Eugene Fischer

Tag: Ted Chiang

Thanksgiving 2014

I’ve just returned from a lovely four days in Madison with friends. We stuffed ourselves, saw two excellent movies (Nightcrawler and Attack The Block), sat around reading books, and talked late into the night. Here are some pictures.

WisCon 38

MoxieNot going to do a full con report this year, but I attended WisCon38 and had a generally lovely time. I got to see Karen, Pär, and Jeremiah, all of whom I’m going to miss terribly when I move away from Iowa City and can no longer easily visit. I roomed with Keffy Kehrli and Sunny Moraine, and also spent time with Ted Chiang, Marica Glover, Jen Volant, Meghan McCarron, David Schwartz, David Moles, Ben Rosenbaum, Will Alexander, Genevieve Valentine, Valya Lupescu, Nancy Hightower, Alice Kim, Liz Gorinsky, Richard Butner, Barb Gilly, Marco Palmieri, Greg Bechtel, and a bunch of my friends from the Clarion 2012 class.

The most notable thing for me this year was that I had my first reading at the con. Gwenda Bond and Christopher Rowe had to cancel their attendance at the last minute, and I got to take one of their places in at the Death-defying Feats of Moxie reading. I read the first three sections of my novella “The New Mother,” and got an enthusiastic reception. Hopefully by next WisCon it will be published.

The First Twenty Books of 2014

First20Books2014
As previously mentioned, graduate school was hell on my reading. To get back in the groove I resolved that this year I would read at least one book a week. Twelve weeks in, I’m ahead of schedule. Here are the first twenty books I’ve read this year. (Collage above made with this online tool.)

  1. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. This one failed to impress me, and I doubt I will read any other books in the series.
  2. Solaris: The Definitive Edition by Stanislaw Lem (audiobook). This is the new translation direct from Polish released in 2008. I’d tried to read the previous translation once, which was actually a retranslation from French, and found it unimpressive. I loved the direct translation, though, and can see why it’s held in such esteem among Lem’s works.
  3. Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin. This is a reread, inspired by the book’s presence on Kevin Brockmeier’s list of his 50 favorite SFF books. I thought it delightful fun the first time, and I still feel that way about it. It’s a collection of linked short stories, but both times I’ve read it in a single sitting.
  4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. This is really a gorgeous, ambitious book. Carmen Machado loves it, and had been recommending it for a few years. The novel’s formal conceit is that it is narrated by Death, and while this is achieved with great sensitivity and beautiful language, my own lack of affection for Cartesian dualism means I found it less affecting than I otherwise might. I suspect that’s why I merely really liked it rather than loving it.
  5. Superman/Shazam: First Thunder by Judd Winick and Joshua Middleton. I was inspired to read this by Justin Pierce, who posted to Facebook a page from it in which Superman is furious when he learns that Captain Marvel is a transformed child. That scene was probably the best thing in the book, but it was fun.
  6. The Genocides by Thomas Disch. This is another one from Kevin’s list. It’s one of the bleakest books I’ve ever fully enjoyed. Humanity is uncomplicatedly eliminated as unseen aliens turn the planet into a monoculture for a genetically engineered crop. As unremitting an apocalypse as I’ve ever read.
  7. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. This, as is obvious if you’ve clicked the very first link in the first paragraph, is a reread. I bought a bunch of copies of the play and threw a table reading party. We all drank mulled wine and hammed it up.
  8. Options by Robert Sheckley. After Van Choojitarom challenged people to come up with a novel odder than Voyage to Arcturus (which I still need to read), I offered this as a possibility. When I was 16 it seemed to me merely a memorably enthusiastic work of metafiction. Reading it now, though, it strikes me as an absurdist take on the difficulties of the creative process. Reading it makes me feel like I do when I’m struggling at the keyboard, and yet it’s entertaining. It’s also short enough that despite the overt metafictional elements, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Might be my favorite Sheckley now. (Note if you’re planning to give it a shot, I’m pretty sure the opening few chapters intentionally read as terribly-written. Which is to say, I think they are well written, but in intentionally bad prose.)
  9. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. Yet another from Kevin’s list. I read it as a kid and didn’t find it terribly impressive then, by Kevin’ and Jo Walton’s appreciation for the book convinced me to give it another chance. They were right. It’s really an excellent book, for all the reasons Jo outlines. Also, I realize I must have been under ten years old the last time I read it, because I remember thinking that if the events in the book were to happen, I would have been among the posthuman cohort.
  10. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. I’d never read one of her novels, and this one won the Hugo award in 1977, so seemed a good place to start. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I liked the opening section well enough, and the writing is good throughout, but I found culture of the clone generations unconvincing.
  11. Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler. I love everything by Fowler I’ve ever read, which is several short stories and now three novels. This one is now my second favorite, behind We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, my favorite novel I read last year. Sarah Canary is lyrical and brilliant. Also, this is yet another one from Kevin’s list, which has yet to lead me astray.
  12. The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis. This is the last of Tevis’s science fiction novels that I hadn’t read, after reading The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird last year. I have yet to read anything by Tevis I don’t find engrossing, but this is a weird one. The opening I loved so much it seemed on pace to become a favorite, but toward the end the book takes a turn that I’m still trying to figure out my feelings toward. I still liked it, but I think less than the previous two.
  13. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. I’d read a few of these stories before, such as “Secretary” (the basis for the movie) and “A Romantic Weekend”(a favorite of mine), but never the whole collection. It’s good. Completely unsentimental psychological realism, full of obsessions and kinks. I’ve got another Gaitskill collection on deck for later.
  14. The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. This was a reread that I assigned my science fiction writing class, in advance of Ted doing a Skype visit. I think this book is perfect.
  15. Hawkeye vol. 1 by Matt Fraction and David Aja. This was a gift from Matt when I visited Portland. It’s great fun, deserving of all the superlatives on the cover. Each issue is a tiny, clever action movie, the cleverest one from the point of view of a dog.
  16. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. After Portland I find myself on a bit of a comics kick. This is the third of the Century volumes, and I didn’t enjoy it that much. Harry Potter as the antichrist was fun enough, but at this point LoEG seems more about enacting its conceit than about telling a story. Still, there were some nice tender scenes between Orlando and Mina.
  17. Weapons of the Metabarons by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Travis Charest, and Zoran Janjetov. A fairly forgettable addendum to an unforgettable series. I bought an omnibus collection of the original Metabarons series in Portland and will probably reread it soon.
  18. The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s writing is beautiful. This book is about a city populated by everyone who is dead but still remembered by someone alive, and what happens to that city when everyone on Earth starts to die.
  19. Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty. I bought this book on the strength of its chapter titles, which are things like “Now I will dismember the world with my hands” and “But I eat them up, Frederico, I eat them up.” This book was…strange. Not bad, but not good either. I’m not convinced that it is about anything except itself. It’s an internally consistent system of symbolism that doesn’t necessarily have any relevance to the real world. The language was very entertaining, but it’s verbal fireworks bursting above an insubstantial landscape.
  20. Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I liked this more than Century: 2009, because it’s more strongly narrative and because I enjoyed the H. P. Lovecraft and John Campbell references. Still a minor work, though.

