Conventions

Stephanie Saulter in the Salon

~ Cheryl

As the Ujima show in which they featured is now unavailable through Listen Again, I have started posting my Worldcon interviews on Salon Futura. The first one is up now and features Stephanie Saulter.

The interviews with Tempest Bradford, Karen Lord and Nalo Hopkinson will follow in due course.

Incidentally, that podcast went up last night. I used it as an example during the podcasting course that Miranda and I did at the BBC Club. The course seemed to go very well, which I’m very pleased about.

WorldCon Academic Track Podcasts

~ Cheryl

Worldcons are such busy events that huge swathes of activity can take place within one without you being aware of them. I spent very little time in the academic track at Helsinki, and consequently I had no idea that a series of podcasts was being recorded. There are now five available. I’m not sure if there will be any more.

I have listened to two of them. The one with John Clute and Gary K Wolfe about estrangement is hardcore LitCrit. I think I probably need to listen to it again to follow it all. However, I can say that it has some very interesting points to make about the changing approach of science fiction to ecological disaster, and about the nature of weird fiction.

The one with Andrew M Butler and Aino-Kaisa Koistinen about gender in films and TV is also very interesting. It goes off the rails slightly when they try to talk about going outside of the gender binary, but there’s some great discussion of Wonder Woman and Doctor Who.

Two of the others look at other cultures. Aliette de Bodard and Emmi Itäranta talk about writing fiction in a second language, while Ken Liu and Stanley Chan talk their own work, which means Chinese S&F. There’s also Edward James & Jyrki Korpua on epic fantasy. All worth a listen, I think.

Creative Histories, the Blog Series

~ Cheryl

As some of you may remember, back in July I attended the Creative Histories conference at Bristol University. One of the things to come out of that will be a series of blog posts on Will Pooley’s Storying the Past website.

The full list of posts making up the series can be found here. As you will see, mine is not due up until November 22nd, but there will be loads of great material before then. Many of the posts are based directly on papers from the conference, and I’m looking forward to catching up with those papers I wasn’t able to see. I am, of course, particularly interested in the use of “choose your own adventure” games as a means of teaching history. My post, however, is nothing to do with my paper (which was on steampunk). Instead I talk about who gets to do history, because they are assumed to be objective, and who gets told that their work is too subjective and can’t be considered. This is all directly relevant to what I talked about at the Trans in Academia conference on Saturday.

Update: I had the date of my appearance in the series wrong. It should be November 22nd. I have corrected it above. Apologies to anyone who saw the wrong date.

Congratulations, Grimbold

~ Cheryl

The British Fantasy Society’s annual convention, FantasyCon, took place over the weekend. Awards were given out. Not all of my friends who were up for things won, but I am delighted that Grimbold Books won for Best Independent Press. Sammy wasn’t able to be there (I understand that she’s kind of busy with baby production at the moment), but Jo Hall and Roz Clarke were on hand to pick up the award. Jo is the Commissioning Editor for Kristell Ink, the fantasy imprint, while Roz provides a lot of editing support. Also on hand to collect the trophy were Joel Cornah who hosts the Grimcast, their in-house podcast, and Pete Sutton who is their newest author.

Well done, everyone. Thoroughly well deserved.

Hugo Award Rules Changes

~ Cheryl

One of the good things about Worldcons these days is that I don’t have to spend much of my time in the Business Meeting reporting on what goes on there. Alex Acks does that for me. What’s more, they wrote a very useful article explaining all of the Hugo Award rules changes passed this year. You can read it here.

Today on Ujima – Worldcon Interviews

~ Cheryl

With so much of this year’s Worldcon centering on black women writers, and in particular Caribbean women, I was able to devote an entire show to interviews done in Helsinki. Ben the Engineer and I had a nice, quiet day, which is just as well as Ujima is in the process of moving offices within The Station and I didn’t want to be bringing in guests.

First up on the show was Stephanie Saulter who set the scene by talking about the current prominence of Caribbean writers. We also reflected on her (R)Evolution series and how the young Finns at Worldcon looked like they were cosplaying characters from the books thanks to their brightly dyed hair.

