Update: Ern’s con photos are now uploaded to Flickr.
I grabbed a tasty cinnamon raisin bagel (slathered with peanut butter) from the con suite, overflowing with folks doing much the same, to chatting amiably about books, eBooks, or whatever. Nodded to David Hartwell, who gave me props for today’s hat…and dropped my gear at the desk for later retrieval.
10 AM ME Protecting Literary Legacies. David G. Hartwell, Jeff Hecht, Barry N. Malzberg, B. Diane Martin (leader), Kenneth Schneyer.
My first panel for the day was the legacies panel, about which I only cared peripherally…but I wanted to hear Hartwell and Malzberg carry on, pretty much regardless of what they were on about. As it turned out there are some interesting wrinkles to the subject. Dune, for instance, may actually be up for grabs, says the contentious Malzberg. Never appoint a relative, admonished Hartwell. Key points: don’t make it hard to find the rights for people. Appoint someone younger than you and knows something about publishing. Also, listening to Hartwell I resolved to go read up on my Theodore Sturgeon.
Following that I had to choose between Reconsidering Anthologies, which interests me, since I’ve edited one (Future Washington) and Absent Friends, among which I count many I enjoyed, admired, and miss.
11:00 AM ME Reconsidering Anthologies. Mike Allen, Leah Bobet, David Boop, Robert Killheffer, David Malki ! (leader).
Versus
11:00 AM RI Absent Friends: Remembering the People We’ve Lost This Year. Lila Garrott, Geoff Ryman, Sonya Taaffe (leader).
Anthologies won out because I still harbor fantasies of doing another one. So I gathered up my stuff, checked the schedule and found that I was already in the right room, so I sat back down..which worked out well for me as a very attractive blonde with a heart and knives tattoo (who turned out to be Rose Mambert, one of the editors of Elf Love and Rapunzel’s Daughter, both anthologies) sat down next to me. Distracting, yes, but in a nice way.
Not so distracting that I didn’t catch the out of the gate success of David Malki’s Machine of Death, which took submissions from a website and pushed to the top of Amazons lists on its first day of sales. So, the big question…who reads anthologies? Besides best of the year anthologies. Anthologies are like annual magazines. They sell through community connections; local authors, active interest themes, fan communities. They’re not expected to make a lot of money. And to check out Boop yes thats his name) ‘s anthologies. How do you manage payments to contributors? A fixed fee up front, the a royalty split fifty fifty witht the authors fifty divided up by word count. Its about the launch day. And we willnpay you royalties after we break even. Or through shared royalties…which mean no advance, which doesn’t work out all the time for the authors. I also learned that panelist Leah Bobet is either suffering some serious anthology PTSD or just doesn’t do Sunday Mornings. And to look for the Lesbian Steampunk anthology the Mike Allen contributed.
I did get to chat Rose up after the panel, and got some more good ideas about anthologies…at least until I ran into Daniel Dern who reminded me that Eric Vans’ neuropsychology lecture on What The Brain Pays Attention To was starting.
12:00 PM ME Attention! How the Brain Decides What to Think About. Eric M. Van. Why do some people have no problem attending to the task at hand until it’s done, while others have file drawers full of uncompleted projects?
You should know, if you don’t already, that Eric Van, Co-CEO of Readercon, is driven, brilliant, and among other endeavors considers himself a serious researcher in neuropsychology, especially when it’s about his brain. Eric did study the subject extensively at Harvard, but spared himself the pain of getting a degree in it. By turns, he’s wacky, manic, brilliant, possessed, and in general both thought provoking and fun to have around.
“I don’t need more dopamine,” understated Eric in a rapid fire patois laced with neurotransmitters and cognitive models. “I realized what I need is more norepinephrine, I need a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. There are no models out the for what controls attention switching behavior.”
Hopefully there’s a podcast of the talk, because it was as typically interesting as all of Eric’s, and of course it might be handy to slow down the speed to human hearable rates. Eric has gotten interested in something called Future Perspective Memory, which he separates from short and long term memory and he thinks is equivalent to cache memory. Other interesting ideas; conditional salience tagging, and emotion is the way things are tagged. Norepinephrine, Eric believes, controls relative salience and hence how ideas compete for priority. It was seriously SRO, btw.
