Potlatch 20: the program
Mar. 7th, 2011 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacAt a panel searching the question, "Whither Potlatch?", a suggestion was made that Potlatch should consider having a Guest of Honor instead of a Book of Honor, basically on the grounds that this might attract the author's fans. Perhaps as it is, though, we attract some of the dead author's book's fans. As observed along with the suggestion, this would certainly change the character of Potlatch. It's tough to criticize an author's works to her face, but our Books of Honor have often enough gotten their share of brickbats.
Certainly Earth Abides did, particularly on the grounds of sexism. I don't consider "This old book expresses once-accepted attitudes now deprecated" to be generally a very insightful or productive line of discussion, and the most penetrating remark on that line was made by Jeanne Bowman at a confab of the BoH panelists and sundry over breakfast before the panel started. She said that, while the fathers are seen trying to teach the children, the mothers are not. And it's not just that we don't see this - after all, the book is primarily from Ish's male viewpoint - but that we don't see the results of this in the children's behavior. That struck me as telling.
As a mighty denouncer of fiction I dislike, I try to be equally mighty in defending that which I do, so I spent much of my time on the panel praising the book on two points I've seen be controversial. To moderator Laura Majerus's request that we provide a brief answer to the question, "What is this book about?" I said: "This is a book about letting go, deciding not to give a sht, learning how not to try to change the things you cannot change." That's an answer focused on the ending, whose resigned air - Ish used to be gung-ho about rebuilding civilization, but in his age he just can't be bothered any more - has disturbed some readers. I think it's meant to be disturbing, like I think the supposedly transcendental ending of Clarke's Childhood's End is meant to be disturbing. Like ancients at the fall of Rome hoping for a Renaissance they can hardly imagine, Ish will just have to hope that someday the future will be able to and interested in reading whatever of the old civilization is left. For all its ambiguity, it's more hopeful a view of the question than that in A Canticle for Leibowitz, a more-read classic that got such vigorous bashing during the panel on the political content of post-apocalypses that it made me feel better for Earth Abides.
For much of the book before the ending, many noted, Ish is a self-righteous prig. Some may have meant this as a criticism of the book. I think he's meant to be a self-righteous prig. He's a deeply flawed character; so are all the others. The question is, can you enjoy reading about them as people regardless? Some could not, but many could.
What most interested me about the story was the survivors' gradual transition from a salvage economy (living off the surviving ruins) to a subsistence economy (making do with their own resources). The characters discuss this in the story, variously encouraging or retarding the change. The author brings up the complexity of the manner of, and the rate at which, systems and material will fail. It would not have previously occurred to me, for instance, that the first failure point of automobiles after the fall of civilization would not be running out of gas, nor the crumbling of the highways, but the decay of the rubber in tires.
Stewart has gotten a lot of criticism for getting specific facts wrong in his systems failure discussion, but at least he considers the question seriously and imaginatively. I'm struck, though, by the frequency with which he's criticized inaccurately. An audience member stood up to object that Stewart got one particular point wrong, only to subside when another audience member said no, actually, he was right. I pointed out one on the panel, too. In the con suite the previous night I heard Stewart criticized for having his characters enter a grocery store twenty years after the disaster and find toilet paper intact and usable. Rats would have used it for nesting, this person said. Thanks to B's e-reader copy of the book, I was able to do a quick search of the text and read that, some twenty years after the disaster, the characters enter a grocery store and find ... that rats have used the toilet paper for nesting. The critic was so antipathetic to the book that it was remembered as saying the opposite of what it did say.
That was one of two uses of the phrase "toilet paper" in the book, and the opportunity for me to make one of the two jokes which, while they amused the people I told them to earlier, seemed to fall flat on the panel, which was to point out the difference between Earth Abides and genre SF of the period by observing how swiftly Catherine Tarrant, the legendarily high-minded assistant editor of ASF, would have struck out any references to toilet paper. Earth Abides indeed reads - in style and narrative pace - remarkably unlike genre SF of the 30s and 40s, though it's more similar to work of the 50s and 60s, and I wonder if that may have been its influence. It's slow, contemplative, focused on accumulating detail and examining character, unlike the insanely zippy, fast-paced, often superficial and jaw-cracking, almost Runyonesque, early SF.
Besides the panel I was on, and the two others I mentioned, I also got to part of the "Potlatch Memories" session, which went down each of the twenty Potlatchi in turn, eliciting stories from the audience. I told of announcing at the pre-con collation session at Potlatch 3 that, previously unbeknownst to anyone else there, it was actually B's and my engagement party, I having just proposed to her in our room at the much-remembered Tudor Nightmare Village; and of how Stu Shiffman judged B. winner of the Art Show Coloring Contest at Potlatch 5; she had taken one gray crayon to Stu's line art and drawn "the Lathe of Heaven version."
