Worldcon 2019: Saturday had panels with TABLES

[spindizzy]

Saturday

• Went to the dealers' room again, this time scoping out the book stalls because I am a FOOL with NO SELF-CONTROL. I bought MANY BOOKS and also ended up with an ARC of a book I didn't recognise, AND


• Look, the Patreon panel was useful and there was cool things said, but THEY HAD TABLES IN THE ROOM THAT WE COULD SIT AND IT WAS MAGICAL. YES THIS FOR EVERY PANEL. LET ME JUST SET UP MY NOTEBOOK AND PENS WHERE I CAN SEE AND WRITE COMFORTABLY WITHOUT PRETZELLING MYSELF OR ELBOWING ANYONE. ... But also yes, I did in fact write up the whole panel because it might be useful? I know a bunch of us set up patreons that we haven't done anything with because we wanted to get ahead of the new fee structure Patreon was rolling out.


• The Invisible Work: Mothers and Caregivers in SFF would have been exactly up forestofglory's street! It was an entire panel on how mothers are(n't) depicted in media – they're either not there, bad, or dead.
  
  • The panel posited how much more interesting Rogue One would have been if Jyn's mother had survived and become a/the fanatic and I kinda want it? Or what happened to Killmonger's mother? Or what if Dad of Boy had been Mum of Boy? (Someone pointed out that making the mother the centre of the story, or even MENTIONING them, probably didn't even occur to most male writers.)
  
  
  • Characters (in the west) are expected to be unencumbered – orphans and isolated characters with no family, or to specifically reject their families to prove that they've reached adulthood. Or, y'know, the cult of individuality that looked at the thousands of year old stories about kinship and went "No." See also: modern western stories devalourising teamwork and relationships that aren't romantic.
  
  
  • "We're all in networks of relationships, why do people think they can't write them?"
  
  
  • I did appreciate that they talked about emotional labour and caregiving as SKILLS THAT CAN BE LEARNED, even though media can present it as a binary "Natural caretaker"/"Bad Mother". Although once they pointed out that there are more people writing about rape than about motherhood or caregiving I was kinda like "... Oh god, ew."
  
  
  • ... I'm not gonna lie, I do love stories with siblings, but it seems like more siblings live than parents, even if those siblings are in a parenting role.
  
  
  • And women are expected to not have physicality – or what physicality they do have is supposed to be sexy, which: ew. Like, "post-menstrual" can't be used as a descriptor because women aren't allowed to menstruate. (Real talk: the only authors I know mention menstruating are Tamora Pierce and Kristin Cashore, and even the Kristin Cashore one it was plot relevant.) Pregnancy exists in SFF as body horror or a way to write the mother out, and then we're expected not to think about the practicalities of, say, breastfeeding!
  
  
  • The historical rate of death in childbirth is carried into modern media, but the 40% rate of child death is not, because people are picking and choosing what they want! And often what creators want is to use a woman as a vessel to get a more important character.
  
  
  • Apparently this is mainly a problem with male writers, but it can be internalised by people of other genders, as the panelists demonstrated by going through times they caught themselves playing into these tropes!
  
  
  • It was just to pleasing to hear people dragging the tropes and scenarios that mean that women are sidelined or punished by the narrative for daring to exist or have bodies or exist in a way that would inconvenience the adventure going on, okay.
  
  
  • Recommendations: Aliens. Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch. Teresa Edgerton. Girls Made of Glass and Snow by Melissa Bashadoust.
  
  
• The Inclusive Game Design panel was cool and frustrating in equal measure, because there were lots of good suggestions for making games inclusive and accessible! And so many stories about people being DELIBERATELY UNHELPFUL. But they managed to cover LARP, TTRPG AND videogames! But the main takeaway point from it seemed to be that if you want accessibility, you need to build it in from the very beginning, or otherwise you're NOT GOING TO GET IT.


• I spent a surprising amount of time looking for somewhere that would sell me a make-up sponge for Dubious Nail Science and something to make my feet ache less, but I guess on the plus side I got to explore a little bit more around Dublin? But also... Dublin prices.


• In clashes of doom: the Tamora Pierce panel was at the same time as the Sarah Gailey signing! I did the first half hour of the Tamora Pierce panel, because I HAD TO, and then bugged out to the signing. I don't have a lot of notes, really, because I didn't realise that the panel had started for quite a while and that the panelists weren't just having a natter while they waited to get started? But there was the CORRECT amount of love for Kel, i.e. all of it. (Examples: Kel is the GENERAL, which now makes me picture her as Leia and oh my heart. The Kel books are "children in the world that Alanna and her friends made." Alanna didn't do what Kel did; she might have been the first female knight in centuries, but Kel was the first one to do it openly as a girl.) I did bug out just as someone started saying "I acquired a husband somehow" and nearly went back in to be like "MATE, SAME!" because that was how it worked for me too!


• There was a little girl at the signings table, who I think was there with her dad, and she was doing a "guess how many stars are in the bag!" game, which was REALLY CUTE.


