October Means Online Octocon

This virtual science fiction convention idea sounded interesting, and I’d staffed the last few Cons, so I agreed to help again… luckily people with more experience of virtual Con hosting are setting up everything, and I am staff for the weekend. Getting started at present, and this looks like fun.
Most years I sit and scribble notes on the panels, then share them here the following year. Next year’s post will be decidedly different, but to get in the mood, here’s the 2019 Octocon. We had a much reduced Con due to having hosted a Worldcon in the same year. Still great company. I have necessarily omitted contributions for space.

Early chat room on Worldcon We each mentioned what we’d loved and generally agreed we’d do it again.

Fae panel wings on fairies arrived in the time of Shakespeare, because during performances of Midsummer Night’s Dream the audience had trouble telling the fairies apart from the mortals. The costumer came up with the idea of putting light wings on fairies. The idea stuck.

Environment Peadar O’Guilin said as a species we are short term vision beings. Stephen Baxter wrote in the Orion novella that humans used up all resources in human space and had to keep expanding. At war with many species.
Noelle - carbon tax, electric cars would not be clean in Poland, as they use coal for power. Her car runs on 30 – 40% green power.
Dr. Fox Purcell from Santa Barbara said he sees fires every ten years and people are required to have fire training. But what started fires every ten years in the past now starts them every few months. Power lines were cut off for a couple of months. He is running a new shop on solar. Believes society is so tied to fossil fuels it will be ten generations before we can get off it.
Xander – young people, protests, need to understand ecological collapse, climate change affecting the least advantaged first.
Carol Connolly – stories like The Hunger Games, overthrow a regime and replace it with one suspiciously similar; the Irish overthrew British rule and reimposed the Catholic Church.
Peadar – a cause of short termism is cynicism – comes with age – we need youth and energy.
Dr. Fox is writing a series about space travel to new world, strip-mining.
Carol – watch The Good Place. We have built complex systems, the world is better for people but causes problems.
Xander – KSR’s Red Mars series – responsible.
Peadar – cli-fi, 1979 Brunner, The Sheep Look Up. Short term – voting for someone who gives a tax break rather than generates clean power.
Noelle – Avatar.
Xander – we see narratives that we reach balance only after WW3. We could probably fix it now, but fiction likes to wait for it to get really bad. Judge Dredd – over the top fascism.
Carol – Mad Max. Help 17 year olds vote as soon as 18.
Dr. Fox – write cli-fi, or give the idea to one of us and we’ll write it.

Panel on spoofing science
Dr. Edmund Schlussel, Marim Siljak, Michael Carroll, Carol Connolly.
Michael – school, told religion teacher about mass = gravitational attraction, not just what goes up must come down. Had to fetch the physics teacher to explain. The religion teacher refused to believe him.
Ed. Resonant frequency of space elevator cable – pluck it to the right note, you can make planet explode. Nobody will believe this when he puts it into a story.

Carol – The Martian – no mention of the light levels involved in potato growing.
Marim Siljak – if you can’t keep my attention with the plot I will focus on the science so it better be good.
Michael – likes more science in SF but the story is most important. The War of the Worlds. The more you have to explain the slower the story gets.
Dr Ed – Another Life has virus that is boron based – he wants to know where all the boron is coming from.
Carol – Dr Who falls in to myth and legend rather than SF.
Q. Do we do bad science because it’s cooler?
Michael – yes. May nudge science to make story work or may nudge story to make science work. In 1970s Harry Harrison wrote Skyfall which was going to be picked as Book Club of the Month – but a publisher said they didn’t do SF. So instead they picked The Andromeda Strain. No peer review in movies. We like dinosaurs and cowboys, put them together.
Dr Ed – Film script has beats to be hit.
Carol - Star Trek occasionally requires an info dump. Sometimes a character says ‘tell me how this works’. Women are apparently confused by science in those old films and books.
Dr Ed. – if we are not conveying meaning through writing it isn’t writing. It’s just putting characters on a page.

Adaptations panel Diane Duane, Peadar O’ Guilin, Ruth Frances Long.
P – Brothers Grimm very dark. Adapted means telling in a different form or for a different audience.
DD - who are you adapting for? Children or their parents who will read it out?
P – Disney versions have become canon. People now adapt not just originals but Disneys.

DD - you do licensed work, take the king’s shilling. One project they wanted Victoriana spruced up, made cute.
P – new culture. At a conference in Birmingham convention centre he saw over 100 little girls dressed as princesses. Disney on ice. Also a group of teen gamers/ cosplayers and one girl came out in her skimpy tribal costume; she felt nervous among shoppers, but two princess girls ran up to her and she was their hero.
DD – part of being human is to want things to turn out all right. Mostly they won’t, we think in more adult process, but we are entitled to read / see a happy ending.
RFL - her kids, the things she would expect them to be upset about, they barely react to but get upset about other things. As they grow up they get to see subtexts they never saw before.
P – Kids generally don’t think they are going to die. Tree climbing, risks etc. You should do whatever you like as long as it makes a great story. People prefer to read SF that is near to our world; if it is massively different you drop ¾ readership. People say a cyborg in a Cinderella tale is original, but they would never read something completely original.
DD – she has seen and dislikes taking a fairytale and making it into a kill the monster movie. A French woman used to hold salons and fairytales were told – female empowerment. Later, morals were added.
Q. Rejected Princesses. A book of short tales of strong girls.
DD - 1001 Nights – some adult, some child friendly, many deeply nested in each other.
P – 3 or 4 literary canons are being used and Irish, Decameron are not being told.
DD – How to re-introduce others?

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