What
Dreams need Come: A Task List for Visionaries
Glenn
Glazer (mod), Janna Silverstein, Jeanne Gomoll, Dan Trefethen
Panel
description (from the program guide): At the National Book Awards, Ursula K. Le
Guin issued a call to auctorial arms. She warns of hard times to come, charges
us to dream alternatives to the ways we live now. But is she right? Science
fiction is rarely predictive, so what is it good for? I speculative fiction a
tool for change, a gate to better futures, or just another obsessive technology
of popular distraction? Other than amusing ourselves, what good do we really
expect from dreaming new worlds?
The
program guide provides URLs to a video clip of the speech and to a transcript:
As
with my notes on the Women Destroy panel, these are partial and scattered notations
of statements that interested me.
Janna:
Editors now have to be advocates for books as different from other commodities.
Publishers have a responsibility to be a standard-bearer for that.
Dan:
I'm not an editor or publisher—I think she [Ursula Le Guin] was speaking for
art for art's sake. In that speech, she is storming the castle. She has the
credentials to do that. [Later, this is characterized as “speaking truth to
power.”]
Jeanne:
She was identifying science fiction to the people in the room as being a key
part of any movement that seeks to change the world. She is posing the
question: what kind of world are we ideally moving toward? So many people
outside of the sf world do not think of science fiction in connection with
revolution or change. Le Guin is pointing out its social value.
Glenn:
These publishers [reference to the Big Five, and generally to the publishing
people sitting in the audience Le Guin was speaking to] are driven by changes
in the technology that we did not see coming. What do authors need to do to
survive?
Janna:
Ursula may be 6 months ahead of what's going on, but the publishers are years
behind—when they should have seen it coming and prepared for it. Publishing is
having a real hard time with this transition.
Aud
(Huw Evans): Le Guin talked a lot about freedom in her speech. Science fiction
should be the first to embrace technological change. Readers are the gatekeepers.
Aud:
Booksellers and librarians are mediators between books and readers and the
books' authors.
[In
the course of the discussion that followed, panelists and audience members displayed
a diverse and contradictory range of notions about who or what are “gatekeepers”
and how rating systems and algorithims work. Vonda mentions one of the earliest
recommendation programs designed by Dave Howell and how well it worked, one
with different aims to, say, Amazon’s recommendation algorithims.]
Janna:
Signal to noise ratio is off-kilter with self-publishing. There's a higher
proportion of noise now. But bloggers can be discriminatory filters.
Glenn:
[Expresses worry about the vanishing of indie bookstore, which has been an
important discriminatory filter. The sad closing of Borderlands came up during
the ensuing discussion.]
Aud:
There’s a difference between gatekeepers and arbiters. It's not always a good
thing that gatekeepers have a diminished role.
Janna:
We need something that provides a faithful reflection of readers' ratings and preferences.
Jeanne:
Women Destroy SF is evidence about the myopia in the field.
Dan:
WDSF was crowd-sourced, not produced by big publishing.
Janna
insists that the reason it couldn't have been published by the Big Five only
because it was an anthology, not because its contributors were all women. [Because
anthologies don’t sell enough to be published with the print-runs all books
published by them have recently come to need.]
Aud
(Nisi) We need not more gatekeepers, but gate-openers.
(Aud)
Readers ratings can be (and are) gamed. They can't solve the signal-to-noise
ratio problem.
Aud:
Le Guin is addressing two audiences-- writers (that they live with integrity and
write with integrity) and publishers. I think she was trying to shove writers
into greater integrity in their writing.
Aud:
It's important to remember that writers are reflecting back the values of
mainstream society.
Dan:
I think if she were here today, she would say, “I'm talking about you people.
Don't sell your soul for a mess of pottage, so to speak.”
Janna:
These days, decisions have to be made more consciously than in the past (precisely
because these conversations are happening). Everyone in publishing has become
more conscious of how their decisions will be read.
Aud
(Vicki R.) Often books are rejected because of the marketing dept. Editors might
love a book and reject it because they think it won't sell.
Janna:
That's the reason I left publishing.
Aud
(Tom Becker) Amazon's algorithims are measuring biases & decisions people
have already made; they don’t suggest departures [from what people are in the
habit of reading]. Algorithims are not going to suggest paths of bold reading.
Dan:
UKL says we need to know the difference between art and commerce.
Dan:
Small presses are the one bright light in all this.
Janna:
We as a community need to heed Ursula's clarion call.
Jeanne:
One of the things Ursula does, more than telling us, is that she shows us by
her own work. [Cites Tehanu, as an
example of revisioning one’s own past work and ideas.]
This panel could have gone in one of several clear directions; instead, it took a scattershot approach. Because it began with an emphasis on technological change and the mainstream publishing industry's apparent cluelessness about it and its inability to do more than attempt to play catch-up, I began with the impression that the discussion would be centering on that. But when the audience entered the discussion (which, being Potlatch, was fairly early), the discussion got bogged down in generalities about the quantity of work being published and the lack of filters (authoritative or otherwise) for helping readers find what they want to read. Although both panelists and audience members made a lot of references to things Ursula said in her speech, I noticed a general avoidance of pursuing the ramifications of what the difference between art and commerce is and whether that difference will vanish (which is clearly one of the concerns UKL expresses in her speech). For all its excellent intentions, we were not collectively bold in our discussion. (I say "we" because I was present, even though I did not speak. As an indie publisher, I always feel I risk appearing self-serving in voicing my opinions on such matters.)
It occurs to me that it might be interesting to see someone unpack the sentences of that very brief speech. That wasn't, of course, the point of the panel, but such an exercise might be fruitful.
