Notes on "What Dreams Need Come: A Task List for Visionaries" Potlatch 24 panel

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:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk

http://parkerhiggins.net/2014/11/will-need-writers-can-remember-freedom-ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards/

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.

Notes on "Women Destroy Science Fiction: Not Again panel at Potlatch 24

Here are a few notes I jotted while attending the Women Destroy Science Fiction: Not Again! panel at Potlatch on Saturday afternoon:

Panelists: Kate Schaefer (mod), Eileen Gunn, Debbie Notkin

Kate notes that the iconography of the cover is pretty much the same as that of the second Women of Wonder books of 20 years ago: featuring a kick-ass babe.

Debbie loves the scope of the book but wishes that the nonfiction hadn't all been reprints of the fundraising pieces. She raises the question: What is the value of assembling all-women issues together?

I can’t help but note that this question is one that people have been raising for decades now. Are the answers different now than they were in the past. (Which may be to say: I feel as if this is yet another iteration of the constant reinvention of the wheel so familiar to experienced feminists.)

Eileen: How long will we have to keep destroying science fiction? She notes a string of authors who have destroyed science fiction (and of course the ease with which she could go on adding names to the list): Karen Joy Fowler destroyed science fiction. Pat Muprhy destroyed science fiction. Samuel R. Delany destroyed science fiction. Kelly Link destroyed science fiction. . .

Debbie: A big fear about this book-- is that no one who isn't already onboard will read these stories.

Eileen: We are the choir. And we're no longer a little isolated corner of the field.

Aud: What is it that needs to be done?

Nisi: Pardon me for pointing this out, but my essay in the book sets out some of the things that need to be done.

Kate: One of the things that needs to be done is that fiction needs to continue to be published. Print markets are limited, each market controlled by an editor, each with their own limitations. Gordon Van Gelder, to take one prominent example, has particular limitations. (I like Gordon, but I don't much care for his taste in fiction.) (And yes, I’m pleased to hear that Charles Finlay is taking over the editorship of F&SF. And as long as the stories by women have to be ten times better than those by men, we're not there yet.

Eileen: For myself, I'm wishing for liberation from all the little subgenres. Being a woman is being in one of those little boxes.

Debbie: How has the pressure against women in sf changed?  The people we are angriest at have very little power, unlike in the past. I think it's important to think about where the power is.

Aud: Would this book have had the same impact if it hadn't been packaged as "women destroy science fiction"?

Kate: No. There would have been a different impact.

Eileen: I thought on first hearing about the project that this was a marketing decision. Now that I see it, I think the book could have done well without the marketing tag. But with the marketing tag, it's political and angry—and produces a larger voice.

Debbie: “The Cold Equations” is consider a famous example of “hard science fiction.” In fact, it indulges in preposterously bad science; if it had been a woman's story, it would be characterized as "soft science fiction." Men get a pass for writing "soft science fiction."

Kate: Old science fiction isn't about the science-- the "science" was always a pretext. Old science fiction was about social and human relations.

Eileen: That’s true even of Hal Clement's work, long-considered the hardest of hard sf writers. How many people here have read Mission of Gravity? [only a few hands went up, one of them mine.] If a woman writes it, it's not really sf. If a man writes it, it is. For years and years I thought I was writing science fiction. Now people are telling me that what I write isn’t science fiction. It’s an unconscious thing they do. If I were a man, they’d accept that whatever I wrote was science fiction.

When Kate asked for last thoughts with which to end the panel, Eileen said: It's an sf writer's job to destroy science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

I'd be interested to hear what this blog's readers might have to say on the subject. My impression was that the audience contained a range of attitudes, many of them expressed in comments or questions from the audience. One older man apparently didn't see the relevance of the issue; some fired-up younger women apparently didn't realize that we'd been working on this problem for a long time already; some grumpy older women expressed pleasure in seeing young women energized and angry (because as Eileen put it, she's been angry for forty years, and it's good to be joined by younger women in that anger) and happy to see so much quality fiction by women getting recognition; and a lot of people wondered how it could be  that, as "the choir" (as Eileen put it) continues to expand so tremendously it is still being perceived as different and requiring qualification marking it as different.

