{"id":4486,"date":"2013-11-12T11:17:22","date_gmt":"2013-11-12T19:17:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=4486"},"modified":"2013-11-13T06:24:02","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T14:24:02","slug":"in-which-i-graciously-respond-by-moving-many-hands-and-also-a-giant-elephant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=4486","title":{"rendered":"In Which I Graciously Respond by Moving Many Hands, and Also a Giant Elephant"},"content":{"rendered":"

So the “Animals are Assholes<\/a>” interview is out, and I’m\u00a0 not sure whether there was a misunderstanding during the actual interview or if Google Translate is no longer my friend\u2014 but just for the record I did\u00a0 not<\/i> say that giant squid eat jellyfish.\u00a0 I said that in a few decades there’d be nothing left except<\/i> giant squid and jellyfish, and I didn’t know what the giant squid would eat. (Jellyfish, of course, can take care of themselves.)<\/p>\n

But the rest of it? “He graciously responded by moving many hands, as a true Southerner, and gave me a lot of humor and pickling ideas”?\u00a0 “I have not hung Starfish, but I think I still seduce leave to bread more.”? Yup. All pretty much accurate.<\/p>\n

\"Nantes<\/a>

Nantes has changed significantly from the time I remember it.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"mainhall\"<\/a>

The Main Hall.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anyhow, it was our second time at Nantes, and as usual it was a nice change. (When your attendance weighs it at 14K and the mayor speaks at your opening ceremonies, you know you’re not in Canada any more. Can you imagine Rob Ford being caught dead at an SF convention?) \u00a0Last time<\/a> we hung out with China Mi\u00e9ville, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Brandon Sanderson, and Larry Niven, among others. This time I was looking forward to hanging out with William Gibson, but he was under doctor’s orders not to fly so he didn’t make it. I had very mixed feelings about hanging out with Orson Scott Card (face it, people, his Omni<\/i> stories back in the seventies and eighties were pretty awesome), because I’d been asked by various people to either punch him in the nose or to give him a long, deep French kiss, and it would have been difficult to honor both requests at the same time. As it turned out the issue never arose, because every time he was on stage I was either signing in the bookstore (they slotted me into way<\/i> too many of those), or on a different stage myself. Caitlin saw him one time I was otherwise occupied, and reported back that Card had defined atheism as just another religion, because look at how stridently they try to convert everyone else to their beliefs. (At which point I immediately fugued into a daydream in which I<\/i> had sat on said panel, and in which I rejoined “I dunno. Speaking as an atheist, I don’t find myself especially driven to proselytize.\u00a0 I mean, I’m bemused<\/i> by belief in invisible sky fairies of any stripe, but there’s no denying the adaptive value of the religious impulse so I certainly understand where they’re coming from. The only time I’d get especially het up would be if someone cited their own personal sky fairy to tell me what I could and couldn’t read, or who I could and couldn’t climb into bed with. Then<\/i> we’d have a problem.\u00a0 But barring that\u2026” And it wouldn’t matter what I said after that, because it would be drowned out in thunderous applause.\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 I dream heroic.)<\/p>\n

\"notyouraveragecon\"<\/a>

Not your Average Con.<\/p><\/div>\n

I don’t have the same visceral reaction to Card as many folks do. It’s not that I don’t find his homophobia and politics offensive\u2014 or actually, it is<\/i> that. His views are so completely over-the-top that I have a really hard time taking them seriously. Some part of me wonders if he’s not engaging in a piece of\u00a0 performance art that people didn’t quite twig to, so he’s just kept piling it on until we finally get the joke. Reactionary bigots, homophobes, science deniers; those types should be fought tooth and nail. But judging by some of the things I’ve seen emerging from Card’s keyboard lately, he’s leveled up way past those descriptors, all the way to Fourth-Degree Black Belt Loon\u2014 and I find it hard to engage in combat when my eyes are rolled this far back in their sockets. Surely nobody is taking him seriously. Surely he’s not having any kind of impact beyond comic relief.<\/p>\n

Anyway.\u00a0 Enough about that.<\/p>\n

Someone else we didn’t hang out with was Max Brooks.\u00a0 I would have liked to, and there was opportunity\u2014 turned out his room was directly across the hall from ours, and once or twice we saw him breakfasting, alone and vulnerable, at the hotel restaurant\u2014 but I was too shy. I mean, what do you say to the guy other than Man, really loved WWZ, condolences on the movie<\/i>? I did have an angle\u2014 I was going to congratulate him on the offhanded way he dropped Bergmann’s Rule into World War Z<\/em>\u2014 but that would have been too obviously straining for effect. So I contented myself with sitting in the audience during the Q&A, during which he said (amongst other things):<\/p>\n