Conventions

The Program Has Landed – #Worldcon09

~ Cheryl

Anticipation has published a draft program schedule (two whole weeks before the convention is due to start – good going!). The draft convention guide is available online here (it is a 7.2Mb PDF so I’ve linked to the main programming page, not the document). This is somewhat provisional as last minute changes are still seeping through (I’m still listed on an item I asked to be taken off because of my Masquerade duties), but it should give you a good idea of what will be on offer and who will be on panel.

One program item I want to get to (though it is going to result in a very busy Friday afternoon) is this one:

International Awards Spotlight – Putting The “World” Back In “Worldcon”!
Julie E. Czerneda, Eric Gauthier, Emma Hawkes, Eric Picholle, Nir Yaniv, Brian Hades, Tamie Inoue, Jeanne-A Debats, Frédérick Durand
While the Hugos are the centrepiece of the Worldcon, and the Auroras of Canvention, there are many other awards given the world over for science fiction literature and media…

While I’m on the subject of things on the Anticipation web site, Masquerade Registration is now live. If you intend to compete, please fill this in now, it will save so much time at the convention.

ConReporter Progress

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

The convention reporting web site is developing nicely. We now have people able to report in French, Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew. Today I added two Montreal residents. But this is definitely a case of “the more the merrier”. I don’t have any Australians yet, or any Japanese, and I’d like to add a few more languages (German, Finnish?). Most importantly I could do with a few more people who won’t be attending the convention to keep an eye on the site while Kevin and I are busy at the con.

My #Worldcon Schedule

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Things seem to be coming together for Montreal. This is a preliminary schedule, because other people may have issues that cause things to move, but we’ve been through one round of changes so hopefully this is close to firm.

Thu 14:00 – Don’t Main the Streams?
How does the mainstream media report on the world of SF? How is SF perceived, how can it be covered well, and what fandom can do to get its story across?

(Sam, Damien, Kate, Mike and anyone else I’ve forgotten who writes for mainstream newspapers, I’d love to hear your views on this.)

Fri 14:00 – The Future of Gender
From contraceptives to computers, is technology undermining traditional gender roles and if so where is this taking us?

Fri 20:00 – Future Sport
Yet more commercialism, leagues and spectator culture? Or is that merely a distraction from the growing number of guerrilla sports, hobbyist groups, and people who think ironing on a mountain top is a sport?

Sat 14:00 – Greatest Fan Writer Besides Me
Best Fan Writer Hugo 2009 nominees recommend the fan writers that you should read and why you should read them. An excellent introduction to the current fan writing scene.

(This is one of those panels that cries out for a list of web links to be published afterward. I will be suggesting that to my fellow panelists.)

Sat 18:00 onwards – Masquerade
I’ll be backstage helping the show run and doing video interviews with some of the costumers.

Sun 14:00 – Private Passions: The Many Interests of Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman talks about the many things that interest him.

Yes, I am introducing Neil’s GoH speech. Can I say how totally stoked I am about this? Woo hoo!

Sun 18:00 onwards – Hugo Awards Ceremony
I’ll be covering the whole event, including the pre-ceremony reception. Right now it looks like I’ll just be tweeting because of lack of wi-fi, but I’ll arrange for someone to be “in the studio” as well.

I have one other possible panel, but I’m not sure I will be able to make time for it. I haven’t listed other participants yet because I’m not certain that they will all be available.

Saving Children From Writers

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

Today’s Independent brings the news that a group of leading UK writers of children’s books will no longer be doing school visits because they object to having to be vetted to prove that they are not paedophiles. Philip Pullman is one of the more prominent authors involved.

This is part of a wider government initiative to insulate the nation’s children from all possible forms of harm, no matter now unlikely. One of the possible side-effects I have seen discussed is that UK conventions will no longer be able to admit children unless all convention staff have been vetted.

Of course, this is all for the good of the children. They have to be protected from bad people. And you can be sure that this legislation is going to get used to bar all sorts of people from working with kids, starting with LGBT folk.

