Technical Difficulties

Phantom Maids and Ghostly Ladies
Description: Women have been writing, selling and starring in ghost stories for centuries. Authors from Sarah Orne Jewett to Shirley Jackson to Dorothy Allison have written women into a prominent place in the ghost story tradition. By turns tragic, terrifying and comic, ghost stories provide timeless entertainment. Let's talk about why they endure and what they have to offer. Are there lessons to be learned from the ghost stories of the past? What lies in the future for a good spectral read?
Location: Conference 4
Schedule: Fri 9:00 - 10:15PM
Panelists: M: Catherine Lundoff, Valerie L Guyant, Sarah Monette, Kristine Smith

The Politics of Posterity
Description: A panel/roundtable discussion with authors, librarians, archivists, and scholars about how the SF/F canon is established, with focus on how the archiving of literary papers affects canon formation. Is archiving feminist authors, authors of color, or authors that typically write in feminized genres (e.g. fantasy, women's fiction, fanfic) a political act? When so many modern archives are mostly electronic, how can we ensure that a broad variety of works survives?
Location: Conference 5
Schedule: Sun 2:30 - 3:45PM
Panelists: M: Lynne M. Thomas, Brad Lyau, Sarah Monette

The SignOut
Location: Capitol/Wisconsin
Schedule: Mon 11:30AM - 12:45PM

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Also, if you're going to be at WisCon, and you'd like to meet for drinks, food, bookstore trawling, etc., please let me know! (coffeeandink, are we still on for dinner?)

"Punctuation, Grammar, Usage: Who Needs 'Em?"
"The difference between 'that' and 'which' or 'anxious' and 'eager'; proper use of the subjunctive mood; the serial comma. Lots of rules...why should you care? Panelists discuss the delicate balance between the precision of expression that the rules are meant to support and the fact that living language is fluid and malleable, and how this all applies to a genre which is sometimes described as unconstrained by time, space, or reality."
Friday, 9:00-10:15 P.M.
Senate B
M: Delia Sherman, Deb Taber, Rebecca Maines, Tom La Farge, Sarah Monette

Two Heads With But a Single Brain - Collaborators talk about writing together
"How two (or more) can do what one can not (or not). The advantages, the pitfalls of writers pooling their talent. Collaborators provide anecdotes, insights, recriminations."
Saturday, 10:00-11:15 A.M.
Capitol B
M: Richard Bowes, Mark Rich, Sarah Monette, Eileen Gunn

Why Return a King (or Queen)?
"Why are fantasy writers from democratic countries so fascinated by monarchy? Why is The Return of the King assumed to be a good thing? And why do some women writers seem to adopt monarchy and just substitute a queen instead of a king? Is it just easier to write 'in the tradition', or are there deeper forces at work?"
Sunday, 10:00-11:15 A.M.
Capitol A
M: Georgie Schnobrich, Chris Hill, Tamora Pierce, Sarah Monette, P. C. Hodgell

Like Quills upon the Fretful Porcupine
Sunday, 2:30-3:45 P.M.
Fair Trade
Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, David Levine, Ellen Kushner

How Much Is Too Much?
"Unless we're reading or writing about a utopia, the societies in our fantasy worlds are going to have problems. In fact, a culture without problems invariably comes off as shallow and unrealistic. Does this mean we need to include things like sexism and racism if we want to tell a believable story? And if so, are we, as authors, guilty of perpetuating whatever-ism in the real world?"
Monday, 8:30-9:45 A.M.
Assembly
M: Sarah Monette, Catherynne M. Valente, Gregory Rihn, Elissa Malcohn, L. Timmel Duchamp

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Okay, who, WHO is the sadist who decided that 8:30 AM on Monday was the perfect time for a panel about realpolitik verisimilitude in fantasy?

Everybody who shows up is seriously getting a reward. There may be doughnuts.

More accurately, of course, I am here.

75,820 words of Summerdown written. 99,180 words to go. 62 days to write them in. I need 1,600 words a day now, instead of 1,500.

