Swan Tower

Next weekend I’ll be down in L.A. for the World Fantasy Convention. If you’re going to be there as well, here’s where you can find me:

*

Combat!
Friday, 1 Nov, 17:00 – 17:55, Marquis 4-6

Experts in fighting hand-to-hand and sword fighting debunk myths and set the record straight as they talk about what authors get right, what authors get wrong, and why it matters.

Participants: Christopher Husberg (M), Troy Carrol Bucher, Scott Drakeford, Elizabeth Crowens, Marie Brennan

*

Magic Systems 101
Saturday, 2 Nov, 10:00 – 10:55, Marquis 1-3

What makes a magic system work? What do you need to do to make it believable for the readers? And what makes it so unique and compelling that readers can’t put down the book?

Participants: Barbara Hambly (M), Margo Lanagan, Susan Forest, Marie Brennan, TA Moore, Marshall Ryan Maresca

*

The World of Fairy Tales
Saturday, 2 Nov, 13:00 – 13:55, Marquis 1-3

Tales of events which occur outside of reality exist in most every culture throughout the world. What are the recurring themes that cross cultures? Are these expressions of societal norms or propagations of religious myths? Or are they just stories to scare kids into “behaving properly”?

Participants: Marie Brennan (M), Sheila Finch, Jack Zipes, Kathleen Jennings, Ann Chamberlin, Emma Törzs, David Drake
*

Reading
Saturday, 2 Nov, 15:30 – 15:55, Pac Coast 3

I have my schedule for Dublin WorldCon! If you’re going to be there, do try to catch me at some point and say hi.

What has science ever done for art?

Format: Panel
15 Aug 2019, Thursday 18:00 – 18:50, Liffey Room-1 (CCD)

From the making of art materials to the understanding of anatomy, what scientific discoveries have helped to make art what it is today?

Grzegorz Aleksander Biały (Atelier Improwizacji), Tom Toner (Gollancz), Marie Brennan

The above panel was unfortunately canceled.

Stories from other media turned into games

Format: Panel
16 Aug 2019, Friday 12:00 – 12:50, ECOCEM Room (CCD)

From the transition of ‘select-your own adventure’ books to Douglas Adams’ first computer game version of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, storytellers have been happy to entice their audience to play in their worlds through games. What are the different ways they done this? Which stories have transitioned well? Which have not?

Michael Cule (M), Rebecca Slitt (Choice of Games LLC), William C. Tracy (Space Wizard Science Fantasy), Marie Brennan, Keith Byrne (Tantalus)

Autographs: Friday at 14:00

Format: Autographing
16 Aug 2019, Friday 14:00 – 14:50, Level 4 Foyer (CCD)

Victoria “V.E.” Schwab (Tor Books, Titan, HarperCollins, Scholastic), Marie Brennan, Sarah Pinsker (SFWA), Taiyo Fujii (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan), Sam Hawke, Mary Turzillo

Reading: Marie Brennan

Format: Reading
17 Aug 2019, Saturday 13:30 – 13:50, Liffey Room-3 (Readings) (CCD)

The bare bones of worldbuilding: archaeology in SFF

Format: Panel
18 Aug 2019, Sunday 10:00 – 10:50, Wicklow Hall 2B (CCD)

Whether it’s an actual archaeological dig looking for evidence of alien civilisations or fantasy characters camping in the ruins of their ancestors, archaeological evidence and research can be used to help develop a world beyond the here and now and add complex layers to a story without the need for exposition. The panel will discuss the ways in which archaeology has been used to deepen SFF worldbuilding and storytelling.

Ehud Maimon (M), Dr Katrin Kania (pallia – Mittelalter hautnah), Alyc Helms, Marie Brennan

Kaffeeklatsch: Marie Brennan

Format: Kaffeeklatsch
18 Aug 2019, Sunday 11:00 – 11:50, Level 3 Foyer (KK/LB) (CCD)

Invented Mythologies in SF

Format: Panel
19 Aug 2019, Sunday 19:00 – 19:50, Wicklow Hall 2B (CCD)

Whether it’s creation myths for sentient AIs or a pantheon of alien gods, invented mythologies can add depth and weight to SF storytelling. How have myths from our own past informed the creation of fictitious mythologies in SF? Where do you start when inventing mythology? What makes a mythos convincing, and how do you subtly weave your mythology into the narrative?

