Book review: C. J. Cherryh "Foreigner"

It was a slow-paced book, and I was afraid I wasn't going to finish it -- I no longer force myself to finish books that don't sufficiently appeal to me -- but I finished it because, despite the slowness, it had some indescribable satisfactory quality. Perhaps because it was a book you could watch unfold before your eyes like a movie. Sometimes you read a book where every sentence falls apart into a pile of words as soon as you are finished with it, without adding up to an image in your head. This is the opposite. This book is highly immersive. Just for that quality you might like to continue reading it even when the plot is not very compelling. But those who like fast-moving narrative might not find it to their taste.

The main character, Bren is an ambassador of sorts to an alien race, called atevi that lives on a planet where humans are guests. Or perhaps he is more like a translator between humans and atevi. His official title in atevi language is paidhi, and that's how he is referred to throughout the book. He lives in the royal court of one of the planet's several kings, or aiji. Humans are permanent, though unwanted, guests on this world, because they ended up there by mistake and can't get off of it. Humans live in just one continent, maintain a truce with the atevi, and have been slowly trickling out their technologies to the atevi. At present they brought the local technology up to roughly the level of early 21st century Earth. The locals are civil to the humans, but (as behooves aliens) inscrutable.

One day someone attempts to assassinate paidhi Bren. In response to that, the king / aiji quickly orders him whisked away to a remote corner of the country. It's done under the guise of the paidhi's protection, but it quickly becomes clear that it's more like imprisonment. He is exiled to a place where he is completely isolated and has no way to contact any humans.

This happens fairly early in the book, and then for the next 300-something pages neither he, nor we, the readers, know what was the true reason of his abduction, or where all this is going. The book slows down as Bren tries to figure out where he stands with his captor-protectors based on short, fragmented conversations he has with them.

He is not sure where their loyalty lies. Are they loyal to him? He strongly suspects not. Are they loyal to their employer(s), such as the aiji, or other organizations and alliances? Nor is he sure whether it is useful to them to keep him alive. He knows (but is not sure if the natives known) that the atevi can't use him as a pawn to extract something of value from the humans, because if his life is threatened, the human government will let him die. They said so from the start and he took the job with the full understanding of this. So, in this situation, he knows there is nothing protecting his life but his captors' whim.

He tries to probe their minds via short, fragmented conversations, but those conversations always skirt the essence of the topic. Yet they occupy the next 300-something pages of the book. Those talks are fraught with misunderstandings, some of them absurd, but not in a funny way. For example, the atevi can't fathom that the word "like" has many meanings, and that to like a food is very different than to like a person. This seemed rather unLIKEly to me. Bren even speculates that the locals don't have feelings. At the same time, it is obvious that they have feelings of dignity and pride, and that pride is rather easily wounded by a foreigner asking the wrong kinds of questions.

Those conversations don't go very far, and three quarters into the book we still don't have a clue who Bren can or cannot trust. So we are still waiting for the other shoe to drop, which is to say we are waiting for this low-grade suspense to lead to a huge revelation. There are so many minor shoes dropping throughout the book that you can never tell which of them is "the real thing" as opposed to random incident. Then, finally, around 3/4 into the book, his situation goes from merely uncomfortable to much worse. Only then the key point is revealed, and we find out the real reason he is kept captive. The pace of the book picks up after that.

I didn't understand what conclusion he reached at the ending either. Maybe I need to reread it. It seems like he was faced with a hard conclusion that humans were not welcome on this planet, but found a way to negotiate with atevi that could lead to permanent peace. But if there was an a-ha! moment in this book, it was rather subtle.

To summarize, this is a book for those who like science fiction with lots of psychological nuance. I personally like it too, but this wasn't the kind of nuance I could relate to. But then I'm known to be a robot. If you can tolerate the plot advancing very slowly, and if you are intrigued by characters trying to figure out what another character meant by their every utterance or gesture, with cultural differences thrown in, then it may be a book for you. I have to say, for me, the character's ruminations supplied just enough intrigue not to put the book aside, but ultimately did not add to something satisfying.

Editing like a boss with Tex Thompson: ArmadilloCon 2018 panel

This was another of the wonderful panels / mini-workshops on various aspects of writing -- this time, on editing your own work -- by Arianne "Tex" Thompson. Like everything by Tex Thompson, her advice on editing was broken down into bullet points and sub-bullet points, each of which contained examples of how to accomplish it.

Five hot tips for content and developmental editing

1. Eliminate happy coincidences. The coincidences that make the protagonist's life harder are mostly OK. Turn "but fortunately" into "oh, shit".

Example: if you have characters who are willing to help the protagonist, turn them into characters that are not really able to help. Or into character that are able to help, but not willing. Why should I help you? You should earn it. Or characters that are able and willing to help, but their help comes with strings attached.

2. Blow up the boring parts. You are bored reading them, but you don't know how your story should get from part A to part B.

Here are some examples how to make boring parts more exciting.

Instead of having a breakup conversation in a private place like home, or a Starbucks or a restaurant, have it in an unusual setting: in the middle of a traffic jam in a car, when no one could escape, on a whaling ship, or at an 8-year-old's birthday party at a roller rink. Can we do it at a paintball match? This can help you to spice it up and put some interesting twist on it. The world is dropping from under our feet, but we still have to do the hokey pokey, since it's an 8-year-old's birthday party. Or at the roller rink somebody falls and breaks their leg.

Arianne 'Tex' Thompson 'Editing like a Boss' panel

In a novel "Matterhorn" (by Karl Marlantes? There are other novels by that title, but I assume that's the one Tex meant -- E.), there is a long infodump when a character goes around a military camp and is introduced to lots of people and is told their military ranks and names. That would be boring, but at the same time there is a medical drama brewing, where somebody has to be medevacuated, but helicopters can't land because of high winds. So there is a ticking clock. The infodumpy introductions are alternated with the medical drama.

A race against time can definitely spice up the boring parts.

Another way to introduce suspense is to let your readers know that something dangerous or terrible is about to befall the characters, but the characters don't know it. For example, the audience knows there is a monster under a child's bed, but the kid doesn't know it. So any time when the kid rolls over and his arm drops off the bed, the audience winces.

3. Target accidental repetitions

Make them deliberate or delete them! A word or phrase repeated twice looks like accidental echo, but repeated three times sounds like you know what you are doing.

This applies not just to word usage, but to plot elements as well. For example: if the characters in your book take a road trip and are staying in motels, make the motels shabbier and shabbier as the characters run out of money. So when they are pulling up to the next motel, the reader will be cringing: what kind of bad things will be lurking at this place?

4. Sharpen relevant contrasts

Conflict is not enough, says Tex Thompson. Contrast is everything.

5. Multitask relentlessly

A great page should do at least two out of three: advance the story, develop the backstory or the setting, and build or reveal character.

Other tips

Line editing

Tex Thompson also gave tips on line editing, though I can't put them into nifty numbered-bullet-point format, because I didn't write all of them down. But here are some:

• Before every editing pass, change the format of the manuscript, such as the font or font size. The words line up differently. That way you'll see it more like a new reader. You'll see more what's actually there, not what you think is there. Have Stephen Hawking's robotic voice read it out to you. If your book sounds good while read in robotic monotone, it's good.
• Read it backwards (a basic rule of proofreading). Microsoft Office has a read-it-backward option.
• Delete distancing words: thought, said, saw, heard, felt, realized, wondered. They emphasize the distance between the character and the reader. We want the opposite -- immersion. Too much of that distance and you feel like you are watching someone playing a video game. You can google "filter words fiction" or "distancing words fiction" to find out which words you should consider deleting.
• Tex Thompson mentioned some software that can help with various aspects of writing, and the audience threw in their own suggestions. For example, Prowriting Aid is a good program that shows you how many times you've used various words. Hemingway can tell you when your sentences are too complicated. Also it's a good idea to get a readability score for your text, and the grade level. In the early chapters, while the reader doesn't yet care about the story, it's good to keep it lower grade.
• Do at least one "fast pass". Read the whole thing in a day, the way a reader who binges on your work would read it. That's the best way to find overused words / phrases. Also, you will catch inconsistencies.

Tex Thompson also gave tips for gathering and interpreting feedback.

• Try giving beta readers single chapters first. Don't give them the whole novel, because they most likely will get scared off, because they were not preprared to read this much material.
• Look for points of convergence. What comments do you keep getting? Are there common themes among them? Also remember this: people who notice a problem in your writing are usually right. People who suggest a solution are usually wrong.

• Strive to have a mix of both readers AND writers among your beta readers. Each kind will be valuable in their own way. People who are just readers but not writers haven't internalized the rules of writers, they haven't chopped up the Hero's Journey and snorted if off of a mirror. They care more about the story. Does it hold their attention?

  Also ask readers-that-are-not-writers: what other books that you've read would you compare it to? Hopefully they won't say, it's like War and Peace: I didn't finish it.

  It is important to write at least as well as Dan Brown. If you pass the Dan Brown test, you're good. This is a guy who writes "he picked up the phone with one of his two hands", but his stories get people hooked.

Writing dialogue: an ArmadilloCon 2018 panel

Authors Arianne "Tex" Thompson and Mark London Williams gave a panel on writing good dialogue. Here is some of their advice.

Mark London Williams. In emotional situations, the characters will often be indirect.

