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[personal profile] kaberett
I skipped transcribing most of Ellen Kushner's contributions because, right, it got to the point where she said a thing and I growled so loudly about the racism that everyone sitting near me collapsed in giggles. Also, if you've caught me complaining about the guy who described himself as a "straight white male" and "the prototypical reader"? Yeah, that was this one. However, if you ignore whitey it was a proper fantastic panel.

Imagining Fantasy Lands: the status quo does not need worldbuilding

"world-building is not actually an extra"

Introductions I have missed because argument about access. >:[

We have an archaeologist on the panel!

Kate Elliot: the imagination is not without context! Western white middle-class etc etc. People who don't use world-building are implying the dominant culture. If we don't put out any thought into worldbuilding - no matter how much worldbuilding we put in the story - it's a problem of *craft* - using the status quo is lazy and is NOT truly speculative.

moderator: Samuel R Delaney, the unmarked state. There is no such thing as "leaving it open" because of readers' assumptions: if you don't specify you fall to the readers' default (implicit biases!)

Tobias Buckell: existing narratives have momentum & velocity - have to work really hard to get people to sort out their own base assumptions. AHAHAHA CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS EDITOR SAID "NO POLITICS PLEASE" HA. Implies politics = anything he's not comfortable with - when EVERYTHING is political, the personal is political, even if it's not overt - action-adventure is politics, it's just a certain kind and it becomes invisible! Shit like: acceptability and utility of torture. Space far-future - people using CREDIT CARDS on their shopping break 300-400 years in the future! Small worldbuilding details reveal assumptions. -- now having a really interesting conversation about how to indicate in dialogue that Caribbean English is being used without being/seeming racist. Tobias says he uses standard English spellings but uses the relevant grammar. Twain, asked why do you write dialect? "I'm writing what I hear around me."

Rochita: when surrounded by default-white media, you are turned into a monster - you have no reflection. Characters with people of colour: works are automatically political if they feature brown folk, because the status quo (everyone is white) vanishes. "We write the worlds we secretly believe."

Ellen: "I don't really fit! All of my novels are set in mediaeval Europe!" Whitey says that the big difference between her world & that of historical fiction is that she interrogates the worldbuilding, in Swordspoint and affiliated novels, ins that queerness & bisexuality not considered radical. You have to write /what you believe/. "Interrogating aspects of a traditional Western European society I'm not comfortable in" - well, okay, but... it sounds like you're still really traditional? Like, everyone's still white... rrgh. Okay, actually "Sexism - ways girls and men are expected to be" -- that I can work with. "When one does work with a world one already knows and existing assumptions, the challenge for us all is to interrogate, not in a forced way, but in a way that redeems our field"

Kate: ... really dislikes term "tomboy"? Things she liked to do weren't really "girl" things, they were "boy" things (child things or people things!). People come to secondary worlds with preconceptions about who lives in these worlds, how they live, who's important, and thus who can do things. Comment "in the old days 99% of women were illiterate, ignorant, pregnant peasant women who didn't do anything".

moderator: checking "We have always fought". In these conversations, you get a bunch of marginalised people who realise, hopefully over time, that they want to write their own stories. It's a process of decolonisation - peeling away dominant narrative. "I'm brown, queer, a mom, poly, and these are the characters I write now - and then there's publishers to get through..." SOUTH ASIANS IN SPACE YES PLEASE.

why is belated white lady reccing books by whitey about Chinese wossname?

Moderator: okay, so we want to write & read these stories: how do you do this worldbuilding?

Victoria: exercise with first-year students (is a pre-historian) - write a story. Doesn't have to be long, just a page, write a day in the life of this person. Forces people to realise that they're making decisions about who they are, what their life is like, what materials they're surrounded by, etc etc... and you're trying to build a story around pot shards.

Moderator: Toby can pass for white - how does he feel with that? and Kate - how about diversity in her books?

Tobias: I tend to not talk much on panels about race because I muddy the issue, so to speak. I pass for white, but my father's side of the family is Grenadian and my mother's side of the family is from London. Grew up on a boat as an outsider, even while living in the Caribbean. In the US race is binary, in the Caribbean not so much - he complicates things. In the US he feels a lot of pressure to be easily identifiable as /something/, which he is not. Being awesome about how he gets passing privilege but it's simultaneously exhausting. Likes no-one looking at him funny when he speaks with a Caribbean accent in the Caribbean.

