Tag Archives: SF conventions

Ad Astra, 2014: A convention report

Why is it that, no matter how I travel to a convention, I always seem to wind up with not enough space in my luggage on the return? If I'd my copy of The Curse of Chalion to hand, I'd pull out Cazaril's quote about overflowing saddlebags, although this trip's luggage crisis was made up of two parts: I had left my larger duffle bag on the other side of the continent, and I needed to pack business casual clothes for a second conference immediately after Ad Astra.

So it was with a snugly-packed small duffle bag, a computer case, and a Vancouver Public Library book bag with copies of the Darkborn trilogy – just in case – I headed out on Friday morning, April 4, to meet my ride to Ad Astra, and the launch of Breakpoint:Nereis – minus, it transpired, my camera and dental floss. Half way to Toronto, we met the forecast rain-front and spent the rest of the way in intermittent grey outs.

Ad Astra was at the Sheraton Parkway Hotel in Richmond Hill, north of Toronto, where World Fantasy Convention was a couple of years ago. I was staying at the associated Best Western Hotel, along with several hockey teams from a med school charity meet. I was in a suite: tucked under an arch to one side of my room was a small bar area. I didn't spend much time in the suite, though. I made it into the swimming pool twice, on both mornings – one of the swimming pools, since I only discovered the Athletics Club with the second swimming pool on Saturday evening, looking down from the tenth floor party suite, and only went looking for it, wet swimsuit in hand, after the second swim, after I realized that geometry made it impossible that the pool I had swum in was the pool I had seen. Next time.

I was scheduled for three panels and a book launch (mine).

The aesthetics of SF, with Donato Giancola (artist), Michael Martineck (writer), and Zainab Amadahy (academic/activist, who proposed the subject and prepared a slideshow that looped on the screen throughout).

Colour schemes in 'serious' science fiction and fantasy tend to be muted – even monochromatic – messes. Is it because we equate bright colours with children and immaturity, or just plain ugliness? Which (if any) SF/F works get away with a colourful palette? Open your mind, and maybe your crayon box, for this colourful discussion.

We talked about trends in illustration and visual design for film, and how it anecdotally did seem to be moving towards a more muted display, with examples from the field of artists being asked to desaturate their colours. About whether that was due to the current fashion for dystopia, which tended to hark back to the grimy drabness of 1984 and post-WWII Britain, and how drab seems to be 'right' for poverty to the Northern-Western eye, even though in Latin American and Asian cultures, poverty keeps a vivid palette. About how colonialism influences our aesthetics, by associating bright colour with tropical 'primitive' cultures. We compared the available, living palettes of the tropics and the north, and the economics of colour. We brought in the influences of militarism, and religion – austerity was one of the ways that emergent Protestantism (particularly its strains of Calvanism and Puritanism) contrasted itself to Catholicism. We considered the gendering of colour, how in North Western societies the allowable palette for men's dress is much more muted than that for women (though professional women are advised to emulate the male), and how women's dress historically was for attracting mates and displaying family wealth. We got a bit into the uses of colour by writers, and how the meaning of colour changes across cultures. I mentioned how I had used the colour yellow in Contagion:Eyre (sequel to Breakpoint:Nereis), and brought up JM Synge's use of the meanings of white, black, red and grey in Irish mythology to heighten the fatalism in his plays Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows.

The Once and Future Plague, with David Stephenson (see the panelist page), Hayden Trenholm, Katrina Guy, Stephen B. Pearl.

From the Black Death to schistosomiasis to zombie hordes, infectious diseases and the plagues they cause have made for many a fascinating read. Even as we progress towards eradicating disease, we continue to tinker with tailor-made germs. This panel will explore how historic traumas shaped classic stories, and where the fear they create overlaps with present-day anxieties to create something altogether new, yet familiarly terrifying.

Alas, I scrambled in late, and I missed everyone's introductions. But we talked about forensic anthropology and accidental rediscoveries of burial grounds from the Black Death and other epidemics, SARS and how it exposed a the vulnerability of healthcare workers as well as the effect of political distraction and denial, what kind of fatality rates would change society forever, vaccine politics and renascent outbreaks, accidental releases and bioterrorism, synthetic biology and the eventual possibility of rolling our own bad bugs, and the fact that the most devastating infections might not affect us directly, but might affect our food sources. As a finale, we got a chance to speculate on how a devastating pandemic would play out in the here and now. My answer was it depends – largely on whether we recognize and react soon enough. (Which you can guarantee not to see in fiction; after all, where's the fun in that.)

