I Already Miss ICFA...

... and I already can't wait for WorldCon. The good news is, barring any unforeseen developments of the next week and a half, it looks like I'll be going to WorldCon. Amen!

But ICFA always feels something like home, and I had a great time there this year. I've finally gotten to know enough people (and some folks have gotten to know me) that I don't feel like a stranger there at all anymore.

Highlights!

Meeting up with fellow Masterclass alumni Sarah Herbe, Stefan Ekman, Graham Sleight and Stacie Hanes (as well as one of our distinguished faculty last year, Gary K. Wolfe). Sarah and Stefan gave particularly interesting papers--I didn't get to see Stacie's and she was presenting as the same time I was (and the same time Gary was--bummer). I'm hoping to snag a copy of hers.

Sarah presented a paper showing how the existence of genetic modification in various authors' futures meant a completely different way of presenting character. When the body is no longer fixed, what you look like says as much about you as our clothes do today. She focused on British writers from the last decade or so, such as Justine Robson, Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod, etc. It was the sort of excellent paper where you'd note a question to yourself, and then she'd answer it.

Stefan's paper hewed closer to the conference theme (Time and the Fantastic), and he dealt with how time flows in polders in fantasy lit. Polder in this context is a Clute-ism, and generally means a niche in the fantasy world with boundaries against the outside world, sometimes a safe place for the heroes, often maintained by one central figure. Lothlorien rather exemplifies the concept. One thing I thought Stefan did remarkably well was realize that the term 'time' had gotten rather overloaded in these discussions. Thus he defined 'tempo' to mean the pace at which time flows in the polder, 'moment' to mean a moment in time, and 'historical time' to distinguish the passage of time outside the polder. He proceeded to apply the polder concept to Lothlorien from Tolkein, Djelibeybi from Discworld, and the Mythago Wood cycle of Robert Holdstock. Also, his delivery is first-rate--I've rarely met a drier sense of humor than Stefan's.

My paper this year was completely unimportant except inasmuch as it lays the groundwork for something *incredibly cool* that I'm going to do *next* year--however, I'm afraid it's all sekrit and I can't talk about it currently. But come to ICFA next year and see! This year I was telling people not to come to my session, but to go see Gary & Amelia Beamer or Stacie instead (although bless them, Curtis, Ted Chiang, Robert Sawyer and Fiona Kelleghan came anyway). NEXT year I shall be dragging people bodily into my paper session--at least, if it turns out as cool as I hope it will.

Other than that, it was getting to know folks better and getting to know new folks. Shameless name dropping time! I spent time with (aside from those already mentioned): Marie Brennan, Chris Barzak and his partner Tony, Daryl Gregory + wife Kathy and son Ian (whose names I hope I'm spelling correctly), Crystal Black, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelley, Russell Leston, Peter Straub, F. Brett Cox, Andy Duncan, Patrick O'Leary, and more whom I'm afraid I've blurred out after rather a lot of wine.

Oh, and Gary used a quote from a review of mine to introduce Crawford award winner Daryl Gregory! As Jim Kelley put it, I got a shout out from the podium! W00t! But that is minor compared to the fact that the Crawford award goes to awesome writers like Daryl and Chris Barzak (last year). Check out Daryl's award speech, the video (or at least the audio) is on his blog--very well done, I thought.

So, this ICFA was great, and next ICFA stands to be even better. I'd say life doesn't get any better than this, but I've got a midterm tomorrow, a presentation on bionocular rivalry worth 20% of my grade on Thus night, and for some odd reason, I didn't get much studying done over my spring break. I can't imagine why. So I'll slog through the remaining 50 more days of my semester, and then life will be truly be excellent.

Oh, and pictures to come after Curtis and I unpack the camera! For now, here are some from Mr. Gregory, and some from Ellen Datlow.

ICFA, Wrap Up

So after a mighty rough morning (up 'til after 3am having a wonderful time; not so wonderful when we had to wake up at 6:30 to catch a 9:40 flight), here we are at JFK waiting for our flight home. Thanks, JetBlue free terminal wi-fi! Still the march of luminaries continues: we shared the shuttle to the Orlando airport with Roger Luckhurst and John Kessel, and we realized that we'd shared the flight to JFK with Mike Kelly, Peter Straub's archivist.

Last night was wonderful. The awards went smoothly, the acceptors were brief and gracious, the expression on Brian Aldiss' face when he learned he got the retro BASFA award was priceless, and a good time was had by all.

Then out by the bar we did not get rained on, and thanks to the contributions of many dedicated alcohol lovers, we had a wide and splendid variety of things to drink. I got to talk to just about all the people I wanted to, and listen to brilliant people being very funny. And I've learned more about Flannery O'Connor, whose work's I'll have to look up now. By the way, all things Southern are funnier when told by Andy Duncan in his native accent, or Bret Cox in his original accent, apparently since moderated by time in Vermont.

So that's it for ICFA for this year. Every year (OK, two now), it feels more like home.

ICFA, Part III

Well, my official duty at ICFA is now over. I delivered my paper, and I think it was well received. There was an audience (at the last paper session on Saturday, you never know), drawn by papers on Charles de Lint (by Taryne Taylor) and on Octavia Butler (by John Pennington). Realted to my paper some interesting discussion ensued, partly driven by other fans of From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain. Last night I found out that it was the runner-up for the Philip K. Dick Award, which made it even better. I'm sorry it didn't make it onto the Hugo Nominee list, but we can't have everything.

Anyway, it looks like if I want to continue studying superheroes there's quite a bit of material there: relationships, power, myth, and post-9/11 narratives. That may end up being more serious than I want to deal with; I'll have to see.

