Cheryl’s Mewsings

I spent the evening in Bristol in the company of Joanne Hall and Andy Bigwood who are part of the local group looking to set up a regular convention here. It was a very positive meeting, and I like what I’m hearing from these folks. This year’s con will be very small, but the plan for next year is to do a whole weekend and I hope that people will give this year some support so they’ll feel encouraged about next year.

I’ll have more to say about this in a few weeks when we have more information on line. In the meantime, however, I should point out that Andy has won the BSFA Best Artwork prize for the past two years, so whatever else happens we should have a kick ass art show.

So, here I am in Bristol - at the University of the West of England campus at Frenchay to be precise. I have a room, I have mobile broadband (because the university Internet sucks) and I have a convention. So far so good.

Charlie Butler opened the convention with an extended metaphor about food and apologies for Diana’s non-attendance. The poor dear is very ill, and isn’t going anywhere much right now. We do, however, have the very wonderful Sharyn November in her place. Sharyn has cut her hair, which means that now she only has about 5 times as much hair as I do, rather than 50 times as much. I’m still jealous.

Deborah Kaplan opened proceedings with a paper about age confusion in DWJ’s books. Apparently publishers have a bunch of silly rules about what kids will and will not read. They bear a remarkable resemblance to the well known rule that teenage girls will always buy magazines aimed at an age group 1 or 2 years beyond where they currently are. That’s pretty much true for the magazines, but it isn’t anywhere near true for books. Diana understands that, but even so it is quite surprising that kids take to a book as complex as Hexwood.

Two interesting things came out of this. Firstly the age recommendations on Amazon are often wrong. This isn’t Amazon’s fault — they take feeds from publishers, but the people at the publishers apparently often key in the wrong information about books.

Secondly it was heartwarming to hear Sharyn say that US publishers don’t worry much about what adults will think, or about attempts to ban books, they’ll place a book in the YA market if they think it will sell better there. In other words, the Americans have a solid commercial focus — it is places like the UK where publishers get more nannyish about what they think kids should read.

Tui Head won me over straight away by introducing her talk in Maori. There are people from all over the world here. Tui is from Wellington (and therefore complains bitterly about British coffee). I have also met people from the US, Australia and Japan. I’m sure there are Europeans here too.

Tui’s talk was about girls in adventure fiction. It was a bit unpolished, but it did throw up some useful thoughts. It appeared pretty much agreed that Diana doesn’t like adult women much.

The final session for today was a talk on Diana’s life by Nicholas Tucker, who has known her ever since WWII. He was very entertaining, and I very much liked his suggestion that the traditional British children’s adventure story is actually designed to prepare the kids for being sent away to boarding school.

I’ll have more tomorrow, and some time during the weekend I am going to interview Andy Sawyer about the new John Wynham novel I saw at the London Book Fair. If you want to keep up with the panels as they happen, follow me on Twitter.

The July issue of Clarkesworld went up while I was asleep, and I’m just getting round to reading parts of it. There is fiction by Tobias S. Buckell and Lisa Hannet. There’s the second part of Jeremy L.C. Jones’ fascinating mind meld of editors, and an interview with Jim C. Hines. And finally there’s an editorial by Neil about the way the online fiction market is developing. As Neil points out, more and more people are publishing free online and asking for donations from those who can afford it. All too often this is from necessity, as has been the case with Cat Valente and Tim Pratt. However, it would not surprise me to see this become the norm. As I recall, Amanda Palmer is saying much the same thing about the music business.

Neil ends with a short plea that I’d like to echo:

Spreading the word about user-supported fiction is easy and requires only a little of your time. So, aside from telling you to go read Catherynne’s and Tim’s wonderful new stories and asking you to consider tossing a coin in the hat, I’m going to ask you to pick three or four online fiction ventures and (if you can):

1. Do a review or tell people about them on your blog. Pretend it’s a meme if it makes it easier. Pretend it isn’t if memes make you ill.
2. Link to a story or the main site on Facebook and Twitter.
3. Get an account on Stumbleupon and give “thumbs up” recommendations to your favorite works. (Honestly, this one is huge. A single recommendation can trigger a storm of new visitors.)
4. If you are already doing these things, thank you, now go encourage others to do the same.
5. Use your imagination and try something else I haven’t mentioned.

Give it a try. Sometimes, tough times can be eased by the simple measures of a group of individuals.

The huge news in the LGBT news today is that a court in Delhi has ruled India’s law on homosexuality unconstitutional. Currently anyone convicted of homosexuality in India can be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. While convictions are not common, the law does mean that gay people are unlikely to be open about their behavior, and this can cause huge problems with medical issues such as AIDS.

