Greer Gilman's Blog, page 25

The light fantastic

Amazingly, our "Mapping the Fantastic" panel at Arisia drew 38 engaged and eager listeners at 10 o'clock on Monday morning. Thanks to Sarah Smith's excellent groundwork—airwork?—we had a screen and and a gallery of images, created or collected by Sarah, Chris Philbrook, Anne Nydam, and myself.

I got to talk about the stories written in the sky.

My starmaps were inspired by Lascaux, where 16 or 17,000 years ago, an artist painted a bull and six black dots above his shoulder, which might be Taurus with the Pleiades: not a hunt, but The Hunt.





And just a day or two before the panel, I found this:





A stone carving from Kashmir, circa 4600 B.C.E., records a supernova just above Taurus—again envisioned as a great horned creature, a stag—confronted by Orion shooting a bow at him, and with a starry spearman and a dog at his heels. The discovery rejoices me, and led beautifully into my attempts to trace Story in the heavens.





All images are here, kindly hosted by our moderator.

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The way to the underworld lies in the stars

Some new Cloudish star maps.

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Contrafibularities

Arisia is this coming weekend, and I have some lovely panels.  I am especially psyched for "Finding Alexandria: Libraries in SFF," as its counterpart in Helsinki was sheer bliss and all too brief, and for "Mapping the Fantastic," for which I am reworking some of my Cloudish starmaps; but of course, there are sessions that simply catch fire.  Any of these could be terrific.  How lovely to have a themed reading session!  And with such co-readers!  I always seem to be paired or grouped with authors reading something utterly dissimilar to my work:  military hard SF or the like.  Nothing against the diversity of genres in our field, but it's hard to please such disparate audiences.

If You Didn't Know, Now You Know: SFF Divination
Friday 5:30 PM
Charlie Boatner (m), Heather Urbanski, Greer Gilman, E. C. Ambrose, Heather Albano

SFF Authors use foreknowledge of events, whether predictive models, visions, or prophecy, to give characters future knowledge, often to solve story problems. In this panel, we'll look at the problems this foreknowledge creates, for the characters, for the author, and for the reader.

Finding Alexandria: Libraries in SFF
Friday 7 PM
Cate Hirschbiel (m), Robert B. Finegold M.D., Greer Gilman, Christopher K. Davis, Megan Lewis

Many authors love and use libraries, and some of them like to show off their love in their works. What are some books that celebrate libraries and librarians? What would you like to see differently in portrayals of libraries and librarians?

SF and the Feminine Elder
Saturday 8:30 PM
Lisa Batya Feld (m), Greer Gilman, Andrea Hairston, N.S. Dolkart

As our population ages and more people are living longer lives of greater vigor, older folks remain underrepresented as protagonists in SFF. Older women, in particular, rarely appear even as supporting characters, and often only appear in trope-laden roles we've all seen before. What stories break this mold? What stories are there yet to be told for older women in SFF? How do the fem-of-center relate to technologies of life extension or body replacement?

SFF, Homage and Transformation
Sunday 4 PM
Ken Schneyer (m), Ruthanna Emrys, Victoria "V.E." Schwab, Greer Gilman, William Frank

A vast majority of literature has homages to previous works - familiar tropes and nods to existing tales. Some stories, however, seem to be nothing other than things you’ve seen before. Our panelists will discuss the art of homage and transformation, and the ways in which the familiar can be remade into the startling.

Mapping the Fantastic
Monday 10AM
Sarah Smith (m), Chris Philbrook, Greer Gilman, Anne Nydam

Authors and artists use maps and geography to worldbuild and create a sense of place. If geography is destiny, how will you build your world to make sense of the cultures, religion, politics, and economies there? What do maps add, for readers and writers, to the worlds that only exist in imagination?

Spec Fic and Historical Fantasy Reading
Monday 2:30 PM
Greer Gilman, Sarah Smith, Sonya Taaffe

Step into a different time and place with authors who will be reading their own original works of historical fantasy and speculative fiction.

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Tu-whit to who: A merrie note

It's gone above freezing!  Positively the Bermudas.

