Conventions

Meanwhile, Back to Work

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

The live webcast from BayCon was working tolerably well. Video was heavily pixilated and it the connection dropped a few times, but the audio was pretty good. Sadly the same can’t be said of the accompanying chat which was pretty stupid and childish. That’s the last time I’ll be bothering to watch one of those.

Aussi, En France

~ Cheryl

One of the things I picked up in Epinal was a flier for a convention of erotic arts taking place in Rennes in December. The event is being put on by an organization called Les Féerotiques. Fée is, of course, French for fairy, so there’s a definite genre influence here, and the fliers appear to have been distributed by the folks doing the all-over body painting. Interesting. Wonder if they can paint maps of Palimpsest?

Lazy French Sunday

~ Cheryl

It is the last day of the con here in Epinal. The sun is shining brightly outside and the hotel lobby is full of people checking their email, sad creatures that we are. I appear to have failed to post anything at all on this blog yesterday, so here’s a pile of catch-up.

Yesterday I did some shopping and shot a pile of video interviews. The three US guests here have all had a wonderful time. I haven’t done an interview with Hal Duncan yet, but when I left him last night he was in the local Irish pub working his way through the various beers that they have so I’m pretty sure he’s happy too.

My friends at Bragelonne, one of the leading SF&F publishers in France, did a panel yesterday talking about their upcoming schedule. Stéphane Marsan talked rather too quickly for me to follow about their fantasy list. I did manage to note that James Barclay is very popular here. Tom Clegg is now handling the SF line and he made me very happy by announcing that they have a French translation of Brasyl in the works. The best audience reaction of the panel, however, was reserved for Isabelle Varange who edits their new Milady imprint. This mainly does urban fantasy and supernatural romance, but what got the audience excited was an announcement about a series of books featuring a sexy cyborg and her elf rock-star boyfriend. Go Justina!

The other panel I attended yesterday was devoted to the French-language podcast web site, Utopod. It is run by Lucas Moreno who lives in Switzerland but was born in Uruguay and who speaks Spanish, French and English fluently. He’ll be at Worldcon – look out for him. Podcasting is a fairly new idea in the Francophone world, and many of the audience had difficulty coming to grips with the idea that Utopod‘s output was available for free. They kept suggesting daft schemes by which they thought Lucas could monetize the web site, and he kept explaining why they would not work, and would just mean he had many fewer listeners. The phrase “Cory Doctorow” got used a lot.

The evening was given over to the Prix Imaginales, which I covered live for SF Awards Watch. The viewing numbers were not great, but we had people following the blog from France, Belgium, Switzerland, the UK and the USA, so I’m pretty happy. Huge thanks are due to Lionel Davoust who helped me organize the whole thing and provided helpful commentary on the French writers and publishers. You can see a picture of the trophy here. It is made of plastic so it is not quite as imposing as a Hugo, but it is undeniably cute.

After the ceremony we all headed off to Le Bagatelle for dinner where we discovered that green rhubarb is a local delicacy. And then, just in case we hadn’t had enough wine and green rhubarb liqueur, we fell into the nearby Irish pub. And that means I am all caught up here and can get on with doing SFAW posts and checking the video.

Imaginales – Day 2 Wrap

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

First up I have discovered to my embarrassment that I have been mis-pronouncing the name of the convention for ages. The final ‘s’ of Imaginales is silent. I have been spending too much time with Latino people, I think, and my mind processes foreign languages as if they are Spanish.

Today has been amazing. Around lunch time the kids arrived. I guess school was out for the week. Admission to the con is free, so there are huge numbers of young people here. As with Finncon it will be hard to estimate how many, but certainly many hundreds. I suspect it will be several thousand by the end of the weekend.

Hal Duncan has arrived. As you may have seen him tweet, he was only on his second beer of the day when a 10-foot tall blue-skinned woman marched into the convention. It is true, I have video.

On the downside there have been a few schedule mistakes, one of which led to poor Bruce missing a reading this afternoon and a bunch of us having a small panic about where he was. These issues are, of course, fixable with good program ops people and sufficient staff. But if you have so many young people attending then finding new staff should be easy.

I have a photo of the own-label wine here. They have both red and white, only 9 Euros a bottle.

Tomorrow evening I will be live-blogging the awards ceremony over at SF Awards Watch. Huge thanks are due to Lionel Davoust who not only helped to arrange this with the tech crew, but also volunteered to help host the event. His English is excellent and of course he’ll be able to able to respond to any French people who chance along.

Imaginales: Day 2

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

Hello everyone. I am writing this from the Internet lounge at the convention, which is an interesting experience as the French keyboard layout is subtly different to the UK/US one. My laptop is back at the hotel and it is raining heavily. I don’t want to get my fur wet.

If you have seen the photos on Twitter you will know that some of the convention space is in tents, but they are very good tents and the rain is no problem.

I have been meeting a number of French writers, several of whom speak good English and hope to be in Montréal. These include Lionel Davoust, who has two short stories in the running for the Prix Imaginales, and Jean-Claude Dunyach who I believe was in the Jim & Kathy Morrow anthology of European SF. I have also met Andreas Eschbach, who is very nice, and Andrzej Sapkowski who is very amusing and speaks excellent English (along with 9 other languages).

I have also found gamers and costumers – some aspects of fandom are universal – but Jean-Louis and I were met with blank stares yesterday when we tried to explain filk. I’m working on getting wi-fi for the award ceremony.