Biotech, Identity and Personal Freedom, with Shirley Meier.

In Donna McMahon's Second Childhood, one of the characters comments that nobody living in the twenty-second century can know for certain that memories and thoughts are one's own. In this panel, discuss this concept along with whether advances in biotech and greater understanding of our genetic makeup will make us more free, or less.

This is a topic I've pitched before, and it's different every time, depending upon the constitution of the panel. Shirley talked about the tech, since her interest was steampunk, artificial intelligence, and identity, and mine was in neurobiology, psychology, and ethics. We coincided on the subject of liberty and internal and external threats to freedom, whether resulting from programming or our own biological circuits.

The Bundoran Press launch on Saturday night, for Strange Bedfellows, Breakpoint:Nereis, both from Bundoran Press, and Robin Riopelle's Deadroads, from Night Shade books. Strange Bedfellows is Bundoran's kickstarter-funded anthology of politically themed science fiction. Deadroads is a novel about family, ghosts and devils, three Louisiana siblings who have inherited their parents' paranormal abilities, as well as their – in several senses – demons. Hayden read from Gustavo Bondoni's short story “Gloop” from Strange Bedfellows, I read the scene from the cover of Breakpoint:Nereis, of Aeron Ivesen reluctantly visiting a relic of the pre-plague settlement, Robin read a scene in which Baz makes what is clearly going to be a very bad deal in exchange for the whereabouts of the sister he has not seen since she was a small child – spooky and a perfect length for a short reading, and Andrew Barton read from his short story “Three Years of Ash, Twenty Years of Dust”, also from Strange Bedfellows.

As for the rest of the weekend, I didn't leave the hotel, though occasionally I noticed there was bright sunshine out there. I had a couple of hours stint in the Dealer's room, watching books get sold. I dropped by the SFCanada table, hosted by Ira Nayman. I met Matt Moore, of the Ottawa ChiSeries readings, and Annette Mocek, of the Merrill collection, and James Alan Gardner. I said hail-and-farewell a few times in the hall to a Doppler-shifted Julie Czerneda. I signed books. I finally got to meet Derek Newman-Stille, of the Speculating Canada blog, in person. I met my editor (Hayden), and Bundoran Press' publicist (Beverly Bambury), and Alyx Dellamonica, author of Indigo Springs (winner of the Sunburst Award), Blue Magic, and a memorable and – dare I say it, very Canadian – urban fantasy from Tor.com, “The Cage”. While I enjoy butt-kicking heroines as much as the next woman, I love civilization even more. Dellamonica's heroines in “The Cage” defend themselves and each other with guile, law, and community. Her forthcoming novel, Child of a Hidden Sea, promises to scratch more of my itches: portal fantasy, with oceans. Anyone I missed mentioning, sorry, not on purpose! I did not meet the guest of honour, David Weber, which was a shame, because, yes, I'm an Honor Harrington fan, but I know he's coming north again this year.

Book tally, in my overflow bag (remember the Vancouver Public Library bag in the opening act):

  • Eight author's copies of Breakpoint:Nereis
  • Michael J Martineck's The Milkman.
  • Robin Riopelle's Deadroads
  • Tom Barlow's. I'll Meet You Yesterday.
  • Plus two geeky T-shirts from Antimatter Apparel.

Catching up: February-April, 2014

Derek Newman-Stille interviewed me for his Speculating Canada blog. Derek has published an academic paper about and presented at conferences on the Darkborn trilogy, and he asks good, probing questions.

I was one of the readers at ChiSeries Ottawa on March 18, 2014, whereupon I discovered it is indeed possible to go to Ottawa and back in an evening (It was a Tuesday, I had a Wednesday morning meeting, and the 0625 train held very little appeal). The piece I read was the follow-on to the posted section of Breakpoint:Nereis. And it's on YouTube.

I was invited to speak at the Ampersand 2014 conference (theme Science(Fiction)) here at McGill on March 22, 2014.

I went to Ad Astra 2014, April 4-6, 2014, and launched a book!

