FRIDAY, JUNE 22nd
3:30 PM: Welcome to 4th Street Fantasy!
4:00 PM: All the Things We Do That Aren’t Smashing Things
Mary Robinette Kowal, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Chelsea Polk, Abra Staffin Wiebe, John Wiswell (M)
Based in part on certain ideas expressed in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” essay.
A discussion of all the ways we tell stories about building lives, civilizations, and legacies using anything but the edge of the sword. Why do we so often truncate our experience/expectations of fiction to revolve so firmly around the linked concepts of heroism and violence when there are so many other crucial aspects to being human? How has the fantasy genre dealt with this conundrum, and how have specific fantasists tried to approach it? How do we keep the discussion from degenerating into a prudish or performative rejection of the abstract concept of “violence” altogether, while affirming that there are other common and crucial ways of getting things done?
5:00 PM: Meal Break
7:00 PM: In Consideration of Smashing Things, and What Follows
John Appel, Tim Boerger (M), Aimee Kuzenski, Sloane Talest, Blair Woodall
Combat, and the ways of warriors, are a staple of the fantasy genre. We read about daring swords-folk, the ranked legions of Empire, spell-wielding gunslingers, steppe horse-archers, and all their doughty opponents. What might a mixed panel of military veterans and martial artists think of these depictions? What did our narratives of conflict teach them about fighting that proved true? What proved false? What lingers, possibly forever, in the wake of an instant’s violence? How can tales of fantastical combat best evoke the realities of war in our own world, and should they? As a matched panel to “All the Things We Do That Aren’t Smashing Things,” panelists will also speak to the issue of reconciling the narrative concepts of “heroic” and “mundane.”
SATURDAY, JUNE 23rd
9:30 AM: Rebuilding the Mystery: Rejecting Rules for Magic
Casey Blair (M), Max Gladstone, Chelsea Polk, Caroline Stevermer, Django Wexler
Magic is a common feature of fantasy fiction, and the “magic system” has become a common means of framing and describing it for reader comprehension. Brandon Sanderson, one of the most noted codifiers of magic systems in contemporary fantasy, has posited “An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands such magic.” Not everyone agrees, to put it mildly. So let’s have an energetic discussion about the uses of de-concretized, nebulous, “soft magic,” comparing the various traditions of sorcery in fiction and describing circumstances under which a story might be suited to or even improved by throwing rules and systemization out the window. How can we narratively center the wonder of magic without teaching the reader precisely how it works?
11:00 AM: The Craft of Cutting Out: Using Reductive and Restrictive Tools
John Chu, Mary Robinette Kowal (M), Arkady Martine, Caroline Stevermer
“The difference between life and art is that art has a frame,” someone once said. All art comes from some manner of limitation, and this will be a craft-centered discussion on the use of limitation as a deliberate creative tool— whether it means using minimalist typing programs like Writeroom, or a typewriter, or a notebook and pen, or a simple instrument rather than a complex one, or a limited and controlled environment (Maya Angelou famously maintained a hotel room in which she would write every day sans distraction) to channel creativity. What happens when we go unplugged rather than electrified? Where do we draw the line between healthy asceticism and punitive measures?
12:00 PM: Meal Break
2:00 PM: You Don’t Own Me: Concepts of Freedom in the Work of John M. Ford
Pamela Dean, Marissa Lingen, Elise Matthesen (M), Teresa Nielsen Hayden
Distilling the work of the late John M. Ford down to a few key points is a mind-bending and questionably plausible endeavor, but there are some recurring themes we can at least pretend to conclusively discuss in our too-short time together. One subject that peeks out from the fog of invention over and over again is that of freedom in multiple aspects. Whether it’s freedom of identity and freedom from imperial conquest (The Dragon Waiting), freedom from erroneous stereotypes and cultural traps (The Final Reflection), freedom from colonization and from the boundaries of parental control (Growing Up Weightless), or even authorial freedom from every established constraint on the demeanor of a franchise (How Much for Just the Planet?), Ford was on the case. We miss him and it’s been awhile since we talked about him deliberately. Let’s fix that.
3:30 PM: Complicity and Consequence in Interactive Narrative: Press ‘D’ to Feel Guilty!
Max Gladstone (M), Scott Lynch, Cat Manning, John Wiswell
A panel discussing the challenges and implications of attempting to inspire feelings of guilt, responsibility, or complicity for fictional activities/decisions in players of games and interactive fiction, also touching on the concept of vicarious responsibility when experiencing a more traditional narrative (if one laughs along with Corwin of Amber being a total bastard, does that make one a bad person?). Why do this? When is this a useful frame-breaking learning tool? When is it a cheap trick? Can we truly use fictional spaces to make people interrogate the decisions they make and the circumstances they dwell in? What are the practical and ethical limits of this sort of exploration?