Why Free Will is Compatible with Determinism

Recently I was having a fun and interesting conversation with someone I’d just met, a clearly very bright person, and during our talk I commented that I’m a compatibilist determinist – someone who believes that free will and determinism are compatible concepts. My clearly very bright new friend dismissed the idea as obviously false. In fact, he trivially dismissed it; his immediate response was that claiming that free will and determinism are compatible didn’t even merit the weight of consideration he’d given the rest of the conversation.

I get that reaction a lot. Narratives about the future are almost always about how it is an unfixed fog of infinite possibility, crystalizing onto history and becoming solid in the flash of the present moment. Almost all time travel stories include the instance or threat of someone going back in the past and changing the future, positing an assumed indeterminist model of reality. In those very few (and usually very good) time travel stories that do take place in a deterministic universe, the discovery of the fixed nature of the future is usually treated as a tragic diminishment of possibility, an attack on free will. But outside of academic writing, free will is very rarely defined. My impression is that most people, even irreligious people, have a sort of vague sense of what they mean by “free will” that is inherently numinous, that free will is some ineffable quality by which we are masters of our own fate. When I’ve asked people to try to explicate to me what they mean when they say “free will,” they usually say something about the existence of choice, and free will being the thing that makes choices possible, and that choice is what gives life meaning. The notion that a fixed future annuls choice seems intuitively obvious.

It isn’t. Here I’d like to offer a fairly straightforward argument for why not.

Prologue: The Predictor

Consider the following hypothetical scenario conceived by Ted Chiang.1 Imagine that I gave you a toy, a little box the size of a remote for unlocking a car, called a Predictor. The Predictor has only a button, a small LED light, and some internal circuitry that I tell you has a built-in negative time delay. When you play with the Predictor, you find that the light always illuminates exactly one second before you push the button.

I give you a Predictor to play with, and at first if feels like a game, like the goal is to push the button right after you see the light flash. But if you try to break the rules, you find you can’t. If you try to press the button without having seen the light, no matter how fast you move it always flashes exactly one second before your finger gets there. If you try to wait for the light to flash, intending to not push the button after, then the light never turns on. There’s no way to fool the Predictor.

So, I’ve given you a toy that conclusively demonstrates that your future actions are already determined. Having played with this toy, the question is, do you stop feeding yourself? Or paying your bills? Or caring for your family? You’ve been shown a demonstration that the events of the future are, in principle, precisely determinable from the present. It either is or is not true, already, that you will feed yourself, get dressed, pay your bills, bathe your children, etc. So do you think that you, the person reading this article, would stop doing those things after I gift you a small toy? If you don’t believe that you would stop, then you have some intuition that a fatalist attitude of defeated meaninglessness is not a necessary consequence of determinism. It remains for me to motivate exactly why that might be, and to convince you that your choice to continue doing things like feeding yourself is, in fact, a choice, despite the revealed deterministic nature of the world. I will try to do that now, then return to this hypothetical example.

1. Definitions

Let’s get the terms out of the way.2 As used here, determinism is the notion that at any given moment the physics of the universe admits only a single possible future.

Choice is a little more complicated. When I use the terms “choice” or “decision,” I am referring to categories of actions undertaken by specific agents. For these choices to be free, they must be caused strictly by processes internal to the agent, but that alone is not a sufficient definition. Taking people to be the agents in question, there are plenty of actions that people perform for reasons that are strictly internal, but are not volitional. (Sneezing, for example, or breathing while asleep.) So let us say that an action is a choice or decision if and only if it is caused by the agent’s beliefs and desires.

This definition still admits some quibbling. How are we to consider, for example, addiction? It motivates action based on beliefs and desires, but we feel in some sense that the desires have been warped by an external factor. Similarly with compulsion, where we feel that desire has been warped by a non-volitional internal factor. So let us even more narrowly define a free choice: a choice is free if and only if (1) the agent would have acted differently had it so chosen, (2) the action was voluntary (unaffected by internal restraint), (3) the action was uncoerced (unaffected by external restraint).

It’s worth noting that if we consider things like addiction and compulsion to be, in some fashion, an adulteration of free will, then seeing such things exist in human beings lends credence to the mechanistic description of free will that I am going to develop. But what do I, specifically, mean by “free will?” Let us describe an agent as having free will if and only if the agent possesses the ability to perform deliberative processes that result in choice.

