Convention over, all go home now.

The morning began with a couple of excellent panels. James Allen presented a moving tribute to the enormously talented Ian Gunn who died 10 years ago. I still miss his friendliness and good humor. I’m sure all of Australian fandom does too. That was followed by Trudi Canavan’s chocolate panel in which we learned the the “food of the gods” is poisonous to all mammals except humans and guinea pigs. Scarily this could mean that guinea pigs are the second most evolved species on the planet.

Inspired by Trudi, I went to Haigh’s to buy some souvenirs for friends and family. (Oh, and for me too.)

The afternoon saw Sean Williams read from a thriller he is working on. It sounds a lot of fun. I bagged interviews with Sean, Julie Czerneda and a couple of guys with a very interesting book. I’m hoping to get all of the video online at the weekend.

All too soon it was closing ceremonies time. It was rather neat to see people saying goodbye in the bar afterward and calling “see you in Montreal” as they left. At Sean’s recommendation I went off to a very nice Thai restaurant called Nu with Donna Hanson and Jenny & Russell Blackford. A great meal was had by all. Then it rained. Not Melbourne rain; Sydney or Brisbane rain. (Or possibly, given what we had just done, Bangkok rain.)

There were more hugs, more “see you in Montreal” farewells. I, however, have Bristol and Helsinki to do first. And I have con reports to write. Sleep would be good too. G’night.

I didn’t buy a lot of comics in Bristol, because not a lot stood out. Only one thing seriously caught my eye (as opposed to things I got told about, or which I was looking for anyway). It was in the small press expo in the Mercure, and judging by the table there was something seriously Gothy going on. But these days there are different types of Goths. Not all of them are gloomy and depressive. Whatever was happening here was also seriously cute.

I bought issue #1 of Vampire Free Style on spec, and I loved it so much that I went back on Sunday to try to find more. The event in the Mercure was over, but fortunately someone in the Ramada had copies (thank you, Chebbo!). I now have all four issues published to date, and I still love it.

The story? Well, there is a boy called Pandroncino who is training to be a witch but isn’t very good at it. Part of this is because his girlfriend has vanished without trace, and he’s very upset. His main comfort is a stray cat that has adopted him. She’s called Micia and that’s her in the graphic. There is also a vampire called Edward who is very old and who sees a young girl whenever he looks at Micia…

It isn’t just cute and romantic, however. There is a lot of humor in the strip. In particular Micia suffers from the attentions of Pandroncino’s Aunt Margherita who owns a witchcraft shop and has a passion for dressing up dolls, or anything else to hand that is cute and roughly doll-sized, much to the amusement of the other local ferals.

The artist, Jenika Ioffreda, is Italian, and her English is not always spot on, but it is good enough to convey the story and art speaks in all languages. Jenika has a wonderfully fresh and uninhibited style that won’t pleased those who insist on strict naturalism but will delight just about everyone else.

So yeah, Vampire Free Style is cute and funny, but there’s nothing wrong with that, especially if it is done well. You can find out more about Jenika and her work at the Neptune Factory web site.

I only had a couple of hours at the London Book Fair today and it took me that long to walk around the whole thing. Here are preliminary impressions.

1. Unlike BEA, there are no vast piles of freebies. Perhaps that’s just the economy.

2. SF stuff is rare. The big publishers are advertising some SF titles, but the only small press pushing SF is the one with all of the L. Ron Hubbard books. As Darren Nash pointed out to me, the SF business has conventions. Other literary subdivisions mostly don’t have such events on a similar scale to attend.

3. A lot of space was taken up with people from foreign countries promoting their authors. I saw stalls for Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and many others.

4. The show has a special India theme, and one of the bigger companies was a printer. They advertise that you can get your books delivered to stores more cheaply having them printed in India and shipped out than printing them locally. This can’t be good for the environment, can it?

5. There is also a lot of emphasis on ebooks. I saw a chap from Sony bemoaning the proliferation of document standards. Also the Espresso book vending machine. I’ll try to spend some time at the latter stand tomorrow so I can see how long a book takes to print, and how good it looks.

6. My feet are sore (14,000+ steps today).

Talking of University Challenge, just before the show the BBC ran a short ad for a series of radio dramas. That’s an unusual thing for them to do. Even more unusual, it was for a series of science fiction radio dramas. I’d love to know what other shows the BBC thinks it is appropriate to screen this ad before.

