Monday, December 14, 2015
Podcast in Response to Chuck Wendig: Starring Rakesh Chatrath, Christoph Eckrich, Camden Ko, and Andy Xu
You can access this four-man podcast conversation responding to Chuck Wendig via the link below:
https://archive.org/details/AndyCamdenChristophRakeshSpecFicPodcast
Andy, Camden, Christoph, and Rakesh will be happy to take your comments in the comment field below, of course.
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Andy, Camden, Christoph, Rakesh -
ReplyDeleteCool 16 bit soundtrack intro, boys... :)
Your discussion of architecture was really exciting for me (I have to admit, I was kind of dorkily cheering you all on at various points) as you each bring a different view of how the visual spaces authors offer shape the tone and character of a work. I think your discussion of how to picture the glassite houses of _The Martian Chronicles_ (organic and intuitive? boxy and solid? irregular? rationalistic?) was a great embodiment Christoph's point that an incomplete visual offers the reader space to envision a variation on the theme that suits their own imagination.
The mediocrity discussion was fun and Camden's comment about understanding why sff would avoid addressing mediocrity for narrative reasons made me think of Patrick Ness' recent novel _The Rest of Us Just Live Here_, a book where the characters we follow ARE the ordinary people surrounded by people with X-Men style powers, hero quests, magical powers, and so on. It's worth checking it if you'd like to see an interesting deconstruction of how much being ordinary can matter in the context of the extraordinary. This might be an example of Camden's search for a story where "the problem itself is the mediocrity."
I agree with Rakesh that there's a very common trope running through sff of "mediocre character discovers they're more." I think a lot of sff's most well-known narratives capitalize on this, not necessarily in the sense of being mediocre but in the sense of rising from obscurity, that everyman narrative. Star Wars is all about the farm boy who rises from nothing -- and the newest Star Wars film does the same, but with a scrappy scavenger.
Andy's raising the Hawking petition against developing independent AI dovetails well with sff's ongoing fascination with, as Rakesh says, "pushing the limit of how far artificial intelligence is taken." Christoph's memory of Asimov's "Reason" as peak discomfort because of how the robots render human intelligence obsolete was interesting to me because of Asimov's characters own eventual acceptance that their role can just be to camp out in the station and put in time while the robots take care of everything. It's interesting to me that Asimov seemed ready to accept that turn of events, that obsolescence, as a matter of pragmatism -- and did that sixty years ago. And here we are in 2015 still processing with real, natural discomfort whether we can handle being unnecessary because of what we managed to create.
Your cloning discussion could be a whole unit of study in a well-written sff course, and you could run the master class workshop for it, I think. It was really gratify to hear your weave together the sff you know from your own reading and viewing habits with things we've read or created through the SFS class.
I'm glad you opted to create this podcast, gentlemen. The cross-talk was authentically interesting, something I hope you're proud of creating, and something I hope you share with others.
Best,
TT