Possible conversational touchpoints include the following games and interactive fiction pieces: Tyranny – Dishonored – Knights of the Old Republic – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – Subnautica – This is the Police – Papers, Please – Lime Ergot — various Fallout titles. A supplementary guide will be provided for the sake of audience members less familiar with these works.
5:00 PM: Talking Across Ten Thousand Years
John Appel, Elizabeth Bear, Casey Blair, Marissa Lingen (M), Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Time is big. Really, really big. You might think it’s a long anxious wait to get to the bathroom after a 4th Street panel, but what about gulfs of time longer than the recorded history of our civilization? SF/F deals frequently with the concept of Deep Time, but how astutely? Can a human society really hold a consensus cosmogeny together for a million centuries? Can a wall of ice really be manned by the same order of guards for 8,000 years? We already look at the people of just a century or two ago as something akin to aliens. This panel will also address the essential challenges of communication and interpretation across vast spans of years— for example, the U.S. Department of Energy has a mandate for the permanent warning signs and symbols in place at its deep bedrock nuclear waste storage facilities. They need to somehow work ten thousand years from now, when the assumption is that our culture, languages, histories, and data will be gone… but our hazardous atomic waste will still be dangerous. How can we talk when only our words are left, and even the words have no context?
Useful Reading: “This Place is Not a Place of Honor,” by Alan Bellows
6:00 PM Meal Break
8:00 PM: Who Put This $#@!! Balrog Lair in the Middle of a Sewer Line? (Alternate Title: Life in the Temporary Topmost Layer)
Elizabeth Bear, Ben Kinney, Arkady Martine(M), Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Vivian Shaw
The Balrog, of course, would say “Who tried to drive a &^%#!! sewer line through the middle of my lair?” First principle: We’re not all that excellent at shunning risk even when we manage to identify it. Some of our cities are literally sinking, while others are precariously perched next to volcanoes, and yet we keep buying new furniture anyway, c’est la vie.
Second principle: We’re all living on top of stacked and flattened layers of history. Our nations spread over the bones and borders of the nations they replaced by fair means or foul. Our neighborhoods are named for trades or functions that vanished decades ago, our streets were built for the vehicles of ages past, and they were built atop still older streets and neighborhoods.
Combine these two principles and you begin to construct a fascinating, disquieting picture of how our lives are shaped by the compacted strata of legacy infrastructure, detritus, and danger beneath our very feet. All the layers of history in a place act upon the living. How and when has this been accurately reflected in fantasy fiction? How do you present the secrets and dangers of a fantasy landscape as a vivid influence on its inhabitants rather than a meaningless detail on a map or list? Also, how do we grapple with the notion that we must some day become just another thin line in someone else’s deeply-layered history?
SUNDAY, JUNE 24th
10:00 AM: Literally Killing Figurative Characters
Stella Evans, Scott Lynch (M), Ginger Weil, Vivian Shaw
A series of meditations on ending our relationships with fictional persons— whether we’re authors deciding that we’re not going to write them any longer, or readers realizing that we won’t be reading new words about them ever again, or making the deliberate decision for any reason to cease reading/caring. Is it ever possible to cease caring? How is it best to dispense with a fictional person whose time has come? Will include discussion of the sometimes tempestuous relationships between author and long-term characters, referencing C.S. Forester’s private love/loathing poem to Horatio Hornblower, pop culture images of the writer chained to a best-selling imaginary person but yearning to break free, and the different modes in which an audience decides to close the book on an imaginary friend.
11:30 AM: Grim Times, Bright Tidings
John Chu, Alex Haist (M), Jennifer Mace, Reuben Poling, Paul Weimer
Fantasy in the last decade has seen the rise of a distinct thread of bloody, gritty, goth-rococo work that has been called (originally jokingly) “grimdark.” The wheel always turns, and now a distinct exploration of the aesthetic antithesis of grimdark has emerged, under equally semi-serious rubrics like “hopepunk.” What does it mean to deliberately write and seek hope in a work of fiction? Fantasy has always been known as a powerful vehicle for escapism, but let’s dig deeper into the value of this mode of fiction; how and why do we engage with injustice optimistically, and model ways of transcending awfulness? How do we maintain sufficient attention to detail and realism to claim that we’re plausibly confronting reality rather than eliding it, and how do we do that without swooping all the way back to grimdark in the end? Is it even possible, and should it be desirable, to balance escapism and social awareness?
12:30 PM Meal Break
2:30 PM: But That’s a Different Panel…
3:30 PM: Thanks! And What About 2019?