a moment of burnt hat

This is the third in my series of posts about my e-book backlist from Orbit. 

Double Vision and Sound Mind were experiments in autobiography using a cross-sectional view that addressed the more abstract undercurrents of what so-called  ‘normal life.’ 

To a certain extent I used autobiography in these books in the same way I would have used found sound in composing music. I took pieces of my own life and dropped them as chunks into the SFnal narrative, observing the way they interacted with their new environment. (You could argue that all stories are built this way to some extent, and I wouldn’t disagree; but with these books I was intentionally cultivating this.)  I made certain alterations to the autobiography so that I could work it into the story, but I stayed as close to my own personal recollection as I could. In this way I created parameters for my fictional experiment. 

One of the problems with this approach lay in the loaded racial content I was working with, including massive environmental racism.  It was in the air everywhere when I was growing up, and coupled with it there was an utter denial that it even existed. This fucked-upedness found its way into my fiction in various ways. 

There is an episode where one of the minor characters in Double Vision has a dodgy sexual encounter with an Okinawan karate master who she naively believes is taking her aside out of interest in her martial arts ability. Something very similar actually happened to me when I was sixteen on a trip to Okinawa and Japan. In the novel some details are altered and some aspects are exaggerated, but the gist of it is out of my life  and I lifted a good bit of the dialogue straight out of things that were actually said.

And here’s where the question comes: can you just drop stuff out of your life into a story and expect it to work as story? Well, in this case, not so much.  Certainly as a white writer portraying non-white characters, I might have thought through the implications of what I was putting on the page much more carefully.  When I read Requires Hate’s review  where she quoted some of these passages, the bottom of my stomach dropped out. There were a lot of angles I hadn’t considered.  I ended up parroting the racism of that time and place when I might have been unpacking it instead.  

Guess what? I didn't see what I was doing. I'm not very happy with myself, because I should have seen it.

I was working out my personal issues with karate on the page. I had been with a group of Americans travelling to Okinawa to train, and while we were there I learned a little about the American presence on the island.  It was only years later that I began to hear of the abusive behaviour of US soldiers toward the Okinawans—especially the women. But I didn’t think this through when I was writing.  I’m ashamed of the fact that when I flipped the roles around in Double Vision and made the Okinawan masters visitors to the US (which I did for storytelling convenience) I completely failed to see the ways in which I was reversing the more typical scenario of US male sexual assault upon Okinawan females. I couldn’t see it at the time. I was too busy trying to deal with the way it felt to write about what had happened—the karate side of things more than the sexual side, to be honest—and so I didn’t look at the material properly.

The reviewer also flagged up a character’s use of the word ‘robotic’ in connection with karate.  This is something where I think I can offer some partial explanation.  I will show you three clips of Japanese martial arts so you can see what I’m talking about.  This is judo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgVoMD1RhYg

And you can see it’s free, natural movement which displays technical facility as well as athleticism.  And this is sumo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G72bQBMZmzs

 Again: tremendous physical expression and use of the body for a deliberate purpose, to get the opponent out of the ring.  Now by contrast this is karate, and here is what I meant by robotic, because the style of movement is unnatural and contrived. The better you are at karate, the more controlled and unreal your movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky0tumrBK4w

It never occurred to me that in this choice of phrase I was playing into a slur against Japan associated with its technical industry, because there are lots of Japanese martial arts that are not robotic at all. When I read the passage in question I’m more embarrassed about the height thing and the broken English. I’m not even sure what I was trying to do with weight and food in that book. I honestly don’t even know.  I will say that I’m working on my blind spots and my ignorance, and I expect to be doing so for the rest of my life.

The power gradients in the world flow in favour of white Americans getting to say whatever we want about anybody, not just in a freedom of speech kind of way but in a go-to-the-bank-and-collect-lots-of-money-and-also-prizes kind of way.  We often receive praise and money for what we write about other cultures even when it is misrepresentative and hurtful.  This kind of entitlement is something that I think many of us (especially white) USians take for granted, so that we are shocked and horrified when it is challenged even in a small way.

In her thesis Technology and the Vulnerable Body in Feminist Post Cyberpunk SF  Kathryn Allen pointed out a racial approach in Maul that I doubt I would use so blithely now. I used racial stereotypes like they were candy; I exaggerated everything I could find. When Maul works, one of the reasons it works is because I took the crappiest of crap that was in my head and let it come out in ways that were sometimes intentionally ugly. 