Jones and Stross in Copenhagen

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Knud Larn reminds me that the Danish national SF convention is taking place at the end of August, and the GoHs are Gwyneth Jones and Charlie Stross. I can’t afford the time – I’ve got Worldcon at the beginning of August, and two cons in September. However, for UK fans who are not going to Worldcon this looks like a great option. Copenhagen is a lovely city, and the Danes are very friendly. The convention web site is here.

21st Century Worldcons – An Update

~ Cheryl ~ 13 Comments

Back when I did my post on 21st Century Worldcons I suggested that Web 2.0 techniques could be used to better involve those who cannot attend the convention in what is going on. That, of course, requires a web site. I haven’t had the time, and don’t have the skills, to do that properly, but it is amazing what you can fling together in a hurry using WordPress and a few simple plug-ins. As a result, I’d like to present to you, ConReporter.com.

What’s all this about? Well, the technical term is a “mashup”. That means it is a site that gathers material from elsewhere. In this particular case it does it using RSS feeds. So people who are attending a convention give us their feed URLs. We put them all into the web site. And then anyone who can’t go to the con has us as a one-stop-shop for a wide variety of reports on the event. It is Citizen Journalism in action. I have already signed up a bunch of people. You may recognize some of the names.

It isn’t perfect by any means. I’d like the reports to be much more searchable, but that requires more complicated programming. What I have done instead is assign tags to each reporter on the basis of their interests. That means that users of the blog can easily get a list of those reporters who have an interest in, say, costuming, or science panels.

Someone, I am sure, will accuse me of stealing other people’s content. That’s certainly not the plan. We only syndicate people’s feeds if they ask us to. Of course that means that you have to ask. We won’t automatically include your feeds just because you are reporting on the con.

What I need now is help. Kevin and I cannot run this by ourselves. We’ll be way too busy. And besides, we need reporters. So I am looking for two groups of people.

Reporters: Are you going to be at Worldcon? Will you be blogging or tweeting from the event? If so we’d love to have your reports included on the site. We are particularly interested in people whose interests are not yet covered, and in people who are going to be reporting in languages other than English. This is a Worldcon, and we want the whole world to be able to participate.

Editors: If this thing takes off as we hope it will, we’ll need help over the next few weeks getting all of the reporters set up on the site. We also need people who are not going to be at Worldcon who can monitor what is going on and create blog posts on the home page highlighting particularly interesting reports. We need people who can act as studio editors for the CoverItLive sessions, answering questions and approving comments.

Long term this is something I hope other people will take over. I hope the technique can be used for other conventions, and I don’t have the time to keep it running. But I’m putting it out there because I want people to take an interest in Worldcon, and I want people who run conventions to see what can be done.

Feedback would be very much appreciated.

Readercon Does A Boskone

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

While I was at Finncon I was seeing regular enthusiastic tweets from people at Readercon. It sounded like a very impressive event (albeit, Graham, very small in comparison). Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover on getting home that Readercon 2010 will be seriously downsized. Some initial unhappy reaction, and response from the convention, can be found here.

Much of the negative reaction can, I suspect, be blamed on the fact that Boston fandom has a very poor track record when it comes to convention downsizing. The infamous Boskone meltdown, which gave rise to Arisia, is something that fandom ought to have learned from, but is also bound to be brought up any time a US con has to downsize. Also Eric Van, although ferociously intelligent in many ways, is not the best communicator in fandom. He needed someone else to handle the downsizing project.

Therein, however, lies the rub. Eric is downsizing Readercon because he doesn’t have the time and energy to run it at the current levels any more, and he says he can’t find anyone to help him. Is that really the case?

There are issues with popular culture events that can lead to a desire to downsize. I’ll talk about them more in the Finncon report. However, Readercon has never been anywhere near the size that Finncon is now, so it shouldn’t suffer from those sorts of problems. Nevertheless, fan-run conventions continue to get themselves into this sort of mess because as a community we tend to be bad at delegating, bad at managing people, and bad at PR. We are also bad at understanding our motivations.

I’ve never been to Readercon – there tends to always be something else happening around that time – so I can’t speak authoritatively on this. However, I understand that it is around the same size as WisCon (under 1000), which also has phenomenally good programming, so running it should not be impossible. WisCon also instituted a membership cap (because it didn’t want to leave its current facility) without causing undue upset. Of course if the Readercon folks don’t want to run their convention any more, that’s down to them, but I don’t believe that it is impossible to carry on the way they were going, if they could get other people involved.

