ArmadilloCon: Stump the Panel

Panelists at this event are supposed to come up with mundane and science-fictional uses for objects supplied by the audience. They can also use objects they brought themselves. This year's team is C. J. Mills, Steve Wilson, and Chris Roberson.

Below, left-to-right, are:

1. A pez dispenser in the shape of a character from Ratatouille. Chris Roberson thinks it's an oracle. You ask it a question, and its head tilts back to reveal an answer comes from its neck. The answer will be yes, no, or pez. So you have to formulate the question really carefully.

2. Chris Roberson thinks this neti pot may play a role in fertility rituals. Steve Wilson thinks it extracts something from your brain through your nose.

3. A metallic squirrel that cracks nuts with its tail. Someone in the audience thinks this is a robotic squirrel designed to teach aliens not to molest the local wildlife.

4. Munchkin game pieces. C. J. Mills thinks they are lumberjacks that you rehydrate when you come to the forest. A woman from the audience says they are snacks for a gnome-eating alien.

5. This ethernet hub... You'll just have to click on the image to find out what Chris Roberson thought it was. Beware of a gross-out factor.

6. A cell phone with an cute / evil face on it. It is unanimously decided that this phone isn't really evil, it's just charmingly possessed. It loses your messages, and texts your boyfriend at inappropriate times. C. J. Mills thinks it's a psychic phone that lets you know exactly when opportunity is.

7. C. J. Mills and Steve Wilson hold a cable reel, which, as someone suggested, might be a prayer box for an orthodox giant.

Here is an article about a "Stump the Panel" from the ArmadilloCon 2008, with Rhonda Eudaly, S. Andrew Swann, and Lou Antonelli. And here is an article about a "Stump the Panel" from the ArmadilloCon 2006, with James P. Hogan on it.

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2009 are in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon: what's more alien than aliens?

You've built your world (see previous post), and someone needs to inhabit it. It may as well be aliens. So there was a panel on creating believable aliens. This topic, like others, gets recycled every few years. There was a better panel on this topic in ArmadilloCon 2003, or maybe it only seemed better because I had not yet heard the usual advice on creation of believable aliens. The "usual" advice is discussed in detail in this article on my web site.

"Believable aliens" means they should not talk and act like Midwestern 20th century Americans, yet they shouldn't be too alien, because the reader won't understand them at all. It's better if their societal model is based on some human cultural situation, or animal behavior -- and Taylor Anderson, who has a Master's degree in history says that pretty much any societal model you can dream up, such as a matriarchal cannibalist society, has a precedent in human history. Extremely alien aliens might work in a very short story, since the reader may be able to read it without getting too confused or losing interest. "The Dance of the Changer And The Three" by Terry Karr was given as an example of such a story.

Speaking of human models for alien societies, Chris Roberson suggests we look no further than the Japanese society. He thinks there are more differences between Japanese culture and ours, than there are between any science-fictional aliens and us. To interact with Japanese, he had to be taught how to do do smallest things in certain ways, so as not to offend them inadvertently. For example, there is a right way and a wrong way to accept a business card from someone. It is mandatory that you pause and read the person's name in the card. To tuck it away without reading it would be rude. Japanese is endlessly fascinating, he says. It's like watching alternate history. Even though they've experienced the same recent major events as the Western society, such as World War II, they've spun it into something completely different.

Joan Vinge thinks that may have been the case in the past, but in the era of globalization Japanese aren't as opaque to us as they used to be. Still she thinks James Clavell "Shogun", a novel of 16th century Europeans' exploration of Japan, is an excellent first contact story.

Taylor Anderson, Ann Aguirre, Joan Vinge, and Chris Roberson in the Aliens panel.

An aside. Not long ago, as I wrote about Lithuanian science fiction fandom, I mentioned being mildly annoyed that every cultural discussion was accompanied by a refrain "Orientals are soooo different from us! Don't try to understand them, lest you go crazy!" Yet I didn't find myself rolling my eyes at this discussion, probably because it approached those differences -- which are real, no doubt -- without employing that vague catch-all notion of spirituality. Once you start down the "orientals are sooo spiritual, and their spirituality is sooo different" track, that's when my eyes glaze over. Otherwise, yes, I agree, there are many cultural differences, and in some ways they are opaque to us.

Back to the panel. So, human societies and animal behavior as models for your aliens? Ann Aguirre chose the latter. She based her aliens on praying mantis. This has an advantage that when she gets fan mail asking how do her aliens have sex -- and she gets those letters at least once a week! -- she can tell them to Google it. Hint: sexual cannibalism. :-)

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2009 are in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon: first draft in Icelandic, and other advice for writers

All the advice that could be given to beginning authors has already been mentioned in my posts from writing workshops of the past (you can find more of them by clicking the "writers' workshop" tag under this post). Overall, I'm afraid all that could be said about speculative fiction has already been said in my earlier posts from ArmadilloCon and other conventions. There's no point in repeating it, so what's left? Jokes. Thankfully, jokes at ArmadilloCon are fresh every year, which is amazing, because the people are the same.

The writers who taught the ArmadilloCon writing workshop were trying to one-up one another on how badly they sucked when they were just starting out. Sharon Shinn: I'm a poster child for perseverance. I wrote 10 books before I sold one. Chris Roberson: I wrote 11 books before one sold. Sharon: But I wrote three or four after I sold the first one, that never sold. Scott Lynch, this year's Guest of Honor, can top that: he wrote 12 unpublished novels, many of them in high school. He never finished any of them before he wrote a novel that actually sold (I assume he's talking about "The Lies of Locke Lamora"). Thus, the skeletons in his closet are malformed embryo skeletons.

