Conventions

Today on Ujima – BristolCon, Stephanie, Art & Refugees

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today’s Women’s Outlook show had a lot of science fiction content. For the first half hour I was joined by Joanne Hall, the Chair of BristolCon. We discussed the various things that people will be able to see and do at the convention, and then we went on discuss Jo’s new book, Spark & Carousel, which is launching at the convention. We may have noted that Jim Burns like a beer or two.

One of the many fine authors who will be attending this year’s BristolCon is Stephanie Saulter. Last week I did a phone interview with her about her latest novel, Regeneration, which I broadcast today. The whole thing is about half an hour long, so I had to cut it down quite a bit for the show because of ads, music and news. I will post the extended version on Salon Futura in due course.

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

The second half began with the studio full of artists. They were all people involved with the Art on the Hill art trail, which is one of many such trails in Bristol. Nicolette de Sausmarez provided all of the admin details, Jane Lee & Sue Jones talked about their art, and Alan Gibson represented Nota Bene, a local a cappella group.

Finally we got serious and discussed the refugee crisis. Paulette, who is back from Jamaica at last, announced a new initiative from Ujima to help people in Calais. I talked to Dr. Naomi Millner from Bristol University who wrote this fine article about what we can do to provide practical help.

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

The playlist for today’s show was as follows:

  • Earth, Wind & Fire – Fantasy
  • Janelle Monáe – Tightrope
  • Pointer Sisters – We are family
  • Bob Marley – Could you be loved?
  • Prince – Art Official Cage
  • Nota Bene – Let’s do it
  • Jamiroquai – Emergency on Planet Earth
  • Jama – No Borders

And finally, here is a news report about Ujima’s recent win at the National Diversity Awards.

BristolCon Next Week

~ Cheryl

Yep, it is only a week to go to BristolCon. Because I host the website I see the committee emails go through and I know how hard Jo and her team are working. But that’s all under the surface. I’m sure that on the day everything will seem as serene as ever. If you are thinking about going, look who else will be there:

  • Jasper Fforde
  • Jaine Fenn
  • Chris Moore
  • Paul Cornell
  • Jim Burns
  • Emma Newman
  • Pete Newman
  • Gareth L Powell
  • Anne Lyle
  • Huw Powell
  • Stark Holborn
  • Jonathan L Howard
  • Adrian Tchaikovski
  • Stephanie Saulter
  • Juliet E. McKenna
  • Ben Galley
  • Sarah Ash
  • Janet Edwards
  • Danie Ware
  • Jen Williams
  • Graham Bleathman

And many, many others. And me, of course. See here for my schedule.

Jo Hall will be in the Ujima studios with me on Wednesday to preview the event, and I’ll also have an interview with Stephanie Saulter.

Creating Comics – Book Now

~ Cheryl

The Eventbrite page for my Bristol Festival of Literature event on Creating Comics is now live. Waterstones has limited space and this is likely to prove quite popular, so please do book up in advance.

As a reminder, the panel for the event is:

While I’m at it, huge congratulations to Cav for having been selected as one of ten authors who will write a book for next year’s World Book Day. The books will retails for just £1 each, and kids all over the UK will be given £1 books tokens with which to buy one. Cav’s book will be an official Star Wars story, so I suspect it will be rather popular. (Ireland is in this too, though presumably pricing will be in Euros.)

Colin Harvey Hardcovers

~ Cheryl

Colin Harvey hardcovers
I have the proof copies of the new Wizard’s Tower hardcover editions of Winter Song and Damage Time now. They look OK so I’m confident they will be available for sale at BristolCon. The UK cover price is £20 per book, but for the convention I’ll be selling them at £15 each and £25 for the pair.

Naturally I don’t want to be stuck with huge quantities of stock, so I won’t be ordering many more books than I think I can sell. That means I need a good estimate of how many copies people want. So, to avoid disappointment, if you want copies, and can collect them at BristolCon, please email me and let me know. I’ll make sure I have enough copies to satisfy everyone I know wants them.

For those of you not able to get to BristolCon, copies will be available through our friends at Tangent Books in due course. Kevin and I are looking at how we make copies available in the USA without you having to pay postage from the UK. And of course the books will be available from the piranhas.

Translation Conference, Day 2

~ Cheryl

I was up stupidly early on Thursday so that I could get to Bristol for a 9:00am start. The first set of panels was on the subject of self-translation. The presenters had very different approaches to this.

First up was Olga Castro talking about Galician fiction. Galician is one of the less commonly spoken languages of Spain. To reach the widest possible market a book needs to be translated into Castilian, the language we know as Spanish. According to Castro the Castilian publishers, knowing that they have economic power, insist that Galician writers self-translate their work into Castilian. (Apparently the languages are similar enough for this to not be a completely unreasonable request.)

Of course translation is one thing, but that isn’t necessarily all that is done. When a British novel is “translated” into American for the US market it is usually just a matter of changing spellings and substituting words. But translating a Galician novel into Castilian may involve changing the names of the characters to names that Castilian people might have, and also changing the setting of the story so that the action no longer obviously takes place in Galicia. This process is known in translation circles as “domestication”.

Because readers tend to shy away from translations, the Castilian publishers often present the translation as the original work. That’s why they want the original author to do the job. Because the Castilian publishers have much greater market reach, the Castilian translation will sell better. And when it comes to selling rights for translation into other markets at book fairs it will be the Castilian version that gets sold. Translation into other languages is done from the domesticated Castilian version, not from the Gailician original. That may even be the case for translation into Portuguese, a language which is much closer to Galician than Castilian.

Castro’s point was that by participating in this domestication process the Galician writers are actively participating in the erasure of Galician culture.

Next up was Jozefina Komporaly, an Hungarian academic who lives in Romania. Her subject was Matei ViÅŸniec, a Romanian playwright who lives in Paris. Because he is fluent in both French and Romanian, ViÅŸniec is able to write his plays in French for the much more lucrative French market, and also provide translations to Romanian for use in his home country where he is hugely famous.

