Boskone Sunday
Feb. 16th, 2010 01:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eimarraI spent a good portion of Sunday wandering, looking at the art (Whelan and Picacio covers in all their original glory!), and buying gifts for my family. Oh, and letting my brain digest what it had already taken in. So this post is going to be somewhat light on actual events. I suppose I should have gone to the 11 a.m. talk, "SF/F/H Sites to See (Before You Die): E Publishing and Online Media," with Scott Andrews (Beneath Ceaseless Skies), Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld Magazine among other things), and James Patrick Kelly, but I didn't.
The 10 a.m. panel, "25 Things I learned from Science Fiction," was a lot of fun. Panelists included Lawrence Schoen (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
klingonguy), Ginjer Buchanan, Steven H. Silver, Michael Flynn, and Neil Clarke clarkesworld). Neil Clarke came prepared with a list of 25 things; the others came prepared with quips, general knowledge, and the punchiness that arises at that hour on the Sunday morning of a con. Ginjer Buchanan gave a concise discussion of didactic novels and why we expect to learn anything from SF or other books. Things people said they learned included, on the not-so-serious side, that aliens were vulnerable to Earth bacteria and viruses and that it's not science fiction unless there's a space princess. On the more serious side, klingonguy learned how to make a vacuum tube, Alfred Bester taught such things as pheromones and earworms, and various card games from cribbage to chemin de fer have been explained in books.
The next panel I went to was "Believable Relationships," with Beth Bernobich, Lois McMaster Bujold, Darlene Marshall, Jo Walton, and Geary Gravel. It started off with discussing why so many people in books in are orphans with no ties and went on to discuss how to make relationships believable if they're not mirroring your own relationships (I, for example, do not have a sister, so how do I write sister-sister interactions?), differences between SF and fantasy (fantasy tends to have much larger family relationships, Beth Bernobich said -- though Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigian books certainly have a wide range!), how one does research, why so many women read M/M sex stories, what relationships the panelists enjoy most when reading books, and relationships as motivation. A couple of the things said in this talk helped me fill in a blank spot in my outline for Sundered Sword, and it's going to be stronger for it, I think.
The final panel discussion I attended was "Are Good and Evil Gone from Epic Fantasy?" The moderator, David Anthony Durham, was hoping that the panel could come to a yes or no answer by the end of the talk. Panelists, including Beth Bernobich, Greer Gilman, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, weren't so sure. They discussed what worked about good and evil. PNH made the observation that even Tolkien wasn't about good and evil, but about the high cost of good. Other panelists agreed, discussing shadings of good and evil and nobility and change through his work. (bonniers pointed out that Sam does function as a purely good character.) Topics ranged from the seductiveness of evil to accommodation to characters with alien motivations to whether books for children and teens should have black & white morality. At one point, evil was discussed as equivalent to a disaster in a disaster movie -- a volcano or iceberg, without motivations, just a plot driver for the characters to work their more human stories out around. At the end of the panel, David Anthony Durham asked each panelist whether good and evil are gone. Beth Bernobich: "Still exists, but the preponderance has shifted." Greer Gilman: "It's not gone, and the bad guys still have all the best clothes." PNH: "I think there's still spaghetti and meatballs *and* chocolate mint." (That did make sense in context, really.)
Overall, it was a terrific con with a great mix of panels. It would've been fabulous if I could have gotten to more talks, but I'm sure my brain would feel even more full than it does already. I highly recommend going next year if you can make it.
The 10 a.m. panel, "25 Things I learned from Science Fiction," was a lot of fun. Panelists included Lawrence Schoen (
klingonguy), Ginjer Buchanan, Steven H. Silver, Michael Flynn, and Neil Clarke clarkesworld). Neil Clarke came prepared with a list of 25 things; the others came prepared with quips, general knowledge, and the punchiness that arises at that hour on the Sunday morning of a con. Ginjer Buchanan gave a concise discussion of didactic novels and why we expect to learn anything from SF or other books. Things people said they learned included, on the not-so-serious side, that aliens were vulnerable to Earth bacteria and viruses and that it's not science fiction unless there's a space princess. On the more serious side, klingonguy learned how to make a vacuum tube, Alfred Bester taught such things as pheromones and earworms, and various card games from cribbage to chemin de fer have been explained in books.The next panel I went to was "Believable Relationships," with Beth Bernobich, Lois McMaster Bujold, Darlene Marshall, Jo Walton, and Geary Gravel. It started off with discussing why so many people in books in are orphans with no ties and went on to discuss how to make relationships believable if they're not mirroring your own relationships (I, for example, do not have a sister, so how do I write sister-sister interactions?), differences between SF and fantasy (fantasy tends to have much larger family relationships, Beth Bernobich said -- though Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigian books certainly have a wide range!), how one does research, why so many women read M/M sex stories, what relationships the panelists enjoy most when reading books, and relationships as motivation. A couple of the things said in this talk helped me fill in a blank spot in my outline for Sundered Sword, and it's going to be stronger for it, I think.
The final panel discussion I attended was "Are Good and Evil Gone from Epic Fantasy?" The moderator, David Anthony Durham, was hoping that the panel could come to a yes or no answer by the end of the talk. Panelists, including Beth Bernobich, Greer Gilman, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, weren't so sure. They discussed what worked about good and evil. PNH made the observation that even Tolkien wasn't about good and evil, but about the high cost of good. Other panelists agreed, discussing shadings of good and evil and nobility and change through his work. (
bonniers pointed out that Sam does function as a purely good character.) Topics ranged from the seductiveness of evil to accommodation to characters with alien motivations to whether books for children and teens should have black & white morality. At one point, evil was discussed as equivalent to a disaster in a disaster movie -- a volcano or iceberg, without motivations, just a plot driver for the characters to work their more human stories out around. At the end of the panel, David Anthony Durham asked each panelist whether good and evil are gone. Beth Bernobich: "Still exists, but the preponderance has shifted." Greer Gilman: "It's not gone, and the bad guys still have all the best clothes." PNH: "I think there's still spaghetti and meatballs *and* chocolate mint." (That did make sense in context, really.)Overall, it was a terrific con with a great mix of panels. It would've been fabulous if I could have gotten to more talks, but I'm sure my brain would feel even more full than it does already. I highly recommend going next year if you can make it.
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