Kevin and I have just completed around 40 minutes worth of telephone interview for MSN Mexico. This was for Roberto De Antuñano’s Ultralinea program. He wanted to talk to someone about WSFS and the Hugos, and of course Kevin is The Man as far as WSFS is concerned. Hopefully we did a good job. I have no idea when, or if, any of this will be broadcast, but if I find out I shall let you know. I’d like to thank Roberto for giving us the opportunity to plug WSFS to his audience. Here’s hoping we see a lot more of Spanish-speaking science fiction fans in the future.
Conventions
2011 Wordcon: The Bidders Speak
Kevin has been busy uploading video of the Fannish Inquisition session from last year’s SMOFcon. The material of most interest is that covering the 2011 Worldcon race. If you are not sure who to vote for, you may find this interesting. Videos below the cut.
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Editing Needed
I’ve just done a first trial read-through of the ICFA paper. 28 minutes. Clearly I have to cut some of it, as the time limit is only 20 minutes. Fortunately I was expecting this, and already have some good ideas about what can go. I’ll make the full version available later.
Back to Normal
Well, that’s another conference over. Sorry it has been so quiet here, but I have been busy on my company blog and I haven’t had much time for anything else.
The conference was a lot of fun, and reminded me quite a bit of ICFA (as opposed to other work conferences I’ve been to which have been either all-business or heavily theoretical). I think I might go to more of these, though they do need to do less of the mandatory formal banqueting and cut the cost. I mean, what’s the point of going to New Orleans and then forcing everyone to eat hotel food?
This evening we had a reception in the Cabildo, which is the big building at the far end of Jackson Square from Cafe du Monde. It was very nice. Good food, and there’s a museum in the building with a lot of local history. Obviously it has a lot about the good people of New Orleans seeing off the evil British, but I’m used to that sort of thing. Kevin would have loved it.
By the time that was over I just about had enough energy to stagger across the square for hot chocolate and beignets. Now I am going to bed and not putting the alarm on. If I get up in time I’m going to Two Sisters for brunch, and maybe doing some shopping. I’ll be home later tomorrow. Normal service will be resumed on Sunday.
Katrina & The Waves
OK, so I’m sure I haven’t been the first person to use that pun about New Orleans, but it seemed appropriate given the subject matter of this post.
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Conference Comparison
Aside from the early start, so far so good. The conference has been running pretty much to time and I’ve seen people wandering around with “two minutes” and “stop now” signs. The badges are done right. We got nice, spacious tote bags with our reg packs. My only real complaint is that the whole thing is too heavily programmed – 7:00am to 9:30pm with very little time out. Lunch and dinner are provided, and they have speakers at both events.
Fortunately the first plenary session of the morning is about the energy industry in the Gulf (we are in New Orleans, after all), which is of little interest to me. My original plan was to hit Cafe du Monde for breakfast, but it is pouring with rain and I forgot to bring an umbrella. Starbucks has been a very inadequate substitute.
Internet access in the Sheraton is interesting. They have a range of daily plans priced according to the download speed, so if you really want to watch movies you can, but if all you want to do is blog and get email you don’t have the pay for the premium service. I’m on the cheapest ($10/day) plan and it is working fine. What they don’t have, however, are multi-day discounts. Boo.
If anyone is interesting in knowing what I’m actually doing here, there will be coverage of the conference on my company web site.
About Next Week
One of the reasons I decided to go for Twitter is that next week I will have an ideal excuse to test it – I am off to N’Awlins for a business conference. That means I’ll be detached from my laptop for a fair amount of time Wednesday thru Saturday, but I will have my phone. Therefore, if I feel the need to say something like, “You are at SMOFcon in Columbus where it is probably snowing, but I am in Cafe du Mode eating beignets” then I can do so.
Not that the actual conference I’m at will be any more entertaining than SMOFcon, but it is in N’Awlins and it does have a couple of evening functions. Having not been to one of these things before, I inquired of a colleague about the dress code. This is what he said:
my suggestion is to err on the side of being over-dressed and not the other way around
He’s clearly never seen my wardrobe. 🙂
But I might just take something utterly speccy. I shall explain why later.
Wave Incoming
Novacon took place in the UK over the weekend, and one of the things that happened there is that Steve Green and Martyn Tudor re-launched their famous fanzine, Critical Wave. This being v2.0, it is available online at efanzines.com. At a panel on “electronic fan writing, threat or menace?” (or whatever it was called – helpfully live-blogged here by Feòrag) Steve explained that those icky bloggy things don’t do proper con reports, so he wanted to create a fanzine to carry them. So far so good, in that issue #1 contains reports on FantasyCon 2008, James Bacon’s ZombieCon and NewCon 4. Here’s looking forward to more.
By the way, I see from the Novacon web site that, after years of being paper only, the Novas are now open to electronic fanzines. I wonder why that could be?
