World Fantasy 2007 – Nov 4th (Sunday)
Got up very early — got to the convention (very early for us) — saw stuff. Then drove home — 10 1/2 hour drive. I’m bushed. Will re-edit this post and finish Sunday’s report tomorrow.
Continued:
Well Monday turned out to be Wednesday but here’s the rest of my report. When we arrived on Sunday, we met some people and chatted and then got to the 10AM panel on What Are the Taboos in Fantasy Today? Panelists: John Grant, Tom Doherty, Sharyn November (moderator), Lucienne Diver, and Steven Erikson. Description: They shift with the times. Is the writer ever really free to write about ANYTHING?
Basically, the panel agreed that if the story is strong enough just about anything goes even though if a taboo is broken it means reduced sales and limited markets. Bestiality seemed to be the big taboo of today — however, there has been at least one YA book published with bestiality in it. One of the panel members had turned down the book but it was published elsewhere. Some things that weren’t taboo in the past are taboo now (smoking was one that was mentioned). Explicit sex is out — panel preferred a shirt on the back of the chair and it’s morning to descriptive narratives (because they’re very difficult to write and they don’t want to read them). One interesting point on bestiality was that if the characters are werewolves they can have sex in human form but not as wolves or one wolf/one human. While the panel could understand the human/wolf taboo — the wolf/wolf taboo didn’t make sense to some or to some of the audience either.
The last panel that we went to was Urban Fantasy–Beyond the Usual Suspects. Panelists: Jenna Black, Marie Brennan, Ernest Lilley (moderator), Ekaterina Sedia, and Melanie Fletcher. Descripton: It seems as if most urban fantasy uses the familiar European myths. What other possibilities are there? Which authors have successfully exploited them?
This panel certainly got a lot of emotional steam going once they got to cultural appropriation or using myths and icons of a culture not your own as a basis for a story/novel. It’s at this point that while they understood the need to be sensitive to the members of a culture and that most of the myths and icons of one culture show up in others under different names and couldn’t they be used without harming the culture since it existed in my culture too but under another name? (If that didn’t quite make sense but you got the gist that would explain why after 50 minutes there was still a lot to be said and no one agreed totally on rules that would indicate when you could or couldn’t use bits of a culture not your own in a story. Quite an interesting conversation and I’m sure anyone could recreate the conversation with their own friends just by listing the discussion descripition and adding the phrase “Cultural Appropriation”.
We didn’t attend the banquet where the World Fantasy Awards were handed out but there is a list of the winners on SFRevu in the News Column.