Worldcon fun

Work constraints didn't allow me to attend all of Noreascon 4, but since I live in the area, I did drop in today and had a great time, mostly going to author panels, Terry Pratchett's typically entertaining Guest of Honor speech, and the Hugo ceremony. I can sum up the experience by saying that it's amazing to be in the presence of so many from the small fraction of humanity who can genuinely leave me starstruck.

Giants of the field abounded and were brilliant and charming, but my favorite panel was definitely M. M. Buckner, David Friedman, Cory Doctorow, and Benjamin Rosenbaum's contentious and thought-provoking talk on "Postcapitalist Social Mechanisms" (such as, say, Doctorow's "Whuffie" from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or the AI-driven gift economy in Bruce Sterling's "Maneki Neko"), which was not nearly as utopic as it might have sounded and was for once more Future Now than Future Past (the means of attaining Future Future has not yet been invented, which is what makes it Future Future). Rosenbaum seemed to be approaching a one-man Singularity throughout the hour.

I caught up with Cate Pederson and Andy World in the dealer area and also ran into one of my co-workers, of whose fannish tendencies I had previously been unaware.

Hugos

By the way, I was a little embarrassed at the Hugos, since this year I happen to have read unusually little of the nominated material. Fortunately, as a day-pass last-minute visitor, I didn't have a vote.

Many of the novellas, novelettes and short stories were in the Dozois Best of the Year anthology, so I was planning to read them there and then misplaced the thing somewhere while I was on vacation. The nominees in the shortish fiction categories were, however, all made available online, which was pretty cool. Neil Gaiman had the odd experience of being both master of ceremonies and the winner for Best Short Story; "A Study in Emerald" was one that I hadn't gotten around to reading, in part because I had my fill of science-fictional Sherlock Holmes pastiches some time ago. Personally I was pulling for Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels", but it was not to be.

"Reputation-based economies need bankruptcy laws"

In the aforementioned panel at Noreascon, either Cory Doctorow or Benjamin Rosenbaum said the above; of course, the main plot thread of Doctorow's novel is all about the experience of getting completely busted in a futuristic reputation-based economy. The point was made that systems based on things sort of like Whuffie have always existed, and they're not necessarily better or less stressful than working in a money-based world. Friedman mentioned that academia is one, and "some people don't like being in academia".

(Of course academia is tremendously money-based, but personal reputation is what you get when you accomplish something big, and the money-grubbing is primarily seen by the workers as a means to further work.)

Rosenbaum brought up the classic example of high-school social relations. As always, it's great if you're on top, but reputation tends to be distributed by some sort of sharply peaked power law, and it is essentially impossible to redistribute; it can be reflected, but not in the arbitrary manner of an account transfer. So it works best in situations where this is a feature rather than a bug. Meritocracy is all well and good, but if it's all that determines who eats, it might be very hard to achieve a balance with basic compassion. That's probably why it's easier to imagine whole meatspace economies based on reputation in worlds in which scarcity has been eliminated and nobody has to worry about just getting by.

The point about academia struck home with me. One thing I was surprised to discover when I moved into the corporate world was that it was actually something of a relief to be working, for the first time, for people who were primarily motivated to get money. Their motives, and what they consequently wanted from me, were really easy to understand, however ignoble to my preexisting mindset.

(Of course the commercial sector is tremendously reputation- and connection-based, but raises and bonuses and fat stock options are what you get when you accomplish something big, and the reputation-grubbing is primarily seen by the workers as a means to further work.)

One way to reboot your reputation, Friedman mentioned, is to abandon your whole identity and start a new one. You can do that in online worlds, less easily in meatspace. But if Clay Shirky is right and DNA becomes the ultimate identifier (as it already is in some criminal and other legal contexts), the only way to do that would be to either have yourself somehow genetically modified, or bring on the kung fu bubble eunuch clones.

Trying to understand Québécois French

Québécois French is frustrating Maciej Ceglowski. I can sympathize, though intellectually I realize that it's not the language's fault.

