A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Every now and then you come across an article that just, while it seems so short, answers a lot of questions. For example this one, Sperm Travels Faster Toward Attractive Females in Discover Channel article by Jennifer Veigas. Of course the research was done on red junglefowl, a sort of chicken.

While women may be picky when choosing a mate, it seem that the male is most likely to produce more sperm with a great desire to make it to the egg if the male finds the female attractive and the more attractive the faster the sperm swim to their destination.

While this is interesting research especially for those who are trying to learn more about fertility, it does seem to be making a lot of assumptions when the chickens can’t exactly tell you that that chicken on over by the watering can is the most beautiful he’s ever seen. The researcher said:

“Female attractiveness is determined by the expression of a sexual ornament — the comb — which is phenotypically and genetically correlated to the number and mass of eggs females lay,” according to study co-authors Charlie Cornwallis of the University of Oxford and the Royal Veterinary College’s Emily O’Connor.

I don’t think that this research can really be expected to map on human behavior because I don’t think it actually maps on chicken behavior — flushed comb or not — some hens are better layers than others no matter what the rooster thinks of them. Ask any farmer? So, while interesting, I think the assumptions are flawed but then again the original papers are not available and the reported methodology just doesn’t make me think they got anything going with this line of research — but it does make you wonder….

Charles N. Brown, 1937-2009

Locus publisher, editor, and co-founder Charles N. Brown, 72, died peacefully in his sleep July 12, 2009 on his way home from Readercon. (More on the Locus site)

Most of the science fiction community is abuzz this evening as the news about the death of Charles Brown spreads. I was shocked when I heard since we’d just gotten back from Readercon late this afternoon. It’s so difficult to grasp that he’s gone. In panels and in person, he was friendly and incredibly knowledgeable about the field and seemed to always have whatever information was required, stored in memory.

He will be greatly missed.

Sunday is the last day of Readercon.  I’m beginning to think I just might be a bit old for the very late night/early morning thing.  Anyway, we were up and packed up our room to check out before opening our table in the Dealer’s Room (we set up at 9:30 and the room opens at 10).

"Classics for Pleasure" Panel

10:00 Classics for Pleasure. Panelist: Samuel R. Delany, John Clute, Michael Dirda (Leader), John Crowley, Elizabeth Hand, Howard Waldrop. Talk/Discussion (60 min.). In his latest book, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Dirda continues his lifelong campaign to break down the artificial boundaries between mainstream and genre classics. In this collection of nearly 90 essays he writes about such fantasy authors as Lucian, E.T.A. Hoffmann, James Hogg, Sheridan Le Fanu, Jules Verne, E. Nesbit, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, and Edward Gorey. In one section, “Loves Mysteries,” he discusses Sappho, the Arthurian Romances, The Princess of Cleves, Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer, George Meredith’s sonnet sequence “Modern Love” (which is actually about divorce), the poetry of C.P. Cavafy and Anna Akhmatova, the regency romances of Georgette Heyer, and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Throughout Dirda writes about adventure novels, mysteries, ghost stories and science fiction with the same respect and affection he brings to discussing Samuel Johnson, Henry James, and Willa Cather. If any of these authors are new to you or if you want to suggest some other favorite books, come talk with Dirda and his discussants about the pleasure of reading the classics.

Dirda talked about his childhood and how he’d bought a bag with three paperbacks in it and one of the books was The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton  Fadiman.  He loved books already and was fascinated by this book.  The essays were not so much critical reviews of the works but invitations to share in the joy and pleasure of reading these books.  That in his own books, he wants to share that same passion and enjoyment and joy in reading.
He said he believed that people who read only one type of book are provincial in the same way that people who never travel are provincial — you are missing the joy and experience of finding new areas to explore.

Other books that were recommended as good to get ideas were (of course) Michael Dirda’s books and Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman and Clifton Fadiman’s Reading I Liked.

Next the panelists were asked to talk about how they chose to become science fiction or fantasy writers or critics of the genre.  All of the stories were very interesting.  Delaney spoke about how he’d read voraciously but the first science fiction book that he read, Farmer in the Sky (Robert Heinlein), elicited an emotional reaction that none of the other books he read did.  Partly because he identified with the character who had a pesky sister and the events of the book.  But as he read more and more in the genre he found that these books resonated with him.  The others had similar stories to tell.  Waldrop said that he’s been reading SF and fantasy since he was six and so his ideas just come to him in that format.

These stories and the resultant conversation about the barriers between the genres and mainstream fiction and what the relationship should be between genre fiction and mainstream filled the hour.

I took and hour to help out in the Dealers’ Room — mostly get Hyperion some water and chat.

