Conventions

Montreal Speaks

~ Cheryl

No less than three press releases in my inbox from Anticipation this morning. This is generally a bad idea, unless you want to bury some of the news you are announcing, but I will mention all three anyway.

First up the convention has an Artist GoH. He is be Ralph Bakshi. Yep, the guy who did the animated Lord of the Rings movie. That’s a fascinating choice. I’m impressed.

Secondly, Anticipation will be hosting the Prix Aurora Awards. That was pretty much expected, but it is nice to have it confirmed. Science Fiction Awards watch will be there – live if Internet connection permits.

And finally Anticipation now has an installment plan for those of you who can’t manage to pay the whole membership at once.

As ever, full details at the convention’s web site.

SMOFcon 26

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Via Kevin I discover that SMOFcon 26 has a web site at last. It is a little light on details (I’m sure they have more than three members), but at least it looks professionally put together. Progress. And Kevin also reports that there are plenty of good places to eat nearby.

Of course even competent web designers can make mistakes. Is it really a good idea to have your header graphics so large that most people have to scroll down to see any content at all? (What, you mean that ordinary people don’t have massive screens like I have on my development machine?)

2010 Too

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I have been reminded that there is also some competition for 2010. A bunch of engaging lunatics from Rochester, NY want to hijack a ferry and run a pirate cruise around the Great Lakes. Needless to say, this is a hoax bid, but given how badly one or two of the Australians reacted to the Alcatraz in 1999 bid it is probably necessary to point out that it has no chance of winning, or indeed affecting the result in any way.

Robert Asprin, RIP

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

There are plenty of things that can cause a convention committee to lie awake at night worrying, but one you never think about because it is too awful to contemplate is having your main Guest of Honor drop dead the day before the con starts. Much sympathy therefore to the family and friends of Robert Asprin, who died yesterday of a massive heart attack, and to the committee of MarCon, whose convention he was due to grace over the weekend.

I’m not a great expert on Asprin’s work, but Kevin got his start in fandom as the founder and President of the MythAdventures Fan Club. Kevin is also a GoH at MarCon this year, and was looking forward to seeing Bob for the first time in years. And indeed Asprin’s career seemed to be taking off again after years in the doldrums. It is all very sad indeed.

And for the con committee it gets worse, because as Kevin explains, two of their other guests were Jody Lyn Nye, who has been co-writing books with Bob, and editor Bill Fawcett, who was Bob’s business manager. Understandably both of them have more important things to be doing right now than attending a convention.

At times like this there is not much you can do except try to make lemonade from the lemons that life has thrown you. Presumably there are a lot of Robert Asprin fans at Marcon. Hopefully they can show true fannish resourcefulness and come up with something that will pay tribute to Bob in a totally awesome way. I have every confidence in them.

Update: idiot spelling mistake fixed – thanks Chaz

Making Hay

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

It seems to be a good day for amusing comment threads at The Guardian. The latest blog entry to turn up in my feeds was this one, which is about their coverage of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. Sadly the first comment has now been deleted by Guardian staff, which is a shame because it was a rather funny rant about the commenter’s opinion that no one wants to listen to a bunch of luvvies talking to each other. In The Guardian’s defense I should note that the comment did include at least one reference to copulation so it probably wasn’t deleted for being uncomplimentary about the literati.

Anyway, this encouraged me to pop over to the Hay Festival web site to see what I could find. Two things were immediately obvious. Firstly, no one involved with the Festival is aware that the European Cup hasn’t been called the European Cup since 1991. And secondly, the next time someone complains that a convention web site is doing a poor job of presenting the program online I shall point them at Hay’s web site so they can see how badly it can be done if you try hard enough.

I did, however, look through the entire brochure. After all, Hay isn’t that far away. If there was a train station there I could pop over for the day (but there isn’t). And indeed they have appearances by Michael Wood, Ben Goldacre and Karen Armstrong that I might find interesting. On the spec-fic side there’s not so much. It seems that Hay is quite happy to talk about fantastical things if they are in books for children, in movies, or even in opera, but in books for adults, oh dear me no. (Well, except for Mr. Rushdie of course, but we mustn’t accuse him of writing anything fantastical, even if his new book has just been reviewed by John Clute and sounds really rather interesting.)

But never fear, science fiction fans, the people who run Hay know that you exist, and this year they have put on a program item just for you! They have got the man who does the voice of the Daleks to come and run a Doctor Who trivia quiz. Isn’t that thrilling!?

