Life, the Universe, & Everything

I’ve spent the last couple days attending Life, the Universe, & Everything, a small regional con that’s been running for 26 years at Brigham Young University.  Every year this con attracts a couple A-list authors, a number of B-listers, and the local C-listers.

This year the big names were Gail Carson Levine, who impressed me with her demure but undeniable presence, the artist Kevin Wasden, and Orson Scott Card, who I’ve seen speak often enough that I sometimes know what he’s going to say before he says it.  And while I disagree with a lot of what he says (Bloom would pin it on anxiety of influence), I’m always amazed by the sheer number of opinions he produces, how willing he is to toss them around, and how entertainingly he does it.

Card’s 1,001 Ideas in an Hour exercise is fun, and I enjoyed his keynote address on why Mormons seem disproportionately represented in fantasy and science fiction, a topic too much can be made of too easily.  He also did a panel with Steve Walker, a former professor of mine, on the topic of Biblical motifs in fantasy. 

One of their conclusions related to the dual roots of Western culture: Plato and the Bible.  Where Platonic thought asserts that the ideal is the only reality, and that the reality we experience is not real, the narratives of the Bible are typically very straightforward, and expect to be understood at face value.  Moreover, they concern the everyman’s ability to interface with the divine, as opposed to many sacred texts and traditions which set the divine at a remove (classical gods and heroes, etc.). 

Similarly, contemporary fantasy, at least since Tolkien, demands to be taken at face value.  It presents itself as reality and you do not need to decode it to understand a hidden meaning.  Its protagonists are usually identifiable as commonplace people, even if they’re touched by remarkable events.  The Bible and fantasy share this: the realistic portrayal of sympathetic people encountering the wondrous.  They make the unreal real, just as Plato and much “literary” literature makes the real unreal.  (This recalls Truesdale’s essay.)

I also enjoyed several panel discussions on using folklore in your writing and the enduring resonance of fairy tales.  In addition to Gail Carson Levine and some others, Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury, moderator of the Hatrack River Writers Workshop, participated.  Rick Walton was also at the convention.  I took a week-long children’s picture book writing seminar from him last year and it was fun to see him again.

Since the story I’m currently working on is humorous (intentionally), I paid close attention to the panel on satire in SF.  Howard Taylor kept us laughing, and I recommend you check out his strip, Schlock Mercenary.  Eric James Stone was there too.  He’s a previous winner of Writers of the Future, and was kind enough to send me an email when I was named a finalist last year.

The author who’s book is currently glued to my hands was there also.  Brandon Sanderson is perhaps the fastest rising star in fantasy today after landing the contract to finish Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time Series.  I agree with Orson Scott Card though: Brandon is a better author than Jordan ever was.  His Mistborn series is as good as anything out there right now if not better.  He very much provokes my inner Salieri. 

I’m helping organize a breakfast address for him at a conference for librarians.  Here’s a tip: if you want to sell children’s books to libraries, write one about librarians.  We’re suckers that way.