I’ve just got back from having lunch with Guy Gavriel Kay and Scott Bakker (and also Scott’s wife and Deanna Hoak). The boys were talking about novel creation, and specifically about the tension between writing a challenging and complex book, a book that will be more accessible to a traditional genre audience, and a book that will be accessible to a much wider general audience that doesn’t have a background of genre reading to inform their understanding of the narrative. This is the sort of thing that happens at ICFA.

I also had a long conversation with Donald Morse about the hotel, which will help me draft a much better con report than might otherwise have been the case. The oddest hotel behavior can make sense once you know the background.

One of the papers I attended this afternoon was about the Gaiman & Vess Sandman episode based around A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The presentation was considerably enlivened by the presence of Charles Vess in the audience. Jim Casey made the point that the story is very much concerned with authenticity and authorship. The fairies in the story get to watch Bottom and his friends playing them as characters in a play. Shakespearean scholars, meanwhile, have always been exercised by the question of who actually wrote the plays, and modern theories are open to the probability that the final versions we have were honed by input from other members of the acting troupe. Gaiman, however, postulates collaboration of another kind. In the Sandman stories the two most fantastical plays in the Shakespearean canon are shown to have not been written by Shakespeare himself, but were provided to him by Morpheus as part of a Faustian bargain. Jim noted, however, that Morpheus is not a real person, but rather a character created by Neil Gaiman, and that therefore, if you follow the logic through, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest were not written by Shakespeare, but by Neil Gaiman.

And before poor Jim gets descended upon by hordes of irate Gaiman fans I hasten to add that this idea was presented in jest and was most definitely not an accusation of arrogance. We all had a good laugh, and I’m pretty sure that Neil will find it funny too. (Neil, I suggested to Charles that the two of you claim the whole story came to you in a dream.)

I gather the weather is pretty bad all over the US today. In Florida it is just overcast and windy, so not much lounging by the pool will get done today, I suspect. Fortunately there is plenty going on indoors. Indeed, the papers on offer have been interesting enough to drag me out of bed to attend an 8:30am panel. This is deeply uncivilized, and I apologize to the panelists for eating my breakfast while they were holding forth.
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The theme of this year’s conference is, “The Sublime in the Fantastic”. Accordingly the opening panel set out to explore just what we might mean by that. We are now all thoroughly sublimated (not to mention purified and exalted, if you happen to have a Thesaurus or John Clute to hand).

Roger Luckhurst, this year’s Guest Scholar, kicked things off by exhorting us to create a list of those genre writers who, despite the shrieking, gibbous insanity of their eldritch prose, somehow manage to forge a connection to the unnameable and unknowable.

Mr. Clute, sharp as ever, talked about the movie technique of “selling the shot” and how it is all about never showing the whole monster.

And Brian Aldiss, unwilling to trade erudition with the rest of the panel, chose instead to read a brief fragment written by someone he knew:

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

So now, without being shown the whole monster, you should have a good idea of what we are trying to talk about.