Tex Thompson agrees. When a horse approaches an object, it does not go straight to it, does not make a beeline. That's a predator move. A horse comes up at an angle to get a better view at an object. Similarly, good dialogue does not say something directly. It makes several approaches, several passes. It suggests (for smart readers to get), and then confirms, so that everyone could get on the wagon.

Specific dialog problems

Tex Thompson addresses the audience. How many of you had in your own writing struggled with a scene where you had a dialogue bouncing back and forth for pages ans pages, but not getting to the point?

She then asks Mark London Williams: What advice would you have to overcome this?

Mark London Williams. Start a scene as late as possible. Start with at teacup already smashed on the floor, and a woman says to a man: "I can't believe you did it! You always do this!" -- now the readers are forced to wonder: he did what? What does he always do? Smashes teacups? Hurts her feelings?

Tex Thompson gives another example. Let's say the dialogue starts with a line: "So the school called again today". Now the readers want to read further, because they have a sense that someone is in trouble, and they are wondering who did what.

Tex Thompson. Instead of "he said, she said", put in a sentence describing action.

"You always do this." She picked up a broken piece.

There is a rule: one paragraph for one actor.

"You always do this." Her face was calm, but under the table she was picking at her 500 hundred dollar French manicure.

Dialects

The discussion also covered dialects, accents, slang and vernacular. One of the general advices on that topic is: avoid writing out a dialect or an accent phonetically as it sounds (like "ze" instead of "the" in a stereotypical French character's speech), because that quickly becomes grating and annoying. In small amounts it can be OK, just don't write entire paragraphs like that. I don't remember most of other advice, but I remember these interesting observations:

Where more than one language is spoken, the lower-prestige language contributes the grammar, while the higher-prestige language, the vocabulary. This happened, for example, to English language after the Norman conquest of England, when French became the language of the court, while English remained the language of the peasantry.

Similarly, the names for raw foods come from the native / lower-prestige language (cow, pig), whereas the names for cooked food come from the higher-prestige language (beef, dessert).

Book review: Jo Walton "Just City"

This was an easy and pleasant read. But it could have been so much better if it had actually tackled the premise that it promised. The premise seemed ambitious; ir promised speculative fiction with the capital S. But it didn't deliver.

The Just City in the title of the book is the city that Plato talked about in the Republic. The story describes the social experiment of the Republic implemented in real life. It's set on an island somewhere, presumably, in the Mediterranean sea, in an undefined time in the prehistory. The time it's set in is before the rise of the classical world. Even Illiad and Odyssey had not yet been written. It doesn't matter, because the inhabitants of the island are completely shut off from the surrounding world and have no interaction with it. Most of the inhabitants are 10-year-old children (10080 of them), that were bought from slave traders of different eras, and brought to this island, across time, to be raised according to the Platonic concepts of justice. They are expected to implement Plato's Just City in real life. They are schooled by a number of teachers from different eras of history, and all of them have one thing in common is that at some point they prayed to Athene. For it was Athene that set up this experiment, and transported people through time to bring them here.

The plot of the book is rather uneventful, but I was hoping for plot twists based on the moral dilemmas these people face, and how they have to adjust their experiment when it is not turning out as planned. Of course, the experiment does not turn out as Plato envisioned, because people are people and they bring their human natures with them here. They also bring their prejudices, perceptions, beliefs, and ways of doing things from their eras. So, not surprisingly, even in the Just City rape victims are still responsible for their rape.

What's odd is that the "masters" -- the teachers who are responsible for the upbringing of these 10080 children -- do not question the notion of justice beyond the Platonic ideal. This ideal was held by a person who lived 2000+ years ago, and much of it doesn't jibe with our modern notion of justice. And many of the masters were from eras historically close to ours, or even beyond ours.

So it's strange that none of the teachers entertain a more modern paradigm of justice, even in the matters of life and death. Such as availability of modern medicine. Athene "imported" something from technologically advanced era (I won't say what, because one of the plot developments hinges on that), so she could have imported advanced medicine as well. And yet they don't treat sick newborns, but "expose" them, i.e. leave them in the wilderness to die. They oddly think it's more humane than to kill them. They do it even to the babies with small birth defects like cleft lip or palate, which are entirely correctable in our times. What about treatment of injuries and illnesses that surely must have occurred among those 10080 children, because of sheer statistical likelihood? Was their medicine as barbaric as the medicine of the ancient times? To be fair, one of the teachers mentions "mold drugs", so apparently they did import the antibiotics from the future. But what about everything else? I would think that realistically this question would have popped up very early in the existence of the city, and I also think that those teachers who came from the more modern times would find it a gross violation of ethics to not provide lifesaving treatments when they could be brought in from the future. And if you are dedicating your whole life to put a vision of justice in reality, then surely you would assign the utmost importance to ethical questions?

In other words, I expect that realistically in such a city there would be never ending debates, serious arguments, maybe even fights over whose ethical system is considered the most just. Yet none of it happens. Everybody leads largely untroubled existences filled with philosophy, music, arts and sports, and nobody runs into ethically ambiguous situations, in which Plato's vision directly contradicts their own internal sense of justice.

To be fair, something similar does start to happen towards the end, but it was a bit too late to make me "buy" into the book. The whole book seemed like one big missed opportunity to get deeply into ambiguities and paradoxes of justice.

Margaret Atwood at the Texas Book Festival in 2015

Margaret Atwood was interviewed at the Texas Book Festival in October of 2015. I have only read one of her books, The Handmaid's Tale, and as we know, it's a depressing and scary book. Considering that, the interview was surprisingly (to me) light-hearted and revolvedheavily around popculture. I got an impression that Margaret Atwood is quite engaged with it. She participates in art / experimental projects that revolve around books and reading.

One of such projects was the Future Library in Oslo. It was started by an artist Katie Patterson. In May of 2014 she planted 1000 trees near a forest in Oslo. These trees will grow for a 100 years. Every year a different writer from around the world, invited by a committee, each writing in a different language and different genre, will contribute a manuscript in a sealed box to the future library. 100 years later all the boxes will opened. There will be enough wood from the trees that have grown to make paper to print the anthology of those stories.

As Margaret Atwood explained, the stories can be in any form: one word, a poem, a short story. No images. And you cannot tell anybody what is in the box, except for the title. But these boxes will be in the future library with the author's name and title visible. You can go into the library, see the names and titles and imagine what could be in them. "So in May (of 2016), I'm going to Norway with my box, tied with a nice blue ribbon," said Margaret Atwood. "I imagine there might be a moment at the immigration checkpoint where they're going to ask me what is in that box, and I'm going to have to tell them, I don't know," she said, adding that that might not go over well.

She also noted that the success of this project was based on a number of assumptions: that people will want to read and will be able to read, that Oslo will still be there. (Not to mention an even more questionable assumption that books in a hundred years will still be printed on paper -- E.)

Margaret Atwood seems to encourage all the ways in which people consume and produce the written word nowadays, including mashups and remakes. For example, she wrote her own version of Shakespeare's play "Tempest" for the Hogarth Shakespeare project, in which modern writers reimagined Shakespeare's works. She had a fan fiction contest for her latest book. (And no, she replied, she wasn't going to read all the thousands of entries herself. She had slush readers for that.) When asked if she was ready for other people to take over her characters, she indicated she had no problem with that. She said: "Fanfiction is very very old, except it wasn't called fanfiction. It started with the Greek mythology. When Don Quixote was published, there were a lot of other books published about Don Quixote by other authors. So Cervantes had to put out a notice that those other books aren't authentic."

She also contributed, even if in a small way, to the Zombies, Run! app. It's an interactive app for exercise, based on the premise that a zombie apocalypse is taking place, and you are running from the zombies. At one point the run takes you to Canada, but the entire Canadian government has been zombified, and the entire NHL hockey league are zombies on skates. However, you can establish contact with Margaret Atwood. Naomi Alderman, co-creator of the Zombies, Run! app, wrote her into the game. The way Margaret Atwood explained it, "I'm a pushover. You want to put me in a zombie game? Okay."

Margaret Atwood (left) at the Texas Book Festival in October of 2015, surrounded by the audience members.

Despite the lighthearted tone of the conversation, the interviewer couldn't help but note that we were at the Texas Capitol, the place where Texas Legislature makes laws -- and some or many laws that they passed recently resonated strongly with the themes in Margaret Atwood's most famous dystopian novel "Handmaid's Tale". You could get an impression that Texas Legislature used "Handmaid's Tale", um, aspirationally. So, not surprisingly, the interviewer brought up political topics.

"Margaret, you do a lot of advocacy work. And we are in the Texas state capitol, so I want to ask you about how far we have come and how far we have to go," said the interviewer, Kelly. (I don't remember her last name -- E.)

Margaret Atwood quipped something about making a law from here. (The interview took place literally in the House Chamber of the Texas Legislature. All the audience were sitting at the lawmakers' desks.) Then she said:

"The people who passed it (referring, I think, to a recent law severely restricting availability of abortion -- E.) don't think about the effect there will be down the line. Real people will have to live with these things. The effects will turn out to be not what they thought to be. For example, California reversed its draconian prison legislation because they couldn't afford it. I don't think you can really sustain the society if you alienate a lot of young people, because they're going to move somewhere else, and then who's going to pay for your old age? If you are prohibiting abortions, you may think that there will be lots of babies born, lots of poof children, future serfs? That might not work out that way."

As usual, there was time for audience questions.

A question from the audience. Oslo is building huge library, but a few hundred feet from here there is a huge library that's mostly empty, there's nobody there. (I think he might have been referring to the Austin Public Library central location. -- E.) So why do you think that the Oslo Future Library be successful?

