Worldcon 2019 panel notes: Saturday

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I'm starting to run out of steam with these, so they take longer/are getting a bit shorter from now on. Fortunately I'm almost done.

Full contact medieval combat demonstration
Fighters from the Irish full contact medieval combat team will be on hand to demonstrate their high intensity, exciting sport, and to talk about the realities of using weapons and armour.

I forgot about this in my Worldcon summary! It was great. I missed the first half of the explanations because I was on the wrong side of the foyer and the guy didn't have a microphone but there was still a lot of interesting stuff. Most of them have 14th-century armor because "it's the ideal balance between quality of armor and what we can afford." There were demonstration of sword-and-shield fighting and longsword fighting, mostly guys but also one woman. The fights were fascinating. So fast! There were a couple of questions, i.e. how does one use the toilet ("you're sweating so much you don't need to.") Sadly I had to leave a bit early to get to a reading.

Nonhuman and interspecies communication
There is much to be learned by terrestrial, yet nonhuman, lifeforms that communicate within and between species. We have already learned a lot from language experiments with great apes, parrots, and dolphins. What more do these animals and others have to teach us about communicating with lifeforms beyond the Earth, should we ever meet?
Manny Frishberg(M), Dr Claire McCague, Dr Bob, Christianne Wakeham

Very interesting panel that I enjoyed a lot.

What do we mean by communication and intelligence? Communication: a message is sent & received & understood. Intelligence is harder – we know it when we see it? It's related to languages. There are many different kinds of communication, like quorum sensing by bacteria. Forests also communicate, e.g. by chemical means, to manage the forest, e.g. storing and releasing water. Acacia trees warn each other of giraffes. Often communication doesn't work between different species, e.g. dogs and horses.
There are several stories of research with captured animals. Cuttlefish, after capture, go from fear to trying to scare people to trying to attract notice, which is probably them asking for food. Much patience is required. Once a group of chimps got familiar with adult researchers and tolerated them, but when someone brought a human baby a chimp stole it and killed it, because that was a new thing and nobody considered that the chimps might react differently to a baby than an adult.
There are two kinds of research: how animals communicate with each other, and training them to communicate with humans. The latter was tried with chimpanzees, parrots, crows, dolphins… MF talks a bit about chimpanzee research with Washo and the bonobo Kanzi.
It's interesting how much humans try to make other species speak our language, instead of trying to speak their language. Will it be the same if we encounter aliens, would we expect them to try and learn our language too? We have a noun-heavy language, but that's not a given. If aliens arrive, we assume they're intelligent. If a human is captured by aliens, how can you convince them that you're sentient and intelligent?
Language is connected to culture, it depends on the culture what things a language has words for etc. (The WWF had to change its name because some languages don't have word for "wildlife", some languages have no expression for "lost in the woods.") Aliens might have a completely different view of intelligence, would they even understand ours? Book rec for "Semiosis," where humans have to communicate with plants.
What are necessary conditions for communication/language? A species of social creatures helps, which also encourages a bigger brain. Curiosity or conflict-avoidance are likely reasons. Butterflies have a king of genetic communication.
When studying communication/language, it's easy to "anthropomorphize" communication, e.g. the horse that could apparently calculate but just followed it's handler's cues. Dr. B tells a story of a film crew that wanted a trained owl to attack where bait would be buried, but the owl quickly figured out that bait would be where the humans pointed and attacked too early.
There's a question I didn't quite understand about humans being a micro-biome and in symbiosis with bacteria – we are about half and half, and research is just beginning to understand how much we are e.g. influenced by our gut bacteria, which creates interesting questions about free will.
Is a universal translator possible? Language is full of metaphors. Human translators don't translate word-for-word but concepts. The university of Washington is working on a universal translator based on common concepts. Book rec for C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series.
What human-animal-communication would you like to see explored in fiction? It's possible to communicate quite effectively with some animals without language, it's all about listening and intuition. It's also very important to turn off one's own conceptions. MF would like to see more with dolphins, there's lots of research being done there, apparently dolphins identify objects by the sounds that they make. CMC would like to see more with cuttlefish and is currently writing about them. (After the panel I asked Dr Bob, who's worked with cephalopods, if she's read "Children of Ruin" and what she thought of it, but unfortunately she hasn't had the time yet.)

What fanfiction can teach genre writers
Fanfiction’s popularity continues to grow, tapping into the special creative connection between authors and fans. What is it about this literary nexus that is so fascinating and stimulating for fans? And what might authors have to learn from fans who write it?
Sara-Jayne Slack(M), Naomi Novik, Jeremy Szal, Kate Sheehy

I met dolorosa_12 and dhampyresa in this panel, which was nice :) Naomi Novik got applause when she introduced herself as one of the founders of the AO3; I'm curious what percentage of the room are in transformative fandom but my guess would be a lot.