The self-hate that Sun expresses in the book was intended as the kind of adolescent self-loathing and cynicism that I recognised in myself. But I am a white member of the dominant culture and Sun comes from a mixed background with more than one cultural allegiance. I was wrong to think I could just get into her head and substitute my experience for hers as if our perspectives were somehow interchangeable. And so, unlike my own white girl everything-sucks-in-a-generic-way mindset, Sun’s attitudes read as racial self-hate. Which is really squicky coming from me as a white author.  At times I mangled Sun’s viewpoint because I was too quick to assume I knew how she would react; I don’t. Some of Maul is cringe-making to read, now, and I don’t attempt to excuse it. There are things I messed up about the non-binary nature of gender for sure.  Gender-wise, I did what research I could with the resources I had, but the fact is I was in way over my head in more ways than I can count.

Similarly, writing about Cookie as a black woman—and a woman of size-- was a risk that I probably would not undertake quite so readily were I writing the book today.  I went charging in with an entitled attitude: isn't it cool that I'm writing about people who aren't white and including them in my work?  I was a little uncomfortable, a little bit conscious that I might be trespassing. But it didn't really hit home with me that I'd taken liberties--that what I was doing might be unwelcome by members of the groups I was writing about--until RaceFail.

I didn’t have beta-readers to help me with Cookie.  I didn’t have Nisi Shawl’s and Cynthia Ward’s book Writing the Other, nor access to the wide range of online discussion now available for writers working cross-culturally. Because of my isolated circumstances, I didn’t have real people to talk to, either.

I did have a sincere desire to make Cookie a kind of hero—but most of my working material ended up coming from the weakest parts of myself. For my own reasons, I needed to work with those foibles and failings, and maybe by doing that in the context of a black character I created a negative impression of what it is to be a black woman—or for that matter a large woman—in America. That kind of association was never my intention.

As Cookie develops, she becomes more self-assured and she ends up as a mythic figure who assumes power in the symbolic world.  But I was never sure if I did the right thing by her in the end.  I couldn’t quite work it out.  The truth is, when I was writing the books I didn’t have an answer for what might be possible for a being like Cookie, in this world or any other.  Her eventual fate was more of a note scrawled on a Post-It sticker rather than a definitive statement carved in the stone of story.  Knowing her spiritual trajectory, I doubt she would stay where she found herself at the end of Sound Mind.

I've been turning these issues over in my mind for a good few years now.  The e-books coming out seemed like as good a time as any to set down a few words on the subject.  Maybe this post comes across like I’m just trying to cover my ass. I’m sure that on some level that’s what I’m doing, because I don’t get a do-over with regard to the way I handled race and gender in these instances.

Sincerely, I need to get this out there and be honest about it.  I was paid to write these books and I’ve received a certain amount of praise and attention for them, and I think it’s only fair to say that there were places where I messed up.  Mea culpa.

This is the second in a series of blogs exploring some aspects of my UK-published science fiction backlist, now available electronically through Orbit books.  (I have several other novels that are out of print, in case anyone reading thinks that Maul was my first novel. It was my fourth.) Today I'll write about Double Vision.



This book was originally titled Cookie Starfishes, after the behaviour of the protagonist (Cookie) who can stretch her consciousness across what she believes is interstellar space and also after the name of a fictional breakfast cereal.  Yeah, that’s what I said.

I was interested in ecosystems.  I’ve always been curious about mathematical modelling as a way of representing factors and forces we can’t directly apprehend, of tracking them and making them perceptible.  I kept wondering about the behaviour of ecosystems that aren’t biological, but ideational, informational.  When I thought about the world I had grown up in (and much of my youth was spent watching TV), I had the itchy feeling that an ideational  system was being built that wasn’t under the control of its creators; indeed, it didn’t even seem to be within the perception of its creators. I wanted to bring this itch into some kind of focus for myself.

I called the system The Grid in honour of Tron, because after all the book is set in 1984 and when I thought of SF of that time period the luminous graph-paper cyberspace of that movie came to mind (I've never seen it, oddly enough).  But my Grid was not cold.  It seethed with life, not to mention consciousness.  And we could only see it through the eyes of Cookie.

