Minicon Report

[naomikritzer]

First, I just want to note that jiawen, the Minicon programming czar, rocks. The programming this year was awesome.

My first panel was The Real Taboos. On the panel were me, Jane Yolen, Adam Stemple, and Lois McMaster Bujold. I was on the panel in part because my children's book has an explicit bathroom scene where the characters have to figure out how to use a zero-G toilet. Also because I once wrote a food poisoning scene so visceral it made everyone in my critique group actively nauseated when they read it. (I took it out, and then recycled it but toned WAY down, because making your readers sick to their stomach does not win you loyal fans.) On my way to the con, I was thinking about "the real taboos." There is some vomiting in fiction (people get drunk, they get space sick, they throw up after killing someone or seeing someone killed) but very little constipation and relatively little diarrhea. Menstrual cramps are a rarity, as are rashes. Labor rarely happens on-screen in any detail, and miscarriages are far more rare in fiction than in real life. No one ever gets tooth aches, and at least in the movies, no one suffers tooth decay or dental accidents.

The problem was that almost everything I came up with (labor? birth defects? middle-aged protagonists?) HAD been done by one author -- Lois, who was on the panel.

As I was waiting for the panel to start I was chatting with carbonel, and she added two more to the list: bad (consentual) sex, and urination. I thought about it for two minutes and realized that Lois had covered both of those, as well. Ekaterin has really bad sex with her first husband, and Cazaril urinates in a chamber pot and finds blood there (and is later questioned about the contents, as it's possibly evidence against him). When Lois came in, Jane Yolen told her regretfully that she had one-handedly ruined the panel, as she'd apparently done everything we'd otherwise say was taboo.

Partway through, the panel veered into a discussion of male hormonal cycles, which caused me to note that I don't think I've ever seen a story in which a male character suffered erectile dysfunction.

Lois also noted that she went to a discussion with a young-ish book group about The Curse of Chalion and discovered that the thing about Cazaril that really made him foreign to this set of readers was not that he was a landless medieval nobleman but that he was the positively ancient age of thirty-five. Heh. Sigh.

My next panel on Friday was Hard SF's Relationship with Public Education, which included me, mrissa, dd_b, and Kelly Strait. Kelly is a chemistry and algebra teacher, and we spent a lot of time on the panel talking about math and science education and whether good SF can to some extent make up for a lousy education, at least in terms of getting kids interested in science.

Saturday, I had another panel with Jane Yolen moderating -- this one on Unusual Jobs in Fantastic Worlds. (Not everyone gets to be the hero, wizard, or starship captain, so what's everyone else doing?) The other person on this panel was Pat Wrede. Pat is apparently writing an alternate-history-fantasy in which the American continents were empty when Columbus reached them. (Presumably the Siberian land bridge wasn't there and the Vikings got eaten by wolves?) Magic works, but there are people who reject it on religious grounds and have developed technology instead. It sounds like a really fascinating book. We spent a lot of time on this panel talking about housework, and the TV shows Frontier House and Victorian House, and how stupid it is to try to maintain 21st century American standards of cleanliness if you don't have hot running water and a mechanical washer. Someone mentioned this very interesting list of American cultural traits.

This list is so interesting that having found it to link to it, I've spent the last hour reading through their cultural traits for different places (in response to the American culture list, people made lists for England, Canada, Quebec, Brazil, India...) So I'll have to finish this tomorrow.

Comments

[dtm]

Partway through, the panel veered into a discussion of male hormonal cycles, which caused me to note that I don't think I've ever seen a story in which a male character suffered erectile dysfunction.

I'm embarrassed to say that I have read such a story. Not because of the subject matter, but because this will expose that I not only read some Piers Anthony before I knew better, but remember it in detail.

Our hero with the magical ability to talk to inanimate objects (which tells me this is Xanth, and would be the one centered around a young Dor, which according to wikipedia makes it the book "Castle Roogna") comes across someone (a centaur, as I recall) who is suffering from ED. Dor discovers that it is magically induced and the result of a spell that has been placed on the centaur by his wife, who purchased the enchantment from a local witch. ("No wonder she was so understanding") With the nudge-nudge-wink-wink characteristic of much of Anthony's work, Dor sends the centaur off with knowledge of how to cure it and the centaur goes off to surprise his wife.

Ew. I think my hands are dirtier for having typed that.

Re: taboo?

[naomikritzer]

You know, come to think of it, someone may have mentioned this book as a counterexample as soon as I brought up the ED issue. I know Piers Anthony got brought up at some point.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

In Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, Gorlois is unable to perform with Igraine after suspecting her of having an affair with Uther, so Gorlois accuses Igraine of casting a spell on his manhood.