The second interview was with Karen Lord who talked about being Toastmistress and putting the world into the Hugos. We also discussed her forthcoming role as a writer on Season Three of Tremontaine, and her new book deal.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

Hour two opens with me talking to Tempest Bradford about AfroRetroFuturism, issues of race in the SF&F community, black people in Roman Britain, and the significance of N.K. Jemisin’s second Hugo win. We also mentioned the Writing the Other course, of which there happens to be one coming up soon.

Finally I headed out to Helsinki’s only Jamaican cafe to interview Nalo Hopkinson over a very nice “lion juice” smoothie. We discussed Nalo’s job as a creative writing teacher at U.C. Riverside, the novels that she is working on, and what she’s seeing coming from younger Caribbean writers. Nalo also talked about her medical struggles with anemia and fibromyalgia.

You can listen to hour two of the show here.

The playlist for today was all SF&F themed songs by black musicians.

  • Prince – Art Official Cage
  • Parliament – Mothership Connection
  • Jimi Hendrix – All along the Watchtower
  • Michael Jackson – Thriller
  • Clipping – True Believer
  • Janelle Monae – Dance Apocalyptic
  • Jamiroquai – Space Cowboy
  • Sun Ra – Space Jazz Reverie

I was pleased to get a Clipping track in. Most of the songs on Splendor and Misery have too many swears in them to be playable on the radio.

The show will be available at the Listen Again links above for a week or two. Once it has vanished I’ll start putting the interviews up on Salon Futura.

Ujima Tomorrow – Worldcon Special

~ Cheryl

I’m back in the studio at Ujima tomorrow. Obviously I haven’t had much time to find guests while I have been in Finland, but I have been collecting material all the same. This year’s Worldcon was the first with any headline guests from the Caribbean, and of course was notable for N.K. Jemisin’s second successive Hugo in the Novel category. To mark this I will be running interviews with Stephanie Saulter, Karen Lord, Tempest Bradford and Nalo Hopkinson. The music will all have a science fiction and fantasy theme. You can listen live via our website from Noon to 14:00 tomorrow, or catch the show via the Listen Again feature for the next week or so.

Tampere Site Visit

~ Cheryl

I have no idea whether the Finns are serious about bidding for Tampere in 2032, but just in case I paid the proposed site a visit today.

Tampere is just over an hour by train from Helsinki and has been the site of many successful Finncons. Right now it does not have the facilities to host a Worldcon, but there are plans to build a brand new convention center around the railway station. This is an ideal location. There are already many hotels in the area, including two Scandics, a Holiday Inn that appears to be undergoing a massive expansion, and a giant Sokos that might be the ugliest hotel in the world. There are cheaper hotels as well.

There are plenty of places to eat in the area, and as the university is close by some of them are very cheap. And there is a small shopping mall. The city is building a tram network that will be in operation much sooner than the convention center is built, so getting to other parts of the city will be easy. My only reservation is the airport, which is very small and currently only has bus links to the city.

The main attraction of Tampere is the brand new Moomin Museum located inside Tampere-talo, a massive arts complex located just 5 minutes walk from the railway station. I visited the Moomin Museum a few years back and, while it had lots of great things in it, it all looked a bit sad. The new museum has put a lot of work into presentation and is well worth a visit if you have any interest in Moomins (save for eating them, Paul).

The city also has a fascinating cathedral with some great art, and the world’s only Lenin museum. The great revolutionary lived in Tampere for some time while plotting his take-over of Russia and the city has lots of interesting material connected to his time there.

Today I visited Vapriikki, a museum complex a little further out of town. It contains several discrete exhibitions including a brand new games museum. Most of the material in it is concerned with electronic games, for which Finland is justly famous, but it has some board games and RPG material as well, including a whole section on Finland’s annual role-playing event, Ropecon, which was in Messukeskus two weeks before us.