Unfortunately, as a convention gets bigger and more successful, there will always be people who wander around complaining that “things aren’t like they used to be”, there are way too many people around, and they are “not like us”. If you listen to these whiners it is all too easy to get depressed about your convention and want to give up. Ultimately, however, there are only two good reasons for running a con. They are 1) “I want to run a big party for myself and my friends” and 2) “I want to promote an interest in science fiction.” You can do both for a while, but if you are successful you have to believe in 2, otherwise it all becomes too much. It sounds to me like Readercon wants to go back to doing 1, and that means there will be a hole in the market for anyone who wants to start a con doing 2.

Finncon Wrap

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

I’ll be doing a full convention report on Finncon (and the DWJ conference) later, but I wanted to take time out now to make a few final comments and thank people who needed to be thanked. So, thank you very much to:

  • Otto and Paula for being such generous and graceful hosts
  • Jukka, Eemeli and Topi for chairing the biggest and most successful Finncon I have seen
  • Merja for running a very enjoyable academic session (and for the copy of her doctoral thesis)
  • Irma for being as wonderful as ever, for the tiara, and for the bottle of pine tar liqueur (which made it home safely this year, possibly due to an absence of thirsty Sean Williams books in my suitcase)
  • Aleksi for loyally preserving some of my HangerOne Chipotle vodka for two years so I could drink it again
  • The Finnish filkers for performing one of my songs so beautifully
  • Everyone who entered the CosPlay and Masquerade, or came in costume
  • All of my fellow judges for both CosPlay and Masquerade
  • George, Al and Adam for being such great guests
  • FluffCthulhu for accepting our sacrifices and ensuring that it rained in Cardiff but not in Helsinki

Two things stand out about the event. The first is that Adam Roberts totally charmed the Finns (see comments on his blog for examples). I have occasionally heard people say, “Oh, there’s no point in my going to X because none of my books are translated there.” Adam has comprehensively proved that idea wrong.

Secondly there is the sheer size of the event. As I have said before, it is extremely difficult to get accurate figures on the attendance of free events, but the estimate of 15,000 that was being bandied about on Sunday doesn’t seem unrealistic to me. Previous Finncons have appeared to have very large attendances in too-small venues. This one had a much bigger venue, excellent media coverage, and a seemingly endless stream of teenage kids going in and out. Every program item I attended was standing room only, and only one of those (the individual CosPlay) was anime-related.

Future Finncons will have to be smaller. I’ll talk more about that later. But this one was phenomenal, and I’m very proud to have played a small part in its success.

Finncon Live Tweets

~ Cheryl

The following window will draw in tweets from myself and a bunch of Finnish fans who I know are at Finncon. As the convention has good free wi-fi I hope to be able to log in and answer questions at some times during the weekend, but I won’t be online constantly.

Truth Today

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

The Iron Sky guys are an endless source of amusement. For Finncon they have produced a mock tabloid newspaper called Truth Today. Naturally it leads with the rumor that there are Nazis on the Moon! It also has a bunch of other spoof articles, including “United States Accepts Soccer as Sport”.

Here Be Hordes

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The convention is now in full swing and I am at the main venue. There are thousands of kids here, many of them in fabulous costumes. For the first time Finncon has a venue (just) big enough to cope with the numbers, and it has sprouted a Worldcon-sized dealers’ room to take advantage of the crowds. Despite the vast size of the venue, the con committee is looking nervously at the hordes and wondering what would happen if it rained and they all wanted to come inside at once. Thankfully most of them are outside photographing each other.

Our Swedish friends are here, and there are posters around advertising both the 2011 Eurocon and this year’s Swecon, whose GoHs are Liz Williams and Graham Joyce. I’m told that there are also Russian fans here, but I haven’t seen any yet.

My first job here will be to check out the rooms where my program items are. After that I’ll go take photos until 5:00pm when the all-GoH panel of writing is due to start. After that, dinner and pub.

