I attended one panel as a participant at WFC and one as a spectator.
"Asian Horror" was the first, though it should have been called "Japanese folklore and Hong Kong cinema", as that is what we actually talked about. The panel worked better than I thought it would. It geared up right away into, "And here's another crazy monster from Japan you can write into a story!" with a bit of "And from the two movies I've seen, I'd like to make expansive claims about how much Asians hate women, love hierarchy, and find water and black hair terrifying." We managed to pull it back from the brink, luckily. I was interested to find out that one of my favorite little stories from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio—about a martial artist who had mastered the "iron penis" trick, only to violently mess it up one time with hilarious results—was made into a film in Hong Kong! I did feel the need to point out that in Japan, a panel about "American horror" would have had much more knowledgeable people on it, as Japanese authors of popular fiction are great readers of and have a lot of access to American work.
"Commerce vs Art" was one of those little trainwrecks of a panel the problems of which few people seemed to notice, if only because the question was wrong to start off with. And it was the nature of the panel that the panelists really couldn't be questioned given the careerist impulses of many WFC members. Tom Doherty of Tor Books recommended, for example, that people write "from their hearts" and don't worry about chasing the market as by the time one has produced a work in response to a fad, it may be over as it will have been drowned in mediocrities. The latter certainly can be true some time, but it rather begs the question of where the flood of mediocrities come from-does Tor publish 300 works of genius a year?—and what role publishers have in swamping their own successes. The former...well, in a heavily mediated world many a heart is stuffed full of clichés.
On the "art" side was Nancy Kress, who complained that four major publishers rejected a novel she wrote as it might offend dog-lovers. It was eventually published anyway of course. But is that art over commerce? Was its ultimate publication by an independent press an example of art over commerce as well, or maybe just commerce (Kress is a name! It's a novel and not a collection!) over art? (A bunch of dogs go feral and start killing people, eh?) Even funnier was the commerce-born recommendation that perhaps a heroic dog or two could have made the book "better" in the eyes of the major publishers.
Anyway, this is pretty much why the definition of "pro" at World Fantasy is "someone who only attends the panels they are on, and then only sometimes." See you all in San Diego?
"Asian Horror" was the first, though it should have been called "Japanese folklore and Hong Kong cinema", as that is what we actually talked about. The panel worked better than I thought it would. It geared up right away into, "And here's another crazy monster from Japan you can write into a story!" with a bit of "And from the two movies I've seen, I'd like to make expansive claims about how much Asians hate women, love hierarchy, and find water and black hair terrifying." We managed to pull it back from the brink, luckily. I was interested to find out that one of my favorite little stories from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio—about a martial artist who had mastered the "iron penis" trick, only to violently mess it up one time with hilarious results—was made into a film in Hong Kong! I did feel the need to point out that in Japan, a panel about "American horror" would have had much more knowledgeable people on it, as Japanese authors of popular fiction are great readers of and have a lot of access to American work.
"Commerce vs Art" was one of those little trainwrecks of a panel the problems of which few people seemed to notice, if only because the question was wrong to start off with. And it was the nature of the panel that the panelists really couldn't be questioned given the careerist impulses of many WFC members. Tom Doherty of Tor Books recommended, for example, that people write "from their hearts" and don't worry about chasing the market as by the time one has produced a work in response to a fad, it may be over as it will have been drowned in mediocrities. The latter certainly can be true some time, but it rather begs the question of where the flood of mediocrities come from-does Tor publish 300 works of genius a year?—and what role publishers have in swamping their own successes. The former...well, in a heavily mediated world many a heart is stuffed full of clichés.
On the "art" side was Nancy Kress, who complained that four major publishers rejected a novel she wrote as it might offend dog-lovers. It was eventually published anyway of course. But is that art over commerce? Was its ultimate publication by an independent press an example of art over commerce as well, or maybe just commerce (Kress is a name! It's a novel and not a collection!) over art? (A bunch of dogs go feral and start killing people, eh?) Even funnier was the commerce-born recommendation that perhaps a heroic dog or two could have made the book "better" in the eyes of the major publishers.
Anyway, this is pretty much why the definition of "pro" at World Fantasy is "someone who only attends the panels they are on, and then only sometimes." See you all in San Diego?