"Strong Stories with Strong Parents" panel

12:00 Strong Stories with Strong Parents. Panelists: Sonya Taaffe, Laurel Anne Hill, Shira Daemon (Leader), Judith Berman, Alaya Dawn Johnson. Absent or clueless parents are endemic in YA fiction: after all, it’s much easier to put your young protagonists in dramatic peril when Mom and/or Dad aren’t there or aren’t up to protecting or rescuing them (or noticing they’ve gone AWOL). Rather than bitch about the many offenders, we’ll talk about YA books that feature strong, capable parents who do the right things but whose kids still get in fantastic hot water. What are some of the ways of creating peril and predicaments for teen characters even as their parents watch over them well?

This was another excellent panel.  After bemoaning the trend to kill off the parents or somehow get the children on their own for an adventure, the talk turned to books that do it right.  Rather than blather on here’s the list:

Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog by Ysabeau S. Wilce
Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S. Wilce
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming (The book NOT the movie, in the book the children have both parents and the parents go on most of the adventures with the children.)
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (The Wolves Chronicles) by Joan Aiken and Pat Marriott
Magic Or Madness Trilogy by Justine LarbalestierLittle Brother by Cory Doctorow
Children of the Lamp series by by P.B. Kerr
Percy Jackson & the Olympians by Rick Riordan
So You Want to be a Wizard series by Diane Duane
Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet series by Eleanor Cameron
Song for the Basilisk by Patricia A. McKillip (not strictly YA)
A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L’Engle
The Secret Country Trilogy by Pamela Dean
Cycler by Lauren McLaughlin

[Hyperion: Two nice young ladies at a Dunkin Donuts along the way where kind enough to give us the last couple of donuts they were going to to otherwise throw away.  I’m sure it’s against company policy, so I won’t say where this took place, but they were just too nice not to get a word of thanks.]

Up early again. Hyperion had to be in the Dealer’s Room by 9:30 and I wanted to get to the Green Room for coffee before my 10 o’clock panel. We made it.

10:00 Upbeat Downbeat in YA Fiction. Panelists: Ellen Klages, Gayle Surrette (Moderator), Leah Bobet, Tui Sutherland, Paolo Bacigalupi. Dark and downbeat endings have become fashionable in YA fiction, even to the point where they have been questioned as a fad gone too far. The trend raises a host of questions about the psychology of young readers that need to be asked and answered. Is the tone and resolution of a work of YA fiction actually more important than in adult fiction, e.g., because the readers are still at the age where their worldview is being shaped? Do young readers have a different tolerance for or reaction to downbeat endings than adults? Do they need to be forcibly exposed to the cruel realities of the world, shielded form them, or gently inoculated?

Since I was the moderator for this panel, it’s hard to evaluate how I think it went. I believe it went well and we gave some interesting ideas and feedback to the audience, but then I’m biased. So, if you were there let me know your opinion and what you got out of this panel.

I read several quotes and asked the panelists to give their thoughts in reaction to the quotes.

From Brooklyn Arden (a blog by Cheryl Klein) I got a quote by Richard Peck:

YA novels “end not with happily ever after, but with a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived”; and the events in the book have left the character better prepared for that.

From the ASJA Monthly, a quote from YA author Nora Baskin:

…YA books today are addressing some of the most controversial and authentic topics in our culture, from eating disorders to drug use, death, suicide, transgender issues, incest: the books reflect the issues that young adults are dealing with in their lives, in more honest and contemporary ways than ever before.

From Cheek by Jowl, a book of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, in “The Critics, The Monsters, and the Fantasists”

The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore hope.

We also discussed Meg Cabot’s June 10th post on her blog where she said:

Why read these books? (trauma porn) If worse than your life they make you feel better. … But if your life is worse what then? What do you read.

Meg read books to escape and now she chooses to write books similar to the ones that offered her escape when she was younger.

"Invention of Fantasy" Panel

1:00 The Invention of Fantasy in the Antiquarian Revival. Panelists: Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Kathryn Morrow (Moderator), Erin Kissane, Faye Ringel. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of scholarship on myth, ritual, and cultural traditions form ancient Greece to contemporary Sussex, a mix which had a profound effect on fields as disparate as classical music, analytical psychology, and literature of the Fantastic. Whether the names Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, or Cecil Sharp mean anything or nothing to teh average reader of fantasy, their legacy includes the mythic vocabulary that underpins much of our field–an older world beneath this one which still seeps through, to be identified in fragments and perilously traced to its source. Join us in exploring the present-day inheritors of these motifs and their framwork, starting with our own Guest of Honor (Greer Gilman’s Cloud derives its physics form The Golden Bough and The White Goddess, its history from Child ballads; Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love not only draws on the Victorian folk revival for inspiration, but sets its plot going among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Folk-Lore Society; Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist is perhaps the archetypal novel of slippage between worlds. Green Men in varying guises haunt the ficiton of all three). Is this a peculiarly English take on fantasy? If so, what are two Americans doing writing it? Or have we all internalized katabasis, solstices, Indo-European trinities? Bring folksongs to answer the questions if you must, but Morris dancing will be politely discouraged.

