Well, approximately live anyway. After a couple of days of a fun convention there is a certain zombie air to proceedings around here. What’s more I have had to be intelligent all morning as I have been at work. But let me start from the beginning.

Firstly the convention went very well. My congratulations to Carolina and her team who not only managed a very well-run event, but also created the largest SF convention ever to be held in Sweden, by a very long way. The final warm body count was apparently over 700, which is also quite big for a Eurocon (except when it is in Finland, or combined with a UK Worldcon).

The awards ceremony went very smoothly, and the results of the first ever SF&F Translation Awards have been published (details here). My congratulations to Hannu, Georges-Olivier, Edward and everyone else involved. A press release will go out as soon as I hear back from Hannu who was surrounded by adoring fans for Saturday evening and then had to dash off.

The ESFS Awards were also given out, and much to my surprise one of them went to Wales. No, it wasn’t me, or Langford. It was, of course, Al Reynolds, who was voted Best Author by the assembled national delegations. The Swedes, in the form of artist Nicolas Krizan, produced some marvelous trophies based on the famous Dalahäst wooden toy horse that is so popular with tourists. These are not traditional Dalahästs though, they are SFnal. One was a robot, another was green and had three eyes, a third had eight legs. And Al’s? Well, Al got My Little Space Pony.

He’s very cute, and as I was the only British person daft enough to be doing Eurocon and Alt.Fiction back-to-back I was given the job of looking after him and taking him to Derby.

There will be a full con report later. Right now I need to do other things as I am working here in Stockholm today and tomorrow. There is a major energy economics conference going on, and I’m meeting up with a few colleagues. I’m not going to say too much about that here, partly because I get very bored with having my job mansplained to me by people who have never worked in the field, and partly because it will attract cl*m*te ch*ng* trolls from both sides of the debate.