Where’s Cheryl?

My Fantastika Schedule

~ Cheryl

Another weekend, another convention. I’ll be off to Stockholm shortly. Here’s my programme schedule.

Friday November 1st, 20:00 – Strong Female Characters
How have gender roles changed over time in SF and fantasy? Female characters take on ever-greater roles in fantastic fiction. Have strong female characters displaced male ones? Is it because women play an ever-larger role in society generally? Do female characters play a more significant role in science fiction and fantasy because more women are writing and creating fantastic worlds? How do changing gender dynamics affect how one reads, or how viewers appreciate what they watch?
With TL Huchu, Elin Holmerin, Jukka Halme and Åsa Lundström (m)

Saturday November 2nd, 16:00 – 50 years of The Dispossessed
2024 marks the 50 year anniversary of Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic science fiction novel The Dispossessed. One of the few books to win the Hugo, Locus and Nebula Awards, it is widely considered a defining work of SFF literature. What made the book so beloved and what keeps people reading it to this day? Does it read as a political manifesto, a character study, a speculative thought experiment – or all of the above? What themes resonated with contemporary audiences, and what can we take from the novel when rereading it 50 years on?
With Joachim Björk, Saga Bolund, Jerry Määttä and Markku Soikkeli

Sunday November 3rd, 13:00 – “Herding cats” – how to moderate a panel
The success of a panel naturally depends on the subject and the participants, but the moderators impact could be crucial as well. But how do you prepare to moderate a panel? How do you handle a discussion that has steered away from the subject or if one panelist is about to take over the conversation? When should you let the audience in and how do you interrupt an audience question that just goes on forever? This and much more will be discussed in this panel of experienced moderators.
With Johan Anglemark, Jukka Halme, Timothy Johansson (m) and Britt-Louise Viklund

Sunday November 3rd, 15:00 – The State of Publishing: A Conversation
Juliet McKenna and Cheryl Morgan discuss the state of publishing today. This wide-ranging exploration will be between an author and her publisher, between a defender of authors against unjust legislation and a champion of translation and intercultural dialogue. It is likely to cover anything from copyright protections to e-books, publishing corporations to self-publishing, editing to translation.

Book and Convention Schedule

~ Cheryl

This weekend will be BristolCon, which is a two-day event for the first time. The programme is still being worked on, but as far as I know this is what I will be doing:

Saturday, 12:00: Creating A Culture – Building A Working Fantasy / Sf Society

Sunday, 11:00: Book Launch

Sunday, 13:00: Cli-fi – subgenre or necessity?

Of those the most important thing is the book launch. I’d hope that we would have at least 2 books for that, maybe as many as four. As it turns out, the only new book we have since WorldCon is Resurrection Code, and Lyda won’t be at the convention. Both The Green Man’s War and Fight Like A Girl 2 have been hit by life happening. Juliet has written a little more about this on her blog.

So there will be no paper copies of either book at the convention. But I will be taking pre-orders, and I will be selling ebooks because those are ready. If you pre-order paper, you get a free ebook. Those advance ebooks sales will only be at BristolCon. Well, maybe, except.

When I get home I have a couple of days to get turned around and then I am off to Stockholm for Fantastika where Juliet is a Guest of Honour. There’s no way I can get boxes of books to Sweden, but a local bookstore has promised to have some Juliet books available. They may also take pre-orders for the two new ones. I would like to have the ebooks available there as well, but that is complicated as there is VAT on ebooks in Sweden and I don’t want to have to register to sell them. But, remember all that good work that Juliet & Co did back before Brexit in getting the EU to have sensible tax thresholds? That might just allow me to sell stuff. Funny how these things come back around.

The programme for Fantastika is not public yet, but I have some interesting panels, and because I don’t have a dealer table I can do more of them.

As for books, The Feast of the King’s Shadow, the fourth Outremer book from Chaz Brenchley, is waiting on Ben Baldwin to have time to do the cover. That will probably be out in December, followed by the second Helen Brady book, The Elfstone, in January. After that, exciting things are in store, but I can’t tell you about them yet.

My FantasyCon Schedule

~ Cheryl

FantasyCon is only a couple of days away. Here’s where you can find me.