This is not a new development. As The Times of India reported a few days ago, the Indian government had been considering repealing the law, which many see as an unfortunate hangover from colonial times. However, as this Thai newspaper reports, religious leaders from India’s Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities are united in their opposition to any change.

The news from India is important in a wider context because of the vast number of people that live there. As part of the Stonewall commemoration over the weekend Jeff VanderMeer and John Coulthart linked to a chart showing the state of gay rights legislation around the world. I thought at the time that it would be interesting to see the country representations weighted by population (hello, Russell, you there?). Changing the situation in India would make an enormous difference to such a map.

The second part of Karen Burnham’s excellent SF Signal Mind Meld feature on non-anglophone SF is now online. It includes material by several of my friends, and also by a bunch of people I’d love to get to meet. Apparently there’s more to come next week as well.

It occurs to me that this is one of those areas in which the Mind Meld format works really well. The topic is so vast that no one person can have more than the briefest glimpse of the whole. However, read together, all of these individual glimpses help us get a idea of just how much is going on that we can’t read.

And talking of things we can’t read, I discover from Tero that the Al Reynolds story in the latest issue of Tähtivaeltaja is actually an exclusive. It is in Finnish, so most of you won’t be able to read it, but if you are a Reynolds completist then you need to get it because there is no English version. No, even Al doesn’t have a copy in English. Details here.

See what can happen when you get drunk in a bar with a bunch of Finns…

Over the weekend I shall be at the Diana Wynne Jones Conference in Bristol. I’m not a great expert on Diana’s work, so I thought I’d ask you folks which papers sound most interesting to you. You can find the schedule here. Which ones would you most like me to report back on?

“Robots! Robots were marching . . . Robots were marching, and were about to spread havoc and destruction across the earth, and as yet the sleeping earth knew nothing of their coming.” - Robert Lionel Fanthorpe

These days, of course, we do know about their coming in advance, because we have the Internet. The guys at Angry Robot have been telling us that they are coming for months now. But finally they are here. The imprint is officially launched, and the first books should be in the shops, at least in the UK and Australia (all except Darkest Somerset, were it takes the native bearers some time to deliver goods through the part-flooded fields to the little hilltop cow shed cum general store where we locals shop).

Given that Angry Robot is headed up by my long-time friend, Marc Gascoigne, whose good taste and commercial sense I am in awe of, I’m sure that they will do very well.

US and Canadian readers will, I think, have to wait for Worldcon, but I’m sure that spectacular things will happen there. I, for one, welcome our new metal overlords.

In order to enjoy The Caryatids you need to remember three things.

Firstly, Bruce Sterling is simply brimming over with ideas. He has put lots of them in this book. Some of them may not make a lot of sense, at least in context with the other ideas, but boy are there a lot of them.

Second, the book is satire. If some of the characters appear a bit like caricatures, that’s because they are. Sterling is exaggerating for effect.

And finally, Sterling is an incorrigible cynic, so he’s going to be poking fun at everyone and everything.

If you are OK with all of that, you should enjoy this book.

As for me, mainly it reminds me of how much I miss California. Yes, we may be stupidly optimistic at times, but at least we do have a positive attitude towards life.

If you haven’t sent in your nominations for this year’s World Fantasy Awards, today is your last chance to do so. You can find details here.

Also the deadline for the Hugo Award final ballot is Friday. Yes, Friday. You do not have the weekend in which to make up your mind. And if you are heading out to a convention over the weekend, you probably have even less time. Vote now and get it done.

Yeah, I know, I haven’t finished reading everything either. I’m also not planning to say too much before the panel at Finncon. But it did just want to say that I think John Kessell’s “Pride and Prometheus” is particularly splendid.

Matt Cheney has posted a review of China Miéville’s The City and The City. I think he pretty much nails it. I see the book is the subject of a discussion panel at Readercon and participants are being urged to read the book before attending because spoilers are impossible to avoid. I feel a bit the same way about pointing you at Matt’s piece, even though he has tried hard to avoid spoilerage. Those of you who have read the book, go here now. The rest of you, here’s the short version:

“The more you think about The City & The City, the more interesting it gets.”

Now go buy the book.

With thanks to Tero, I am now able to let you know what I’ll be up to at Finncon.

