Late Night Wiscon Post
May. 26th, 2008 02:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenna_c_tanWhich means 3am east coast time... no wonder I'm yawning.
Just came from the Gaylaxicon party. Gaylaxicon, the sf con for gays, lesbians, queerfolk of all kinds, and their friends, will be in Washington, DC in October and I might go... I also got to read a short, sexy excerpt of my fiction at another party, and had much fun.
But to recap from earlier, the Polyamory in Fiction panel went really well. Mary Anne Mohanraj, Katie Clapham, Moondancer Drake, Magenta, and I all turned out to be poly ourselves. (Sometimes you get a panelist who has a purely literary interest in the topic, but not this time.) The room was pretty much packed, and from the nodding heads in the audience I would say at least 90% of them were poly, too. Many of them shared personal anecdotes and things as we went along talking about representations of polyamory, good and bad, in things like Torchwood and Laurell K. Hamilton.
We started off talking first in the Green Room for panelists before the panel, trying to come up with some really recent examples of poly relationships in sf/f other than Torchwood and stuff in paranormal romance. We didn't come up with much. There's a lot of 1970s era stuff like Robert Heinlein and Marion Zimmer Bradley that has poly themes, but we were drawing a blank for recent stuff.
Once we got to the panel room though, we did come up with a few others, like Tanya Huff (The Fire's Stone was a ways back, but her Blood Lines series is more current), and Catherine Asaro. And Mary Anne recommended the online series "Tales of Mu."
The "pansexual" part of the panel description got dropped early on as the polyamory elements took most of our attention. Many of us feel polyamory may be the next alternative lifestyle to gain better acceptance, although horror stories like the polygamist sect that had institutionalized abuse and oppression set us back a bit.
Mary Anne talked about how she sold two books to a mainstream publisher, Harper Collins, the first of which was a set of 20 linked short stories called Bodies In Motion, which was erotic and one of the stories featured the beginnings of triad relationship. The second book was supposed to be a novel about the three of them, and yet it turned out her editor's idea of a "threesome novel" and her own were so drastically different that ultimately the book had to be pulled from the house.
Much discussion of how we'd like to see novels where polyamory is going on in the story but isn't the focus of the main plot. It's just part of the culture or the structure the characters have made for themselves. Mention of a doctor on Star Trek who was from a polyamorous culture and when his wife comes to visit him, he encourages her to have a thing with a crewman she is attracted to. (The crewman, meanwhile, can't wrap his head around the fact that this is ok...)
Discussion of Nepalese relationships where one woman may have multiple husbands, often brothers, as a strategy for maximizing the survival of children in a harsh living environment. Islamic polygyny. Tilda Swinton and Jada Pinkett Smith being poly. Like I said, wide-ranging. I'm afraid I have barely scratched the surface here, but...
It's nearly 2:30 now so I must get to sleep. Tomorrow is about checking out of the hotel and going home, so I must get up in the morning. :P
Just came from the Gaylaxicon party. Gaylaxicon, the sf con for gays, lesbians, queerfolk of all kinds, and their friends, will be in Washington, DC in October and I might go... I also got to read a short, sexy excerpt of my fiction at another party, and had much fun.
But to recap from earlier, the Polyamory in Fiction panel went really well. Mary Anne Mohanraj, Katie Clapham, Moondancer Drake, Magenta, and I all turned out to be poly ourselves. (Sometimes you get a panelist who has a purely literary interest in the topic, but not this time.) The room was pretty much packed, and from the nodding heads in the audience I would say at least 90% of them were poly, too. Many of them shared personal anecdotes and things as we went along talking about representations of polyamory, good and bad, in things like Torchwood and Laurell K. Hamilton.
We started off talking first in the Green Room for panelists before the panel, trying to come up with some really recent examples of poly relationships in sf/f other than Torchwood and stuff in paranormal romance. We didn't come up with much. There's a lot of 1970s era stuff like Robert Heinlein and Marion Zimmer Bradley that has poly themes, but we were drawing a blank for recent stuff.
Once we got to the panel room though, we did come up with a few others, like Tanya Huff (The Fire's Stone was a ways back, but her Blood Lines series is more current), and Catherine Asaro. And Mary Anne recommended the online series "Tales of Mu."
The "pansexual" part of the panel description got dropped early on as the polyamory elements took most of our attention. Many of us feel polyamory may be the next alternative lifestyle to gain better acceptance, although horror stories like the polygamist sect that had institutionalized abuse and oppression set us back a bit.
Mary Anne talked about how she sold two books to a mainstream publisher, Harper Collins, the first of which was a set of 20 linked short stories called Bodies In Motion, which was erotic and one of the stories featured the beginnings of triad relationship. The second book was supposed to be a novel about the three of them, and yet it turned out her editor's idea of a "threesome novel" and her own were so drastically different that ultimately the book had to be pulled from the house.
Much discussion of how we'd like to see novels where polyamory is going on in the story but isn't the focus of the main plot. It's just part of the culture or the structure the characters have made for themselves. Mention of a doctor on Star Trek who was from a polyamorous culture and when his wife comes to visit him, he encourages her to have a thing with a crewman she is attracted to. (The crewman, meanwhile, can't wrap his head around the fact that this is ok...)
Discussion of Nepalese relationships where one woman may have multiple husbands, often brothers, as a strategy for maximizing the survival of children in a harsh living environment. Islamic polygyny. Tilda Swinton and Jada Pinkett Smith being poly. Like I said, wide-ranging. I'm afraid I have barely scratched the surface here, but...
It's nearly 2:30 now so I must get to sleep. Tomorrow is about checking out of the hotel and going home, so I must get up in the morning. :P
