The convention is now in full swing. Last night Charlie tweeted, “This convention is sort of like a unicorn on anabolic steroids – big, pumped up, energetic, and slightly scary!” I know how he feels.

Friday started quietly. No programming before noon, remember? I’m staying with a Croatian family, and yesterday grandma turned up and made crêpes for breakfast. Lovely people, Croats.

The first panel of the day was one I really wanted to see: “Women with swords, and girl cooties”. Author and translator, Milena Benini turned out to have a marvelous line in feminist snark. She’d been busily mining the Internet for pictures of women warriors and adding little comments to the pictures. For example, she started by reading us the description of Dejah Thoris from A Princess of Mars. As some of you will know, our heroine wears nothing except jewellery. The text makes this plain. The cover, mysteriously, has her clothed. That was the 1950s. Women warrior clothing has gone down hill since. Although the snark was a lot of fun, we did a lot of positive stuff as well, handing out recommendations for the likes of N.K. Jemisin, Laurie Marks, Nnedi Okorafor, Tansy Rayner Roberts and, of course, Mary Gentle.

After that I did two interviews: one for a Croatian magazine called Sirius B, the other for a feminist website.

For dinner Tomislav and I went back to the brewery that we’d visited briefly the previous night. It turns out that they have three types of beer: light, dark and half-and-half. The dark is the best option. My meal was Ćevapi, which is best described as minced meat fingers. It’s not that great on its own (unless, I guess, you have really good meat), but it is served with a spicy relish called Ajvar which makes all of the difference. I wouldn’t recommend the brewery for fine food, or fine beer for that matter, but two meals, and two half liters of beer, cost us around £10, which is ludicrously cheap by London standards.

Up until this point the convention had been taking place in a large hotel, and it felt very much like a Eurocon: maybe a couple of hundred people, from all over the continent. On Friday evening it moved into the main venue for SFerakon, the annual Zagreb convention, in a nearby university building. Suddenly all of the dealers turned up, and hundreds more Croatian fans. You can get some idea of the dealer tables from Monique’s posts on the con blog. I’m eying up the jewellery.

The evening GoH talks for Tim Powers and Dmitry Glukhovsky took place in a lecture theater. The seats were uncomfortable, of course, but it was a big room with built in tech and good views for all. Tim was interviewed by John Berlyne (of course) and was his usual entertaining self. The best story he told was about his German translations. When he got the books he found that they all had a section in the middle in a different font. He can’t read German, but eventually he found out what was going on. In the middle of the book, when the characters were placed in some urgent situation, one of them would say,

“Do we have time for soup?”
“What sort of soup?”
“It’s xxx soup, it’s very quick and easy to prepare.”
“Really, what flavors do you have?”

And so on. Once the soup had been made and eaten (and it was indeed very good soup), the characters got back to saving the world (or whatever else it was they urgently needed to save).

It turns out that Tim wasn’t the only author to have his work added to in this way. William Gibson had suffered similar treatment. Probably other authors did too. I’ve redacted the name of the soup company that paid for these ads, but the books are now a legend amongst translators and a prized collector’s item.

There was a brief power outage during Tim’s talk. I guess that proves that God is a Jehovah’s Witness, and still hasn’t forgiven him for the accidental Bible burning.

Glukhovsky turned out to be a very interesting guy. Born in Moscow, he has a degree in journalism and international relations from Jerusalem. He’s lived in more countries than I have, and is a committed internationalist. When his book, Metro 2033, became an international hit (partly on the back of the video game adaption) he was pestered for endless sequels. Not wanting to get trapped into a Robert Jordan like career, he started a shared world system in which authors from all over the world get to write their own books in the Metro universe. The basic idea is that a nuclear war has left Earth devastated, but small groups of survivors exist in underground locations around the world. The original book is set in the Moscow Metro, but lots of other major cities have underground railways too, so franchising is easy.

Today I am heading off to a TV studio where I will be interviewed about conventions and e-publishing for a popular culture show. After that I have a panel on online fiction with, amongst others, Glukhovsky, who was pioneering free online fiction in Russia around the same time that Cory Doctorow was doing so in North America.

Also today is the Eurocon 2014 site selection vote: Ireland v Romania. ESFS uses an electoral college system, with two delegates per country. Fluff Cthulhu is complaining loudly on Twitter that there are no votes for Elder Gods. Apparently Dave Lally has ruled that they are not part of Europe. This can’t end well.