A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Slept in a bit late on Friday. Well didn’t sleep well — never do the first night in a new place. Got up and ready to go. Registration opened at 10:00 AM. There was a program item we wanted to see at 11 so we made sure to get down to registration on time. The line was already quite lengthy. I got my registration material in the green room but my husband had to go through the pre-reg line. That’s when we hit the first snag. His registration wasn’t there so back in line for the at-the-door and filling out the forms. Finally completed the process at ll:32 AM.

If you’ve been here before you know that registration is down a side hallway. It was crowded and hot, very hot. Many of the people leaving were joking about forming a registration survivors support group. It was truly amazing that people didn’t spontaneously combust from either heat or bad tempers, especially those working at registrations who didn’t get to leave that heat for much longer than those getting registrations. That doesn’t even take into considerations the problems with some of the technical equipment. GOOD JOB in a bad environment, people.

The first panel we managed to get to was at noon.

Noon: Muzzling the Horse’s Mouth.
Panelists: Graham Sleight, Veronica Schanoes (leader), David G. Hartwell, Michael Dirda, Ruth Sternglantz.

Description: Conventions, zines, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook provide many venues for writers to shape the dialogue around their works. When it’s hard to avoid information about what a writer intended, how does that affect the critical reading experience? As readers and as critics, can we feel confident that we would have seen on our own what the writer has revealed to us? How do we differentiate and prioritize between our own insights and those shared by the author? Does the writer’s emphasis on some aspects of a work make it harder to see other aspects? And what happens when the critic’s desire to convey information about a work—such as an author’s stated intentions—comes into conflict with the critic’s desire to demonstrate a viable personal reading of the text?

What that description all boils down to is: does an author’s published intent about his work effect the critical reader? Many felt that the text should speak for itself and if the author’s intent doesn’t get borne out by the text than the readers interpretation is just as valid as the author’s.

The topic did move onto the difference between reviews and criticisms. Reviews are for people who haven’t read the book and criticisms are for those who have read the book. It was felt that all reviews are subjective views for the reviewer. Panel members felt that the best reviewers present a sincere response to the work. Readers get to know a reviewer’s taste and can then learn to trust the reviewer to either be close to their own taste or opposite to their taste. (Personally, I had one reviewer that I knew if that person hated the work then there was a good chance I’d enjoy it.)

Panel talked about how many times what you get out of the text is sufficient to enjoy the work. However, with some books a second reading can add richness and texture to your experience. (This was mostly said in relationship to the works of Gene Wolfe.)

Another interesting side issue was on audio books. There was the feeling that audio books add a paratext as the narrator (not author) reads the book using pacing, inflections, and other performance tricks that may change the experience for the listener to be different from that of a reader. [In a panel on Saturday, a blind woman talking about text-to-speech readers said she preferred the mechanical reader rather than a person because it allowed her to get an experience more like reading — when she was sighted.) Ruth Sternglantz said (and I’m paraphrasing) that audio books are not reading text but a reading of the text.

1:00 PM: Theological Debate in Fantasy and SF.
Panel: John Benson, Ellen Asher, James Morrow, Sonya Taafte, Harold Tonger Vedeler.

Description: From Spenser and Bunyan to Michael Chabon and Stephenie Meyer, writers of speculative fiction have engaged in fine-grained, subtextual theological positioning and debate. Leaving aside instances of more obvious religious maneuvering, what happens when implicit or encoded theological dialogues become invisible to readers, either because the passage of time has stripped away their contexts (as with, say, High Church vs. Low Church Anglicanism in Victorian fiction), or because they are only available to the initiated (as with Meyer’s LDS-inflected fantasy)? Are these vanishings a loss? Is there something insidious about books whose surface narratives conceal debates to which we lack access, or do these dimensions enrich the texts? Are we ‘better’ readers if we try to suss them out?

Religion for the purposes of this panel was defined as “God is in the details.”

Reader may get the moral message from a work but not the actual religious underpinnings. Panel and audience talked about specific books such as reading The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe as a young person and understanding the right/wrong, good/evil, strength of family unit, etc. but totally missed the Christian message. One person said they actually thought it was a Mithras tale.