When I first began writing about Cookie, she was a white man in an abortive short story.  The only things the original character had in common with Cookie were his weight and his SF fan status, and those things were there because I wanted a dramatic disconnect between the protagonist's day-to-day life as a sedentary corporate drone and his ideational life as a flier in an alien war.  But he was soulless.  I soon realised this was because I’d conceived him straight out of a stereotype; he wasn’t a person.  So I decided to write about a black woman, because, hello, SF? Where were your black women? Few and far between. Once I made that decision I became nervous and uncomfortable about what I was doing, but this seemed like a better place to be. Suddenly I had a character who was talking back to me.

At the time I was writing Double Vision I was going through a hard phase with a baby son who demanded more energy than I had (I literally could not keep weight on), and our living situation was unstable. It was fraught, actually. There was enough money for food and minimal heat, full stop.  Our dial-up internet was rarely used and I often went weeks without talking to another human being apart from my partner.  I coped by bundling my son in a waterproof pushchair or backpack and walking for several miles a day. The physical discipline kept me from cracking up. 

I thought about survival: what it means, how we do it, where it diverges from what is called victory.

I made my soldiers female, and while I was writing I kept comparing my own experiences as a stressed-out mother with theirs. Until I’d had children I’d never really felt particularly womanly and there was a part of me that didn’t quite accept being female—maybe because I identified with strength and self-reliance, and women generally seemed to be short-changed in that department.  After going through pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding and all the usual I started to redefine my ideas about what strength can be, and I began to question the validity of self-reliance. Having a baby totally dependent on me restricted me, stretched me, changed me—and it made the me of me at times irrelevant. I began to see myself as part of a larger system whose inner workings were mysterious.  All of this fed into the way I wrote about the Grid.

Here’s an excerpt from the point of view of Serge, one of the soldiers who has inadvertently reproduced within the generative intelligence that is the Grid; she now has nine alien children.

            They took her to the place where the missile had fallen. It didn’t look the same to her now. She was still aware of all the misfit equipment arranged above the dust bowl, but the importance of the human artifacts seemed reduced in her new eyes. She noticed now that the Grid was woven into a spiderweb, a concentric series of irregular rings crosshatched with pulsing beams of something forever caught in a state halfway between solid matter and sheer light. And she knew what had happened because the Grid’s memory was a part of Serge: it lay in the bottom of her lungs, the coming of the MF missile with intent to destroy all life at the logic mines and being instead itself pulled down by the defensive system that these little girls had created.

            Oh, they had built it, for sure.  Six would have provided that aptitude in his ejaculate.

            They had sacrificed miles of the Grid’s sinew, wedded it to stolen stereo components and transistors, poached body parts thrown in for good measure; and now by the will of the Grid, whatever that was, the dead zone was coming alive in some sneaky and hard-to-fathom way.

            The girls went down into the dust, proud of their creation.

            She looked at them, jerky little Sergettes with music around them like a smell.

            She was no longer wanting to have them exterminated.

            She was well and truly screwed.  What good was she, Captain Bonny Serge, with the Grid leading her around by the nose, literally? Information hung in the air.  It thrummed in the branches. It simmered in the well. She was just another storehouse, a mobile one, but a member of the club now all the same.

            ‘Holy Poobah,’ said Serge. ‘I’ll never be just me again. I’ll never be an individual. From here on out, I’m always part of something else, something alive.’

            She paused, chewing her lip.

            ‘I don’t like that.’

            My next blog in this series will be about some of the racial and cultural issues that I messed up in these novels, and what I’m learning from the mistakes I made.

A couple of weeks ago I got hold of Natalie Goldberg’s Thunder and Lightning.  Natalie, of course, is a Zen Buddhist who uses writing as a spiritual practice.  I have been wanting to share this bit with you guys for some time, and I finally had a few minutes so here it is.  I don’t think I need to explain.  Just read it:

‘I never gained control of my mind—how do you dominate an ocean?—but I began to form a real relationship with it.  Through writing and meditation I identified monkey mind, that constant critic, commentator, editor, general slug and pain-in-the-ass, the voice that says, “I can’t do this, I’m bored, I hate myself, I’m no good, I can’t sit still, who do I think I am?” I saw that most of my life had been spent following that voice as though it were God, telling me the real meaning of life—“Natalie, you can’t write shit”—when, in fact, it was a mechanical contraption that all human minds contain.  Yes, even people with terrific, supportive parents are inhabited by this blabbing, resistant mouthpiece.  But as I wrote longer, went deeper, I realized its true purpose: monkey mind is the guardian at the gate.  We have to prove our mettle, our determination, stand up to its nagging, shrewish cry, before it surrenders the hidden jewels.  And what are those jewels?  Our own human core and heart, of course.’

