Dorothy Marley's Journal

I noted in my introduction that Ann Leckie was very definitely mentioned on the podcast.

Carl: complicity one of two threads saw in SFF from 2010s until very recently; the other is empire perpetrated against people and fighting back from outside. very generally, these were split on racial lines. Neon Yang's Tensorate series is example of one that's both

me: thank you for not making me be the first person to mention race. I was willing to have that be my role, but. (edit: I see on looking at con bios, while looking for Bluesky handles, that Tom Greene is biracial)

Constance: offered two authors more on romance side, who I believe were Jessie Mihalik and Jennifer Estep.

Alexander: what is it about space opera as a background for stories of complicity?

Carl: equivalent to epic fantasy; scale makes it hard to avoid empire; larger organization leads to little cogs in machine struggling

Constance: the remove makes it easier to absorb the message

me: one of failure modes for me of general stories about systemic oppression: take a real-world problem, make a very clear magical/science fictional analogue for it, and then solve that problem by fictional means. feels trivializing and frustrating. space opera doesn't give me that problem because it's an extrapolation of our world, not a parallel to or set in ours.

Tom: All Quiet at the Western Front and Dune are really subversive of their structure

Carl: Dune is revolution not complicity

Alexander: is this about edge versus center?

Carl: fantasy examples: The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson: Baru tries to take down system by becoming expert in the master's tools (paraphrased). Robert Jackson Bennett, Divine Cities Trilogy, core-periphery recently swapped, journeying between. can do that swap faster in genre because of implausibilities.

me: Some Desperate Glory: tiny space station of the few humans who didn't surrender after Earth destroyed by aliens, fascist leadership dangling return to their birthright of being in command

someone: and Ancillary Justice definitely starts at core

someone: says something about "critical theory-ish space opera" and asks whether the same audience is there for it

me: gets irked, says reductive to call it that, all example works are bangers. not only that but Locked Tomb is somehow New York Times bestseller, Leckie and Tesh are Hugo winners, etc.

Carl: cynical business take is that really commercially successful works get most of their success from their non-core audience anyway through snowball effect. also thinks on downswing of (idea that? books that?) think can do something about empire by writing about it. trend now for cozy and escaping. still some: a little in very popular Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros

me: thread in Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson, which is new book getting a lot of buzz around my circles

Constance, Tom: discussing Andor and how it shows why people cooperate with empire, how it starts out, the tendency of technical people to find purported technological solutions to problems and "order" appealing

me: other failure mode of complicity stories is too much about appeal of empire and guilt/helplessness for being part of it; which I don't think applies to examples, which I all like very much, but others can disagree. I look for genuine change at end to reassure self that not "just dazzled by the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism" (tm Bujold)

Carl: historically empires don't tend to fall to individuals (increasing inefficiency, slow degradation), which is problem for our genre with individualistic focus

me: yes; Imperial Radch, changes around edges, but still matter (which got me drive-by calligraphy!); Machineries of Empire, last book shows a lot of group work being done

audience: can't have enough tension if don't deal with both sides of complicity equation?

(I did not understand this question, but Carl appeared to)

Carl: is that: emotional tension by investing in oppressors and oppressed? sure. can go a long way by mechanisms that are non-personified or notional. Empire exists inside your head.

audience: does space opera require an empire? cites more anarchic seen in Delany.

Tom: also Le Guin, but environment naturally selects for it

Constance: space opera is about (? I think) expansion, so if you don't see an empire, maybe it's you ...

Carl: maybe no-true-Scotsman here, because there's no Platonic ideal of space opera And Yet ... also, on epic scale, expect to see ideology clashes.

me: I haven't read any of the Star Wars novel set during the High Republic, so I don't know whether Republic is actually not empire, but they exist. also C.J. Cherryh.

Constance: Farscape.

And that was time.

I began the panel saying that I'd submitted the idea because I'd seen this Tumblr post and been enormously struck by it, but I didn't really have a strong feeling about the questions posed by the description as revised by the lovely program team ... until I got emails from the other participants that were—to exaggerate for effect—generally "coherence! who needs it!"

This led me to suspect that other people had a different definition of coherence, of something cohering, than I did. So I started by asking the panel their definitions.