I do not, however, regret Wiscon. Nor will I regret going bookgeeking with brisingamen and peake tomorrow. This (the before, during, and aftermath of Wiscon) is the one chance I have most years to talk f2f with a number of friends I love, and I would not swap it for the world.

I also need to check the page proofs of "Three Letters" for So Fey, and write an introduction for The Bone Key (600 words, give or take, of which I have 515 with which I am not satisfied). Oh, and an acceptance speech, so that in the unlikely event I win the Campbell, marykaykare will not be forced to adlib.

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As matociquala reminds us, today is the 414th anniversary of Christopher Marlowe's death.

Next time, Kit, pay for the damn fish, okay?

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I crashed this morning for a 2+ hour nap. And I'm still tired.

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I had an excellent Wiscon and came home with a huge stack of books.

( for those of you who want to play along at home )

I did not take notes at my panels, nor at the one panel I managed to get to that I wasn't on, so the probability of a useful con-report out of me is slim to none. People were smart; I may have been one of them.

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Break's over. Back on your heads.

FEY FAERY FICTION I(READING GROUP) (Readings)
Friday, 4:00-5:15 p.m. in Conference Room 2

JoSelle Vanderhooft, Melissa Scott, Sarah Monette, Aynjel Kaye, Steve Berman

SM in Feminist Science Fiction
Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m.

M: Lori Selke, Sarah Monette, Catherine Lundoff, Ian K. Hagemann

Although some feminists in the 1970s stated with great assurance that "no woman would ever want to be dominated and no woman would ever want to dominate another," the experience of most SM practitioners is quite different, with some women quite enjoying all sides of power exchange. There have been a lot of unequal relationships in feminist fiction, from nonconsensual relationships such as those in Suzy McKee Charnas' "Holdfast" series and Candas Jane Dorsey's novel _Black Wine_ to more ambiguous relationships such as in Samuel Delany's "Neveryona" series and Susan Matthews' ""Andrej the Torturer" series, to clearly consensual relationships in some slash fiction and other erotica such as Cecilia Tan's "Telepaths Don't Need Safewords". This panel will talk a bit about what SM is and isn't, what consensuality is and isn't, and then go into an overivew of the literature including what has literary value, what has political merit, and what's hot and sexy enough that one might need to turn the pages with one hand. There will also probably be some time to talk about more traditional plots which have a lot of SM elements in them even if those elements aren't necessarily identifiable to non-kinky people.

Wicked!
Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m.

M: Janine Ellen Young, Keith M. Willenson, Jennifer Stevenson, Sarah Monette, Penny Hill

Evil queens, cruel step-mothers; incestuous fathers, despicable princes: In fairy tales, it seems that good girls haven't got a chance. Are there authority figures who aren't venomous? And should we trust any of *them*, either? A discussion of the relation between gender and malice and parenting in fantasy and fairy tale.

How To Do Good Work in High Fantasy
Sunday, 4:00-5:15 p.m.

M: Delia Sherman, Jennifer W. Spirko, Sarah Monette, Kelly D. Link, Patricia Bray

How do writers work within the genre expectations of traditional high fantasy? What limitations do they face, and how do they challenge and stretch those limits? It's possible to write good fiction without churning out yet another young-man-in-a-remote-village-discovers-his-hidden-destiny plot, isn't it? Let's explore inspirations and ideas for this popular but critically suspect genre.

The SignOut
Monday, 11:30am-12:45pm

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I am so psyched about these panels, words cannot even express.