Natalie Goldberg, for me right now this is gold! Thank you.

She goes on, ‘I’ve seen it over and over.  The nearer I get to expressing my essence, the louder, more zealous that belittling voice becomes. It has been helpful to understand it not as a diminishing parent but as something universal, impersonal, a kind of spiritual test. Then I don’t have to wither or sneak away from censoring dad, carping mom, or severe schoolteacher with sunken chest when I hear that onerous yell.  Instead, it is my signal to perservere and plow through. Charge! I scream with pen unlanced.’

I hope this can be of use to some of my writer friends.  Unlance your pens!

I have a lot of processing to do after the math exam so I’m putting this very long post behind a cut.

Meanwhile, I gratefully thank everyone who has encouraged me and listened to my whinging and who has said, ‘You can do it.’ I have needed and used every speck of that help and I appreciate it so very much.

Now I have to get on with everything I’ve been neglecting, including e-mails. I feel a bit floppy. I may need to be a comatose rabbit for a day or two.

If you think colonialism is dead... think again. Globalisation has indeed made the world smaller--furthering the dominance of the West over the developing world, shrinking and devaluing local cultures, and uniformising everything to Western values and Western ways of life. This is a pernicious, omnipresent state of things that leads to the same unfounded things being said, over and over, to people from developing countries and/or on developing countries.

It's time for this to stop. Time for the hoary, horrid misrepresentation clichés to be pointed out and examined; and for genuine, non-dismissive conversations to start.

Accordingly, here's a handy bingo card for Western Cultural Imperialism--and we wish we could say we've made it all up, but unfortunately every single comment on this card was seen on the Internet.



Card designed by Aliette de Bodard, Joyce Chng, Kate Elliott, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, @requireshate, Charles Tan, @automathic and @mizHalle. Launch orchestrated with the help of Zen Cho and Ekaterina Sedia in addition to above authors (and an army of volunteer signal boosters whom we wish to thank very much!)

Any signal boosting on this much appreciated!

http://aliettedebodard.com/pics/2012/CulturalImperialismBingoCard.png

  At the end of my second set of dead lifts I looked up and Chima Chima was standing on the other side of the glass that separated the gym from the hallway. A translucent white logo partially obscured his body, but I could see his face clearly.The saccades of his eyes made invisible tracks that ran all over my body like a swarm of ants. It was like he could take me to pieces with his gaze.
  I dropped the bar on the mat with a resounding clang.

  'Thanks,' I gasped to the bodybuilder as I charged

------------

This morning I attempted a practice math test under exam conditions and got 43%! It's so bad it's good! My assignment scores were in the 90s, so god help the people who were struggling in their assignments. Less than a week to go. Has anybody got a spare rock for me to crawl under?

I have to apologise for the naivete of this post.  I'm stumbling my way through thinking about these things.

I used to joke that I wrote SF because I didn’t know enough about reality to write in it.  It wasn’t wholly a joke.  Eighteen years into my professional writing life, I still don’t know much about the 'real' world.  My life experience is limited and my education is somewhat sketchy, so some writers have much wider life experience than I do, and many have studied more.  Still, I suspect that  writers glean a good percentage of our working material by recycling it to some extent or another out of stories—books and movies.  By ‘recycling’ I don’t mean literally nicking things and using them (although this happens) but rather, that we digest a mix of story and real life and then it emerges in a different form in our own work. 

So what is the reality of what we have digested? Especially, of what we have digested from second-hand sources?

