I see from Ellen Kushner’s LiveJournal that there is to be a Finnish translation of the very wonderful (and World Fantasy Award winning) Thomas the Rhymer. You are in for a treat, Finnish friends. And now I can start conspiring to get Ellen and Delia to Finncon…

I am safely arrived in London and am once again staying with Teddy and Tom in Wimbledon. This evening Teddy got to play dressy-up with a life-size doll and I got to wear a corset for the first time in my misbegotten, overweight life. The bad news is that even in a corset I still have a pot belly. However, there are photos. They’ll get posted eventually, along with whatever I take at Pride tomorrow.

Not through a rabbit hole, though it feels a bit like that right now. Wonderlands is a new Ning-based social networking site for the fantasy fiction community. I found out about it from Mark Newton, and it appears to be UK-based as it only has 19 members and I can see John Jarrold, Debbie Miller, Neil Williamson and Darren Turpin amongst the usual suspects. So I have gone and signed up and now I’m waiting to be approved. I’ll let you know if that happens.

In the meantime I’m none too impressed with the software. Maybe it is just a theme that someone did for it, but the sign-up screens are pretty much impossible to read. Also when I clicked on “My Page” I got a message box that managed to tell me that my account was both pending and approved.

Anyway, I am now apparently approved, so I’m off to chat to people there. Feel free to come and join us.

Update: Now 50 members, and a whole lot of US people joined as well. Word is getting around.

Update 2: Debbie Miller appears to be the person who started this. Who knows what it might turn into, but thus far I have discovered a new fantasy convention due to take place in Chester next June. It is called Aetherica, and the GoHs will be Peter Beagle and Joe Abercrombie. Aside from John Wilson, the committee are people I don’t know, and that is good news because it means new con-running blood. Sadly I have to be in San Francisco for this, but I hope the con goes well and that they manage to make it a regular event.

I’m off to London for Pride in an hour or so. If you are at the parade tomorrow I may see you there. Failing that I’ll be about Sunday and Monday morning. Internet access may be patchy due to the flakiness of the T-Mobile mobile broadband system. But as all of the US is on vacation this weekend I don’t think I’ll be missing much.

The good folks at SF Signal have done one of those Mind Meld things on the question of gender imbalance in SF. I was asked to contribute to this, but I turned them down: not because I have anything against SF Signal - the Mind Meld thing is very popular and works quite well, so I was honored to be asked - but because I think that the whole debate has got very narrow and very silly. I may try to write something more general and (hopefully) more useful sometime soon.

Meanwhile David Moles has entered the affray, including the following:

I’d love to edit a fiction magazine that was run like a proper academic journal, by which I mean one based on anonymous independent peer review by experts in the field, which is in this case to say by published authors with expertise in the genre or subgenre of the story under submission.

I’m sure this would be totally dysfunctional, but it would be totally dysfunctional in a different way than our current totally dysfunctional short fiction publishing system.

And that is so true. If there is anything that a career in regulatory economics teaches you it is that no matter how many whiz ways people come up with to “fix” things that are “wrong”, the primary effect of all this huffing and puffing it to create something that is totally dysfunctional in a different way.

Glenda Larke may have found one, in Como. And what is so good about it? The building in which it is located has been around since the 6th Century. That’s the sort of building that ought to be selling books.

I quote from Nature:

The Spanish parliament’s environment committee last week approved resolutions for chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans to gain some statutory rights currently applicable only to humans. It is thought to be the first time a national legislature has taken such action.

More here.

Because apparently it is possible to “pull a quantum state back from the brink of collapse, ‘uncollapsing’ it and returning it to its unobserved state.” Nature explains. I’m afraid it is a bit to much for my brain this evening.

Given the occasional embarrassing error that has occurred at Hugo Award ceremonies over the years, it is a relief to know that even big mainstream events can get it wrong. Fortunately the difference between winning and losing a Hugo is not generally in the region of $18,000.

As you probably know by now, I’m not good at obituaries. I generally don’t know what to say, and I also think there’s a major cultural disconnect between the UK and US in this area, so I often end up saying nothing rather than sound stupid or offensive. But I’m going to make an exception for Frank Darcy.

I’m not sure that I ever met Frank, though we may well have been at a convention together at some time. I did, however, know him through the Internet. Quite a few people I know have been struggling with cancer of late. Some, thankfully, have beaten the disease. Frank lost his battle this morning. But along the way he showed amazing bravery and good heart, in particular by starting the Toast to Life project. And as I consequence Frank became one of those people that I would very much have liked to meet. Now I won’t get the chance. Sometimes life gets you like that. But hopefully Frank’s good example will have inspired other people. And when it is my turn to go I hope to do so with the same amount of good cheer and concern for others.