Margaret Atwood replied that some libraries were very heavily used, for example, the New York or Toronto public library systems. "So I don't think it's a question of library or no library, it's a question of what kind of library, how accessible it is, and what kind of interactivity do they do? I believe that access to books and reading is one of the cornerstones of the democracy," she said.

A woman from the audience says she's getting her PhD in literature, and (if I understood correctly) is teaching literature to freshmen. Making them read feels like she's murdering them. She asks if Margaret Atwood sees it a general rule of thumb for this generation (unwillingness to read), and if so, does she have any advice?

Margaret Atwood. Freshmen read all the time. You can't use internet without being able to read. There is a place where they can write anonymously, and post what they're really interested in, which may be vampire stories. Another way you can help them is audiobooks. But sometimes they just want to put in the studying time. When I was teaching grammar to engineering students, I started them on Kafka's parables, which are very short. So you can start your students on flash fiction. They're all 18, it's a difficult age. When I taught the same class to returning students, there was a huge difference. They wanted me to challenge them, they argued with me.

Make your students write a zombie or vampire story. Or an article of economics of vampires. Vampires are always rich. Why is that? They are immortal -- if they became a vampire in 1930, how much money you have accumulated? Have them do a business plan for being a vampire. There are two vampire movies where this accumulation of the riches is done explicitly. 1. An Iranian vampire western movie called "A girl walks home alone at night" - a feminist Iranian vampire, who was killing only bad people, but in the process she accumulated a lot of diamond watches. 2. "Let the right one in", with a 12 year old girl vampire. There is a classic line in it: a little boy says to her when he [starts suspecting something]: 'How old are you really?' She replies: 'I'm really 12. I've been a child for a very long time.'"

A woman from the audience. What words of comfort you have for readers who know they'll never lay their eyes on your contribution to the future library?

Margaret Atwood. There are many books you'll never lay your hands or eyes on, because you've never heard of them. As a tribute to that idea, find a book you never heard of, read it, and find other people who love it.

Arianne "Tex" Thompson's worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016

Subtitled "Escape From Clichea", Arianne "Tex" Thompson's worldbuilding workshop was the most remarkable event at the ArmadilloCon 2016, and was alone worth the price of admission. She gave a heap of good, practical, doable recommendations on how to improve your worldbuilding, storytelling, and characters. At a typical writing workshop you'll get vague advice like "show, don't tell", and "kill your darlings", but rarely will you hear specific recommendations what to do. But Tex Thompson's workshop was an avalanche of such implementable nuggets of goodness. She showed us how to look at your story material differently and tease the interrestingness out of it.

To be sure, this wasn't the kind of workshop where professional writers and editors critique your manuscript. This was 1.5 hours of Tex Thompson speaking. But I came out of it full of ideas of how to make my stories better.

I wrote them down to the extent I remembered them.

The workshop wasn't strictly just about worldbuilding, but also covered deeper aspects of writing, like how to find your identity as a writer, how to find what makes you unique, and use it to build your online presence.

On how to build your identity as a writer

Write down 3 things you have been paid to do. Then 3 things you could write an article about. If the things on those lists have nothing to do with writing, that's completely fine. Those are things that make you unique. They help you stand out between other writers. If nothing else, they could give you ideas for your blog posts, and a blog is a big part of how a writer attracts and keeps an audience.

Here is another way to mine ideas for blog posts.

Write a list of 3 stories that you want your work to be compared to. Then write down common elements between them. For example, Tex Thompson said that for her, those elements are: (1) ensemble cast / team effort; (2) people with different abilities or powers; (3) big, wild, slightly-ruined world. Such elements are great for mining ideas for your blog or convention panel topics. For example, combining (1) and (2) could lead to Top 10 teams in comics.

Other lists to tease out your identity

Things you would you do with your life if you won a million dollars

What you tend to get into arguments about

Worldbuilding exercises

Association exercise. What do the words "four kingdoms" remind you of, asks Tex Thompson.

Audience says: 4 elements, 4 directions, 4 seasons.

Tex Thompson. Take your first idea and place it carefully in the garbage. Because it is also many people's first idea.

What could be a fresher take on the "four kingdoms" idea? The audience replied:

• Aliens come and the kingdoms have to unite to defeat them;
• Economics arms race;
• Each of the 4 lands has a princess and they are all supposed to be in a beauty pageant, but one of them has a prince and he wants to compete too.

Best practices for writers

"Arianne 'Tex' Thompson leads the Escape from Clichea worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2016 (39) are in my photo gallery.

• Use the Triforce!

Triforce consists of: Education - something you know about; Passion - something you care about; Inspiration - something you are excited about. At the intersection of those things is a story that only you can write, says "Tex" Thompson.

• Ask yourself: "what is the easiest, laziest thing I could do here?" Then do something else.
• Start with Episode IV, and leave space for more stories as you go.

What happened in Harry Potter world before the HP started? All the Voldemort stuff, the Marauders. Your idea for the front story might make an awesome back story.

• Question your assumptions.

Have you read a story about space travel that's set in the 25th century, but all the gender norms are from the 20th century? Or they have all the same notions of nuclear family and property?

Everything that surprises you about another country / culture says something about your own. There is a book series CultureShock! that explains how to live in another country. In US it says, don't drop off at someone's house uninvited. It's OK to ask what people do, but not how old they are. You can call uninvited, but not after 9 pm. Never cut in line, that will not be good to you.

• Give us something we expect and something we don't.

Many enormously successful TV and book series do that. Star Trek: a Western but in space. Game of Thrones: medieval fantasy, but gritty / realistic. Harry Potter: witches / wizards, but in high school. Another example. Chuck Wendig once asked: what would a vampire do in a zombie apocalypse? In "Double Dead", the vampire tries to make sure that the human race does not go extinct, because then he'll be out of food. So he herds human survivors through the apocalypse.

In any scenario, ask:

• Who benefits from the current state of affairs? Who tends to benefit in most zombie apocalypse stories? Zombies, warlords, gritty surrivors. Even in the worst of times somebody turns a profit. Doomsday preparers, escaping prisoners, drug companies? Gun manufacturer Colt?
• Who loses out? Who is the first to go? The slow and the sick. The people on the front lines where the apocalypse started -- hospital workers who got blood sprayed on them. They are gone.
• Who's trying to maintain the status quo? Usually people who are winning, or people who think they are getting a better deal than they would otherwise. How many of you stayed in a crappy job because its certainty was better than the uncertainty of the alternative?
• Who is trying to change things? Someone who is losing, who has nothing left to lose.

Explore the timeline

While my memory of the workshop is already vague, I think this was a segue of the "vampires protect people from zombies" exercise. I assume this all means not that we, writers, need to explore all these time periods in our prose, it's just that perhaps the story could be built around not the event itself, but what happened n number of years later.

• 3 months later: chaos, social collapse, ragtag survivors
• 10 years later: status quo; the world is relatively stable. But what are we doing now that we weren't doing 3 months after the event? Maybe we are enslaving zombies. We have started to adapt to this new world.
• 50 years later: the idea that there was something before this seems strange. You still have people who remember the old world, Kennedy's assasination, the days when presidents used to drive down the street in open convertibles. But also the current generation may not know or appreciate reasons for the current state of affairs. This leads to a possibility of a new conflict. They have no respoect for their vampires-elders. They don't understand why people submit to the vampire lords.
• 100 years later: nobody remembers the way it was. Nobody alive today remembers the flu pandemic of 1918. From the 50s to the 90s our big preoccupation was the cold war and the Bomb. Now everybody has a bomb. We don't worry about Russians launching nukes so much. We are worried about people sitting next to us in a movie theatter. The Great War doesn't come up so much as it does in the fantasy novel prologues.

How much info to dump?

When Tex Thompson teaches at the DFW writers workshop, she tells writers: don't pack me a lunch, leave me breadcrumbs. If your mom packs you a lunch, you'll throw away the apple, trade the cookies, etc. You are more like T-Rex: you don't want to be fed, you want to hunt.

Give readers just enough information about your world to build something of their own

Consider how many bigger-than-big franchises -- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel Universe, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Pokemon -- give you enough information so that you can create your own Jedi, superhero, wizard school, etc. And they make the world vast and intriguing enough that you would WANT to! Ask yourself: what am I giving my readers to do while they wait for my next book? Fan theories about what is Jon Snow's real heritage, Rey's from Star Wars real heritage, etc. Can they make a costume of a character? In how many ways can they participate in this world? In what ways can you make it exciting to participate?

Tex Thompson enjoyed Harry Potter, but like many fantasy novels, the main character was a dude. She wanted to make her own hero. For example, in the world of Sugar Rush racers, who are all named after candy, Tex's friend made his own Sugar Rush racer, Molten Milk Toast. Does your world accommodate other heroes? Do you establish your world well enough for your fans to actively participate in it? And is it interesting enough that they would want to? If your wizard school is in UK, would the readers wonder what it would be like in the Caribbean?

A guy in the audience. Leave the rules a little open, that the people would wonder how much is possible.

Tex. Right. We need some rules at the outset, but we don't need them all right away. And a lot of the secret sauce is what is the right order of revelations so that they would let people build upon one another, etc.

"Use the Triforce, Luke! Triforce consists of Passion, Education, or Inspiration -- in other words, something you care about, something you know about, and something you are excited about. At the intersection of these three lies a story only you can write. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2016 (39) are in my photo gallery.

