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On the Road: Readercon 2008
July 30, 2008

Quick administrative note: Genreville now has an RSS feed!

On the Road is an occasional feature that reports on genre events around the world. I'm delighted that I get to start off with a report on Readercon, as it's my favorite convention of the year, no question. This year I didn't get to as many panels as I usually do, and only a few are really relevant to Genreville: two on criticism, one on the recent history of speculative fiction.

Every Critic His Own Aristotle: The Languages of Writers, Critics, Academics, and Fans. Gary K. Wolfe ran down the list of different terms that different people use for different types of genre writing, and the ways they use them. There was some discussion of the value of collaboration between readers from different backgrounds, which both requires and generates a common language, and a lot of complaining about how academics make "discoveries" about old books that were made in the reviews written when those books came out. Apparently some grad students are taught that you should never cite anything that isn't either the original source or something published in a scholarly journal. The consensus was that this is stupid. I left wanting to read more scholarly writing on speculative fiction and also realizing that my allergy to magazines has meant that I miss a lot of the speculative fiction reviews that I really ought to be reading. Of course, my other allergy is to reviews of books that I might want to read someday, and especially of books I might want to review someday. I have no desire to be derivative, but that leads me to being less a part of a conversation about a book and puts me at risk of making redundant points and false discoveries, or worse, stating a belief that's already been refuted elsewhere.

What's it All About, Skiffy? Graham Sleight delivered a very authoritative talk on the past 20 years in speculative fiction, including his charming new taxonomy. He mentioned the need to read outside the genre and used the term "intermarry", which I found very appropriate and gave me a strong vision of science fiction in particular as an Amish community that has only reluctantly, over time, allowed its children to venture out and marry people from other lands. There are very good mappings for the benefits and drawbacks of intermarriage, too: fresh ideas, disruption of established ways, disparaging or ignoring elders, healthier children... I think a lot of what we're seeing in the proliferation of sub-subgenres is essentially the result of crossbreeding, sometimes overtly as with interstitial fiction and sometimes a little more subtly. There was a panel on the "-punk" suffix, which I didn't catch, but I now find myself thinking of it as a patronymic.

The Critical Review: Griffin, Gorgon, or Sphinx? This was unsurprisingly excellent, though there was very little discussion of the critical review itself. Instead the panel got on the topic of the morals of reviewing. John Clute said some very vehement things about the need for honesty, all the more so when you're in such a small, close-knit community that you inevitably end up reviewing your friends and friends of your friends. There was also some discussion of reviews being shaped by their audiences, which led to me wondering about whether there is any sense in talking about "a review" as a general concept. Does a PW review, 160 words intended for people in the publishing industry, really have anything in common with a Strange Horizons review, 3000 words intended for end readers, or with an academic paper, 6000 words intended for other academics? I'm undecided on that point. There's value in generalization--as Graham pointed out in "What's It All About" where he included "all the literature of the fantastic" because the lines between the different genres and subgenres are so blurry that it's very hard to see them at all, and as Gary pointed out in "Every Critic", where he noted it's very easy to get bogged down in defining and redefining for one's own purposes--but there's also value in distinctions when they're appropriate.

Numerous other Readercon reports have been collected at del.icio.us by the intrepid Kate Nepveu.

Posted by Rose Fox on July 30, 2008 | Comments (4)