Greer has about 8,000 variants of Child ballads.Child was interested in the survival of the text but not in the music or the performance. Sharp (sp?) saved the music too and what he could of the performance of the songs.

There was a lot of talk of the strong impulse that seems to insist that a rite or ballad or ritual must be historic and unchanged and the belief that those doing it are following in the footsteps of their ancestors. When, in truth many of these rites/rituals/songs have been transformed or invented or melded with other traditions and none of them can be traced unbroken to the neolithic past.

One point I enjoyed was that nostalgia was really fast. TV today has nostalgia for the 1990s. History begins when you are born and everyone wishes for that “better” past.

There was much discussion of the research of Jane Ellen Harrison and how she was dismissed by her male counterparts but that they then used her research as the basis for their own.

"I Spy" Panel

2:00 I Spy, I Fear, I wonder: Espionage Fiction and the Fantastic. Panelists: Chris Nakashima-Brown, C.C. Finlay (Moderator), Ernest Lilley, James D. Macdonald, Don D’Ammassa. In his afterword to The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross makes a bold pair of assertions: Len Deighton was a horror writer (because “all cold-war era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation”) while Lovecraft wrote spy thrillers (with their “obsessive collection of secret information”). In fact, Stross argues that the primary difference between the two genres is that the threat of the “uncontrollable universe” in horror fiction “verges on the overwhelming,” while spy fiction “allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over” it. This is only one example of the confluences of the espionage novel with the genres of the fantastic: the two are blended in various ways in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Tim Powers’ Declare, William Gibson’s Spook County, and, in the media, the Bond movies and The Prisoner. We’ll survey the best of espionage fiction as it reads to lovers of the fantastic. Are there branches of the fantastic other than horror to which the spy novel has a special affinity or relationships.

Spy novels have a specific atmosphere to them. Usually a person working for a heartless agency and the mission are imposed onto the agent or innocents are pulled in assist.

SF has movement into different space –middle class world to the underworld — while spies seem to go between governments.

Agents are always alien because a spy always is alienated from those around them. Their mission and purpose is imposed and they aren’t themselves. They don’t have true feelings. In SF the character’s feelings are their own.

Spies seldom have personal connections because they aren’t themselves — they play a part and if they have feelings they are based on false premises.

There was a long discussion of sexism because spy novels seem to be an area for men. However, the audience mentioned La Femme Nikita, Alias, and others. But it was considered that the pronoun on most of these female characters could change and no one would notice. There was also the mention of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Polifax novels where the pronoun couldn’t be shifted and still have the book work.

Other books mentioned:
Time Power’s — Declare, Three Days to Never
Dresden Files
The Wolf’s Hour by Robert R. McCammon
The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service by Erskine Childers

3:00 Is Darwinism Too Good for SF? Panelists: Steven Popkes, Anil Menon, Jeff Hecht (Leader), Robert J. Sawyer, Caitlin R. Kiernan, James Morrow. This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great SF inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

The problem is that with science and physics you can look at the rules and the equations and they work just about anywhere and you know what would happen if you changed any one bit. But for biology we don’t have a handle on things. We’ve only got Earth to see how things work. One sample just isn’t enough. We need another planet to have some comparisons. If we found life on another planet and the DNA matched bits of ours that would tell us a lot. But we don’t, and things aren’t solid.

We’re really still resistant to Darwin’s thesis of Natural Selection because it means we’re not special or fallen angels, we’ve simply evolved along with all the other animals on this planet.

Discussion continued on what would have happened if Darwin hadn’t published. Would Wallace have published? Would the theory just come from one of the other researchers who was working along the same lines.

In our instant world, could you develop a theory based on historical perspective when our current history is only about 17 hours old.

We need to get the supernatural out of the way. Would a Buddhist have similar arguments for/against Natural Selection as Europeans and Americans do? If the theory came from another culture would it be more acceptable?