Problem: infodumps are boring

Solution: do not let your story answer any questions the reader hasn't had time to ask!

Give out world details and exposition like treats. Instead of infodumping an explanation of how the star drive work, ask yourself, what question is that an answer to? The question probably comes up when the star drive is broken and needs to be fixed. "We need a new flux capacitor, or else the discombobulator won't work."

What excuse do they make for explaining magic in Avatar the Last Airbender? "Why is so-and-so special? Why can he control all 4 elements?"

Anything you are tempted to go on and one for 100 pages about, make it the focal point of your story. Make your story about how to survive on Mars, and hundreds of pages on growing potatoes will become relevant.

Problem: making a fictional world as detailed as the real wone would take forever, and also be super boring. What should you do?

Answer from the audience. Use the same cliches as in the real world?

Tex. Yes. Use the words "magic wand". Readers already know how it works. Or "hyperdrive". Everybody knows what it is.

You don't want to include things that are not relevant, things that have no emotion attached to it. But if I tell you what magic the blue crystal does, what will you automatically wonder about? What other crystals are there, and what magic they do.

Solution: imply that your world contains more detail than is explicitly given in the book.

Conservation of detail: if something is explained in depth, it's because it's somehow important to the story. (The Malazan series by Steven Erikson stomp on this idea. He explains everything about everything.) Respect your readers' brain cells. If I ask the reader to spend a brain cell, there should be a reward for it.

Using the real world responsibly

How to avoid stereotypes

In real life we have stereotypes about entire nations, about some states or even some cities. In fantasy it is easy to fall into the same pattern. Elves have stereotypes about orcs and vice versa. Their races do not get along. But in reality, within any nation, people are quite different from one another. There is enough internal variation between elves and between orcs. In real world, your biggest beef is usually not with the person across the ocean, but with a person across the street. Your fantasy world will be more detailed if you tell us what elves fight among themselves about. Is it what type of wood is best for bow crafting? Is it something as silly as what end of an egg to open from breakfast?

What kinds of people tend to get left out this kind of story? Can you find a way to include them?

Going back to the vampires-in-a-zombie-apocalypse example, what kind of people don't make it through a zombie apocalypse? The elderly and the sick. One of Tex's friend had said: "Why would I want to read stories about apocalypse? If power goes out, my fridge goes out, I won't get my insulin and I'll die. So why would I want to read it?"

One of the plot threads in your book could be about how a guy with diabetes makes it through the apocalypse. Will the vampire take care of him personally? Will he the vampire hunt pigs to make insulin?

Make a story that includes a category of people who are not commonly included, and you might have a whole new big group of fandom for yourself.

Smash the Monoliths!

Question. What is the easiest, laziest, most obvious, least-realistic thing I could do with my fictional people?

Answer. Create a monoculture.

You are probably wondering: but what if I mess up? What if I write a character outside of my own experience and get it wrong? Don't worry, says Tex: you WILL mess up. No matter what you write, someone will hate it. There is a famous quote: "If you're not pissing someone off, you probably aren't doing anything important." Use your fear of hurting people (from other cultures or marginalized groups) to motivate you to do your research. Listen to people, and solicit feedback -- even painful feedback.

---

The following year I had the fortune to attend another of Tex Thompson's workshops, "Plate Tectonics Theory of Dialogue". It took place in Austin in July 2017, and focused on dialogue. Your characters are constantly in motion: they clash, collide, fold, buckle, shift. Good dialogue expresses all that. Here are some of the slides from the dialogue workshop

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Book review: Lauren Beukes "The Shining Girls"

This is a book about a time-travelling serial killer and a woman who survives her own murder attempt and sets out to catch him. The most interesting part is that she doesn't even consider time travel as a possibility (the book is set in the conventional reality), but gradually comes to accept it, based on evidence.

The weakest chapters of the book were the ones written from the killer's point of view. Those parts have a detached, distancing quality. I didn't get any clue as to the killer's motivation. At some point he feels forced by the House itself (a house where he lives that serves as a portal to different eras) to go murder all those women. But he does not respond like an ordinary person would if they felt compelled to murder someone. At the very least s/he would be upset and conflicted about it. Even more so if the urge was planted directly in their mind by a mysterious force. That should make anyone question their own sanity, but the murderer does not seem disturbed. He is very nonchalant about all that.

If the killer had been portrayed in a way that readers could connect with him (and yes, to enjoy a book you have to connect with the villains too; you need to get into their mind and understand why they do what they do, even if you don't find it justifiable), I would have added another star to the review.

It is in the victims' plotlines that the storytelling really picks up. Each of the eight murdered women were interesting, different, and vivid. They made the book worth reading. It quickly became clear why they were called the Shining Girls. Each of them was ahead of her time in some way, breaking the mold of what was expected from women of their time. In that way perhaps the House could be viewed as embodiment of evil reactionary forces of the world. But if so, that metaphor isn't developed in the book very well.

The story really takes off when one of the women survives the attempted murder and gets on the killer's trail; as level-headed as she is, she is eventually forced to accept the evidence that the killer might have traveled in time to commit murders. I really liked that she applies every ounce of skepticism to examine all the other possible explanations, and only after exhausting them settles on the seemingly impossible.

I will not reveal the ending, except to say that it was a quite confusing. Perhaps that was deliberate: time travel stories are very difficult to resolve in a satisfactory and logical manner. Once you start dealing with time paradoxes, there is no good way out. So even though the ending felt handwavingly dismissive and intentionally obscure, it doesn't detract from the story that much; its essence was about the journey, not the destination.

Rating: approximately 3.5 or 4 stars out of 5

ArmadilloCon 2015: New Feminist Science Fiction

Beside book and story recommendations, this panel on the best recent feminist science fiction and fantasy involved a discussion on what the panelists would like to see more in the feminist SF/F.

Feminist speculative fiction writers, recommended by our panelists

Stina Leicht recommends:

Kameron Hurley, Elizabeth Bear, Ann Leckie, Nisi Shawl, N. K. Jemison, G. Willow Wilson.

Katherine Sanger mentioned science fiction written by men that has awesome female characters, but it went by too fast for me to write down the names (-- E.)

Nancy Jane Moore recommends:

Andrea Hairston -- her work "Mindscape" really plays with gender stuff. Jennifer Marie Brissett "Elysium". Also, Aqueduct books. If you need a reading list of feminist SF, just go to the Aqueduct books page. And anything on the Tiptree awards page.

Kelley Eskridge's collection Dangerous Space. It has a character named Mars, and I defy you to tell me whether Mars is male or female.

Going into fantasy world -- Laurie J. Marks, whose Elemental Logic series starts with Fire Logic. Gender politics, war and peace, you name it, it is covered in the Elemental Logic.

Caroline Yoahim recommends:

Nicola Griffith Hild -- historical fantasy. She is a really intelligent female character. There is a freedom for her to explore sexuality in the way that was not available to women.

Tina Connoly: IronSkin, Copperhead, and Silverblind: steampunk Jane Eyre with fairies.

Nnedi Okorafor Who Fears Death

Nalo Hopkinson writes fantastic feminist stuff, such as Brown Girl in the Ring.

Short fiction

Caroline Yoachim recommends the Crossed Genres magazine. Of the notable stories there she recommends these:

Sylvia Spruck Wrigley "Space travel loses its allure when you've lost your moon cup".

Rachael K. Jones "Makeisha in Time" -- story of a black woman who lapses backward in time.

Alyssa Wong "The Fisher Queen" is up for a Nebula this year. It is a mermaid story, and some themes in it require trigger wanings. Cost of not speaking up against injustice.

Sofia Samatar "Selkie Stories are for Losers".

Amanda Downum recommends:

Kij Jonhson short story "Spar";

Catherine Valente's Fairyland series for children that starts with "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making".

What they would like to see more in the feminist science fiction

Amanda Downum. I am a fan of playing with subtle things, instead of bringing a hammer. I like Trojan horses. I like books with an array of women doing an array of interesting things. Not just having one special woman, because then it becomes a token.

Stina Leicht. I'm like you. I don't like having one special, kickass token female character to who nothing bad can happen. (She refers to Arya from Game of Thrones as an example of a female character that's singled out for special treatment.) Arya is great! She's never going to be raped!

Amanda Downum. I like the normalization of women doing things.

Caroline Yoachim. I like a wider range of cultures represented in SF.

Amanda Downum. I also have hard time pulling feminist out of broader range of cultures. (Perhaps she meant that it is impossible to dissociate diversity of cultures from feminism. -- E.)

Caroline Yoachim. The broadening of feminism in science fiction is a good thing.

Nancy Jane Moore. [I like that] We finally moved away for the reality where white male is the default, and anyone else's existence needs to be justified.

Stina Leicht. Minorities and women are historically not permitted anger. You're supposed to have a sense of humor, laugh it off.

Nancy Jane Moore. The same issue as with Sandra Bland dying in a jail cell. She was not permitted to get angry when she got pulled over.

Stina Leicht. When the Hunger Games movie was made, a lot of people got upset, because they were convinced that Rue was white. They thought it was not OK for her to be a person of color.

Amanda Downum. You can describe your character very clearly, and some readers will still sail past what you're trying to do. (I think she means that some readers will visualize your character as white even if you described him or her as a person of color, simply because white is the default to them. -- E.)

Caroline Yoachim. It's tricky. I'm half Japanese, and I write a lot of Asian characters. But you don't want to bludgeon people with the character's race. When you're writing a modern Japense American character, they don't have to have a traditional Japanese name. And people will automatically whitewash it.

