Readercon Reflections

Readercon 21 was, for me, exciting and stimulating, though this year in particular it felt like I only had a few minutes to talk with everybody I wanted to talk with.  I think part of this is a result of my now living in New Hampshire rather than New Jersey, so I just don't see a lot of folks from the writing, publishing, and reading worlds much anymore.

Before I get into some thoughts on some panels and discussions, some pictures: Ellen Datlow's and Tempest Bradford's.  Tempest asked everybody to make a sad face for her, not because Readercon was a sad con (just the opposite!), but because it's fun to have people make sad faces.  The iconic picture from the weekend for me, though, is Ellen's photo of Liz Hand's back.  I covet Liz's shirt.

And now for some only vaguely coherent thoughts on some of the panels...

Stories of Faith & Fiction, Reality & Escape, Shobies & Invaders

For my first bit of venturing back into 1990, two stories offer not only a good place to start, but an interesting pairing: Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Shobies Story" (first published in Universe 1) and John Kessel's "Invaders" (first published in F&SF, October 1990), both of which were reprinted in Dozois's best-of-the-year anthology.

(By the way, in these posts I plan to discuss the entirety of the stories, which means that if you don't like to have plot elements revealed, you should not read here about stories you have not read.)

David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have offered a good basic summary of the ideas Le Guin is exploring in her story:

"The Shobies' Story" describes a society in which consensus matters more than individual viewpoints. [... It] posits a reality that emerges as the sum of what all the participants say: a meta-narrative, a democratically constructed myth.  Le Guin tells us that the observer is part of the reality she's trying to describe.  Every observer sees things differently, and the melding of those interpretations becomes the world.

It's not just interpretations, though -- from the title to the final word, it is stories that create reality for her characters.  Stories are dramatizations of interpretations, webs of cause and effect, and they are they are themselves subject to interpretations.  "The Shobies' Story" becomes a kind of metaphor for science fiction: the characters are the first sentient beings to travel via a new, instantaneous space ship drive, and what they discover is that such travel requires them to get their stories straight.  But the interesting thing here is not just that the new form of travel requires consensus reality, but that it requires consensus storytelling -- instantaneous travel through the universe relies on stories.

Now here's a passage from early in "Invaders", where a colonel is interrogating an alien who has landed a flying saucer in a football stadium:

"Our ships operate according to a principle of basic physics [said the alien, Flash].  Certain fundamental physical reactions are subject to the belief system of the human beings promoting them.  If I believe that X is true, then X is more probably true than if I did not believe so."

The colonel leaned forward again.  "We know that already.  We call it the 'observer effect.'  Our great physicist Werner Heisenberg--"

"Yes.  I'm afraid we carry this principle a little further than that."

"What do you mean?"

Flash smirked.  "I mean that our ships move through interstellar space by the power of prayer."