2. A Brief Hearing for Indeterminism

Let’s look quickly at the notion of free will in the absence of determinism. Imagine, instead, that the future is completely independent of the present, that there is no causal relationship between this present moment and the one to come. What, then, does choice consist of? If there is no causal relationship between the present and the future, then, as David Hume noted, any attempt to make an informed choice as to how you should act in pursuit of a goal is futile. In the purely indeterminist case, past experience is not a logical guide for future behavior. So rather than free will being obviously incompatible with determinism, it is in fact pure indeterminism that trivially excludes the existence of free will. Choice can not exist in a universe where the future is random. Choice requires some degree of causal relationship between past, present, and future.

“Some degree,” though, is a quibble phrase. Perhaps, one might argue, the universe is determinist-ish. It’s predictable enough for choice to exist, but not perfectly predictable. Perfect predictability, one might wish to argue, also excludes free will. If one wishes to take this perspective, then one has to answer the question: at what point does the somewhat predictable universe become too predictable for free will to exist? I will now argue that choice can exist even in a purely deterministic universe, sliding that boundary point right off the scale.

3. Deliberative Process as Physical Event

Posit that we exist in a perfectly deterministic universe, and consider the case where you throw a ball at my face. If I am asleep–eyes closed, largely insensitive to my environment–then you are very likely to hit me. If I am awake–eyes open, watching your throw–then you are unlikely to hit me. (What do I mean though, in this deterministic universe, by “likely” and “unlikely?” I’ll address that more later. For now, let’s say that if we repeated many trials with slightly varying contextual conditions, in most of the cases where you throw the ball at my face while I’m asleep you hit me, and in most of the cases where you do so when I’m awake, you miss.) I am, when awake, able to avoid the ball, using faculties unavailable to me when I am asleep. I am able to avoid the ball, but I don’t have to do so. If, say, you’ve thrown a ball at my face because we are playing baseball, I might perceive some advantage in allowing it to hit me. That is to say, I might avoid avoiding the ball. I’m able to do this because our species has evolved sensory apparatus (sight, proprioception) that allows me to know when projectiles are coming at my head and move out of the way. When those apparatus are nonfunctional, such as when I’m asleep, I can’t move out of the way.

Events that I have the capacity to perceive and avoid are what Daniel Dennett likes to call evitable3 (to distinguish from those that are inevitable). Now, you may be objecting, “the universe was posited to be deterministic. Whether or not the ball hits your face was already determined the moment it leaves my hand. That makes it inevitable.” To which I would respond: inevitable to whom? It is clearly not inevitable to me; as the baseball/non-baseball example shows, whether or not the ball hits me is influenced by my beliefs and desires. Perhaps you mean inevitable to the universe. But that is not a meaningful notion, the universe is not a volitional agent. It does not make sense to speak of the universe avoiding, or avoiding avoiding.

The motions I make with my body after you throw the ball at me result from a cascade of electrochemical events in my brain, which correspond to my weighing the desirability of the ball hitting my face, the position of my body, how I would have to move to avoid the ball, etc. This electrochemical cascade, this physical event, is itself a deliberative process, one that results me choosing to dodge or not dodge the ball. All of my initial definitions for free will have now been met: I am an agent possessed of the ability to engage in deliberative processes that result in the perpetration of a choice: decision to dodge or not dodge the ball. That decision is definitionally a choice, in that it is an action caused by my beliefs and desires, where my beliefs are my sensory/conceptual model of the world, and my desires are my internal preferences. It even meets the more restrictive definition of being a free choice. The fact that the dodge or the hit was already extant in the future when the ball left your hand is irrelevant. The free choice was already extant, too.

I know of no logically coherent way to define freedom of choice that is incompatible with choice as an event that can occur within a deterministic universe. As long as choice is a behavior arising from a deliberative process, it is compatible with determinism. Thus free will, as I have defined it, is also compatible with determinism.

4. The Issue of Counterfactuals

One reason that it seems (incorrectly) to many people that determinism is incompatible with choice is that our deliberative processes which result in choice involve the consideration of counterfactuals. We think to ourselves, “What would be true if I did X? What would be true if I did Y? How likely is it that any action I take will result in Z?” This notion of likeliness seems to be challenged by determinism. How can one meaningfully think of things being likely or unlikely if the future is already determined? But in truth there is no contradiction. When we utilize counterfactuals in our deliberative processes, we are conducting mental simulations based on our beliefs and our understanding of past experiences. Our ability to judge how likely we think something is does not depend on what actually later occurs. The mental events of simulation and prediction are just part of the deliberative process that results in choice.

We talk about counterfactuals in a confusing way, though. If I am standing at the free throw line on a basketball court, and I shoot a free throw that bounces off the rim, I might be heard to say, “I could have made that.” What does that statement mean? I’m not actually saying that if everything about the state of myself and the world were somehow exactly the same down to the minutest detail, and the situation were to recur, I would make the shot. Rather, I’m making a claim about counterfactuals. I’m saying that among the family of possible worlds admitting minute variations of the air, moisture on the ball, potential gradients along the ion channels of the cells in my muscles; in many of those possible worlds I make the shot. Here again, the fact that when I took the shot there was only one physically possible future does not invalidate my counterfactual analysis. Just as it is meaningful to say that it is, was, and always will be the case that I missed the shot, it is also meaningful to say that I (counterfactually) could have made it. It is simply semantic ambiguity that makes these two notions seem to be in conflict.

Epilogue: The Predictor, Again

So let’s go back to the case of the Predictor. If I were to gift to you a tiny toy that happened, by implication, to demonstrate that the future already existed, of course you wouldn’t stop feeding yourself, or paying your bills, or acting in the interest of others you care for. You do these things because you believe they matter, and make choices motivated by that belief. The only reason for your choices to change would be if your beliefs fundamentally changed. Maybe you’ve been previously convinced, for no good reason, that determinism would mean that nothing matters. Then playing with the Predictor might be dangerous. You might then, as some people in Ted’s story do, choose to abdicate all personal responsibilities and never do anything again. But that’s not the Predictor’s fault, nor the universe’s; it’s the fault of you having “determinism = meaninglessness” in your head as a disabling, destructive narrative . That would be a tragedy if it were to happen–but why should it? The Predictor is just a small piece of plastic that you can throw in the trash if you want4, and anyway, reading this has taken a long time and you’re hungry. Might as well go eat something.