Stina Leicht. It happened to Ursula LeGuin, the Earthsea wizard -- people assumed he was white.

Left to right: Caroline Yoachim, Nancy Jane Moore, Katherine Sanger, Amanda Downum, Stina Leicht. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

Amanda Downum. One of the things that frustrated me in science fiction is that people stop questioning. They have their speculative idea, their fantasy world, but then they don't question and push -- they just stop. They found one thing they wanted to write about, and they don't think that anything else can be different. You have a world you are creating from scratch, so why don't you push yourself to imagine more? Why your gender relationships are like from the 1950s America?

Nancy Jane Moore. Academic book "Brain Storm" by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young -- most of research that find brain differences between men and women are bad science. When you look at differences among people, they don't break down along gender lines.

Amanda Downum. When you're a shallow writer, you're a shallow writer. It manifests in more than just not being able to write female characters.

More book recommendations

Caroline Yoachim recommends:

Collections of short stories: "Women destroy SF", "Women destroy fantasy", "Women destroy horror".

Nisi Shawl "Filter House" -- another Tiptree winner.

Amanda Downum recommends:

Jacqueline Koyanagi Tangled Axon books. The first book is "Ascencion".

Caroline Yoachim recommends:

Maureen McHugh: short story collections "After the Apocalypse", "Mothers and Other Monsters".

Nancy Jane Moore recommends:

"Necessary Ill" by Deb Taber. Her main character is a neuter. The neutter people go by "it". They are neither male nor female. They don't have genitals. They do very disturbing things. It is a disturbing book , and that's the greatest recommendation I can give for a book.

Amanda Downum. Talking about characters doing unpleasant things: I would like to have a discussion about female characters doing unpleasant things, and how audiences respond to them.

Stina Leicht. Women are people, and part of being people is making terrible mistakes. It happens, and it needs to be OK in the books.

Questions from the audience

Q1. How do you like the treatment of those issues in film?

Nancy Jane Moore. 10 minutes of Fury Road was a great movie. Overall I think film is way behind fiction.

All the panelists agree.

Amanda Downum. Marketing constraints, etc.

Stina Leicht. And there are very limited roles for women once they hit 35.

Caroline Yoachim. Also, other contraints like race, sexuality. When we celebrate the broad range of female characters in the books, that's totally not true for film.

Nancy Jane Moore. The only SF movie I liked last year was "Her". It is not feminist, but it is going someplace really interesting science fictionally. And the best feminist film of the last years is "Obvious Child", which is not science fiction.

Q2.Do you have high hopes for Ghostbusters?

Stina Leicht. I really don't, sorry to say. What does it say that our best feminist movei hope is a movie that's completely lacks in plot? It is just explosions. A woman driving a monster truck. I don't like what Hollywood is doing where we rehash everything. Hollywood caters to the established audiences, and they don't take chances.

They mention Geena Davis institute for women in film, and it is doing good work.

Q3 (not really a question, but a remark). A movie that was very interesting from feminist perspective was "The Age of Avalon" -- about a woman who doesn't age, and the difficulties she's going to have. She comes across one of her former lovers, who is 65, but she still looks 29. And she's dating his son.

Short Fiction You Should Have Read Last Year: ArmadilloCon 2015 panel

For starters, panelists K. B. Rylander (moderator), Eugene Fischer, and Rebecca Schwarz list their favorite short stories of the year.

Rebecca Schwarz. Ken Liu "Cassandra".

K. B. Rylander. Eugie Foster "In the end, he catches her". It was published the day she died, just by coincidence.

Best sources of short stories

Rebecca Schwarz. I listen to a lot of stories. There are lots of great ways to listen to them, such as the podcasts by Clarkesworld, Cast of Wonders (Young Adult fiction), Beneath the Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons. Tor is on and off with their podcasting, but sometimes you can discover great stories there, like Kij Johnson. Escape Pod -- they do a lot of reprints. (It also exists in the print form.) Starship Sofa also does a lot of reprints. Bourbon Penn.

Eugene Fischer. Lightspeed, Strange Horizons. Oddly, the best publication for finding new authors these days is Twitter. Follow authors, they will recommend a lot of stories. This year majority of the stories I found is not because I read Asimov's cover to cover, but because I follow authors, and when they have a story out, they'll tweet a link. You can harness social network effects to curate your reading for you.

Short Stories You Should Have Read This Year panel, left to right: K. B. Rylander (moderator), Eugene Fischer, Rebecca Schwarz. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

K. B. Rylander. When you think about stories you loved, what makes a great story? What makes them stand out?

Eugene Fischer quotes Kevin Brockmeier, who said that every great fiction owes its greatness to fidelity to one of 3 things: fidelity to language, fidelity to lived human experience, or fidelity to authorial obsession. An example of fidelity to language would be Ursula le Guin. An example of fidelity to authorial obsession -- J. G. Ballard. His writing is off the wall, but the images were strongly felt to the author. If a story doesn't bring at least one of those things to the table, says Kevin Brockmeier, then it won't work.

Rebecca Schwarz. I like stories that play with form, such as "Five Stages of Grief After The Alien Invasion" by Caroline Yoachim, who hangs the story on the traditional five stages of grief. Another example would be "Noise Pollution" by Allison Wilgus in Strange Horizons. It's punk as in cyberpunk. It's a young rebellious kid narrator telling a story.

K. B. Rylander. The way I approach story, the story needs to elicit emotion from the reader. Even in hard science fiction there needs to be emotional interest for that reader.

Eugene Fischer. "Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology" by Theodora Goss, published in Lightspeed, resembles Borghes: it's about how reality actually works. Lorrie Moore, in an introduction to "Best American Short Stories", said that a novel comes to us already half-ruined by its length, but in short story we can experience something pristine: a single moment. It is not necessarily in time, but a single esthetic moment. In "Cimmeria", students go to a field study in a country that exists only because they made it up. One of them falls in love with the daughter of a king. In this country there are strange cultural differences that they invented when they designed this country. One of them is, twins are actually the same person. The esthetic moment is, a shift from viewing cultural experience as an outsider, to viewing it as an insider. It's not a moment in time, but a moment in cognition.

K. B. Rylander. A lot of time in a story there is a very visceral emotion that people can relate to: loss, love, revenge. Those strong emotion stories are often ones that become the big stories for the year.

Rebecca Schwarz. Annie Bellet "Goodnight Stars": it was nominated for Hugos, but she withdrew.

Eugene Fischer Sam J. Miller "We are the cloud".

The panelists mention that they've found many notable stories that draw from global mythology, such as Chinese or Pakistani. An example would be Carmen Maria Machado "The Husband Stitch", nominated for the Nebula Award.

Humor stories

Rebecca Schwarz. Daily SF publishes a lot of humor. Also, Alex Shvartsman publishes humor anthologies, Unidentified Funny Objects.

K. B. Rylander. Two flash pieces: "I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galexies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything." by Laura Pearlman. It's a Reddit with an alien who has came to earth. Oliver Buckram "Half a Conversation, Overheard While Inside An Enormous Sentient Slug".

Eugene Fischer. Alice Sola Kim "Mothers, lock up your daughters because they are terrifying" -- a ghost story of Korean adoptees loking for the biological parents with the help of Cthulhu.

K. B. Rylander. Kris Dikeman "Madhouse on Aisle 12" -- a woman goes to a grocery store, and the food talks to her. It's hilarious.

Great stories that didn't get much attention

K. B. Rylander. What stories were great, but didn't get a lot of attention?

Eugene Fischer. Guernica magazine published a story by Anna Noyes, "Becoming", from a point of view of chimpanzee who grew up in an 1950s experiment of raising a chimp in a human family to see if it grows up like human. It's not going to get attention in genre fiction awards, and there's no such thing as realist fiction awards.

K. B. Rylander. Story by William Ledbetter, "That Other Sea", publsihed on Escape Pod (available in both podcast and text versions). It takes place on Europa, on the theory that there is life under ice on Europa. It's a first contact story from the point of view of the aliens. What drew me into the story is that the alien has overwhelming curiosity about the world, the yearning for what's out there.

Rebecca Schwarz. A story in Strange Horizons, Kate Heartfield, "Limestone, Lye and the Buzzing of Flies". It leans a little literary, it's a little interior. It's a fantastic coming-of-age story with magic elements.

Must-read short story writers

K. B. Rylander. Do you have any must-read writers?

Eugene Fischer. Carmen Maria Machado, Ted Chiang, Alice Sola Kim, Kelly Link, Meghan McCarron.

Rebecca Schwarz. Karen Russell, M. Bernardo (she recommends his story in Beneath the Ceaseless Skies, possibly "The Penitent" or "After Compline, Silence Falls"), Kevin Brockmeier.

K. B. Rylander. Sarah Pinsker, Caroline Yoachim.

Controversial, influential, wave-making stories

K. B. Rylander. What stories do you think were very important to the industry as a whole, that really made waves, that were controversial?

Rebecca Schwarz. Cruel stories well done are just perfect. Chuck Palahniuk wrote a story "Loser" in Neil Gaiman anthology, it's aboujt a guy on The Price is Right, he's tripping on acid, and he gets called on the stage.

Eugene Fischer. Kij Johnson "Spar". Kij Johnson experimented with stripping as much as possible from the story. It produced incredible winners, including "26 Monkeys". Rachel Swirsky "If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love".

