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truepennyWiscon is lovely as always. I've been on one panel, attended another, and done a reading. Other than that, I've been hanging out with people I like and talking, mostly but not exclusively about books.
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matociquala and melymbrosia, I don't do real-time blogging, but I did take notes at Bear's panel last night. I'll try to provide some connective tissue between the things that I actually wrote down, but it's going to be a little sketchy. Also, I generally have no idea of who said what. They were all smart and articulate people, so I'm mostly just attributing it all to the mass mind of the panel. But if I remember that something was said specifically by a particular panelist, I shall note it.
Living in an SF disaster novel
Panelists: Jane Hawkins (m), Elizabeth Bear, Ian K. Hagemann, John Helfers, Lyda Morehouse
The panelists began by agreeing that if you read the right headlines, we're already living in an SF disaster novel.
A recurring theme throughout was the role of the media in propagating fear and burying information. Bear pointed out that the more interested a network is in ratings, the more violence and less news they put in their programming.
Examples of real-life disaster novel scenarios about which we hear almost nothing: Chernobyl and that Rhode Island sized chunk of the Ukraine that is uninhabitable by human beings; Tierra del Fuego and its hole in the ozone; smog in Las Vegas and St. Paul (these last two being the personal experiences of the panelists).
Two different ways of classifying SF disaster novels were put forward. One (Jane's) distinguished between the post-apocalyptic novel (watching the protagonists trying to resurrect something out of the ashes of the disaster) and the snowball effect novel (watching one tiny mistake lead to another and another and then, hey, the world's ending). The other (Bear's) distinguished between the sexy and the quiet, or to gleefully misappropriate T. S. Eliot, the Bang School and the Whimper School. [Although they didn't get into this discussion, I think an interesting conversation could arise by thinking about cross-classifications between these two taxonomies.]
Jane mentioned Cassandra as a sort of archetype for the Snowball Effect School. [Another point I would have liked to see being followed up ... but that wasn't really what the panel was trying to talk about, and that's more than fair.]
Bear formulated a fascinating question: people in disaster novels can't help themselves--help has to come from outside--so if your disaster area is the whole planet, where does the help come from?
Ian Hagemann pointed out that we, as a species, are not evolved to deal with slow danger. Our attention is attracted by bright colors and sudden movement: imminent peril. Longterm threats tend not to register. And Lyda added to that by observing that we also don't focus on danger that doesn't affect us directly: the Not In My Backyard school of thought.
Got to talking about possible disasters not caused by human arrogance and stupidity: ice ages, volcanoes, meteorites, magnetic shifts, disease.
Someone pointed out (Ian Hagemann again, I think) that, as a species, we've had 100s of millions of years of evolution as reptiles, but only 100,000 years or so of evolution as thinking primates. When the crunch comes, social structures are going to be the first things to go. [Which reminded me of somebody's famous dictum that civilization is always only three meals away from barbarity.]
From here, they got to the modern proliferation of information, the phenomenon of virtual flash crowds, the fact that we can know more now and know it faster than ever before--but that we still don't act on what we know. [I tried to make a point here about the countering of information by misinformation and disinformation, but I don't think I got it articulated properly, and I wouldn't mention it at all if it weren't for the fact that, hell, this is my blog and I thought it was a kind of cool idea even if I couldn't make it make sense outside of my own head.]
Getting out and saving the world is a pain in the ass.
Again with the evolutionary model, H. sapiens is programmed to think in terms of Us vs. Them. Ian Hagemann postulated that Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Malcolm X and all those other people who have tried to change the world are people who have something wrong with them, evolutionarily speaking.
Good is hard.
Evil is easy.
People are not designed for ambiguity.
Jane provided the data point that the optimal size for a human social group is about 150 people. More than that and the social engineering gets dysfunctional.
People get overwhelmed with too many choices, and the more choices we have, the less likely we are to be satisfied with whatever choice we make.
BEAR: The way to save the planet is to make it easier than not saving the planet.
LYDA: (sotto voce) We could just wait for the Rapture not to happen.
People don't recognize that they're in an SF disaster novel because they're protecting their comfort zone. There has to be a sense of real urgency in an impulse towards change, or it's just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Jane cited the Influenza Pandemic of 1918: 20 to 40 million people died worldwide, and the pandemic spread around the world in three to six months.
Bear put forward a genre distinction: the way you can tell science fiction from techno-thrillers is that techno-thrillers clean up after themselves. SF breaks things and does not fix them.
The panelists agreed that one thing SF tends not to be realistic about is the way that characters in SF will drop their hostilities and differences and all pull together. The privitization of water was adduced as a RL counter-example to that slightly Pollyanna-ish way of thinking.
The example of the drought in the Southwest was also put forward: individuals are practicing water-conservation by uprooting grass and trees and planting desert gardens instead, but businesses are screaming bloody murder about being asked to turn their fountains off.
Corporations cannot be taught to care unless the scorecard changes so that money is no longer the bottom line. And that can only happen if the consumer mentality in this country can get dismantled. We aren't conditioned to buy what we need; advertising is aimed at making us uncomfortable. Bootstrap levitation.
The final point made, and a slightly more optimistic one, is that the reason post-apocalyptic novels are enjoyable is that they're problem-solving novels. Instead of watching the world come down around people's ears, we can watch them trying to build it again. And this time maybe get it right.