Friday, October 11th 9pm (Baba Yaga Room)
Fantasy In The City – Urban or second world, the city is fertile stomping ground for fantasy. Why? And how do we treat the city like a character? Panellists: Cheryl Morgan, Ella Summers, Liz Cain, David Green, Sandra Unerman (m).

Saturday, October 12th 7pm (Kraken Room)
Queer Role Models in Fandom – There’s nothing quite like the thrill of discovering someone like you in your favourite book, TV show, or movie. What characters are queer role models done well in genre? Panellists: Cheryl Morgan (m), Susan J Morris, Tej Turner +1.

Sunday, October 13th 1pm (Kraken Room)
Demystifying the Editing Process – Every editor is different. Here, they share their methods of working, from developmental editing to line edits, and what writers can expect. Panellists: George Sandison, Claire Cronshaw, Jonathan Oliver, David Thomas Moore, Cheryl Morgan (m).

I will not have a dealer table. If you want to buy a Wizard’s Tower book, let me know tomorrow and I’ll put it in the car before leaving.

My Octocon Schedule

~ Cheryl

This weekend I will mostly be at a writing retreat in Llandybie along with Roz, Jo and various friends. However, I have to rush home on the Saturday evening because I need functioning internet. I am doing one virtual panel at Octocon, as follows:

Saturday, 5 October 2024; 20:30
Stop Passing the Buck: Consent in Historical Fantasy: So often in historical fantasy, we are bombarded with violence we didn’t ask for, particularly sexual violence against women. When this concern is raised, the authors frequently hide behind “I want to stay true to the time period” and “we can’t judge the past by today’s standards”. But why are authors bound to a period that didn’t exist when they’re creating a new society? Why do they hold to this, instead of creating their own? And why does the adherence to the past only seem to show up in violence against women and not to the beauty standards of the time? Why is assault more palatable to an audience than unshaved armpits? How do we go about demanding that this change, or do we have to abandon a genre we otherwise love? – with Faranae, Kat Dodd, Nick Hubble and MaryBrigid Turner (m).

Juliet McKenna is also attending the convention, and she has a panel at 13:30 on Sunday about exploring lesser-known fairy tales. That sounds like something where she might talk about the research she does for the Green Man books.

Full details of this year’s Octocon (and you can still buy a virtual membership) are available here.

Worldcon Ho!

~ Cheryl

In a few days time I will be packing the car with books and heading up to Glasgow. Most of the time I will be in the Dealers’ Room, so I should be easy to find. I have precisely one panel. Here it is:

Sunday, 11 August 2024 – 11:30 – Gods and Faith in Fantasy – Forth, Duration: 60 mins

Faith and the divine have played a huge role in fantasy, from Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods to N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow. This panel will discuss the presentations and representations of the divine in fantasy, the ways writers put faith on the page, and the role of gods in story.

With: Ehud Maimon (moderator), Meg MacDonald & Wole Talabi

LuxCon, For Real This Year

~ Cheryl

Last year I was invited to be a Guest of Honour at LuxCon. It was the weekend after Eastercon which, if you remember, was a massive superspreader event for COVID. So I ended up being sick and unable to go to Luxembourg. The con committee were very understanding, and have kindly invited me back this year.

I think I will be able to make it. When I was first invited the date I was given was the weekend after Easter again. Since then it has been moved two weeks later. So I am now going there direct from an Assyriology conference in Malta. However, I’m confident that my Assyriologist friends will be rather more careful than Eastercon attendees. My main worry is having to go through Heathrow.

Assuming I do get there, it looks like being a fabulous event. I’ve been offered some fun panels. It looks like they have an excellent cosplay culture. And there is talk of a live role-playing game featuring the guests.

I’m particularly impressed with the number of guests from around Europe they have (full list here). Given that everyone in Luxembourg seems to speak at least 3 languages, I guess I should not be surprised.

I will report back in the April issue of Salon Futura.

February Looms

~ Cheryl

And that means that LGBT+ History Month is on the horizon. Interest in this sort of thing seems to have waned a bit over the past few years. That’s partly because the sorts of institutions that put on events are increasingly demanding something recorded that they can use for years to come. The problem with that is that you have to ensure that your presentation is free of copyrightable images, and that takes a lot of effort. Also, of course, there’s a good chance doing such things, especially if they involve trans issues, is likely to become illegal soon, regardless of who wins the next general election.

