Psychogeography? What's that? An enormously rich worldbuilding topic

I attended a fascinating panel at WorldCon in Reno about Psychogeography, featuring David Cake, Cory Doctorow, Ian McDonald, and Renée Sieber - and I was amazed at how well it fit my worldbuilding interests, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts about it. Here's a (rather daunting) quote from the convention program: "Psychogeography is variously defined as 'the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals' or where psychology and geography meet in assessing the emotional and behavioral impact of urban space."

Think about it this way. What kind of physical spaces do you move through as you go through your day? How many of them have been planned by you? If it's the furniture in your home, you've probably been able to decide where it went on your own. But how about the layout of your house? How about the layout of your neighborhood, or the neighborhood where you work? The public spaces in your town, or in the towns you've visited as a guest? Each of these physical layouts will influence the way you move and potentially the way you think.

Here's an example from my local area. I have a mall nearby - within walking distance of my house, if I care to take the twenty minutes required. But do I walk there? No... not unless it's Christmas season and I don't want to get involved in the traffic (in which case I have walked there on principle). The way the place has been laid out is inimical to pedestrians. It's an indoor mall surrounded on all sides by broad parking lots which add a full five minutes to the walk even when I'm going quickly. There are no pedestrian entrances to the lots, and no pedestrian walkways leading across them. You have to walk right through all the car aisles to get to the main entrances. Is it any wonder that nobody walks there?

In the typical medieval town, there was always a market square. This was a central open space where people could gather to sell their goods, and gather they did. Those squares could also potentially be a place where unhappy people could gather to protest. If there were a ruler who didn't want unrest, he might crack down on the people, but it would still be hard to get rid of that central gathering space.

One interesting example mentioned by Cory Doctorow about London was that a lot of the London buildings had been destroyed by bombing after the second world war, and the planners of the city had to rebuild them, so they were thinking about making the streets easier to navigate by straightening them and making the streets rectilinear. However, the people refused to go along with this, and insisted on moving markers and traveling the paths they remembered of the old tangled road system, and in fact in the end the old roads were restored almost precisely as they had been.

Think about the cities you know, and how different they "feel" based on the way they're laid out. I think of Kyoto, Japan, where the north-south-east-west grid layout meant I never felt entirely lost even when I didn't know where I was, and where I learned my cardinal directions in a way I never had comprehended at any previous point in my life. I compare that with Tokyo, where you have to follow directions with absolute precision because the streets are not on a grid and a single wrong turn can diverge you into a totally different neighborhood where side connecting streets are not certain to deliver you back to your previous path. I compare each of those cities, with their narrow streets and tightly packed neighborhoods, with the wide-streeted towns of California where the lack of density means it takes twice as long to get anywhere and walking to the grocery store is an impractical plan...so neighborhoods are larger and people who live near one another are less likely to encounter one another in the street unless they happen to be walking to the local school (the local school being a very interesting "meeting point" and a huge creator of solidarity across the surrounding neighborhoods).

I'm sure you can already see the worldbuilding opportunities bursting out of this topic at every seam. What are your spaces like in your world? How wide are streets? Where do people gather? How easy is it to travel using various modes of transportation? My underground city of Pelismara is five levels deep and organized on a radial system, which means that it's actually rather compact and easy to traverse, especially at the deeper levels. People who use vehicles can cross it very quickly. People who walk have to be in excellent shape (for all the stair-climbing), but can get across town in relatively short order.

The panel at the convention also talked about technology and how it influences the use of space. Surveillance was one of the major discussion points here. The sense that one is being watched and recorded in any given public area can totally change behavior... but won't always do it the same way. During the discussion we also talked about the perceived "space" of the internet, Twitterverse, etc. Clearly, as seen in many instances of unrest across the world including China, the Arab world, and other places, the texting arena, and the Twitterverse, have become hotly contested virtual spaces where people can "gather" and their governments in response try to exert control over them by controlling the "space." In a city, these real and virtual environments lie side by side, and augmented reality can potentially blur the boundaries between them so that two different people can experience the physical spaces in entirely different ways. Mind you, our own subjective judgments of spaces can already cause us to experience spaces in vastly different ways, as I have previously discussed, but the possibility of augmented reality will only magnify that effect.

This is an enormously rich opportunity for worldbuilders, as you can see. I hope this very brief and cursory introduction gives you plenty of ideas for going back and considering the links between spaces and thought in your own stories. Have fun with it!

WorldCon, The Rest

Well, the excitement of WorldCon was such that I have been unable to blog for a few days! Now that I'm back and somewhat recovered, I thought I'd start by telling you the rest of it.

