Tomorrow from 5:30 to 6:30 I shall be chairing a panel at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. It will feature Ken MacLeod, Chris Priest and Jane Rogers, and the title is: What is the Lure of Dystopia. Here’s the blurb:

Welcome to the world of the dystopia: of government and society gone nightmarishly wrong. From 1984 to The Handmaid’s Tale, this image has been a gripping cautionary force. Ken MacLeod (Descent), author Chris Priest (Adjacent) and Jane Rogers (The Testament of Jessie Lamb) join chair Cheryl Morgan to explore fiction’s greatest nightmare visions and their enduring appeal.

I know that not many of you are likely to be at Cheltenham, but if there’s any chance of you being there please do come along. It isn’t often that such a major festival has clear SF&F programming and we need to support them when they do.

Hopefully there will be some back channel action for those of you who can’t attend. The hastags are #cheltlitfest for the Festival, and #dystopias for the panel. I’ll be tagging everything with both.

If you want to suggest questions for me to ask the panel, please do so below (or tweet me tomorrow). Here are a few themes we’ll try to cover:

• What is dystopian fiction? How is it different from post-Apocalyptic fiction?
• Are certain types of dystopian themes popular in certain time periods?
• Are modern dystopias anti-left, anti-right or something else?
• Are dystopias written by straight-white folks different from those by non-straight-white folks?
• If we enjoy reading/writing dystopias, what does this say about us?
• Does dystopian fiction do harm or good?
• Why do publishers appear to use “dystopia” rather than “science fiction”?

And if you can’t make it there tomorrow but can do Friday 10th, you could go along and see A Celebration of Sci Fi and Fantasy, featuring Ben Aaronovitch, Joe Abercrombie, Mitch Benn, Sarah Pinborough and journalist David Barnett.

The program for BristolCon is now live (a whole 3 weeks before the convention, y’all). This is what I’m doing:

10:00 – 10:45 Music in my Writing: Music might be even harder to write about than Sex or Death, and yet it’s a really important part of the process for most writers. Many authors write to music or put together soundtracks of their own books. How does music seep into and influence our work? With Tricia Sullivan (Mod), Gunnar Roxen, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kim Lakin-Smith.

19:00 – 19:45 Steampunk and the Class System: Does steampunk ignore what goes on below stairs? Is it all top hats and parasols, or should we be looking more at the dark underbelly of industrialisation and Empire? With Robert Harkess, Scott Lewis, Roz Clarke, Adrian Tchaikovsky.

I’m very pleased that JCG is on the music panel with me, because I can thank him for introducing me to some fine Arabic music. As to the steampunk panel, I guess I should read this before the convention.

There’s lots of other good stuff going on too. Check it out here.

In the morning I had a panel on untranslated books, which I ended up moderating because I was the only monoglot on the panel. I have a lot of recommendations from that, but I’m going to save posting them until after the other international SF panels today.

In the afternoon I interviewed Guest of Honor, Ylva SpÃ¥ngberg. She’s a fascinating person. She joined the Swedish Tolkien Society at the age of 11 and was editing their fanzine a few years later. She’s chaired four conventions, and as a translator has brought a wide range of different English-language fiction to Swedish readers. We managed to fill up around 3/4 of the generous 2 hours that we had been given for the panel.

In the evening there was the traditional fan party. This year it was somewhat hobbled by a decision of the hotel, just a couple of days before the con, to not allow unwrapped food or alcohol over 40%. This meant everyone ended up serving candy and beer. Given that most people would have been in transit when the rule change was announced, other things may well have been available. I have no idea how strong the Ukrainian honey pepper vodka was, but it tasted great, in small quantities.

I have also managed to spend time talking to people, which is a vast improvement on the madness that was Worldcon.

The site selection results are in, and the 2016 Eurocon will be in Barcelona. It was apparently a very tight race, and the Polish bid was very good indeed. Against that Barcelona is truly world class city, Spain has never had a Eurocon before, and the Polish convention clashes with the Kansas Worldcon. Having said that, I can’t go to Kansas, and the Polish convention will take place anyway (it is already a seated PolCon), so I may go to both.

The website for Barcelona is here. The Guests of Honor are Aliette de Bodard (France), Richard Morgan (UK), Jun Kiyazaki (Hungarian fan) and Enrique Corominas (Spanish artist). The date are November 4-6 which should be the weekend after World Fantasy. It is probably also the weekend after the Lucca Comics & Games Festival, which Maurizio Manzieri was enthusing to me about at Worldcon. It should be pleasantly warm in Italy and Catalonia at that time of year.

I have an update to my Eurocon schedule (meaning that they have given me another panel). The full schedule is below:

Friday August 22nd, 9:00pm – BOYCOTT!
Does boycotting a creator’s work or an event actually make an impact or just give them more publicity? Is there any point in boycotting dead creators?

Saturday August 23rd, 11:00am – Mocking the Monoglots: Untranslated Hidden Gems
While technology advances the universal translator is still dodgy at best, which means that so many stories are unavailable to those who only know one or two languages. The panel aims to discuss the best of hidden, single language stories and why you should definitely fire up DuoLingo to learn to read them.

Saturday August 23rd, 4:00pm РGuest of Honour Interview РYlva Sp̴ngberg
Ylva Spångberg interviewed by me.