Meanwhile the ever reliable Joe Gordon has not only found the ad on YouTube, but has some commentary up about the series. The BBC’s schedule of broadcasts can be found here. Annoyingly they don’t always credit the writers. As Joe notes, the adaptation of Iain Banks’ “The State of the Art” is by Paul Cornell. Also “Cry Babies” is by Kim Newman. “Mayflies” is by Mike Maddox who has apparently written some Doctor Who novelizations, and the play stars Derek Jacobi. Anyone know stuff about the other material?

From today’s Houston Chronicle:

California has shown bold and bipartisan leadership through its effort to forge 21st-century standards, and over a dozen states have followed its lead.

But instead of serving as a partner, Washington stood in their way. This refusal to lead risks the creation of a confusing and patchwork set of standards that hurts the environment and the auto industry.

The days of Washington dragging its heels are over. My administration will not deny facts; we will be guided by them. We cannot afford to pass the buck or push the burden onto the states.

Yep, that’s change alright.

I have deleted a post here because the comments were starting to get into delicate territory. Sorry, but this is not the place to discuss legal issues.

Whatever the problem was with LiveJournal cross-postings appears to have gone away. LJ folks, if you want to catch up on what I’ve been saying over the past week, just click here.

News from PS Publishing today is mainly about their brand new book on Tim Powers:

Secret Histories has been nearly ten years in the making and brings together an astonishing range of Powers ephemera – a huge treat and a remarkable resource for both fans and collectors alike. As well as a complete, illustrated reference of every Tim Powers book published to date, Secret Histories offers an extraordinary insight into the stories behind the stories, collecting together in a single volume Powers material previously seen only in private collections.

It sounds like John Berlyne has done an utterly fabulous job here, and it is a book I’d very much like to own. Except – it is described as an “oversized hardcover”, the cheapest edition is around $70, and that’s a limited print run that is apparently almost sold out already.

It is not quite in the same category as the Lovecraft art book, but in my current circumstances I’m not feeling too flush.

The very excellent Louis Savy of the Sci-Fi London Film Festival sends out the following in a press release:

Yes, folks, the ‘Fear is Here’ in the form of Dark Floors, the motion picture conceived by and starring Finnish metal act Lordi, who play the villains of the piece in their outrageously theatrical monster gear. Directed by the band’s longtime music video director Pete Riski ­ one of Finland’s top commercial directors making his feature debut ­Dark Floors is a surprisingly polished and serious piece of work, one that avoids playing the camp card delivering a tightly plotted, exceptionally well shot thrill ride that sets the rules of its world very early on, lets the audience know what to expect and then executes it beautifully.

The UK premier will be on Friday October 3rd at the Apollo West End as part of Sci-Fi London’s Oktoberfest.

There’s a trailer here if you really must watch it.

Chris Roberson has a long and interesting post about FanFic, mainly gleaned from work done at the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. The central argument here appears to be that FanFic is no different from the sort of extension of existing work done by, for example, Kim Newman (who is published by Chris’s MonkeyBrain Books). I particularly like this bit:

If anything, modern conceptions of copyright have slowed down a long-standing tendency of people to retell existing stories. Fan fiction revitalizes that creative impulse, operating in a world where many different people might retell the same story and in the process, expand the range of potential interpretations of the source material.

On a similar note, see this essay that Gary K Wolfe wrote for Emerald City.

Tickets for Neal Stephenson’s Anathem book launch party in San Francisco are now available here. The cost is $10 for entry, or $42.50 with a signed book, plus a service fee (12.5% as I remember).

And yes, I did book our tickets before telling you lot. I am occasionally mean and self-interested.

So, I am back home, and I no longer need to spend my days rushing around a convention center or on a plane. This is good, because I have a backlog to deal with. Sometime soon there should be:
Continue reading →

I’m home. I appear to have missed BASFA. I need to unpack and eat. I may be able to do more tonight, but I suspect that after eating I shall do the usual big cat thing of falling asleep.

That will teach me to start talking about Word A Day. Today’s entry is rather less useful, and certainly doesn’t apply to me, but it is good to know that there is a word for it:

callipygian (adjective): Having well-shaped buttocks

I’m sure I must have seen that in a John C Wright novel at some point.

Not everyone has been offline over the holiday weekend. Jeff VanderMeer has been busy. In particular he posted this thoughtful essay on behavior on the Internet. I’m not sure that he’s right that passive-aggressive behavior doesn’t work online, though I’d be very happy if he is. The rest of it I find myself nodding in agreement with. Good advice.

Jeff has also been talking about one of my favorite SF books, M. John Harrison’s Light. The passage that he highlights struck me a very clever too, and it certainly does have ramifications way beyond FtL travel.