By the way, I am writing this thanks to the free wi-fi at the convention. Yet another thing that Finncon has got right.

Modes of Fantasy

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today’s academic papers were very interesting. I don’t want to go into every paper in detail here as it would bore most of you. However, I do want to highlight a couple of ideas that came out of the discussion on Jyrki Korpua’s paper on Tolkien.

Firstly we are all used to thinking of The Lord of the Rings as the archetypal secondary world fantasy. However, Adam pointed out that one of the functions of the hobbits in the story is to stand in for the modern, middle class novel reader who can then visit the far stranger medieval and Anglo-Saxon worlds of Gondor and Rohan. When Tolkien tries to do without our hobbit intermediaries, such as in The Silmarillion, we find his books much less accessible. This makes LotR much more of a portal fantasy.

We also discussed the whole idea of the novel as the story of a character’s life journey, the Bildungsroman, and how this is actually a Renaissance invention that was possible only when people abandoned the medieval world view of an unchanging society and started to see the world as something that could and should be changed.

Press Success

~ Cheryl

The Finncon media machine has produced its usual good coverage. We have almost a whole page in the most important Finnish newspaper today, including a long interview with George. They also did a “what’s on at the con” section, in which I get a name check as I’m on a panel with George. And of course the coverage repeatedly mentions that entry is free so everyone should come along.

I have more academic papers to review this morning. Opening ceremonies at the con are this afternoon.

#Finncon is Under Way

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Here I am in Helsinki, and Finncon is well under way. I arrived late last night and headed straight to a pub where I found our GoHs, George RR Martin and Al Reynolds, in the company of the usual suspects (including Toni Jerrman who can always be relied upon where beer is concerned). From there we went to an interesting restaurant called Zetor. It has something of a tractor fetish. I had the sauteed reindeer, which was very nice despite coming with an Evil Dill Pickle.

I am staying with my good friends Otto and Paula (and their two cats). Otto is once again providing guest liaison services and his car has been transformed into the official Finncon GuestMobile for the duration of the convention. I’m very grateful to him because today Helsinki is getting the weather that London had on Tuesday.

The morning saw the traditional press conference which I am pleased to say went very well (good job, Hannele). There were several journalists and photographers, and both Al and George got taken aside for interviews. The general question session saw the expected questions – George was asked abut his over-enthusiastic fans and Al about his million-pound book deal. However, we did get other stuff as well. I suspect that the thing you will be most interested in is the Song of Ice & Fire TV show. Here’s what George said.

Casting is currently under way, and they are very serious about this. They are even holding casting sessions in Australia. I asked if I could play Sersi, but George politely declined to reply. Filming will be taking place in Northern Ireland, actually in a studio on the site of the old Harland & Wolff ship yard where, as George noted, they built The Titanic. HBO will not make a decision about the series, or even screening the pilot, until after the pilot has been shot. As George explained, some pilots never even get shown. But hopefully this one will and a series will follow.

George was also asked why he started such a huge fantasy series. He said that after years in Hollywood he got fed up with being told that his ideas were too big and expensive to film, so he decide to go back to books where he could have whatever ideas he wanted. The irony is that now those big ideas will be filmed, but of course technology has moved on a lot in the last decade (hello Weta).

There was also an interesting discussion about book signings. Al said that the bookstores and publishers in the UK are not interested in doing signing tours, or even one-off signings, these days unless they are sure you will attract the sort of crowds that Neil Gaiman (and George) get. Even someone like Al, who is a big enough name to be signed to a 10-book million-pound deal, apparently only attracts 20+ people to a signing at Forbidden Planet. It is all very sad.

I’m currently in a book store in Helsinki that is run by my friend Iida, and I’m borrowing her Mac to do some quick blogging before having to head off to the academic conference at 13:00. I’ll be tweeting from the convention throughout the weekend, but don’t expect much in the way of blog updates unless I can find free wi-fi at the con. If you would like to see what the Finnish fans are saying you might want to check out the Finncon Twibe. However, that depends on people remembering to use the #finncon hashtag, so when I get a spare moment I will set up a CoverItLive session for the weekend that will capture all tweets from the Twibe members.