On revising your work: Most pros recommend completing the first draft of the book before revising, rewriting, or editing it. The alternative -- revising after you finish each chapter or page -- is not so good. Jim Frenkel, a Tor editor, says George R. R. Martin is an exception in that respect, and the worst role model to a beginner writer. "He doesn't go to on to write an new page until the previous page is perfect. And you wonder why his next book is taking so long?"

Sharon Shinn recalls what someone else has said on this topic. "Revising while you write is like drinking decaf coffee in the morning. Great idea, wrong time. Your first draft should read like it was hastily translated from Icelandic by a non-native speaker."

Ah, so I must be doing something right!

In other encouraging news (see, I said it was going to be all jokes, but there is some useful advice in there): yes, you can find time for writing. Julie Kenner wrote her first 15 books while working full-time as a lawyer, and the last seven of those with babies and small children (she has two). Martha Wells wrote some of her first books while being constantly distracted. At that time she worked in tech support, where she wrote programs in KOBOL. She worked on her novels while the programs compiled and ran. Her desk was in a very small space, surrounded by mainframe computers whose hard drives constantly made clicking noises. And since she was in tech support, people would drop in and ask questions all the time. So now she needs distractions in order to write, such as a television in the background.

I wonder which of my bad habits will one day turn out to be an unexpected blessing.

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2009 are in my photo gallery. There are only a few of them there, but I'm adding new pictures every day.

ArmadilloCon 2005: opening ceremony and space opera panel

Opening ceremony is one of the most memorable parts of an ArmadilloCon. The toastmaster tries to embarrass the Guests of Honor by poking fun at them on stage. The toastmaster in 2005 was a Canadian urban fantasy writer Charles de Lint. In his speech he made a big deal of the fact that the writer Guest of Honor, Charles Stross, is a "computer wrangler" and that he is from Scotland. I don't know if perhaps Scotland is viewed by Americans as being primarily agricultural, but Charles de Lint drew a lot of parallels between computers and farming (and, by extension, wrangling). "Scotland doesn't have server farms, their computers are free-range".

Then he talked at length about Jim and Laurie Mann trapeze wedding. I missed most of it. I was too busy messing with my new recording gear, which is an MP3 player with a voice recording function, and a microphone that plugs into my laptop and allows me to record sound directly into the computer. It doesn't work very well. I don't know if it's a bug or a feature, but it stops every couple of minutes and then I have to press the Record button again. By then, some time has passed before I notice that it has stopped. So I'm sure my recording is missing large chunks of that speech.

Developments in Space Opera

Then I went to a panel "Developments in Space Opera". Charles Stross was on it. There were some interesting points made there, but I still don't know if my recording is of a good enough quality to capture everything that was said.

There was much wondering why so much space opera is coming out of UK nowadays, as opposed to America. Chris Roberson "accused" British authors of distrusting heroes. (I'm not sure if or how that was supposed to explain why British authors lead in space opera. :-)) Charles Stross said he doesn't so much mistrust heroes as doesn't think it's a realistic notion that one character in the right place could change the world, as in common in space opera and in science fiction in general. "In space opera, one shiny bright character always does the right thing, everybody revolves around him," he said. "In real world, we call people like that world criminals.

As may be expected for a panel with Stross, the discussion veered towards Singularity, although he didn't bring it up. (I'm actually surprised there are no Singularity-related panels in this year's ArmadilloCon, even though Stross is a guru on the subject. Two years ago, when Vernor Vinge, the writer who popularized the idea of Singularity, was the guest at the ArmadilloCon, several panels revolved around Singularity.)

Chris Roberson said we should ask Charles Stross to enumerate all singularities that the humankind has already been through. It turns out Stross thinks there had been a few. Apparently he does not define it as a very steep technological advance beyond which life becomes unpredictable: by that account we haven't had a singularity yet. I guess he has a broader definition: it's any kind of technological or social change beyond which life can't be predicted. If that's really his view, then it's almost like he is taking an easy way out. Because all these developments listed below, except the first one, are not the kind that would create an unbridgeable gap between the humans on one side and the humans on the other. You could take a person who lived before let's say, agriculture was practiced, and explain the concept to him or her; he/she would probably understand what it means to cultivate the crops, even though he/she may find that idea strange or silly. Even though it's true that the long-ranging consequences of agriculture could not have been predicted in advance, it still does not create an intellectual gap so deep that the "before" would have no means, no tools, no capabilities of understanding the "after".

In contrast, Vinge (I think) associates Singularity with an emergence of superhuman intelligences. In that scenario we have no chance of understanding what those intelligences are like, or what they are "about", or how they will begin to change the world, than a dog has a chance of understanding what human beings are about. That's probably why Vinge, in his novels, does not try to portray a post-Singularity society, but limits himself to the "left behind" societies, or scenarios where Singularity happened, but a particular society was somehow bypassed, or escaped it.

On the other hand, one guy in the audience commended Stross for not avoiding the post-Singularity scenarios, but "bear-hugging" them.

Anyway, this is Stross' list. It is probably incomplete (I might have missed something).

1. Development of language. Obviously, there is an unbridgeable gap between the primates that don't have language and those who do.
2. Agriculture. Once humans started farming, a given area of land could support many more people than it could when they were hunter-gatherers. Once the population density increased, it would have been impossible to go back to hunting-gathering. Or so his argument goes.
3. Writing -- ability to transmit knowledge from generation to generation.
4. Invention of finance and investing. He says, read Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" trilogy to get an idea how it changed society.


In the picture: the Space Opera panelists. Left to right: Chris Robertson, Charles Stross, Jim Minz, Sean McMullen, Jayme Lynn Blaschke. Here are more posts from ArmadilloCon 2005.