However, the lovely folks at M-Shed in Bristol are still doing good work. They have a fine program of talks scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 24th, and only one of them is by me. Excitingly there will also be a talk by Mark and Jack, the Museum Bums boys. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be talking about the search for trans people in Celtic Britain. OutStories Bristol has a long post about the various talks.

I will be doing a couple more talks, including one at Oxford University, and one online for a university in Canada, but I don’t yet know of anything else that will be open to the public. If something turns up, I will let you know.

Introducing Speculative Insight

~ Cheryl

On the assumption that a lot of people won’t be paying much attention to the internet over the holidays, I’ve been queueing up a bunch of posts, so apologies for the unusual flurry this week.

To begin with I’d like to draw your attention to a new online critical magazine for SF&F literature. It is called Speculative Insight, and it is edited by Alex Pierce whom you may know from Galactic Suburbia, Letters to Tiptree, Luminescent Threads, or even Locus. Alex kindly asked me to write something for her and, much to my surprise, it ended up launching the magazine.

“What is Fantasy Anyway?” is an essay-length version of the talk I did at Bristol Central Library in support of their contribution to the British Library Fantasy exhibition. It is basically me having a go at the people who are heavily invested in policing genre boundaries. Hopefully some of you will find it interesting.

Speculative Insight will continue with a mix of paid and free articles over the coming months. I’m looking forward to seeing what it produces. And remember when you look at the prices that an Australian dollar is only worth a little over 50p.

Fantasy in London and Bristol

~ Cheryl


A major exhibition on Fantasy will be opening at the British Library next week (Friday 27th) and will run until Sunday, February 25th, 2024. The curation team included Neil Gaiman, Aliette de Bodard and Roz Kaveney, so you can tell it will be very good. There are a whole bunch of events planned around it as well. Full details are available here. Many of them are online. I’m particularly keen to see Natalie Haynes interviewing Susan Cooper, and the Black to the Future event. I might also try to get to London for the full day of events on December 9th (or not, it is sold out, but online is available).

For those of us out west, I am delighted to see that Bristol Central Library is joining the fun. They have a bunch of events of their own. That includes co-hosting the Neil Gaiman livestream on November 20th, but also a bunch of events of their own. The following are part of their Lunchtime Lectures series.

Thu, Nov 9, 12:30 – Fantasy and the Cotswolds – a talk by the wonderful Cathy Butler. Who knows, it might feature Juliet McKenna, given that she lives in that part of the world.

Thu, Nov 30, 12:30 – Dianna Wynne Jones – I don’t know Henrietta and Lydia Wilson, but any talk on Dianna is likley to be a lot of fun.

Thu, Nov 16, 12:30 – What is Fantasy Anyway? – Oh, that’s me. Here’s the blurb:

Literary critics and booksellers are fond of dividing books into smaller and smaller categories. Is this book epic fantasy or sword & sorcery? Urban or rural? Historical, folklore or mythological? How can we tell? Authors, however, are much more slippery than those who seek to categorise their work would like. Books tend to slip and slide between genres, not just within fantasy, but outside of it as well.

In this talk, Cheryl Morgan, will look at how books at categorized and, with the help of some fine example works, make the argument that pretty much all fiction is fantasy of a sort.

For those of you who can’t get to Bristol, this talk will be getting turned into an essay, for publication in a venue I can’t tell you about yet.

There are also a couple of events at Bedminster Library. The full list is available here.

My BristolCon Schedule

~ Cheryl

BristolCon is this weekend. Things will be happening.

Most importantly, Juliet’s book launch for The Green Man’s Quarry is FRIDAY NIGHT. I can’t see anything on the convention website that makes this clear. Juliet will not be at the convention on the Saturday, so if you want to see her, or want a personalised signing, you need to be there on Friday night.

Signed books will, of course, be available in the Dealers’ Room on Saturday. I’ll be there most of the day.

However, at 13:00 I will be in Panel Room 2 for this:

How to make AI socialist?