Fanfic is about the character we already love, and also those we don't know yet, minor characters etc. Fic can change our perspective on canon and make us care more about side characters. The magic of fanfic is that a character can be different in each story you write, you can play with them more.
The concept of "canon" is relatively recent, nowadays it's easy to e.g. rewatch episodes, earlier that was hard. (Even in Doyle's Sherlock Holmes Watson's injury is not always in the same place.) Fanfic is more flexible, there is no absolute fixed storyline.
What distinguishes fanfic from e.g. tie-in novels and adaptions (e.g. Wicked?) Fanfic is something communal, you have a shared universe and it's also in the context of a community with other fans. Also, fanfic denies & defies canon, and sometimes you want the same thing (e.g. Steve saving Bucky) again and again and again.
The "need to be original" and valorization of originality is poison. There's creative energy to be gained from writing against things, e.g. known stories, it gives the author another layer to communicate on: what the readers know/expect and if the author does that or not, play with their expectations. "Show don't tell" doesn't apply as much when the readers already know about the characters/world/story. Don't be afraid to name your influences. "I wonder what they've done with this story."
In the fanfic community you get prompts and bingo cards, you get people writing completely different stories for the same prompt and it's never boring. (After all, there are how many hundreds of paintings about Christ on the cross?)
NN talks a bit about the AO3, as a model for "owning the servers", which means they don't need to maximize ad revenue, which other platforms do by e.g. encouraging fringe voices. On AO3 users aren't the commodity. One thing genre writers can learn from fanfic is not to put up walls around their work so much. If you want your work to be alive, you have to let others in. Reading is a collaborate process. Fanfic communities also invite comments, communication about works, in a respectful place, and you can learn about dissecting and interrogating texts.
SJS says that as a publisher, the things she most appreciates about writers from fanfic communities is that they already have the ability to take critique and listen to feedback.
Do you treat fanfic and original characters differently? NN says that her stories start differently, since fanfic for her is play and she can only write the interesting bits; fanfic taught her how to sustain longer narratives, and also how to recognize when you do have a story that wants to be an original one. She doesn't have a problem with feeling defensive about writing fic. KS says that sometimes agents even contact fic writers, asking if they have an agent yet, and agents too like that fic writers are already familiar with the editing process.
Can fanfic teach you about worldbuilding too? Yes, if you write AUs. You can do/learn any kind of writing with fanfic. The mindset that if you're a good enough writer you should go pro is strange, there is such a thing as hobbies, nobody asks a good hobby singer when they'll go pro. You can write fanfic as a hobby, but if you want you can also try to go pro.

After Worldcon I read a post by fairestcat We Did The Thing: Musings On the AO3, Wiscon, and Winning the Fandom Culture Wars, which gives a bit more background to my feelings on how fast the acceptance of fanfic has changed. It's nice :)

Next I originally wanted to go to a panel about writing feudal systems, which dolorosa_12 thankfully collected notes for here, but the room was full. The panel we went to instead was also fun:

Children's books: the gateway drug
For most of us, exposure to sci-fi and fantasy starts as children. At what point does imaginative children’s book illustration start being labelled ‘fantasy’? What creators influenced you? How aware are these two industries of each other? We talk to people who’ve had experience of both.
Oisin McGann(M), Gili Bar-Hillel, Holly Black, Lee Moyer, Ben Hennessy

This panel was interesting, and made me want a lot more illustrated books. (My favorites, and some of the few I can think of right now, are the "Zamonia" books by Walter Moers.)

Fantasy is a natural part of many children's books, when does it become its own genre? Does it matter? Not for children but often for e.g. educators, who think fantasy isn't "real literature." There's this idea that there's an age where kids don't want illustrations in their books anymore, and the mentality that "serious literature" doesn't have pictures in it. The panelists agree that this is sad and that they always want pictures. Pictures are powerful and give immediate emotions. Some kids do at some point prefer to "do their own work" imagining characters' faces. Unfortunately, printing illustrated books is expensive.
"Visual literacy", the ability to focus on both text & images in comics etc., is a learned skill easiest acquired as a child. Some books are great in how the illustrations add to the story, add details that aren't in the story (yet.) The current generation is literate in images, new forms of communication, e.g. memes.
The illustration/animation market in Dublin is broken up into small age segments, it's age-dependent how many colors are used etc., to best hold kids' attention.
For the first time right now people read&write more than they speak.

Future financial systems and transactions
The recent global financial crisis revealed major flaws in the system. What were some of these flaws? Were they fixed and what impact will they have on the legacy of our financial systems? Investors are looking for stability and security in the systems. Where should they place their trust? What do we need to know, and what red flags should we be watching for in the future?
Jo Lindsay Walton(M), Shmulik Shelach, Dr Stewart Hotston, Nile Heffernan, Ms Maria Farrell

Unfortunately this panel was at the same time as the Masquerade, but I really wanted to go. I don't regret it, it was very interesting. (But it was late in the evening and my notes reflect that, they are even shorter than usual and sometimes I couldn't remember what the context/meaning was.)

What is finance? My favorite explanation was by NH, who said if economics is climatology, finance is about making & supplying umbrellas.
Important – how do we define & measure value? It's becoming more popular to think about alternatives to capitalism. Some things that were mentioned: gift economy (problem on a larger scale), deflation theory, universal basic income (panelists generally like the idea, but don't trust it/don't think it can work without bigger changes/worry about benchmarks moving etc.) Algorithmic trading and flash crashes are mentioned. The problem with complex systems is that they are often rather opaque. The best traders know what they're telling the computer to do, but many don't. Trading =/= investing: trading uses the system to get profit, investing plans to make profit by taking advantage of things that are undervalued. Humans aren't built for trading. AIs are there to help but they're not perfect. The universe is built on radical incompleteness; Laplace's demon? even with enough info and computing there will be randomness. But could you predict an economic system? If there were an AI that could do that it would be dangerous. What if we use AIs not to predict, but to allocate?
Will there be an end to scarcity? Only if we solve some serious energy issues… There can be an end of scarcity of need. Money has to be scarce enough to have value, scarcity can be valuable, but should not apply to things like food & health care.
Advances in information technology will lead to regulatory problems.
How would financial systems work between different solar systems? Communication would be a huge issue. Also smuggling, of course.
What throws you out of a story? Authors should please be economically literate, and at least think about how the army eats.
There is a new line of business: writing short SF pieces for businesses on demand, who use them for advertising/planning/idk.

There were a lot of book recs, Maria Farrell tweeted most of them. Also mentioned were for example Iain Banks' "Culture" books (as well as I couple where I couldn't make out the names.)

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