The writer doesn’t necessarily add religious underpinning but the religion is so much a part of the writer’s world view and core beliefs that it is intrinsic to how he or she see and interacts with the world and thus it shows in the text.

There was also a lively discussion of whether it even mattered if you didn’t recognize the religious underpinnings. Was the reader’s enjoyment any less valid if they didn’t get it? Most thought that it didn’t really matter if they recognized which religion if they got the basic moral message being conveyed.

One comment that I found interesting was that mysticism is flexible and theology is not. I hadn’t really thought of it in this way before but did see it as being more or less a valid way of looking at things.

2:00 PM: Serendipity in the Digital Age.
Panel: David G. Shaw (L), John Benson, John Clute, Michael J. DeLuca, Kathryn Morrow, Michael Dirda.

Description: Libraries are closing off their stacks from patrons and sending robots to retrieve requested books; brick-and-mortar bookstores are being supplanted by Amazon’s massive warehouses and recommendation engines. While these arrangements increase efficiency on the business end, they destroy serendipity on the reader’s end. Yet sites like Wikipedia and TV Tropes give us what Randall Munroe called “hours of fascinated clicking,” trails of discovery that strongly resemble the old-fashioned bookstore or library experience. Can those sites teach us how to recreate browsing in our browsers? Should Amazon look more like the new online edition of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia?

We all love to browse in bookstores and library stacks. However, more and more libraries have closed stacks and many bookstores are closing or there are none near you and you end up with online sites that have recommendation engines which are often not really your taste or not finding things by chance.

On the other hand the panel agreed in principle that we’ve never really had true serendipity since bookstores and libraries don’t have everything but only what the buyers believe the patrons will want. There’s always been a limiting factor on what we can browse and that hasn’t changed. So, we need to try harder to find that gem that wouldn’t normally be the kind of thing you read but that you stumble across anyway.

3:00 PM: Anthropology for Writers.
Panel: James L. Cambias, John H. Stevens (L), Christopher M. Cevasco, Francesca Forrest, Harold Torger Vedeler.

Description: In a 2011 blog post, Farah Mendlesohn wrote, “‘Worldbuilding’ as we understand it, has its roots in traditions that described the world in monolithic ways: folklore studies, anthropology, archeology, all began with an interest in describing discrete groups of people and for that they needed people to be discrete.” This panel will discuss the historical and present-day merging and mingling of real-world cultures, and advise writers on building less monolithic and more plausible fictional ones.

The conversation among the panelists was interesting and wide ranging but the key to this panel was summed up at the very beginning by Harold Torger Vedeler in three points:

1. Worlds must change over time allowing the characters to act in a historical context.
2. No world is homogenous. Story may look at only one group but the other societies will have an impact on that one.
3. People often say one thing and do another. They may idealize their culture but then what they actually do doesn’t agree with that idealized culture.

4:00 PM: Sherlock Holmes, Now and Forever.
Panel: Veronica Schanoes, Ellen Asher, Michael Dirda, Victoria Janssen, Fred Lerner.

Description: Sherlock Holmes is everywhere right now: in TV series like House, BBC’s Sherlock, and the upcoming Elementary; in the Robert Downey Jr. movies; and in books and stories being written about Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. What accounts for the endless appeal of this character? Are we ever going to get tired of brilliant and slightly mad detectives? Or is it all really about Watson, as suggested by our collective urge to keep telling and retelling Holmes’s stories?

Lively and interesting points were made by the panelist and the audience. The key element, it was agreed, to remember is that there is a distinction between the stories by Conan Doyle and the interpretation of the stories in movies and in other media and the continuation or addition of new material by others writing about Holmes and Watson.

Key reasons why the stories are still popular was thought to be the atmosphere of the stories and the friendship of the two main characters.

Evening: We decided to call it a day. Went out for dinner and found Brave was showing so went to see it more on that later.

That’s it for Friday. I hope to have my Saturday of Readercon report up soon.

We got out of the house just about on time — meaning we were an hour late (11:00 AM) and we arrived at the hotel at 9:30 PM.