The panelists seemed to agree that SF and Fantasy tended to play it safe with Darwin’s theory — some books mentioned:
Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear
Darwinia: A Novel of a Very Different Twentieth Century by Robert Charles Wilson
Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
Teranesia by Greg Egan
Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
Frameshift by Robert J. Sawyer

The Dealer’s Room closed at 6 PM and then a group of us went out for Chinese. But, by the time we got back to our room the lack of sleep was catching up to us so we’re going to make it an early night since we start driving home late tomorrow afternoon with a stop in Providence to visit our son. So, we need a bit more shut eye than the six hours we’ve been getting.

This is the first full day of the convention.  Registration opened at 10 in the morning so, we went off in search of caffeine and our registration packets.  Caffeine was fairly easy to find as during the morning hours the hotel has a Starbucks coffee bar n the lobby with some breakfast type baked goods.

I picked up my tags and the program materials.  My panel isn’t until Saturday at 10 and the dealers couldn’t move into their space until about 3 PM.  This left time to go to some panels and stretch our imaginations and our intellect.

"SF as the Literature of Things" Panel

11: 00 SF as the Literature of Things. Panelists: Paul Di Filippo, Lawrence Person, John Clute, Leah Bobet (Leader), Chris Nakashima-Brown. It’s commonly agreed that stories set in the future can “really” be about the future or about the present.  But in novels like William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, and Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist and Zenith Angle, we are for the first time seeing stories set in the present which seem to be about the future. These fictions seem to argue that the future will be built bottom-up rather than top-down; that progress does not derive from the implementation of ideas but rather from the accumulation of quotidian technological change. Character in these works is not so much a matter of nature or nurture, but a product of our interaction with things, things produced as fast as we can (because we can) and without any deep consideration for their consequences. Is this “SF as a Literature of Things” ultimately just an interesting sub-genre, or might (or should) the field itself be morphing in its direction? There are more and more slipstream stories that start with an architectural setting or an object or some arcane text; do these reflect the same movement?

Some random notes:

Cyberpunk — things are symbolic indicators, they tell you about the world and background without having to do an “as you know Bob” informational dump for the reader.

Characters are defined by their interaction with the environment and their things/possessions.  In Pattern Recognition a character doesn’t even show up until the middle of the book but by then we know all about the character and what to expect because of the description of the character’s apartment and things.

There was a lot of discussion about whether you could tell what a person was like from the things owned because we all have public and private personae.  If all you see is the public face then are you that public face or are you still the private person you envision yourself to be?

We often seem, now-a-days, to experience the world through things.  We film events and see it through our cameras, iphones, or recorders.  We don’t see the actual events because we’re annotating and filming it.  How does that effect our view of the world and things?

An audience member asked if we were to believe that things were reliable narrators and the panel generally agreed that while the things are narrators they are not necessarily reliable.

Noon: How to Write for a Living When You Can’t Live Off Your Fiction (Special Kaffeeklatsch). Barbara Krasnoff. You’ve just been laid off from your staff job, you can’t live on the royalties form your fiction writing, and your Significant Other has taken a cut in pay.  How do you pay the rent? Well, you can find freelancework writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-sfnal stuff. Despite today’s lean journalistic market, it’s still possible to make a living writing, editing, and/or publishing. Let’s talk about where and how you can sell yourself as a professional writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and how else you can use your talent to keep the wolf from the door.  Bring whatever ideas, sources, and contacts you have.

The room was packed.  We networked and pickup up some useful ideas and URLs of resources. Rather than go over all the tips and idea presented, I suggest that you go to Barbara’s website of “Useful sites for Earning a Living” at:
http://bkrasnoff.googlepages.com/resourcesforfreelancewriters

Also check out the websites for:
American society of Journalists and Authors: http://www.asja.org
The Authors Guild: https://www.authorsguild.org
National Writers Union: http://www.nwu.org
Freelancers Union: http://www.freelancersunion.org
mediabistro.com: http://mediabistro.com
Editorial Freelancers Association: http://www.the-efa.org
National Association of Science Writers: http://www.nasw.org
American Medical Writers Association: http://www.amwa.org
National Book Critics Circle: http://www.bookcritics.org

1:00 Narrative Psychology and Science Fiction. Robin Abrahams with discussion by Ellen Asher, Eric M. Van, David Swanger. Talk/Discussion (60 min.).  If a character gets shot, it’s a mystery story.  If a character gets shot with a phaser, it’s science fiction. But are there elements to science fiction that go deeper than the surface tropes? Psychologist and writer Robin Abrahams discusses what cognitive psychology and her own research about mental models of literary genres–including science fiction, fantasy, and horror–and what personality factors correlate with a liking of different kinds of stories.