  1. In his story “What’s Expected of Us,” Nature, 2005 ↩

  2. I’m indebted for portions of this section to Curtis Brown, my symbolic logic professor at Trinity University. ↩

  3. Dennett discusses evitable and inevitable events at length in his book Freedom Evolves, which is a much more learned and thorough explanation of compatibilist determinism than this article. ↩

  4. All of the discussion up to this point has been about a hypothetical universe that I simply posited at the start was deterministic. I haven’t made any claims about the actual reality you and I inhabit, nor have I placed a tiny plastic Predictor in your hand. And, of course, I can’t. They don’t really exist. But I think I can give you something that is very close to the same.

    Special relativity has as one of its basic results that simultaneity does not have any meaning across reference frames. The math for this isn’t too complicated, but instead of writing out equations, here’s a two minute video that clearly demonstrates the phenomenon.

    There are many versions of this thought experiment, but the one in the video is the one Einstein proposed. As you can see in the video, the man on the platform sees the bolts of lightning strike both ends of the train simultaneously, and the woman riding in the train sees lighting first strike the front of the train, and then strike the back of the train. And neither person is wrong. In the man’s frame of reference, the strikes were simultaneous. In the woman’s, one came before the other.

    Special relativity has been experimentally confirmed time after time. As theories go, it’s one we are as sure of as we are sure of anything at all. Consequently it is already widely accepted that simultaneity as a concept has no meaning across reference frames. But lets think through the implications: the man on the platform observes an event that, at the time he observes it, is still in the woman on the train’s future. That is to say, there exist an event–the lightning striking the back of the train–that is in the man’s past, and in the woman’s future. Thus it is possible for a physical event that is already in my past to still be in your future. But the past is unchangeable. Anything that is in the past, for anyone, is necessarily a thing that happened in the universe. But if my unchangeable past can be your future, that means that an event in your future is determined. And this reasoning can, in principle, apply to any arbitrary event. Therefore the future already exists, and the events of the future are already determined.

    Conclusion: special relativity implies that the universe in which we live is, in fact, deterministic. ↩

New Writing: Ted Chiang, Ben Mauk, Carmen Machado

New things for you to read!

WisCon 35

My con badge

After a year away I returned to my first and favorite SF convention, WisCon. I last attended in 2008, and had such a good experience that I sent Nalo Hopkinson flowers as thanks for having convinced me to go despite my incredulity. As good as 2008 was, this year was even better. A big part of the reason why relates to that pink thumbnail.

Day 1:

J, sky buddy.

My WisCon began before I even got to Madison. While still in DFW airport I met up with J, just parted from M after flight delays forced them to take separate planes. J had been assigned the last standby seat on a direct flight to Madison, whereas M had already boarded a plane to Minneapolis, where she would get a ride into Madison from Haddayr Copley-Woods and David Schwartz. Fortunately for me, though, J’s flight was the same as my own, and we got to sit next to each other chatting about interesting research in psychology and physics all the way to Wisconsin.

We were picked up at the airport by Karen Meisner. She took us to her (amazing!) house, and introduced us to (amazing!) Amal El-Mohtar. We chatted for a while in Karen’s library, then went to the Madison Concourse Hotel to check in to our rooms. Then it was off to the Guest of Honor reading at A Room Of One’s Own, one of the last remaning feminist bookstores in the country. The event began with the reading of Joanna Russ’s story, “When It Changed,” and then WisCon Guest of Honor Nisi Shawl read an excerpt from a story that was, I believe, published in one of this year’s WisCon publications. It involved oracular dreams about Michael Jackson, who would also be a subject of Nisi’s Guest of Honor speech on Day 4. (UPDATE: Karen points out in the comments that the story, “Pataki,” was originally published in Strange Horizons and can be read here.)

After the reading J went off to find M, and I met up with roommates Keffy Kehrli and Liz Argall (who was to stay with us unti Liz Gorinsky arrived the next day). We ended up going out to a Japanese fusion restaurant with a group that included my former teacher Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kat Bayer, as well as a man named Alex. (Unfortunately, no one had name tags yet, and I didn’t get Alex’s last name written down. If you read this, let me know who you are!)

After dinner it was back to the hotel, where Keffy and I had a pleasant reunion with Geoff Ryman, our other former Clarion teacher who was at the con. We ended up in the bar, where Geoff bought us drinks, and I finally got to meet Rachel Swirsky and her husband Mike. Rachel is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was extremely generous with her time when I emailed her out of the blue some months ago to ask about her workshop experience. It was lovely to finally meet her, and I ended up spending a long time at a table chatting publishing with Rachel, Keffy, Liz A., Kater Cheek, and Julie Andrews. Eventually the gin that Geoff poured into me had me feeling extra social, and I introduced myself to Gwenda Bond and reintroduced myself to Annalee Newitz, whom I had met previously when she gave a lecture at Trinity University. We discussed our favorite extinct megafauna. Eventually the bar began to empty, and Keffy, Liz A., and I went up to our room and crashed.

Day 2:

Spent a long, lazy morning in the room chatting with Liz A. and Keffy. Our phantom fourth roommate, Michael Underwood, had appeared sometime during the night, but was gone again before the rest of us got up. Eventually we got up and left the room, immediately running into Cat Valente who had the room across the hall. We ended up heading to lunch at a noodle place with Cat and several of her friends, whose names I failed to write down. (Were you at that lunch? Let me know who you are!) After lunch I went to the WisCon gathering and poked through stacks of ARCs. A little while later I got a call from Rachel, who wanted to introduce me to several of her students from when she was at Iowa. I met L Savich, Ryan Leeds, An Owomoyela, Jei, Sam Larsen-Ferree, and Jai Marcade. I also met Ann Leckie, who was not one of Rachel’s Iowa City students, but seems lovely all the same.