Plays add a whole new level of complexity to the translation issue. To start with in both poetry and plays the languages choices are constrained by the requirements of performance. Simply changing the words is not enough. Plays, however, are not just words. The staging and the acting are equally important. Indeed, I’d argue that every time a new director stages a play the result is a translation of a kind. Modern staging of well known plays such as Shakespearian favorites often change the words dramatically too, of course.

I was very pleased to hear Komporaly mention the importance of literary awards recognizing translators. This doesn’t often happen. I am very proud of the fact that the Hugo Awards actively promote translations by allowing then an extra period of eligibility, and I was absolutely delighted that Sasquan chose to list the translators alongside the authors when two Hugos were won by translated works this year. Both translators got rockets of their own. That’s the way it should happen.

Anne O’Connor’s presentation was very different. She was talking about the various reasons for producing translations of Irish works in the 19th century. On the one hand, English translators wanted to produce works that showed how primitive and barbaric the Irish were. On the other, Irish translators had various reasons for promoting their own culture. The trouble was, of course, that by translating works into English the Irish translators made it unnecessary for Irish people to learn their own language. It is a thorny problem.

Of course one reaction to that problem is to refuse to translate. Some Irish writers took the view that translation was impossible. O’Connor read us a wonderful quote in which an Irish writer was opining that the English language was but a feeble brook into which the full raging glory of Irish literature could not possibly be poured.

The final paper of the session, by Liz Wren-Owens, was something of an anomaly in that she was looking at translation from Italian. Eventually her research will look at the different ways that the Italian writer, Antonio Tabucchi, has been translated into a variety of languages. For now all she could comment on was the English translations.

The most interesting thing for me in her presentation was where she talked about how Tabucchi’s celebrity translator, Tim Parks, has become as big a name as the original author. Parks is an acclaimed author in his own right, and he is now given equal billing with Tabucchi on book covers. It is very rare for a translator to achieve that sort of prominence, but it is good to know that publishers will exploit it when it happens.

The final session was about cultural stereotypes and how they impact translation. We began with David Norris whom I believe lives in Belgrade and has a Serbian wife. I was delighted to find that they know Zoran Živković well. David’s presentation was all about magic, that is the power of naming. When you translate a work, you are in effect re-naming something. You are changing it, molding it in an image of your own design.

Sometimes, of course, this can be a total misrepresentation. Jules Verne was a proud Frenchman, but in order to make his books more saleable in the Anglophone world his disdain for the perfidious British had to be excised from translations. A much more pernicious example is the way in which Steig Larsson’s profound feminism was watered down and even inverted by the English translations of his books.

There is a particular problem when translating works from a culture which is already in a minority position vis-a-vis the rest of Europe. Translations, and even the selection of works that are chosen for translation, can easily do damage to the reputation of that culture.

Norris also noted the Anglophone literary critics need to be taken to task for the way in which they assert the primacy of Anglophone culture in their theories. F R Leavis came in for a particular kicking. Apparently he claimed that one of the touchstones of literary greatness was the author’s ability to express Englishness.

Ursula Phillips brought Norris’s main point home in two ways. Firstly, as a proud feminist, she noted that almost all of the works of Polish literature available in translation are by men. When Polish literature is taught in Anglophone universities, it is the work of men that is foregrounded. Phillips has made it her life’s work to make the work of Polish women writers available to the world.

Secondly she noted that the way in which Polish literature has been translated (and chosen for translation) makes it seem like Poland is a very isolated country that has little contact with the rest of Europe except when our armies roll over it on their way to fight someone else. The works by women that she has chosen to translate make it very clear that Poland has always been part of a wider European culture, and has interacted significantly with that culture.

The final paper was by Antonija Primorac from the University of Split in Croatia. The title of her paper was “But you do misery so well!”. It was all about how the work chosen for translation by Croatian writers tends to be almost exclusively stories about the misery of war.

Of course Croatia’s struggle for independence from Serbia following the break-up of Yugoslavia is very recent. The war took place between 1991 and 1995. Memories of the war are very fresh, and authors can write from personal experience. As the war happened in parallel with the Bosnian struggle for independence, and the tragedy of Sarajevo, there has been a great deal of interest in these wars in the Anglophone world. Naturally publishers have sought out war narratives, and these have been pretty much all that has got translated.

There is a feedback loop too. Croatian writers are now very much aware that if they want to sell into English translation they need to write war stories, so that is exactly what they produce. The end result, of course, is that wartime tragedy has come to dominate the Anglophone world’s view of Croatian culture. Thank goodness for package holidays and A Game of Thrones which are picking away at that image.

Of course as a publisher of a book of translated stories by Croatian writers I had a personal connection to this paper. I have to admit that many of the stories in Kontakt are set in war time. Indeed, my three favorite stories by male writers in the book are all set in war time in one way or another. Living through a war has to have an effect on writers. But I hope one day I will get to publish another Croatian anthology, one that is perhaps informed far more by Croatia’s emergence as a country in its own right. That sounds good material for science fiction stories, right?

My thanks to Rajendra Chitinis and his team for two very enjoyable days, and hello to all of the new friends I have made as a result. Sadly I won’t be able to make the conference in Budapest next year as I have to be in Canada in March, but hopefully I’ll see one or two of you in Barcelona. The science fiction world does want to promote translations, why not come and see that in action?

And finally, if you want to come to your own conclusion as to whether Croatians are miserable or not, why not buy this very fine book?

Kontakt

Joe Haldeman and Me, On Film

~ Cheryl

The fabulous Tony C Smith has posted all of the video from SofaCon 2 to YouTube. This includes my interview with Joe Haldeman, which I have embedded above. I wasn’t really thinking about being videoed. You can all have a good laugh, and my apologies about the poor video quality. The little camera on my laptop isn’t great.

Those of you who are going to be discussing The Forever War at the Mr B’s Book Club next month should take a listen. The interview is also quite interesting with regard to attitudes towards gay rights back when The Forever War was first published.

The full list of SofaCon 2 videos is available here.