What is personality if not your interpreted style? Perhaps people like stories that fit their interpretive style.  Abraham’s research asked undergraduates to rate various types of genre on several different opposition scales (predicable/unpredictable; emotional/unemotional, etc.). There were some surprises and some “Duh” results.

most predicable — romance
most unpredictable — mystery
most unemotional — science fiction
most bound to time and place — science fiction
most optimistic — self-help
most morally complex characters — biography
most considered to have clear good and bad guys — science fiction
most read to be entertained — humor
most read to learn — self-help
most often written for money — horror
most realistic — self-help
fantasy found high on escapism
science fiction was neutral on escapism

There was a lot of other results but I couldn’t keep up with the talk and take notes too.

There was an interesting thought thrown out that with education and specialization that people raise sub-ordinate categories up to become base categories.  For example most people consider dogs a base category.  But, to people who breed dogs or are very interested in them knowing that it is a dog doesn’t tell them anything.  The sub-ordinate category of breed raises to the base category level.

I then took over getting our table in the dealers’ room setup while Hyperion attended a panel at 2 PM.

2:00 Where the Turtles Stop: Preons as the Most Funadamental Particle.  Eric M. Van. Talk (60 min.). The discovery (invention?) of the quark simplified the “particle zoo” immensely, but the Standard Model of Physics still contains an embarrassing plethora of “fundamental” particles: six quarks and six leptons (both of which fit into neat and cognate 2×3 grids) and a variety of bosons (the photon, gluon, etc.). That all of these particles might be composed of various combinations of two or three truly fundamental “preons” seems obvious. Van will explain why the preon concept was unfairly rejected in the ’70s and ’80s and talk about its recent resurrection by t he Australian physicist Sundance Bilson-Thompson. He will then (of course) present his own preon model, which he argues is simpler and has much more (way cool, in fact) explanatory power. Note: this talk is designed to be intelligible even to those who believe “leptons” manufacture iced tea and Cup of Soup.

While the talk was interesting, it was wholly theoretical.  There is no evidence to support the existence of preons, and there may never be any.  What makes the preon theory attractive is both its simplicity, and the ability to explain much (if not all) of the Standard Model and Quantum Mechanics as an emergent behavior of these simple entities.  Van’s model is based on what’s gone before, but is modified to fit his own understandings.  Given that, the preon model is basically that there is only one basic entity in the universe, the preon and it’s anti-particle, which is just the preon with a negative spin.  Things get a little strange at this point as preons live their lives in p-space, a structure which contains two spacial dimensions, one time dimension, and a special non-time, non-space dimension called “qwa”.  And it’s in this Qwa dimension the the preons do their spinning.  According to the theory, preons are only happy in even number pairs, although the pair may contain any combination of preons and anti-preons.  Since each preon has a charge of either +1/6 or -1/6, combining six preons (or anti-preons) gives you all the standard particles in the Hadron family.  Other combinations of two or four preons gives you other “normal” particles.   The rest of the zoo is, presumably, made up of other combinations.  What makes the preon theory predictably nice is that there are multiple ways that two groups of three preons and be bound together.  And those methods then determine the masses of the resulting particles, such as the Electron, Muon, and Tauon particles.   There was a good deal more, but I think that pretty much gives the flavor of the theory.  One last bit, Van assumes that gravity is an emergent property of p-space, and therefore predicts that when the LHC is finally brought on line, they will NOT find the Higgs Boson.  Well, we shall see.

"How to Review" Panel

3:00 How to Review. Panelists: Rose Fox, Gary K. Wolfe, Charles N. Brown (Leader), Michael Dirda, Lev Grossman.  A roundtable on reviewing: what to do and what not to do. How do different audiences need different sorts of reviews?

I was late to the panel because I need to work more in the dealers’ room but managed to get there for the last half hour.

One thing to remember is that writing that isn’t fun to read won’t be read, and that includes reviews.

Review space in most places is shrinking.  Reviews should be essays and part of the essay is to give the feelings and thoughts that you had upon reading the work.

Trashing a book doesn’t make a review.  You can write a negative review but you must explain why it isn’t good — where does it fail and how.

A review needs to be an accurate account of the book.

The audience for genre review (since this is a genre convention) need not be written for the fan but for the general intelligent reader who likes a wide variety of reading material.  Hopefully to entice them to try something different or something similar to another author that they enjoy.

Dirda says he believes that people should read more and beyond the Best Seller List.

5:00 Memorial Guest of Honor Interview. Michael Swanwick. Talk (60 min.) Swanwick will interview the late Hope Mirrlees, author of “Paris, a Poem” and Lud-in-the-Mist, in person.