And finally, as this is France, why yes, the convention does have its own label wine. I shall buy some and bring it back.

Epinal!

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Well, I am here. Epinal looks to be a lovely town, and they are really taking the convention seriously. When I walked out of the station I was greeted by a large poster advertising Imaginales. There are posters in the streets, and in my hotel. It is wonderful.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Thanks to being able to stay with the Clutes (thank you, John & Judith), it was no problem getting to St. Pancras for a 7:30 departure. The Eurostar was very comfortable, and I slept most of the way through the tunnel. France is very overcast today, and it was pouring with rain when I had to walk from Gare du Nord to Gare de l’Est. Fortunately it isn’t far. The TGV was also very comfortable, and the on-board food was very tasty. It is wonderful to be in a country that likes cheese to taste of cheese.

I’m rooming with my new friend, Gillian, who is co-editor of Galaxies magazine, one of France’s leading SF publications. She has promised to introduce me to all of the French writers. She’s also done most of the talking for me. Apart from ordering my lunch on the train I haven’t had to speak French at all. I’m sure this will change, and then I will embarrass myself.

Also here is Jean-Louis Trudel from Canada who is doing a panel on Worldcon this evening. I’ll go along to that to answer questions.

The only small snag I had had thus far is that the wi-fi signal is too weak in my hotel room so I have to come down to the lobby get online. Fortunately I also have the iPhone and Twitter. That’s the best way to keep up with me while I’m here. I don’t expect to be able to answer email more than once or twice a day.

Not Work Safe

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Continuing the coverage from the Bristol Comic Expo, the guys from The Geek Syndicate have posted of podcast of “Two Drunk Guys in a Panel”, in which Tony Lee and Dan Boultwood fearlessly set out to destroy careers and reputations (their own). Amazingly, despite being given almost an hour to talk, they did not manage to offend the entire universe, though they did try ever so hard.

Et Maintenant, En Français

~ Cheryl

Well, headlines anyway…

This being the year of the Montréal Worldcon, it seems to be a good time to look into what is happening in the genre community in French-speaking countries, and in particular in France. I’m off to London tomorrow afternoon, and on an early morning Eurostar to Paris, and then TGV to Epinal, where I will be attending Imaginales, one of France’s biggest conventions.

As part of my preparation for that I have been looking at the annual awards they present. The Prix Imaginales are something like the World Fantasy Awards, except for work in French rather than English. There’s information about them on the SF Awards Watch site. You can see from the nominees for the Translated Novel category that our French friends have excellent taste in literature. Swordspoint and King of Morning, Queen of Day are two of my favorite fantasy novels, and the rest of the list is very impressive too.

Interestingly the YA and short fiction categories are open to translated fiction as well as works originally written in French. Thus we find Kelly Link (of course) in the running for the short fiction prize, and three translated novels in the YA category. Hopefully you are all familiar with Walter Moers because I have reviewed one of his books. Licia Troisi is an Italian writer who, according to Wikipedia, is also a professional astrophysicist.

For information on the French writers and artists I am relying on the help of the folks at Galaxies magazine. Gillian Gray has been enormously helpful already, and I’m hoping to meet up with Pierre Gévart at the convention. More information about the current French-language SF&F scene should follow.

I see from the con schedule that there is a program item about Worldcon on Thursday evening, and I will make sure I am at that, but I shall leave most of the talking to Jean-Louis Trudel because he’s a native French-speaker and my French is still atrocious. Hopefully it will be better by the end of the weekend.

Fortunately there will be a few English-speakers about. David Anthony Durham, Hal Duncan and Bruce Holland Rogers are all guests of the convention. I’m also hope that Andreas Eschbach and Andrzej Sapkowski speak good English because I really like their books.

And finally I hope to spend a little time at Le Musée de l’Image, which looks to be totally awesome (25,000 works of art, from the 17th Century to the present day).

Fresh Blood?

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

Over at con-news.com there is some evidence that the huge success of the new Star Trek movie is resulting in a greatly increased interest in science fiction convention. Go look.

And before people start whining about how “they’ll all be Trekkies, they won’t know anything about fandom, they’ll just want to be entertained” and so on, and start concocting schemes for keeping all of these newcomers away, just remember what became of some of the people who came in on the first surge of Star Trek fandom. Some of them are still here and running Worldcons.

It occurs to me that Montreal ought to be getting in touch with the Star Trek people right now. It may not come to anything, because Hollywood is still Hollywood, but you never know.

Bristol Saturday Wrap

~ Cheryl

Well, that was the day that was. It seems from Twitter than a number of people enjoyed what I did. The viewing stats were very low indeed, but that will be partly because most of it happened when the US was asleep, and partly due to the lack of interactivity. Having field reporters is all very well, but I think these things go much better when you have people online and can talk to them.

If anyone has any comments on the technology I’d be grateful if you could share them so I can do better next time.

My thanks are due to Paul Cornell, Tony Lee and Simon Gurr for agreeing to add their tweets to the coverage. Here’s hoping they found it useful too. Paul kept telling everyone he introduced me to about the live blog, so I guess he was happy with it.

Thanks also to all of the fabulous people I met during the day, including Amy of Birds of Geek, Asia Alfasi, Dave and Barry of Geek Syndicate, and Dennis of Zzizzl Comix. I’ll have more to say about all of them (ominous drum roll) when I write the con report.

And finally, thanks to Liam Sharp, Eugene Byrne and Rod Jones, all of whom I don’t see often enough.