Based on these limited data points, witchcraft is the most-blamed cause of ED in fantasy fiction. Interesting.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Oh, I dunno, I think thirty-five is pretty ancient for a time period with those standards of hygiene and medicine...

[servant-of-clio.livejournal.com]

Arrgh! No! I'm a historian, and this is a pet peeve; yes, the child & infant mortality rate was high, but once a person reached, say, 15, he or she would have a reasonable shot of reaching 35. That age, for men, would likely have been considered the prime of one's maturity, not a particularly ancient state.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

*g* Yeah, I know, I'm a Roman historian and it was a similar situation then. I think it depends on how you look at the statistics (insofar as you can call them statistics)...whether you look at life expectancy, or whether you look at the very different distribution of ages around that life expectancy compared to the modern distribution.

[servant-of-clio.livejournal.com]

True 'nuff. When I teach ancient & medieval history I just constantly have to disabuse students of the notion that everybody dropped dead by the age of 40.

Re: taboo?

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I have. I think most of the books I've read have at least one character with some kind of mental illness, though it's usually not diagnosed explicitly. Sometimes I marvel at how easy it is these days to read a lot of sf without reading a *variety* of sf. I think my father-out-law has read 2 books/week for 20 years, and it's all been straightforward military sf.

Re: taboo?

[naomikritzer]

I wish you'd been sitting in the audience to bring up this one, because then I could've plugged my own book instead of Lois's. In the world of the trilogy, characters who do magic develop bipolar disorder. (Why? Because the process you engage in to do magic in this world messes up your brain chemistry.) There are all sorts of ramifications to this; the mages are extremely powerful, but they rule by committee, basically, so that if the person in charge swings into a severe depression, the decision-making power can be passed routinely to someone who's in better shape.

Re: taboo?

[naomikritzer]

Yes, this is. They call depression "melancholia," and they call mania "the cold fever."

Taboos

[romsfuulynn.livejournal.com]

I was still somewhere between O'Hare and MSP at the time of that panel, but the truly awesome romance writer Suzanne Brockmann had an incident of ED in one of her books. She often has story arcs over several books where secondary characters have interactions and relationships that may or may not come to be told in a book focusing on them as main characters. The particular story arc begins around book 3 the particular incident in book 6 and the characters finally resolve their issues around book 9 or so. It allows for significant tormenting of characters. She manages to do this so that the characters have real lives and potentially unresolvable issues in a particular book. (She has a funny "interview" with some characters who have not yet had stories."

But Brockmann has had a Muslim as the man in one secondary story arc, a bald hero, a romance between a biracial woman FBI agent and a male Navy seal from Texas and her most recent book, 12th in the Troubleshooters is "as FBI agent Jules Cassidy ties the knot with the man of his dreams, Hollywood heartthrob Robin Chadwick."

[jiawen]

Thank you for the compliments. I'm glad your Minicon was good. :)

Interesting that Zompist came up... We also talked about Mark's website a little in the Creating Believable Languages panel. There are some inaccuracies in his "How to tell if you're..." pages, because of course there are always differences between people in a culture, but overall they're fascinating.

[naomikritzer]

Yeah, when I read the American culture page I thought, "I could nit-pick this, but most of the generalizations here are pretty fair." For cross-cultural contrast, my favorite was the one about promptness. Americans mumble an excuse if they're five minutes late, apologize profusely if it's 15 minutes, and consider an hour late to be unforgiveable -- obviously, all these things vary by context (if you are flying in to another city, the trump excuse the covers all ills is that you were stuck on a runway, unable to call) but it's pretty representative of the American sense of time and promptness. Whereas another country (India, maybe?) said that you'd mumble an excuse if you were an hour late. The "personal space" one was also pretty entertaining to me because I've experienced it personally -- I had a Spanish Lit teacher in college (who was from somewhere in Latin America, I forget where) who literally backed me across a room, neither of us realizing what was happening. He'd get in my space and I'd step back. And I'd seem too far away to him for a proper conversation so he'd move in. I wound up with my back against a wall, thinking "what the hell? how did I get over here?"

[imponderabilias.livejournal.com]

The "Real Taboos" discussion sounds so interesting.

You should add urination *after* sex as something not written about - I'm thinking mainly romance novels, here, I guess. Don't those heroines know they'd better move quick after their third slamming orgasm of the night, or they'll be doubled over with a UTI a week later?

My 11 y.o. loved the bathroom scene in Castaways, btw.

But now I'm feeling like I'm not a real American (being an atheist who doesn't really understand the rules of basketball), despite having lived in the heart of the US for 45 years, so I'd better go read some more about what else I should know. ;-)

[naomikritzer]

There are a lot of sex-related things that go unwritten about even when authors are extremely graphic about sex. Basically anything mundane and unromantic EXCEPT condoms, which are now permissible.