Just in case any of you are tempted, please note the following warning:

Do Not Sign Up With Setanta

We originally signed up with them to watch the IPL. The coverage was pretty good, but after that tournament ended my mum decided that she didn’t want to continue with it, mainly because they put the price up by 30% after the first month. So last month she wrote to them canceling the service, and stopped the direct debit. This month the service is still available on our TV, so mum called them to see what was up. Firstly she was told that she was in debt to Setanta and was not even allowed to talk to anyone about her account until she paid for another month. That’s extortion. And when she finally got to talk to the finance people she was told that they won’t accept cancellation of accounts unless you write to a special address, which they don’t make public until you call and complain.

So basically we are getting charged for a service that we don’t want, and won’t be using, because the supplier of that service is making is almost impossible to cancel it. Doubtless there are all sorts of legal loopholes that allow them to get away with it, but I know they they couldn’t have done so in the US because I’ve been through this sort of problem with an ISP.

Anyway, you have been warned.

Further to yesterday’s mention of the auction to help defend California’s marriage laws, Tero reminds me that if you can’t contribute work and don’t want to bi on anything you can just donate money to one of the organizations they are working for. I recommend Equality California.

In the meantime, if you are a writer or artist, please consider donating something. I’ve seen Ellen Kushner and Anne Harris mention the auction, so obviously word is getting round, but the more the merrier.

And just so you won’t miss this post, here’s the banner:

Advance warning for Bay Area people: the next SF in SF reading will feature none other than Mr. Cheeseblogging himself, Jay Lake. Also the very wonderful Susan Palwick. The event is at 7:00pm on July 12th. Further details from the web site. Also this month’s movie night features one of my all time favorite SF movies: City of Lost Children. That’s the evening of July 9th, along with Spirited Away.

Jennifer Ouellette reports on the great female fantasy: a camera that can make you look slimmer. Sadly the urban myth that normal cameras make you look fatter than you are does not appear to be true. Meanwhile I shall continue my quest for a camera that automatically places a brown paper bag over my head when anyone takes a picture of me.

There was a SMOFcon-type event in the UK last weekend. Alex Holden reports:

Later everyone divided into three teams to play an RPG about conrunning called If I Ran the Zoo Con. It was a nice idea, but unfortunately the game has some pretty major problems - it’s very outdated and US-centric, the scenarios presented have very limited options and often key points of information needed to make a decision are not provided, it hovers uncomfortably somewhere between silly and serious, and it’s much too long to run through a complete game in the hour allocated for it.

(My emphasis in bold. I also note that when we run the game at ConStruction we allow an entire evening for it.)

Alex also reports on discussions about possible venues of a future UK Worldcon. One of the possible sites is Liverpool. Don’t all run away screaming, now. There are a lot of nice things about Liverpool, and it is not Blackpool.

Via Andrew McKie I discover that the London Review of Books has a long article about Philip K Dick, inspired by the Library of America editions of his work.

Over at Crooked Timber Henry Farrell trails a paper he and some colleagues have been writing about the nature of people who read (and presumably comment on) blogs. I haven’t read the entire paper yet, but this comment caught my eye:

First – blog readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people who are roughly in accordance with their political views. Left wingers read left wing blogs, right wingers read right wing blogs, and very few people read both left wing and right wing blogs. Those few people who read both left wing and right wing blogs are considerably more likely to be left wing themselves; interpret this as you like. Furthermore, blog readers are politically very polarized. They tend to clump around either the ‘strong liberal’ or the ‘strong conservative’ pole; there aren’t many blog readers in the center. This contrasts with consumers of various TV news channels, as the figure below illustrates. All of this suggests that blog readership is unlikely to be associated with the kinds of deliberative exchange between different points of view that some political theorists would like to see.

I’m not entirely surprised, but it is rather depressing.

Via Justine I learn about this auction happening on LiveJournal to raise money to combat the Defense of the Patriarchy people who are seeking to deny same-sex couples the right to marry in California. There’s a wide variety of stuff on offer, and hopefully a lot more will be added soon (any authors reading this please note). Details about how the auction works, and how to offer an item for sale, can be found here.

And besides posting that I feel kind of useless. Maybe if I offered not to blog for a week people would pay for that.

Today’s Guardian book blog has a post about how the London Review Bookshop has managed to succeed in a commercial environment that has seen other independent bookstores closing all over the place. It is written by someone involved in managing the store, and is pretty self-congratulatory in places, but this bit in particular rang true:

More than anything, the LRB shop’s defining achievement of the last five years, if I may modestly boast, has been the events programme. It has established the shop as a place where literary and political debate can flourish week after week, with American, European and Arabic writers and commentators, as well as British. We have held over 250 such evenings, and very labour-intensive they are too…

That (as Mr. Punch so famously said) is the way to do it.

I’d buy one of these for Jeff VanderMeer in a shot, if it wasn’t advertising someone else’s book.