I constantly complain about fight scenes in books (and obviously movies too) on this basis.  Most of them are unselfconsciously ridiculous. My sister, a nursing professor, complains about medical scenes.  The phenomenon could extend in many directions depending on what it is that you know more-than-most about.  Certainly in reading the recent discussions on colonialism, globalisation, and the failure of world literature to include genuine non-Western viewpoints, I’ve been thinking a lot about the particulars of the SFF genre and my own work in this context. I’ve been thinking about a kind of self-perpetuating bullshit cycle that seems to turn up.

I’m not speaking specifically about colonialism here, which is deserving of its own space.  This more of a tangential thought about the genre: I wonder if fantasy literature, which by its definition allows us to bypass reality checks, is particularly vulnerable to allowing us to delude ourselves and therefore get away with stuff that is distortionary and prejudicial in whatever manner.  Because it’s not ‘real.’   And anything is fair game.  We wouldn’t expect to publish a political thriller without knowing the ins and outs of government and world affairs and lots of other fact-checkable nuts and bolts, but if we write that thriller in dressed-up fantasy terms, there’s a lot of fudge-space there.  I’ve used it myself. I think there could be something extra-pernicious about our genre in this department. Maybe that's not an insight to anybody but me?

Granted, it’s hard to get a reality-check on something that doesn’t exist—a theoretical projection or a proposed future, for example. But even when I’m going out there as far as I know how to do I must necessarily refer to what I do know.  I reach for some example of what I already know and try to bend or stretch it, or juxtapose it with another object so as to create an interaction that may generate something genuinely original.  I suppose in way that’s a definitional problem of writing SFF—no matter how I may try to set up a philosophical experiment, it always has to have some grounding in the concrete world.  I try to notice my real-life reference points.  I try to make some honest attempt to face up to the pitfalls of the way I’m using them, although the pitfalls aren’t always obvious to me at the time.

But what about the idea of inventing because actually learning the facts is too hard?  SFF writers are in a particularly privileged position in terms of being able to do this. What about saying, ‘I don’t know shit about how X works so I’ll just borrow a pinch of this and a dash of that and throw in some stuff that I saw this other writer do, and it’ll all be OK in the mix’?

That might not be actively harmful.  Or it might.  What if the stuff you borrow and (inevitably) distort is actually a portion of someone’s reality?  I mean, it seems obvious to say that’s uncool, but the uncoolness seems somehow unexamined, glossed-over, when in our genre it should probably be an area of mainstream writerly concern--there's no shortage of discussion on how to write an effective query letter, after all, but cultural appropriation doesn't get enough coverage at entry-level even though writers are effectively gods of our made-from-whole-cloth worlds.

The marketing machine demands fodder, of course, so it skews toward the derivative anyway.  Within the dominant culture, this skew can be very annoying.  But when you start to think about what is happening globally when Blockbuster X comes rolling into town, it seems what we can end up with is this big armoured tank of derivative untrue nonsense rolling in and crushing the original cultural ecosystem, wrecking it and replacing it with the machine’s own paradigm. Never mind what writers inside that culture produce; it's now irrelevant as far as the machine is concerned.

If it’s not my culture that’s being destroyed by globalisation, I can be upset about this overwriting and the losses it entails, on a theoretical level.  I can try to empathise with the people being silenced, and I can feel badly about it when I choose to think about it.  But I don’t have to think about it if I don’t want to.  And I can’t actually know or imagine how it feels to be in the path of that oncoming machine, how incredibly toxic the whole business is.  As a whitebread USian I’m riding more or less on top of a wave of destruction.

I need to really think about it and decide what my level of complicity with that armoured tank, or that wave, actually is.  To what extent am I OK with letting this destruction occur rather than stating up front that I prefer the complexities and disagreements and dangers of a world in which my culture might not end up in total absolute power over all things?  Because that is what it comes down to, right?  Actually giving others some space and not just coopting everything.  I don't know why that should be so hard, but apparently the capitalist model does what it does, and too bad if people don't like it on an individual level--I don't know how to stop it, personally. 

I want to say, oh nonono, this isn’t of my making, it’s not under my control, I don’t want it at all not even one tiny bit.  But I suspect that subconsciously some part of me must be a little relieved to be safely inside that tank.  I’m not proud of it, but I really need to look at that cowardice and make some changes in my head.

Fumbling, rambling.  Thinking.

I may have been absent from the internet lately, but I've got the best possible excuse: I've been working! I really don't know how writers who blog and tweet seriously manage to do both. All respect for that, but it's outta my range. I can't be online when I'm writing seriously.