When Words Collide 2013: A convention report

Summary

  • Skipped doing panels (not organized enough to propose ones or get onto the ones I would have been able to contribute to; resolve henceforth to do better)
  • Friday: Flew Montreal to Calgary in the morning, arriving just before noon, made it to the hotel (via public transit from the airport, glad I packed light – Eagle Creek small holdall), checked in, waited for the elevator (10-floor hotel, one working elevator, locked stairs), mastered the key elevator card (went up and down a few extra times in the process), picked up registration package, talked to people, wandered around spacey with sleep deprivation for what remained of the afternoon, and headed out to see a friend for supper and the evening. Thereby missing all of Friday’s programming. After I got back to the hotel, I went back to my quiet room, and slept for about 10 hours. Thereby missing all of Friday’s parties.
  • Saturday: Surfaced just in time for the 9 am communal breakfast on the 10th floor, a excellent innovation from SF Canada for larks and easterners, attended panels (see below), had fascinating conversations, worked two stints on the Bundoran table in the dealer’s room, and had an extremely sociable, very tasty, but desperately slow supper at a adjacent Indian restaurant that could not possibly have anticipated an invasion by hungry con-goers. Thereby missing all Saturday evening programming, including the Bundoran launch. Next year, we have collectively resolved to warn them.
  • Sunday: Breakfast in the hotel restaurant (pancakes), panels, conversations, a swim in the hotel’s enticing outdoor pool, crystal blue water, excellent temperature, decorative sprays. Second elevator still down, but stairwell was now open and getting much use, particularly between the first and second floors. Checked out, adding my orange holdall to a substantial hoard behind the main desk, snatched lunch at Starbucks, attended panels (see below), hit the dealer’s room one more time, and, failing to find anyone else heading to the airport for a late afternoon flight, availed myself of the hotel’s offer of a subsidized taxi ride out to Calgary airport … wishing I’d stayed until Monday.

Books bought

(It was a little holdall.)

  • Right to Know (Ed Willett), Bundoran Press’ latest, a generation ship story.
  • Shanghai Steam (edited by Ace Jordan, Calvin D Jim, and Reneé Bennett), an anthology of steampunk wuxia stories
  • Healer’s Sword (Lynda Williams), seventh in the Okal Rel series

Later in my trip I added

  • Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan), a fascinating book about very early seafaring and exploration, which has just come out in trade paperback, and which I have already paid library fines on
  • A Distant Soil: The Gathering (Colleen Doran) The remastered, definitive version of Doran’s long-running epic space opera (which I started reading when I was doing my PhD thesis), now finally on the home stretch.

The Alien (reconstructed human) as metaphor

Nina Munteanu, Peter Halasz, Lynda Williams, Candas Jane Dorsey

  • Lynda mentioned the risks to understanding others, the fascination and danger. I identified one source of danger as the risk of being estranged from one’s culture of origin without necessarily being accepted in the adopted culture. The loss of family and community. The writer can wave his/her narrative magic wand and make up those losses, but the real-life experience of exiles, dissidents, and even migrants who have simply sought better opportunities elsewhere, shows it isn’t necessarily that easy … By the third book of CJ Cherryh’s foreigner, series, Cherryh has brought Bren Cameron to that position of estrangement without acceptance; acceptance comes later, by several books.
  • My other thought was that the interest in aliens was rooted in the childhood experience of trying to learn social rules, which were frequently bewildering and apparently arbitrary.
  • A lot of writers wanted to address the problem of humanity in a way that does not raise hackles (by invoking current concerns).

Academic Papers I-II

  • Jessica Bay, on “Kisses and categories: blurring genre definitions through relationships”, talking about two series, one of which I had not read, the Kate Daniels series, by Ilona Andrews, and the other the Mercedes Thompson series, by the con guest Patricia Briggs, talking about the crossing over between a romance and quest plot.
  • Paula Johansen presented on “Looking for Ghosts in The Curve of Time.” The Curve of Time is a memoir by M. Wylie Blanchet, who spent multiple summers travelling the BC coast with her children in the ’30s. Paula traces the movement from invitation to a haunting in an abandoned house (which the narrator flees), through her encounters with deserted first nations longhouses and arboreal burials, to her awareness of the eerie movements of the wind and the trees – a reversal of the usual progression of a ghost story from suggestive and non-specific spookiness to the climactic encounter.
  • Aida Patient talked about “The Centennial Reader: Online publication and reading practices”.