Translation Conference, Day 1

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Way back in February I attended a workshop on translated fiction in Bath. I mentioned at the time that there would be a follow-up conference in Bristol in September. That date has now arrived, so I was up early and off to the big city.

I did actually miss the first set of papers. It has been a very long week on the day job already, and there was no way I was getting up at the crack of dawn, but I made it there for morning coffee.

That was important because the first paper of the second session was by Paulina Drewniak from the University of WrocÅ‚aw. Her paper was all about Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series, which is one of the few cases of a major international hit from translated genre fiction. It turns out that Paulina is a fan, and had been at the Eurocon in Dublin last year (where Sapkowski was one of the Guests of Honor). I apologized for voting for Barcelona. We agreed we’d be going anyway, and I’m trying to get her to come to Helsinki. We should bug her for a paper, Merja. Anyone who ends her academic talk with a picture of a Lego Witcher figure is OK by me.

Actually I want to know more about the figure of the Witcher in Slavic folklore. Apparently Sapkowski drew on pre-Christian traditions for his stories, as well as including a wealth of Polish in-jokes, most of which were omitted in the English translations.

Next up was Olivia Hellewell from Nottingham University who is working on Slovenian literature. I had a great deal of sympathy with the writer she interviewed who said that he now sends translations of his work to US and UK publishers under his own name, because if he says they are translations they go straight in the bin.

Finally in that session we had Richard Mansell of the University of Exeter on Catalan fiction. I love the Catalans. They are so proud and defiant. They refuse to be described as having “minority” language, but rather insist that it is a “minoritized” language. Nor is Catalan a stateless language. It is the official language of Andorra. While most Spaniards will have a copy of Don Quixote on their bookshelves to show that they are cultured, Catalans have it bookmarked at the page where Cervantes describes a Catalan novel as the best book ever written. I could go on. I am so looking forward to Barcelona.

There is a fairly well known Catalan novel that is a bit experimental and science-fictional. Richard didn’t think much of it as a book, but he noted that the central character spends the first few chapters talking about how he was once a member of the IRA. That section has been omitted from the English translation for fear it would offend delicate English ears.

I had managed to miss booking lunch, but I got really lucky and found a really good Indian restaurant across the road. This one. The little mint leaf in white chocolate that they gave me at the end was to die for.

The graveyard session was allocated to the poets, perhaps in the hope that they could entertain us and keep us awake. It is not an area I have much interest in (save for Roz Kaveney’s translations of Catullus), but I was astonished to hear that there are 119 books of Macedonian poetry translated into English. Apparently it is because they have a big international poetry festival in Macedonia and stuff gets translated for that. I was also delighted to discover that there are books of Cornish poetry in English translations. People write poetry in Cornish these days. I remember visiting the house in Mousehole where the last living Cornish speaker died. It is wonderful that the language has been resurrected.

The final poetry paper was about Cavafy, which was kind of appropriate because the conference was being held in the former home of another great gay poet. John Addington Symmonds is one of the superstars of Bristol’s LGBT history. He was also a translator. Up until he took a look at them, no one in the UK knew that Michelangelo’s poems were homoerotic. The original translator had gender-swapped some of the characters so that sensitive English readers need not be offended.

The final session opened up with Åžule Demirkol Ertürk from Istanbul talking about two different translations of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (which is not SF, the title is a reference to clocks). The first translation was done by a small press specializing in Turkish literature. However, after Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize publishers looked for other Turkish writers to exploit, and a new translation of Tanpinar’s book was commissioned, with the involvement of Pamuk’s translator, Maureen Freely (though apparently most of the work was done by her student, Alexander Dawe).

Åžule’s paper was fascinating in the way that it contrasted the different approaches, and wildly different commercial success, of the multinational and small press publishers. It wasn’t just the marketing muscle. Penguin also made a specfic effort to package Turkish culture in a way that would appeal to Western readers likely to be suspicious of the country.

Interestingly exactly the opposite is happening with Jules Verne. When he was first published in the 19th Century the big publishers of the time rushed to get him to the English-speaking market. They too were insistent on packaging him for their audience, including removing all of the anti-British and pro-Socialist rhetoric. Nowadays there is a movement to re-translate Verne and let the English speaking world read the books as they were originally written. This is all being done by small and academic presses such as the fabulous folks at Wesleyan.

The next paper was about Swedish women writers, which would have been great except that it focused on the 19th century and was half about poetry. If you are interested, there is a blog maintained by the researchers.

Finally we had a couple of Serbian academics telling the story of one particular translation. It didn’t help that the original was badly in need of an edit, but their tale of English translators and editors desperately trying to dumb down the book for the English audience was hilarious. Too many characters with funny names? Seriously? Have these people never read epic fantasy? Probably not. I wish I could have given those people a Zoran Živković book. If they had to put a dream sequence in a different font to help the reader understand what was going on they wouldn’t stand a chance with Zoran.

Anyway, it was a fun day. It also shone a light on a few cracks in the world. There was a very clear divide in the audience between those people who thought that translations were a good thing to do regardless, and those who felt that unless the project resulted in a major best seller like Steig Larsson it was all a sad waste of time. It was also clear that while international literature and poetry festivals were seen as a valuable way to promote the product, international science fiction conventions were mostly seen as an embarrassment to be avoided.

Anyway, my thanks to Rajendra Chitnis and his team for an entertaining day. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, if not exactly to getting into Bristol for a 9:00am start.

My BristolCon Schedule

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The programme for this year’s BristolCon was released last night. Here’s what I’ll be doing.

09:50 – 09:55 Room 2 : Welcome, by me (we don’t have opening ceremonies, we just do a quick welcome in each room).

10:00 – 10:45 Room 2 : Crossing the Genre Borders – They’re here, they’re respectable, and they’re taking our awards. These days more and more LitFic writers are dabbling in SF&F. This year’s Clarke Award shortlist contained several books marketed as mainstream fiction, rather than genre. Should we welcome these genre-crashers with open arms, or view them with suspicion? with Alex Davis (Mod), Adrian Faulkner, Cheryl Morgan, Dan Pawley and Sophie Sparham.