This was very interesting and especially well done.  I’d downloaded Lud-in-the-Mist for my Kindle and had read Swanwick’s short essay about Hope Mirrlees before the convention.   For this presentation there was a woman who looked much as you’d expect Hope Mirralees to look like.  Swanwick stated that he would be asking questions and then turn it over to the audience but there had been a great deal of negotiation for Mirrlees special appearance and that only questions which had well documented answers available publicly could be asked.  The humor and British air were refreshing and endearing.

"How Do We Choose What We Read" panel

8:00 How Do We Choose What We Read? Panelists: Michael Bishop, Chuck Rothman, Victoria Janssen, Rosemary Kirstein (Leader), Rick Wilber, Michael Dirda. Those of us with broad tastes in literature are constantly choosing among many different types of story. What determines these choices? Do our story preferences vary with psychological state? What’s behind the phenomenon of concentrating on one subgenre or even one author, or acquiring a transient aversion to same?

First off, Kirstein asked what each panelist’s first genre books was or how they decided to read genre.  Books mentioned were the ones with a rocket ship or atom on the spine.  Danny Dunn.  Tom Swift. Tom Swift, Jr.  The Magician’s Nephew. Lucky Star. Podkayne of Mars. Have Spacesuit will Travel.  Mostly they just stumbled across a book or it was recommended to them and they liked it.  Bishop said his first genre was baseball stories then SF/F.

As adults:
Dirda said he enjoys history and will pick a book because it’s an interesting historical, an author he likes, or a topic he wants to learn about.  He tries to keep an even mix of fiction and nonfiction.  Since he reviews, he reads all the time but seldom just for pleasure because he reviews what he reads.

Wilber said that he travels a lot and tends to stick with an author.  As a child if he liked a book, he then read all the books by that author or in the series.  As an adult he still does that.  He’s a completist. If he’s traveling he’ll sometimes pick up a book at the airport because of the size — picking one he thinks will last the trip.  He also reads books he thinks he should have read to fill in the gaps in his reading mostly picking up the classics he hasn’t read before.

Rothman also tends read authors he’s liked in the past.  If it’s a new book, he’ll pick it up if it is very different from other books of the type that he’s read before.  Usually, the choice is because of the blurb and seldom from the cover art.

Janssen said that she chooses books for two reasons 1) for herself and for pleasure reading and 2) for work or the author part of herself.  The second is to be read as an author looking at the structure, style, and tropes and conventions of a genre.  She’s been writing for Harlequin Spice and is filling in the gap in her romance reading education.

Dirda said when he is starting to read a new author or in a new genre he looks for the best representation of the work by the person or in the field.  That gives him some point of comparison and a starting point for finding more books in the area.

Bishop said he’s drawn to books by reviews.  Reviews got him reading some mystery writers that he hadn’t come across before and he really enjoyed the work and then read more of them.  He’d brought Newsweek with the cover story, “What to read now”.  It was a list of fifty books that everyone should read.  Number one was by Anthony Trollope and there were only two fantasy/science fiction books: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick)
and The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper)

Wilber said he reads about three books a week: 1 for business/work, 1 for fun, and 1 book that he feel he should have read (usually a classic).

All agreed that if a book doesn’t give you pleasure and you don’t have to read it for a class or for work — give it up.  Sometimes you can return at a later time and find that it now fits your needs and other times it will just be a bad book that doesn’t work for you or at all.

Grand Ceremony

10:00 Readercon 20 Grand Ceremony.  Listed all the past Guests of Honor and of those past guests all those who are attending this year’s convention.

Cordwainer Smith Award Ceremony

10:30 The 2009 Cordwainer Smith Rediscover Award Ceremony. Barry N. Malzberg and Robert J. Sawyer.
This year’s winner was A. Merritt.

Meet the Prose Party, Crowd

10:45 Meet the Pros(e) Party.

There was cake and it was good.  At this event the Pros all have a sheet of peel off labels with a phrase or sentence that they sent in to the convention people.  Attendees talk to the Pros to try to collect a label from each one.  It’s a nice bit to get people to talk and mix a bit.  Most authors use something from their books or story stories.  Since I’m not a writer but a reviewer, each year I try to come up with a sentence that is very weird while making sense in context of SF/F.  This year I wrote:
It’s as if Elizabeth Bennet and The Tick try to explain the meaning of life to a race that has no numbers.

Now it’s late and we’re off to relax and sleep, perhaps to dream.  Tomorrow is another full day.

Up at 6 this morning to finish packing the car. Unfortunately, we didn’t get underway until a bit after 8 so the schedule was trashed from the beginning. It’s an 11 hour drive from our house to the Marriott Hotel in Burlington, MA. Of course that includes a few stops along the way. So, it had already been a long day when we got here and checked in. Then we searched out food and tried to get to the evening panels.