My Weekend in Silicon Valley

Delightful, energizing weekends like the one I just had at Potlatch in Sunnyvale, California, sometimes make me question whether I'm truly the introvert I know myself to be. The panel I moderated, "The Many Roads of Narrative" was stimulating and interesting and scintillated with several lightning moments, when the panelists (Jeanne Gomoll, Howard Hendrix, Ursula Le Guin, Vylar Kaftan, and Naamen Tilahun) sparked off audience comments or questions and left me with that so-desirable sense that if we'd had another hour, the discussion might well have explored lands we could, by the end of the panel, glimpse beckoning in the distance. My writing workshop proved to be a pleasure, likely because we collectively achieved the degree of focus that for me, at least, makes workshops interesting and valuable. On the personal side: spending time with friends I don't often get to see, renewing acquaintances, and making new acquaintances warmed and cheered me. I even got a little bit of Aqueduct business done, too, which is so much easier (not to mention more fun) doing in person than via email. Face to face may not always make for superior communication, but it often feels better, no?

Before our flight, Tom and I had time to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where we watched Charles Babbage's Difference Engine calculate the table of values for a polynomial. The Difference Engine, as you may recall, was designed by Babbage in the middle of the 19th Century. Babbage was never able to afford to build it in his lifetime, but one was actually completed in London in 2002. The construction of the one on exhibit in Mountain View was commissioned by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly chief technology officer and Group VP at Microsoft. It's an elegant piece of work, as one would expect of steam-punk technology. Photos of the Difference Engine are available here. The museum's website offers this description:

Its 8,000 parts are equally split between the calculating section and the output apparatus. It weighs five tons and measures seven feet high, eleven feet long and is eighteen inches deep at its narrowest. As a static object it is a sight to behold - a sumptuous piece of engineering sculpture. In operation it is an arresting spectacle.

It is surprisingly sleek and shiny. Why do I say surprisingly? I suppose it's because of the contrasting impression made on me by more recent outdated computer technology on display in the museum's "Visible Storage" room. A stroll through aisle after aisle of old computer technology from the 1950s on left me oddly nonplused. I recognized quite a few pieces there, which of course made it more interesting. But with each moment of recognition came also the disconcerting thought of how Shiny and Sleek and Fast and Modern all these objects once appeared to my eyes, when now they appeared so dusty, clunky-, and even cheesy-looking. (Sort of the way the tech in Star Trek OS and 1950s & 1960s sf movies look improbable and silly.) I hasten to note that of course they weren't literally dusty: I only felt as if they would be dusty to the touch. I suppose what disconcerted me was my experiencing a sort of affective disconnect between memory and artifact. Once the patina of infatuation has worn off, once exciting and highly desirable objects become, simply, curious old things made of glass, metal, and plastic. I knew all this intellectually, but it's not a comfortable thing to experience in the moment.

Aesthetically, none of our recent technological objects can begin to compare with the Difference Engine. In a sense, the Difference Engine has the same sort of enduring beauty one often finds in musical instruments. I can think of several reasons for why it is that 20th- and 21st-century technology is largely indifferent to creating objects of enduring aesthetic beauty. Perhaps we need a panel on this at WisCon. (It's too late to propose for WisCon 33, but maybe next year?)

Potlatch 18

This weekend, I'll be attending Potlatch 18 in Sunnyvale, California. (This is a con that moves up and down the West coast.) Aqueduct won't be in the dealer's room this year, but I will be an instructor for the con's Taste-of-Clarion writing workshop and the "ringleader" for a panel titled, "How Many Roads? (Reading Multiple Viewpoints." Just to give you an idea of what it's about, here's the description:

When a story has multiple narrators, can the reader trust any of them? Does a narrative with multiple viewpoints give a more complete picture of the story or the world than a story with a single narrator, or does it make things murkier? What are the strategies we use to read stories with multiple narrators? What do we make of the same set of events seen from multiple points of view, or the same society seen from different positions within it? What if it's not even clear how many narrators a book has? And has anything changed since Roshomon?


These are just the kind of questions I love. Not that I intend to do much of the talking. I've got a great crew to do that: Ursula Le Guin, Howard Hendrix, Jeanne Gomoll, Naamen Tilahun, and Vylar Kaftan. Not to mention the audience (which at this con tends to be high-powered).

If you live in the Bay area, do consider attending. (There will be registration at the door, for latecomers.) Potlatch is small and offers a single track of intense programming. The Dealer's Room is always heaven (even when Aqueduct isn't in it). Please do introduce yourself and say hello to me if you do attend.