Well, not quite.
As my two readers know, I’m quite taken with pottery. In the process of getting some supplies, I ended up at the local El Super, which, until that point, I did not know existed. El Super is, essentially a supermercado—a Mexican department store, here instantiated as a grocery—transplanted into Southern California. The labels are in large Spanish letters with the English equivalent in small letters beneath. I had spent some time in Mexico and this felt like a homecoming of sorts.
Also in the El Super, was a collection of hand made (though I’m certain those makers were in a factory) Mexican pots. The picture above shows them. I took many, many pictures of them. Be forewarned, there are similar pots in your future.
I had five panels and a reading at WorldCon. I’m not going to go into intimate descriptions of what actually happened at the panels. Convention panels are an improv experience and trying to capture that after the fact is pointless. What I will do is talk about how I prepared for them and what sort of thing I did.
How to Change your Writing Process--When Pantsers have to Outline
The description suggested a writer has to pitch an idea to an editor and the editor demands an outline. Oh! No! The writer is a seat-of-the-pantser and doesn’t do outlines! What to do?
I’m not really a “pantser” within this context. I write extensive notes and have a lot of sequences I write down. But I don’t outline to detail. I’ve found if I do that, I lose the joy of discovery and no longer want to pursue the work.
I have written what I call “treatments”—though they don’t necessarily fit what the film industry calls them. They follow a three section format:
- Section 1: The Idea of the Story. Here describe the rough path of the story and what you’re trying to do.
- Section 2: The World: this describes how the world you’re writing about work.
- Section 3: Subdivision descriptions. I almost always separate parts of novels. It’s a thing with me. Here each subdivision (Part 1, Part 2, etc.) has a brief synopsis. Sometimes there are snippets of dialog or incidents.
I’ve written them for my own benefit and, once, wrote one out to describe a novel to an editor. They passed on it so I wrote it anyway. That novel is Smilodon Country.
The treatment technique could also be useful in fleshing out a story where the author is stuck. I’m stuck right now. We’ll see how that turns out.
Science Fiction and The Economics of Technology
Or, why did we get social media instead of five hour workweeks?
The obvious answer is we have five hour workweeks now. At minimum wage. It’s called the gig economy.
I came up with two examples. Star Trek, where automation is essentially complete and democratized across society such that money is not necessarily. Roddenberry’s idea of a post-scarcity economy. Star Trek doesn’t say what replaces money but the Ferengi explained that in terms of acquisition. Later in the series, money makes a come back.
Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is another. Again, technology is democratized but it is not at all a post-scarcity economy. Instead, scarcity is democratized along with everything else.
One thought I did have is that “economics” as we think of it has no place in the natural world. There is a calculus that animals have to maintain. This predator has to decide if going for that prey is worth the risk. That herbivore has to balance its dietary needs against the risks of fulfilling. It is an economy of sorts. In fact, some of Darwin’s evolutionary theory was inspired by Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith. Darwin’s idea that animals competed against one another for survival and reproduction and their offspring inherited their success.
I did have a discussion once with a friend about the apparent dichotomy in Firefly where we had spaceships and maglev trains along side brutal hand mining. His point was this was unlikely. My point was it’s happening right now. Why shouldn’t it happen in the future?
Time: Do People, Animals & Aliens Experience it Differently?
This one was easy. I was the moderator. All I had to do was crank them up and let them go.
I did have some thoughts, though.
Time is incredibly mysterious in that we can measure time’s passage but we can’t see time itself. We have direct evidence and theoretical explanations of the three of the four forces. The fourth, gravity, has a theoretical base in the geometry of space-time. We can only perceive gravity in its effect, not in any direct sense. So, time and gravity have similar qualities.
One thing seems to be true: the perception of the passage of time seems to be intimately connected with something resembling consciousness. That is, without the individual subjective experience, we can’t perceive time’s passing. Animals can respond to time but it doesn’t seem that they experience it. Of course, how would one test this?
Also, most “conscious” beings we know of on Earth appear to be vertebrates. This could be pure chauvinism. Until we understand more about the other consciousness on the planet, the cephalopods, whose neurology is distributed across its body as opposed to being centralized in a brain, we don’t know anything.
It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's the Superman Panel!
I probably shouldn’t have been on this panel. It was mostly populated by fanboys of one kind or another. I was pretty much the sole critic.
And I am critical of Superman—and superheroes in general but given Superman was our first Guy in Spandex, he gets most of the credit and the blame.
My feeling is that Superman remains in print because he makes money. He makes money the Superman metaphor seems to satisfy something deep in modern humanity. Even when the execution of that metaphor is flawed or even just, well, bad.
The first criticism I have is a moral one. This is a godlike being. What the hell are the writers doing having him fight gangs and space pirates? I mean, they set him up as godlike and they want physical conflict so the villains have to have guns just as big. But why isn’t he out in Africa using his amazing abilities to get rid of landmines? He has future technology in his Fortress of Solitude. Why doesn’t he release just a tiny bit of it? Or submit himself to research?
Now, I know why the writers don’t do it. Because Superman in a lab coat doesn’t sell dozens of comics per year or generate an audience for blockbuster films. (Kudos to James Gunn for getting Superman to be just a little political.)
Which brings me to my second criticism. Superman has been doing the same kind of stories for over ninety years. Some variation here. Some variation there. But, like the Stations of the Cross, the Superman metaphor has a collection of characters and events that are necessary to the myth.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with that directly. Zeus has his Prometheus, after all. But after all this time, the most interesting Superman stories are those that depart the metaphor. Even then, it’s often just redressing the same image in new clothing.
The Reading
I was originally going to read from the book that’s coming out next June. But it was pointed out to me that 1) this was a book that no one could by. And 2) I just released the last volume of the Brother to Jackals trilogy in June and the omnibus version was coming out in December. So, was I an idiot?
Bowing to superior wisdom, I read from Brother to Jackals.
It was well received. One listener bought the book right after I was done.
Writers' Co-Ops: Book View Cafe
This was the last panel I was on. It was also the least structured, since we just showed up and talked about ourselves. It was fun. I won’t go into it as I have no notes. You can read about us here.
We finished up and flew home. The garden had turned into a jungle. The cat was unforgiving. Nothing had changed.
This gluing of vacation to WorldCon appears to be working. Next year’s WorldCon is in Montreal. The year after it is in Brisbane.
We shall see.
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