Author with Their Work. Thankfully, this did not turn into an indictment of foolish readers, because considering the number of authors who put their autobiographies in fiction or express their deep moral concerns in their stories, it's not a foolish assumption to think that the work expresses the author's ideas, even when the conclusion is in fact wrong. Instead, this was a thoughtful panel on how authors go about the task of expressing fictional characters who are emphatically not them, whom they disagree with or even find repellent.
Urban Fantasy as Alternate History. Really good thoughts on how the public existence of vampires, werewolves, etc. would affect our legal system, social behavior, etc. If you could achieve immortality by becoming a vampire, would you do it? What would this do to a Christian's chance of achieving Heaven? For that matter, would a verifiable Hell make people clean up their acts? (I doubt it: it doesn't seem to have much effect on all of those who do believe in Hell; and many people seem unable to believe in their own deaths, despite that being pretty verifiable.) Someone claimed that humans wiggle out of pacts with the devil, but that "The Devil Always Keeps His End of the Bargain" (L.E. Modesitt: "That would make a great story title.") I thought of one obvious counter-example and offered it after the panel: Bedazzled, which is all about the devil repeatedly wiggling out of bargains. He doesn't technically cheat, but he does so by intent. And that's what humans do in these stories also: they don't technically cheat either, having no power to do so. They find loopholes.
Coarse Dialogue and Graceful Description: The Balancing Act. Became the copy-editing panel. "Copy-editing is like bathing: nobody notices unless you don't do it." Much discussion of having characters talk ungrammatically as expressions of their personalities, and how this differs from narrative. Blatant anachronisms in The Once and Future King. How does White get away with it? Because he's good enough: he maintains the tone, and integrates the dialogue into the narrative. (Nobody mentioned the weasely "this is only a translation" caveat in OFK, absent from the original Sword in the Stone, where White just did it, and more wittily too.)
F&SF Turns Sixty. Panel on the history of the magazine. Fought off efforts by wanna-be authors in the audience to turn it into the "How to sell to F&SF" panel. Enjoyable anecdotes from long-memoried Dick Lupoff and Grania Davis, but I sure hope Gordon Van Gelder is a better editor than he was a panel moderator, or else the magazine is doomed.
What Makes a Good Monster. I missed part of this, having decided I had to get something to eat eventually. One of several panels in which horror drove the boat, and "non-horrific fantasy" was the awkward term used to describe everything else, even that with monsters in it.
Multi-Author Reading of "The Raven". Just what it sounds like. Three authors in turn each read out the entire text of Poe's poem, each in their own individual and inimitable style. Just enormously enjoyable, at least for those of us who enjoy re-reading favorites. All good, but Donald Sidney-Fryer's mournful and terrified rendition was the best. Garth Nix also offered an Australian translation: "G'day, nevermore, mate."
