Loscon: I survived eight panels

[calimac]

Supporting Casts, i.e. characters other than the protagonists: Phil Foglio talked about Girl Genius. David Gerrold talked about Star Trek. Emma Bull did a great job as spontaneous moderator. It seemed to me we were discussing two topics: minor characters used for building world texture, and major characters whose relationships with the protagonist(s) and each other shape the story. Thus, Star Wars has a triangle, with Luke as ostensible protagonist, and Leia and Han to inspire and help him, and to bicker with each other and then fall in love; Harry Potter has the same format; so does Star Trek, with Spock and McCoy being just antagonists to each other (though I suppose there's slash fic with the two of them somewhere).

Re-Reading: If a novel isn't worth re-reading, it wasn't worth reading the first time. We re-read for comfort, to appreciate the author's craft without being distracted by plot urgencies, to renew acquaintance with characters we love, and because we already know this story was a good one.

Don't Start With This Book: I shared this panel with two Heinlein experts, Bill Patterson and Michael Engelberg, so we spent a lot of time on Heinlein, and whether it's a good idea for a reader new to him to begin with a novel in which the heroine's nipples go spung. And don't begin your first reading of the Chronicles of Narnia with The Magician's Nephew. Start with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as the movies did. Even though the publishers say Lewis authorized the other order. They're lying.

Fantasy Houses with SF Furniture in Them: Nominal fantasy that treats magic as a branch of engineering long predates the Stross and WJ Williams named in the panel description, going back through McCaffrey (an Analog author, don't forget) and MZB at least as far as Pratt & de Camp's Mathematics of Magic. Even much "pure" fantasy has engineering magic: in Harry Potter, the wand and the spell nearly always work, and if they don't, something's wrong which you can diagnose and fix. That's very different from how magic works in, say, Tolkien. There are many other models of magic: the tweaking of probabilities (Wynne Jones), importuning of gods for favors, or - and I find this the best - something like charisma: you know it when you see it, if you have it you can exploit it, but it doesn't always work and you can't teach it or bottle and sell it to those who don't have it.

My Library Has a Small House In It: I wasn't sure if there was a panel in "owning a lot of books," but there was. Electronic storage as a substitute - or not - for physical books. (There's more to preferring books than the smell of the paper.) Having so many books you can't find them. Weeding books and the pangs of deciding what not to keep. Cleaning out the homes of dead friends with large collections. "Oh, look, here's the one thing I never expected to find in this house: an empty drawer." Sadly, Len Moffatt, scheduled to be on this panel, was absent in the hospital and died Tuesday morning.

Moviemakers and Writers in an Ideal World: The proper term for Craig Miller and Bill Warren is blockheads. They're not stupid, they're not evil, they just don't get it. They denied the entire premise of this panel, that movies and the books they're based on could have a healthier relationship. As far as they're concerned, if a movie is financially healthy and pleases a large audience, it's done its entire job. That maybe it could also not have the fans of the original novel up in arms would not improve matters for them in the slightest. And they spent an entire hour saying that there was nothing to say. The false premises that "faithful to the book" means "dull reproduction of every paragraph of the story" or "novelists interfering in filmmaking when they do not understand it" kept reappearing even after the other panelist kept explaining that's not what it means.

Does Copyright Have a Future?: Got off on the wrong track at the start and never regained a right one. An attempt to lay the groundwork by explaining the differences among copyright, trademarks, and patents fell victim to fans' inability to give a simple explanation of anything, and veered off into a series of copyright and patent office horror stories from the audience. There was more content in a five-minute talk I had beforehand with another panelist than in this entire hour, and that other panelist, who was the Fan Guest of Honor and an experienced software engineer, hardly got to say a word the entire panel.

Favorite Science Authors: Isaac Asimov; who else? Willy Ley. George Gamow. Jared Diamond. Sarah Hrdy (not a typo). Timothy Ferris. Abraham Pais. Gerard 't Hooft (also not a typo). Alan Boyle. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Kip Thorne. Mitchell Waldrop. Bill Bryson. Brian Cathcart. Steven Jay Gould; whoops, almost forgot about him. And others I did not write down. Strangely, I don't recall that Carl Sagan came up.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I prefer Sagan's ex, Lynn Margulis, though more for her actual scientific books than for her popular ones. I disagreed radically with Steven Jay Gould's political outlook, but I thought he did an excellent job of science history writing, treating the views of scientists of past centuries with respect and trying to figure out what they actually thought.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I would have liked to stick my head into the Moviemakers panel, but I was on another one (about existing in writing critiqe groups) at the time.

But you're right - those two seem blockheads for "not getting it". Perhaps they don't read books themselves, and so have no experience really with the nature of appealing to previously established audiences. Blah.

And sorry I missed catching you for conversation! I saw you at a distance dining with Mike and Lynn on Friday, but I was engaged.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

They do read books. But they both work professionally with movies and are so steeped in that culture that they see movies as entirely autonomous with rights to trample over any landscape. Sort of like the kind of dog owners who say that, since it is the nature of dogs to foul the footpaths, nobody has any responsibility to clean it up. Craig in fact specifically said that the only alternative is for the book's author never to sell the film rights, as if the filmmakers couldn't decide on their own to do a better job. And Bill hauled out the tired old "the book is still on the shelf" argument, as if seeing - or, often, even just hearing about - the movie won't affect the reading of it. Even when I said, "But the book may not still be on the shelf, if it's a bookstore shelf - sometimes it's replaced by a novelization of the movie," they said that's not the movie's fault, as if it isn't.

They don't believe in consequences, they don't believe in negative externalities, they don't believe the 5-ton gorilla bears any responsibility for what it happens to sit on. Sorry for going on about it again; I'm still astonished.

You were the person there I most wanted to see but didn't at all! I knew you were on at least one panel, but guess what I was doing then.