Certainly Earth Abides did, particularly on the grounds of sexism. I don't consider "This old book expresses once-accepted attitudes now deprecated" to be generally a very insightful or productive line of discussion, and the most penetrating remark on that line was made by Jeanne Bowman at a confab of the BoH panelists and sundry over breakfast before the panel started. She said that, while the fathers are seen trying to teach the children, the mothers are not. And it's not just that we don't see this - after all, the book is primarily from Ish's male viewpoint - but that we don't see the results of this in the children's behavior. That struck me as telling.
As a mighty denouncer of fiction I dislike, I try to be equally mighty in defending that which I do, so I spent much of my time on the panel praising the book on two points I've seen be controversial. To moderator Laura Majerus's request that we provide a brief answer to the question, "What is this book about?" I said: "This is a book about letting go, deciding not to give a sht, learning how not to try to change the things you cannot change." That's an answer focused on the ending, whose resigned air - Ish used to be gung-ho about rebuilding civilization, but in his age he just can't be bothered any more - has disturbed some readers. I think it's meant to be disturbing, like I think the supposedly transcendental ending of Clarke's Childhood's End is meant to be disturbing. Like ancients at the fall of Rome hoping for a Renaissance they can hardly imagine, Ish will just have to hope that someday the future will be able to and interested in reading whatever of the old civilization is left. For all its ambiguity, it's more hopeful a view of the question than that in A Canticle for Leibowitz, a more-read classic that got such vigorous bashing during the panel on the political content of post-apocalypses that it made me feel better for Earth Abides.
For much of the book before the ending, many noted, Ish is a self-righteous prig. Some may have meant this as a criticism of the book. I think he's meant to be a self-righteous prig. He's a deeply flawed character; so are all the others. The question is, can you enjoy reading about them as people regardless? Some could not, but many could.
What most interested me about the story was the survivors' gradual transition from a salvage economy (living off the surviving ruins) to a subsistence economy (making do with their own resources). The characters discuss this in the story, variously encouraging or retarding the change. The author brings up the complexity of the manner of, and the rate at which, systems and material will fail. It would not have previously occurred to me, for instance, that the first failure point of automobiles after the fall of civilization would not be running out of gas, nor the crumbling of the highways, but the decay of the rubber in tires.
Stewart has gotten a lot of criticism for getting specific facts wrong in his systems failure discussion, but at least he considers the question seriously and imaginatively. I'm struck, though, by the frequency with which he's criticized inaccurately. An audience member stood up to object that Stewart got one particular point wrong, only to subside when another audience member said no, actually, he was right. I pointed out one on the panel, too. In the con suite the previous night I heard Stewart criticized for having his characters enter a grocery store twenty years after the disaster and find toilet paper intact and usable. Rats would have used it for nesting, this person said. Thanks to B's e-reader copy of the book, I was able to do a quick search of the text and read that, some twenty years after the disaster, the characters enter a grocery store and find ... that rats have used the toilet paper for nesting. The critic was so antipathetic to the book that it was remembered as saying the opposite of what it did say.
That was one of two uses of the phrase "toilet paper" in the book, and the opportunity for me to make one of the two jokes which, while they amused the people I told them to earlier, seemed to fall flat on the panel, which was to point out the difference between Earth Abides and genre SF of the period by observing how swiftly Catherine Tarrant, the legendarily high-minded assistant editor of ASF, would have struck out any references to toilet paper. Earth Abides indeed reads - in style and narrative pace - remarkably unlike genre SF of the 30s and 40s, though it's more similar to work of the 50s and 60s, and I wonder if that may have been its influence. It's slow, contemplative, focused on accumulating detail and examining character, unlike the insanely zippy, fast-paced, often superficial and jaw-cracking, almost Runyonesque, early SF.
Besides the panel I was on, and the two others I mentioned, I also got to part of the "Potlatch Memories" session, which went down each of the twenty Potlatchi in turn, eliciting stories from the audience. I told of announcing at the pre-con collation session at Potlatch 3 that, previously unbeknownst to anyone else there, it was actually B's and my engagement party, I having just proposed to her in our room at the much-remembered Tudor Nightmare Village; and of how Stu Shiffman judged B. winner of the Art Show Coloring Contest at Potlatch 5; she had taken one gray crayon to Stu's line art and drawn "the Lathe of Heaven version."