From there I went to a panel on autism and Asperger’s syndrome in fiction. Curiously, no one on the panel was actually on the autism spectrum. Haddayr commented on this and offered to give up her panel space to any audience member on the spectrum who wanted it, but no one accepted her offer. That turned out to be for the best, as Haddayr ended up being the most insightful of the panelists. There was another panelist who was woefully uninformed about autism issues and frequently made statements that were ignorant to the point of being offensive, such as characterizing autism as a mental illness and equating Asperger’s syndrome with psychopathy. Fortunately, Ryan Leeds, who is on the spectrum, was in the audience and called her on her more outrageous pronouncements, giving a much-needed insider perspective. Rachel Swirsky also was not shy with her displeasure, for which I was grateful. It was, as Haddayr later noted, a panel where the audience was educating the panelists.

Stylin’ in a piece from the M Collection.

From there I met up with Liz A., J, and M (safely arrived in Madison), and went out to another Japanese restaurant with Ben Rosenbaum, Susan Marie-Groppi, and David Moles. Liz A. and I spent most of the dinner talking with Ben about Maimonedean Judaism, and attempted a positive construction of atheist principles.  After the meal we walked around Madison until we found a FedEx store to make copies of the posters for the Genderfloomp Dance Party (about which, more later) and the We Have Always Captured the Castle reading (ditto). On the way we talked of generational shifts in feminism, SlutWalks, and things from childhood that fail to age well. On the way back I mostly talked about how I was cold and getting rained on, so M, who was wearing many layers, lent me her jacket.

Back at the hotel it was time for the karaoke party. Liz A. sang “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and goaded me into finding something on the list to sing. None of my usual karaoke songs (i.e., songs that merely require speaking to a beat rather than singing) were on the list, so I ended up giving a first-time performance of “I Am The Walrus.” Ben, Amal, and David queued up “Like a G6,” but ignored the lyrics on the screen and instead performed “Roll a D6.” M offered an astonishingly great rendition of “Born This Way,” complete with contextualizing editorial against theism and biological essentialism. Then I got to serve as one of several lascivious backup dancers for Liz A.’s performance of “I Touch Myself.” By that point it was pretty much equal parts karaoke and dance party, and it didn’t let up until well after midnight. When it was over I went up to the party floor and spent a while chatting with Rachel among the wreckage of the FOGcon party, but soon discovered that three hours of dancing had left my legs unable to keep me upright for extended periods of time, and so took them upstairs to bed.

Day 3:

Began my day by following Keffy down to the “Journeyman Writers’ Group” event, largely because it was being run by Vylar Kaftan, whom I wanted to meet. There was an interesting discussion of query letter verbiage, but overall I didn’t get a lot out of it. After that I spent some time in the lobby with Rachel who introduced me to Sarah Prineas, who lives in Iowa City and who let me know about the local SF writers’ group she’s involved with. While I was in the lobby I ran into Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Laurenn McCubbin, who I had been looking forward to meeting at the con, and planned a breakfast date for the next day. Then it was back upstairs for an important cosmetics appointment.

Karen Meisner: making my stuff prettier since 2009.

In response to my saying that I was not very good at it, Karen had the day before offered to paint my nails for the Genderfloomp Dance Party. I went up to my room to retrieve my cosmetics, and found Karen and Susan chatting at the 12th floor computer desk. Karen offered to do my nails right there, and produced some varnishes of her own she had brought for the purpose. We ended up doing a layer of bubblegum pink (mine) under a layer of glittery clear coat (Karen’s). It took me a while to internalize that I couldn’t use my hands normally right after my nails were painted, and Karen ended up having to redo a few of them, but eventually I figured it out. While my nails were drying I chatted with Karen and Susan about the distinctions between editorial vision and editorial bias, and as other people walked by they were drawn in by the salon atmosphere. J, Cat Valente, Gwenda Bond, and Theodora Goss all paused a while in the hallway to discuss fiction and cosmetics with us. Eventually my nails were dry and the next round of programming about to start, and the salon dispersed.

I went with Jen to the “…And Other Circuses” reading by Gwenda Bond, Richard Butner, Genevieve Valentine, and Christopher Rowe. Gwenda read the beginning of her circus-themed novel in progress. Richard read a story called “Backyard Everest” which was not circus themed in any way, but was great fun. Genevieve read an excerpt from Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, her novel which just sold out its first print run (I went to the dealer’s room an grabbed a copy immediately after the reading). (Side note: before the reading started I finally got to let Genevieve know that she seems to be the only other person on the planet who understands the fabulous wonderfulness of Flight of Dragons the same way I do. I agree with every letter of that link. Until I found a clean digital copy of the movie, it would have been impossible for me to justify having children.) Christopher read a circus-themed excerpt from his D&D novel, and then a non-circus-themed excerpt from another novel, the title of which (if it had one) I failed to record. After the reading I chatted with Christopher, M, and Alice Kim, whom I had met 2 years ago and of whose writing I have since become a great fan.

I went to dinner with Keffy, Sunny Moraine, and Liz Fidler. We went to a pub food and beer restaurant, where the food was quite good, as was the company, but I unfortunately had to leave the meal early with a minor bout of Crohn’s issues. I went back to the hotel and read in my room for a couple of hours until they passed. When I was feeling better I headed to the Governor’s Club lounge to snack, and ended up hanging out with Kater, Nayad Monroe, Michael Thomas, Lynne Thomas, and Seanan McGuire. Seanan and I figured out that I had met her once before, when I was in elementary school and she was playing Little Red Riding Hood in the touring company of Into The Woods. This set a new life record for known delay between two meetings with the same person.