AI and machine learning are set to transform the knowledge economy in the same way automation changed the manual labour economy. How can society learn from the mistakes of the past in not disempowering the workforce and putting lots of people out of work?

With peter sutton, Stephen Oram, Roz Clarke and Piotr Swietlik (M)

My Octocon Schedule

~ Cheryl

I can’t make it to Dublin this year. Indeed, I’ll be spending most of the weekend at a writing retreat here in Wales. However, I have agreed to do one online panel for Octocon. It is on Sunday Oct 8th at 13:30 and the subject is: “Who Reviews the Reviewers: Current Trends in Review Culture”. Full details here.

My FantasyCon Schedule

~ Cheryl

FantasyCon is only a week and a bit away now. I will be there, but I will not have a dealer table as I still don’t have a car capable to transporting books to a con, and the car hire cost would not be economic. So…

If you want a book from Wizard’s Tower, let me know so I can bring it with me. Usual convention discounts will apply, so paperbacks are mostly £10.

If you are wanting the new Green Man book, that’s not ready yet, but I may have e-ARCs and the book should be at BristolCon.

And now, my panel schedule.

Building Your Writer Website- Saturday 10.00am (Panel Room 1)
E.M. Faulds (Moderator) Steve Morgan, George Penney, Ryan Cahill, Cheryl Morgan.

Designing and maintaining your own space on the internet is part and parcel of being a writer these days. Our panel will go through some of the ways you can set up your website and offer advice on the dos and don’ts.

Fantasy: Where Are The People Like Me? – Saturday 2.30pm (Panel Room 3)
Cheryl Morgan (Moderator), Lindz Mcleod, Omar Kooheji, C. L. McCartney.

A panel that looks at how different readers can see themselves in the fantasy worlds of authors. This is a consideration of identity and formative inspiration.

I’m currently also listed on The Great British Monster Off, but that appears to clash with the banquet so I’m waiting to hear back from the con on that one.

August in Glasgow

~ Cheryl

Later this month I will be making the long train journey up to Glasgow for an event at the university. This is not anything to do with the Fantasy Centre, but rather a queer history thing that happens to involve Glasgow academics. The event is aimed primarily at early career humanities scholars, looking for ways to engage with professionals outside of academia. However, it is free, and will be broadcast on Zoom, so if you are intersted I’m sure you’d be welcome. Details are available here.

While I am in Glasgow I am hoping to swing by the SECC and do a quick check of the Worldcon site. It is a while since I was there and I know things have changed quite a bit.

Pemmi-Con – Day 4

~ Cheryl

I was hoping to see a bit more of Winnipeg yesterday, but the timing of various events didn’t give me a decent-sized time slot so I spent time writing and doing a bit of Day Job instead.

My final panel was about AI. I had two excellent co-panellists. Helen Umberger works for a company that tries to monitor AIs for accuracy and lobbies for proper regulation of the industry. Having been involved in industry regulation for energy markets and commondities trading, I wish her the best of luck. Shalya Elizabeth is a Winnipeg local and a member of the Indigenous Writers’ Collective of Manitoba. Her perspective was invaluable.

I attended the Closing Ceremonies because it was an opportunity to catch up with Kevin, and I was hoping for another performance from the First Nations drummer. Both expectations were fulfilled. We also had a bagpiper, apparently in recognition of the Mansfields’ Scottish ancestry. Linda is a Ross, after all, and that’s a very fine Scottish name.

I should have reported yesterday that Buffalo won the right to hold the NASFiC next year, when Worldcon is in Glasgow. Obviously I can’t attend, so I have not been paying much attention. However, I’m delighted to see a Black man chairing an official WSFS convention. Congratulations to Wayne Brown and his team. The full view of the Business Meeting at which his convention was officially seated is below, and you can find him around 9 minutes in, after Kevin has finished with the official stuff and Sharon Sbarsky has announced the results of the voting.

I’m now all packed and ready to head off to the airport. Thanks are due to my room-mate, Heather Rose Jones, for saving me a lot of money and providing companionship. And of course to the Pemmi-Con committee who did a good job under difficult circumstances.