Friday I began with a reading by members of Broad Universe, which was very enjoyable. I also attended a panel about the nature of Consciousness, featuring Mary Turzillo, Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, Daryl Gregory, and M. J. Locke. I had an amazing encounter with Greg Bear in the dealer's room where we started out discussing worldbuilding (since I'd attended the panel with him the night before) and I ended up offering him a copy of "At Cross Purposes" which he - to my astonishment - asked me to sign. This was the moment when I would have loved to have a copy of a Greg Bear novel on me to ask him to sign in return, but I'd been "traveling light" and didn't even have my program! Sigh. I learned that my friend Alan Smale had won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for his story "A Clash of Eagles" in Panverse 1 - super exciting! At lunch on Friday I headed over to the Peppermill hotel for lunch with Stan Schmidt, my editor at Analog, his wife Joyce, and fellow Analog author Paul Carlson. We chatted about stories and about life in general, and though I tried to leave early the shuttle was terribly late, so I was late for my first panel of the day. This one was a bit depressing, entitled "Anticipatory Anthropology" with Margaret McGaffey Fisk, Pat McEwen, and Irene Radford. It was mostly about how people would live and how society would develop in a relatively near future where resources were very scarce - but everyone there had interesting things to say! At four I had a panel called "Neologism and Linguicide" which I had expected to be depressing (needless to say I was steeling myself after the previous one!). But though we were discussing the extinction of world languages, the panel was very upbeat - I was up there with Sheila Finch, David J. Peterson, and Lawrence Schoen. All of them are practical linguists and so between the four of us we took a pragmatic approach which I'll have to go into in more depth in a separate post. Much time was spent talking about how wonderful it was to learn a language very different from one's own, a cause I can get behind any time. All the panels I saw (during the whole convention) were very well-attended. After the panels I rejoined my family for dinner. We ate at the Claim Jumper with Margaret McGaffey Fisk and her husband, Pat McEwen and Rebecca Partridge, which was wonderful fun. Contrary to my usual pattern, I decided to dress up and go out to a party thereafter - I headed up to the SFWA suite for a party hosted by Dell Magazines. I saw so many people there that it would be impossible to list them all, but they included Nayad Monroe, Sheila Williams (who the next evening won the Hugo for best editor!), Bud Sparhawk, Brad Torgerson, Ann Crispin, Joan D. Vinge, Jerry Oltion (who gave me an Analog MAFIA pin!), Traci Morganfield, Aliette de Bodard, and many others. Traci and Aliette are both members of my online writer's group, Written in Blood, but this was only the second time I'd met Aliette, and the first time I'd ever laid eyes on Traci!

After getting to bed late on Friday, I started Saturday attending a panel about common myths that Science Fiction has caused the general public to hold as truths (rather inadvertently!) the one that stands out is the idea that anything scientific can happen quickly. On the panel were Greg Benford, Mike Flynn, Joe Haldeman, Corry L. Lee, and Alastair Reynolds. It was a terrific discussion and often quite amusing. Between that and my noon panel I tried hanging out and socializing, and met Gardner Dozois, who is an interesting man and very fond of jokes (I mentioned that he had reviewed me and he feigned fear of reprisal!). At noon I was on a panel called "Designing Believable Languages" with Peadar Ó Guilín, David J. Peterson, and S.M. Stirling. That was wonderful fun. We began by addressing the rather odd question put forward by the description of the panel, which was how factors like biology and population density affect language (they do). Then we took turns discussing how we start going about creating a believable alien language. I was particularly taken with David's model, in which he designed the language and then "aged" it to give rise to irregularities and sound changes. After lunch with my family I joined Mary Turzillo, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff and Stanley Schmidt for a discussion of the woman writers of Analog. That was a very interesting panel, as we were able to discuss Analog and our own stories, and also to address some of the myths surrounding Analog and its taste for "hard" science fiction. I found it heartening that the number of women appearing in Analog has gone up steadily in recent years, though many fewer submit to Analog than do men. According to Rick Lovett, the number of women appearing in Biologs (biographical pieces for people who have had three stories in the magazine) is about one in three, with a total of 40% in pending biologs. After that panel I had my reading at 4:30. I read from "Cold Words" to a small audience which included my children and my husband (yay!). That evening we went to pizza with friends, and then at their request I finished reading the story to them afterward. Unfortunately, I was too exhausted after that to make an appearance at the Hugo award banquet.

Sunday we had a pretty slow morning, but I finished the convention with an autographing session. I sat beside Jack Skillingstead, who is quite a wonderful person to chat with. He introduced me to Daryl Gregory, who was standing by and took advantage of this opportunity to autograph some things too. I had been concerned (as you might imagine) that nobody would come and see me, but to my pleasant surprise I was visited by a good number of people during the hour. I watched the lines of people cycling through for Nancy Kress and Gail Carriger, sitting down the table from me. Many of the people in Gail Carriger's line carried parasols, which was delightful. The most incongruous moment of the hour was when Gail, looking gorgeous in complete Victorian garb, started talking on her cell phone.

We had a very long drive home, which due to traffic was about five and a half hours rather than the four it had taken us to drive to Reno from California. However, we are home safe and sound, and as an added bonus, the termites had been killed while we were gone from our house (whew!). Of course, this did mean that there was no food in the house - and by that I mean literally, NO FOOD. But a quick trip to the store got us through and we have a few days to resume our routine before school starts.

After such an awesome time I'm feeling newly energized for my writing, and I'm very excited about what will happen when I suddenly have six hours a day to work. Watch out, works-in-progress!

