I wrote a post on BayCon this morning that turned into something very different: my history with this convention laced with tips for the newer convention goers. I’ll post that at some other time, but it’s on the top of my head because I brought two first timers this year, my older son and a friend who is in her early twenties. Seeing the convention through their eyes, though both did a much better job of finding a place their first year than I did, has brought back a lot of memories.

The BayCon I experience now is very different from my first years because I engage with the con and the people in it. It helps that I am on panels, so I have no choice ;), but I’m just as likely to strike up a conversation with someone in the hallway.

This year I was feeling distanced from my anthropological background, and so focused a lot of my panel going on cultural topics, whether steampunk or mythology, along with the writing panels I like to sit in on to see what people are thinking and talking about. Some enterprising person, aided by Deirdre, the head of programming this year, put out a smartphone app with the pocket guide. All it lacked (and I have it on good authority that will change next year) was the presenter’s names. Therefore, I found it funny that panel after panel I’d chosen based on topic had at least some of the same presenters. Luckily, they had interesting things to contribute that were unique to each topic.

I won’t go into detail on all the panels, but I wanted to highlight a few things that struck me.

In the steampunk in literature panel, I discovered the goggles have no historical basis unless you’re responsible for shoveling coal, which is good because they really didn’t fit in my story, but at the same time, they’ve become one of those genre flags. Once the goggles are in place, people know this is supposed to be steampunk, which makes for an interesting conflict between true to the time period and meeting reader’s expectations. Another interesting discussion was over the contradiction between class as a bad thing and class as the main reason for industrial, medical, and scientific advancement. If not for the wealthy leisure class, the experimentation that sparked innovation would have been swallowed up by daily wage work. Amusingly enough, this is also true for the discovery of ether and nitrous oxide as anesthetics. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how those tie together. I also got a huge list of books to read, some I’ve already read and others were already on my list, but I have at least a handful of new ones to check out.

The panel of authors with numerous appearances in Analog offered some insights into Stanley Schmidt and his relationship with his authors once you reach that point as well as some tips on how to come up with ideas that might appeal to him. There was also a hint that he doesn’t appear to like dark stories.

In the panel about first pages, and a later conversation as well, the importance of establishing the story you plan to tell was emphasized over and over again. One person put it as you set the social contract with your reader in the first three chapters (for a novel). In a later hallway discussion with Jon DeCles, Juliette Wade, and my sister Jennifer, Jon touched on how Marion Zimmer Bradley (his sister) had taught him that everything in the story exists on that first page. It’s a concept that is hard to swallow as a flat statement, but has a lot to do with setup and reader expectation. The writing style, the characters introduced, the accoutrements whether goggles or ray guns, tell the reader right from the start what kind of story this is going to be. Our job is to make sure we deliver on that promise.

The two main anthropology panels I went to were one on mythological roots and another on reading in cultural context. The thing that caught my attention most about the mythological roots was the concept of ownership. I don’t mean that in a negative way, and I do understand the complexity of the issue, but it brought a new level to the “always in medieval England” trend in fantasy. There’s a concern expressed when writing in cultures not your own that there is a sense of appropriation, as though by incorporating those elements you take something away from the underlying culture. However, that appropriation does not exist, regardless of your own genetic background, if you write with Celtic or Greek or even Norse roots. Those cultures have become so appropriated that they’re fair game. Someone on the panel (at a different time so not directly connected) said there’s a point where the active participants in a culture (barring recreationist societies of course) have either moved on or are not generally recognized, and that’s the point when culture becomes mythology and so open to everyone. Any case where the culture is still active, though, there are social and political implications to adopting a culture not your own, even if you do your best to represent it honorably. No answers, but a glimpse at the questions a convention can inspire.

I walked away from the reading in cultural context panel a little disappointed, not at the content or the discussion, but the general acceptance that we cannot recognize and put aside our cultural bias. Thanks to my odd upbringing, I can accept a story world as the world. When it jars against my own beliefs and expectations, I notice but don’t restrict or deny the context the story was written in as long as it is internally consistent. I got the sense that this was an unusual approach, and it saddens me if this is the case. While rewriting certain tales to meet a modern context would resolve their issues, experiencing the issues that could not be resolved at the time of the story opens our eyes to different cultures and different contexts. The evaluation and consideration piece, for me, comes after enjoying the read.

I wandered in to one of the signings, to support Juliette even though I had forgotten my copy of her latest Analog story at home, and ended up meeting Madeleine E Robins who described one of her novels, a futuristic urban fantasy sort of, as including dinosaurs. I plan to check out The Stone War on that basis alone (as you might have guessed from my interesting links, I have a fascination with everything dinosaur related), and when an author captivates me, I tend to stick with them.

On a more general note, I highly recommend going to the author signings. Depending on circumstances, they can dissolve into fascinating discussions, and even if you don’t know the author, you may discover someone you really enjoy.

On my own panels, the first turned out to be something very different than I expected, but the description was very sparse. Once we nailed down the intent of the panel (Encouraging Critical Thinking Through Literature), I thought it sparked an interesting look at how people are influenced by what they read and how a subtle introduction of the possibility that there are more ways to look at things considered set can advance civilization as we know it. The title was Stealth Philosophy. Any time philosophy comes into the picture, you should know it’s going to be a big picture look. I’m on a panel in the Teaching Speculative Fiction Workshop at WorldCon this year, and some of the discussion did turn on topics that belonged in that context as well.

The second was billed as World Building Basics but turned more on specific authors and the choices they made, especially with the inclusion of specific cultural elements in terms of how readable the story will be in ten or fifty years. A little off topic, but backup techniques were also covered as one of the dangers is losing all the hard prework. One notable conversation looked at how each of the panelists managed world building as a dramatic demonstration that the “musts” of world building are false. While there was some crossover in approach, I heard at least one unique element in each person’s technique.

Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough. You should be able to tell at this point that it was a complex, fascinating, and fun convention in which there is something for almost everyone to do and enjoy. Maybe you’ll come join us next year.