Vapriikki also contains a natural history section, a geology section, exhibits about life in Tampere in 1918 and 1017, a doll museum, and Finland’s Ice Hockey Hall of Fame. It does not yet have an exhibition devoted to the sayings of Kimi Raikkonen, though I am sure that will come eventually.

Right now there is also a traveling exhibition with material from the Forbidden City in Beijing. It is Qing Dynasty, so relatively modern, and very impressive.

I put a whole lot of photos on Twitter today if you want to see more.

Still in Finland

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

As I had some suspicion of just how exhausting Worldcon would be I planned to spend a couple of days after the convention hanging out with my dear friend, Irma Hirsjärvi. This involved taking a trip up to Central Finland where the internet connectivity is not as world-beating as it is in Helsinki, so I am offline much of the time.

I am, however, getting to write. There will be a con report in due course. Nor have I forgotten about the Emerald City Best Dressed at the Hugos Award. I will do that post once I have been able to catch up with Paula again and get the rest of her photos.

In the meantime I continue to be absolutely mortified about the number of times during the convention that I mistook someone for someone else. Whether this was just tiredness or the signs of impending senility, I am not sure, but I’d like to apologize profusely once again for my rudeness.

I’m signing off now as apparently I have to go for a cruise on a lake this evening. It is a tough life, and I will probably get eaten to death by mosquitoes, but I am willing to make that sacrifice for you.

Tomorrow I will be spending a few hours in Tampere, the proposed site of the 2032 Worldcon. The convention center we plan to use has not been built yet, but work on the city’s brand new tram network is underway, and of course the new Moomin museum opened earlier this year. Guess where I will be going. Hopefully there will be photos on Twtter.

Worldcon: Day 5

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday I had just one panel, at 16:00. It seemed to go well. The morning was spent catching up on sleep and the afternoon on bagging interviews with people for a Worldcon special show on Ujima next week.

In the evening I attended the Dead Dog and the Old Pharts (former Worldcon Chairs) parties. I confess to having had a few tears hearing people who have chaired good conventions praising Jukka for his achievement. These days most Worldcons take place in cities, and even venues, that have held one before. To run a successful Worldcon in a country that has never had one before and where English is not the first language is an amazing achievement. I am so proud of Finnish fandom.

The final stats for Helsinki were as follows:

  • 10516 total memberships of all types
  • 7119 “warm bodies” on site
  • over 2000 attendees were at their first Worldcon

The term “warm bodies” represents a formula for calculating memberships that takes into account facts like five people on one-day passes not being the same as one person on a full membership. If you need an explanation, ask Kevin.

In terms of total memberships, Helsinki is third behind Spokane (2015) with 11,742 and London (2014) with 10,718. Both of those conventions were boosted by high numbers of supporting members wanting to vote in the Hugos to counteract the Puppies. In terms of warm bodies it is second behind Los Angeles (1984) with 8365. That was boosted by being the first venue ever to show all three original Star Wars movies back to back. Helsinki was not boosted by anything other than a brilliant local fandom, and had they not had to start turning people away due to lack of space they might well have beaten LA’s record.

Congratulations, Dublin!

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Dublin beat Rottnest Island and all of the usual silly other write-in bids that we get when a bid is unopposed. The 2019 Worldcon will therefore be just a short flight over Wales and the Irish Sea from Bristol. It will be very easy to get to. I hope to see a lot of Welsh and West Country people there.

The list of Guests of Honour can be found here, and the membership page is here.

I am, of course, deliriously happy for Ian McDonald.

Worldcon: Day 4

~ Cheryl

I was so tired last night that It forgot to set my alarm and woke up 1.5 hours later than planned. While I did get around 7.5 hours sleep, I didn’t get breakfast because I had an 11:00am panel and it takes almost an hour to get to the convention from my hotel.

Thankfully the panel went well. This was the one on the history of gender, which I had suggested. Originally I had been asked to moderate, but Scott Lynch kindly stepped into that role to allow me to talk more. He did a great job of keeping order on a panel with three very opinionated women (Jo Walton, Gillian Pollack and myself). My apologies once again to Thomas Ã…rnfelt who didn’t get much of a look-in, but had some great medieval history info when he did.

