Svetlana Velmar-Janković

That this is unfinished is probably obvious. I had asked for this to be held back, but.. it wasn't. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.1% of all FPs} 04:47, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

a lot of the shows from past years were not particularly well documented on Commons. Hopefully, I can document them before publication oof, that's unfortunate. —⁠andrybak (talk) 19:37, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• This puts me in mind of a brief conversation you and I had about the effects of the Festival on Edinburgh back at Wikimania 2016 in Italy which it would be fun to bring up again now—you had mentioned how you were unable to get to Wikimania 2014 because it conflicted with the Festival, and I mentioned Charles Stross's novel Singularity Sky (an article which I mostly wrote). He also lives in Edinburgh, and recalled on his blog how, while writing the book, he'd been stuck trying to find a truly disruptive antagonist for the society where most of the novel is set, a confederation of worlds that are an authoritarian state with mostly late 19th-early 20th century technology (save where they use the advanced tech of his universe several centuries from now) and social mores.

  He was out one night during the Festival with some friends; they'd had to go to a pub in Leith to escape the crowds at their usual watering hole. He wanted this antagonist culture to be an outside-context enemy, "someone they can't understand or figure out". One of the friends suggested, "Why not the Festival"? He noted how that makes Edinburgh in August the sort of place where the unusual is mundane, where encountering bagpiping elephants, say, is not big deal.

  So, that's exactly what he did: The aliens in the story are, basically, the Festival with technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, and the novel is about how their arrival terminally disrupts this rigidly organized society far beyond anything the resistance could have ever done. Daniel Case (talk) 05:32, 2 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]