Greer Gilman's Blog, page 53

"Bear falls through skylight into party, eats all the cupcakes"

Just that.

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"This is London calling..."

Here's my draft schedule for Loncon 3 (d.v.)

When is a Fantasy not a Fantasy?

Thursday 13:30 - 15:00

Many of the more liminal fantasies play with the idea of psychosis as a blurring the boundaries of the world (Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons, Steve Cockayne's The Good People, Jo Walton's My Real Children); many 'mainstream' novels present worlds built of dream, the afterlife, or metaphor. What determines whether something is a fantasy or not: authorial intent, genre signals, reader perceptions? How far should we accept characters' own sense of the world, and when can we judge them as unreliable witnesses?

Paul Kincaid (M), Greer Gilman, Graham Sleight, Jonathan Strahan, E. Lily Yu

Better Worldbuilding Through Poetry

Thursday 16:30 - 18:00

When you ask someone to think of poetry in SF and fantasy novels, they are liable to think first of the epic or pseudo-epic verse of Tolkien and his inheritors -- language used to elevate and mythologise the world and the events they create. But poetry can be put to many and varied uses within larger works, as evidenced by such recent books as Anne Carson's "Red Doc>" (a verse novel), Sofia Samatar's "A Stranger in Olondria" (which includes poetry as imagined literary history), or Kim Stanley Robinson's "2312" (prose-poems evoking AI consciousness). How do these and other SF and fantasy works use poetry to help create moods, worlds, or characters? What forms and what kinds of language are most common, and why? And to what extent is poetry contextual -- are there examples of writing that we accept as the next page of a novel, but would treat as a poem if published separately?

Jo Walton (M), Jenny Blackford, Amal El-Mohtar , Greer Gilman, Neil Williamson

You Write Pretty

Friday 21:00 - 22:00

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, so let us behold some fine fantastical sentences. Our panel have each picked a sentence, and will have a chance to make their case for why theirs is the fairest of them all -- but it will be up to the audience to decide.

Geoff Ryman (M), Greer Gilman, Frances Hardinge, Christopher Priest, E. J. Swift


Fabulous co-panelists! Chewy conceits!  If I get a reading, I'll be over the moon.

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Midsummer Night

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in:

Dream well. Wake smiling.

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on little bear feet

Sackbuts and shawms!






                Melt earth to sea, sea flow to air,
                    And air fly into fire,
                Whilst we in tunes, to Arthur’s chair
                    Bear Oberon’s desire








Kathleen Jennings has created me a third magnificent cover.  I love love love the starry bear, so graciously aware of her celestial dignity.  And on the back, there's a two-guys-in-a-fur-coat bear that makes me giggle madly.  They know they're an anticlimax, but they brave it out, they prance abashedly.

I am so very fortunate to be with Small Beer Press--they wrap me in cloth-of-gold.

Utterly thrilled!

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Eugene Goostman

Whoa.  "Turing test beaten for first time by virtual 13-year-old boy."  I want a transcript.

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ETA:  transcript! (of an earlier trial).

[12:48:01] Eugene: Is it your hobby to ask little poor Jewish boys such tricky questions they don't have an answer for?

Nice trick, making English his second language.  He can screw up on adjectival order ("little poor") and it only seems charming.  But he got the intonation somehow:  you could speak that line.

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Crossed Foyles

For all of us who've shifted books...

(I can only dream of that much shelf space.)

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Hey ho

A manuscript has been handed in.

In the last two weeks or so, I've seen an adorable steampunk As You Like It, an utterly astonishing Ariel and Caliban, a brutal Lear, and a radically Jacobean Duchess of Malfi (thank you, much_of_a ).  Not a bad month, all told.

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Watered silk

I'd wear this, if it could be woven.

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Rune tree

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Teaser

Quoth Small Beer Press:   "And by the end of the week we should have another piece of very exciting news for fans of Greer Gilman!"

Stay tuned!

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