Fonda Lee (M), Marina J. Lostetter, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Marie Brennan

Dragons, wyrms, and serpents: why the myth endures

Format: Panel
19 Aug 2019, Monday 12:00 – 12:50, Wicklow Hall 2A (Dances) (CCD)

There are a lot of mythical beasts that can and do feature in fantasy, but the dragon/wyrm/serpent seems to be one of the most popular. What are the reasons for this enduring popularity? What roles does it perform? What mythic properties does it embody and why do these continue to resonate (if they do)?

Marie Brennan, Karen Simpson Nikakis (SOV Consulting LLC -SOV Media) (M), Aliette de Bodard, Naomi Novik, Joey Yu (Kino Eye Ltd. / Freelance)

It’s going to be a busy few days . . .

I know this blog has kind of been All Arisia, All the Time lately; I promise it won’t stay that way forever. But, well, when a friend of yours is the one who’s brave enough to finally tear the covering off a festering wound . . . you wind up following the story pretty closely. And there are three recent developments I want to specifically discuss.

The first is the simplest: the acting president of Arisia has found a way to finagle the bylaws so that anyone who attends the corporate meeting on November 11th will be able to vote. (Normally voting rights come at the end of your first meeting, i.e. you have to show up to a second one in order to vote.) I don’t know who the people are who have stepped up to the plate to run for office, replacing the members of the board who have resigned, but I know some people have done so, and I hope more will join them. If you’re local and you care about fixing Arisia rather than just letting it die, consider going to the meeting.

The second is this rather astonishing statement from the founder of Arisia, Matthew Saroff. He hasn’t been involved with the con since 2005, but he’s apologizing anyway, because he believes his own actions back then — especially in the final six months, when he refers to himself as a “legendary asshole” — contributed to the problems Arisia has today.

I don’t know if he’s right. Thirteen years is quite a long time, especially in con history; lots of other people have come and gone and left their mark on Arisia. Even if he did set things on a bad path, it isn’t like he’s wholly to blame, and everybody else can wash their hands. But that’s the thing about rape culture, and white supremacy, and all the other systemic ills of our society: they are simultaneously bigger than any one person and built by individuals, one brick at a time. Saroff recognizes that he did something wrong, and he’s apologizing for it, years after the fact, at a point in time where quite possibly nobody other than himself would think to point a finger of blame at him.

Good on him. And good on Cody Lazri, who was briefly on the executive board and has resigned as staff for A’19 and apologized (with some insight into Arisia’s internal politics). I’ve been pleasantly astonished by the amount of support I’ve seen for Crystal Huff, Maura Taylor, and everyone else who has come forward with their stories, and the lack of the usual accusations against them — though such statements always come with the asterisk of “I haven’t seen all the conversations about this” — but there’s still been a dearth of those responsible apologizing in a meaningful way. Neither Saroff nor Lazri is at the epicenter; those who were have, so far as I know, remained silent. And that part’s still not good.

The last thing is that the Olders have made a firm decision not to attend Arisia as the Author Guests of Honor this year. The Artist GOH, Elizabeth Leggett, will still be attending, but will be donating proceeds from one of her pieces of artwork to the Boston Rape Crisis Center.

I’m going to be very interested to see what Arisia does about the Author GOH void — or, to put it another way, to see who steps into that void. Anybody who does so runs a high risk of having half of fandom fall on their head: it’s going to look a lot like they wanted the spotlight badly enough that they were willing to hold their nose and ignore the stench. I don’t know if Arisia’s setup means they can limp along without a GOH at all; doing so might very well be the best course of action. But if not, then I sincerely hope whoever does take that slot does so on terms that make it less about them and their own prestige, and more about keeping the focus on the problem. A keynote address, a panel — one or more somethings to make it clear that GOH isn’t there to put a smiling face on the situation, but to help with the soul-searching.

