The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jo Walton:

I didn't see any of this until now. Good wishes to Scraps and hugs and all good things.

This sort of thing makes me feel so helpless.

That 1988 photograph is so weird. You all look so young and thin and black and white and far away.

Bruce: I don't think so at all. I think it's very important to have characters who belong to their own world. I think the important thing is that the characters and the story be more important than whatever message. I'm not saying art can't be propaganda, or that the artist can't be thinking about it as propaganda, I'm just saying it has to be art first.

Xopher@41: I'm also not saying that I write in a naive trance without knowing what I'm doing.

I think what I really really want to say (I've been away and made dinner thought about this) is that even though PNH is an awesome Hugo Winning Editor and has expressed a preference for a kind of SF, don't rush to the word processor thinking that now you'll write a relevant novel and he's bound to buy it. Even more than with most sorts of thing, this is easy to screw up.

This does sound very zen, but there are certain things that work best if they're not done with intentionality -- falling in love, being happy, writing zeitgeist books.

What I mean is, I didn't sit down to write [i]Farthing[/i] thinking "Now let's write a parable about the present!" or "What can I find in the present world to write SF about" and I think it wouldn't have worked if I had. I think we write about the present because we're in the present and alive, not because we're trying to be relevant.

I think the failure mode of this is people trying to be relevant and ending up producing those painfully earnest things that sell their birthright for a pot of message.

I'm not sure, but I suspect this might be one of those things it's not possible to do on purpose.

I have that problem all the time at Home Depot, about half the time at Reno Depot and occasionally at Canadian Tire.

I've found two ways round it. One is, take a male person (kids work) and get them to get the attention, then once they have the attention, talk. The other one is to shop in Hogg, a local hardware store with awesome service.

Once, in Hogg, I was buying things to fix my toilet and the guy told me which bit I didn't need (resulting in me spending less money) and even ducked into the employee bathroom to check that what I wanted to do with the flush mechanism would work. I shop in Hogg because when I say "I'm looking for paint stripper..." they say "What kind of paint stripper? I mean, what are you planning to strip?" instead of ignoring me or, at best, saying "Aisle four" before scurrying away. They also ask me things -- when I was buying liquid lemon wax (for the wood) a passing worker paused and said "That's a new brand for us, have you used it before? Is it any good?" I never realised I wasn't being treated as a human being in hardware shops my whole life until I found Hogg.

Now I wish I could find a computer shop where I was visible.

All true, but think of the most confusing bit of your city for which strangers really need a map, and consider that that's what every square foot of London is like. Which is why everyone who lives in London tends to have an A-Z in their bag all the time, and why London taxi drivers have to pass a very hard exam where in North American cities taxi driving is something new immigrants who can drive can do in their first week.

Alan: I never saw him in the bathroom, but he certainly believed he should put his underpants on (and off) without his hands touching his penis.

(Apart from this weird quirk he was relatively normal and a very nice person.)

In North American cities outside Boston, while street maps are occasionally useful, they're not a total necessity the way an A-Z is in London, because of the grid system. This is hard for Europeans to understand, but in a North American city three lefts make a right -- you can literally go around a block, any block. And if you are a couple of miles north, or east, of where you normally are, half the street names are the same and you know what street will be coming next, because the grid is big and extends. Also, because the streets stay the same, numbering gets high but it changes by block, so if you have a street address you can tell how far up that street it will be. So it's really easy to find places, and you only need a map for the odd exceptions, not every single time you go anywhere new, as in Europe.

There's a bit in Delany's Triton where Bron is on Earth and he keeps saying "Don't think in terms of urban units, there aren't any!" which I thought was science fiction until I realised it was the way Americans are with blocks in Europe.

It's recently become available in Montreal -- the STM website became about a zillion times easier to use once they gave an option of using Google Maps instead of their own crazy system. And it works on iPhones.

I once had a boyfriend who had been told that touching his own penis was unmanly and that he should not, for instance, roll a condom on. I had kind of classified this as a weird phobia, I didn't realise it was a movement.

Tom: Good question. I think people don't want to admit to it. And I think we like to define what we did as self defence, even when it was pre-emptive.

Let me put that another way. I think I don't want to admit to it, and I think I like to define what I did as self defence, even when it was preemptive.

I sometimes get really tired of certain kinds of provocation and lash out, and I had far less self control as a kid. If I made anyone's life a misery when we were all under ten, either by fighting them, or by sarcasm and name calling, I'm really sorry.

Whoever started it.

Liza: There was one review of Farthing that assumed I had made up the idea of homosexuality being illegal. It took me a little while of hissing "1967! And don't you know what happened to Turing!" before I calmed down enough to see that the existence of people who axiomatically assume that of course it's always been legal to be gay because what could possibly be wrong with that is actually a good thing. We've come a long way from that culture of hate being acceptable, as Brown explicitly says in that apology.

This brought tears to my eyes when I saw it in my email this morning. It's so unambiguous and straightforward.

Sylvia: Robert Sawyer argues that the reason Canada (with c. 10% of the population of the US) has proportionately so many writers is because we have health care, so writers can afford to take the risk of writing. Starving in a garret is a reasonable risk, your kids' health isn't.

Of course, there may be other cultural reasons why Canada produces more art per capita than the US. And the fact that the US has such a big population disguises the evidence. I haven't seen art per capita figures for other first world countries. It would definitely be interesting.

I love the robots in Egypt illustration.

I was already working on the poem then, but I didn't actually write it until Sunday morning, because it was shabbat. No, really... but as a side effect, not as a conscious decision.

I am now picturing Susan Calvin as the daughter of Calvin and Susie, which keeps coming up as "My father had a tiger loved a man..."

I don't forget.
It isn't hard to set
A robot in its place
By works, or grace.

Wow, crossover!

I don't think we have one of those in Montreal. That's probably because we don't have a large community of Lutherans. There are some, I went to a concert in their church once, but not enough for there to be a huge demand for their cuisine, never mind the halal version of it.

I loathe voicemail. Yet Bell send me paper mail every other week explaining how I could add it to my package for only a little extra. The alternate weeks they send me mail trying to get me to buy their high speed internet that costs twice what the one I have costs. They haven't called me to try to get me to buy voicemail or high speed internet since the time they called me when I was eating and I told them that if they ever called me again and it wasn't about a bill or a problem with the line I'd cope without a phone at all.

There are times you need to use the phone for immediacy of response. (Not very many, actually, since they invented Gmail chat.) And there are times you need to use the phone because the other person is 83 and has failing eyesight. And there are times you need it so you can hear the other person giggle. Oh, and I believe some people use phone rather than textual communication to have a conversation "off the record".

The thing that seems very odd to me about this swine flu epidemic is how much people seem to be focusing on it, often in an almost gloating way, as if they're delighted to have something like that to worry about. I suppose it's a pleasant distraction from the economy? Or maybe they have learned lessons of cosy catastrophes rather too well.

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