Conventions

Finncon Now In Progress

~ Cheryl

Yesterday we did the press conference, drove to Tampere (via a chocolate factory), and did the sauna thing. Today has been academic conference for me, and Moomin Museum for Liz and Lois. Later there will be fine viking food and cinnamon beer.

Yesterday’s culinary experiment was smoked reindeer cheese. That’s smoked cheese made from reindeer milk, not cheese made from a smoked reindeer. It was part of a dish rather than on its own, so I can’t comment much on flavor, but now I know it exists and can seek it out.

The academic conference was good, though most of the papers were fairly unimaginative. I have come away from it with a great idea for a paper that I probably won’t have time to write.

Also Edward James (who is here researching a book he’s writing about Lois’s work) told me about this interesting conference on gender in literature that is taking place in Bristol in September.

Tomorrow I’m going to be busy at the convention for about 12 hours solid. The only blogging I’m likely to do will be the results of the Translation Awards.

Finncon Program

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

The program for Finncon 2012 has been published. You can check it out at their website. Here’s a quick rundown of what I’m doing.

Thursday 19th – The press conference in Helsinki

Friday 20th – The academic conference in Tampere

Saturday 21st

  • 13:00 Panel on this year’s Hugo Award nominees
  • 14:00 Translation Awards Ceremony
  • 16:00 Ebook panel
  • 17:00 Masquerade judging

Sunday 22nd

  • 11:00 Liz Williams and I discuss various systems of magic

There are, of course, many other panels I want to go to, including Liz and Lois’s GoH events, Martha’s presentation on the work of N.K. Jemisin, and the Detectives in SF panel, but how much of them I can make time for is open to question.

There will, of course, be sauna.

Kiev, St. Petersburg and LGBT

~ Cheryl ~ 12 Comments

When Cat Valente and I tweeted enthusiastically about the prospect of a St.Petersburg Eurocon we immediately received replies condemning us for considering visiting a city that had passed an oppressive anti-LGBT statute. Now it seems that Ukraine is about to follow suit with a similar law to those being adopted in Russia. So, what is one to do?

As ever, these things are much more complicated than they appear on Twitter. To start with, Ukraine is about to play co-host to the Euro 2012 soccer tournament, and the UK papers are therefore full of stories about what a hideous place it is. This happens every time a major soccer tournament takes place overseas. There are few things the British tabloids like more than encouraging their readers to think poorly of foreigners. So my cynicism filters are turned up to the max right now.

Secondly I’m not convinced of the utility of sending petitions to foreign governments. I know how people here would react if there were a Twitter campaign aimed at discouraging the UK from passing a law that had popular support. It may make more sense to lobby our own governments to put pressure on their peers.

But my main concern is the effect boycotts can have on the people on the ground. Let’s not forget that many people credit developments in telecommunications for helping bring down various dictatorships. From fax machines in Soviet Russia to mobile phones in the Arab Spring, the ability of oppressed peoples to see how their lives might be different, and to organize themselves, has allegedly been crucial to effecting change. It is also believed that in the past science fiction was used by writers to avoid censorship when they wished to protest against dictatorial governments. Refusing to attend a convention in a country because its government has repressive policies may only succeed in depriving ordinary people in that country of support that they desperately need.

Then again, there’s the safety issue. As I understand it, these laws forbid public displays and mention of LGBT activities. So for a lot of people there’s no great danger unless you go with a partner and are very obvious about it. Those of us who are LGBT advocates, on the other hand, are more likely to be known by the authorities. And of course it is pretty much impossible for a post-op trans person to not be publicly trans. You might not be noticed by those not in the know, but you are very definitely doing it, all the time.

So I have a dilemma. I’d love to go to Kiev, and to St. Petersburg if it happens. I want to help fans in those cities become more of a part of the international community. But at the same time I have the real concerns of fellow LGBT people to think about, the possibility that my attendance will get the convention into trouble with the authorities, and my own safety to consider. It’s complicated.

Honored Guests

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

While attending board meetings is now something I can only do virtually, I am still a director of San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc., and I still take a keen interest in what my friends back in the Bay Area get up to. The next convention to be run under the SFSFC corporate umbrella is Westercon 66 (the 2013 Westercon). The con will be chaired by my good friends Andy Trembley and Kevin Roche. And this being BayCon weekend, the convention had just announced its Guests of Honor. I am delighted to see my friends Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge headlining. I wish I could be there. If you are on the West Coast, do consider going.