18:00 – 18:45 Room 2 : The Secret Life of an Editor – Editors stare out of the window and drink gin all day… or do they? What do editors actually do? Why do you need an editor? What can they do for you, and what can you do to help them get the best out of your work? with Cheryl Morgan (Mod), Alex Davis, Jaine Fenn, Jen Williams and Richard Bendall.

18:50 – 18:55 Room 2 : Reading: Cheryl Morgan.

Yeah, I’m doing a reading. But people will have time to flee before it starts.

There are lots of other great panels going on too. I am particularly pleased to see that we have found room on the programme for this one:

17:00 – 17:45 Room 1 : Bad-ass with a Baby – It’s still fairly rare to see depictions of parenting in SF&F. If a character has a child, does that mean they’re no longer allowed to be a bad-ass? And how difficult is it to juggle childcare and saving the universe? with Lor Graham (Mod), Amanda Kear (Dr Bob), Jasper Fforde, Peter Newman and Stephanie Saulter.

The full programme for this year’s convention can be found here.

20 Years Ago Today

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

I did warn you that there were a lot of anniversaries coming up. Here’s today’s.

Saturday August 26th, 1995. By this time I was living and working in Melbourne, but I had gone back to the UK to do some project work there and pick up some more of my belongings. The project work took me to Edinburgh. My friend Anabelle suggested that I attend the World Science Fiction Convention, which was taking place in Glasgow around the same time. I would know several people there, including Martin Hoare and Dave Langford, and Teddy whom I expected to be in the masquerade, so I figured I might as well give it a go.

One of the things I wanted to do there was see if I could find some Australian fans. At this time I was living as a woman at all times except for work, but the only people I knew in Melbourne were my work colleagues. I wanted some people I could hang out with socially as me. To my surprise and delight I discovered that Melbourne was fandom central in Australia, and that Melbourne fans were bidding to hold Worldcon there in 1999. I offered to help. They explained to me how Worldcon site selection works, and sent me off to vote on that year’s race to see the system in action. (Martin was supporting one of the two rival Boston bids, so he was keen for me to vote as well.)

Instant runoff voting wasn’t new to me — I’d seen it used a lot in student politics — but my diary tells me that I had a few questions and a very helpful American guy behind the desk answered them all for me. I thought nothing more of this, and enjoyed my day at the con, including watching Teddy and his colleagues take the masquerade by storm. Afterwards I had agreed to help my new Aussie friends run a bid party. Who should turn up, but the American guy from the site selection desk. And apparently he was there to see me.

I should note that at this time in history the standard advice to trans women was never to get involved with a man prior to surgery, because he will only be interested in you as a “shemale” and will drop you like a stone once you no longer qualify as such. I was mindful of that, but probably a bit giddy too. I had, after all, never been chatted up by a bloke before, let alone kissed one. I rather liked this Kevin fellow.

The following day he asked me for a date (dinner, the Hugo ceremony, and the firework display). I said yes. It is the best decision I have ever made in my life.

What’s In A Name?

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

So, the Helsinki Worldcon is now a reality. The vote tally was officially confirmed at the WSFS Business Meeting yesterday, and the newly seated convention has launched its website.

Very quickly long-time Worldcon attendees noticed something different about it. The name of the convention is Worldcon 75. That’s it. No silly fannish name. No local focus. Just Worldcon. I love it.

Partly that’s because Worldcon has a long history of conventions that have seem themselves as far more important than the fact that they are Worldcons. It is, in a way, an artifact of the resolutely anti-authoritarian stance of WSFS, but it is also a result of jingoism by committees (and not just nationalist jingoism either, city and state pride comes into it too). Helsinki has, in effect, made a statement that it sees being a Worldcon as important, not as an annoying inconvenience. However, they also put out this tweet:

That made me really happy. Looking at what went on in Spokane on Saturday night, and much of the reaction on social media afterwards, I got a very strong impression of a community drawing in on itself. That’s a very natural reaction of a community that is under attack, which it very much was, but it is also a lost opportunity. Thanks to our Morose Mongrel “friends”, we have had an explosion of interest in the Hugo Awards and Worldcon this year. (Over 48 Gb of web traffic yesterday, over 81,000 visitors to the website, lots of interest from mainstream media outlets.) This is a golden opportunity to reach out to new people and welcome them in, not a time for bristling against anyone seen as “not part of our community”. Helsinki appears to be determined to try to grasp that opportunity.

Finally, look at their Guests of Honor:

  • John-Henri Holmberg – Swedish, male; fan and publisher
  • Nalo Hopkinson – Jamaican, queer female; author
  • Johanna Sinisalo – Finnish, female; author
  • Claire Wendling – French, female; comics artist
  • Walter Jon Williams – White male American writer of thrilling space adventures, with Finnish ancestry

They could so easily have had a mostly-Finnish or mostly-Nordic guest list, and I do hope that the convention will also make a big fuss of the likes of Petri Hiltunen, Toni Jerrman and Irma Hirsjärvi. But that is a brilliant set of Guests of Honor. Someone thought very hard about those choices. Well done, Helsinki. Let’s continue putting the world in Worldcon.

Hello World, Welcome to Helsinki!

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Helsinki


Well look at that, I think we done got ourselves a Worldcon. 🙂

The results are technically pending until confirmed at the Saturday WSFS Business Meeting, but here are the numbers from the count:

  • Helsinki 1363
  • Washington 878
  • Montreal 228
  • Nippon 120

In a 4-way race, Helsinki wins on the first round of counting with 52% of the vote.

Thank you, fandom. See you all in 2017.

I am so very proud of all my Finnish friends right now.

By the way, it won’t be snowing in Helsinki in August. In summer Finland looks more like this:

Finland summer

My Sasquan Panel

~ Cheryl

I managed to wake up in the middle of the night to do the “Exploring Orientation and Gender in Fiction” panel at Sasquan. It was a lot of fun. Many thanks again to Cat Valente for inviting me and providing the Sasquan end of the tech, and also to Heather Rose Jones who is a fellow historian of things LGBT. She has a wonderful online resource here that I shall be spending a long time reading through.