PANEL: Pushing the Envelope
PARTICIPANTS: Jed Hartman, Aaron Lichtov, Joan Haran, Elizabeth Bear, Melissa Scott
DESCRIPTION: Melissa Scott's Shadow Man is an example of the thesis that the most cutting-edge writing/thinking about gender (i.e., about deconstructing the binary sex-gender system) is happening in science fiction, though almost no SF/F out there has pushed our ideas about sex-and-gender as radically as that book did (though some have come close). In his post-W28 livejournal, Jed Hartmann said, "I think the real-world spectrum of gender possibilities is more interesting and broader than most of what's available in SF." Sadly, that appears to be true. How do we push the envelope? How do we effectively clamor for more radical thinking/imagining about sex and gender in SF/F? What can fans do? What can writers do?
NOTES: Shadow Man was the core text of the panel, a fact which Melissa Scott seemed to find a little embarrassing, and the first question asked was: what are the silencing factors that prevent more books like SM from being written?

Melissa had one answer: SM sold very poorly.

The analytic triangle seemed to be desire---politics---performance.

Aaron had a list of aspects of gender: biology, gender assignment, gender expression, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, relationship structure. And Jed had a list of sexualities that push the envelope (a practice which the panelists agreed is both highly subjective and, if you're doing it right, frightening): queer, poly, kinky, transsexual. So the kind of sf the panel hoped to generate (and I think this was very much a panel about trying to get more of this stuff being written and being read) is sf that rejects the heterosexist, heterocentric, biologically-determinist vanilla monogamist norm and tries to ask different questions and find different answers. It's sf that DOES NOT OTHER, that is interested in exploration instead of exploitation.

Someone (Jed?) pointed out much later in the panel that people in the norm also have sexual orientation and gender, and writing about the transgressive is a way to turn the spotlight back on the normative.

The Left Hand of Darkness was for Melissa Scott the same kind of transformative text that Shadow Man was for some of the panelists.

An audience member asked about the absense of transsexual women as protagonists in sf. This sparked a great deal of discussion about discomfort thresholds and about how much any one book can be expected to do. Also discussion about why male-to-female transsexuals tend to get scapegoated and Othered. The answer is relatively obvious, but still bears repeating: it is still true that "male" is a higher status label than "female," and therefore normative society thinks it "understands" women who want to be men. Because OBVIOUSLY any woman in her right mind would want to be a man. [/sarcasm] But a man wanting to be a woman ... that's deeply disruptive.

It is also true that discomfort is useful, and that it's better to confront it than to avoid it. But it's hard to do.

Melissa talked a little bit about the way in which writing as she does very deeply within sf conventions buys her time for the transgressive discussion of gender.

There was also a question about why sf has to engage with these problems, why we can't just write about utopias in which they've been "solved." (I am all about the sarcastic quote markes this morning.) There were several different answers.

1. That would be boring.
2. Human social interactions are always going to be complicated; if it isn't one set of factors, it will be another.
3. sf is always, in its dark and secret heart, about now ("now" being the author's subjective space-time coordinates in the process of writing the book).

Melissa pointed out that there is also room for books (quoting a librarian talking about Tony Hillerman's books) in which the underdog wins.

This panel left me with two knottily theoretical thoughts:

1. people who deploy "color-blind casting" and propose writing sf in which gender/sexuality "doesn't matter" are people who don't want to give up their privileges. Because you only deny the importance of inequality if you're the dog on top. [ETA: clarification here.]

2. personal --- political is one axis. But public --- private is also an axis. They aren't the same. (This was part of a conversation in the bar afterwards, and I can't remember the context. But it still feels important.)

PANEL: All About the Benjamins
PARTICIPANTS: Kate Schaefer, Eleanor Arnason, Elizabeth Bear, Avedon Carol, Rebecca Maines
DESCRIPTION: Last year at a panel, Eleanor Arnason asserted quite eloquently that the great divide in our culture is economic—which led to a discussion about why there are so few regular working stiffs as heroes in our fiction. Let's discuss this in greater depth.
NOTES: Economics and class issues--so dovetailing interestingly with the panel about animals.

Avedon Carol recommends Thom Hartmann pretty much across the board.

Eleanor Arnason read from the Communist Manifesto about the role of the bourgeoisie as destroyers of feudalism:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

Marx & Engels (and, yes, there's plenty to be said about their reification of history, but that would be a different panel) see society becoming divided into capitalists and the working class.