“Pantser, plotter, or quilter”

Amanda Sun, Jodi McIsaac, Susan Calder, Patrick Swenson

As a member of the Ancient and Proud Order of Literary Pantsers[1][2], I had to go to “Pantser, plotter, or quilter” where Amanda Sun, Jodi McIsaac, Susan Calder, Patrick Swenson compared the merits and demerits of the various modes[1] of getting from idea to finished story. Having written technical documents according to guidelines and templates, I know how pleasant it is to have a sense of the shape from the very beginning, and how peculiarly relaxing it is to know exactly where you stand in relation to the end, even if the relaxation is one of limp hysteria at the disproportion between what remains to be done versus what time remains to do it in (no, never happens, never) …

Unfortunately, I snuck in late, missed the introductions, and was too far away from the speakers to read their nametags, so I cannot properly attribute the following pearls

  • “How many characters actually listen to their author??”
  • “Plotting removes the organic energy of the story”
  • “One of the best pieces of advice I received was that, while it was impossible to think of 20 good ideas, it is also impossible to think of 20 bad ideas.”

[1] Pantser[2] = flies by the seat of their pants, outlines retrospectively and/or only when compelled to do so. Plotter = prepares a prospective outline, usually in (obsessive, from the pantser perspective) detail. Quilter = writes out of sequence, as pieces come to them. Probably could be a special case of either of the previous categories.
[2] Battle cry: “Outlines? We don’t need no stinkin’ outlines!” Mayday: “Help! I’m stuck in the middle!”

Patterns of recognition in humans and what it means to writers

Patricia Briggs and Lynda Williams.

  • The human brain is a pattern recognition machine. One of the cardinal problems of artificial intelligence is that computers have difficulty recognizing patterns
  • The writer can make use of this pattern recognition: one does not have to work so hard to join up the dots
  • Characters contribute a huge pattern to the story. When they enter, they are neutral, and then they gradually define themselves. Tropes can be very valuable (Lynda), but with main characters, the readers should not be able to recognize the tropes (Patricia); tropes are, however, useful for secondary characters.
  • One strong pattern is that of cause and effect; readers expect that cause and effect will match
  • The writer needs to be careful as to what patterns are invoked. If a pattern is invoked, and then contradicted, the reader may get confused, or see it as a betrayal. Eg, in Mooncalled, Patricia killed off a character early in the novel, “and got crap for it”. [He was one for whom the pattern demanded better treatment (he was young, innocent, a victim, and seemed to have found rescue).]
  • How well subverting expectations works depends the skill of execution, the reader’s expectations, and the character. You can break the pattern for some characters, but not others.

Examples mentioned:

  • Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman, which begins conversation between a man and his mistress in which the time and place are never specified but is somehow is still utterly clear
  • Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series, where the central character is an archaeologist who regards herself as a proper Victorian lady, but by the reaction of the other characters is clearly a holy terror.
  • As an example of breaking of a pattern, Patricia cited the death of Colonel Blake in MASH, a random and capricious accident of war overtaking an everyman character whose role in the series was principally as a foil to the others
  • Patricia also cited the death of Bothari in Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Warrior’s Apprentice, both because it is unexpected (a retribution from a generation before) and because it is unexpectedly tragic. Readers do not expect to mourn monsters. (Bujold does this all the time, subverts patterns.)

Readercon 23 schedule, July 13-15, 2012

Readercon is coming up in a couple of weeks, once more at Burlington Marriott, in Burlington MA, just north of Boston. This year, I’ll be there for Friday as well, although the epic journey from downtown Boston to Burlington after the Express bus has stopped running means that I’ll miss most of the Thursday evening programming. The menu is once more full of meat and potatoes as well as spicy crunchy bits not served elsewhere. The full schedule is here, and my part of it is . . .

Friday July 13

11:00 AM    G    Subversion Through Friendliness Glenn Grant, Victoria Janssen (leader), Toni L.P. Kelner, Alison Sinclair, Ruth Sternglantz

In a 2011 review of Vonda N. McIntyre’s classic Dreamsnake, Ursula K. Le Guin quotes Moe Bowstern’s slogan “Subversion Through Friendliness” and adds, “Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easy—instant gratification, as it were. Subversion through friendliness is paradoxical, slow-acting, and durable. And sneaky.” Is subversion through friendliness a viable strategy for writers who desire to challenge norms? What are its defining characteristics? When do readers love it, and when does it backfire?

