The Revenge of Readercon

Fear not, Kind Reader! It is I, your faithful bloggist, stuffing the Turkey of Truth with the Rice of Opinion. Yesterday I began an account of my visit to Readercon, and if you haven't seen that yet, you should look at it now, because you'll get nowt else of an introduction here.

John Clute popped up again on The Death and Possible Coming Rebirth of SF, which is not surprising, because the death of SF is his baby. Clute believes that science fiction is basically a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which is coming to a close...Stuff will continue to be written that looks like science fiction, but, in some subtle way, it will also be different. The panel was great fun to watch, pitting John Clute against Patrick Nielsen Hayden, with Allen Steele unable to stop talking, and Graham Sleight getting in the occasional point or joke as circumstances allowed. The conclusion was that science fiction may or may not be dying, and something else might possibly some day take its place, unless it doesn't. Clute makes good points about how the genre is changing, whether or not those changes constitute a death...

The very first panel on Friday was on "Understanding" Superhuman Intelligence, on the challenges and possibilities of writing about people smarter than we are. The name of Ted Chiang was bandied about a fair bit, and Thomas Disch, both of whom wrote about characters who attain superhuman intelligence, and moreover did it in the first person (more or less; Disch uses diary entries, which are close enough). It's a shame Leonard Nimoy wasn't on the panel. Stepan Chapman claimed to be the panel's 'token stupid person', and I believe it was he who conjectured that super-intelligent people should also be super-funny. Graham Sleight had a corker of an idea about the influence of gender on portrayals of superhuman intelligence, but the moderator beat him to the punch. Eventually it drifted off into talk of how you define intelligence to begin with, and different sorts of intelligence, and such, which I think is pretty irrelevant, when all the science fictional literature seems to adopt as its working definition of intelligence a combination of pattern-recognition and something else which was just on the tip of my tongue an hour ago but which now escapes me, which just goes to show that, whatever superhuman intelligence might be, I don't have it.

I stuck around following that for Offbeat!, on which Gene Wolfe was in fine form, contributing the lines 'I suppose you're all wondering why you've called me together today,' and 'Bald guys have a lot of hats.' Wolfe does not consider himself an offbeat writer, because his books sell. He offered the following, cute but untrustworthy, explanation of why his books are filled with so many unanswered questions: the only source of coffee in his house is in his study. His wife will, sooner or later, come for it, interrupting Wolfe at work; they'll talk for an hour or so, and when he gets back to work at last he's forgotten what was going on. Rudy Rucker explained that the sort of books he'd like to read would be 'more pornographic, less violent,' and discussed fiction about a 'talking dildo called Reverend Jerry Falwell', which encourages me to search the Infinite Matrix for some of his work.

Rucker is not quite what I'd expected. He's much less drug-crazed than I'd pictured. One particularly memorable quote from his speech was 'Fuck that shit, you know?' I collect obscenity. The speech was devoted to four different tools for writing science fiction, which he called power chords (traditional tropes like flying saucers, butt-headed Martians, alien invasions), thought experiments (science fictional situations as testing grounds for various ideas), transrealism (a philosophy of writing Rucker invented, and of which he is the sole practitioner; writing about one's actual life and the real world sort of metaphorically as science fiction), and monomyths (Campbellian mythical archetypes)...Transrealism, he holds, is intrinsically left-wing, politically, he holds. He took a moment to rag on Douglas Adams for using the power chords without 'paying his dues', without respecting them, or doing something new with them, just being, as Rucker said in a funny voice, 'Silly, silly, silly.' He did, as the audience vocally pointed out, get the Ultimate Answer wrong.

I caught Rucker on a panel on Adventures in Other Dimensions, too, where he discussed his interest in visualising a fourth spatial dimension...I must buy Spaceland at some point. The chap who edited Bowling for Columbine was on the panel, looking panicked.

I took a large quantity of notes during The Unique Authorial Voice, mainly to do with Samuel R. Delaney's magnificent Old Testament beard, which he stroked from time to time, hand-over-hand, as if he meant to climb up it. It'd be a neat trick. Everyone calls him Chip, and I have no idea why. He seems like a very approachable fellow, with a wonderful aesthetic, and he loves Alan Moore; despite this, when, later, I asked him to sign my copy of The Motion of Light in Water I was so panicked by the fact that he's SAMUEL R. DELANEY that I very nearly had some kind of spasm. It'd be like meeting the Pope, if I weren't rabidly anti-Papist. Michael Swanwick also appeared on the panel, his earring drawing the eye unstoppably; quoth he, 'I was put here on this earth to spread confusion,' which he does admirably while inscribing copies of Gravity's Angels with what appears to be a sort of riddle, which the astute reader should be able to solve: 'From maybe to the world, with stops in between...' Swanwick talked of posthumously rewriting an Avram Davidson tale, and hates the voice of the later Robert Heinlein. I was unfamiliar with Barry Malzberg before this panel, but his very entertaining, although bitter and hopeless, performance on this and other panels has filled me with a desire to seek out his work. He publishes his first drafts, for economic purposes.

Malzberg was on the Ambizione! panel too, and when talking of ambition, claimed he no longer had any, and that his life's work was as so much dust, and had an incredibly depressing anecdote about the death of Leonard Bernstein. He must be great fun at parties. Malzberg, I mean, not Bernstein. Bernstein's much too dead. Ellen Kushner is extremely animated; I should read her, too. Sometimes I think I might have ambition, but then I usually decide I'm too lazy...

And, to my delight, I managed to catch a kaffeeklatsch with Teresa Nielsen Hayden, editor, and proprietress of Making Light, which is what all blogs aspire to be. She's a terribly nice person, interested in pretty much everything, capable of knitting what appeared to be a rather fetching scarf while carrying on conversation about box canyons. While I didn't say much, I did say more than I did at any other event, and I got her proverbial John Hancock on my shiny new copy of Making Book, which is a bit good indeed, let me tell you. She's sort of like a cross between MacGyver and your favourite aunt. (My use of the term aunt should not lead you to believe she's old; it's just that I'm quite young.)

All this, yea, and the kitchen sink...Thus was Readercon. And they all lived happily ever after.

Posted by aloysius at July 16, 2003 11:01 PM | TrackBack |