At WorldCon, Day 2

I was wall-to-wall busy today. I had breakfast with my family and then went out for the "Strolling with the Stars" walk, which was a leisurely walk around the neighborhood with all kinds of people. We must have had about 100 people confusing the traffic during this time. I met Ellen Datlow in person for the first time after having been on a Twitter greeting group with her (I thank Charles Tan for placing me there). She just happened to be chatting with Kay Kenyon and Cory Doctorow, so I met them too. Also on the walk were Lawrence Schoen and Margaret McGaffey Fisk. Our stroll ended right around 10, whereupon I changed out of my walk-in-hot-weather clothes and into my air-conditioned-convention gear, and headed into the convention.

I met lots of people today. I reconnected with Wendy Shaffer who was in a past writing group, and met Traci Morganfield for the first time - she's been in my writing group for years now, but I had never met her in person. I also crossed paths with Aliette de Bodard and her husband. I saw Alistair Mayer, Paul Carlson, and Rick Lovett, and met Brad Torgerson - all of them Analog folk.

The panels have been varied and quite interesting. Stan Schmidt spoke about upcoming things at Analog, and there was a really great panel about how architecture and the construction of physical spaces influence our thinking. I'm going to have to post in more depth on that one in the future. There was a great panel, ostensibly about Linguistics, which ended up taking on the issue of variation in world languages. That one featured Stan Schmidt, Michael Capobianco, Peadar Ó Guilín, Lawrence Schoen, and David Peterson. It was fun hearing so many of them attempt difficult phonemes, and try to elicit strange sounds from audience members! I also attended a great worldbuilding panel featuring Greg Bear and others.

My own event for the day was a KaffeeKlatsch, which basically involved me sitting at a table with a cup of coffee and talking about myself with anybody who cared to come. This was lovely, and people came to speak with me! I saw familiar faces Gregg Castro and Margaret McGaffey Fisk, and Brad Torgerson actually came to pick my brain a bit on the topic of language. There were three others whom I had not previously met, and we had a good time (though I wish they'd served everyone coffee and not just me!).

By the end of the day (that being now) I was exhausted. So I'll sign out and tell you more as it happens!

At WorldCon, Day 1

We drove to Reno today; it took just over four hours. The hotel is enormous and the room is comfortable. The convention center is similarly enormous, but I'm starting to find my way around. I met Alan Smale near the registration desk - he's one of nearly twenty people I'm hoping to run into while I'm here. It's taken me hours to begin processing all the sessions I might be interested to attend. Today I went to a session about classic sf movies. Bob Eggleton was one of the people on the panel, and so I was able to meet him in person. He is a huge fan of classic sf, particularly monster, movies. I learned all kinds of things (especially since this isn't my area of expertise!).

I'll try to keep reporting each day that I'm here. It will be very busy and fun!

My schedule for WorldCon in Reno!

So here it is, officially! I've received my schedule for Reno Worldcon. I'd love to see you if you're attending. I've got some great panels, as well as a reading and an autographing session (with some very awesome people). These are the most reliable places to catch me:

Thu 15:00 - 16:00, KaffeeKlatsch: Thu 15:00, KK1 (RSCC)
Juliette Wade, Carol Berg, Lee Harris, Larry Correia

Fri 14:00 - 15:00, Anticipatory Anthropology: Study of Future Humans, A16 (RSCC)
Margaret Mead said "Anthropology has to date made very
meager contributions to man's developing concern with the
future" ("Contribution" 3). Two decades later, the American
Anthropological Association began awarding an annual prize
for "Anticipatory Anthropology" in order to ameliorate this
shortcoming, what Robert Textor (who sponsored the award
and for whom it is named) called the discipline's
"tempocentrism"- i.e., its concern only "with the past, the
ethnographic present, and the actual present"
Irene Radford, Juliette Wade, Margaret McGaffey Fisk, Patricia MacEwen

Fri 16:00 - 17:00, Neologism and Linguicide: How the Dominant Language Mutates and Assimilates Other Languages, D04 (RSCC)
We've all heard of species becoming endangered, but the
famous anthropologist Wade Davis warns of a similar problem
happening to the languages which endangers the richness of
the world's cultures. How we preserve or destroy these
languages and how we cultivate linguistic habits, will
determine what we are able to think in the world of the
near future.
Lawrence M. Schoen, Juliette Wade, Sheila Finch, David J. Peterson

Sat 12:00 - 13:00, Designing Believable Languages, A10 (RSCC)
How do biology, population density, and other features help
determine the development of languages on an alien world?
Peadar Ó Guilín, Juliette Wade, S.M. Stirling, David J. Peterson

Sat 15:00 - 16:00, Analog Doesn't Publish Women?, A10 (RSCC)
The Analog Mafia, not just for men...
Stanley Schmidt (M), Juliette Wade, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Mary A. Turzillo

Sat 16:30 - 17:00, Reading: Juliette Wade, A15 (RSCC)

Sun 11:00 - 12:00, Autographing: Sun 11:00, Hall 2 (RSCC)
(Juliette Wade, Nancy Kress, Grania Davis, Jack Skillingstead, Robert G. Pielke, Gail Carriger, Joe Haldeman)