Here is the first of my podcasts from Ã…con 7. It is a panel about post-colonial SF. The panelists are: Karen Lord, Sari Polvinen, Juha Tupasela & me.
I noted while editing it that I totally derailed Sari’s question about classic SF that counted as post-colonial, for which my apologies.
Tech services at Ã…con are provided by Jonas Wissting to whom I am indebted for this recording.
I have finally (finally!) got a con report of sorts written for this year’s Ã…con. You can read it here.
I’ll be following that up with a number of podcasts of panels, including my interview with Karen Lord.
In the report I talk a bit more about Archipelacon, the big new convention happening in the Ã…land islands next year. I’m very much looking forward to that one.
I’m back from Liverpool, so I guess it must be time to prepare for the next trip…
Finncon 2014 has their full program online now (almost a month before the event – well done!). You can find it here. My personal events are as follows.
On Thursday and Friday I shall be attending FINFAR, the academic conference that runs alongside Finncon.
Friday 11th: 15:30 — I am moderating On Writing, featuring Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch & Hannu Rajaniemi.
Saturday 12th: 11:00 — The LGBT Superheroes talk gets another outing.
Saturday 12th: 13:00 — Likeable Characters in SF, featuring Rjurik Davidson, Jukka Halme, Hannu Rajaniemi and myself.
Saturday 12th: 17:00 — I am MCing the Masquerade.
Sunday 13th: 13:00 — Women & Publishing, featuring Elizabeth Bear, Johanna Sinisalo, Salla Simukka & me.
Sunday 13th: 14:00 — LGBT in SciFi and Fantasy, featuring Dirk Weger, Suzanne van Rooyen and me.
Update: I’ve added a Sunday panel, which had a provisional working title of “Grimpink”.
Hey, look what is happening in Finland next summer. You want to be there, trust me.
That’s another Ã…con more or less done. The boat for Helsinki leaves around midday tomorrow, and as most of us are desperately sleep-deprived you can guess what we’ll be doing before now and then.
Lots of stuff went on. Thanks are due to Karen Lord for being a fabulous GoH, Jukka for some really fun game shows, Otto & Paula for providing transport, and the Ã…con committee for a really great event. I’ll try to write something more coherent tomorrow.
All is progressing well here at Ã…con. Last night Karen Lord and I were on a panel about post-colonial SF, during which we managed to recommend many fabulous writers. I also presented by LGBT superheroes talk, which folks here seemed to enjoy.
Today this far we have had a panel on steampunk, at which I very quickly sold the small number of copies of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion that I carried with me. There will hopefully also be copies available at this year’s Swecon, which is steampunk-themed, and at Finncon.
And now I must rush, because I am interviewing Karen shortly.
The program for this year’s Ã…con is now available. It is probably a bit late for anyone to sign up, because I think hotel bookings are closed and the ferry sailings may be full. But if any of you happen to be in Ã…land anyway…
As you’ll see, I’ll be reprising my talk on LGBT superheroes. I also get to talk about postcolonial SF together with Karen Lord. I’m looking forward to hearing what Swedes and Finns recommend as good steampunk. It should be a fun and relaxing weekend.
Ã…con, the Finnish/Swedish relaxacon, has announced its Book of the Night, which will be the center of a book-club style discussion as part of the programme (similar to the Book of Honor at Potlatch). The chosen book for Ã…con 7 is The Secret History of Moscow, by Ekaterina Sedia. It is an excellent book. I loved it, and so did Gary Wolfe when he reviewed it for Locus. Neil Gaiman gave it an enthusiastic blurb. I hope that my Finnish and Swedish friends enjoy it as much as I did.
Well, yesterday went pretty much as I expected. Many thanks to all of those who made kind comments about my post. However, please don’t be misled by the echo chamber effect. What matters is not just who comments, but who does not. It is pretty clear to me that I am mostly getting support from one side in this, and that means I have made a lot of people very angry with me.