Which leads to the question: how does sf (which is all about the evolution of society) understand social class?

Often sf characters don't have jobs because they're too busy being protagonists. The counter-example cited was Maureen McHugh.

sf & f tends to elide out the lower-middle and functional working class (meaning the working class that is scraping by from paycheck to paycheck but is scraping by), only representing the professional class and then slaves and criminals: the underclass and the lumpenproletariat.

Eleanor gave a kind of schema of class in America

the rich

the middle-class

small business people
professional and managerial class
comfortable working class

underclass

low level shitty jobs
petty criminals
(in America, the underclass tends to be racially marked)

But what sf likes is the technological working class

• Susan Palwick, The Necessary Beggar
  
• Melissa Scott
  
• Minister Faust
  
• John Varley, "Lollypop and the Tar Baby"
  
• C. J. Cherryh
  
• William Gibson, Virtual Light
  
• Bruce Sterling, Zeitgeist
  
• Theodore Sturgeon
  
• Philip K. Dick

Eleanor also described the three chronic problems with representations of class in American sf:

1. incredible unclearness of social class in the US
2. dominant politics of sf being right-wing libertarian
3. sf springs from pulp action stories--once the story starts, the job will necessarily disappear. [This is much like my complaint about quest narratives in fantasy: it's hard to find another model to engage with.]

Ken MacLeod was brought up; Eleanor opined as how his problem is that he thinks problems can be solved by shooting people, and there was some disagreement about whether that was true or not. But sf does often use violence to solve problems, more often in the work of male writers than of female. It is very invested in the romance of the frontier.

An audience member asked about sf in which the job is the solution to the problem. Alien, Air, The Unconquered Country, the oeuvres of Steven Brust and Eric Flint were cited. Also Nicola Griffith, Rebecca Ore's Slow Funeral, Sharyn McCrumb, Lyda Morehouse, Chris Moriarty's Spin State, and Peter Watts.

noir detective fiction was also cited as being about working class/underclass heroes in the person of the down-on-his-luck private eye. [I have some personal reservations about this assertion, but it is definitely a trope that sf has imported.]

sf, said an audience member, is inherently momentous in its plots. It maximizes risks. Whereas working/lower-middle-class life is all about minimizing risks.

In sf, even middle-class protagonists are risk-takers in a way that is rather unrealistic--but of course this is part of the escapism that genre fiction offers: a chance to read about people who AREN'T tied down by the kids and the mortgage and the need for health benefits.

Class in America is all about being able to pass.

It was announced that the Plunkett Award is in the process of creating itself; it will be to class as the Tiptree is to gender and the Carl Brandon is to race.

Pamela Sargent brought up the problem of class among sf & f writers, with full-time writers sometimes being perceived as higher status than part-time writers. Someone pointed out that Clarion is a luxury, and it definitely has cultural capital. And again with the escapism: sf writers aren't writing about their own lives.

I've been taking notes at panels, so what my con reports are going to be is the transcription of said notes, with elucidation and commentary when I can remember anything beyond what I've written down. I am still afflicted with the random upper respiratory crud, and the Monday of WisCon is never a good brain day at the best of times, so, yes, my lovelies, this would be a pig in a poke.

But (as John M. Ford says), anyway ...

PANEL: Animal, Human, Alien
PARTICIPANTS: Elizabeth Bear, Ursula K. Le Guin, David D. Levine, Liz Henry, Tom La Forge, Lisa Tuttle
DESCRIPTION: Let's talk about books which explore animal/human boundaries as a way to explore gender and, often, race. Books where women become animals, or animals take on a narratively feminine gender role. Examples would be Carmen Dog, Troll, Mister Boots, books like that. What roles do we project on animals? The trope of the telepathic companion animal as perfect Wife, or as the externalization of the heroine's object position and disempowerment. What are the boundaries of sentience? In fact, animals, aliens, and AIs all explore this idea.
PERSONAL CONFESSION: I want to be Ursula K. Le Guin when I grow up.
NOTES: I'm going to list the writers and books the panelists mentioned first, and then try to talk about the discussion.

