Hazel Gold

Icon 2015: Guest of Honor Ted Chiang

Posted on October 15, 2015 Updated on October 15, 2015

Every now and then Icon manages to acquire a major international writer as a guest of honor. It always seems like such a great opportunity, but on the other hand, I’m often only faintly familiar with the authors in question and their work. This year was an exception. Having just recently embarked on my career as a professional writer, and being that I’m still struggling with the specific demands of writing proper short stories, this year’s guest of honor events seemed too good to miss.

The festival takes place over three days during Sukkot and there are events all day long (and well into the night). Although I decided I couldn’t afford to write three full days off for writing, I was adamant that I would make the most and pre-ordered tickets to three evening events. These events were a panel on the subject of “the search for a perfect language”, a general short stories panel, and a one-on-one Q&A. Alas, I got ill on the second day and ended up missing the final event (the Q&A) which I was most looking forward to, along with the closing event where awards are announced.

The first panel was very interesting. The subject of language in science fiction is of perennial interest to me, not least because I’m myself bilingual. What I hadn’t realized (not being a linguist) is that “perfect language” is actually a quite specific piece of terminology. It describes, as best as I could understand, a language in which it is possible to perfectly express the speaker’s intent, without ambiguity. As a writer, obviously this seems like a terrible idea, because without ambiguity literature loses much of its magic. But, as a computer programmer, I’m a lot less worried.

All in all, it was very interesting and I’m very glad I got to hear it.

The second panel was a bit of a mess. I, like some others on the audience (and, I got the impression, also the panel moderator) got the feeling that the two Israeli panelists were dominating the conversation and injecting too many personal references and inner jokes. There was still a lot of interest to listen to, in between arguments about who won the most Geffen awards and short slips into Hebrew. ‘Where do you get ideas from?’ cropped up but also, more interestingly, some questions that were more about the process of transitioning the raw idea into a story-shaped concept.

I’m still sorry I missed the third event, but glad I went to the ones I did, especially the language panel. I’m even more glad that this gave me a good impetus to look up some of Ted Chiang’s short stories online and find out for myself why he’s so highly regarded. The stories I read are very high-concept based and feel like a distillation of the core process of creating science fiction. A novel scientific concept, a series of speculations, potential social implications and finally, their impact on the individual human.

A good week, despite my illness.

Crossposted to Dreamwidth.