After the drive and several slow downs along the way, we arrived just as the ambulance and fire department were finishing up. The next morning we had a note under the door saying that the alarm in the lobby had been pulled accidentally. [We heard later that someone got distracted when talking and tried to open a door but instead grabbed the alarm. I don’t know if this is what actually happened but it is plausible.] We thought that explained the ambulance but today (June 14th), we learned that while setting up his booth in the Bookstore, one of our book-dealer friends suffered a heart attack. We were of course shocked to hear this and are hoping he’s doing well and recovers quickly.

Anyway, the hotel, as always, is comfortable and since we’ve been coming to Readercon for several years now it’s a known facility. The programming is all on the same floor at ground level. The lobby is available for sitting and talking and there’s an in-hotel pub for talk and a drink. The con suite is again on the 6th floor and the Kaffeeklatches are on the 8th floor.

We checked in and essentially called it a night. Guess we’re not as young as we used to be, but then who is.

Our intrepid reports are at NY Comic Con. Here’s their overview for today:
Very busy first day–
We got to the Jacob Javits Convention Center around 4pm, found the press room and got registered.

Then we went to the con floor and toured the displays– the best included: Legendary Pictures, which had several movie props on display; Hasbro, which had plenty of toys in the cases; and many, many more. We also spoke with several publishers and made contacts for future reviews.

Today was really the day for press, professionals, VIPs and fans to enjoy the show prior to the throng arriving tomorrow. It was busy, lots of people, but it won’t hold a candle to Friday and Saturday.

More news coming tomorrow!

This year, SFRevu will have people at New York Comic Con and their coverage of the convention and its happenings will be posted here. What is written about will depend on what we can get in to see and who we get to talk to. So check back now and then to see what’s been added to our coverage.

The start of a whole new day. Managed to get down to the Book Shop to open on time. We moved one of our bookshelves in order to help get traffic to our table when authors are doing signings. We’re right next to the autograph tables and when the lines get long they block off our table because we’re closer and we become inaccessible. Moving one bookcase seemed to ease the press so even if the lines were longer we still got customers. Of course this move was aided by the author close to us moving his chair closer to the other author’s chair so they could talk and none of the rest of the day’s authors moved it back to center on that table.

But still business so far is far less than it was last year but the conversation about books, reading, the rise of ebooks, and other topics has been entertaining, enlightening, and fun. If tomorrow doesn’t improve in sales we’re not even going to break even this year with the travel and hotel costs.

11:00 AM: Book Design and Typography in the Digital Era.
Panelists: Neil Clarke, Ken Liu, Erin Kissane, David G. Shaw (leader), and Alicia Verlager.
Description: Design and typography can heighten the experience of reading a written work; in the case of poetry, typesetting can be crucial to comprehension and interpretation. eReaders can change font sizes with the press of a button, making books far more accessible to people who have visual limitations or just their own ideas about how a book should look. What happens when these worthy goals are at odds? Will the future bring us more flexible book design, much as website design with CSS has become more flexible as browser customization becomes more common? Or will we see the book equivalent of Flash websites where the designer’s vision is strictly enforced.

Ken Liu gave a quick history of the book from scroll to codex. First there was the scroll but you didn’t have random access to it — you always had to roll and unroll the entire thing to find what you wanted. With a codex or book you could go right to the page. More of the development of the book driven by the desire to print the bible and get access quickly to the parts you wanted.

China also had the scroll and they went to whirlwind books. These books were still more scroll-like but the bottom layer was a long scroll page and the top was a slightly shorter one and so forth. When unrolled completely the shorter layers curled up looking like whirls. This was developed for a dictionary and it was a way to solve the random access problem.

Now we have the ebook which handles the random access aspect quite well to search for an item but the return to the section you were reading is not always easily or correctly handled.

They talked about design issues and the conversion problems of print to ebook. For newer books you still have the electronic file and that makes conversions a bit easier but for older books the scan, OCR, run through converter formula that many places are using create awful books, making those who run into these badly converted/formatted books think all the books are like that. There was general agreement that more quality control for editing the OCR’d book and cleaning up HTML needed to be added. It’s mostly the small publishers doing this and the larger publishers are watching and learning from them.