6:00 PM    ME    Podcasting for the Speculative Fiction Author; Or, Will the Revolution Be Recorded? Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Jim Freund, Alexander Jablokov, Alison Sinclair, Gregory Wilson (leader)

Building on last year’s talk at Readercon about promotion for the speculative fiction author and drawing from an upcoming SFWA Bulletin article, Gregory A. Wilson and discussants will focus on the pros and pitfalls of podcasting for fantasy and science fiction authors, looking at some examples of successful podcasts in the field, different types for different purposes, and the basics of getting started with podcasting.

Saturday July 14

7:00 PM    ME    Kurzweil and Chopra, Ghosts in the Same Shell Athena Andreadis (leader), John Edward Lawson, Anil Menon, Luc Reid, Alison Sinclair

Transhumanism (TH) has been a prominent strain in contemporary SF; cyberpunk is in many ways the fiction arm of the movement. Athena Andreadis and discussants will explore core concepts of TH (longevity, uploading, reproductive alternatives, optimization projects from genome to organism), investigate which are strictly in science fiction versus science territory, and examine the larger outcomes of these tropes within the genre as well as in First Life, aka the real world.

Sunday July 15

10:00 AM    G    Making Science Sound Like Science Jeff Hecht, Katherine MacLean, Eric Schaller, Alison Sinclair, Allen Steele, Eric M. Van (leader)

The science fantasy of the 20th century tried to make the magical and impossible sound scientific and plausible. Thanks in part to that legacy and in part to the increasing complexity of scientific discoveries and developments, when we write about 21st-century science in ways that are meant to sound scientific and plausible, it often comes across as magical and impossible. How can we make quantum entanglement feel at least as real as the ansible? What can we learn from science fantasy about imbuing writing with not just truth but truthiness?

12:00 PM    G    Paranormal Plagues John Benson, Richard Bowes, Alaya Dawn Johnson, James D. Macdonald (leader), Alison Sinclair

Some paranormal novels portray vampirism, lycanthropy, and even zombification as infectious diseases that work in ways directly opposite to real-world diseases, such as making the infected person physically stronger and longer-lived. The idea of a disease we can choose to have and choose to share is also compelling. Yet these paranormal diseases are rarely explored in comparison to real-world ones (other than in the innumerable vampires-and-AIDS stories of the 1990s). Is disease just a narrative convenience, or does it relate to real-world medical issues such as the (overhyped) evolution of multiple-drug-resistant bacteria and the persistent incurability of illnesses like HIV, cancer, and influenza that we were supposed to have beaten by now?

1:00 PM    G    Mapping the Parallels Greer Gilman, Walter Hunt (leader), Alison Sinclair, Howard Waldrop, Jo Walton

Stories of parallel worlds are often actually stories of divergent worlds. As such, they contain implicit ideas about how and why divergences can happen: questions of free will and personal choice, theories of history, and speculation about the core constants of the universe. The range of divergences, and the reasons behind them, also serve as at least a partial map of the kinds of possibilities considered worth telling stories about. With this in mind, let’s talk about what has been done, or could be, with the idea of parallel worlds in fiction—both classic and contemporary examples in SF&F, women’s fiction, MG/YA, and more. How do the differences in usage of the trope—such as the scope of divergence (personal vs. societal vs. scientific, human-centric vs. extra-human), the degree to which the causes of divergence are explained, and the ability to travel between divergent worlds—play out across parallel and divergent world stories? How do they express ideas about what is possible?

. . . And I am resolved to know my customs allowance to the nearest cent, this trip! Unlike last.

Farthing Party follow-up: Who is qualified to write SF?

At Farthing Party last August (good grief), I was on a panel on the question of “Who is Qualified to Write SF?”. My intro packed in an awful lot of thought, so I figured I would take the opportunity to unpack – though why I did not post this until now I can’t really explain, because it reached close to final form in the first couple of weeks after. Might have something to do with submitting Shadowborn, going out west, and starting a new job.