I spent most of the panel telling anecdotes about trans history, but I did also get to do some show and tell. There is a great company in the dealer’s room who make cuneiform tablets. If you have some text, they’ll do a custom one for you. So I got them to make this:

https://twitter.com/CherylMorgan/status/896301656656289792

For an explanation, see this blog post.

I also got to attend (and I had to queue early to get in for both) two trans-themed panels. Neither of them told me much new, but it was great to see packed out rooms for such things. The first trans panel I can remember at Worldcon was in Montréal in 2009. There were about 15 people in the audience, one of whom was a very hostile feminist, and all of the other panelists were cis. Here we had several trans-themed panels with a variety of identities represented (including non-binary people with no wish to transition medically), and all of them were younger than me.

Despite having got a decent lunch, the no breakfast thing meant that by mid afternoon I was fading fast. Thankfully Otto managed to catch me and steer me to the staff lounge for some vitamins before I collapsed. However, that was not before I managed to mistake someone for someone else on several occasions and embarrass myself horribly. My apologies to all concerned.

In the evening Thor came to see the masquerade. Despite beating on the roof of Messukeskus very hard, he didn’t get in. Thankfully he got bored after a while and I was about to get out to the party run by the lovely people from Storycom. I got to meet some young Chinese writers and a guy who has started a convention in Hong Kong. And we got to see Neil Clarke on film, which partially made up for his not being here.

I didn’t see the masquerade, but I gather that Miki Dennis got a big prize, as is only right and proper. Best in Show, however, seems to have gone to a very young person in her first masquerade. I want to see photos of that.

Overall things have gone very smoothly today. There are still queues, and some panels do max out, but the vast majority of people are getting to see what they want to see. The discussions I’m hearing in the hallways are changing from, “why don’t these idiots do something about the overcrowding” to “wow, this is an amazing convention!”. One day left, and I suspect it will only get better from here.

Worldcon: Day 3

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

That was an even longer day, and I’m only back at my room now because I skipped the Hugo Loser’s Party.

The space issues are vastly reduced now. The panel I was on today had 20 people in the audience for a room rated to seat 200. Of course it wasn’t perfect. Sometimes programming guesses wrong when it goes to the popularity of a panel. But for the most part anyone who wanted a seat for one.

The text-based coverage of the Hugos went pretty well, which is good because the live video failed. Thanks to Kevin, to Susan de Guardiola who stood in for Mur, and to everyone who joined us online.

And most importantly:

TEA AND JEOPARDY WON A HUGO!!!!!!

Worldcon: Day 2

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

There has been a convention. I have done many things. Tomorrow I will do even more. Gods willing, I will be reporting live from the Hugos here. I am also being an emergency, holographic Neil Gaiman as the real Neil is busy working on the Good Omens mini series. I do not expect to have time to blog tomorrow other than that.

In the meantime the concom is getting a handle on the overcrowding. Everyone I spoke to today said that things were better than yesterday, and many panels had empty seats. Attending membership is, I believe, over 6100. There were almost 5000 people on site yesterday, which is more than the peak attendance of any non-US Worldcon save for Loncon 3.

Kevin and I were chatting with Jukka this evening. Someone, I think Kevin, said that Helsinki had scored a Critical Hit, but that doing so was not always good. No, I said. You have scored a Critical Hit. You are now covered in the intestines of the huge monster that you have slain with a single blow. You smell awful.

Slowly but surely, the Helsinki committee is digging its way out of the gigantic pile of shit that its unexpected success has caused.

By the way, it is worth noting that it has always been the plan that the Dealers’ Room would be open to the general public without the need for a membership. This has not changed. People who turn up and cannot get in can still see part of the convention.

Worldcon 75 Day 1: Where Did All These People Come From?