Moderator: conversation w/ Ben Rosenbaum at WisCon about being Jewish and PoC. Ben went around surveying people...! White people didn't think he was a PoC, PoC mostly did (did not disclose Jewishnesstude, is dark-skinned for Jew, but grew up in DC). Political demarcation of boundaries.

belated white lady continues awful about how ~fascinating~ she finds inter-PoC discussion about race & racism.

Tobias: I don't want to be a teacher all the time fu

Kate is very decent about how it's much more okay for HER to write about PoC than it is for PoC to - because privilege. Very privilege. ... but then slightly mocked people who took issue with her invented Creole and then was all "but the people who got what I was trying to do!!!" ... and gets most complaints from white women ("I'm not sure as many men were reading the Spirit Walker trilogy because it has a woman on the cover") -- the room sniggers.

Rochita: wants to see stories of herself; white people who take it on themselves to take umbrage on behalf of brown people about representations of PoC...

Moderator: discussion of how you will Get Things Wrong, and the Internet will fall on your head. But (a) you /will/ get things wrong, and (b) the Internet /may/ fall on your head /if/ they notice, but you have to be gracious & apologise and then things are... fixed.

Victoria: (tips for effective world-building)

Q: "I'm a white straight male reader, but I'm wondering, how much do you want me to be as the prototypical reader, just accepting this diversity subconsciously as normal, versus noticing it and questioning my assumptions?" M: depends what I'm writing. T: it's not *medicine*! Look for stuff that's /interesting/. WHITE LADY PLEASE SHUT UP. K: embedding diversity, not sledgehammering it. WHITE LADY: SHUT UP. V: difference between author's intent & readers' interpretation!

M: the extent to which people just... don't notice that people aren't white, they'd missed the descriptions in the books.

Q: how do you balance what feels right versus selling the story to editors who are all about the bias towards the ~prototypical reader~? Directed at Rochita. "If I have worked hard as a reader to adjust to the status quo, the reader can take a turn to adjust to /my/ mindset, and change the status quo." Tobias answers: strange experience when first breaking into novels. Editors responding to proposals with confused reactions - they'd expected him to write magical realism or literary SF - but he wants to write milSF steampunk with dreadlocked cyborgs - lots of really puzzled responses, asking if he wants to write magical realism! Keeps being offered huge amounts of money to write magical realism about magic immigrant into the US... and lol he keeps turning it down because EW. M: on a south-asian lit panel - "you have to write the arranged-marriage novel and get it out of your system" - things that are expected of you, to the extent that it's hard to override them. T: I had to fight kicking & screaming to not write it. I'm a 13yo kid still, and I want. explosions.

Question that Rochita responds to... "First, think who are you writing this story for? Firstly, for myself. Secondly, for Filipino readers to see themselves and experiences reflected. Other readers are of secondary importance. If white readers also like it, okay?" Depends how you prioritise yourself & what you're writing. T: one of his short stories, people from the developing world get what he was trying to do; US readers REALLY DON'T THEY THINK IT'S A CUTE COMEDY.

M got told in grad school: "So, you're writing this for white people?" "What?!" - she was explaining EVERYTHING, food & cultural references &c.

White Lady is White Ladying everywhere about how ~everyone has different contexts and will read things differently~.

M points out that if you say "New York" people think they know what you mean but they really don't - nicely in conversation with yesterday!

Q: what about dead cultures? V: well, Ancillary justice isn't just Romans in space - clientage, and so on - cultures are echoed but not perfect. Tobias follows up - as an archaeologist, what are the biggest mistakes? V: the original detailed amazing worldbuilding, JRR Tolkein's "mediaeval history" - it's Anglo-Saxon! The big tradition is ANGLO-SAXON. You can't make it perfect - but you can make it vibrant. Something that will live in someone else's imagination - but day in the life... the first lesson: how difficult it is to write about people's daily lives in the past, even when we know a lot.

Q: most important bits of worldbuilding? V: how do people use their *space*? K: economy - how do people sort out food? What are Hierarchies? VILE USE OF "BIG MAN/CHIEFTAN" WHILE WHITE. Just because M was doing it BECAUSE IT IS RELEVANT doesn't mean you as whitey get to!!!!

WHITE LADY LEFT BEFORE END OF PANEL YEAAAAAAAAAAH

(no subject)

Date: 2014-08-20 06:04 pm (UTC)
birke: (Default)
From: [personal profile] birke
belated white lady continues awful about how ~fascinating~ she finds inter-PoC discussion about race & racism.

Tobias: I don't want to be a teacher all the time fu


It is fascinating, in fact, but this is why I try to listen as a lurker.

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