What do you call an event where costumers mingle with bestselling authors, artists hang out with scientists, the Arrogant Worms perform, and the sight of knights in chainmail whacking each other with swords draws scant attention?
A science fiction convention, of course—specifically, Calgary’s ConVersion XXI.
This year’s guest of honour was best-selling SF and fantasy author George R.R. Martin. The artist guest of honour was James F. Beveridge from Edmonton, and the Canadian guest of honour was Spider Robinson, known not only for his books but for his essays in The Globe and Mail under the heading “The Crazy Years.” (Unfortunately, Spider fell ill on his arrival in Calgary and was unable to attend the convention.)
For me, the heart of the convention is the series of panel discussions on topics related to writing SF and fantasy. I served on panels on topics ranging from “Finishing Your Novel” to “Turning a Short Story Into a Novel” to “Making the Transition to Full-Time (Writing).”
The reason so many people are interested in writing SF and fantasy is that they love to read it—and the love of reading fiction was the topic of George R. R. Martin’s keynote address.
Martin said wherever he goes, from the Czech Republic to Croatia to Canada, he’s struck by just how remarkable the process of decoding printed symbols is—and how fewer and fewer people are bothering to undertake it. “We who read are a proud and lonely few,” he said; recent studies have shown that college graduates in the United States read an average of only one book a year—and that book is unlikely to be fiction.
But then, why should anyone read fiction? Martin asked. After all, it isn’t true.
He gave four reasons. The first is shared with non-fiction: learning. Hugo Gernsback, who published the world’s first science fiction magazine in the 1920s, thought that science fiction should be a way of sugarcoating science fact: “like putting chocolate on broccoli,” Martin said. SF continues to interest people in science: it’s largely responsible for my own interest in science, and just about any astronaut or cosmonaut you ask began as an SF fan.
A second reason for reading fiction is intellectual exercise. The classic whodunit is the best example; some SF is similarly constructed like a puzzle. The late Hal Clement, for example, was known for meticulously imagining what a planet with a particularly orbit, atmosphere and mass might be like, and then creating a story to illustrate the results of his thought experiment.
A third reason for reading fiction is the pleasure inherent in “the sound of words, the look of words, the way the words rub up against each other,” Martin said. That’s the pleasure of poetry, he said, and we all like a little poetry in our prose. Although science fiction has its stylists, style is not what SF is usually known for, perhaps because fantastic places and non-existent things must be described in transparent prose to keep the reader from getting lost.
Some readers and critics believe that style is the most important element of fiction; but if that’s the case, asked Martin, “What about translations?” In Croatia, he couldn’t read a word of his own books, but people there were able to talk to him about his books. None of his words survived—but his story did. For Martin–and for me, and probably most SF and fantasy writers and readers—words are important, but what keeps us reading any book the story, the desire to find out what happens next. All truly great books combine wonderful words with an equally wonderful story.
The fourth reason for reading fiction is to visit places we’ve never been. “Novel” means “new,” Martin said, and the novel first became popular at a time when most people lived very closed lives, rarely traveling further than the next village, and meeting only a handful of people their whole lives. Novels took them to the far corners of the Earth and introduced them to people very different from those around them. “Novels enabled them to live a thousand lives instead of just one,” is how he put it; and that’s still true today. Although we travel more than our ancestors, we still find that traveling to the worlds described in books often engages us on a deeper level than our own day-to-day journeys.
“I pity those who look at words on paper and get no joy from decoding them,” Martin said. “Count yourself lucky, you strange and proud few, and keep reading.”
I intend to.