Rebecca Schwarz. "Dinosaur" became politicized in the Hugos, and that had nothing to do with the story.

Eugene Fischer. "Dinosaur" became a token, a symbol for people for who stories with emotional load is not sufficient. People who think they have ownership over what the speculative fiction genre should be.

Trends in short fiction

K. B. Rylander. Do you want to talk about any trends in short fiction? Do you see it evolving recently?

Eugene Fischer. Last year it shifted to digital publication. Print is fully an afterthought. Charlie Finley's new regime in Fantasy and Science Fiction produces very good stuff. Print venues are continuing to do good job, but the critical mass of attention has shifted online.

Rebecca Schwarz. I'm seeing more diversity. Ken Liu has now translated several short stories from Chinese.

Eugene Fischer. Chris Brown two years ago co-edited an anthology "3 messages and a warning" of Mexican science fiction stories translated into English.

Then Eugene Fischer asks the other two panelists: What's out there that people should read of yours?

Rebecca Schwarz. "Black Friday". It is a story of a future dystopic Thanksgiving that has become codified, football game to the death, in a big box store, that everybody watches. It is in Devilfish Review.

K. B. Rylander. "We Fly", about trying to find life in Alpha Centauri system. It's based on real science. The story opens when an uploaded human mind, a woman, wakes up in a spaceship. She wakes up, and something is completely wrong, but there is no external damage. It's her trying to work through these things.

The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance: an ArmadilloCon 2015 panel

It's not too much overstatement that blood was expected to flow on "The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance", a.k.a. the Sad Puppies debacle, panel at the ArmadilloCon. But the discussion was instead polite and even funny at times. Here are the main points of the discussion. (Pretty much everything is paraphrased.)

The panelists were Lou Antonelli, Justin Landon, Michelle Muenzler (moderator), Marguerite Reed, and Jacob Weisman.

The discussion opened with moderator Michelle Muenzler asking who exactly the Hugo Awards represent. A lot of fandom claims they don't represent them.

On one hand, Hugo Awards are the only science-fiction and fantasy genre awards that the general public (at least the portion that reads those genres) has at least heard about. But upon closer look, Justin Landon said, only a very small part of the SF/F-reading population has heard of Hugos, cares about Hugos, or lets Hugo Awards influence what authors they read. At the end of the day, it only represents the Worldcon voters. Marguerite Reed agreed that people who vote on Hugos are a small percentage of SF/F readers. Jacob Weisman too agreed with everyone else that this award represents mainly, or only, the fans who bought memberships to Worldcon.

Left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, Justin Landon. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

If that's really the case, why are we worried about what the future of Hugo Awards means for the future of the speculative fiction genre?

I could say that there was a brief argument as to whether the fans who bought WorldCon supporting memberships were "true fans". But in reality, none of the panelists were presumptuous enough to divide the fans into "true" and "false", so it was more like a meta-argument, a survey of popular arguments. For example, one could say that the "true fan" would be considered someone who buys Worldcon memberships and votes for Hugos year after year. But the panelists agreed that the definition of a fan can't be as restrictive as that. Marguerite Reed said that she didn't believe that everyone who bought supporting membership was a true fan, and that no doubt some people bought it for questionable reasons, such as to put Sad Puppy nominated authors on the Hugo ballot; but she is willing to welcome all those people into the science fiction community. She hopes that they will like it enough to stay. Jacob Weisman said that, on the contrary, it might bring such a deep divide that people will opt out, as happened to the Nebula Awards a few years ago.

Justin Landon had very harsh words to anyone who likes to divide fans (even the politically-motivated Hugo voters) into true geeks and not true geeks. He, too, has been accused at conventions of being a fake geek. "When we see someone to come into our community, how screwed up it is to say, you're not one of us, get out, just because you're a conservative?" he said.

Left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

All this discussion or meta-discussion about true vs. fake fans/geeks seemed a bit pointless to me. The notion of being a science fiction fan or geek is so subjective, it's not like there could ever be a test administered who is and isn't a true fan or geek.

Lou Antonelli, who was nominated for Hugos by the Sad Puppies, said that he regretted how it turned out, and that he didn't want the Hugo ballot to be full of authors nominated purely based on political agenda.

Lou Antonelli. Whenever you have a system with laws, you chug along until someone finds a loophole, and then you rectify it. So maybe this year we will introduce some provisions. I think people should have fewer nominations than there are places on the ballot, to assure that there won't be a slate. It is ridiculous when someone is nominated more than once in the same category. I hope some reforms will come out of it. I got nominations, but I'm not happy with the way it turned out.

Naturally, other panelists asked Lou why he is not happy with the way it turned out (especially since, according to Marguerite Reed, Lou in his blog called current science fiction "dystopian slipstream pornography", or something like that); and more importantly, why he didn't recuse himself from the Hugo ballot, like so many people had. He said that he stood on it as a matter of principle, to not give in to the abuse that people heaped on the nominated authors.

Lou Antonelli. I think Letters from Gardner was good enough for Hugo nomination, good enough to make it on the ballot otherwise. But I said, I didn't need two nominations. And then ... I refused to be bullied and insulted. So I stayed the course. The first short story was withdrawn by the nominee, Annie Bellet, because she couldn't take the heat. When she went down, I decided I wasn't going to let that happen to me.

Justin Landon pointed out that while some nominees indeed withdrew because of the bullying they got from "people we would identify as social justice warriors", other nominated writers withdrew themselves without being bullied.

Lou Antonelli. I would rather make a decision that turned out to be wrong, but not bow down just to be popular.

Justin Landon. I have a lot of empathy for people like Lou, who worked in science fiction for many years, and one year they get a chance to get nominated for a Hugo, and I can't imaging being in their position and having to say "no". I don't want to beat up Lou. I don't envy position you are in.

Left to right: Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, and Justin Landon with a glass house in front of him, ready for people to throw stones. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

If, as everybody on the panel agreed, conventions and organizations can run their awards however they see fit, it begs a question, voiced by Marguerite Reed: Why didn't Sad Puppies have their own award? Justin Landon thinks it is because Sad Puppies are intent on destroying the Hugos. So then the question is, what are we going to do about it? Justin Landon thinks we should still vote. Not voting would be worse for Hugo Awards.

Justin Landon. If you want to vote No Award in some category, go ahead. But if you vote that way in all categories, you are making a statement. But statement-making is what Sad Puppies do. {I think he says, don't do it.} If you don't want to read sad puppies, don't read them. How many people before voting for Hugos, read everything on the ballot? (Nobody in the room raised their hands.) If we vote No Award in every category this year, what will it mean for Hugos next year?

But does it matter if Hugo Awards are destroyed or made irrelevant (which is likely to happen if many people vote for No Award)? Panelists and audience think it does.

Jacob Weisman. Science fiction and fantasy genres are more fragile than realized. More books are published but fewer numbers per title are being sold. Too much acrimony will shrink fandom because of the culture war.

A fan from the audience echoed that concern. "In the past, the science fiction community always healed itself, because there was a sense that it was important to maintain the community. This time, there are many who do not feel the preservation of the community is more important than getting their agenda met. This makes this a far more problematic and "dangerous" time in fandom."

The TL;DR version: the panelists would like you to go and vote for the Hugos no matter what. Find something you like, or at least are not opposed to, in as many categories as you can, and vote, and let the Hugo Awards continue.

ArmadilloCon 2015: What You Should Have Read in 2014-2015

A bunch of authors, editors, critics and booksellers discuss their science fiction, fantasy and horror picks of the year.

Some books got a nod from more than one panelist. This year those were Emily St. John Mandel Station Eleven, Ken Liu Grace of Kings, Kim Stanley Robinson Aurora, and Neal Stephenson Seveneves.

Below are each panelist's recommended books, and his or her comments about why they are worth reading.

John DeNardo recommends

Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. If you don't read short fiction, here are 3 reasons why you should read this collection. 1. "The Regular" by Ken Liu. I made a mistake of starting it late at night. it pulls you in, and you can't wait to find out what happens next. The way he does it, alternating viewpoints. The way he reveals these plot twists. 2. Rachel Swirsky "Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)". A pinocchi'esque story about father and inventor whose daughter has cancer, so he transfers her memories into a lookalike automaton. It is heartbreaking, but not for a reason you think. It is very moody and emotional. 3. Nancy Kress "Yesterday's Kin", also sold as a short novel by Tachyon. A story of first contact -- a ship landed in New York, and has been there for several weeks, and nobody is able to make contact, because the ship is surrounded by a force field. A geneticist is called to make contact. She also has family issues. The aliens affect her family and relationships.

Emily St. John Mandel Station Eleven. It is is a great character study of people. For our muggle friends, who don't like science fiction, this is a very accessible book -- it is something we could share with our friends mainstream readers. (Also recommended by Justin Landon.)

Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, edited by Nisi Shawl & Bill Campbell.

Neal Stephenson Seveneves.

John DeNardo. One of the things I like about science fiction is worldbuidling, and Seveneves is stuffed with it. I even thought there was too much worldbuilding. I never thought I would say it about any SF. But you'll learn about orbital mechanics in a way that you'll never think you are learning about orbital mechanics.

Willie Siros. It is Stephenson's best work since Baroque Cycle. It is Moonfall done right. Bad stuff happens, and mankind doesn't step up to the plate well. It's not really apocalyptic, and it ends with a more hopeful ending than you would think halfway through the book. It is amazingly well-written, very tight, more accessible than his other books.