Verlanger, who is blind, and has a technology blog where she writes about accessibility issues with technology among other tech-topics, spoke about the problems of back code which make the books inaccessible simply because they can’t be read by the programs used to translate text into speech. Scanners on the lowest quality setting sometimes create files where the images are not even identified as images by the OCR programs and weird groupings of letters are are added into the text/speech confusing the listener. Also DRM came up, in that a lot of the programs DRM for PDF and other formats identify the text-to-speech programs as illegal pirating software and do not allow the access at all.

Many issues were discussed and if you were interested in book design and conversions to ebooks and their utility this was a panel with a wealth of information for the audience.

Then it was back to the Book Shop and our table for an hour.

1:00 PM: Urban (Fantasy) Renewal.
Participants: Toni L.P. Kelner, Craig Laurance Gidney, Leah Bobet (leader), Ellen Datlow, and John Clute.
Description: The term “urban fantasy” has encompassed the work of Charles Williams, a contemporary of Tolkien who sometimes situated his fantasy in London or suburban settings as opposed to a pastoral secondary world; the novels and short stories of Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, or Robin Hobb (as Megan Lindholm); the phantasmagoric cities of China Mié or Jeff VanderMeer; and most recently, the magical noir of Jim Butcher and Charlaine Harris. Is it possible to reclaim “urban fantasy” as a useful critical term? Rather than wring our hands at how it no longer means what it did, can we use it to examine what these very different writers have in common, and to what degree they reflect different eras’ anxieties around and interests in the urban?

John Clute read a definition that he’d put together for his Encyclopedia of Fantasy. It was a good one and quite long and I couldn’t write it all down. One part I remember and I’m pretty sure it’s from this section was that the city is so much a part of the story and the characters environment that it’s just “the city” — any big metropolitan city but usually London, NY, Paris…

There was also some talk about urban fantasy that wasn’t contemporary but most felt that modern readers expected urban fantasy to be contemporary rather than set in the distant past.

The panelists also tossed around the term rural fantasy, suburban fantasy, and paranormal romance and how it differed from urban fantasy. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance differ in how central to the story the search for a mate is. In urban fantasy, you may find your mate but it’s not the central core of the story while in paranormal romance it is the central to the story.

An interesting panel with some very interesting views on labels and these labels in particular.

Worked with Hyperion at the SFRevu table until closing at 6:00 PM. We then had an hour until my panel at 7.

7:00 PM: The One Right Form of a Story.
Panelists: John Langan, Meghan McCarron, Gayle Surrette (leader), Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen, and Judith Berman.
Description: Quoth Mark Twain: “There are some books that refuse to be written…. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written– it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.” Anyone who has adapted a fairy tale for a poem or developed a short story into a novel might disagree, yet many authors have also spent years chasing stories that evade capture until they’re approached in just the right way. What makes some stories easy-going and others stubborn? Is the insistence on a story “telling itself” a red herring? And what does “form” really mean here?

This was one of the easiest panel I’ve ever moderated. From the first question the panelists just played off one another, building on or suggesting ideas until I opened it for questions. Each shared experiences where the story didn’t work and wouldn’t come together as they imagined it until they found the core or the character that the story was about. That form was when all the pieces fit because the creative and intellectual side worked together and the writer found the thread the story wove around. (This is my comprehension of the discussion and I was avidly listening but also concentrating on seeing that everyone got a chance to contribute.)

8:00 PM: I’ve Fallen (Behind) and I Can’t Get (Caught) Up
Panelists: Michael Dirda, Jennifer Pelland, Craig Laurance Gidney, Don D’Ammassa, and Rick Wilber.
Description: In a recent blog post for NPR, Linda Holmes wrote, “Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything…. There are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling or surrender.” How do you choose among the millions of books that you could be reading? Do you organize your “to read” books or are all your books “to read” books? How useful are books reviews, Amazon recommendations, Goodreads, LibraryThing, etc.? How do you budget your limited reading time? And how do you cope with the knowledge that you will never read everything you want to?

In other words — how do you pick what to read in your TO-BE-READ (TBR) pile when it’s larger than any one person, no matter how fast they read, can read in a lifetime?

