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Thursday, November 03, 2011

World Fantasy Convention: Days 2-3

I expected to have a lot to say about the rest of World Fantasy.  But it can be summed up fairly quickly: I went to panels, I went to parties, I met interesting people.  I talked to John O'Neill and the Black Gate crew again, which is always fun.  I hung out with friends, and with Kristin's friends.  More Kristin's friends than mine, actually, as she knows more of the regular Con-goers than I do (which is only natural, as she's been going to Cons longer than I have).

That said, let's try to hit the high points.

In terms of panels, the most interesting one I went to was on the role of character stupidity in genre fiction.  I felt that this was somewhat one-sided, as the arguments of the panelists boiled down to "your characters shouldn't be stupid."  But I felt this was unfair.  The real issue with characters, especially in horror movies, is that they don't know that they're in horror movies.  Much of their stupidity stems from this fact.  People, all the time, will go downstairs, alone, unarmed, in their underwear even, to check out a strange noise because they think the dog knocked over something or something toppled over, and they won't be expecting someone to be lurking there.  If they knew they were in a horror movie, or a suspense movie, they wouldn't do that, but they don't know.  That's not stupidity, it's just ignorance.

The most interesting party was the pajama party, which was a release party of N.K. Jemisin's new book, The Kingdom of Gods.  You were supposed to wear your pajamas, and there were kids' games like Hungry, Hungry Hippos and Operation, and there was liquor in sippy cups.  The book supposedly has a god of childhood in it, hence the theme.  It was fun.  We went, but didn't wear our pajamas, since we were going to the aforementioned panel on stupidity later.

One thing we enjoyed was the sun.  San Diego in the fall is nice--the temperatures in the 70s, rather than the 50s, like it is here in Boston.

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