As I have a healthy sense of self-preservation, I have cancelled my appearance at Worldcon. I may still be in London at the time, depending on what Kevin is doing, if anyone wants to catch up.
I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone who is now worried about being tarred by association with me. I certainly won’t take it against anyone who wants to sever their relationship.
The next task is to take stock of my various projects and see what damage has been done. I suspect that the bookstore may be a casualty of this. However, the biggest problem is the Translation Awards. I confess that one of the reasons things have been so slow this year is that I have been afraid to do anything for fear of accidentally provoking a shitstorm. That’s now gone up by an order of magnitude. So if there is anyone out there who thinks that they are worth preserving, please contact me privately.
Meanwhile, day job, which desperately needs attention after the past few days of distraction.
Nine Worlds, the new British SF&F convention, has been collecting feedback on its first year and has produced a report. You can read it here. I’m very impressed. Obviously it is much easier for them to do this sort of thing than it is for a traveling event such as Woldcon or Eastercon, but I think all conventions can learn from what they have done.
This is mainly for those of you likely to be attending Finncon this year. I hand over to Irma Hirsjärvi.
What is Finfar?
Finfar 2014, Finncon’s academic conference, will gather together the foremost experts and students of fantasy and science fiction for two days at the University of Jyväskylä. Students and scholars of all levels are welcome; texts are welcome in English, Finnish, and Swedish.
Due to the participatory nature of the conference and limitations on time and space, the conference is open only for the participants and designated commentators.
Call for Papers
DOES MIND MATTER – DOES MATTER MIND?
XV SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY RESEARCH SEMINAR
Department of Arts and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä
Thu & Fri 10–11 July, 2014
The traditional, free annual meeting of science fiction and fantasy scholars is again hosted in conjunction with Finncon, this year in the University of Jyväskylä. The questions about the relations between mind and matter are wide open for discussion, and all areas of speculative fiction as well as the mediums are freely approached. We invite abstracts from various angles the convergence of mind, matter, time and space, ideas and arts, like “does mind matterâ€, “is there matter over mindâ€, or “does matter even careâ€. The mind/matter dichotomy is in connection to the questions of imagination and fantasy worlds and their materiality — like in dragonlands or steampunk.
Our Honorary member of Finfar, Cheryl Morgan will attend the English parts of the seminar. The commentators this year are Liisa Rantalaiho from the University of Tampere, researcher Markku Soikkeli, from the University of Helsinki Merja Polvinen and Paula Arvas, as well as Sofia Sjö from Åbo Akademi and Irma Hirsjärvi from the University of Jyväskylä.
We welcome all kinds of work focusing on science fiction and fantasy, whether you are working towards a seminar essay, article, MA thesis or a PhD. Papers can be in Finnish, Swedish or English, but if you wish to receive feedback from the international participants in the seminar, we recommend writing in English. The Guests of Honor are writers Elizabeth Bear and Hannu Rajaniemi and the Fan Guest of Honor the true new weird guy of Finland, Jukka Halme. However, even while/if we focus on the nature of reality and fiction through the themes of mind and matter, all the papers about the works of Bear and Rajaniemi, arts and quantum physics or new weird not to mention fantastic in general are most welcome as well.
The plan is that the first issue of the year 2015 of Fafnir — The Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research will again collect the articles from this seminar.
Please send your 300-word abstract by April 31st to hirsjarvi [at] gmail [dot] com (Word or RTF) with title FINFAR 2014 ABSTRACT [YOUR NAME]. Selection will be made and further instructions sent during May. The final paper should be 10,000–15,000 characters in length. Depending on the amount of abstracts we receive, we will try to accommodate papers not directly related to the seminar’s theme.
Welcome to Jyväskylä!
I haven’t been spending a lot of time at SMOFcon, partly because I’m mainly in Toronto on business, and partly because I have better things to do with my life. This evening, however, saw the traditional highlight of the convention, the Fannish Inquisition, at which seated conventions and bids get to make presentations and answer questions. That I could not pass up. Here are the highlights.