Eurocon Report

~ Cheryl

It is catching up with backlog time here, and the first thing I need to do is get the Eurocon report online. You can find it here. There are photos of Zagreb with it. (Including pictures of a railway and a tram for Mr. Standlee, and pictures of everyone’s favorite Elder God.)

Tax Comparison

~ Cheryl

I’m somewhat more in the land of the living today. I still can’t breath through my nose, but at least I have a semi-operational brain. So of course one of the first things I’ve done is book my flights to another convention (Finncon in July). This, again, is on points, but these days “points” doesn’t excuse you from paying large sums of money in airport taxes. Here’s what I have been stung with for Lufthansa flights to Helsinki with plane changes in Germany.

UK – $60.10
Germany – $32.80
Finland – $15.10

Hmm.

By the way, with regard to Finncon, I’m delighted to be able to have my dear friend Irma Hirsjärvi announcing the winners of the Translation Awards both as a member of the jury and a Guest of Honor at the convention.

Still in Finland

~ Cheryl

My apologies about the lack of bloggage over the past few days. I have been kept very busy: with Ã…con, with the Translation Awards, and with clients wanting me to do work. I’ll be back home tomorrow and can start catching up then.

In the meantime, a few quick notes. The convention was excellent (as I have come to expect from the Finns). I have eaten very well, and seen lots of beautiful places. The weather has been great (and not as screamingly hot as Zagreb). All is well except with my waistline, and lack of sleep.

Hello World

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Yes, I know I have been neglecting you. It’s not my fault that I am having too much fun, honest. The Finns kidnapped me and dragged me here, you know.

Anyway, last night we hired the local cinema and gave ourselves a showing of Iron Sky. I’ll try to write something more formal about it later, but for now suffice it to say that it both demonstrates that film making is much more complicated than it might look, and that Timo and his crew are far better than they have any right to be given the resources at their disposal.

This morning’s program item was a trip to the local chocolatier. Unlike at the Jersey SMOFcons, Ã…con’s source of fine chocolate is a substantial drive away. In fact it is technically on a different island, albeit one connected to the one on which Mariehamn sits by a road bridge. We hired a bus. The chocolatiery (if there is such a word, because “chocolate factory” sounds way too industrial) is located in the old post office established by the Russians when they conquered Finland in the early 19th Century. Ã…land was a vital link on the post route from Sweden to St.Petersburg.

None of that, of course, has anything to do with chocolate. The present day owners of the building, Peter and Mercedes, have less dangerous and more delicious, if perhaps less necessary work to perform. Mercedes is from Venezuela, and is one of those amazing people who can talk about cocao in the same way that expert vintners talk about grapes. We had a tasting of different types of chocolate. Then we sampled some of her pralines. I died and went to heaven.

Unfortunately the Finns want me to do some program items later in the weekend, so they resurrected me and brought me back to the hotel.

Cat has done a fine Guest of Honor interview. We crashed the hotel’s wifi network, presumably through overuse.

Now it is getting on towards evening. I have persuaded Otto & Paula to take me in search of Baltic sushi. There will be herring, and perch, and eel, and hopefully other interesting fishy delights.

Talking of fish, Aloysius the squid is enjoying his visit to the Far North. He says that the Baltic is a nice little pond, but not deep enough to have food in it. Somehow I don’t think the sushi bar will have sperm whale on the menu.

Also I have been conspiring with Kisu and Karo about the Finncon program. And if all goes well the Translation Awards short lists will be announced tomorrow evening.

In The Islands

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Hello again. I am safely arrived in Mariehamn. Ã…con 5 is due to start in a few hours. But I owe you a couple of days of blog posts, so let’s go back a day.

Otto, Paula and I drove to Turku yesterday afternoon. It is a holiday weekend in Finland, and the entire population of Helsinki appeared to be trying to leave the city. Thankfully Paula had some ideas about alternate routes. It only took us an hour to escape. Another car that left before us arrived after us.

We found Cat and Dmitri in Harald (where else). They had already been persuaded to try the tar ice cream. I got them onto cinnamon beer as well. I’m pleased to report that a branch of Harald will be opening in Helsinki soon, so all of the major Finncon venues are now covered.

I had perch in nettles for dinner. Perch have lots of little bones, but are otherwise lovely.

After dinner some of us repaired to the Cosmic Comics Cafe, a thoroughly geeky establishment funded by local comics creators. It has good beer too. But we couldn’t stay long as we needed to be up early to catch the ferry. I almost wrote “at the crack of dawn” then, but that would have been about 3:00am in Turku at this time of year.