• Listen, listen, Sarah Gailey is so fabulous and gracious in person, it's amazing. Like full-on "Everyone I know who spoke to them came away feeling special" levels of kindness. (THEY KNEW CLAIRE'S CHANNEL! And they looked at my badge for a minute, where I had my twitter handle, and was like "I know your handle, why do I know your handle?" And I, A FOOL, was just like "Oh, I follow you on twitter!" not "I write for one of the finalists!")


• The From Fan to Pro was great, because all of the speakers were funny and knowledgable! Like, they did specifically talk about the cons of making that transition, and there were some truly infuriating stories about the ways that people were treated as fans? But also Zen Cho talked about how excited her colleagues are for her career, and about going on Women's Hour and accidentally ending up in a conversation ON AIR about A/B/O fic, which is AMAZING.


• I think Saturday was the day that vproofreader and I spent accidentally Scooby Doo-dooring each other.


• Listen, listen, the Introduction to Afrofuturism panel was FANTASTIC. The introduction was "I hope everyone came ready to FIGHT about this," and the panelists proceeded to deconstruct afrofuturism (defined at the start as "reimagining of a future with art/tech/etc through a Black lens" as a term that was a) invented by a white dude, b) grossly misapplied and overused to mean "SFF by Black people," (See also: Maquel A. Jacobs doesn't write afrofuturism, she writes carribean SF)and c) oversimplifying things horribly because what is not a Black lens? And talked about the standards that marginalised creators are held to and how afrofuturism is used by writers in the diaspora vs writers in continental Africa. Recommendations: P. Djèlí Clark, SF from all over the place, but also Caribbean SF in general, Nalo Hopkinson, An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, Karen Lord, Nicky Drayden, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler.


• I'm not gonna lie, my main memory of the Narrative & Storytelling for games panel is that the moderator COULDN'T REMEMBER TO USE THE MIKE. So I've got points where I've got the answers but couldn't hear the questions so I'm working them out from context! There was a lot of discussion of how to actually build narrative and still account for player choices (e.g. people who want the lore vs people who'll skip it, or people who want to talk to the NPCs for the plot vs the ones who'll have to get it off the NPC's corpse...), and working in teams where your work is the part that's cheapest to replace and theoretically costs least sounds about as nightmarish as I'd thought. Recommendations: Soma. That Level Again. 80 Days.


• I DEFINITELY DID NOT SPEND THE EVENING BEFORE THE HUGO AWARD CEREMONY FRANTICALLY SCRIBBLING DRAFTS OF OUR SPEECH AND COPYING THEM INTO SLACK FOR APPROVAL. THAT WOULD BE FOOLISH.


• Send in the Crones was a good follow-up to the motherhood panel! The covered similar topics, in that they're both about how women are erased from narratives and functionally invisible after a certain point! But it also brought into discussion that part of the problem was the women men don't see – or rather, older women have lives and spaces that male authors don't even think about, so they get erased! (Although apparently this is a very western media problem; Allie Baker was of the opinion that China doesn't have a chosen one narrative, so the parents don't need to be killed off, and older people are allowed to still be around and have wisdom! But yes, the discussion of older women being allowed to exist and have agency without their story being focused on their children was good, A+ work.


• I was so salty when I realised that the after dark panels at Worldcon were ACTUALLY AFTER THE WATERSHED, I am an old woman who needs to paint my nails, okay.


• THAT SAID, the Ins and Outs of SFF Erotica panel was mostly great! It was funny, it was punny, it was fannish – literally the worst part was the audience but WE WILL GET TO THAT. It's mildly NSFW (Okay, I think the closest it gets to actually naming any genitalia is "cloaca" so it might be fine, but WHY RISK IT) so I've put it in its own post over here, although fair warning a couple of people bring up paedophilia and beastiality.


• So yeah, I was a little shaken up by that, and a LOT shaken up by the time I finished dealing with the lady on my home who wanted me to let her sleep in my hotel room (?!) and kept trying to push the buttons on the ATM to make it give her more of my money even after I told her that the machine was not going to give her that three pounds, it doesn't vend coins. (Like, seriously, I didn't have enough money to pay for this trip anyway, might as well give money to the random lady grabbing people in the street.) But it was fine! I made it back! I listened to the audiobook of Widdershins and painted my nails with the MOST low-budget ombre effect, and got to natter with Reiley and Avery when they came back! (Reiley had a lot of RPGs, and Avery knows PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE.)


• Me before I left England: I talk about the Hugo too much, I need to talk about it much, much less.
  redrocketpanda: What've you got on tomorrow?
  Me: Oh, a rehearsal for the Hugos Ceremony.
  redrocketpanda: Wait, why do you have to go to a rehearsal?
  Me: Because I'm... In it?
  I THINK THIS MEANS I DID OKAY????


• Saturday's haul: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland. The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. Pantomime by Laura Lam. We Rule the Night by Claire Eliza Bartlett. The Poppy War by R. F. Huang. Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Monstrous Heart by Claire McKenna. iD by Madeline Ashby.