Sunday August 24th, 10:00am – “She wrote it, but…” – Invisible Women Creators
Women have been profoundly important and influential creators since the very foundation of Speculative Fiction, so why are they often left out of the academic texts, the awards lists and the reprint market? And what do the panel and the audience do to alter this trend?

Sunday August 24th, 11:00am – The Science Fiction from Beyond Seas and Mountains
Science Fiction is a many splendoured and the stories vary hugely from country to country. Our panellists will talk about SF from all across Asia and Latin America and introduce you to some new & wonderful tales.

I note that I had the pleasure of chatting to Ylva Spångberg at Worldcon and I think I can promise the attendees a fascinating conversation.

I’m not going to do a full-blown report on this year’s Worldcon. I didn’t have the time to do all of the investigative journalist stuff, and anyway I’m sure that the angry white men of UK fandom will be busily telling us what a utter disaster the event was any day now. I wouldn’t want to confuse them with actual facts. However, a few brief comments and thanks are in order.

Registration – we know how to do this, Worldcons should not be messing up that badly on such a basic function.

Programme – by far the most interesting programme of any Worldcon I can remember. Some of the room assignments went badly wrong, but that’s really hard to get right.

Dealers – everyone I spoke to was very happy. I know I sold 9 of the 10 copies of Airship Shape that I brought, so I am really pleased.

Exhibits – this was magnificent. I’m sure much of it was down to Farah’s energy and enthusiasm, but I suspect it also shows that having someone in charge who has a high profile and respectable academic job makes a huge difference to the willingness of people to be involved.

Art Show – it looked good to me. I was pleased to see many artists from all over Europe.

Masquerade – I missed it, but I have heard good things about it and am eagerly awaiting the video.

Hugos – went very smoothly for the most part, and some excellent winners. I was so very relieved.

Fan Village – a highlight of the event for me. It was so much better than room parties. However, I note that being able to do something like this is dependent on having a venue prepared to allow it. I have no idea how a convention center in another country would react to a request to allow fan groups to serve alcohol independently of the official bars.

The venue – I got a lot of exercise, and ate surprisingly well. Special thanks are due to Mint Leaves for being open so long. The one thing that was an issue was the fact that the professionals tended to socialize at the Fox while the fans tended to socialize in the Fan Village, which resulted in far more separation than I’m used to at Worldcon. Special thanks are due to Mary Robinette Kowal for taking her Hugo straight to the Fan Village after the ceremony, and encouraging others to do the same.

The people – another highlight. There was a much more diverse membership this year than any Worldcon I can remember. (I note that I did not attend the Japanese event).

It makes me very happy to see lots of other folk going on about how diverse the membership was, but I have a feeling that it would have been even more diverse, and much younger, had Nine Worlds not lured a lot of people away.

I also note that next year will be very different. Even many of my American friends are saying that they won’t go to Spokane. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if they get more than 3500 attendees. Most of those people will be older Americans. So if you want the Hugo winners to be as good as this year, and in particular if you want another magnificently international Worldcon in Helsinki in 2017, you need to buy a supporting membership and vote in site selection. All of the good things about Loncon 3 could so easily be lost.

Monday’s panels were a bit of a let-down. We started with the Diversity in Criticism panel, which had been given only an hour but could have benefited from a lot longer. I also had one of those experiences where I could not work out whether someone really wanted to kill me with her mind-lasers, or was just very tired and desperately trying to focus.

One comment I would have made, had there been time, was in response to Aisha noting that a lone critic from another country often gets cast in the role of expert on her people and their literature. That does happen to me in the case of trans people, but just as often I get people assuming that I can’t possibly know what I’m talking about because I’m one of those crazy people who don’t know their own minds.

Which brings me to the Queering Anime panel. I was pleased to have some interesting recommendations of anime and manga with trans themes. However, I was a bit concerned that the panel was all white, and that three Japanese people in the audience stayed silent throughout. When interpreting the meaning of art from another culture you have to understand that culture really well. What the panel did make clear was that Japanese culture was changing significantly as a result of Western influences. However, I’m really not confident about Western interpretations of the meaning of gender-swapping story lines in Japanese fiction, especially because a lot of what was being said about trans people in general, especially by the audience, was considerably less than enlightened. I had this awful feeling that at times I was seeing the equivalent of a foreigner looking at UK culture and enthusing about how pantomime dames are a wonderful example of trans people in British theater.

Following that I did a couple of interviews from Ujima. One was with Glenda Larke, and is all about being an Australian woman who marries into a Muslim Malaysian family. The other was with Ann Leckie, whom I had not met before and who turned out to be utterly delightful and very smart (as you might guess from her book). We spent a bit of time (outside the interview) speculating on how we might film Ancillary Justice and still get the head-exploding effect that the use of female pronouns has in the written version. I’m now actually quite keen to see the book filmed (assuming we can get the production company to play ball).

In between those two interviews I had a long chat with Candas Jane Dorsey about what she’s doing these days. If there is anyone out there from a major publisher wanting a really great YA novel, you should chase her up.

I missed the BASFA Meeting due to interviewing Ann, but I gather it was suitably anarchic, even without Chris Garcia.

Most of the rest of the day was spent in the company of a group of Israelis who are delightful people (and utterly despairing of their government). This included a trip on the Emirates Air Line cable car service from the Excel across the river to the O2 Dome. I would not recommend taking the trip on a windy day, but having taken a cab back I can recommend it as a fast and cheap method of transport.