For reasons of geography, I've spent far more time in Québec than in any other place whose primary language is not English. So my school training in French actually comes in handy... except that, like Maciej, I learned the wrong version of the language, and Québécois is still frequently baffling to me. It's sort of like the difference between, say, Scottish and Texan English. As a non-native speaker, it's been a little harder for me to "get accustomed" than it probably is for native French speakers.

I remember one time I was at the Montréal jazz festival and suddenly realized that there was one French-speaking group that I could mysteriously understand when they introduced themselves; it turned out that they were from Paris, and I think Tom Dignan, who is much more fluent than I am, overheard some people in the crowd making fun of their crazy accents. (Of course, when I was actually in Paris I didn't have much more success, because the people there talk at like a thousand words a minute and use lots of abbreviations, verlan and other slang. I have the most luck with people who are trying to speak very clearly, such as broadcast announcers and people introducing bands.)

Some consonants and vowels in Québécois sound to me more like the way they do in American or Canadian English than the way I was taught they were supposed to sound in French. So sometimes I end up doing this mental flip in which I imagine an English speaker reading words out loud, and that clears up some difficulties. (Native speakers of the language would probably be insulted to read that, so I stress that I'm not claiming they're pronouncing their own language incorrectly or in an Anglicized manner. It's just what I hear in my own head. And it probably has as much to do with English's borrowings from old Norman French as with anything else.)

...And, yeah, dépanneur completely threw me the first twenty times, too.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

This little book is a collection of short stories with a common premise, written over the past several years, some apparently new to this volume.

Most of Le Guin's science fiction (such as the novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed) has been set in her Hainish Ekumen universe, a widescreen galactic setup that allowed her to invent planets that were basically imaginary foreign societies of humans and near-humans. That the central premise was biologically implausible (Earth humans turn out to be one of the many genetic experiments of the ancient Hainish) never mattered much; she was really doing something along the lines of speculative anthropological and political fiction, doing her own thought experiments. But the star-travel trappings set certain limits. Travel was by time-swallowing relativistic starships, with limited instantaneous communication by "ansible"; her outside-observer characters were not 20th century Earth humans but ambassadors of the far-off Ekumen.

Changing Planes is in a similar vein to some of Le Guin's short anthropological stories such as "The Matter of Seggri", but tosses out the interstellar Ekumen and replaces it with a cosmic tourist agency and an overtly whimsical inter-universal travel technique based on a pun. There are, it seems, lots of "planes", which in practice tend to manifest themselves physically as more or less Earthlike planets inhabited by more and less humanoid people; and humans of our world can travel between these planes by a special psychological technique that can only be performed while feeling uncomfortable and stressed in an airport waiting lounge. The people of other planes have been doing this for a long time, and there are already hotels and tourism bureaus set up. The visiting tourist of many of the stories seems to be Le Guin herself or someone very much like her, very much not a Mary Sue (hey, it's transrealism! Call Rudy Rucker!)

In most of the stories, all this is just background; the stories amount to capsule descriptions of the strange and familiar cultures that abound on different planes. There is satire and humor here, but some of the stories are as earnest and even tragic as anything Le Guin has written, and the description is always vivid. Le Guin's other worlds are more fleshed-out than, say, Calvino's invisible cities.

I first read the chapter "The Island of the Immortals" a few years ago when it was published as an independent short story (without the explanatory chapter on "Sita Dulip's Method" that opens the book). I was struck then by the economic casualness with which Le Guin introduces the "planes" concept and passes over it to get to her story about a particular plane and its mysterious island. I think that the whimsy of the central conceit is an intentional signal that we're not supposed to investigate the technical details of interplanary travel very closely. The point is to imagine what it would be like to visit these Earthlike but novel lands and what their societies would be like. For this purpose, binding them to the mechanics of star travel just gets in the way; you might as well get there by teleporting out of an airport lounge.

It's a good book and now out in paperback; the hardcover, at least, has excellent illustrations by Eric Beddows, in a style that probably intentionally recalls Escher.