I ran into Tom Easton and Jeff Hecht in the hall afterwards and exclaimed, “Listening to Eric Van is better than reading Lesbian Steampunk in a Jacuzzi!”
To which Hecht asked, “Yes, but how does it rate compared a root canal?”
“Well,” I said,” it depends on the drugs involved.”
Just then Easton pointed at an approaching Leigh Grossman holding an infant in one arm and what looked to be a phone book in the other.
“Have you seen that yet?” Tom asked.
I wasn’t sure if he was speaking of the adorable Grossman offspring or the phone book, until Leigh held up the latter to show its cover. The book is Sense of Wonder, and it’s an uber-reference for anyone teaching science fiction, or anything that impinges on science fiction. You could fit the entire Norton Anthology of Science Fiction into one of its chapters. “The problem with the Norton book,” says Leigh (and I’m paraphrasing here), “is that they selected a range of stories that show diversity rather than define the genre (Wow, I’m really paraphrasing).”
I seriously want it in eBook, which is available, since carrying around a text the size of the NYC white pages would be problematic. Otherwise I’m really looking forward to taking a closer look. Leigh and I kicked my mid-brow criticism pub idea around a bit and he offered to connect me with his academic contacts, which will be great.
It was one, and I was hungry, so I stopped in the bar and saw Steve, my personal bartender, wiping down the bar. As I crossed the room I ordered a Bass ale and a bowl of chowder, the first of which arrived at the bar about the same time I did. When the chowder slid in next to the Bass, Steve offered that salt, salt, pepper and hot sauce were by my elbow. I’d never thought of hot sauce in chowder, and don’t actually know if anyone else has either…but having tried some I can say it’s not bad.
Meanwhile, back at the conference…
1:00 pm G Social Darwinism in Science Fictional Thought. Gwendolyn Clare, Kathryn Cramer, Chris Moriarty (leader), James Morrow, Eric Schaller. In a 1978 essay, Philip E. Smith II analyzed a central ideology of Robert Heinlein’s fiction: social Darwinism, a belief in “survival of the fittest” …
Which I wandered into at the halfway mark. Emotions were running high in the audience as to whether Carnegie had been a villain or not, the preamble to which I’d missed, so i was happy when the panel turned to sf and fiction. Moriarty was asked about her novel Spin Control, which I liked tremendously, and she told them that the social code she developed for it was an extreme example of genetic proscription run wild. She had wanted to create a society that echoes ants and see what evolution look like from their perspective?
J. Morrow talked about his short story for Extraordinary Engines, about a w Ladies Society that had a drug which could regress men to their primal state. Good story, btw.
In the audience was Leonid Korogodsk, author of Pink Noise, and Chris remarked that she had read his book, which deals with the subject and was very good (OK, another one for the list). Chris pointed out about that notion of the 1/f noise offers an alternative to teleological views of evolution, and Clare threw in some comments on Zero Force evolutionary theory, which says that systems will still get complex without having an agenda. Kathryn Cramer tossed Peter Watts Vampire evolution lecture (which is available on the web) into the mix.
I had a bus to catch back to Logan, but I had time for at least half a panel, and this one sounded right up my alley…
2:00 PM F Why We Love Bad Writing. James D. Macdonald, Anil Menon, Resa Nelson, Eric M. Van, Harold Torger Vedeler (leader).
Though Eric wanted to find some cognitive structure in reader’s brains that explained a love of prose and scene so great that plot paled (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…though actually…this might really be a nail) Macdonald summed it up nicely for me when he re-sharpened an old saw, “Times of good plot will get you through times of bad prose better than times of good prose will get you through times of bad plot.”
And then I ran for the bus.
Links / Sources
- Readercon 22 @ FLickr: www.flickr.com/photos/elilley/sets/72157627104982889/
- Eric Van’s full talk notes: ericmvan.livejournal.com
- Peter Watt’s Neurophysiology of Vampires Lecture: www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
- Full Readercon Schedule: readercon.org/docs/RC22schedule.htm