I caught the end of the always entertaining Tiptree auction with Keffy and Liz A. I got there just in time to see Geoff get held down while a Space Babe temporary tattoo was applied to his cheek. (A cheek on his face, as opposed to elsewhere, thanks to a $100 intervention by the Tiptree Motherboard.) I made a late, winning bid on an ARC of “The Alchemist” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Then I went up and fluttered around the parties on the 6th floor for a while. I ran into M, J, and Alice in the hallway, and as we discussed physical fitness a group began to nucleate around us. Eventually we grew too large for the hallway and bounced around floors for a while looking for free couch space. Eventually we ended up in M and J’s room with Kater, Geoff, Gwenda, Christopher, Richard, Karen Fowler, Ted Chiang, and Barbara Gilly. We talked about primatology, and played with some of the Genderfloomp party favors, and I won a dollar bet with Ted. Eventually people began to droop, and we all retired to our rooms.

Day 4:

I slept poorly and had a few seriously disturbing dreams. But this resulted in my being awake earlier than normal, so I was able to join J for a light breakfast in the Governor’s club lounge. J let me know that reservations for next year’s convention block of hotel rooms opened that morning, so I headed down to the lobby and booked a room for 2012. Then I waited for Kelly-Sue and Laurenn.

Ten years!

This breakfast was ten years in the making. I first interacted with Kelly-Sue on the Warren Ellis Forum when I was 17 years old. She was already one of the cleverest and most well-liked people in that community when teenager-E. J. first got there, looking to impress. Laurenn I don’t think I had ever previously interacted with online, but I remember that not long after I joined the WEF, people started talking about Laurenn’s book XXXLiveNudeGirls, and I soon became a great fan of Laurenn’s artwork. Kelly-Sue got married to a man she met on the forum and had children and became a comics translator and writer, and Laurenn kept making art and became an illustrator and comics artist. I became, well, me. Finally, after a decade: coffee, tea, and scrambled eggs.

This is my “I can’t believe I’m really having breakfast with Laurenn McCubbin” face.

Laurenn told me about her experiences getting an MFA, and about the visual media program she’s going back to grad school for, and told me that, based on our conversation, she thought I would do well as a grad student. Kelly-Sue congratulated me on Iowa and told me that she and her husband Matt had followed some of the younger WEFugees online over the years and that I hadn’t disappointed, which is one of those absurdly generous compliments that comes out of nowhere to knock your world slightly askew. We talked about Kelly-Sue’s career, and her children, and I got to tell her how an interview she gave while pregnant with her second child was crucial to helping me crack open the emotional core of a story I was writing. It was a delightful meeting with people I’d admired from afar for years, who turned out to be even more impressive in person. I hope I don’t have to wait ten more years for our next encounter.

After breakfast I went to the panel, “How to Respond Appropriately to Concerns About Cultural Appropriation,” and listened to Geoff, Rachel, Victor Raymond, and K. Tempest Bradford speak intelligently on the subject. Geoff had a comment I especially liked that cultural practices and artifacts are embedded in cultural context, and that severing them from their context to serve as set dressing in a story is a hallmark of poor writing. After that panel I stayed in the room for the next bit of programming, “Sibling of the Revenge of the Not Another F*cking Race Panel,” with Tempest, Amal, LaShawn Wanak, and two other people whose names I neglected to write down. (UPDATE: The other two were Candra Gill and Isabel Schechter.) This was almost all good fun, but was pretty much ruined for me by one guy who went up and made an ass of himself. His name was Ben, and he had already revealed himself as someone prone to boorish behavior at the karaoke party. He went up to ask a question, and my stomach twisted into knots at the car-crash-seen-through-a-window feeling that something bad was about to happen and I was powerless to stop it. Sure enough, he spent a few minutes with a microphone in his hand doing little other than harassing Amal. She handled him with great aplomb, but I, who frequently watch awkwardness comedies like The Office through the cracks in my fingers, had my face buried in my hands the whole time. Eventually the audience booed him and Tempest called him on spouting entitled nonsense and sent him back to his seat. After that the panel proceeded normally, but I was too keyed up to really enjoy it.

After the panel I left the hotel and went to Michelangelo’s for the “We Have Always Captured the Castle” reading with Ben, J, M, David Moles, Amal, and Geoff. Ben read an excerpt of his novel in search of a title, in which multi-bodied humans of the far future scoff at the notion of colonizing other planets. J read a lyrical story of a fisherman with a magical boat. M read an excerpt of her novel-in-progress, which was fantastic. (I’m just going to pause here to reiterate: M is writing a novel. Get excited, tell your friends; this is a big fucking deal.) David read a story called, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Giant Robots.” Amal sang a song, recited a poem, and read a story. Geoff, being a gifted performer as well as a brilliant author, was made to go last. He read a monologue-style story about a man whose job is to collect evidence for war crimes trials in areas where rape is being used as a weapon of war. He embodied his main character, and the whole room was stone silent, and when the story ended it took us a good 15 seconds to remember to applaud. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room. I had to remove my glasses because watching him perform while I listened to him became a little too overwhelming. It was a deeply disturbing and powerful piece.

Between the unpleasantness at the panel and the affecting end to the reading, I ended up a bit dazed. The sequence of events evoked a surge of social anxiety, and I wandered around feeling oddly insulated from my environment. Back at the hotel, Karen Meisner found me and asked, “Are you feeling a little lost?” She gave me a huge, unprompted bolus of acceptance and reassurance, and cemented my perception of her as one of the kindest and most gracious people I’ve ever met. I headed up to my room to wait out my already ebbing funk, and commiserated with Keffy, who was also feeling shaken after an unpleasant encounter with someone possessed of a very poor understanding of how to be a trans ally. We chilled for a while, talking and reading. Then I went to have a dinner of snacks from the Governor’s lounge before heading down to listen to the Joanna Russ memorial and the Guest of Honor speeches, both of which were moving. I did not, though, stay to watch the Tiptree Award presentation, because it was time to prepare for the Genderfloomp Dance Party.