The experience did remind me that 90 minutes is the ideal time for convention panels. Any longer and you’ll probably run out of steam, but any shorter and you’ll barely scratch the surface of the topic. I know an extra half hour doesn’t seem a lot, but when you take out 15 minutes for room change (i.e., a 60 minute slot means a 45 minute panel) and 15 minutes for audience questions you only have a half hour panel. A 90 minute slot doesn’t need to extend either of those, so you get an hour for the panel, meaning you have doubled the time available.

This morning Tero asked me about my experience of participating in a panel by Skype. It was mixed, but I’d still do it again.

The connection to Spokane was a bit spotty. A couple of times I got the dreaded “connection lost, trying to get it back” message. Thankfully the second time worked, but I lost quite a bit of the first half of the panel. Obviously if you are going to do this you have to have a good connection.

Microphone technique becomes much more important if you are using Skype. The mics that are provided in convention centers tend to be sensitive and highly directional. People who keep moving their head while speaking, or who wave the mic around as if they are on Top of the Pops (where, as you should know, everyone is miming) are a menace, because you only get to hear half of what they say.

That goes double for audience questions. Even if you provide people with a mic, the chances are they will mis-use it. Kudos to Cat for realizing this and repeating the questions for me.

Moderators who have one or more Skype panelists should probably keep an eye on the text window. This wasn’t really an issue for us, but if I’d had a problem then texting via Skype might be the only way I had to let the moderator know.

The thing I wasn’t expecting was how much I missed visual clues. I know Cat and Ctein so I could recognize their voices, but I had difficultly telling whether Julia or Heather was speaking, and it was clear that the panel was never quite sure if I’d finished, and was politely not jumping in too soon. Having video as well would probably have helped, except that no one would have wanted to see me at 4:00am.

If there’s anyone who was at the panel who would like to see my lecture at Liverpool University earlier this year, you can find it here.

My Sasquan Schedule

~ Cheryl

No, of course I am not in Spokane. That doesn’t mean that I won’t be involved in Worldcon. They can’t get rid of me that easily.

As most of you will know, on Saturday night I will be helping Kevin and Mur Lafferty co-host the text-based coverage of the Hugo Award Ceremony. Because of my travel plans, I’ll actually be doing this from a hotel room in Liverpool. The ceremony starts at 4:00am my time. Ouch. You can find information about how to watch the coverage here.

However, it appears that won’t be my only involvement. I may be on a panel too. Tonight Cat Valente is moderating a panel titled “Exploring Orientation and Gender in Fiction”. There are no obviously trans people on the panel, so last night Cat put out a call on Twitter for trans writers who might want to help out. I muttered something about not being there, and to my surprise and delight Cat offered to Skype me in. There’s no guarantee this will work. The tech might not be up to it, and someone at Sasquan may decide that fandom needs to be protected from a notorious Menace like me. However, we are going to give it a try. That means I have to be up for a 4:00am event tomorrow morning too.

Anyway, fingers cross, and huge thanks to Cat for making the offer.

It is a good job that all I’m doing on Friday and Sunday is catching trains.

Hugos and Business Meeting Update

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

I have been having a very interesting email discussion with my friend Neil Clarke about my post from yesterday on the issues for debate at this year’s WSFS Business Meeting. Neil has made a very clever point that I am convinced by, and I think will save a lot of time this year.

Right now one of the problems with deciding what to do about the Puppies is that we have very little data to go on. We don’t know what effect either of the proposed anti-Puppy techniques would have had, had they been in place this year. Nor do we know what effect the vastly greater interest in the Hugos that Puppygate has caused will have on future years’ Award ballots.

However, all amendments to the WSFS Constitution take two years to pass. Anything that is passed for the first time at Sasquan cannot take effect until it is ratified at next year’s Worldcon, MidAmeriCon II in Kansas City. Therefore, we can pass both 4 and 6 and E Pluribus Hugo this year, and decide which one of them would work best next year when we have more data. We don’t even need to waste time debating their relative merits now, we just get the ball rolling on both so that action can be taken as swiftly as the deliberately pedestrian WSFS Constitution allows.

The spanner in all this is, of course, popular ratification. If that passes with the wrecking amendment added in London intact then it could take three years to do something about the Puppies rather than two years. Personally I think it would be a very good thing if whatever technique we adopted to combat the Puppies was subject to popular ratification, because then democracy would be seen to be done. However if, as some people fear, the Puppy vote will be able to flood the nomination ballot in all future years, the sooner something gets done the better.

I haven’t had a chance to ask Kevin whether the wrecking amendment can be removed again at Sasquan, but if the price of having popular ratification is that it will take another year to do something about the Puppies then I’m pretty sure it will get voted down.

By the way, this does raise another interesting constitutional question. If we had popular ratification, and both anti-Puppy proposals passed this year, would that leave us with the possibility of the popular vote passing two mutually incompatible next year? I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing that will get Kevin excited or keep him awake at night, but I’m very glad that I have him to think about such things so that I don’t have to.

Fixing the Hugos

~ Cheryl ~ 15 Comments

As I can’t travel to the USA I won’t be able to attend this year’s WSFS Business Meeting. That means I don’t get to have a direct say in what gets done about Puppygate. So I am going to write about what I think needs to be done here in the hope that it might sway some people who do have a vote.

Before I get onto the actual Puppy-related motions, however, there are a bunch of other pieces of business that also deserve attention. The full text of all motions can be found on the Sasquan website.

Business Passed On from Loncon 3

A.1 Popular Ratification

I still believe that the 3-year timescale that was forced into this motion at Loncon 3 is a bad thing, but overall the idea of popular ratification is a good thing. The vast majority of fans cannot afford to go to every Worldcon. Giving those who can’t attend a stake in the convention’s governance is a something we need to work towards, and small steps are better than no steps at all.

Also all of the material about electronic voting is a Very Good Thing. I know Sasquan tried to make site selection available online, but the process was unnecessarily complicated and needs to change.

