Friday continued at the convention with “The End is Now” at 2pm .
Panellists were: Kathleen Ann Goonan, Peter F. Hamilton, William F. Nolan, Samantha Shannon, S. M. Stirling, Tricia Sullivan.
My Notes
– If anything changes socially, then it can be apocalyptic for the individual. Which makes them interesting, for one thing.
– A discussion begun around happy endings versus satisfactory endings, and even just “one that made sense”. Someone said you owe the reader a happy ending after they’ve sat through 4-hours of your world. I’ve already shared my thoughts on this in this post, which essentially hasn’t changed except that I now know that others disagree even as far as “I don’t want a happy ending even if sometimes it makes sense.”
– “Adventure is someone in deep shit far away.” I wish I’d noted who said this, because it’s amazing.
– Science fiction is slightly different as it it’s actually not that “far away”, because our modern day science can be slightly sci-fi-esque. And perhaps that’s partly why it’s so popular – helps us understand the possibilities.
– We can’t individually cope with our own world as it is.
This was a massive one for me. I use a laptop/phone/car and I can’t look after those myself. Not completely. Individually, we’re stuffed in terms of how much control we have our own environment and the technology around us.
– If you predict science/technology, you wouldn’t write books about it (you’d patent, invest or buy shares in it!!!)
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This was a panel I very nearly didn’t attend. I have one post-apocalyptic novel in progress, and two dystopian. The rest are YA Fantasy. I don’t read or write science fiction. So this was an interesting panel to attend, and it really got me thinking about life and how we as humans experience our world.