Readercon started having panels on Thursday night a couple of years ago. These panels are open to the public which means people can come to see a panel or talk and decide if they want to come back and pay for the membership to attend the rest of the weekend’s events.

8:00 – Writers Who Review. Panelists: Michael Bishop, Paul DiFilippo (leader), Elizabeth Hand, Barry N. Malzberg, Howard Waldrop, Gene Wolfe. The reviewers in our field have often also been writers: Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Algis Budrys, James Blish. Does being a writer/critic inevitably affect the practice of both arts? Or are the required skill sets sufficiently different that doing one has surprisingly little influence on the other? Our panelists look at the careers of the greats and talk about their own experience as two-way players.

Unfortunately, in our quest for food we missed most of this panel. I think we managed the last ten minutes. Where the panelists were basically agreeing that even though the time spent reading the books and writing the reviews took time away from their own writing, it was worth it. Waldrop said that one year when he was doing his taxes he realized that over half his income was from nonfiction writing which included reviews. Hand said that often, in the past, reviewing was a way to earn money between writing projects. The last five minutes of the panel was spent answering questions from the audience.

During this time period there were two other panels and four half-hour readings.

9:00 The Origin of Character in the Breakthrough of the Bicameral Mind. Panelists: Daryl Gregory, Eileen Gunn, Elizabeth Hand, James Patrick Kelly (leader), Ellen Kushner, Peter Straub. Our panelists all report the experience of their characters “taking over” the story and behaving in some way autonomously. But we wonder whether this is actually multiple different psychological phenomena rather than a single one that everyone shares. So, we’ve asked them to compare notes.

Kelly started the panel off by giving a one minute overview of Julian Jaynes book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Check out the link for the reviews on Amazon). Basically, Jaynes was discussing the history of the conscious (recent) and unconscious mind and how many of our actions are unconscious (breathing, walking, and some problem solving?).

The panelists then discussed writing as a conscious/unconscious process. Most gave examples from their own experiences when a story or character just came to them. Sometimes it was writing a story and having a minor character show up and then finding that that was actually the main character and the story took off in a different — though usually more interesting — direction. They also discussed “gift stories” or the stories that seem to just appear full blown and it is a race to get it down before it’s gone.

Gregory said that he really gets upset when people say the “book wrote itself” because he has to do fourteen drafts. He also said that often it isn’t until he’s really worked on it and maybe is into the second draft and the characters have gelled until he begins to find that the story wants to go in another direction and that usually comes out as he works on dialog.

All the panelists said it was important to listen to that inner voice because you could trust it. It might not be perfect but it would get you in the right direction.

Kushner said that often if you can get a person to rapid fire questions at you about your character and you have to answer without thinking about it you’ll find the direction and information you need to take the story where it needs to go.

There was much discussion about the creator/critic dichotomy in writing and that it was important to write without the critic to get a first draft.

This panels was very lively and managed to enthrall the audience. The questions period was taken up with asking about how do you recognize the inner voice that’s helping versus the very loud voice that’s just self-doubt. Basically, if it’s not helping you then it’s most likely self-doubt because that inner voice is usually trying to help you.

In this time slot there were two other panels and four readings.

Hyperion attended the reading by Michael J. Daley author of Rat Trap and Shanghaied to the Moon (YA). [Hyperion:  Michael said that his newest book has had its publishing date pushed back to 2011.]

Tomorrow is a full day of programming so we’re calling it quits so we can get some sleep.

If you’re a Starbucks habitue then you’ve probably seen this cup. It’s surprising how many of their cups I seem drawn to for their color, functionality, and design. This one just screamed the blistering heat of July in Maryland. It’s the gradations of the warm/hot colors in the stylized grid for me it speaks of lazy days sitting on the porch with a good book and a drink — usually iced coffee or tea. Well, at least this cup is large enough for an iced beverage but it’s also a great hefty coffee cup.

Got it on the clearance table too. I’ve noticed lately that the things on sales tables are the things I’m actually looking for at the time. Though I do remember seeing this cup on the shelves for the last several months, but I didn’t want it then. Marketing seems to always be out of step with what I’m looking for as it is for most people. Winter clothes during the heat of summer. Summer clothes while I’m freezing in my woolies. I don’t understand marketing at all — obviously, which probably explains why I nearly always buy things on sale because by the time I want something the “season” has passed and they’re gearing up for the next one that I’m not ready for yet. Maybe it’s them that doesn’t understand marketing which would explain all the Christmas decorations before Halloween.