Pemmi-Con – Day 3

~ Cheryl


I didn’t see much of the convention on Saturday. In the morning I took myself off to the Human Rights Museum, which is something you don’t get in every city you visit. It is, in various ways, amazing, heart-rending and disappointing. Certainly worth a visit, but equally a measure of who is deemed to have a legitimate human rights struggle and who isn’t.

The afternoon was spent taking care of some WSFS stuff with Kevin. If he gets a visa for China, he probably won’t be able to update the Hugo Awards website from Chengdu. I will be at BristolCon. Somehow we will get it done, though it will probably be behind places like Tor.com and Locus.

The evening saw the Pemmi-Con masquerade, which I went along to because my good friend, Sandy Manning, was running it. It was small, but very well done. I almost ended up on the judging panel, but thankfully Sandy found someone better qualified in time. They had four novices who had never been on stage before, including one young lad who had used a 3D printer to make parts of his costume. The journeyman category had a topically revived Barbie costume that had last been in competition in 1999. There were three master level entries. It is not often that you will see the Pettingers place third in a field of three, which should tell you a lot about the quality of the entries. The clear winner, by audience acclamation as well as by the jury, Best in Show in both Presentation and Workmanship, was the Baba Yaga’s Hut costume pictured above.

Today’s job, other than one panel, is to find the names to go with the photos I have taken so I can do a fuller write-up in Salon Futura.

Pemmi-Con – Day 2

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I was scheduled to give my talk on the Pre-History of Robotics. As per yesterday’s report, it had to be moved because I’d been put in a room with no screen or projector. I ended up in York 2 in the 5:30pm program slot.

This was progress in that I knew that room did have the necessary kit, but that’s only half the problem. Should I be sending my slides to someone, or could I use my own laptop? And what about the online part of the convention? I figured I should check the room out early. It turned out that the tech kit in the room was an Apple laptop that didn’t have PowerPoint, so I’d have to use my own machine. To do that I needed to be able to log in to Zoom as a panelist. I should have an email with a link, right? Er, no.

Apparently the links for the day were not send out until 1:00pm. Once I had the email, it all went fairly smoothly at my end. Sadly the same was not true for the online participants who had problems with the sound throughout. I don’t blame the tech guy in the room for this. Like many of the con staff, he was a very late recruit. And having to do set-up on a different machine for each program item is far from ideal, especially with only 15 minutes between panels. The Eastercon system of allowing 30 minutes between panels because the tech for a hybrid con needs that much time is sounding more and more sensible.

Anyway, I had a reasonable-sized audience and they seemed to enjoy the talk. My apologies again to the online audience.

The rest of my day was taken up with being photographed. There’s a Bay Area fan photographer called Richard Man who has a project to take high quality photos of prominent people in the field using a lovely old camera. It is one of those things where you have to slide a plate in for each shot, which puts a tremendous amount of pressure on getting each take right. My official photo was taken by Lou Abercrombie using a digital camera and she must have taken at least 300 shots. Richard told me he can only afford two per subject.

As it turned out, I ended up being done twice. Richard, having not been involved with Bay Area fandom when I lived there, hadn’t been entirely sure who I was. After the initial shot he did a bit more research as asked me if I’d come back for a photo using a Hugo trophy. There are three on display in the Exhibits area, one of which is Kevin’s which he got for being co-chair of ConJosé so there was no problem borrowing one.

It will be a while before I see the results as the plates need to be developed, but you can see some of Richard’s work here, and there is more available in this year’s Hugo packet as he is a finalist for Best Fan Artist. Y’all should vote for him ‘cos he’s lovely.

Pemmi-Con Program Update

~ Cheryl

My talk on the Prehistory of Robotics is now taking place at 5:30pm in York 2, so I should have a screen and projector.

Also I am on “How technology treats minorities and women differently” at 1:00pm on Sunday in York 3. For some reason that doesn’t show up on list view or tile view on the online schedule, but it is on the grid view.

I’d suggest trying the Speakers page to get a list of my panels, but I’m not listed as a speaker.

As a software professional, I’m a little aghast that it is possible for these things to be wrong in Grenadine.

Pemmi-Con – Day 1

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I am in Canada, by the skin of my teeth. I am getting too old for travel nightmares.