Genderfloomp:

*pout*

M had told me she was planning the Genderfloomp dance party with Liz G. some months prior to the con, when we were hanging out in Austin. The mandate: “We seek to explore and expand our concepts of gender via booty-shaking.” The motto: “Fuck the binary, let’s boogie.” When she told me about the event, M also mentioned that all the guys she had told responded with something like, “Sounds fun, do I have to dress up?” and preemptively assured me that I could attend even if I was unwilling to do drag. By implicitly doubting my commitment to sparklemotion, M ensured that I would go absolutely overboard. I gave myself a $50 budget and spent two weeks putting an outfit together, getting lessons in fashion and cosmetics from hand-picked representatives from the San Antonio community theater crowd. I color-coordinated my accessories and bought ankle boots. I grew a beard just so I could shave it off before the dance. I was shooting for dazzling.

The dance was easily my favorite con programming. It was joyous and human and enthusiastic and exhausting. People made shadow puppets, twirled feather boas, kicked off their shoes and pasted on mustaches. There was a dance contest, which Keffy won after an epic one-on-one battle with Ben. I won Best Dressed, along with another fellow whose name, I believe, was Tom. At some point Liz A., Keffy, Amal, and I went up to the photobooth on the 6th floor and posed for floompy pictures. As the winners of Best Dancer and Best Dressed respectively, Keffy and I had to pose for a fight picture:

Cynthia Sparklepants vs. Charles Beauregard

While up in the photobooth, we stood in a circle and gave each other new names. I named Liz A., “Lionel Cho, disgraced patent attorney.” Liz A. named Keffy, “Charles Beauregard, construction worker at large.” Keffy named Amal, “Gus Wrigley, accountant to the stars.” Amal named me, “Cynthia Sparklepants, party princess.” These names have been immortalized in the WisCon 35 Photobooth Flickr stream. That silliness done, we went back to the dance party and boogied until we dropped. The crowd did eventually begin to thin out, but there was a group of post-floomp hardcore who stuck around until 5:00 am, which included myself, Anthony Ha, Karen, Ben, Liz A., Liz G., Amal, Alice, and M. But even we had to, eventually, call it a night. Hopefully there will be more floomping at future WisCons. For more pictures of Genderfloomp, you can view my Picasa album, or [broken link to M’s album removed].

Day 5:

Travel day. After packing away my cosmetics and jewelry, I had a quick breakfast in the Governor’s lounge with Keffy, Mike Underwood, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders (both of whom had cut up the dance floor something fierce the night before). Then checkout, a sprint through the airport to catch my plane, and a lot of sitting around until I found myself back in San Antonio, WisCon behind me, the Texas sun sparkling off of my fingernails.

Home.

WisCon 33

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This was my first SF convention, and was something of a test to see if I could enjoy conventions of any kind.  Last summer, while I was in San Diego for Clarion, I went to ComiCon, which managed to awaken an inner agoraphobe the existence of which I had not previously suspected.  But a week later Nalo Hopkinson made me promise to attend WisCon, assuring me I would find it a valuable experience.  Boy, was she ever right.

Day 1:

Geoff Ryman, Kat Howard, Me, and Keffy Kherli

Clarion 2008 Reunion 1: Geoff Ryman, Kat Howard, Me, and Keffy Kehrli

Kat, Keffy, and I drove to Madison from Minneapolis, in Kat’s VW Beetle.  I rode in the back, and slept part of the way, waking up in time to see our entry into the city.  We checked in to the Concourse hotel, then wandered out into downtown until we found a restaurant that wanted to fill us with post-road-trip margaritas.  Then it was back to the hotel, where we visited the Dealer Room (where I discovered that attempting to talk to Ted Chiang turned me into a stuttering fool, albiet one able to correctly identify literary influences), then wandered around until it was time for the opening ceremonies.  I managed to catch Geoff Ryman, Guest of Honor and one of our Clarion teachers, as he was coming in the door, and we monopolized his attention until the stage manager for the opening ceremonies came and asked if we wouldn’t mind terribly letting the GoH go to take part in the Con programming.  There was a skit, which was mildly entertaining but was completely overshadowed by Geoff and Ellen Klages spontaneously making out with each other.

Kat, Me, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Keffy

Clarion 2008 Reunion 2: Kat, Me, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Keffy

After the opening ceremonies, Keffy had a panel.  “TYRANNOSAURS IN F-14S!!!!” on the topic of SF that is so bad that it’s good.  The discussion focused mostly on television and movies.  The consensus opinion was that books generally don’t fall into the “so bad it’s good” category for most people because (a) books lack the audiovisual component that, when done well, can act as foils for a weak story, and (b) the time investment required to read a book is usually enough greater than the time to watch a movie that they are held to a higher standard.   After Keffy’s panel the programming of interest was over and we were off to the parties, where we met Jed Hartman and had a reunion with Mary Anne Mohanraj, another of our Clarion teachers.  We didn’t stay at the parties long, though, as we were all exhausted.