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

The Helsinki Worldcon is now well underway, and the big topic of conversation is the attendance. On the face of it, this is a good thing. We all want Worldcon to grow. The largest number of attending members in history is still LA Con II in 1984 with 8365. LonCon 3 in 2014 had more members in total, but only 6946 attending. The last I heard Helinki was up to 6001. Some of those may be day members, who have to be counted somewhat differently from full attending members, but even so it is an impressive number. Helsinki certainly looks like being in the top 5 Worldcons by size.

Unfortunately, based on previous Worldcons outside of the US/UK axis, expected numbers for Helsinki were more like 3500. Messukeskus could handle that easily. It is more than big enough in terms of exhibit space for what we have. But the function space, where programming happens, is stretched to the limit.

There are many things that a Worldcon can do to cope with the unexpected, but building new program rooms is not one of them. Seeing how memberships were going, Helsinki did negotiate some space in the library across the road. It did not try to turn empty exhibit halls into function space because we all know how badly that went in Glasgow in 1995.

Hopefully tomorrow, with more program streams in operation, the pressure on space will ease, but right now what we have is every program room packed solid and many people getting turned away. Messukeskus is very hot on fire safety. Personally I’m going to avoid program at much as I can because I have been to many Worldcons and there are lots of people for whom this is their first experience of the convention. Hopefully other regulars will do the same. I don’t envy the Helsinki team trying to sort this out, but I guess if you must have a major problem it is better to have one that was caused by your amazing success in other areas.

Everything else appears to be running fairly smoothly. There are plenty of food vendors open at the convention and they seem to be doing excellent business. The dealers, fan tables and art show are all up and running. If I’m not trying to get to panels I may see more of the convention tomorrow.

We Are Officially Received

~ Cheryl


Worldcon isn’t due to start until tomorrow, but this evening a bunch of us were invited to attend a civic reception at City Hall here in Helsinki. Obviously the city couldn’t fit all 6,000+ attending members in, so the convention ran a lottery weighted by contributions to programming. Kevin and I were both lucky enough to get in. There were also fans from Finland, Sweden, Ireland, France, Croatia, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, China and doubtless many other countries as well. It all looked very official (and incidentally gave some of us a great opportunity to check in with senior convention staff in a relaxed and informal fashion).

Of course it also made the forthcoming convention seem so much more welcome in the city. Comparisons were made with Winnipeg in 1994 as the last time a city had pushed the boat out for us in this sort of way.

The building now used as City Hall was originally built as an hotel in 1833. The style is Russian Imperial, Finland having been annexed by Alexander I in 1809.

After the reception a lot of people disappeared off to a karaoke bar. I got registered and went back to my hotel because I was very tired day looking around the city. My Fitbit says I did almost 25,000 steps today so I think I have earned a rest. What worries me is that the con hasn’t started yet. Ooops.

Beware Fake Hugos

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I understand from Kevin that there is an event being promoted on Facebook that offers a link to live streaming of this year’s Hugo Award ceremony. This is fake, and will probably lead to a site loaded with malware. Details of how to follow the text-based coverage that Kevin and I will be providing are here. There is no official link for the convention’s video-based coverage yet, but when it is available it will be posted on the Worldcon 75 website.

Update: the official live stream will be via YouTube at this address.

Pasila Station and Messukeskus – the Worldcon 75 Venue

~ Cheryl

Four years ago, when Helsinki was first bidding to hold Worldcon, I did a video tour of the venue. You can find that here, but a few things have changed since then so I thought it would be worth re-visiting the venue. In particular you may have heard scare stories about construction work. Thankfully that turns out to be pretty much a non-event as we don’t need to go near the parts of Pasila station that are being dug up. Of course the room allocations that I mentioned in the older video may have changed too, but I didn’t have facilities staff around today to explain things.

Here is the latest video, in which I manage to mispronounce Messukeskus in a variety of spectacularly wrong ways.

Helsinki – Airport to City by Train

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

A whole lot of you will be flying into Helsinki for Worldcon over the next few days, and will be wondering how you get from the airport to the city. So I made a video of what I did when I arrived. For the princely sum of €5 you can get a train from the airport to either Pasila, the station by the convention center, or Helsinki Central. The full journey takes just 28 minutes, and the trains are very frequent. Here’s how it is done.