Loncon3 announced that they are on track to have around 8,000 members. They are actually concerned about capacity and will be putting day memberships on sale in February as they may have to cap the number that they sell. The current record for Worldcon attendance is 8,365 at Los Angeles in 1984.
The 2014 NASFiC, Detcon 1, has also been busy. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about their plan to offer free memberships to local fans who could not otherwise afford to attend. The fund-raising drive for that is going well. Money to cover 10 free memberships has already been received, which triggers the matching donation promised by the convention. At least 20 local fans will therefore be getting free memberships.
Detcon 1’s chair, Tammy Coxon, also announced that the convention will be giving out awards for YA and Middle School fiction. These will be voted on by the membership. I don’t want to get the details wrong so I’m not going to rely on my memory of what Tammy said — I’m sure there will be a press release soon. What I should note is that Detcon 1 is a NASFiC, not a Worldcon, so these awards will not be Hugos, but they will be voted on in a way very similar to the Hugos, albeit by far fewer people. This will be an interesting trial.
The 2014 SMOFcon will be in Los Angeles. I voted for the rival Baffin Island bid as it was outside the USA, but I have to admit that I didn’t fancy their proposed Friday evening ice-breaker event of “build your own convention facilities, out of ice.”
Kansas City is still the only bid for the 2016 Worldcon, and judging from their presentation they have some excellent facilities. I’m sad that I can’t go.
The race for 2017 has now become even more complex with the announcement of a bid for Washington DC to add to the existing bids for Japan, Montréal and Helsinki. The Canadian bid looked fairly weak, but the Japanese and Finnish bids both appear to have considerable support. Judging from the questions asked, there was considerably annoyance that a US bid had jumped in to challenge a selection of interesting non-US bids. However, the Washington bid team has a huge amount of experience and, judging from the promotional materials they put out, a lot of money.
Looking further afield, San José (in the form of my colleagues and I at SFSFC) have announced we are looking at challenging New Orleans for 2018. If we do, and it is by no means certain, I hope it will be a very friendly contest like the one we ran against Seattle for 2002. I, of course, won’t be able to attend whoever wins, but I think both would be great conventions.
Dublin is the only announced bid for 2019.
New Zealand reported that they are starting to negotiate with facilities for 2020. They are looking at sites in both Auckland and Wellington.
Finally the forward calendar is starting to fill up with bids for Forth Worth in 2021 and Chicago in 2022. The Chicago bid will apparently be for new facilities, not the Hyatt Regency where previous Chicons have been held.
There has already been some discussion about what will happen with regards to the losing bids in 2017. The Finnish and Irish bids have a good relationship, and if the Finns were to lose again I can’t see them targeting anything before 2021. The Japanese committee stated that they would not want to run too close to New Zealand and would therefore not consider a new bid before 2023. I’ve no idea what Montréal will do. If Washington were to lose, I suspect that large number of older American SMOFs would faint with shock, and possibly even retire from the game. So I guess we’ll just have to make that happen.
One of the things that people who rant about lack of diversity at conventions often miss is that attendance at conventions is not cheap. It is necessarily not cheap, because you have to hire the venue. But the fact that it is not cheap means that those sections of society with less money will be less well represented amongst the membership. To get a more diverse membership, therefore, you have to find a way to help those in financial hardship to attend.
That is exactly what this year’s NASFiC, Detcon 1, is doing. The convention is being held in Detroit, a place famously down on its luck right now. As they note:
The city of Detroit has some of the highest unemployment and poverty rates in the entire country. It is also over 80% African-American.
So the convention committee has launched an appeal for funds to help local fans attend the event. Each $55 donated means one free membership for a local fan. And the committee has pledged to match donations up to a total of $550.
Further details, including instructions on how to donate, and how to apply for one of the free memberships, are available here.
There has been a lot of confusion regarding who exactly ought to be held responsible for the various goings on at World Fantasy in Brighton. It isn’t easy to sort out, but I’ll try to shine a bit of light on it.