Andy Weir The Martian. It's all about problem-solving. John DeNardo could especially relate to it because he's an engineer by day, and engineering is all about solving problems. In "The Martian" you don't feel like you're getting a science lesson. And it is very positive, at least for someone who is stuck alone on Mars. The most the character would say is "I'm not feeling up to it today", so you know what he is going through, but it's not in your face.

Justin Landon recommends

Joe Abercrombie Half a King, Half the World and Half a War (forthcoming). Justin Landon is a sworn fanboi of Joe Abercrombie. 'Nuff said.

Bradley P. Beaulieu Twelve Kings in Sharakhai -- Middle Eastern-flavored world; protagonist is 18-year-old woman who is a gladiator and a smuggler.

Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. It was self-published before it was published traditionally. It's like Firefly, but better. Cleverer, more charming, more real. It is social science fiction about a family living on a spaceship, and how they deal with relationships and xenophobia.

(Forthcoming) Kate Elliott Black Wolves, coming out this fall. It is phenomenal. The protagonist is 70-year-old beaten up woman, well past her prime, and has to figure out a way to protect her father's legacy, king's legacy, her grandson's legacy. Show me another fantasy that shows a capable old woman!

Robin Hobb Fool's Assassin

Rebecca Levene Smiler's Fair. Rebecca Levene used to be a Dr Who writer. It is Night Circus if G. R. R. Martin wrote it.

Sara Lotz The Three. The story is a thriller that may or may not be supernatural -- it is up to you. Four airplanes crash around the world simultaneously. Everybody dies. But on 3 of them, a young child survives. On the fourth there is apparently no such child, but there are rumors that a child might have survived. And so the rumors start that those children are the 4 horsemen of apocalypse. The book is written as a memoir of a woman reporter.

Alex Marshall A Crown for Cold Silver. Epic fantasy but without all the stuff that we hate about epic fantasy: progressive, not sexist, without all the baggage. Very aware of the tropes in the genre, and tries to do something unique.

Michelle Muenzler recommends

Darin Bradley Chimpanzee. In an economic downturn, a professor is in danger of having his education repossessed. So he tries to give it out for free, teaching people in public parks, so he could give it away before it's taken from him. But it's not legal, so he gets caught in a revolution.

Kameron Hurley The Mirror Empire -- great worldbuilding.

John Hornor Jacobs The Incorruptibles is set on an Earth a few dimensions way over there. It has one of the most frightening descriptions of Elves. They take the place of native Americans in this weird version of a western. Is it a terrifying and wonderful story. (Justin Landon added: "And it is not available for purchase in the US, except here in the dealers' room.")

Nicole Kornher-Stace Archivist Wasp is about a girl whose job is to kill ghosts, to make them stop bugging people. But instead she decides to help one of them. She gets pulled into a weird underground world, and learns the real reasons of apocalypse.

Mary Rickert Memory Garden is about old women who may or may not be witches.

Kazuki Sakuraba Red Girls -- three generations of a family, three very engrossing narratives. It spans the time from 1970s to the 2000s.

Willie Siros recommends

Ben Aaronovitch The Hanging Tree

Paolo Bacigalupi Water Knife. Published as a trilogy, but it is not. It has a discussion of the future water wars that are coming to the US as the drought continues. An asssassin arranges for water to go from one place to another, regardless of what the people who think it's their water, think. Texas is such a wasteland that refugees who are trying to get in to Colorado and Oregon, are dismissed as Perry's ramblers.

Author Michelle Muenzler gave out cookies to everyone as a way to combat the midday crash. Next to her, fan guest John DeNardo looks on. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

James S. A. Corey Nemesis Games

(Forthcoming) Julie Czerneda This Gulf of Time and Stars. In this book, Czerneda returns to her main species universe, which was the setting of the books she wrote many years ago.

William Gibson The Peripheral. Willie said that after thinking that Gibson's best work was in the past, he was very pleasantly surprised by The Peripheral.

Peter F. Hamilton The Abyss Beyond Dreams

Robin Hobb Fool's Quest

Stina Leicht Cold Iron

Jack McDevitt Coming Home and Thunderbird (forthcoming)

(Forthcoming) David Mitchell Slade House - a much looked-forward-to novel from the author of Cloud Atlas

Michael Moorcock The Whispering Swarm

Alastair Reynolds Poseidon's Wake is part of Alistair Reynolds series that began with Blue Remembered Earth. It is set in near future and examines how society deals with space travel in various ways. A family is raising elephants to intelligence, and by the end of the third novel it seems like elephants will have surprises for us. It is somewhere between popcorn fiction and serious fiction (the same applies to James S. A. Corey Nemesis Games too).

Kim Stanley Robinson Aurora. It asks: if man in 2000 years only managed to keep things made of stone, that could last 2000 years, how are we going to keep a generation ship going? It is really well done and fabulous. Justin Landon adds: "Aurora is tols form a perspective of a developmentally-challenged person, and Kim Stanley Robinson does a very good job of putting us in this person's head."

Several forthcoming books:

John Scalzi The End of All Things

Charles Stross The Annihilation Score

Michael Swanwick Chasing the Phoenix

Robert Charles Wilson The Affinities

Gene Wolfe A Borrowed Man

Skyler White recommends

Max Barry Lexicon has system of magic that's based on language. If you're a word person, or a magic person, it is so delicious.

Elizabeth Bear Karen Memory. Steampunk-inflected western with a very interesting protagonist. It's set in a bordello. It is Elizabeth Bear's strongest novel yet. It is as conceptually interesting as her other stuff, and also has interesting relationships between people.

Karen Joy Fowler We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

(To tell the truth, the panelists were not completely clear if they were talking about this book -- which came out more than a year ago, so technically it does not qualify for this year's What You Should Have Read -- or about We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory. No one could remember the exact title and author of the book they were thinking of. Then a brief argument broke out whether in Karen Joy Fowler's book there was mention of aliens arriving to Earth's orbit: some of us in the audience who have read it swore up and down that there were no aliens, but one of the panelists claimed that there were maybe a total of 5 lines in the book mentioning the aliens. This made it further confusing which panelists had which book in mind. -- E.)

Max Gladstone Three Parts Dead -- magic is legal-based. There is nothing boring about legal contracts.

Ann Leckie Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy (forthcoming)

Ken Liu Grace of Kings. Incredibly bold, incredibly global, has amazing ability to introduce you to a huge cast of characters, and they are each unique. According to several panelists -- Skyler White, Justin Landon, and Willie Siros -- it has an incredibly unique storytelling structure, a non-traditional, non-western narrative. If you read traditional Chinese novels, it fits into that structure. And if you haven't, it feels completely unique.

Christopher Priest The Adjacent. There is some kind of hop between times, that we don't really understand, but it has powerful applications. It's not hard SF, it is a character study of people who are wrapped up in this event. It is the impending feeling, that things will be terrible, but you don't know why.

Jeff VanderMeer Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy also has creeping dread. It is set in a postapocalyptic future of the American South. This book explores not just conceivable ways in which everything can go terribly wrong, but also impact on survivors, and the ruthlessness of the quarantine. Willingness to sacrifice a few for the good of the many.

Jo Walton The Just City. Jo Walton writes dialogue for Socrates. Just City is a utopian city created by the goddess Athene. They buy enslaved 10-year-olds, who will be become the citizens of that city.

Book review: Helene Wecker, "The Golem And The Jinni"

This was one enjoyable urban fantasy book. It was different from other novels I've read in this genre, though admittedly I haven't read that many, because I got disappointed with the genre soon. There is no Mary Sue heroine here that every werewolf falls in love with; this one has truly interesting, unique characters, rather than the usual assortment of werevolves and vampires.

The title character, a golem, was made by a European Jewish wizard for a man who wanted a custom-made wife; the man took her on a trip to the US, but died along the way. She disembarked in New York not knowing a single soul there, but was befriended by a kind, old rabbi, who quickly guessed who she is. Luckily he is the only human she ever encounters who can see that she is made of clay. Outwardly she is indistinguishable from a human woman.

The jinni, on the other hand, escaped from an ancient flask, accidentally opened by a metalworker in the Little Syria neighborhood of New York. He was trapped in a human form by a sorcerer many centuries ago in a Bedouin desert. While the Golem, who is made of Earth, is an excellent baker, the Jinni, who embodies the fire element, is talented at metalworking. They make their lives in the new country, their paths eventually cross, and they find an unlikely (or maybe likely?) friend in one another, as the only other supernatural creature each has ever met. They are the only ones who can understand what it's like to live in a human shape with all its restrictions, and to have to pass for a human every day. This involves not letting anyone catch on that you don't eat, sleep, breathe, or have a heartbeat.

As much as they try to blend into the society, they naturally create messes in their wake, simply because they are not human beings, and some things they do have unexpected consequences to humans. The Golem cares about it much more than Jinni does, who, at least at first, doesn't give a thought to the broken human lives he leaves in his wake (mostly women, for the handsome Jinni is like catnip for them). The Golem is the opposite: since she was created to serve, she can't help but sense the humans' needs, and feels irresistible urge to help them. The Golem's concern for others rubs off on the Jinni, who, after spending time with her, starts viewing his carefree actions in a different light.

But both of them are bound to the powerful forces who made them what they were, and the past comes looking for them. When that happens, ancient wizardry starts to play out in 19th century New York. To avoid spoilers, some tensions get resolved, and some don't, but it seems that the stage gets set for a sequel.

