Flights of Foundry Signpost

         This weekend I’ll be participating in Flights of Foundry, an all-virtual, global, interdisciplinary convention for the speculative arts.  Since this will be my first time at Flights of Foundry, I can’t tell you much about what it will be like, but nevertheless I’ve made my usual pre-con signpost to point out more resources for anyone interested in the programming I’m on.

• Reading - Once again I’ve got my reading scheduled early in the con before I have a chance to advertise it at my other appearances!  Still, this could be interesting because I’ve got a 50 minute slot, which will give me time to answer lots of questions, take requests, and share a lot more than is usually possible.  (As long as anyone comes, of course!)

        All I’ll share here is the listing of all my published writing.

• Art Showcase - I’m not entirely sure what to expect from this one, but the resources I want to highlight are

        All my currently available work listed on my web page

        My handout of materials, tools, and instructions for making relief block prints

        Process - all the blog posts talking about my own process for particular pieces

        Step-by-Step - all the blog posts giving instructions on particular techniques

• What Makes Good Character Design - As I look through past posts on my process for particular pieces (to see them all, see the link above), I find that I haven’t much discussed the character design of humans!  But here are a few posts that may be relevant.

        Jubjub Bird

        Grand Marhoot

        Portrait of the Artist with Muses

        Billy Goats Gruff (and Troll)

• Finding Hope Through Creativity - Here are just a few posts, mostly about the importance of stories with hope, and the use of spec fic to imagine hopeful futures.

        A Desperate Little Exhortation About (Bitter)Sweetness and Light

        Happy Endings

        A Bit of Hope

        Books for Hope

        Negativity Bias

        Toxic Positivity

        The Tolstoy Fallacy

        Writing the Future

        Ursula LeGuin Says It Right

        Art Changes People

        International Peace Day

        Writing While Stressed

Writing the Future

        Later this afternoon I will be at the Arisia convention, on a panel with four other writers to talk about “Stories to Change the World.”  As any regular reader of this blog knows, this is a topic I get pretty excited about, so I thought I’d slip in one more post before the panel.  This is to direct you to an article by Walidah Imarisha.  Imarisha says “When I tell people I am a prison abolitionist and that I believe in ending all prisons, they often look at me like I rode in on a unicorn sliding down a rainbow.”  That’s understandable, because a world without prisons would be very different from the world we know, and it’s a little hard to get our heads around what that might actually mean.  And that’s exactly Imarisha’s point and mine: speculative fiction is one of the best tools we have for helping us get our heads around ways of being that are different from the ways we currently know.  Imarisha can write stories depicting a world without prisons, showing me what she envisions that might look like, and then I can start to imagine it, too.

        Of course, if Imarisha writes a story in which a prison-less society is a great thing, someone else can write a story depicting all the worst case scenarios of why they imagine this would be a terrible idea.  Neither of these stories would be a True and Accurate Prophecy of what would happen, but that isn’t the point.  Imarisha’s coeditor adrienne maree brown “calls science fiction ‘an exploring ground,’ a laboratory to try new tactics, strategies, and visions without real-world costs.”  The point is simply to break us out of the myth of “realism” to see that other possibilities are possible.  Once we start to imagine what might happen if we made different choices, and what a world could look like if we took other paths, then we are better able to decide which world we want, and what the steps might be that could move us toward it… and what steps we may want to avoid.

        Read Imarisha’s article, Rewriting the Future, and then look to the right of this post in the list of Labels in the sidebar, and click on the Label “Arisia’19: Stories to Change the World” for a selection of other posts that explore this aspect of speculative fiction.

[Picture: Der Gefangene (The Prisoner), woodcut by Christian Rohlfs, 1918 (Image from moma).]

Aliens Are People, Too

        A recurring theme among several panelists I heard at the Arisia con was that they hate it when sci fi authors use aliens or fantasy settings to explore real-world human issues.  One example was the movie “Avatar,” and I agree that it’s problematic to put blue skin on the “natives” and then trot out a whole batch of tropes and stereotypes about colonialism and race relations.  That said, however, I totally disagree with the basic premise that speculative fiction shouldn’t use fantasy characters to explore human problems.  Indeed, I think that’s one of the most important things speculative fiction can do.  Examples where I’ve tried to do it abound in my Otherworld Series.  Return to Tchrkkusk wrestles with the very human issues of prejudice and discrimination, and the complex ways oppressed people may react to their oppression.  Now, my Tchrkym are not supposed to represent African Americans, or Australian aboriginals, or Native American Indians, or any other particular Earth people.  They are their own people with their own history and their own particular situation, but their story is nevertheless a story about a problem that humans have created and then had to deal with over and over - and that’s why I’m telling it.  Vision Revealed is about issues of religious fundamentalism, faith, continuing revelation…  It isn’t about any particular incident in the Middle East or the United States or anywhere else on Earth, but it’s nevertheless about real Earth puzzles that all of us need to think about.
        Authors who use aliens or fantasy to stand in for real Earth situations were accused of wimpiness.  These panelists seemed to feel that the only reason an author would do this is unwillingness to grapple honestly with reality.  (This from people who call themselves fans

of speculative fiction!)  If you want to explore racism, they said, don’t write about prejudice against aliens; write about black and white right here on Earth now.  There may undoubtedly be cases where authors are too squeamish to tackle an issue head-on, but I have two objections to the charge of authors copping out.  First, we are talking about writers of sci fi and fantasy here.  “Realistic” fiction is not their chosen genre, and the implication that only in “realistic” fiction can serious subjects be addressed is nonsense.  Even more importantly, the panelists were looking at this question only from the writers’ perspective, but the readers are equally (or perhaps much much more!) important.  “Star Trek” may be guilty of wimpiness, but it was undoubtedly capable of leading mainstream 1960s viewers to consider important issues (including racism) in ways they might not have done had they seen the show as a Serious Drama About Race in America.  It’s the author’s job to tell a story that readers believe in, not to hit them over the head.
        Finally, I want to point out that, ironically, I don’t think even those panelists who said aliens shouldn’t stand in for humans actually meant it as much as they believed!  After all, they all held up Terry Pratchett and Ursula K. LeGuin as masters of creating fantasy cultures and peoples: authors who do it right.  And both those authors are notable for just how consistently they use their speculative worlds to explore the obviously all-too human issues of sexism, politics, racism, religious fundamentalism, war, and more.  The

distinction here is that fantasy should not be used as a shield to put a comfortable safety barrier between author or reader and a difficult issue.  It should be used, rather, as a probe, a way in, to slip us into a knotty human situation before we quite have a chance to put up our accustomed defenses, and to jolt us into a new perspective on an old issue.
        Perhaps the best way to think about the distinction is to remember the deepest purpose of all - to tell a story.  A work intended to preach a Message About An Issue will likely ring false or grate irritatingly on sensitive nerves looking for nuance.  A story, however, a story by and for people, about people, will of necessity grapple with those same messy human issues, no matter whether the characters are rabbits, robots, elves, or aliens.

[Pictures:  UFO in a Tree, illustration by Bjorn Rune Lie (Image from PioneerHouse);

Ankh-Morpork Civic Protection Stickers, from the Discworld Emporium;

The island of Gont, illustration by Ruth Robbins from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin, 1968.]