Walter: people expect stories to have cause and effect. most recent work, Johnny Talon and the Goddess of Love and War, is deliberately Surrealist, exploration of subconscious as a way of detective work (compare Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective).

Richard: lacks coherence is different than, "this makes no sense." matter of writer and reader expectations. dream logic, e.g., David Lynch (my notes here are particularly unhelpful, sorry Richard)

Ken: all parts somehow fit together and are related. however, mind creates coherence because humans are pattern making animals, very hard to avoid it. impossible for work not to have coherence because coherence is something reader imposes.

me: like a ball of dough: may have different ingredients in it, but comes together into a single Thing. the Thing may be Surrealist or deliberately messy, but can point to various elements and say, I can see what this is contributing to the overall effect. however, I had a weirdly difficult time thinking of examples of a work whose problem was that it didn't cohere.

I believe at some point, possibly here, I asked for examples of works that didn't cohere

Walter: Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, in light of its nesting frame stories and frustration of the reader, based on definition that is narrower than mine

someone I can't make out from my notes, possibly in the audience: works that can't cohere because creator never really finished making them, like Orson Welles' movies

there were almost certainly more but I don't have them in my notes.

some ideas I had for ways a work might not cohere under my definition, which were basically structural:

• unwarrantedly large shift in tone, topic, etc. (some readers have this reaction to the second half of The Fortunate Fall)
• too many balls in the air, some get dropped
• amount of attention paid to different elements is unbalanced (e.g., we get certain details about the world; their logical implications are much different than the story suggests, but the story doesn't focus there)
• this X seems like it's from a completely different book and I can't figure out why
• (suggested to me by someone pre-panel) structure collapses on itself

(as a result, I disagreed with Ken about his idea that lack of coherence is impossible because coherence is inevitably created by the reader. I believe we eventually agreed that any given reader might not find coherence in a work?)

at some point someone mentioned Naked Lunch, which Richard noted depended in part on the author's public persona.

we had audience questions about how this varies by genre; how you find readers; and if there's an genre that gets its energy from asking questions rather than answering them. Walter suggested Haruki Murakami for the last one.

It seemed like a lot of audience members walked out of this one in the first half, so I felt pretty unsure about how it was going; and by the end, I was worried that I'd browbeaten the rest of the panel more than a little. One or two people did say nice things to me about over the weekend, so ... I just don't know.

(I do genuinely want honest, though not intentionally mean, feedback, on any of my panels!)

Melissa: any response or original that made panelists want to be on this panel?

Michael: uncertain about panel's focus, explain?

Melissa: immediately thought of The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein (by Kiersten White), fabulous re-imagining of Frankenstein; Hester Prynne's appearance in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (by Maryse Condé), which is brief but great

Michael: thought panel was about reading contemporary works and how affect precursors. essay by Borges, Kafka and His Precursors

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The last fact is what is most significant. Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.

(quoted from a PDF article called "Re-reading 'Kafka and His Precursors'" hosted by the Borges Center)

Rebecca: how later memetic impressions affect. adaptation versus in conversation: get different things out of them. adaptation, what someone pulls out from original; go back and see, hadn't noticed that before. conversation, sometimes argument, His Dark Materials v. Narnia

Greer: film script for Little Women turned understanding of book, which has known for so long, on head. script branches Jo into one that's in the book and one who is writing the book Little Women. very odd way makes it science-fictional, branched off

Melissa: holds society in which Alcott was existing accountable in way. Mansfield Park film adaptation, fleeting but powerful moment that contextualizes it re: race & colonialism

Michael: is that unfair in a way? undermining book, making think that it is something that isn't

Rebecca: one of things that's really exciting about reading about books in conversations. reading a lot of Great Gatsby adaptations, now going back to original which hadn't read since high school: what people are pulling out that hadn't noticed when reading at 16. in Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful, a character is actually paper: can see how that character in original isn't characterized. also see things that aren't being picked up by adaptations: there are three moments everyone does and some that no-one does, very interesting

Melissa: "fairness," such fraught word, how we dare read or write in these ways

Rebecca: we call it fair use

Melissa: Winnie the Pooh slasher film, definitely not what Milne intended, at same time, for those of us who thought kid in Giving Tree a horror show...