Saturday

16.00 Hugo 2009 Discussion (Turbiinisali)
The panel of experts say what they think about the current crop of the Hugo Award nominees. Marianna Leikomaa (chair), Ben Roimola, Tommy Persson, Cheryl Morgan, Adam Roberts

Sunday

12.00 Big Is Better But Small Is Beautiful (Pannuhalli)
Does fantasy have to be big and epic? Is there room for something less grandeur? General preconception of fantasy still tends to veer toward the door stopping bulky pseudo medieval mammoth, but that is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Jukka Halme (chair), George R.R. Martin, Johan Anglemark, Markku Soikkeli, Cheryl Morgan

14.00 Book Talk (Turbiinisali)
What to read when all the translated books have been read? Jukka Halme (chair), Cheryl Morgan, Hannu Blommila, Marianna Leikomaa

There may be some involvement in the masquerade and cosplay as well, if previous years are anything to go by.

In this age of Twitter and attention deficiency there is a new fashion for writing short fiction, but Bruce Holland Rogers has been writing very short stories for years. Normally you can only get them on subscription (a remarkably good value of $10/year for 3 stories a month), but this month Bruce has opted to make one story (quite an old one) public. He did so because of the recent events in Iran, but in many ways it is also a very appropriate story to point you at on this, the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riot. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, “We Stand Up”, by Bruce Holland Rogers.

Today has mostly been spent working on other web sites - conventions that the like. I have, however, taken the opportunity to do a few things around here. Here are some you might notice.

I have put the April Fool P-Con report in the fiction section because, well, that’s where it belongs.

I’ve added a link to my new AudioBoo account. I don’t expect to use it very much, and it is linked through to Twitter and thence to Facebook so most of you needn’t worry about where it is. I suspect I’ll use it mainly from conventions - and UK ones at that because uploading MP3s will consume more bandwidth than I’m comfortable with when paying roaming charges.

Can be found at Pagan Prattle, where Feòrag and Red Wolf have been reading the loony press so that you don’t have to.

Thanks to Lou Anders and Stephan Martiniere:

Much larger image here. It is a wonderful novel too.

One of the things that has struck me while reading posts about Michael Jackson this morning is the number of pieces that have described him as dying “tragically young”. He was 50, an age by which many people have become grandparents. It is also a commonly assumed starting point for old age - for example SAGA, a UK-based company that markets specifically to “older” people, takes 50 as its base age.

With Jacko I suppose his Peter Pan image might have caused people to believe that he is younger than he really is, but generally the posts I have seen have mentioned his actual age alongside the “tragically young” comment. So I’m confused. Tell me, O blogosphere, have we really reached a time when dying at 50 is perceived to be a tragically early departure, or are all these posts just being written by people who are over 50?

New Zealand fan, Joffre Horlor, has produced a lengthy report on ConScription, including a lot of pictures. You can read it here. I’d like to quote a few short bits. First:

Julie [Czerneda] came across as having irrepressible enthusiasm for science and for explaining it to kids.

Oh my, yes she does. Julie is magnificently enthusiastic. And secondly:

The committee organizing next year’s convention, Au Contraire!, gave a spirited talk. The committee consists mostly of women under the age of 30, and they started off by asking a question that I’d wondered at myself: given that there are clearly thousands of people in New Zealand interested in Star Trek, Buffy, paranormal romance and other genre works, why do so few people go to cons? So the committee has set themselves the ambitious goal of reconnecting SF&F fans with the convention circuit. They plan to do this by keeping the registration fee very low, but actively promoting the con, and by shifting the emphasis of the con from guests towards the fans themselves, by covering activities such as fanfic.

Wellington next year, everyone. Let’s give them plenty of support.

Today’s Independent has a fascinating article about the probable presence of underground caverns filled with sea water on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. All it needs now is squid…

And that’s as good a reason as any to remind that that if you haven’t yet read The Quiet War by Paul McAuley then you should. It will be out from Pyr in September, I believe, so US readers should be able to find it easily soon, though Amazon US does sometimes have the Gollancz edition available.

I’m having a Myers moment. As his regular readers will know, PZ is fond of sending his readers out to crash polls. His usual targets are polls about creationism and the like, but the poll I want you to go and vote in is all about a different sort of creation. Specifically it wants to know what type of convention you like attending. Because we don’t want Creation to win now, do we?

Oh, and for those of you who are hoping to vote in favor of conventions that don’t have any horrible science fiction in them, but instead concentrate on purely fannish matters: sorry, your choice didn’t make the ballot.

SF Signal’s latest Mind Meld column is all about SF in languages other than English. There’s lots of good stuff being recommended, and the participants are most people whose first language is not English. Nice job, Karen. And it is only part I too. Hopefully some Finns in part II.