Yesterday I finished off another round of Shadowboxer. I have lost track of how many times I've recrafted that book to satisfy this person or that person.  This time the changes that were suggested really made sense to me, and although I had to take out a lot of plot to make the book work, I think it does work now. I hope so.  Bloody hell. I reckon I've invested more heart in this story than in anything I've written in the last fifteen years. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing; everything to do with it feels incredibly personal and intimate, even though there's nothing autobiographical as such in the novel at all.

Of course I have a huge stack of things that need doing, and my sense of duty nearly had me plunging straight into sorting out the shed. But I remembered the wise advice of Stephanie Burgis: Celebrate, she said. So today I went into Shrewsbury, bought each of my kids a book at Waterstone's and decided to treat myself to a new notebook and new pen because I will soon resume my assault upon the untitled SF novel whose protagonist is called Pearl. Well. I normally buy the cheapest available pens and paper.  I buy big boxes of cheap biros and reams of cheap copy paper to write on. None of your £13 moleskines for me--yikes, I could fill an entire moleskine with angst about my toenails on any given day, and then where would I be?

But today was special, because Shadowboxer, w00t! I went to Paperchase and compromised my budget with a cheap moleskine knockoff that lies flat. I found a Pilot pen that writes in purple ink!  I sat down in Starbuck's to write a long-overdue card to Kaz Mahoney with the purple pen. Wrote one card. Then opened the notebook and wrote half a page. I glanced up and my friend Yumi happened to be walking past, so I leaped up, we waved at each other through the window, gesticulated a bit, and I sat back down.  THE PEN DID NOT WORK. It took me a couple of minutes to resuscitate it, in the process of which I observed that the ink had already gone down by about 10%.

Friendslist who are stationery fetishists like me, I ask you: how can this be acceptable? It was a Pilot pen, not some dinky thing from The Works. So disappointed.

Anyway, I then went for a lovely walk by the river in Shrewsbury. And as I was soaking up the genteel Shrewsbury vibe I recalled a recent trip to Chester with Steve. As we walked around the top of the old Roman walls and took in all the different perspectives on the city, I kept thinking that it all seemed too perfect. 'Steve,' I said after we'd passed about the twentieth neat thing, 'This place isn't for real.  It has to be run by vampires or something.'

So today, in Shrewsbury-which-is-architecturally-not-unlike Chester, I was thinking about this and I remembered a novel that I dashed off when Rhiannon was a baby. I had it up on my website for a while. It was a YA fantasy about a girl who can't see ghosts in a world that's ruled by ghosts.  My then-US-agent sent it out and it got a nibble from one editor, but I let it go for reasons that have no bearing on this post. I stuck the novel up on my website for a bit and then pulled it down in shame, because to be honest it wasn't very good. I'd written it hastily and without a lot of conviction.

But I always liked the idea.

Today in the car on the way home a new version of the story unrolled at my feet like a...ok, maybe not quite like a magic carpet but like something that's good.  A Twister mat?  A picnic blanket?  A fruit roll-up? It unrolled, damnit, and now that can be added to the long list of ideas that need to be fully developed, fleshed out and realised. I scrawled down some notes and a few paragraphs of narrative. We'll see if anything comes of it after I've worked it a bit more.

Then I went out and sorted the shed. There was a lot of post-flea junk out there. Steve had cut the heavy bag down to make room, so I cleared everything and we put the bag back up. I punched and kicked the bag. I love bags.  You can hit them and they don't hit you back!  How fun is that?

I'm on the last chunk of math and soon I'll be studying for the final.  I make it that I've been studying continuously since November of 2010, so having the summer off school will be heaven.

Yeah, I know this is really late.  Like I said, things went a bit pear-shaped last week…then I had to plunge back into a big pile of work…and also, I think, I may have turned a bit introverted after all the glamour and social performance over Easter weekend. I’m not feeling terribly articulate, but I will try to make this post because it’s silly late.

First of all, huge thanks to the con committee for inviting me.  I had the best time imaginable.  I didn’t see nearly enough of the many people I wanted to see and it all felt very rushed at times, and I didn’t sleep much because I was so over-stimulated.  I think my dark circles were halfway down my face by the end.