• Carmen Dog (Carol Emshwiller)
  
• Not Before Sundown (Johanna Sinisalo)
  
• Wild Life (Molly Gloss)
  
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick)
  
• His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman)
  
• Watership Down (Richard Adams)
  
• Tooth and Claw (Jo Walton)
  
• Animal Farm (George Orwell)
  
• Cordwainer Smith
  
• The Island of Dr. Moreau (H. G. Wells)
  
• Temple Grandin
  
• Andre Norton
  
• Tamora Pierce
  
• Mercedes Lackey
  
• Xenogenesis (Octavia E. Butler)
  
• The Chronicles of Narnia (C. S. Lewis)
  
• A Boy and His Dog (Harlan Ellison®)

This panel suffered (I think) from a certain amount of difficulty in defining what it wanted to talk about. By the end of it, I had sorted out several quite different things that animals do in literature (not all of it fantastical), any one of which would have made a wonderful panel all by itself. Liz Henry, who wrote the panel description, said that what she'd actually been interested in was companion animal fantasy, and one thing this panel showed me was that companion animal fantasy works quite differently from other thematic uses of animals--and that even within that very narrow subgenre, different companion animal fantasies are doing quite different things.

Animals can be used as representations of the Other; as externalizations of the protagonist's repressed desires (cf Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre, specifically Gilbert and Gubar's reading of her in The Madwoman in the Attic); as totem animals, as part of a nostalgia for what we perceive as a lost sympathy with nature; as cthonic psychopomps; as allegory for various things; as a metaphor for class relations, for parent-child relations, for human relations in general; as symbols in a meditation on power dynamics; as a safe space for the expression of emotions like grief; as the shadow-self, seeking and being sought, fearing and being feared.

Ursula K. Le Guin said that her dragons (in Earthsea) belong to the shamanistic tradidion; they represent a powerful part of the self that we have lost, or have lost access to.

David Levine pointed out the freight of what I'm going to call experiential symbolism that animals carry with them. A dragon in a book is a dragon; a dog is a surrogate for any dog the reader has known and loved. And this makes dealing with animals in literature very fraught and very precarious.

Someone (and I'm sorry, I really don't remember who) pointed out the ways in which we learn from animals, especially about taboo subjects (cf the common excuse for a litter of puppies or kittens, which is that the parents want their children to witness "the miracle of birth"). And someone else pointed out that very often in modern society children first learn to cope with grief through the death of a pet.

Animals can represent the oppressed classes almost reflexively. (I have noted in all caps at this point, CLASS IS NOT A METAPHOR FOR GENDER, but I have no memory of what set me off.) Someone remarked that Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy casts human beings as the animals in their relationship with the Oankali (and I apologize if I misspelled that; it's been years since I read those books), and that made me think of Emshwiller's The Mount, which makes that speculative gesture even more explicitly (and which I must finish reading one of these days, if I can force myself to read it--that book just makes me skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, and Carol Emshwiller, I salute you for that).

Companion animal fantasy is the fantasy of the perfect relationship, the relationship we can never have: the intelligent companion who loves you unconditionally and will never be your equal. And telepathic animal companions can be highly gendered (cf Pern's green dragonriders), particularly through the implications of the agency of speech (the animal usually can/will only speak to their special human).

Diantha Day Sprouse made a fantastic comment from the audience about how both Tonto and Silver are the Lone Ranger's companion animals, which prompted me to say something unfortunately rather incoherent about Western hierarchical thinking. Hal Duncan brought up Gilgamesh and Enkidu (who is marked in the narrative as lower-class, animal, and feminized).

And I close to go feed my own companion animals, one of whom is sitting on my desk ignoring me reproachfully, with a quote from Elizabeth Bear:

Dragons make the best gay boyfriends.

Madison's excellent free newspaper, the Isthmus, has a feature on WisCon 30.