Rebecca: getting mad at responses can tell you something about original as well

Michael: matters what order encounter in. if read Tolkien first, then Old English literature: see where Tolkien got all ideas. other way: Tolkien seems like watered-down Old English Literature.

Greer: speaking of order, read Sir Thomas Browne before Moby-Dick. going back to Browne writing about sperm whale washed up on shore, he's trying to describe first contact. also realized that this is before they know how to use whales, sudden rush into world where weren't hunting

(me, to myself: also Moby-Dick was before Origin of Species, which makes the classification chapter read a lot differently!)

Rebecca: read Railsea before Moby-Dick, which contains riff where all captains talk about their obsessions and understand that white whale is a metaphor and an idea. then read Moby-Dick, yes, whale is a metaphor, I understand

(me, to myself, because I'm like that: yes, but also "for the last time the whale is real and it ate my husband")

Michael: are we saying that shouldn't read in context of time?

Rebecca: put multiple lenses on a thing, very rewarding

Melissa: we are of our own time, never going to be able to put self perfectly in reader of time

Michael: why do we want to do these things? "distort"

(me, to myself: I truly cannot tell if he is genuinely objecting or is exploring ideas)

Rebecca: not distortion to lay two interpretations against each other and see where they differ. new Green Knight movie: half people I know considered it very medieval, half not. thinks movie's thematic concerns points out the (different) ones of the original

Greer: "things just happening" was a medieval structure. very difficult effort to get head entirely Gawain-poet's mind: bits of you that don't fit, weren't educated to have those feelings. can reconstruct them, "that's the worst dishonor in the world," but difficult--wonderful thing to try

Melissa: have been talking very much about contemporary re-imaginings of older texts, but lot of older texts did same with even older

Michael: it's also criticism. T.S. Eliot said (I think) that each new work shifts our understanding of works in the past, that's not static. once Raphael was considered great artist, but sentimental works after him make look him like kitsch

Rebecca: one of reasons excited about revisiting: if only seen kitsch, the shock of looking at original and finding that still has power. reading The Iliad for first time, not at all what expected to be

Greer: always been interested in artistic and literary fakes, constantly true that it looks great--at the moment. Kenneth Clark looked at Botticelli and said, "that's a silent film star," and it was, but at time was the ideal of beauty. [I think these two comments were not connected, since Clark seems to have been a critic rather than a forger.] sometimes places where you're standing, can't see what book or work of art is, have to be in it or further away for it. "the 18th century had some damn weird Gothic," that is what they saw [clearly I missed something here, sorry]

Melissa: Gothic chapbooks, or bluebooks, were frequently rushed copies of original higher-production texts, which permitted accessibility to public which didn't have to original. anyone who went to see Beethoven symphony when he was alive, would never hear again, transience. is that affecting how responding?

Michael: Milton was Christian epic poet, until Blake came along and turned Paradise Lost into romantic outcast story. happens all the time. book about a devastated city [title of which I missed] which turns into climate fiction (to a present-day reader)

Rebecca: also exciting when see thematic affiliation that was always there. Iliad: scene where throw up wall in one night; WWI poets always referencing that in making trenches. then Some Desperate Glory (by Emily Tesh) now is looking at WWI poets.

Greer: sometime an artist will go back to younger self, say, no, that's no longer my world. LeGuin returning again and again to Earthsea, asking self, where is the feminism. TH White returning to The Sword and Stone, now this is about fascism.

Michael: complicated. example comes to mind, Henry James, rewrote story to make much more prolix, some readers think original better. artist can decide what version want to send down to history, but is artist best judge? was LeGuin betraying younger self?

Greer: first three Earthsea books are things of beauty. Shakespeare went back to Lear and made it grimmer [note: I am not sure if this is, Shakespeare revisited King Lear in a later play, or Shakespeare was revisiting an earlier play in Lear, or Shakespeare was making the story of Leir grimmer]

Michael: Tehanu, powerful but didn't belong to the first few books.