This book alternates between exotic/mystical and cozily mundane settings: the Golem works at a bakery, and the book has a good number of delightful scenes involving challah, strudel, fresh-baked bread, and so on. They are interspersed with scenes of Middle-Eastern and cabalistic magic. The threads of present and past are woven together beautifully, and suspense arises on two levels -- past and present; while the reader suspects that they must be related, you can't easily predict how it will all come together.

Secondary and tertiary characters truly come to life. Each of them is distinct. The characters that seem at first spoiled or airheaded, turn out to have depth. Sometimes the book teeters too far into the realm of "characters who didn't believe in the existence of paranormal suddenly become believers", but there is only a little of that. The scenes set in the ancient Bedouin desert centuries or millennia ago don't seem as strong as the scenes set in the 19th century New York; I'm not sure why, but maybe because they rely too much on clicheed Middle-Eastern setting, whereas the New York setting is detailed and authentic? Then again, this book is based on Middle-Eastern fairytale tropes, so that would be hard to avoid.

In any case, the result is quite original.

Book review: Karen Joy Fowler "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves"

This was one of the most enjoyable books I read recently. This is definitely character-driven fiction, and not just primary, but secondary and tertiary characters too were developed with unparalleled depth and nuance.

The plot revolves around a young woman named Rosemary, who is trying to figure out what happened to her "sister", a chimpanzee named Fern. In their early childhood Rosemary and Fern (who were born just months apart) were raised as siblings; Rosemary's parents treated the chimpanzee as their own child, encouraging her to do everything Rosemary did. Then, when Rosemary was five years old, Fern suddenly disappeared from the household, and Rosemary never fully recovered from the loss of her sister.

On one hand, it wasn't hard to figure out the mystery of what happened to Fern; it was clear that Rosemary's parents gave Fern away because they just couldn't keep a chimpanzee at home anymore as Fern grew bigger and stronger. Historically, cases of raising a chimp as a human never ended well, because humans were never able to control the chimp's aggressive tendencies; this novel leaves no illusions that this attempt could have been anything else but doomed, and the adult Rosemary understand it very well.

However, there is a twist at the end that makes it particularly ironic -- but by the time it is delivered, we readers are quite skeptical whether we should believe it. That's what makes this book so captivating. As Rosemary tries to piece her past into a coherent narrative, it becomes increasingly clear that none of the characters' versions of events can ever be trusted. Rosemary herself doesn't trust her memory, believing that many of her vividly remembered childhood episodes never could have happened. But we also find out that throughout Rosemary's childhood her parents and older brother Lowell manipulated her, feeding her various lies, fictions, and non-answers to avoid accept responsibility for their actions. So later in the book, when Lowell delivers a key "revelation" to the now-adult Rosemary, there is no reason to think that he isn't manipulating her even then.

This book reveals, in an understated way (because Rosemary is never bitter or angry towards her family) how even highly functional, seemingly caring parents can be subtly cruel towards their children. They raised Fern among humans, knowing that she won't be able to live with them indefinitely, yet making it very hard for her to adapt to a life among chimpanzees. It was just as bad that Rosemary's father, a psychologist, treated not just Fern but Rosemary too as an experiment. While she and Fern were together, they were both studied by graduate students in her father's lab. Everything Rosemary said was interesting to them, but only because she was part of the human-chimp speech acquisition experiment. With Fern was gone, nothing Rosemary said interested them anymore, and her endless chatter became a nuisance.

What I liked best about this book was endless observations about the nature and unreliability of memory, about theory of mind, about animal rights, and the way those meditations were wrapped into suspenseful plot arc.

Ted Chiang speech on lifelogging

Lifelogging is an emerging trend of recording every, or nearly every moment of your life. A simple example of lifelogging would be wearing a video recorder that records continuous video and audio of everything you see and do. Ted Chiang used this example to speculate about how lifelogging would change our society. He made carefully balanced points both for external-recording-as-memory, and against. In the end, I think, he is for it. Here are the highlights of his speech.

Even as we might think that a video of our life would never be used as a memory substitute but only as aid, it won't be so. We have been outsourcing our memory for millennia in every way we could. Ancient Greek philosophers complained that writing has corrupted people by weakening their memories; no one could recite thousands and thousands of lines of Iliad or Odyssey anymore. Since then, outsourcing of memory has only picked up pace. We don't remember phone numbers, because we rely on having them stored in our phones; we are less inclined to commit facts to memory, because we can always Google them. So if we have a continuous video of our life, we will come to rely on it instead of our internal memory; it will become, in fact, our memory.

But our memory is not a documentary; it is a web of narratives that get edited every time we remember something. Recalling past events adds layer after layer to our memories, and also distorts them. Most of our memories contain a version of events that pleases us, or lets us see our lives as having a narrative arch. Maybe it lets us to hold on to a thought that our life is getting better in one way or another -- for example, that our love for our spouse grows deeper over time; and that can be useful, because without this illusion we might not have the strength to go on. For example, in a certain study the female participants said they shared as many interests and spent as much time with their husbands as 10 years ago; but the researchers, who had asked the same question of these same women 10 years ago, noted that it wasn't true: the number of shared interests and the amount of closeness had declined.

Ted Chiang gives a speech on lifelogging. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2014 are in my photo gallery.

As we edit our memories, we are also eliminating those memories that are inconsistent with the way we see ourselves. Ted Chiang gave two examples of famous science fiction writers who had been on the giving or receiving end of it. One of them had misremembered the year of his father's death by 2 years, until fact checkers found an old obituary for his father in the newspapers, and pointed out the inconsistency. The writer provided a hypothesis for that: since his father died just a few months before he started college, and the freshman year of college was a very exciting time for him, his memory simply refused to put those two events in one year. The emotional "tone" of those events was much too dissimilar for them to have happened just months apart.

The other writer in Ted Chiang's example found out, as an adult, that his mother didn't remember beating him with a rope as a child. She denied ever doing that. Again, the way this could be explained is that back in the early 20th century (the time of this writer's childhood) it was acceptable to beat children, but a few decades later it was far less so. So his mother, thinking of herself as a good mother, unconsciously edited out of her memory the episodes of beating her child.

But if we edit out our memories in which we have hurt others, then we are not doing justice to those people; we are denying them their experiences. Similarly, the ruling elite of a nation might be denying the acknowledgement of suffering to the groups in the nation that they had oppressed. The notion of justice -- both interpersonal and on world scale -- requires that we remember our wrongdoings. This was Ted Chiang's conclusion, and this is why he thinks, after all, that lifelogging would be a step in the right direction.

Questions and discussion with the audience

Audience member 1. Forgetting can be very helpful in getting over a trauma; especially forgetting violent events. If we can't forget anything, if our video is there, we might be tempted to go back to those traumatic moments and never make progress in healing.

Ted Chiang responded that these days researchers are working on medicines that help us selectively forget, allowing one to heal from PTSD. (This doesn't quite address the question that selective forgetting won't do you much good if you'll be tempted to go back and revisit the record of violent events. -- E.)

Audience member 2. A certain amount of forgetting goes a very long way in maintaining good relationships with your relatives. When you meet and talk with them only a few times a year, it helps if you had forgotten things they did that made you very angry, or hurt you.

Ted Chiang responded that it would be even better if that person remembered how they wronged you, and be motivated not to do it again.

Audience member 3. What if having a video of all moments of our life would prompt us to live our life as if we are creating a story? When I was in college I deliberately went and did things, had experiences, to have something to write home about. Friday afternoon would come and I would think, oh, I haven't done "anything" this week yet (out of the ordinary) -- I should go be interesting for a couple of hours now!

Ted Chiang responded that this wouldn't be the same as how people these curate their Facebook profiles, posting only those activities that form an image they like. If we don't have to worry about anyone seeing our video, we won't be motivated to appear a good person on the tape.

That last statement hinged on a pretty big assumption, which Ted Chiang stated upfront at the beginning of his talk: that privacy and security issues had been solved, and we don't have to worry about our life record being viewed by the eyes it wasn't intended for. I think Ted Chiang made this assumption only to keep the scope of discussion manageable, not because he thought it would be easy. Still, it was near impossible to discuss lifelogging-as-memory without getting tangled in the issues of privacy, as is evident from the audience's questions.

Audience member 4. What happens when a hacker hacks into the record of your memories? Surely it will happen, because any and every technology that has ever existed has been hacked into.

Ted Chiang. Even if hackers modify your own memories, that wouldn't be the end of the world for you, because any kind of public event would be recorded by at least some other people. So you could compare your memories with theirs, and restore the truth. (This doesn't address the cases when the event is private and nobody else has a record of it; or what if a hacker makes your most private moments public? Or what if you don't even know your memories were tampered with, and thus have no reason to compare them with others' memories? -- E.)

Audience member 5. If everything you do is recorded in the continuous video of your life, then any movie you've seen will also be in it. So who will own that part of the video -- you or the movie studio? If you want to rewatch a movie, would you need to pay to get access to your own memories? If you don't pay, is it piracy?

Ted Chiang pointed out that movie studios are already dealing with similar issues even today, because you can download a movie from the torrents as soon as it comes out on the screen. This won't be that different.

Other audience members asked more questions without good answers. For example, 5th amendment. Police can confiscate your computer records, video records, or any kind of records if they are needed in an investigation of a crime; but if the recording is literally considered to be your memory, they might not have a right to confiscate it, as that would be the same as forcing you to speak. How would the laws, or constitution need to be rewritten in such a case?