I raised four points:

  • The usefulness of having a background (whether acquired through formal education or not) in the discipline (defined broadly) that is the focus of the story, which helps with the details, helps with getting the fundamentals right, and allows extrapolation (in any direction – forward, sideways, or backwards), as opposed to what I chose to call fabrication, which is just picking up the trappings [i]. At the panel we spent a lot of time on the big and small things that made us go ‘owww’ and – metaphorically or otherwise – throw books against walls.
  • The need to know and avoid the ‘big dumb clichés’, the misperceptions of science promoted by news media that tend to normalize the aberrant and popular narrative media conventions that romanticize the deviant. Everyone who is a member of a social group or practitioner of an occupation or serious hobby has to deal with the ‘big dumb clichés’ around their domain. Others have written about the annoying and persistent myths around science; my personal pet peeves are the distortions of human research and medicine (a longer rant for a later time). This is about getting the culture, norms and ethics right [ii].
  • The importance of being engaged with science. I spoke about the social awkwardness around being a young woman in science at social events – particularly those where the sexes were herded into different corners (we’re talking about the late 1970s and early 80s) – and saying what I did was the kiss of death to conversation. I still get the sense that many people who express judgments about science on the Internet are as checked out on the subject as those women who’d tell me that science was boring or too difficult for them [iii]. This is not a position to write SF from.
  • However, being engaged does not mean being uncritical, which brings me to the fourth point, which is an argument that the best people to undertake the critique of science within SF may not be scientists [iv]. Science is a dominant, if not the dominant narrative in our society, and as much as we need competence and accuracy in the depiction of science in SF, we need competence and accuracy in the critique of science in SF – as a culture, as a system, as what my history lecturer would have said a ‘project of modernity’ – as the way it reinforces dominant narratives and power relations, and how it subverts and is subverted by them [v]. This requires a different position and a different toolkit, which is where SF needs people who don’t have a science background, and aren’t socialized and acculturated.

And this is by no means a complete list. Other thoughts:

  • In my observation, it’s more likely that a writer who writes prose that makes me drool, purr, and mutter ‘envy is a sin, envy is a sin’, does not have a formal education in science than that they do (note the epidemiologist’s phrasing here). I may be biased by knowing how much my own style deteriorated from late high school to graduate school, and by the memory of having my style described as both ‘flowery’ and ‘insensitive’ during the same university term, by a science prof and an english prof respectively.
  • Jo Walton and Jim McDonald both said the writing – the mastery of storytelling – was paramount. Yes, yes, yes! If a writer has the writing and storytelling part right, I’ll not only be more prepared to believe that they have the information right if I don’t know the subject, and more willing to accept implausibilities and forgive errors (having fact-checked) if I do.
  • There’s also the problem of time.There’s that million words of garbage or that 10 000 hours of practice needing to be got over. Science-science doesn’t generally give one as much time as social sciences and the arts do for the simple exercise of putting words together to convey one’s meaning accurately, much less time to think about narrative or the production of story.

Expansions

[i] We can argue about whether or not extrapolation is a necessary criterion in the definition. It’s in my own, particularly on those odd Tuesdays when I define SF as a product of the present day in dialogue with the needs, concerns and technologies of the present day, and therefore needing a reference to the present day. Plus, I like to watch writers do the extrapolation. However, my definition of SF is anything but fixed. See also [v].

[ii] And for me personally, errors there are more offensive than errors in fact.

[iii] Today, I could offer a number of responses that might lead into productive conversations about how and why they had become checked out (if indeed they were) – public perception of science, science education, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion – but then I was too young and skinless to deal well with what felt like dismissal.

[iv] At the panel I mentioned butting heads with fellow listserv members on the subject of Margaret Atwood, and realizing upon reflection that the heat was actually being generated by a struggle over who did and did not have the dominant narrative. We were not arguing so much about whether Atwood is a SF writer, or whether she writes good SF or not; we were arguing about power, privilege, and who gets to be the authority. I saw the arts having the dominant narrative, and Atwood being granted disproportionate attention because she was such a major figure in CanLit. I suspect my fellow members saw science as having the dominant narrative, and myself as dissing Atwood because she was neither within the field of SF or the field of science.

My early experience did not suggest that science was privileged. The formative years of my education were at an all-girls school that came out of a particular tradition in female education that took the education and vocation of young women unusually seriously, but which nevertheless centred on the arts, leaving the sciences as something of an afterthought. Then, before I had finished school, we moved (back – it’s complicated) to Canada, in the mid-70s, where the arts were the chosen platform for the expression of Canadian identity. It was in America, where science and scientific prowess were one of the platforms for the battles of the Cold War, that science was being actively promoted.