D’Ammassa has an actual written schedule of when he reads (3 hours every morning and another 3 hours before bed). I can’t imagine being that organized but maybe it’s something to strive for.

Dirda said he hasn’t read for pleasure in years. Just about every book he reads, he writes about. That’s at least two books a week. He also said he’s a slow reader because he moves his lips when he reads. (I have a little person in my head who reads me the books — in other words I can’t read any faster than a person could read the book aloud. I was so happy to learn that Michael Dirda has a similar tic that slowed his reading down.)

All of the panelists stated that they read at different speeds for different types of books — dense text or non-fiction being slower than other books.

Time is always a problem. Dirda said he’d given up TV and movie watching. Other said they read on their long commutes to and from work and missed that reading time when they changed jobs to one closer with less travel time. Airplane trips are great reading times with few interruptions. Pelland said she got a lot of reading done in the Laundromat because there wasn’t anything else to do there while the machines ran.

The issue of ebooks was raised. They avoid the stacks of books but putting them on the drive of the machine and the device was easy to carry and handle rather than hauling around lots of books to read. Also, they avoided the appearance of hoarding.

In many ways this was a slight variation in the Bookaholics Annonomous panel that Readercon usually has during the convention. As someone who could insulate her house with the books she plans to read someday — I appreciated the issues raised and the ideas tossed out by the panelists and the audience.

We’ll be heading to Readercon this weekend. Readercon is one of the few conventions that I attend each year. SFRevu has a table in the dealers’ room — our semi-annual book sale to clear out our basement actually so if you’re there stop by the table for a chat.

Here’s my schedule:
Friday: 12:00 PM G And They Lived Happily Ever After, Until They Died: Retelling Russian Folktales. Patricia McKillip, Gayle Surrette (leader). Ekaterina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow, Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless, Patricia McKillip’s In the Forests of Serre… it appears we’re in the middle of a renewed interest in fairy tale retellings—and specifically, postmodern, genre-challenging fairy tale retellings—based in the folklore of Russia. Is there a specific element to Russian stories that makes them particularly fit for contemporary adaptation?

Saturday: 7:00 PM ME The One Right Form of a Story. Judith Berman, Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen, John Langan, Meghan McCarron, Gayle Surrette (leader). Quoth Mark Twain: “There are some books that refuse to be written…. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written—it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.” Anyone who has adapted a fairy tale for a poem or developed a short story into a novel might disagree, yet many authors have also spent years chasing stories that evade capture until they’re approached in just the right way. What makes some stories easygoing and others stubborn? Is the insistence on a story “telling itself” a red herring? And what does “form” really mean here?

Hyperion and I look forward to meeting our readers and making new friends.

First panel was 9:00 AM. So, that meant getting up early enough to get the brain in gear by 9.

Sun, 9:00 AM, Salon B, Writers We Don’t Understand
Moderator: Gayle Surrette. Panelists: J-F Bibeau, Michael Swanwick
Charlie Stross loads his stories with so much IT jargon it makes the head spin. A PhD in Physics is necessary to get full enjoyment out of a Greg Egan novel. China Miéville is best read with an open dictionary handy. Others create whole new slang vocabularies for the societies they create. Are these writers doing this on purpose? Are they that much smarter than the rest of us, or are we getting a year of painstaking research downloaded into us in a compressed format? Is there a good stylistic reason to confuse your readers?

Great panel. Areas covered were that sometimes you need to read a book during the right window in your life. That sometimes you just need to be in the right place and time to read some books. Other times you need to put the book away and try again at another time when maybe things will work to make you and the book click. Then there are writers whose books you need to work to understand and the work is well rewarded.

Then it was time to get some food and later sit at the Capclave table. My next panel was at 1:00 PM where I was to be a panelist. Hyperion and I made plans to go out after with a friend.

1:00 PM – Salon B – How To Read For Pleasure
Panelists: ??, Elizabeth Moon, Gayle Surrette (M), Paolo Bacigalupi, and Charles Gannon.
This isn’t about being a “better reader” but about how to really enjoy what you’re reading more!

