incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

I introduced myself by referring to my very, very old website The Paired Reading Page—last updated in 2000!—which was amusing for a number of reasons, including the realization that I and my friends had always been all-in on The Fortunate Fall, which was suggested as a pair with no less than five different novels! None of which were Moby-Dick, which may have been because I had yet to read it and become feral over how good it is, but more likely was because it is explicitly named in the text and therefore is obvious.

Which was my springboard into the different levels of explicitness that a book is in conversation: it's referred to in the text; the author says so, in afterwords or interviews or whatnot; the author doesn't say so, but from context we can be more or less sure that they had encountered the earlier work; and we have no idea what the author intended, but the book is nevertheless talking about the same things as the earlier work. I asked the panel about their experiences with these different levels and how it affected their reading.

Morgan brought up His Dark Materials versus Narnia (me: and it is versus) as one with stated authorial intent outside the text, the knowledge of which did affect his reaction to the text. This got panel reactions that ran the gamut: Chad thought that HDM being a critique of Narnia didn't seem to matter to the experience of reading HDM, whereas Meredith could tell that HDM was in conversation with something but didn't know what specifically (which wasn't a problem, but did result in her feeling that the author was more present in the work as constructing an argument).

In a similar vein, we talked about Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog, which explicitly references Three Men in a Boat but doesn't depend on it. Chad loved discovering Jerome's work as a result; Meredith didn't like Three Men but appreciated that Willis had loved something in it that she hadn't seen.

From there, we talked about how much one needed to know about the prior work. I have a note that indicates, less when it's a homage, more when it's debate-y. I suggested that if one must have read the prior work for the later work to make sense, then it is fanfic (value-neutral). Chad noted that this is a change, because there used to be a time when authors could rely on readers having a certain shared knowledge base; he mentioned Edgar Allen Poe stories as having lots of explicit references to other works.

Later on, Morgan mentioned "response literature" (a term impossible to search for, btw) as a category he'd heard that included Wicked in regard to The Wizard of Oz, which had been raised by an audience member. (The same audience member cited The Mists of Avalon, and I suggested that Arthuriana is maybe always in conversation with itself?) Meredith noted that two particularly popular versions of response literature recently-ish are telling the story from the POV of the villain or minor/neglected characters, e.g. Longbourn, which is Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective.

At some point, Morgan brought up books that fail to be in dialogue with existing works, which I interpreted as barging in without any genre knowledge and assuming that these ideas are brand new. He suggested that books should, ideally, respect their predecessors. I said, respect or acknowledge? He noted that he wasn't suggesting ignoring past works' flaws, because engaging with a work in a critical way can be a sign of respect.

I had a comment, possibly here, about how realizing that books are in conversation can tell you something about the later book—expected, fine, good—or the earlier book—my favorite, getting to see that in a different light.

Chad in particular talked about the fun of recognition and revelation: hey I know that reference, oh that's where this is going (deeply paraphrased). An audience member mentioned Greer Gilman's stories in which Ben Jonson is a detective, I think for some of the same fun.

We talked about authors in dialogue with their own works. Meredith suggested Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, because the swerve in its emotional tone lands hardest against the background of the other Guards books. Later, we talked about authors disagreeing with their past works. Morgan mentioned KSR's Aurora (as in the panel description) which takes the position that no, we absolutely should not send out generation ships to colonize other solar systems, which had been the happy ending of his Mars trilogy. An audience member mentioned Orson Scott Card's Bean books, which are (unfortunately, in the audience member's view) disagreeing with his Ender series.

Later on, an audience member mentioned American superhero comics, in which new writers are constantly disagreeing with prior writers of the same character. Other panelists pointed to shared worlds as other situations where that arises, such as Bordertown, in which a twenty-years-later anthology had a number of authors, including some of the original ones, implicitly critiquing the whiteness of the original works.

(Also regarding Night Watch specifically, I mentioned my experience of rereading it after reading Les Miserables (mostly not good). And regarding Pratchett generally, Chad mentioned his extensive references to, e.g., Shakespeare, Hollywood Golden Age movie history, and asked if one could enjoy those without that knowledge. I said yes, because I had, but also it does show one of the pitfalls: I don't care very much about A Midsummer Night's Dream and so Lords and Ladies works less well for me than other Witches books.)

An audience member pointed out that we'd been talking often about genre books in dialogue with non-genre books, and asked about how genre authors approach those conversations knowing that their readers are more likely to be unfamiliar with non-genre books. Meredith referred to Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw, which literalizes the social conventions of Trollope novels by making the characters all dragons. Even not having read Trollope, it's still clear that the book is talking about societal definitions of womanhood etc., so one needn't be familiar with the inspiration to understand the story. (However, knowing that Walton had respected (in Morgan's terms) Trollope enough to write the novel gave Meredith a little handholding into the genre of Victorian literature. Unfortunately she read seven Trollope novels and threw six of them against the wall—but she did finish all of them! (I failed to ask which the seventh was, I'm sorry; if you're reading this, Meredith, Jo would like to know whether it was Phineas Finn.))

Somewhere in this vicinity, Morgan had mentioned the fun of SFF taking non-genre scenes etc. and giving non-rational/real-world explanations for them, like Tolkien taking the marching woods in Macbeth and making them actually march. Someone, possibly still Morgan, mentioned Steven L. Peck's novel A Short Stay in Hell, which took Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" and turns it into a horror story: the main character has to find and read the story of his life in an infinite library to order to be able to leave.

Morgan mentioned John Shirley's collection Really, Really, Really, Really, Weird Stories as something he enjoyed but saw different angles on when he read more cyberpunk and realized how much it was in conversation with the other works in that subgenre. Another thing mentioned as in conversation with a genre as a whole was Ursula K. LeGuin's The Word for World Is Forest, which felt to an audience member very much a reaction to colonialism in SFF. And I have a note about the Lovecraftian mythos, which I believe was mentioned as something that is constantly in dialogue with itself and also very frequently critiquing its foundational texts.

We mentioned satire and pastiche; I suggested that satire usually needs to be read in context with the earlier work, whereas pastiche can often be enjoyed without that context. Meredith cited Catherynne Valente's The Refrigerator Monologues, which mashed up two things she didn't like—The Vagina Monologues and women in refrigerators—into something she did.

Meredith closed by pointing out that the conversation never ends: one can't read every inspiration and reference, and that's not just okay, that's good, because it means the conversation continues moving forward.