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Boreas

Bitter cold and bright.  My fate was to go and shiver at bus stops, singing my winter Dowland dump:

I stand, I wait, I freeze,  I faint, I die
For Dudley bus, in endless misery.

Why in the name of Boreas would I do that?  Because my eminent, elderly, and much-in-demand eye doctor came in on a bitter Saturday to make up all the appointments he'd had to cancel on Thursday.  He didn't want to put us at the end of the queue again.  What a pearl!

My Arctic gear was much the same for the blizzard, amped up with a knit turtleneck instead of one of the shirts and an even heavier velveteen skirt.  Since it wasn't wet out, I wore a long wool coat with a fake fur collar turned up like Maleficent's round my ears.  I was awfully tempted to wear my inherited real fur coat (beaver), but wimped out.  So unCantabrigian.  The only chink in my armor is that I lost one of my gloves, right at the start of my journey, and had to keep putting alternate hands in a pocket.  Other than that, I was pretty toasty.  Even at 3ºF minus windchill.

Fortunately, I don't need new glasses, hurrah!  Slab-off prisms for anisometropia are awfully dear.  My discordant eyes, said the doctor, are like a ten-person orchestra without a conductor.

Coming back some hours later (I stopped for Suan La Chow Show at Mary's), I spotted my glove in a snow drift, not far from my front door.

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The great Globe itself

Michelle Terry has announced the new Globe season!  It's radical in a very different way from Emma Rice's egotistical chaos.
She wants a collaborative, actor-driven theatre: not entirely unlike Shakespeare's own directorless company. (Of course, Shakespeare's original roles were written for certain men and boys, but revivals and plays by others may well have been cast by discussion.)

Terry "said there was too much pressure on a director to 'solve the plays … Actors are amazing dramaturgs. They will tell you about what works in a play.'

Terry said she wanted to dismantle hierarchies. 'It is unfair that everything gets dumped on the director’s shoulders and actually it is a really collaborative process, especially for our theatre, which is one of the most democratic and egalitarian spaces that we’ve got.'

"The first two plays will be presented by a Globe ensemble of 12 actors, two co-directors and one designer. The ensemble will decide who plays, for example, Hamlet or Rosalind."

We shall see if they can make it work.

And after Rice's tearing up the place for goes-up-to-eleven lightshows, I love Terry's respect for the space:

"Terry said she had chosen Hamlet and As You Like It because they were both written around 1599, the year the original Globe was built, and were conceived with its architecture in mind."

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And that (Said John) Is That

Not what I'd call a real blizzard, but a pretty fair snowstorm.

Winter gear:

Two pairs of kneesocks.
Heavy flannel skirt, calf-length, over
Heavy cotton trousers
Two heavy Tencel shirts
A magnificent sweater that I bought in Whitby over twenty years ago: it's essentially an entire moorland fleece
Hoodless parka
Fabulous merino ear warmer knitted by teenybuffalo  (thanks!)
Polar fleece hat over that
Stout shoes
Overshoes (I cannot find the excellent boots I used to have)
Gloves
Shawl-sized scarf

What I would have liked:

Those missing boots, damn it
Goggles, when heading north
A pair of stout poles for plow-wake clambering

Otherwise, perfectly toasty for a sojourn of forty-five minutes.  It's almost never cold enough to wear that sweater, so I was very glad to give it an outing.

Such a pity that the students aren't here.  They'd be sculpting in snow (I have fond memories of an entire perfect Giza, with a Great-Pyrenees-sized Sphinx), and coasting down the library steps on trays, happy as otters.

Almost no one about, except a few dauntless skiers.

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New Year

It's cold to crack bells this night.  But the moon reforges herself, and rises stainless.  So may this earth, this year.

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Under the table

My dear birthday twin gave me this, the best imaginable picture of old sisterhood.




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Thanksgiving these days

Overheard in farmers market:

Woman (frazzled, with a glimmering of hope):  "Oh look.  Bok choy.  She likes bok choy."

Friend (encouraging):  "A nice stir fry..."

Woman (deflating):  "She doesn't eat stir fry."

Hope all of you get something you like to eat, and company you're fond of.

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