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catching up, part 1: capclave
Oct. 27th, 2019 09:52 pmlast weekend, we hared off to capclave, a small SF/F con near DC. since i was frantically busy with work, we ended up going and returning separately, which was no fun... but it allowed me to go at all. while dïe überblønde left friday and returned late sunday, i was there only for most of saturday and part of sunday. and as it turned out, i saw very little of the scheduled programming anyway, instead hanging out with author friends who were working the con. i did enjoy the few things i saw, though.
one panel on worldbuilding mentioned two tools i'll have to go looking for. one is a book by some guy named gillette -- or something like that -- called roughly "world building and system building". it's apparently meant for SF settings. given its age (not published within the last year or so) its ideas of how solar systems should look are probably overly influenced by the one solar system known at when it was published. annoying but hardly fatal.
the other tool is an ancient piece of software named "astrologicus", which apparently has a really good algorithm for generating imaginary terrestrial planets. such things are always useful for any sort of storytelling, even if one throws away most of the worlds it generates and keeps only random bits of real estate.
a panel on novellas, the vaguely-defined length of stories between short stories and novels, yielded a bunch of good lines:
"a novella is a novel that gets to the point.", said by carolyn ives-gilman. she also said something to the effect of "a novella that's been cut down to short story length is like an insect with its legs pulled off."
day al-mohamed described the different lengths of fiction as, "a short story is just a punch to the face and running off with somebody's wallet. there's not much time to do anything else. a novella is holding somebody at gunpoint and going through their pockets. a novel is much more involved: it's a kidnapping. sit down, we're going to be here for a while. and an epic [or was it a series?] is witness protection. it's a whole 'nother life!"
such wonderful quips are one of the reasons i keep going to cons, even though i'm way out of touch with genre fiction.
the last memorable panel was "why so many superhero movies?". i'm willing to chalk it up almost entirely to hollywood's creative bankruptcy, and thus their slavish attempts to copy anything that makes money. so since 2000's x-men made money -- the first of the "modern" supers movies -- all the studios have to try it.
beyond that, i credit some brilliant casting decisions. the panelists mentioned chris evans' captain america and robert downey jr's iron man -- i think those are hard to ignore, but i also think mark ruffalo was an inspired choice for the hulk, and it's hard to overlook the effect of heath ledger, hugh jackman, or patrick stewart in their iconic roles.
i also thought marvel/disney has done well with many of its writing and directing choices, but the panelists pointed out that those are more interesting than i thought. many of their directors had only made small movies and/or TV before being allowed to play with hundreds of millions of dollars in making their blockbusters.
they also credited the matrix with showing that modern SF/X were up to making a supers movie in the first place, and said that the matrix led directly to x-men and the amazing spiderman. ok, that works for me, specially since supers radio theater was always popular, as have been supers animated movies.
and somebody in the audience pointed out a bit of demographics: it took from the post-ww2 comic book boom until x-men for people who grew up reading comics to progress up the ranks in hollywood to finally be in positions of power and influence. now they can make movies about their favorite heroes. this struck me as insightful, especially on reflection: both star wars and raiders of the lost ark were homages to the serials, which was a big part of the previous generation's childhood entertainment.
one panel on worldbuilding mentioned two tools i'll have to go looking for. one is a book by some guy named gillette -- or something like that -- called roughly "world building and system building". it's apparently meant for SF settings. given its age (not published within the last year or so) its ideas of how solar systems should look are probably overly influenced by the one solar system known at when it was published. annoying but hardly fatal.
the other tool is an ancient piece of software named "astrologicus", which apparently has a really good algorithm for generating imaginary terrestrial planets. such things are always useful for any sort of storytelling, even if one throws away most of the worlds it generates and keeps only random bits of real estate.
a panel on novellas, the vaguely-defined length of stories between short stories and novels, yielded a bunch of good lines:
"a novella is a novel that gets to the point.", said by carolyn ives-gilman. she also said something to the effect of "a novella that's been cut down to short story length is like an insect with its legs pulled off."
day al-mohamed described the different lengths of fiction as, "a short story is just a punch to the face and running off with somebody's wallet. there's not much time to do anything else. a novella is holding somebody at gunpoint and going through their pockets. a novel is much more involved: it's a kidnapping. sit down, we're going to be here for a while. and an epic [or was it a series?] is witness protection. it's a whole 'nother life!"
such wonderful quips are one of the reasons i keep going to cons, even though i'm way out of touch with genre fiction.
the last memorable panel was "why so many superhero movies?". i'm willing to chalk it up almost entirely to hollywood's creative bankruptcy, and thus their slavish attempts to copy anything that makes money. so since 2000's x-men made money -- the first of the "modern" supers movies -- all the studios have to try it.
beyond that, i credit some brilliant casting decisions. the panelists mentioned chris evans' captain america and robert downey jr's iron man -- i think those are hard to ignore, but i also think mark ruffalo was an inspired choice for the hulk, and it's hard to overlook the effect of heath ledger, hugh jackman, or patrick stewart in their iconic roles.
i also thought marvel/disney has done well with many of its writing and directing choices, but the panelists pointed out that those are more interesting than i thought. many of their directors had only made small movies and/or TV before being allowed to play with hundreds of millions of dollars in making their blockbusters.
they also credited the matrix with showing that modern SF/X were up to making a supers movie in the first place, and said that the matrix led directly to x-men and the amazing spiderman. ok, that works for me, specially since supers radio theater was always popular, as have been supers animated movies.
and somebody in the audience pointed out a bit of demographics: it took from the post-ww2 comic book boom until x-men for people who grew up reading comics to progress up the ranks in hollywood to finally be in positions of power and influence. now they can make movies about their favorite heroes. this struck me as insightful, especially on reflection: both star wars and raiders of the lost ark were homages to the serials, which was a big part of the previous generation's childhood entertainment.