Before I do that, however, I recommend this post by Laura Lam which follows up on yesterday’s disgraceful attempt by WFC2013 to deflect blame for the lack of action on harassment onto the victims. Laura also confirms my understanding that WFC2013’s statement that the person reported for harassment on the Saturday night was a “fan” is a lie.
I note, for the benefit of the curious, that while at least two of the reported creepers have professional interests in SF&F, none of them is well known. No one is protecting a “big name”. Indeed I had not even heard of two of them before this all blew up.
Meanwhile, back with organizational structures. At the bottom of the tree are the volunteers. These are mostly people described as “Redcoats”. All reports I have seen suggest that these people worked hard and did a good job within the limits of their powers.
The convention’s website lists a “committee”, but I expect that some of these people will have had little or no influence on what went on. The only people who had direct influence on policy will have been the co-chairs and anyone else with a direct interest in whatever organization staged the event.
Finally we have the World Fantasy Board. As Jonathan Strahan noted on the latest Coode Street Podcast, these are people with the power to make policy. There are certain things that they require conventions to do. I also know from experience that they can be very intrusive with regard to the day-to-day running of the convention.
Of course, as Kevin often says, you can get away with anything when running a convention if you never intend to run another one. It is entirely possible that some members of the WF Board were unhappy with that went on in Brighton, and that Steve Jones thumbed his nose at them as much as he did at the membership. But the Board chose to grant him the right to stage the convention, and they did so after having summarily rejected a UK bid from a group with much more convention-running experience.
I note also that Jones may be a member of the Board (he has been in the past, and presumably is now as a past chair of a WFC) and that other members of the convention committee may also be Board members.
So my view on this complex mess is as follows. Steve Jones and his co-chairs are directly responsible for how the convention was run. The World Fantasy Board is responsible for having granted the convention to Jones in the first place (and they have enough experience of his behavior to have known what to expect). The Board is also responsible in that it has the power to set policy regarding how the convention should be run, and to select groups to run future conventions wisely.
Whether they will do so or not is another matter. They are not responsible to anyone except themselves. My suspicion is that as long as people continue to attend WFC in significant numbers the Board will not see any need for change.
I’ve been checking out the comments on the other blog posts made about WFC2013 today. One of them highlighted something in the WFC email that I had missed. The email says:
Regrettably, we learned of one small harassment incident that occurred on the Saturday night when an extremely drunken fan made a nuisance of himself in the hotel Lobby.
I highlighted the word “fan” there. I happen to know who the person accused of harassment on Saturday night is. So does the WFC2013 management, because the incident was reported to them. That person works for a large, international company involved in the industry. So either we are talking about a fourth incident of harassment here, or someone at WFC2013 is telling porkies about it being a fan who was responsible.
The Brighton World Fantasy Convention has sent out a final newsletter and is merrily continuing to thumb it’s nose at the membership. Sophia McDougall summed up their attitude very neatly.
WFC2013: "Ha! Don't you feel stupid now, thinking we would do bad and unreasonable stuff just because we said we were planning to do it."
— Sophia McDougall, MSt (@McDougallSophia) November 17, 2013
It is, of course, good that they didn’t rip people off as badly as they threatened to, but their apparent insistence that this proves that they did nothing wrong is just pathetic. Sadly their attempts to brush off any criticism also extends to the incidents of sexual harassment. One of the victims is furious at the way what happened to her is being dismissed. She comments here.
Update: Alex Dally MacFarlane rants so that I don’t have to. Thanks Alex!
As promised, I have finally got around to posting some comments on the less savory aspects of this year’s World Fantasy. It isn’t all bad by any means. Lots of things went well at the event. But if we want conventions to be better run then we need to take note of what went wrong as well, and this year’s WFC was spectacularly poor in some respects.
The post is very long, so I have given it a page of its own in the con report section of the website.