There are two ferry services between Turku and Stockholm: Viking and Silja. We traveled on Silja, because Hanna works for them so arranging block bookings is nice and easy. Our ship was the MS Galaxy, which is a large ro-ro vessel. As with any such thing, it is a floating mechanism for relieving the resident humans of their money. There’s a casino, several bars, several restaurants, duty free shopping and so on. But it was very comfortable, and you didn’t need to spend money if you didn’t want to. Also, the lunch buffet was very good value – €12 for all you can eat.

Of course the usual ferry rules applied. There were plenty of young Swedes on board who had no intention of getting off in Turku. They were just there to drink themselves insensible for the best part of a day. Doubtless many of the young Finns who boarded with us were doing the same thing in the other direction.

Ã…land is a lengthy archipelago of small, granite islands that stretches out from Turku. It was foggy for much of the trip, but when we could see we were never out of sight of at least one island. It looked like a great place for a sailing holiday, or indeed for a pirate hideout. Aside from the more northerly vegetation, and the separation into islands, I found it very like Cornwall. Cat and Dmitri, of course, found it very like Maine.

I am now safely in the con hotel and listening to Test Match Special. Opening ceremonies are in 2.5 hours, and the main event of this evening is a trip to the local cinema for a special showing of Iron Sky. But first, a nap and a shower.

Oh, and the convention program is online here.

Wrap Up on #BristolExpo

~ Cheryl

There are a few other things I wanted to mention about the Bristol Comics Expo. Here they are.

Firstly, my friend Simon Gurr has a new comic out: The Scarifyers. You can read all about it on the BristolCon blog.

Second, I have the first two issues of Alabaster Wolves, the new comic from the fabulous Caitlín R. Kiernan. I love it. A review will hopefully follow soon. Huge thanks here to Tim from the Bristol Forbidden Planet who picked them up from the store for me on Saturday evening because they hadn’t brought copies with them.

And finally I see from Twitter that some people are claiming that the expo was a massive rip off because they had to pay all of £9 to get in. Scandalous!

I guess they view the thing as a giant shop, and because you don’t have to pay to get into a shop you shouldn’t have to pay to get into a convention either. I don’t know what the economics of the event are, but I’m wondering how many of the small press publishers would have attended had their dealer fees had to cover the full cost of the venue rental, event management, guest expenses and so on.

The Moebius Panel #BristolExpo

~ Cheryl

After the Moebius panel at Bristol I promised I’d post some links to where you could find out more about this wonderful artist.

Tim Maughan’s obituary on Tor.com is here.

A couple of Moebius/Jodorowski collaborations are available from Amazon UK at a reasonable price:

Also the Moebius Silver Surfer story is available as part of Marvel’s Definitive Silver Surfer collection.

There are entries for Moebius and Métal Hurlant in the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia. They note that the English language version, Heavy Metal, contained material from other countries not found in the original French editions.

Every Spawn Should Have One

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I’ll have a lot more to say about the Bristol Comics Expo tomorrow, but for now here’s a little something that I discovered in the dealers’ room. If you want to corrupt your spawn early, this is a good way to destroy their sanity.

Cosmic Horror Colouring Book

The person responsible for this, and much other tentacle-related humour, is Bristol artist Jess Bradley. You can see more of her work at her blog, Squid Bits!.

The Eurocon Dead Dog Interview

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

As I said on Twitter at the time, some people are daft enough to tweet while drunk, but I went one better: I agreed to be interviewed, on video, for a Croatian fan website, late into the dead dog party at the Eurocon in Zagreb. By that time I had consumed quantities of honey schnapps and Dalmatian sweet red wine, and I had moved on to whiskey supplied by some kind Czech fans. The results were therefore unpredictable. Having watched it, I’m pleased to see that I managed to plug the bookstore and say nice things about Clarkesworld, and did not fall over once. It helped that I was sat down in a rather splendid chair, but mainly I think the credit should go to Ana for some great questions, and to the camera crew who had to hold their cameras still despite having drunk at least as much as I had.

Here’s the whole thing. It’s just over 11 minutes long. If you click through to YouTube you should find it recommending other interviews with Charlie, Powers, Dmitry and Darko, all of whom got to talk when sober.

Some Zagreb Reportage

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Thanks to James Shields I have found some TV news reportage from the Eurocon in Zagreb. This is not the chat show that I did, it is from one of the camera crews that was hanging around the convention. They seem to have found just about everyone in costume to talk to, but there are plenty of other fans featured too. Powers gets a couple of slots (with Charlie in the background if you look carefully). James is interviewed as well, as are Gareth Kavanagh and visiting Aussie, Kylie Ding. And there’s me. Enjoy.