Indian Convention Report
I have discovered that there is a blog called Science Fiction in India (which I shall be following in future). A recent post gives a report on a convention in Varanasi that brought together the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies, the Indian Science Fiction Writers’ Association and the National Council for Science & Technology Communication. That’s serious stuff, but they did have more than national planning for science education on their minds:
In the evening a puppet show on SF story of Zeashan H. Zaidy was presented by Arshad Umar, a puppeteer from Lucknow.
Wow.
(Thanks Peggy)
Aussies Rule
World Fantasy Guest of Honor deliberations generally take place between the convention chair and the World Fantasy Board, so I can’t take any credit for this. However, I am utterly delighted to have just posted the first GoH announcement for the San José convention – the very wonderful Garth Nix!
Chicago (well, Naperville)
We are here, we have found the local Chipotle, all is well. As usual, I slept for most of the flight. Chicago laid on some very nice Scottish weather for us. Apparently Windycon is taking place very near our hotel at the weekend, but we have to fly home on Friday morning for an SFSFC board meeting and SF in SF.
Accepted
My paper proposal for ICFA has been accepted. Now all I have to do is get there.
(And write the paper, of course).
Steam Powered Report
My report on the steampunk convention from last weekend is now online. You can read it here.
Steam Powered Video
There are a couple of video reports from Steam Powered linked to on the Con-News.com blog. The second one is a bit fuzzy, but the first one is quite good and includes some snatches of the concert.
By the way, Con-News.com is a neat little blog that works hard and which everyone who runs a convention ought to have on their press release list.
Photos from Steam Powered online
Lots of steampunky goodness for you all.
[shashin type=”album” id=”18″ size=”medium”]
Update: Kevin’s photos are on Flickr.
Steam Powered: Day 2
Well, that was clever, not only did Steam Powered arrange for a whole lot of people in authentically British costume, that arranged for authentically British weather too. Yes, it has checked it down today. Thankfully Kevin and I spent most of the day indoors.
I’m going to write a proper convention report later, so I won’t say too much about today right now. I attended a few panels. I again resisted buying any of the gorgeous stuff in the dealers’ room, and I did some work on the WFC 2009 web site. And now we are back home and looking forward to an extra hour’s sleep thanks to the clock change. We decided to bail on the concert because we are just too tired.
Yes, I know, wusses.
Still, it has been a good day. And Jeff VanderMeer has some big news (and some gorgeous John Coulthart art).
Steamed Up
Kevin and I are back from the opening evening of Steam Powered, the inaugural steampunk convention, and I’m happy to report that things are getting under way quite nicely. The convention is quite small compared to a Worldcon, but it fits the hotel quite well and just about everyone there was in costume which made it seem a lot more busy somehow. There were a few small glitches at registration – the program books were an hour or so late and they ran out of badge holders – but nothing serious and the staff appeared to be able to cope with such mishaps.
The dealers’ room, which was just about the only thing happening today bar some period dancing, is spectacular. If I’d been a little more confident about my future I could have spent a lot of money there. It seems that there is a lot of creativity going into the steampunk movement at the moment, and of course it is a subject that rewards that sort of effort. There will be photos later.
I wish they were having a masquerade. It will be criminal if they don’t give out hall costume prizes.
The games room was empty. No sign of Space 1899 or Forgotten Futures. Boo.
The Domain, aside from being short on parking spaces, looks to be a nice little hotel suitable for small conventions. It could do with more social space, but Steam Powered has taken up a lot of the lobby with exhibits and a different con might use that space just for seating. There’s plenty to eat nearby. Many thanks to Chris Garcia for directing us to a wonderful Mongolian Barbecue restaurant.
I Say, Back On Track!
As Kevin reported last night, a few additional memberships in the Steampunk Convention became available last night. We quickly bagged a couple. If you are going, you can expect to find us around on Saturday. Please note that while we will make an effort, we are unlikely to achieve anywhere near the level of sartorial elegance of Mr. Roche and Mr. Trembley. I will try to get Kevin to read some of George Mann’s The Affinity Bridge before we go so that we can both enthuse about it. The game’s afoot! Tally ho!
In other news, the very wonderful Gigi Gridley has offered to live-blog the World Fantasy Awards for SFAW. More on that later this week.
Well Scratch That Plan
Today we decided we had better get on and buy memberships in the Steampunk convention, only to discover that the web site now says it is sold out. Ah well, that’s saved us some money, I guess. I wonder what Plan C might be. (Sleep sounds like a good bet.)
It’s Menacing Time!
It seems an awful long time since I have had the whole of the SMOF community furious with me, and as I don’t want to have to give up my “Menace to Fandom” title I thought I ought to do some proper menacing. Besides, as you may recall, my Denvention 3 report sort of tailed off because I had realized that I needed to write a whole new article on what value people get from Worldcon and how we can better market the event to them. Well, I have now written that article. I have no expectations that it will solve all of Worldcon’s problems (indeed, it won’t even get a lot of people to admit that there are problems), but hopefully it will spark a bit of debate and get people thinking about the issues. Check it out, and let me know what you think.