One of the things I noticed when I went to the event with Manda Scott and Ben Kane in Bristol last month was that they were both headed off to Harrogate the following weekend for a convention. Indeed, Manda was chairing it. I gather that it was a huge success. They got over 2000 people, which I believe is more than double the number who attended this year’s Eastercon in Bradford. There is a con report from Emma Darwin here. It all sounds very familiar. Provided that it doesn’t clash with BristolCon, I might have to go next year to see how they do things.
Like most other people, I had a good time at World Fantasy in Brighton. That should not excuse some pretty serious short-comings on the part of the convention, and I’ll write about those in due course, but enjoyment of a convention depends to a very large extent on the location, and the number of good friends you have amongst the attendees. From the location point of view, Brighton worked very well. I was also fortunate in knowing the city, and in having things I could do there outside of the convention.
Kevin and I traveled to Brighton by rail, and we took time out to take the short detour to Portsmouth Harbour. You can’t see the Victory from the dockside, and we had suitcases so we could not go into the museum, nor indeed did we have time. However, Kevin got to see the Spinnaker Tower and the Warrior, and got to see a little bit more of England.
We had an excellent room in the Hilton, thanks in large part to my having a Hilton Gold Card. That’s not something I earn through staying in hotels. Back when I had a proper job I signed up for an Amex card that gave me Gold status with Hilton. It has proved so valuable that I have kept it ever since. I knew that the Metropole had some enormous rooms, and thanks to the card we got one. This proved very useful as a recording studio as well as a base of operations.
Shortly after arriving we met up with Claire Parker who hosts the Time 4 T show on Reverb Radio, Brighton’s local station. This is the UK’s only trans-themed radio show. Brit Mandelo and I did an interview which I believe will be broadcast next weekend (Sunday 17th). I’ll let you know when it is available. The subject matter is mainly about the place of trans people in SF&F literature, and in the SF&F community.
Brit and her partner joined us for dinner at Dig in the Ribs. I was pleased to be able to take folks from Kentucky out for barbecue in the UK and have them enjoy what they ate. Well done, Vanessa & co. After that Kevin and I headed into town for Hallowe’en. We hung around in the Marlborough for a while admiring the costumes, then met up with Sarah Savage and moved on to the Queen’s Arms to check out the local drag queens. Kevin proved quite popular. Sadly Fox wasn’t well and could not get out to join us.
My Hilton card also entitled us to free breakfasts, which was very useful (and more than paid for the card’s annual fee right there). We were able to spend part of Friday morning checking out the convention, then I had a meeting with the PR people from Jo Fletcher Books, Jukka Halme and Snorri Kristjansson. We talked about the visit of Karen Lord to Ã…con, and introduced Snorri to the possibilities offered by Finncon. Hopefully good things will come of this. I also got to meet another one of Jo’s authors, Amish Tripathi, who is from Mumbai and therefore an Indians fan. We did not come to blows over this year’s IPL semi-final, even though the wrong team won.
I took Kevin out for lunch to English’s Oyster Bar, and then we visited the Pavilion, which is pretty much a must-see tourist trap. It is hideously over the top, and yet there are parts of it that are extraordinarily beautiful. In particular I love the centerpiece of the dining room ceiling. I wonder how they managed to persuade Temeraire to pose for the sculptor.
My one panel of the convention was at 5:00pm on Friday. The less said about that the better at this point. After that we had a lovely Thai dinner with Rina & Jacob Weisman at Giggling Squid. The evening was given over to the mass signing, which I spent introducing people I knew to other people I knew. Hopefully they all found that useful.
On Saturday morning Kevin and I were hoping to play the lovely Pirate-themed crazy golf course that I had found on the front right by the Metropole. I was a little worried that we would find it closed for the season, but I was utterly gobsmacked to find nothing but a building site. Instead we wandered along the prom as far as Brunswick Square, then up onto Western Road to buy cheese at La Cave à Fromage.
We had lunch with Kameron Hurley and her partner, Jason, Foz Meadows and Lizzie Barrett. It was an official Angry Feminist lunch, and we plotted World Domination. Foz had asked for sushi, and in the morning I had spotted a place called Sushi Garden on Preston Street just round the corner from the hotel. It turned out to be so good that I tweeted Neil Gaiman with a recommendation.