Day 2:

Keffy with Sybil's Garage #6, his first publication

Keffy with Sybil's Garage #6, his first publication

Breakfast was had at a coffee and crepes place we found called Bradbury’s, which struck us as an appropriately SFnal name.  Then Kat and I went to Ellen Klages’s Guest of Honor reading while Keffy went to another panel.  We met up again in the Dealer’s Room to find, among other things, the new issue of Sybil’s Garage, which contains Keffy’s first publication.  Then Kat went to have lunch with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, Keffy went to moderate a panel, “Keeping Up With Science,” and I went to another panel, “What’s in the Air?” with Geoff, Jed, Neil Rest, and Kristine Smith, which was about how techonlogy will be changing human society in the near-term future.  My favorite comment from that one was made by a textile preservationist named (I think) Laura who observed that a post-privacy technological society might have more in common, in terms of interpersonal relationships, with a pre-technological small town than it does with the modern day.  When that panel was over I went to a reading by, among others, Ellen Ku. and Delia.  The reading was notable as the only Con programming at which I encoutered people being assholes: a pair came in late and sat behind me, whispering loudly about how it was “happening again” and “rude to the real writers.”  As it happened, the Con program was printed before the full lineup for the reading was finalized, and the first reader wasn’t listed (though her name was on the sign outside the door).  So the natural thing to do, at least in the minds of the people behind me, was to stand up and interrupt her mid-sentence to say, “When are the writers who are actually scheduled going to be reading?”  Ellen Kushner smacked them down.

After the reading I went to “How Should Magazines and Anthologies Review Submissions?” with Mary Anne, Susan Marie Groppi (EIC of Strange Horizons, a letter from whom I have framed on the wall of my office), John Joseph Adams, Sumana Harihareshwara, Deb Taber, and Adrian Alan Simmons.  The best thing about this panel was getting to meet Susan, Sumana, and Deb, with whom I would find myself interacting more as the Con progressed.  I also learned from J. J. Adams that when F&SF takes a long time to get back to you, it is generally a good thing.  (As of this writing they’ve had a story I sent them for eight weeks.)  After the panel the group got together again for the Tiptree auction, which was one of the most entertaining events I’ve ever attended.  Highlights included a Geoff Ryman striptease act and a group recitation of a hilariously queer award from Ellen Klages’s childhood.

Day 3:

"Giant" by Ingrid Kallick

"Giant" by Ingrid Kallick -- notice the shawl made of people

Again began the day with breakfast at Bradbury’s.  Then Keffy went to “Keeping the S in SF,” and Kat and I attended “The Kids’ Books That Made Us,” after which we went to the art room to pick up a print Kat had purchased.  I ended up buying a different print by the same artist, Ingrid Kallick.  “Giant” whispered to me as I walked past it that it was actually a short story masquerading as a piece of visual art, and really needed to come home with me so I could write it.

As we were leaving the art room, Ellen Kushner invited us to lunch with her and Delia.  We tracked down Keffy and headed out to an Afghani restaurant.  On the way we ran into Mary Anne, Ben Rosenbaum, and Mary Kowal, and the group grew.  And then seemed to grow some more, until Ellen turned around and announced, “I don’t do twelve person lunches.”  The final tally ended up at nine.  From lunch Keffy went to be on “The Obligatory Workshop Panel,” and Kat and I went to hear Geoff’s Guest of Honor reading, after which was what turned out to be my favorite event at WisCon: the Strange Horizons Tea Party.

Me and Karen Meisner

Karen Meisner and me

At the Tea Party I managed to drop all of my social anxiety for perhaps the only time during the Con.  I finally met my editor on “Husbandry,” Karen Meisner, who I had been looking for all weekend.  We hit it off quite well.  I excitedly related my Con activities, and she, amused, told me that I was imbuing ubiquitous experiences with the wide-eyed wonder of a neophyte.  She also tracked down and introduced me to Meghan McCarron, who I had been wanting to meet and of whose writing I am a huge fan.  I stayed for the whole party and then some, sweating profusely and chatting incessantly.  I also met Alice Kim, Eric Vogt, and Jennifer I-Didn’t-Get-Her-Last-Name.  Sadly, the Tea Party did eventually end, and I went back to my room to clean up for the Guest of Honor speeches and Tiptree presentation.

Before we went to WisCon I decided that my friends needed to experience the joy that is a polyester robe with dragons on, so I got them each one as a gift.  We donned them before heading down to the ceremony, in preparation for the fancy dress party later than night.

Kat, Keffy, Mary Anne, and me

Kat, Keffy, Mary Anne, and me

We wandered into the big conference hall which had been set up like a dining room, and Ben Rosenbaum gestured us over to the table where Jed, Mary Anne, and Sumana were already sitting.  We listened with them to the speeches, and then to the presentation of the Tiptree award to Nisi Shawl (Patrick Ness was unable to be there to accept his; Geoff read a letter from him).  Then, this years Guests of Honor having been given there full due in accordance with WisCon tradition, the Guests of Honor for next year were announced.  They will be Nnedi Okorafor and… Mary Anne Mohanraj!  We all completely lost our shit, gawking at each other and, when she came back, hugging Mary Anne.  We trailed along behind her, taking pictures and freaking out for about the next hour, then bounced around the parties for perhaps another hour or two before heading back to the room and crashing.

Day 4:

Due to the exigencies of flight schedules and other non-WisCon committments, we got up early and left without taking part in any of the final day’s programming.  But I think we all felt that we got our money’s worth.  I pretty much can’t wait to go again next year.

Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” Available Online

Ted Chiang has a story, “Exhalation,” up for a Hugo award this year.  It was originally published in the anthology Eclipse 2, and now Night Shade Books has made it available for download.  I just read it, and loved it.  It is in structure and tone very similar to one of my very favorite short stories, “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges.  In fact, the similarities are such that I wonder if Borges was a direct inspiration.  Compare the first lines.

Borges: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, series of hexagonal galleries.”

Chiang: “It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life.”

Additionally, both stories end with the narrator drawing comfort from imagining a universe which extends beyond what is commonly conceived of as the boundaries of the one he inhabits.  Borges’s story uses combinatorial complexity as the basis of its thematic explorations, while Chiang’s uses the laws of thermodynamics.  Basically, Chiang has written the physics-y version of my favorite math-y story ever, and has thus made my inner scientist very happy.