A.2 A Story By Any Other Name

Pass it. This is an amendment designed to ensure that things like the unfair exclusion of Mary Robinette Kowal’s “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” never happen again. (The whole affair should also serve as a warning against activist Hugo Administrators. You may well think they’d be great for combatting Puppies, but what happens when they use their powers to do things you don’t like?)

A.3 Hugo Finalists

Pass it. This is a sad but necessary change in terminology brought on by people who describe themselves as “Hugo nominees” because they have sent in a ballot nominating their work.

A.4 WSFS Membership Types and Rates

Kick it out. This is an attempt to prevent Worldcons from offering a cheap “Voting Membership” in order to encourage participation in the Hugos. We need to do everything we can to encourage participation. It may be that voting memberships are a bad thing, but they have never been tried and I take a dim view of anything that tries to ban an innovation before it can be tested.

New Resolutions

B.2.1 I Remember the Future & B.2.2 Hugo Eligibility Extension for Predestination

These are both requests to extend the availability of works due to limited distribution. I know nothing about either work, but generally films that do well on the festival circuit and then go on to do well in DVD sales ought to get a second chance. WSFS members generally do not attend film festivals, and so don’t see the works premiered there.

B.2.3 Hugo Nominating Data Request

This is a request for some (anonymized) data from this year’s Hugos to help people decide what to do about Puppygate. I have no objection, but the Hugo Administrators might.

B.2.4 Open Source Software

On the face of it, this is a fairly reasonable request. It is asking that any software used by a Worldcon (excluding anything that is a commercial product and legally protected) have its source code be made available for inspection. Obviously we want Worldcons to use good quality software, but this Resolution is a disaster waiting to happen.

Two of the less good things about fandom are the tendency to busybodying and the habit of fans to believe that they know far more about any subject than anyone else. If this Resolution passes then it will be possible for anyone who wants to make a nuisance of themselves to demand access to code developed by Worldcons, to suggest amendments to that code, and to demand that the Worldcon in question either incorporate those changes or justify not doing so. It will be a nightmare for the people actually doing the work.

In the past I have helped build the website for a Worldcon. I wouldn’t do it under the conditions of this resolution. Everything you put on a website is effectively code, even if it is just a blog post. I do not want to have countless arguments with concerned fans about religious issues in HTML and CSS.

There are better ways of improving the software that Worldcons use. The first is that if you have real development skills then you can get involved with Worldcon committees and help write the software that they use. The second is that Worldcons should make a point of developing code that can be re-used every year. There should be no more of this re-inventing everything from scratch each year because someone on the committee is a software nerd who insists that everything ever written by any previous Worldcon is useless and he has to write his own versions. That’s largely a matter for Worldcon chairs to enforce, but IT policy is a question that can be put to bids, and the Business Meeting can set up a Software Development Committee to help pass on code from one year to the next.

B.2.5 MPC Funding

The better known the Hugos and Worldcon become, the more people trying to monetize fandom try to steal our service marks. If people want those marks to be defended, it will cost money. In terms of the overall Worldcon budget, the amounts being discussed are very small, and haven’t changed since the 1980s. This Resolution basically puts a little bit more money into the defense fund. Please support it. It will make Kevin’s life much easier.

Constitutional Amendments

I’m going to take these mostly from the bottom up, leaving the serious anti-Puppy stuff until last.

B.1.8 Electronic Signatures

This seeks to remove one of the excuses that the forces of conservatism might seek to use in order to prevent online voting. That sounds like a good thing.

B.1.7 Two-Year Eligibility

This is daft, and discriminatory. Please kick it out.

To start with the whole notion is stupid. The proposers of the motion effectively say that the science fiction field is too big for anyone to get a grasp of it all in one year, so Hugo eligibility must be extended to two years to give us all time to read everything. Have they any idea how many books get published each year? Let alone short stories. And fanzines. And…

Not to mention the fact that in the second year a whole lot more material gets published, which you also have to read.

In addition the proposal wrecks one of the basic principles of Hugo Award Internationalism. Worldcon has always recognized that the majority of voters come from the USA, and that therefore a work not published in English, and/or not published in the USA, is at a disadvantage. Also US voters would be prevented from nominating works they may love if they don’t find out about them until they get US publication and the work was no longer eligible.

So, the way things work at the moment is that works get up to three shots at eligibility: on first publication; on first publication in English; and on first publication in the USA. Obviously for some works two of those, or all three, are in the same year, but for others they can all be different years.

This proposal would change that. All works in English would get two years of eligibility, but those would be consecutive, regardless of country of publication.

What does this mean? Consider a work published in English in Australia in 2015, and again in the USA in 2018. Under the existing rules it gets two years of eligibility: 2016 and 2019. Under the new rules it also gets two years, but 2016 and 2017. By the time the book appears in the US market its eligibility will have been burned.

To repeat, this is a bad proposal. Please kick it out.

B.1.6 Nominee Diversity

This is what you might call the anti-Doctor Who motion. The idea is to prevent the Dramatic Presentation: Short Form category being filled up with episodes all taken from the same series. The motion would limit any such dominant series to two finalist slots. It would also prevent any given author from having more than two stories in any of the fiction categories, which may make it partly an anti-Puppy measure.

I have a certain amount of sympathy with this, but for reasons I shall explain in detail later I am generally opposed to rules which try to kick specific works off the final ballot when they have received enough votes to get there. It gives people the excuse to claim that the system is rigged against them. So I think I’d vote No on this one.

B.1.5 Multiple Nominations

Despite the title, this is not the same thing as B.1.6. Rather this proposal seeks to prevent a single work from being a finalist in more than one category. The commentary suggests that under the current rules a work could be a finalist in, for example, Related Work and Fancast. This is traditionally something that we have relied on Administrators to be activist about, but they may be less inclined to be so these days. Also having this rule explicitly stated removes one of the more common objections to a YA category. Part of me says that this rule is only needed because categories are badly specified, but perfection is never easy. On balance I think I’d vote for this.