Last night I went to a panel on the Global Fantastique. James and Kathryn Morrow were there, editors of the SFWA European Hall of Fame. Also on the panel were David Hartwell, Stefan Ekman, Javier Martinez, and the always witty Brian Aldiss. They discussed the practical difficulties of translation, the prohibitive cost, and some of the different purposes that SF plays in different contexts. In Communist countries it could be a way of criticizing the regime, but those authors had to find different roles after the USSR disintegrated. Aldiss pointed out that in Singapore, the sf he read was all basically complaining about the regime in Singapore. He pointed out that sf can be the language of complaint, and that it's important to have that outlet. Ekman also pointed out the difficulty native authors have - apparently English-language sf can dominate a market. They generate proven sales, and publishers are less likely to take risks on unknown native authors. All in all it was agreed that we need more dialog between sf in different countries, but there was no consensus about how to make it happen.

Other interesting ICFA bits:

• Ted Chiang pointing out the similarities between the plots of Watchmen and The Incredibles, and wondering if a Watchmen movie is feasible now that The Incredibles has done the same thing in a funny way.
  
• Ellen Klages and Marie Brennan discussing how much fun it is to do research - getting to talk to people with incredibly narrow specialties, and how much you can learn from them simply be being interested.
• Having more and more people recommend novels dealing with superheroes when I mentioned my paper topic - I more than doubled the number of examples I could have used just over the weekend.
  
• Listening to Sheila Williams recount the tale of meeting Isaac Asimov for the first time.
• Having Robert J. Sawyer inform me that Canada invented standardized time zones.
  

All in all I've been having a great time, meeting and catching up with great people, and learning lots of new things. I'm sorry it's almost over, I'm looking forward to the banquet tonight, and I'm already looking forward to next year.

ICFA, Part II

Luckily, I'm not the only person blogging from ICFA. Cheryl Morgan is going to lots of panels that I'm not, so between the two of us we're covering pretty good ground.

Another panel I'd like to mention is "Politics and the Singularity" from last night. Membership: John Fast (moderator), Vernor Vinge, Joe Haldeman, Robert J. Sawyer, James Patrick Kelly, Cristopher Hollingsworth.

Like so many panels about the Singularity and politics, this one never really got around to its subject. It was pulled off course by discussions of how to define the Singularity, all the different kinds of Singularities there are, and what their probabilities might be. At the end, I still declare myself to be a Singularity skeptic (although I do quite enjoy reading fiction about it).

However, a couple interesting points were made that I hadn't heard before. There was discussion of an arms race to build a Singularity-starting super AI computer, with two sides racing to be able to turn it on first. Sawyer pointed out that really, the side to "push the button" first would lose: they'd sacrifice all their power to the Super AI, which would presumably make all their decisions for them, and effectively enslave them. The problems I have with this scenario are the same ones I have with the Singularity concept altogether (it's unlikely people will, or will be able to, design AIs like that), so there may be some interesting dramatic potential there. Fast, the moderator, pointed out that politicians are likely to think of this sort of thing as a magic genie, and probably would push that button without fully understanding the consequences.

Haldeman put forth the theory that the Singularity might take a very long time, on the order of centuries, and in that case we're probably already in the midst of it. In the long run, that makes more sense to me than an over-night take-off. Also, I finally found out what IA means as opposed to AI: Intelligence Augmentation, i.e. designing better humans and better human intelligence. I can more easily see that leading to a Singularity-type scenario than AI.

All in all while I found some things disappointing in that panel, when you've got people that smart and interesting talking, you'll always find something new to think about.

ICFA, Part I

I've been here at ICFA 29 since Tuesday night, and I'm having a lovely time. I'm afraid I've been sober rather more often than I'd anticipated, due to some stomach trouble, but other than that things are going great.

ICFA is the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, and this year I'm giving a paper titled "Superheroes Used Symbolically in Novels." The wonderful thing about ICFA is that I've already heard some great new things that have made me revise the paper on the fly. I love this community!

So far for me the panel highlights have been a panel called "So You Want to Write a Superhero," where I heard from several authors who write unillustrated stories using superhero tropes (even poetry!). Some common elements were using Supers to examine power relationships and also the connection of comic books to modern myths.

A paper session titled "Audience, Adventure, and Archetype: Performance and Participation in Fantastical Texts" was also quite interesting. Jim Casey talked about the presentation of authorship, as well as the disconnect between the actor and the acted in Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess' Sandman issue "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Aidan-Paul Canavan gave a hilarious talk about how stock descriptions of gaming characters influence the subtext in character descriptions in normal fantasy novels (e.g. dark blades would indicate a rogue rather than a fighter, robes instead of armor indicate a wizard, etc.) Then Brian Attebery gave a fascinating talk on how the memorat ("telling of a personal experience without artistic pretense or traditional motifs") framing structure of many folktales and urban legends can be seen in fantasy narratives. He explained how these may function in at least three of the four categories of fantasy identified by Farah Mendlesohn. I certainly learned a lot from that paper.


Just now I attended the Scholar Guest of Honor speech by Roger Luckhurst titled "Contemporary Photography and the Technological Sublime, or Can There Be Science Fiction Photography." This was much more interesting than I feared. For one it gave me another interesting example of how to apply theory. Also, he made his point fairly convincingly for analog/chemical photography, before admitting that digital photography makes it even more likely that sf photography is possible. The pictures he showed as examples were very striking, and really helped make his case about photography using the iconography of the sublime.

Between all that, talking with friends and striking up interesting conversations with new people, this is just as much fun as I remembered from last year. I only hope that my stomach troubles will eventually clear up so I can enjoy some more food and wine - I feel like I've had to resort to a monastic diet to keep things settled.