intertext

I think my paper went well. No one actually booed or threw things or said "well your thesis is fundamentally flawed." The audience was small but appreciative and I exchanged cards with several people afterwards and we're all thinking about writing about how fan fiction needs to be addressed from a feminist point of view as well as the intertextual stuff.

In the morning, before my panel, I went to an amazing panel led by this visionary college english teacher bringing undergraduates to critical thinking and literary analysis through Harry Potter. The three panelists were all undergraduates and they were all quite stunningly good. I was enraptured, and want to contact her after this and get ideas and lesson plans and maybe set up some kind of collaboration.

This afternoon was the Buffy round table, which was great fun. We all talked about how awesome Buffy is and why and it spoke to the whole lack of respect for SF thing. Battlestar Galactica and Buffy and others of their ilk are among the best things EVAH on TV, yet they don't get recognized or treated with respect outside of the field of "popular culture" (or LJ) and they should.

Then I went and bought four books and ordered another - one about Alias, and one about Buffy and one about The Lord of the Rings and one... believe it or not ... about Jeanette Winterson.

Then I went out for dinner with the Buffy/Vampire people and then for drinks after that, so if I'm sounding a wee bit incoherent right now you can chalk it up to all the Scotch I've been drinking (I think I'm moving away from Gin and towards Scotch... or maybe I'm just becoming really hardcore).

Tomorrow is tourist day, ending with the SF group's presentation of the Director's Cut of Bladerunner and discussion, and probably more drinking. Fun fun fun.

a_d_medievalist was writing about how she's just always been an sf/f fan without even thinking about it, partly through her early television viewing habits. Like many others, she cites Andre Norton as her first conscious "sf" reading. (I think mine might have been Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet books, if they count).

Anyway, that got me to thinking, about how one's reading tastes are shaped, and all that "give me a [girl] before the age of seven" stuff, and what was I reading at seven and at fourteen, and have I always been an sf/fantasy reader even if I didn't know it?

Well, yes.

I was reading fantasy before it was a "genre," and before YA was even invented as a marketing tool.

At seven, my mum was reading me The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe out loud, and I wept when Aslan died. My other favourite books were the Arthur Ransome series. That trend continued. I seem to have had parallel affections for "magic" and "realism" - perhaps the mindset that seems to have so many readers of sf also reading Patrick O'Brien or Dorothy Dunnett. Through my elementary years, my favourite books were the Narnias, the Moomins, and the Carbonels. My absolute favourite book, if I had been asked at nine years old, was Alan Garner's The Wierdstone of Brisingamen. I also loved Arthur Ransome and the Little House books, and Noel Streatfield, so there you go.

At twelve, I discovered Tolkien, and I was lost. I also read Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea around that time (the next two in the trilogy came out when I was in my early teens; Tehanu not till I was in my 30's). I had been reading Lloyd Alexander as well, and Joan Aiken, so by this time my tastes were getting pretty much locked into the fantasy area. Also Over Sea Under Stone by Susan Cooper came out around that time. Boy. Someone was saying something about this being a "golden age" for YA or children's fantasy - what were the 60's and 70's, for heaven's sake???

I remember my first real experience of science fiction rather than fantasy (other than the Mushroom Planet books, that is): Ray Bradbury's S is For Space, that my mum got me one weekend from the library. I was completely captivated, and hooked, though I've never been as much of a "hard" science fiction reader as I am a fantasy reader.

I can't remember exactly when I first read Patrica McKillip, but The Forgotten Beasts of Eld appeared in paperback somewhere in my late teens, early twenties, and I was reading the Riddle Master trilogy when I was at university. I remember because the man I was in love with then, the great love of my life, gave me the last book in the trilogy when it came out, and he had read it first, and he teased me by pretending to tell me how it was all going to turn out... Oh, memories.

Old Prufrock may measure his life in coffee spoons; I measure mine in books.