Eurocon Report on SFX

~ Cheryl

Heads up, Croatia, the kind people at SFX have asked me to write about your convention. You can find the report online here.

There will, of course, be a much longer report here, once I get a chance to write it.

Back Home

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

So, I’m back in the UK, and missing Croatia already.

There will be more reportage, but before I do anything else I should give my warmest thanks to all of those people who made my stay so enjoyable. I am particularly grateful to Mihaela and her family, who made me very welcome in their home. Thanks also go to Tomislav for being an excellent dinner date, and to Petra for hunting around Zagreb yesterday morning for a bottle of the mistletoe schnapps. The whole committee deserves thanks, but I don’t know all of their names so I won’t just list the ones I do know. And my thanks to Vlatka and her crew for making my first ever TV appearance so easy.

My fellow guests: Tim Powers, Charlie Stross, Dmitry Glukhovsky and Darko Macan were all great to hang out with, and thanks also to Feòrag NicBhrìde, Bella Pagan and John Berlyne whom I also spent a lot of time with.

Finally, of course, I should thank Fluff Cthulhu, both for not eating me, and for managing the weather so well. My apologies to everyone in the UK, who I understand got Croatia’s rain as well as their own.

Eurocon – Day 4

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Sunday began with the e-publishing panel. It was timed for noon, but even so most of the audience drifted in late looking a little the worse for wear after the previous night’s party. I think we did reasonably well, and I was pleased to get in an explanation of Amazon’s predatory pricing tactics, but there was so much more I would have liked to talk about.

That was followed by the steampunk panel, in which Charlie pointed out that you can generate steam with the heat from a nuclear reactor, and actually that’s a lot more efficient than burning coal, so if he ever does steampunk I think you know what to expect.

John Berlyne and Bella Pagan gave an excellent talk on how the (UK) publishing industry works. Hopefully a few more people will have gone away disabused of the notion that all it takes to publish a book is sending the author’s text to a printer.

Next up I stumbled by chance into the “build a cow-chucking catapult” contest, which was about to go to the testing stage. Fans of Junkyard Wars will know the sort of event I’m talking about, only for us the junk was paper cups, plastic spoons and elastic bands, and the “cows” were plastic models. Most of the catapults were fairly unimpressive, but one pair of lads built a magnificent device that succeeded in hitting the target with their second shot, and overflew it by a long way on the third. They were passed aviator helmets as part of their prize. I gather it has something to do with an Italian comic. There was also a prize for the most impressive-looking device, which I was pleased to see go to a young man and his girlfriend (who was wearing a sailor scout uniform).

There was an official guests & committee photo later in the day. Dmitry had gone to the hotel for a nap, and Charlie had headed into town where, if Twitter reports can be believed, he consumed an enormous plate of sausages. The rest of us died in the baking sun while we were photographed by a very steampunk camera. The results should be interesting, but Powers and I were reminded of walking between the two hotels at an Anaheim Worldcon, or possibly even the legendary Phoenix Anvil of God.

After a quick break to inhale some food I headed back to the convention for the dead dog party. My offering of Irish chocolates and Jura Prophecy whisky went down very well. Indeed, I have never seen a bottle of whisky vanish so quickly. Finnish friends, please do not take this as a challenge. The Croats had some honey schnapps, which Charlie, Feòrag and Fluff Cthulhu were very partial to, and it was nice but they hadn’t had the mistletoe schnapps. There was also a sweet red wine from Dalmatia which is apparently made by leaving the grapes until they are almost shriveled, but does not involve botrytis. It reminded a bit of ruby port.

Later in the evening I did one final interview with some young people from a fantasy fan website. We were all a little drunk, so I’m a bit nervous about how it will turn out, but I was very impressed with their professionalism. You don’t expect a fan website interview to involve a crew with two video cameras. Also I got to do it sitting in the Best Chair Evah! (well, maybe except for the Iron Throne). My thanks to the enterprising Czech fans who had managed to hide a bottle of Tullamore Dew away from the hordes and provided me with a liquid prop for the interview.

I’m doing some packing now, while Mihaela takes Charlie and Feòrag to the airport. If all goes well I’ll be in London around 7:00pm tonight.

There will be a full con report later when I have had a time to reflect on things and chat to Petra, the con chair.