In addition, as a woman training in science, I did not feel privileged. I felt a barely tolerated outsider, stumbling through the complicated dance that would keep the men around me seeing me as a scientist rather than as a female, and entirely too aware that my femaleness would be used to push me outside any time it suited them. I’d discovered feminism, but many feminist writers appeared to equate science with masculinity and condemn it as a tool of patriarchy (it is, it is), leaving me with the sense – rightly or wrongly – that they regarded as science as no place for a woman, and a woman in science as an unnatural being (… where had I heard that before?). It was a splendid moment for me when I picked up a 1982 issue of Ms magazine in which they published a long excerpt from Vivian Gornick’s “Women in Science: Portraits from a World in Transition”.

I got clued to the biases resulting from being embedded in science via various inputs. The ones that come to mind are:

  • the inescapable experience of being female in science and observing how the science around gender was refracted through social expectations
  • the work of critics of the sociology of science like Evelyn Fox Keller and Hilary Rose [vi]
  • going into medicine, where there had been extensive work by feminists and sociologists looking at how the science of medicine intersects with the sociology of medicine and with the lines of power and privilege
  • taking a course on the history of modern Europe, which turned out to be an intellectual and political history of Europe, which gave me the perspective of science as one of the projects of modernity – along with feminism, democracy and individuality.

And I also clue to the potential limitations of science fiction purely by scientists by reading a form of SF written primarily by insiders. I’ve been reading naval and military fiction and SF ever since I got into Hornblower via Star Trek [vii]. I recognize the writers’ authority – not only do most of them have the real-world credentials equivalent to having science degrees and writing SF, but the work gives off that particular resonance of an author confident both in story and subject. However, being an outsider, I also recognize the unexamined assumptions in many of the popular works [viii], and feel the tension of being pulled into the story  and yet being fully aware that as civilian, a physically unexceptional female, and someone whose politics – at least these days – is left of centre, I do not belong there. Well, other than as a shreddie. That’s another area where Lois McMaster Bujold stands out, because she takes the perspective both of the insider and the outsider, does not take for granted militarization as a norm (Barrayar is a militarized society in the process of demilitarization), and questions the power-relations. Furthermore, Miles is by birth, socialization, and ambition an insider, but because of his physical limitations is an outsider.

When I was writing Cavalcade, I was in the middle of medical school and conscious of the ongoing process of socialization to professional norms , and the difference between the realities of the profession and the ‘big dumb clichés’. I wanted a special forces team aboard, and I was sure that popular representations of the military were as distorted as those of medicine. I read a whole variety of books written by insiders, would-be insiders, and people who were consciously using an outside perspective and outside toolkit to look in. Ones I particularly remember were “The Company They Keep”, written by an anthropologist married to a special forces soldier, “The Militarization of Women’s Lives”, about the influence of even a peacetime military on women, families and society, a book about praetorianism (whose exact title I can’t remember), which picked apart the American republic’s history of profound ambivalence and indeed distrust of military power as a threat to democracy, fascinating to someone living next door to the post-WWII, post-Cold War, militarized republic. I never was sure enough of myself to present a point of view from the special forces unit, but their presence and the relationship between them and the forming government ran through the novel.

[v] There are a heck of a lot of my personal causes and beefs embedded in this viewpoint, and unpacking those would run for few thousand words or so. Suffice for the moment to say I Have Views about the social as well as the artistic purposes of science fiction. But see also point [i]. On alternate Wednesdays, I don’t care about the social purposes of SF; I just want some shiny, irresponsible fun.

[vi] Rose discusses science fiction as offering models for a feminist science in a later chapter in her book “Love, Knowledge and Power”, and Jane Donawerth uses Rose’s ideas to give shape to a broad discussion of women’s presentation of science in science fiction (with lots of examples) in “Utopian Science in Science Fiction by Women,” in “Frankenstein’s Daughters”.

[vii] I once had a conversation with Marie Jakober about our shared fascination with war despite being unambiguously opposed to it IRL. I don’t recall that we reached a conclusion, but we were fully aware of the contradiction.

[viii] Unexamined within the work, at least.