We’ll see how it turns out. But for now, this is where things stand.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

Rather than attempting to round up all the links myself, I recommend you read File 770’s posts on the topic, particularly “Arisia Announces Rosenberg Out” and “Arisia Bans Rosenberg, Authorizes Membership Refunds.”

The good news: Rosenberg has resigned. (With absolutely no recognition that he’s done anything wrong, much less apology for same, but I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise on that front.) Subsequent to that, the board has banned him. Also, Arisia is suspending their usual policy of not refunding memberships, so that people who want to back away from the trainwreck this year can do so without having to worry about that sunk cost.

The bad news: Not yet convinced that anything material is going to change.

See, here’s the other totally unsurprising thing: after Crystal posted about her experiences, I saw numerous other people coming forward and saying, yeah, I had X problem at Arisia, and the response I got from staff wasn’t good. Complaints that took months upon months to be addressed, unsatisfactory action (often consisting of “well, just stay away from him and that should solve the problem”), or even complaints being dropped entirely, vanishing into the void. I’m not going to try to link to them all, especially since I’m not certain that all the people making those comments want them blasted all over the internet, but this one is detailed, public, and tagged #MeToo, so I feel perfectly comfortable sharing that as a data point. There are others, linked in the File 770 posts, describing other kinds of incidents, but Maura Taylor’s is the most similar to Crystal’s.

I said this in my original post, and I said it on Twitter, and now I’ll say it again. Rosenberg is only part of the problem. The rest of the problem is Arisia itself — its executive board, its process for handling harassment complaints, its wholesale failure to walk the walk when it comes to enforcing its own code of conduct. Its repeated tendency to protect Arisia staffers when complaints are brought against them, because those people matter to them. (And when it comes to a confrontation between two staffers? They choose the one at fault.)

So Rosenberg is gone. But if you were wondering whether I think Arisia has fixed the underlying problem, the answer is a resounding no.

Their first announcement said “we are going to acknowledge and apologize for our failures,” but they haven’t yet. The closest they come to apologizing to Crystal for what they did to her is to say that they failed her by disclosing her name publicly and that they apologized for it at the time. What about all the ways in which they gaslit her, the times they made promises and then broke them, the ways they closed ranks to protect her rapist even in the face of countless pieces of public evidence that he was stalking and harassing her? And that’s just Crystal’s experiences; it doesn’t touch on all the other people who have been through similar trials. The failures the Arisia announcement lists are woefully abridged. And they can pledge all they like to do better in the future . . . but so far it isn’t at all clear that they truly understand everything they did wrong in the first place. Until that part gets settled, how can anyone really believe they’ll improve?

Now, I will also note that they seem to not be done yet. I’m willing to grant that they may still do more, and better. But let’s be clear on what “better” means, and not let one resignation/ban and some refunded memberships obscure the work that still needs to be done. Sonya Taaffe’s message to Arisia compares this to the Readercon incident some years back, with good justification. I don’t think anything less than the eventual Readercon response — the resignation and replacement of the entire board, alongside an overhaul of their incident response approach — is going to suffice here. Right now various lower-level staffers have been resigning in droves, but the real problem lies with the Arisia board, which has for years been enabling and protecting not just one offender, but several. They have thoroughly demonstrated that their guests and attendees cannot trust them. Arisia needs fresh leadership, not tainted with the sins of the past. It needs a renewal.

For the sake of all the attendees who have long-standing loyalty to Arisia, I hope that happens. But whether the board will do it . . . we’ll have to wait and see.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

I’m going to have a busy Worldcon . . .

• Thursday, 1-2 p.m. — Writing About Fighting (panel with Fonda Lee (M), Kristene Perron, Tony Barajas, Joseph Brassey)
• Friday, 11 a.m.-12 p.m. — The Power of Names — Naming Characters: Techniques and Thoughts (panel with S. Qiouyi Lu (M), Mimi Mondal, D. A. Xiaolin Spires, SL Huang, K.M. Szpara)
• Friday, 5 p.m. — signing at Borderlands Books booth
• Saturday, 11 a.m.-12 p.m. — We Have Always Played Games: Women at the Gaming Table (panel with Donna Prior (M), Diana M. Pho, Veronica Belmont, Erika Ensign)
• Saturday, 1-2 p.m. — autographing (with Cat Rambo, Eric Flint, Bryan Camp, Mackenzie Lin)
• Saturday, 2-3 p.m. — Reading: Hugo Finalists – Best Series (with Brandon Sanderson, Martha Wells)
• Saturday, 3-4 p.m. — In For the Long Haul: The Ups and Downs of Writing a Long Series (panel with Brandon Sanderson (M), Robin Hobb, Seanan McGuire, L.E. Modesitt Jr)
• Sunday, 12-1 p.m. — kaffeeklatsch