Attention Finland

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I see from Liz Williams’ LiveJournal that she has been asked to be GoH for Imagicon 2 in Stockholm next year. If I understand things correctly, that’s a firm event that is also bidding to be the 2009 Swecon. Liz is a wonderful writer (and has produced some fabulous Feminist SF as well as the brilliant Inspector Chen series). I hope lots of Finns (and other persons for that matter) make the trip to Stockholm.

(I’d consider going myself, but I have this Word Fantasy Con to prepare for, and anyway I may have no money by then.)

Dodged a Bullet

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I’ve just been trying to book my flight to Finncon. The SAS web site came back with a message saying that the card purchase had not been approved. So I called Amex. That would be $280 for a plane ticket? Yep. And what about the other charge for $28,000 to the same company?

I’ve canceled both charges and will try again when I get to the UK. Thank goodness for Amex. This is why I use them.

(Gosh – Zemanta just came up with e photo of Joe Haldeman from last year’s FinnCon.)

CostumeCon Catch-Up

~ Cheryl

Kevin is back home with two pieces of good news. Firstly they used my suggestion as the name for the newsletter (it was called “My Evil Plan”). Tom Becker appears to have done a fabulous job with it. Also there are DVDs, already! I’m taking them back to the UK with me. (Doubtless Teddy and Tom have copies too.) I shall bring the SF masquerade one with me to Finncon.

Oh, and the “Space Girls” skit was absolutely hilarious – well done girls!

Antipodean Tour?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Via Concatenation I learn that there are plans afoot for fans in New Zealand to hold their 2010 NatCon the weekend before the expected Australian Worldcon. As you may know, the Aussies pretty much have a lock on 2010 as they are the only official bid on the ballot. I suspect that the prospect of stopping off in New Zealand the weekend before will appeal to a lot of traveling American and Canadian fans (it is harder from Europe as the flights go the other way). I very much enjoyed the one New Zealand convention I attended, and I’d love a chance to go back there, even if it is out of the Super 14 season. Any Kiwis out there know anything about this?

ICFA Photos

~ Cheryl

I have been looking at photo-handling plugins for WordPress and I have finally settled on Shashin, partly because it works with Picasa, my preferred photo hosting site, but mainly because it works. So, now it is installed, and here are some photos from ICFA.

[shashin type=”album” id=”1″ size=”medium”]

ICFA Photos

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

There are photos of ICFA available online from Ellen Datlow and Kathryn Cramer. Incredibly both of them have managed to take photos of me without destroying their cameras.

And if you are wondering why, in one of Kathryn’s photos (actually taken by David Hartwell) I am photographing Lisa Yasek’s back, well you will have to wait for my pictures. I have them all ready, but I have offered Liza first call on them for Locus.

An Impromptu Party

~ Cheryl

Today (it being past midnight) is Gary Wolfe’s birthday, so we’ve been having a little party. A bunch of us had dinner together in the hotel restaurant and amusing conversation flowed. Charles was curmudgeonly – something he’s very good at. Ellen Klages was hilarious – something she is very good at. Clute has become obsessed with the hotel’s habit of distorting the aspect ratio on their TVs so as to make the pictures fill up the whole wide screen surface, thereby making people look shorter and fatter than they really are. There was a running gag about the World Fantasy Award trophy as a result of which I discovered I was one of the few people at the table who did not have a big, ugly head.

The hotel kindly brought Gary a candle with his desert, and we discovered that the Big, Bad Wolfe is indeed not very good at huffing and puffing.

But Gary did come up with one of the best one-liners of the entire conference. Here it is:

“Realism is nothing but the domestication of fantasy.”

ICFA Con Report

~ Cheryl

I’ve done a full con report for ICFA. You can find it here. Photos will follow once I’ve given Liza an opportunity to see if she wants any for Locus.

Convention Finder

~ Cheryl

Via SFWA I have discovered this new web site that claims to be able to give you a list of all of the conventions within 120 miles of your zip code. Of course it can only do that if it knows about the con. If you have a con to promote, you should let them know.

Breakfast

~ Cheryl

I am awake, sort of. Given the time I got to bed last night, I think I may be back on California time. But I think I am doing OK. Over breakfast I have been discussing the role of maps in fantasy novels and the soap opera nature of formula fantasy with John Clute, Liz Hand and Guy Gavriel Kay. Clute is a morning person, and even more terrifyingly clever when he’s awake and you still desperately need coffee. I think I managed to hold my own. I helped that I was the only person at the table able to talk intelligently about role-playing theory.

And now, I have to work.