I loved it.

At the closing ceremonies I mentioned Philippa Watts, who was a brilliant guest liaison, and Zoe Sulma—without whom I’d have been lost and confused much of the time.  The Green Room folk were also lovely, and the guys from Ops were brilliant, doing some last-minute printouts for me—and huge thanks to Alex McClintock for getting my flash drive back to me when I left it in the con’s computer! Whew.

I’d never done a con before in the full-on sense.  I went to Worldcon in Winnipeg in 1994, where I knew no one but still managed to get in the same room as Anne McCaffrey and also harass poor David Brin into giving me a blurb for my first novel.  I went to Glasgow Worldcon in 1995 when LETHE came out, but I still didn’t really know anyone.  I can’t remember much about it and I don’t think I was on the program.  Last year I popped into Eastercon but couldn’t get on the programme despite having a novel on the BSFA shortlist.  In the bar I seem to recall shedding tears upon both Darren Nash and Anne Clarke over the wretched state of my ‘career’ (sorry about that, guys).

This is why Olympus 2012 was a whole new world for me, and after spending so many years surrounded by nappies and uncooperative novels, the star treatment that I got was unbelievable.  I don’t think I could possibly articulate how uplifting it was to sit in a kaffeeklastch for the first time (not only was it FULL, but  Justina Robson and Freda Warrington showed up!) and speak with readers about my work.  Massive ego boost!

I should mention that of my ten published books, nine are out of print (and yes, I know I need to do something about the e-books).  Because of this I was very surprised to find that Forbidden Planet had copies of DOUBLE VISION and someone in the Dealer’s Room had hardcovers of LETHE (with that unfortunate cover).  I went into author signings fully expecting to sign nothing while George got mobbed, but readers  brought me things to sign.  And Zoe talked to me.  It was lovely.

I was busy, but in a good way. I didn't get to attend many panels that I wanted to because I was on lots myself.  It sounds like I missed some great stuff, but I enjoyed every single panel I was on, even the scary ‘Occupy the Metaverse’ with Farah and Adam being all erudite as they are--and speaking of Farah, she really seems to have got the best out of me in her interview.  I only wish there had been space for it on the con’s ustream site. 

The one panel I was worried about (Heroism) seems to have been survived by me—it certainly wasn’t as bad as I feared; I was sweating bullets beforehand.  I’d like to thank the friends who talked to me about it beforehand (you all know who you are) and injected me with the necessary chutzpah.  I muffed some figures about warfare because I wasn’t expecting the discussion to go in that direction and was talking off the top of my head.  When I talked about battlefield studies, I managed to conflate a figure roughly estimated at 10-15% of soldiers firing with intent to kill with the quite different statistic estimating 2% of the population that are ‘natural born killers’. They are two different numbers, and the 10-15% is only a guesstimate; but the point is that armies have to train their soldiers to kill.  It doesn’t come naturally for most. 

On natural born killers https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/a80806fbebea8dd285257015006e1943/09613ff986b2a86885257599001505c1?OpenDocument

And an interesting video as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9Ozno7HMGE

So, lots to think about when we use the word ‘warrior’ especially the bit about a lot of the kills occurring when the enemy was running away. 

I talked about the peak shift effect.  Here’s a little bit more about that.  http://clicks.robertgenn.com/peak-shift.php

I don’t know how well my Bionicles illustrated it at long distance, but I think it’s interesting that our tendency to exaggerate obvious features in artistic representations can be pinned down with a bit of science. 

The other thing that I mentioned but didn’t get to concerns the function of the reticular activating system in how we see what we want to see.  Here’s a little bit about that. http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/essays/scotoma.html

And on the line between fantasy and reality, have a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G1ApUEXcbo&sns=fb

But enough about that.  My reading is here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/21718512.  I read the beginning of the untitled SF novel and also the beginning of YA novel Shadowboxer, which I’m still working on.  People asked me afterward when these books were coming out.  Neither of them is under contract and at the moment I don’t have an agent, either, so! I just don’t know! What will happen! I do know that the encouragement I received at Eastercon will go a long way toward fuelling me on with my work.

To everyone I met over the weekend, to everyone who attended panels or readings with me: THANK YOU.

I am happy.

(Never fear. I’m sure normal whining will resume here before long.)