Update: In answer to Lynn’s question in comments, the schedules are available online here. The trains have a gap in service between roughly midnight and 5:00am, but there are a number of bus services that full the gap. The 615 is half-hourly through the night.

Creative Histories Revisited

~ Cheryl

I was so busy on Thursday, and so tired on Friday, that I didn’t cover the Creative Histories conference very well. Therefore I’m going to look back over days 2 and 3 so I can highlight some of the great presentations we had. (I looked at Wednesday in more detail here.)

Thursday opened with Ronald Hutton who is the UK’s leading authority on the history modern paganism. I was particularly struck by what he had to say about how even being suspected of having pagan sympathies was sufficient to damage his academic career, and make it difficult for him to taken seriously as an expert witness on the subject. This is very reminiscent of how trans academics are treated when we try to say anything about trans-related issues. I’ll have a lot more to say about this in a post I’m writing for Will Pooley’s blog.

The other morning session on Thursday was all about creative writing. Nick Barratt, who is one of the historians who works on the hugely successful TV ancestry series, Who Do You Think You Are?, talked about the tension between entertaining the public and doing good history. We also had presentations on story structure and performative story telling. This is a very long way from the traditional structure of academic writing, but of course an essential skill if you do want to tell a story rather than present an argument.

After lunch I headed out to the Other Lecture Theatre, which involved a trek through the zoo. We had a couple of papers on maritime history, and got to see an amazing quilt made from very small squares so as to reproduce a pixelated image of a portrait of Nelson.

The final session was mine, but I was preceded by two excellent papers. Sonja Boon talked about the difficulties of writing about the history of slavery when some of your ancestors were slaves. Obviously that connects with my comments above about doing pagan and trans history. Joe Krawec is researching 20th Century British industrial history, but as a comics fan she is keen to use sequential art in presenting her research. Her paper was about telling history through comics, and the process of learning to produce them. The title of her paper, “Punching Hitler: comic books and their uses for the historian”, will take a lot of beating.

Friday opened with a session on criminal history, though it might not have sounded like it from my tweets. The first paper was about the Digital Panopticon, a project to make a huge number of 18th and 19th century criminal records available online. The second paper was all about how the techniques of journalism can be used to tell stories from history. And paper three told a fascinating story about how a man convicted of murder in Shanghai later became a minor celebrity in London.

After lunch we had a guest presentation from biographer, Julia Blackburn. She talked about how she writes her books, but also in some detail about her latest subject, artist John Craske. He certainly makes for a fascinating story. Here’s Blackburn talking about her subject in The Guardian.

After lunch we had a session on digital projects, which included the OutStories Bristol LGBT History map. The other papers were about the Many Headed Monster blog, which looks great but is not my period, and about Experiencing Arcadia. The latter is a lovely project about an 18th Century garden that has been let down by some poor IT choices. Historians, of course, are generally not well informed about IT issues, and can easily go down the wrong path.

I need to spend more time writing apps, but I have no time.

There were, of course, many other sessions. The conference had either 2 or 3 streams most of the time. Some of the other sessions looked very interesting. I’m still working on bi-location.

The final session of the conference was a round table looking back on the themes of the conference. There seemed to be general agreement that it was a good thing that historians should be more creative when presenting their work, though admittedly the group was very much self-selected. I’m rather surprised that the idea of a PhD By Published Work doesn’t exist in history. Nicola Griffith has just done a really interesting blog series about her journey towards getting one of those.

The big problem from the historians’ point of view is that being creative is all very well when you have an established reputation, but for anyone starting their career it is a major risk because you will get called out for not being “objective”. For us non-professional academics, being creative is a lot easier, but we run the risk of not being taken seriously by historians who are in academia. Ultimately it is all about hierarchies and gatekeeping. People make rules about who is allowed to do what history, and how they are allowed to do it, to try to limit the types of stories that get told. Conferences like this kick back against such strictures, and I’m delighted to see Bristol University taking the lead in doing that.