While I’m writing this post up, Hyperion is boxing up books to pack up the car for our trip to Readercon tomorrow. [Hyperion: I got called into work and lost about five hours of productive packing time. ] We’re leaving quite early in the morning and it’s about an eight hour drive from here. We’ll be taking some of the back roads until we get to the Delaware and the bridge. But we expect to get to the hotel in Burlington, MA in the late afternoon. SFRevu has a table in the Dealers’ Room. Ernest Lilley is on a panel and so am I.

In fact, I’m moderating the panel: Upbeat and Downbeat in YA Fiction which has the description:

Dark and downbeat endings have become fashionable in YA fiction, even to the point where they have been questioned as a fad gone too far. The trend raises a host of questions about the psychology of young readers that need to be asked and answered. Is the tone and resolution of a work of YA fiction actually more important than in adult fiction, e.g., because the readers are still at the age where their worldview is being shaped? Do young readers have a different tolerance for or reaction to downbeat endings than adults? Do they need to be forcibly exposed to the cruel realities of the world, shielded from them, or gently inoculated?

I’m doing a lot of reading right now for preparation and generating a lot of questions which I’ll then have to pare down to a reasonable number to ask the panel about and hopefully generate some discussion.

If you have a question relevant to the panel that you feel needs to be asked or should at least be considered, drop me a comment. I’m always willing to take ideas under consideration. And to me, my questions sound lame…of course I tend to think that. If I think of something it must be so obvious that a galloping rider on a horse could see it a mile away…and that famous response, “Duh!’ would be the perfect answer. So, help me out.

Well, Ern arrived to help pack up the cars for our caravan to Burlington tomorrow morning. Starting Thursday, my posts will be coverage of Readercon. Hope you enjoy the coverage of the convention — feedback would be helpful.

Okay, I admit it. I’m overweight. I’m working on adding a lot more exercise into my daily life, well as much as I can with chronic pain and fibromyalgia. I do between 15-45 minutes on the Wii Fit each day. Lately, I’ve been also walking down to the mailbox (1/4 miles from the house) and a few times a week, depending on the temperature, Hyperion and I have been taking about a 1.5 to 2 mile walk in the early evening. So, I’m not a slouch with the exercise and I eat healthy and lite — mostly.

But I’m fairly comfortable with myself though if I lose some weight my knees would probably throw a big party with carrots and celery. But then I get the confusing messages from the “world”. Airlines want to charge extra for heavy people to fly because it bothers people to sit next to a fat person. You know what bothers me — people who douse themselves with perfume and fly, people who put their seats all the way back without even thinking about the person behind them who just lost 1/3 of their space and most likely can’t read unless they rest the book on the reclining person’s head, people who feel they must tell you their life story even when you get your book our and open it. Heck, I’ve sat next to skinny people who spread themselves all out over half my seat and their own and half the one next to them as they take off their shoes and pull their legs up into their seat with their knees on my seat arm and in my lap. No, I don’t think overweight people are the problem — I think seats designed for a 1920’s butt that hasn’t been updated since is the problem, but then there would be fewer seats per plane, flying would be more relaxing, and flight attendants would have an easier time dealing with passengers — hmmm….

But mostly, people in the news and in advertising seem to think heavy people are lazy and don’t do anything. Most of the people I know are overweight. Of course they also work 12-14 hours per day and are on call the rest of the day doing IT work of one sort or another. Add the long days to long commutes and there’s not a lot of time to eat responsibly — you grab meals when you can and take what you can get. Most run on caffeine and sugar — that’s the problem for most Americans. We work long hours with long commutes and very little free time. Of course, I work at home but I still work long hours and have health issues so ….

But, I found this gem of an article in the New York Times, Excess Pounds, but Not Too Many, May Lead to Longer Life.  Evidently, skinny people and very heavy people may have health problems from weight issues but moderately heavy and normal (whatever that means) people live longer. There was a similar article about the study, Can A Little Extra Weight Protect People From Early Death? Underweight, Extremely Obese Die Earlier Than People Of Normal Weight in Science Daily. Yeah, for this new study.

I’ve known some skinny people with really bad health problems and some normal people and some heavy people. I may agree that carrying added weight can put some strain on the organs, but then so can a lot of other factors. You just can’t generalize about people on simply one factor and expect it to be taken seriously. I doubt if there is a single factor you could use that starts with “All whatever people are ____” and have it be true for every case. It isn’t true when you use race as that whatever and it certainly isn’t true when you use eye color, hair color, weight, or religion. People are too diverse and unique to use sweeping statements like that.

But I like this study because it found evidence that goes totally against what people have been saying for ages and seems to have some numbers to back it up. We need more studies to see just what being overweight does effect and these studies will hopefully be devoid of blame and accusations.