When I booked this trip I was due to have a Noon flight from Heathrow on Tuesday, spend Wednesday morning with clients, and be on a 6:00pm flight to Winnipeg. That so did not happen.

On Monday morning I got a text from Air Canada saying that my flight from Heathrow was cancelled and they were trying to find me an alternative flight. I was due to see Roz Kaveney who is in hospital recovering from a hip operation, so I put the flight to the back of my mind and went on with my day. But while I was in the hospital I got another text saying that no alternative flights were available and promising a refund. Of course that would only be a refund from the London-Toronto, not the Toronto-Winnipeg. Plus no convention.

Once I’d handed over visitor duties to Roz’s partner, I went on to my hotel at Heathrow (which I had already paid for) and set about trying to fix things. I had been in the queue to speak to Air Canada for about 5 minutes when a new text came through. They had found me a flight to Toronto. It was leaving at around the same time, but from Zurich. So would I please get myself to Heathrow in time to catch the 6:00am Swiss Air flight to get me out there. That meant getting up at 2:30am. It is a good job that I had an airport hotel.

Anyway, I made it, and I got to see Zurich, if only from the air. I got to my Toronto airport hotel around 5:00pm local and went to bed at around 8:00pm as I needed to be up at 5:00am to get to my client’s offices. Somehow I managed to deliver a training course without falling asleep.

Some weeks back the 6:00pm Winnipeg flight had been changed to 6:30pm, which was fine. I was just leaving the client’s offices when a new text came in. The Winnipeg flight would be 7:45pm. We had two gate changes between my arriving at Pearson and the flight starting to board. Boarding began at around 7:40pm, but by 8:00pm we were all on board. And then we sat there, for over an hour. Waiting for I know not what. The pilot blamed it on the ground crew being slow loading the baggage, but it shouldn’t take over an hour to get that done. It was almost midnight by the time I got to bed.

Goodness only knows what will happen on the trip home. I expect to be stranded in Toronto on Monday night.

But before then I have a convention. Today I have watched online talks at the universities of Bristol and Glasgow, which were much more interesting than the programing here. Then I did a panel on diversity in SF&F in past times. I was looking forward to that because I’ve met no end of 20-something fans who are convinced that there were no PoC or queer folks in SF&F before about 2010. But, as it turned out, I’m actually in the younger half of attendees here. Many of the audience were older than me, and they knew a lot about old books, stories and writers. Anyway, I got to rant about Heinlein. My thanks to Nisi Shawl and Sandra Bond for being great co-panelists.

Tomorrow I am giving a talk on the Pre-History of Robotics. I can’t tell you where, but it probably won’t be in York 3 as advertised because that room has no screen or projector.

I get the impression that the concom here are doing sterling work with far too little money and ever fewer volunteers.

However, it has all been worth it because I got to see the First Nations woman perform at openening ceremonies. It was just her voice and a tympanum-like drum, but she was amazing. The wolf song was particularly impressive, you could really feel the drama of the pack chasing down its prey.

Winnipeg Ho!

~ Cheryl

I’ll be leaving for Winnipeg and Pemmi-Con early on Monday. Pretty much any overseas trip from Wales takes a couple of days. Also I’m spending a day in Toronto along the way to visit some clients. I should arrive in Winnipeg on Wednesday evening.

With the convention less than a week away, I’d assumed that I had not been allocated any programming. This isn’t a problem. I’ve not been to Winnipeg before and am looking forward to seeing the city. Also I haven’t seen Kevin since December. But in my email this morning was a message from the programming team. The schedule isn’t finalised yet, but I am doing at least two program items.

Knowing the Roots: Representation in the Genre before (provisionally Thursday 14:30 – 15:45, in York 2, Convention Center)

Modern SF is often considered to be inclusive. But when did the genre begin to include representatives of BIPOC and/or LGBTQ communities? Our panellists point out hidden examples of early SF that treat these communities with respect.

The Prehistory of Robotics (Friday 16:00 – 17:15, Charleswood B, Delta Hotel)

If you were at the Dublin Worldcon, or the Finncon I did it for, you will have seen this. But I’m guessing that most of the Pemmi-Con attendees will not have seen it. Hopefully they will come along and learn about ancient robots.

I will update this when I get a final schedule.