On Saturday afternoon Kevin and I did an interview with a young academic from Sussex University who is writing her thesis on LGBT families and their representation in the media. We were delighted to be able to participate in her research. I hope she manages to find some more families containing trans people to talk to.
After that we managed to get everyone together to present Karin Tidbeck with her Translation Award plaque. Special thanks are due to Ellen Klages who quietened the bar and got everyone’s attention so that Gary Wolfe and I could make the necessary announcements, and Karin could give a speech.
That evening we had a dinner date with Scott Edelman, Ellen Datlow and Pat Cadigan. Pat didn’t make it — she had stayed behind in London to look after Bob Silverberg and Karen Harber. Bob had suffered a heart attack shortly after arriving in the UK, and both he and Karen needed help dealing with the NHS and general emotional support. It was really good of Pat to give up her convention for them.
Scott is quite the foodie, and he wanted to visit a place called Graze which offered a 7-course tasting menu. All of the courses were, of course, quite small. Even so it took us 3.5 hours to get through the meal. It was expensive, but well worth it for a one-off experience. I’m not sure I would recommend an additional £30 for the matched wines, especially as you’d be well pickled by the time you got to the end of the meal, but the food was really good. The company was too.
Sunday was mainly about packing up and moving out. We ate some of the cheese we had bought for lunch, and sat in the bar watching the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with Jukka. Sadly Kimi did not exactly cover himself in glory.
After the awards we headed off to Camden in the company of Gary Wolfe who was staying with the Clutes overnight. Our hotel was just round the corner from Chateau Clute, so we were able to travel together and catch up on industry gossip.
Monday was spent doing tourist things in London. I took Kevin to see the Old Operating Theatre and to the Museum of London to see the Cheapside Hoard (though I was actually much more pleased that he got to see a short clip of The Flowerpot Men).
In the evening we did some scouting for Scott in advance of next year’s Worldcon. We ate at Archipelago, managing to try zebra, python, locusts, crickets, mealworms and alpaca for the first time. I was particularly impressed with the alpaca. I don’t know what the meat is really like, because it was cooked Mexican style rather like a barbacoa. Mexican slow cooking is designed to make best use of cheap cuts of meat, so alpaca steaks might not be up to much. Then again the cooking style might just have been a cultural decision. I’d like to find out. What I can say is that the dish as cooked was spectacular. I definitely want to go back. Many thanks to Jon Courtenay Grimwood for the recommendation.
All in all it was a great weekend. It was rather expensive, but we knew that going in. I didn’t get to talk to nearly as many people as I wanted to, but thankfully most of them will be coming back next year for Worldcon. I did also talk to a few people about future Wizard’s Tower Press projects, including Grimpink. I’ll have more news on that in due course.
What’s more, I managed to enjoy myself despite all of the ugly looks I got from the convention’s senior management throughout the weekend. I guess they really wanted me to have a horrible time there. I’m sorry to disappoint them.
World Fantasy has been fairly busy, though not in the usual convention way. I have spent a lot of time introducing people to other people, which is good. I’ve also bagged a few interviews for a forthcoming Ujima segment about Afrofuturism. But mostly I have been catching up with old friends, often by way of going out to dinner with them. Special thanks are due to Rina & Jacob Weisman of Tachyon, and to Scott Edelman and Ellen Datlow. I also managed to lunch with Kameron Hurley, Foz Meadows and Lizzie Barrett. We may have plotted world domination. We also discovered a very fine place to eat sushi in Brighton: Sushi Garden in Preston Street.
Somewhat to my surprise, I have not yet been expelled from the convention. Indeed, given the number of violations of supposed firm policies that I have see here, it is a absolute wonder that no one appears to have been expelled. Fortunately the con is running very smoothly, and everyone appears to be having a good time despite the program, which is pretty much standard for WFC.
The awards take place this afternoon. Kevin and I will then head up to London for a bit of tourism.