B.1.3 Best Series

Now that the Trojan Horse langauge for getting rid of Novelette has been removed, this proposal is far less odious. I’m still not convinced that we need a Hugo category for ongoing series, though. When it was first proposed I saw a number of authors suggesting that it was a bad thing even without the Novelette nonsense. I’d want to hear the debate on this, but my instinct is to vote against.

B.1.2 The Five Percent Solution

This would get rid of the rule that requires that a work get at least 5% of the votes in order to make the final ballot. That rule is the reason why there have been fewer than five finalists in Short Story a number of times recently.

It is possible that if this rule were put in place we’d end up with 10 or more finalists in Short Story. However, the restriction causes a lot of upset amongst people who feel that they or their friends have been unfairly left off the ballot. Let’s give this a try for a while, and see what happens. If people get even more upset about large numbers of finalists than they did about works being excluded we can always revert. This may be a case for a sunset clause (that is, adding an amendment that says the change goes away after x years unless a Business Meeting votes to make it permanent).

B.1.1 4 and 6 and B.1.4 E Pluribus Hugo (Out of the Many, a Hugo)

I have lumped these two proposals together because they are both aimed at reducing the effectiveness of so-called Slate Voting, in which an organized group all put exactly the same works on their ballot. As such, these are both anti-Puppy measures.

4 and 6 simply adds an extra finalist slot to each category, while simultaneously restricting voters to nominating four works instead of 5. This would make it much more difficult for a slate to work. A simple slate could only get 4 works out of 6 onto each finalist list. Of course it is possible for a well-organized and well-supported slate to distribute votes in such a way as to gain all six finalist places, but that would require more work by the slate organizer and more supporters of the slate.

E Pluribus Hugo is a much more sophisticated approach, relying on a mathematical algorithm to detect slate voting patterns and disqualify works deemed to have benefited from slate voting. I have no doubt that it is a more robust solution to the Puppy problem. I also urge you to vote against it, and for 4 and 6 instead. Here’s why.

Many of the problems that afflict the Hugos are situations that large numbers of people deem “unfair”. Any time the Award rules get complicated you can bet that someone will call them “unfair”, especially if the rule leads to a work missing out on a finalist slot when it got enough votes to be there. So, for example, the 5% Rule is widely deemed “unfair” because it means that short stories that might otherwise have been finalists are denied that honor. You can bet that if an episode of Doctor Who were kicked off the final ballot because the Nominee Diversity proposal got passed then Who fans would be furious about how “unfair” this was.

Even the instant runoff system of vote counting in the final ballot is deemed “unfair” by some people. I have sat through far too many Chris Garcia rants about how instant runoff is unfair and un-American and the Hugo should always go the work that gets the most first preference votes like in proper elections.

So my concern is that if we adopt E Pluribus Hugo what will happen in the future is that whenever a work gets disqualified under that rule there will be a huge fuss about how the Hugos are fixed in favor of some special interest group. Because most people won’t be able to understand the theory on which E Pluribus Hugo is based (and for sure I don’t), this accusation of unfairness will be widely believed, even though it is correctly defending against slate voting.

If you think I’m over-reacting here, consider that Open Source Software resolution. You might wonder why it is there. Surely people aren’t actually worried about websites, or registration software. Nope. My guess is that it is there precisely because people don’t trust the code that will be used to implement E Pluribus Hugo and want to be able to check it.

In contrast, the 4 and 6 proposal is simple, straightforward, and easy to understand. Crucially it will never result in a work that otherwise had sufficient votes to become a finalist being disqualified. Therefore it will not result in future dramas that will have people sympathizing with a slate voting campaign.

If that doesn’t convince you, consider this. The Hugos are often criticized for being snobby and elitist (particularly by the Puppies). In response to that, what sort of idiot proposes a Constitutional Amendment with a Latin title? It is the very epitome of saying, “we are smarter than you, go away”. I don’t think that WSFS should behave like that.

Update: I have further thoughts about the two anti-Puppy motions here. As I explain, I now favor passing both of them this year.

Finally I’d like to note that the only real defense against the Puppies and groups like them is to get more people to participate in the Hugos, especially at the nominations stage. We’ve had a huge increase in participation this year. Let’s do everything we can to keep those people involved, and to get more people voting. This will probably mean that it is even less likely that works I like will become finalists, let alone win, but I’ll take that. If you want to have a high profile, international, fan-voted award then you have to accept a wide degree of participation; you can’t restrict the process to “people like us”.

Announcing Ã…con 8

~ Cheryl

Those of you who had a great time in Mariehamn this year, or who wished you could have been there, may be interested in next year’s Ã…con. As regular readers will know, Ã…con is a very different event from Archipelacon. It is very small — capped at 100 members — and it only has one guest, and one stream of programming. This gives it a very intimate appeal. Of course there is still the whole thing of needing to get a ferry to Ã…land, so it is not the cheapest convention either. But if you like a small, friendly, bookish convention then it may well be for you. If you like the Guest of Honor that may be an additional attraction, because this is not a con where the guests get whisked away between panels.

This year’s Guest of Honor is Zen Cho. She’s already been a Campbell finalist (in 2013) and won the Crawford Award, all for her short fiction. Her debut novel, Sorcerer to the Crown, is due out in September and has already been getting rave reviews. She sounds like she’ll be a very interesting guest.

If you are interested, membership details are available here.

I’d love to go, but I’ve already promised Kisu & Karo that I’ll be at Finncon in Tampere next year. I’m not sure that I can afford two Finnish conventions and the Barcelona Eurocon.

Coode Street at Archipelacon

~ Cheryl

While I was at Archipelacon I was invited to take part in a recording of the Coode Street Podcast. Gary Wolfe was a Guest of Honor at the convention, and he wanted to do a podcast with fellow GoH, Karin Tidbeck. I guess I was invited along as an expert on Nordic fandom or some such. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and the podcast is now available online. You can listen to it via the Coode Street website, or via Tor.com. I’m not sure whether the versions are exactly the same — I’ve only listened to the former.