Unlike
matociquala and melymbrosia, I don't do real-time blogging, but I did take notes at Bear's panel last night. I'll try to provide some connective tissue between the things that I actually wrote down, but it's going to be a little sketchy. Also, I generally have no idea of who said what. They were all smart and articulate people, so I'm mostly just attributing it all to the mass mind of the panel. But if I remember that something was said specifically by a particular panelist, I shall note it.Living in an SF disaster novel
Panelists: Jane Hawkins (m), Elizabeth Bear, Ian K. Hagemann, John Helfers, Lyda Morehouse
The panelists began by agreeing that if you read the right headlines, we're already living in an SF disaster novel.
A recurring theme throughout was the role of the media in propagating fear and burying information. Bear pointed out that the more interested a network is in ratings, the more violence and less news they put in their programming.
Examples of real-life disaster novel scenarios about which we hear almost nothing: Chernobyl and that Rhode Island sized chunk of the Ukraine that is uninhabitable by human beings; Tierra del Fuego and its hole in the ozone; smog in Las Vegas and St. Paul (these last two being the personal experiences of the panelists).
Two different ways of classifying SF disaster novels were put forward. One (Jane's) distinguished between the post-apocalyptic novel (watching the protagonists trying to resurrect something out of the ashes of the disaster) and the snowball effect novel (watching one tiny mistake lead to another and another and then, hey, the world's ending). The other (Bear's) distinguished between the sexy and the quiet, or to gleefully misappropriate T. S. Eliot, the Bang School and the Whimper School. [Although they didn't get into this discussion, I think an interesting conversation could arise by thinking about cross-classifications between these two taxonomies.]
Jane mentioned Cassandra as a sort of archetype for the Snowball Effect School. [Another point I would have liked to see being followed up ... but that wasn't really what the panel was trying to talk about, and that's more than fair.]
Bear formulated a fascinating question: people in disaster novels can't help themselves--help has to come from outside--so if your disaster area is the whole planet, where does the help come from?
Ian Hagemann pointed out that we, as a species, are not evolved to deal with slow danger. Our attention is attracted by bright colors and sudden movement: imminent peril. Longterm threats tend not to register. And Lyda added to that by observing that we also don't focus on danger that doesn't affect us directly: the Not In My Backyard school of thought.
Got to talking about possible disasters not caused by human arrogance and stupidity: ice ages, volcanoes, meteorites, magnetic shifts, disease.
Someone pointed out (Ian Hagemann again, I think) that, as a species, we've had 100s of millions of years of evolution as reptiles, but only 100,000 years or so of evolution as thinking primates. When the crunch comes, social structures are going to be the first things to go. [Which reminded me of somebody's famous dictum that civilization is always only three meals away from barbarity.]
From here, they got to the modern proliferation of information, the phenomenon of virtual flash crowds, the fact that we can know more now and know it faster than ever before--but that we still don't act on what we know. [I tried to make a point here about the countering of information by misinformation and disinformation, but I don't think I got it articulated properly, and I wouldn't mention it at all if it weren't for the fact that, hell, this is my blog and I thought it was a kind of cool idea even if I couldn't make it make sense outside of my own head.]
Getting out and saving the world is a pain in the ass.
Again with the evolutionary model, H. sapiens is programmed to think in terms of Us vs. Them. Ian Hagemann postulated that Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Malcolm X and all those other people who have tried to change the world are people who have something wrong with them, evolutionarily speaking.
Good is hard.
Evil is easy.
People are not designed for ambiguity.
Jane provided the data point that the optimal size for a human social group is about 150 people. More than that and the social engineering gets dysfunctional.
People get overwhelmed with too many choices, and the more choices we have, the less likely we are to be satisfied with whatever choice we make.
BEAR: The way to save the planet is to make it easier than not saving the planet.
LYDA: (sotto voce) We could just wait for the Rapture not to happen.
People don't recognize that they're in an SF disaster novel because they're protecting their comfort zone. There has to be a sense of real urgency in an impulse towards change, or it's just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Jane cited the Influenza Pandemic of 1918: 20 to 40 million people died worldwide, and the pandemic spread around the world in three to six months.
Bear put forward a genre distinction: the way you can tell science fiction from techno-thrillers is that techno-thrillers clean up after themselves. SF breaks things and does not fix them.
The panelists agreed that one thing SF tends not to be realistic about is the way that characters in SF will drop their hostilities and differences and all pull together. The privitization of water was adduced as a RL counter-example to that slightly Pollyanna-ish way of thinking.
The example of the drought in the Southwest was also put forward: individuals are practicing water-conservation by uprooting grass and trees and planting desert gardens instead, but businesses are screaming bloody murder about being asked to turn their fountains off.
Corporations cannot be taught to care unless the scorecard changes so that money is no longer the bottom line. And that can only happen if the consumer mentality in this country can get dismantled. We aren't conditioned to buy what we need; advertising is aimed at making us uncomfortable. Bootstrap levitation.
The final point made, and a slightly more optimistic one, is that the reason post-apocalyptic novels are enjoyable is that they're problem-solving novels. Instead of watching the world come down around people's ears, we can watch them trying to build it again. And this time maybe get it right.
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Jane and Ian
Date: 2004-05-30 09:27 am (UTC)Anita Rowland (http://www.anitarowland.com/)
no subject
Date: 2004-05-30 11:09 am (UTC)People always say that, but most real disasters don't seem to bear out this theory. Accounts of September 11th and its immediate aftermath are notable for the extent to which people helped and cared for each other. People weren't knocking each other down trying to get out - they were being orderly and assisting people who needed assistance.
Another example: during the seige of Stalingrad, when hundreds of thousands of people starved to death, scientists protected the stockpiles of seeds stored in the Mendeleev Institute. They could have sprouted them and eaten them, destroying Russia's heritage of plant genetic material, but even when they were starving to death they had the sense that something beyond their own lives was worth preserving.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-31 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-01 12:06 am (UTC)