Melissa: tension between us as consumers of texts and the rights the artists have to their opinion. never fact-checked professor who said that on opening night of Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht was appalled because audience gave Mother Courage a standing ovation: he ran through audience boo'ing trying to get them to boo

(me: was audience applauding the performer not the character??)

Michael: does that mean he failed as artist, by not achieving his intent

Melissa: but we still read and perform. important: when respond, saying, this exists and should be read. kind of resurrection of work if fallen out of favor/public mind

Rebecca: theater opposed to novel. play always continually reinterpreted, always possibility. don't think that that's as far away from novel as might think. engagement and conversation is always happening, having a text to point you to that conversation is generous and valuable, invitation to join

Michael: are there are certain books that are strong, archetypal, have so many possibilities. The Odyssey. Little Women, so attuned to questions of gender, we want to make these texts fit our views. Shakespeare, should we perform as in Elizabethian times, have we lost something otherwise? very uncertain when came to panel

Greer: (comment about tug of war between something and artist's soul that I could not get down)

Melissa: Michael had asked earlier (in comment I didn't transcribe) if this question was something new, maybe that's what: aspects of text that weren't celebrated at time

Greer: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, turns it inside-out

Rebecca: doesn't take anything away from Hamlet that R&G exists. dream is to watch back to back with same cast

Melissa: Wide Sargasso Sea

Michael: asks Elizabeth Hand (in audience) to talk about her Hill House book, A Haunting on the Hill. what did you think about when decided to do this?

Elizabeth: first thing I thought was, "oh no." told Estate going in that not going to do pastiche, backstory, explanation. wanted to write an Elizabeth Hand novel set in Hill House, is that okay? yeah, go for it. otherwise would not have been able to write, because those characters were Jackson's characters; so was Hill House, but it was also archetype in way that humans are not, because they don't have iconic stature that house did. own characters inhabit House and riff off of Jackson's.

Elizabeth cont'd: listening to panel and thinking, why do we do this? return to work of others we admire? really don't know. fiction in last 20-30 years become much more malleable (like plays) than used to be, artists and writers and fanfic writers. very exciting time, I too enjoy reading all riffs on Great Gatsby

Rebecca: one of foremost ways to keep a work alive, responses to it. le Carré's son just put out new novel about Smiley, father said to him on deathbed, please keep people reading Smiley, so guessed only way to do it is write new one

Michael: Pratchett took total opposite approach

Melissa: q to Greer: did you read Little Women as child?

Greer: oh yes, very picky about it

Melissa; my theory is based on small children. anyone experienced a 3 year old, whatever book they land on, need to have backup copies and will be so sick of by time they're 4. but most comforting thing in world to them.

audience: response to Michael: modern mindset cannot see The Merchant of Venice in way original audience did. that said, The Tamer Tamed, written by Shakespeare collaborator 10 years later: frequently seeing those two performed together

audience: thinking about "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and its many responses: works that people find challenging and want to respond to, moves people, makes them want to think, wants to have conversations. hoping to hear about those kind of stories

Rebecca: if come away from book wanting to argue with, feel like has internalized better. thinks why a lot of works are in conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers.

audience: fanfic is entirely in conversation.

Rebecca: some fans of TV show The Terror have become fans of historical polar explorers. fandom helped find bones because read original journals after being mad about way portrayed in show. (note: a quick look hasn't turned up a link on this, can anyone help?) fandom can drive changing responses to original.

Greer: found Richard III, did not change narrative of Richard III in some people's minds

audience: when read good book, look at what author read to write that, works well. (separately:) took 15 years after watching Howl's Moving Castle to know that Diana Wynne Jones existed. as authors, how can we convey importance of works that are adapting. (examples cite are all films)

Greer: talk to Marketing?

(me, to myself: surely this is what author's notes are for)

Rebecca: wish books came with annotated bibliographies. reading about Alan Garner who over course of life, got more and more resistant to mentioning that was responding to something, felt was failure of work. in Owl Service, mentions the Mabinogion, but in Red Shift, have to know it's Tam Lin

audience: thinking about being in engineering school and taking science fiction class, reading "The Cold Equations", other student wrote about how stupid the engineering design was. really think about how see engineering now as opposed to when written. other works like that?

sadly, no, because we were out of time.