So what did we talk about? Well, there was a lot of discussion of tranlsation, so I figured I should provide a reading list of books, etc. that I mentioned. Here you go:

In addition we talked about YA literature, dystopias, the Barcelona and Dortmund Eurocons, Nordic crime fiction, fiction in indigenous peoples, what Swedish people think of the Thor movies, Sense8, stereotyping of nerd culture, and of course Karin’s writing.

Enjoy!

Archipelacon – Day 4

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Well, that was fairly full-on.

First up on Sunday was my LGBT Superheroes talk. Ten minutes before I was due to start the room was already full to overflowing. Program Ops made inquiries, and we were moved to a much bigger room, which almost filled. I got through 73 slides in 35 minutes, which I was quite impressed with. The audience seemed to enjoy it. As I have said before, I can’t put the slides online because I’m not sure of the copyright situation, but when I get some time I will put together a reading list.

I had an hours to re-inject myself with coffee before the academic program session that I was due to present in. First up was Anders Sandberg, a philosopher from Oxford who gave a great overview of science fiction’s attempts to portray lifeforms more intelligent than us. My paper went OK, and I got a couple of really good questions. Thankfully there were no Fan Studies experts in the audience. (Irma couldn’t get in — the room was packed out — but she did check the paper out before I presented it.) Also in the session we had a great paper on Cat Valente’s “Silently and Very Fast” by Merja Polvinen.

There is a plan for an Archipelacon special edition of Fafnir. Hopefully all three of those papers will be in it.

Then there was lunch, followed swiftly by a two-hour panel on translations with Ian Watson, Sini Neuvonen, Tanya Tynjälä. Again there will be a reading list, but not right now as I need time to put it together. A special guest in the audience was Finnish author, Maria Turtschaninoff, who has recently signed a 3-book deal with Pushkin Press for what she described as feminist epic fantasy. Book 1 should be available early in 2016. To find out more about Maria and the books, check out the new edition of Finnish Weird.

After another brief respite there was closing ceremonies, at which I had to announce the masquerade results. All the guests were effusive in their praise of the event. Obviously they were being polite to some extent, but I have talked to them all, and to many of the other overseas visitors, and everyone seems to have had a great time. Lots of people were talking about wanting to come back to Finnish conventions again. We seem to have created a lot of goodwill for the Helsinki Worldcon bid. I am so proud of my Finnish and Swedish friends right now.

After dinner there was the dead dog party. Farah introduced me to a couple of lovely young men from Iceland and muttered something about organizing a convention. Sounds like a good idea to me. Sjón as Guest of Honor, of course. And maybe Tuppence Middleton.

Parties have been taking place around the pool at the main hotel. It wasn’t nearly as warm as Anaheim, and there are no guest rooms attached to the pool deck, but there was a lot more seating and a good bar. Some bottles of whisky may have found their way into the party as well. I got back to my hotel at around 2:00am. It had not got fully dark, and was showing signs of morning.

Over breakfast this morning a few friends and I were batting around the idea of holding a convention in conjunction with the Midnight Sun Film Festival. We’d have to persuade them to have an SF theme for the event, and get the Wachowskis as Guests of Honor, but it seems a suitably mad project. Finnish fandom can do anything, it seems.

Archipelacon – Day 3

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I think I need to check the convention program book so I can remember all of the things I did today.

I was up early because I had to be at the Other Hotel for 10:00am to record an episode of Coode Street. Jonathan couldn’t join us, so I impersonated him and Gary and I talked to Karin Tidbeck about her work, about vikings, about what Swedes think about Thor movies and a few other things as well. We also covered quite a bit of translation news. Apparently the next episode to be aired will be Kim Stanley Robinson, but I think we are after that.

Having done that we left Gary in peace for a while so that he could prepare for his Guest of Honor speech. I went to find more coffee. Gary was very interesting on the subject of the Impossible, the Not Possible, the Unpossible, the Dispossible and the Possible But Stupid. He did have coherent definitions for all of those things, but I can’t remember them all right now.

That was followed immediately by the Music in SF&F panel, which I chaired. Many thanks to Suzanne van Rooyen, J. Pekka Mäkelä and Bellis for being fine panelists. We talked about lots of good stuff. Suzanne, who is a music teacher for her day job, has promised to write a short story based on the symphonic form.

Immediately following that was Karin Tidbeck’s Guest of Honor interview, in which I discovered that she is a fellow fan of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. Also she has a novel out in Swedish. It sounds very interesting. There is an English translation looking for a publisher. Get with it, people.

Then it was off to get lunch at the Pride Picnic. Helsinki Pride is this weekend, and as we could not go we had a picnic here instead.

I spent the next couple of hours listening to academic papers. Kaisa, my review of the Greg Bear novels is here. And yes, I know I said I preferred John C. Wright’s politics to Sheri Tepper’s. This was before he discovered God. And in any case at least Libertarians let you think for yourself, even if they will shoot you if you think the wrong things. Tepper has a tendency to want to prevent people from ever having wrong thoughts.

There was a good paper about Leena Krohn’s Tainaron too.

I had an hour for dinner, which I spent with Irma. Then it was time for the Sex in SF&F panel, which was a lot of fun, though they did manged to get through an entire 45 minutes without mentioning t*nt*cle p*rn.

Then there was the masquerade, at which I was chairing the judges. My colleagues were Johanna Sinisalo and Parris McBride. Given that we only had 3 entries yesterday afternoon, I was relieved that we got a decent show. Congratulations to Jukka Särkijärvi for being an excellent host. We do need to persuade the Finns to be less shy and not run off the stage as quickly as they can, but the standard of costumes quite high. The prizes will be announced tomorrow and closing ceremonies. I have some photos but I haven’t had time to get them off the camera yet.

And then there was the Brotherhood Without Banners party. I didn’t last very long because I have a 10:00am panel tomorrow.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

Finncon 2016 News

~ Cheryl

I’ve just seen an update on Facebook about Finncon 2016, which will take place in Tampere. The Guests of Honour will include the very wonderful Finnish writer, Anne Leinonen, and the equally wonderful Jasper Fforde.

Jasper mate, clearly we need to sit down at BristolCon and have a little chat. I can fill you in on all of the wonderful things you’ll get to do next year.