Well, I missed the name of the gentleman just to the left of Elizabeth Moon but he added some very cogent comments as did all the panelists. I took on being the moderator as the moderator on the schedule wasn’t there. We managed to have quite an interesting discussion. Many of the same issues came up that we’d talked about in the 9:00 AM panel. How sometimes you need to just put a book away and try again later. Sometimes, you just have to give yourself permission to stop reading and give up. If reading a book isn’t fun — put it away. If you feel you must read it, try again later.

We talked about books we enjoyed and good places to read. The writers talked about how they read the genre differently — more critically and so read other genres for pleasure. That we understand book better the more we read.

Later we hung out with friends, sat at the Capclave table and called it an early night. Can’t believe how tired I feel.

I wish we could have slept in today. Yesterday was really busy though, looking at what I wrote, it doesn’t really appear to be that much. Didn’t matter. I was tired when I got up. First order of business was to talk to programming about getting off one of the panels that I was on today. I’d been placed on an audience participation type panel that was game based — think What’s My Line or Pick the Real Definition of the Word type thing but different. It just was not my cup of tea and staying on the item would be a disservice to the panelists and the audience. Tracked down the right person and got replaced and gave a great sigh of relief.

Next we helped set up the Capclave table and spent some time talking to people about Capclave, WSFA Press, and our upcoming guests of honor — Catherynne M. Valente and Carrie Vaughn. Check out the website and consider coming to Capclave this October — it’s bound to be a lot of fun.

1:00 PM – Belmont – Favorite Shared Worlds. Panelists: Gayle Surrette (M), C. J. Henderson, Michael Hanson, Richard Groller, Neil Levin, Charles Gannon.
Description: Fans, Authors and Editors talk about their favorite shared worlds, old and new. And maybe even toss around ideas form some new shared worlds!

Unfortunately, this panel had a problem — the panelists and moderator showed up but we had no audience. Paolo Bacigalupi was scheduled to do a reading in Belmont at 1:00. Programming moved his reading to Chesapeake — unknown to us they also placed a very large sign outside the door that said that his reading was moved. This was a good idea and they’d told us to announce before our panel started that his reading had been moved. The sign outside the door however didn’t mention that another panel had been moved to replace the reading — our panel.

So, while we waited for an audience to show up, the panelists discussed shared worlds including the newly revived Heroes in Hell, Wild Cards, and Shad’aa. We swapped information and ideas on the topic while waiting. After about 20 minutes we said our goodbyes and went on with our day.

Having some time before my next panel at 4:00 PM, I met up with Hyperion and we checked out the Art Show which had some nice pieces way-way out of our range and some interesting new pieces we hadn’t see before. After that we took a turn in the dealer’s room checking out the offering there. Some beautiful items on sale. We each got a pocket watch with steampunk-ish finishes. We then checked out all the booksellers. You’d think with all the books we have that we wouldn’t need to buy any more for quite a while. After all, each of our To-Be_Read piles are really multiple stacks not to mention the eBooks on our eReaders. Nevertheless, we found several we’re considering for later in the convention.

4:00 PM – Salon C – How Plausible is Today’s Hard SF?
Panelists: Michael Swanwick, Douglas Fratz, Gayle Surrette, Brett Talbot, David Bartell.
Description: Past science fiction stories were either fantastic or built on known science. Now theoretical physics and accelerating developments in biology have led to more fantastic leaps of speculation in what used to be hard science fiction. Is the science in today’s SF at all plausible or is today’s SF drifting towards fantasy?

The conversation went very well between the panelists. There was discussion of physics, biology, classic writers and new, and how writers handle the science of their books. Interestingly, it was brought up the the more expert a writer is in a field the less likely they are to enjoy books with their field depicted in a book or to write about it themselves. There was also talk of how there are just some givens — you need to travel between solar systems so you have FTL and move on with no detail as to how it works other than to keep the time of travel consistent with distances. Many other areas were covered but now I can’t remember who said what or what was covered. Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief was highly recommended as were other writers.

We then helped at the Capclave table until it was packed up for the night. We then attended a short WSFA Press meeting and went out with friends for dinner. Coming back to the hotel, we stopped in a couple of parties and called it a night.

Tomorrow, I’ve got a 9:00 AM panel — after which I hope to get to see some other panels. One can always hope.