23 May 1998: Wow, People Overload

Saturday, 23 May 1998:

Wow, People Overload

WisCon started yesterday. I woke up at a reasonable hour, and was able to get to the post office and to my landlords' offices (to get a new remote for my building's garage door) before arriving at noon to help with registration.

Helping with reg was easy and fun. The rush period for reg is between 5 and 8 pm on Friday, since that's when many out-of-towners finally arrive, and when many locals get off work and show up. I was long done by then. It turns out that Mary Doria Russell volunteered to work reg at the same time, which was cool. (It also turns out she has a Web page, which I can't find!) I had dinner with her last year, which was most excellent. She is - as I've said before - a neat lady.

As I've said before, the name of the convention game for me is panels, and I've been to many already. The first panel I went to, "Lit Crit for Dummies", was rather weak as I learned very little about literary criticism (of SF or otherwise) and I suspect that if I want to learn more I'll be better off reading about it.

The con's opening ceremonies were pretty amusing, and short. Like the saying goes, "Short is good, funny is good, short and funny is best." WisCon's guests of honor this year are Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, and Sheri S. Tepper. There are many other SF pros who show up to WisCon regularly or semi-regularly, such as Pat Murphy, Karen Joy Fowler, Suzy McKee Charnas, Ellen Klages, Joan Vinge, Jim Frenkel and Eleanor Arnason. I started reading Murphy's The City, Not Long After this weekend, and am thinking I should try Vinge's The Snow Queen again. (I think the first time I assailed it I simply wasn't of a temperament conducive to finishing it.)

After opening ceremonies was a discussion of Mary Russell's new book, Children of God. Russell showed up at the discussion, which I think was good in some ways (it gave us the author's perspective on the book), and bad in others (some people were intimidated and didn't feel comfortable doing anything other than praising the book). I screwed up my courage and did bring up the one point in the book which I simply didn't buy, and which was a major stumbling block for me in reading it. I'm not sure I quite got my point across, although later someone told me she thought I was pretty brave to bring that up in that situation. I enjoyed Children of God, but The Sparrow is a far superior book. (Of course, I thought The Sparrow superior to most books I read...)

We had a party for the APA later in the evening which I went to, and which was enjoyable, but I conked out pretty early and was in bed by 12:30.

Saturday I did even more panels, after getting Mary Russell to sign my copy of Children of God. The panel on "the pervasiveness of class in the 'classless' (American) society" was a very interesting panel, and it took only about a minute (if that) to do away with any illusions that America is classless. (In fact we are a very class-oriented society, and unusually schizophrenic about it.) The next two panels were not quite as fascinating, but still pretty good: One was a panel of authors talking about elements of their world and character that didn't get into their books, and the other was on standard "SF tropes" - assumptions of fundamental background such as FTL drive, time travel, and so forth - and whether their presence prevents some people from being able to read SF.

A better panel was "Human interaction in the environment: Earth and elsewhere", which was essentially about environmentalism in SF. One example was Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books - the question of whether or not we should terraform Mars. I tried to make the point that Mars' environment (if we assume that there is no life there) has no intrinsic value. There's nothing on Mars that we can remotely assume cares whether we terraform it or not. The issue is entirely one of human perception and opinion: Some humans may see it valuable as-is, and other see it valuable mainly as a new habitat for humanity. But I think any argument that ascribes to Mars some fundamental value independent of living things is just plain misguided.

This was not a popular point of view; people who have read Robinson's novels (I've only read Red Mars) said that I'm a "Green". I'm not so sure this is true, since I was not particularly advocating that we should terraform Mars (there may be perfectly good human-centric reasons not to do so, after all).

There were many other matters involving Terran ecosystems and all that. I mostly see environmental issues on Earth in terms of these points:

Damaging the environment can render the planet unfit (or at least less fit) for human habitation. It may also destroy potentially useful resources that we haven't yet discovered (e.g., natural substances with medical use). This is clearly a matter humans should be concerned with, as a matter of self-interest.
Damaging the environment may be ethically wrong if we believe that other species on this planet can meaningfully "care" that we do so. Can plants care? Can fish care? Can frogs care? Can voles and cats and bears care? (This point is particularly interesting because if we answer "yes" to any of these questions, then it has ramifications for many other areas of human endeavor, particular as regards our food supply.)
The environment damages itself periodically, wiping out millions if not billions of species. The difference is that the environment acts on much greater time scale, and the species that are wiped out are - on average - replaced at an equal or greater rate through evolution. Humans, however, wipe out species at a far greater rate.
I think it is highly unlikely that humans are even capable at this point of destroying all life on this planet. I suspect that Terran life will survive even in the face of full-scale nuclear war, albeit in a radically transformed state (and without humans). From a global point of view, then, it seems arguable that humans can't to anything to truly destroy the environment. Life seems simply too darned resilient, in some form or another.

In the evening, there was a variety show featuring various fannish talents singing and performing. It was entertaining, particularly the musical acts.

I also bought a number of books to work on in the near future: Michael Swanwick's Jack Faust and Walter Jon Williams' City On Fire (both for our book discussion); J. R. Dunn's Days of Cain, and Pat Murphy's The Falling Woman. I also picked up The Indelible Alison Bechdel, the latest book by the cartoonist who does Dykes to Watch Out For. And I bid on a couple of photographs in the art show - nice framed prints of some colorful mesa formations. They'd be nice to have on my wall, assuming I don't get out-bid. The photographer is also in the APA.

By 11:00 tonight, though, I was worn out. I was also going through some sort of overload of interacting with people, and I wanted to go off and be by myself, so I came home. On the way home, I ran into a local fan who was going into the convention, and he said that for him the con starts when the programming is over. Ah, well!

Oh, and I got a phone call that my new Mac arrived at my workplace yesterday. I may try to pick it up tomorrow, but there's no rush. Who has time?

Michael Rawdon (Contact)