And, y’know, that whole “Hugo ceremony” thing. >_>

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

The latest posts from my New Worlds Patreon are:

• The History We Live In — on how architecture can communicate history
• Greetings and Respect — on the different ways we show courtesy
• Signs of Power — on the objects that signal a person’s importance

Also, I’m going to be at Denver Comic-Con! Just got my schedule today:

• Friday, 1-1:50 p.m. — Avadakedavra! Magic in Literature
• Friday, 2-2:50 p.m. — Kicking Butt in Corsets
• Friday, 5:30-6:20 p.m. — The Past Is Here: Writing Romantic Fiction with an Historical Backdrop
• Sunday, 11-11:50 a.m. — But Is It Epic Enough?
• signing 11 a.m.-12 p.m. Friday, 2:30-4:30 p.m. Saturday, and 4:30-5:30 p.m. Sunday

If I can scrounge up the time and brain cells, I also want to post about Wonder Woman. Short form: go see it! Longer form will have to wait, though.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Background, for those who don’t follow the SF/F convention scene:

A few years back, Jim Frenkel was banned from Wiscon and lost his job at Tor following complaints of persistent harassment against a number of women. More recently, Odyssey Con decided to install him as their Guest Liaison. When their Guest of Honor, Monica Valentinelli, told them that Frenkel had harassed her in the past and she felt neither comfortable nor safe interacting with him, they blew off her complaint; when she withdrew from the convention, they posted her private emails on their Facebook page without her permission, characterized her behavior as trying to “dictate” who could and could not attend the convention, assured everybody that Frenkel and another named problem are great guys, and swore that they’re totally a safe space and will handle these problems appropriately if and when they arise.

They’ve since taken down the emails and their initial statement, so Damage Control Mode is a go. But it’s too little, too late: it is already abundantly clear that they are not dedicated to dealing with harassment in a professional manner. They don’t understand privacy, safety, or basic common decency.

But there are plenty of other people dissecting the daisy-chain of failures here. I want to talk about something slightly different.

I have, in a non-convention context, dealt with a problem like this. I am on the board of an organization that received complaints of harassing behavior and assault by a member — someone I have known for years. I was not part of the group tasked to investigate the complaints, but I was one of the people who had to decide what to do after we received that group’s findings. I’m the one who wrote the email announcing our decision to the membership at large, hand-carving every word in an attempt to minimize the risk of misunderstanding or unintended implication.

It’s hard. No matter what you do, you’re going to upset somebody — and that includes doing nothing. You have to wade into the muck of information you’d rather not hear, examine your reaction to each and every piece of that information, weigh potential responses and their repercussions, and then figure out how to translate all of that into statements and actions. Then, once you’ve done that, you get to deal with the fallout. From start to finish, the whole process sucks.

Too bad. Put on your grown-up pants and do it anyway.

And if you can’t — if your reaction to a complaint is going to be to assume it’s no big deal, to let your gut guide you instead of looking at the evidence, to stick your fingers in your ears and go “la la la” in the hopes that the problem will go away and trouble you no more — then don’t put yourself in a position where you’re going to have to deal with these things. Because the days when you could just skate along and know the woman (it’s almost always a woman) will slink quietly back into her corner? Those are over. These days, if you do this bad a job of handling a known problem, you can and will be pilloried for it. And you will deserve that pillorying, because resources and guidelines for how to do better are readily available, and it was your decision not to pay attention to them.

Creating a “fun, safe, welcoming, event where fans of all kinds can come together and enjoy themselves” takes work. So do the work. Words alone are not enough.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.