Entries tagged with fandom

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Back from Worldcon and darkest Scotland

Had terrific fun at Worldcon. Managed to avoid catching Covid, possibly because I was too tired in the evenings (side effect of medication) to bother hanging about in the bars and instead just went back to the hotel around 9pm each evening.

The local train with an "all the trains you can eat" ticket for £5 for 5 days worked well. Apart from one night when there was a 45 minute gap between trains, so me and an American couple shared a taxi instead of standing in the rain.

Things they could have done better... there was no physical newsletter. And no physical newsletter office. I know - I went looking for it to give them some news. Ops sent me to the Media Office, who sent me to Information, who tried to send me back to the Media Office, then found someone who thought it was only on Discord (at which point I thanked them and gave up).

Things I went to see/did:
- Dune the Musical (awesome)
- Policing the High Frontier
- The Science, Fiction and Ethics of Terraforming
- The Lost Wonders of Science Fiction
- What lines should we cross when writing fanfic?
- Vegetables in space (one of my favourite panels)
- Ancient cultures and context
- Playing with gender and gender expectations in SFF
- Copaganda and the Judge Dredd conundrum
- The Expanse: greatest SF TV series of the 21st century
- SF as a tool to increase STEM uptake
- The many legs of SF - creepy crawlies in space
- Women in military SF (interesting, but they talked mostly about fantasy in a panel specifically named SF!)
- played in a 2 hour Traveller RPG session which was fun
- Chemistry in SF: cavorite, coaxium and other fictions
- All the world's boos depend on the beancounter: economics in SFF
- The myth of the wilderness
- Has science ruined science fiction?
- Going up: space elevators as highways to the stars
- Strong female leads who don't kick ass
- Dr Who fans meet-up
- went to the art show... and bought a couple of prints.
- spent remarkably little money in the dealers room... having to lug everything to Mum's then home on the train rather tempered my impulse to buy large and/or heavy things!

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Levitation – con report for Eastercon 2024

Had a fantastic time at Levitation. Came back knackered because I don’t think I’ve done so much socialising in aeons.

There were minor travel woes getting there and back – rail replacement bus on the way there, broken down train blocking our route on the way back. However, once I got there, all was well. The hotel was about 3 mins walk from the Telford International Centre. When I went for an explore on the Thursday afternoon, I spotted a cinema only a further 6 or 7 minutes’ walk away. So that was my Thursday evening entertainment sorted – I’m pining for movies since the local multiplex closed. Went to see Nasty Little Letters.

Breakfast at my hotel was allegedly continental when I booked it, but there was bacon and beans, so I availed myself of that, and the bread warming machine. I hesitate to call it a toaster. It did the usual hotel thing of once through just warms the bread, twice through cremates it… Had a lovely breakfast chat with various fans which didn’t finish until about 10.30 when the hotel staff were hoovering around us!

In fact, I had lots of nice chats with old friends and with random fans I hadn’t met before, including prior to the Past Isn’t Straight panel, on the train on the way home, and in the Games Room when in search of the water cooler (the newsletter almost wasn’t kidding about it being down a long, dim corridor past the sign saying ‘Beware of the leopard’).

Food – I didn’t venture out to the restaurants or in search of Asda, and just stuck to the venue food. The chips were awesome! Hot food adequate but not much variety. If the vegans didn’t like chilli, they were stuffed.

LOVED the venue – spacious, airy, lots of little nooks with a few chairs and tables to sit and chat, as well as the main fan/food/bar area.

FRIDAY PANELS

· Cats are real but dragons are hard (craft workshop) – I know now that (a) crocheting is fun but (b) it makes my eyes go funny if I wear my glasses!

· Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction – a streamed event. Great discussion of an academic study the panellists had done, which touched on things such as the Islamic attitudes to djinn. The moderator kindly emailed the reading list.

· What happened to SF/F as a force for good?

· Book launch – Dawn & Dave of the Dead by David Wake. Which I’d already read as David did a pre-launch at Armadacon.

· The Past Isn’t Straight – and Neither is the Future.

· Can We Walk Away from Injustice?

SATURDAY PANELS

· Scientists in the Media Imagination – terrific fun.

· Climate Friction: Solar Punk and Environment Justice – went for some recommendations because most of the climate fic I’ve read so far were all character portraits and no plot.

· BSFA Awards

· What is the appeal of Libraries for F/SF readers (I was on this panel – fun discussion).

· Tade Thomson GOH interview

· The Good, The Bad and the Buggy (tech glitches)

· Invertebrates in Space! Again, I was on this panel, fun, informative and we continued in the bar until the Telford Centre kicked us out.

SUNDAY PANELS

· Art materials & techniques: picturing the future.

· Business meeting/bid session. There will be a 2025 bid at Belfast. No location information yet. Useful Q&A from Belfast committee. Someone asked if there was a Supporting Rate and they realised it was not on their list. I signed up as Supporting.

George Hay Lecture: Battling Cancer in 2024. Fascinating.

· Meta-fandom and Transformative works – went down a few rabbit holes, but was entertaining.

· The Impact on Space Opera of Diverse Voices.

· Doctor Who in Audio.

MONDAY PANELS

· Detectives in Fantasy & Science Fiction. Neat, but reinforced the notion that stuff gets forgotten so quickly. A question was asked about science fiction detectives (as opposed to the fantasy ones discussed) and I was thinking Alien Nation and another audience member said Star Cops, but the panellists didn’t mention those and couldn’t think of many others.

· GOH Dr Srinarahari talks about Indian SF – pre-recorded talk. Tech issues at the start before they got it up and running. Interesting, but not what I expected, as it was less about Indian SF and more about SF becoming a pervasive force in modern culture as a whole.

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Writing Strontium Dog fanfic again

I have, after many years hiatus, got back into writing Strontium Dog fanfic again. God, I'd forgotten how much fun it is! And I've now wasted hours of my life re-reading all the graphic novels. And I've ordered a copy of the Strontium Dog RPG.

I've posted all the old fic from Dogbreath on AO3. The new stuff is:

Sins of the Father - an AU where Johnny's mum did the sensible thing and divorced Nelson B. Kreelman. A re-telling of the events in Portrait of a Mutant and Blood Moon. Johnny still has a crappy childhood (because fascist dystopia), but it is differently crappy.
archiveofourown.org/works/45665944/chapters/114916129

Allegiance - how Johnny met his first partner, Sniffer Martinez.
archiveofourown.org/works/45523687/chapters/114547216

True Romance - not entirely new but I re-did the captions and "special effects" and uploaded this "photo romance" spoof done with action figures, which appeared in Dogbreath 12.
archiveofourown.org/works/46534099/chapters/117176938

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Bristolcon 2022

I was at Bristolcon last weekend, which was more fun than I expected. The programme was largely fantasy items and publishing items, so I initially didn't think I'd go to much, given that I'm largely a science fiction geek. And I also knew that several people I usually chat to wouldn't be there.

However, I was down to volunteer and also to moderate a panel on War Never Changes and had been emailing the participants beforehand. Thus on the morning I got the opportunity to meet JP Corwyn, who was one of the panellists and is blind. I offered to be the volunteer to guide JP to the Opening Ceremony and to the first panel of the day. We hit it off and I stayed as his volunteer all morning. JP was a gent and insisted that we go things that I was interested in too.

I went to:
Opening Ceremony
Reading by Anna Smith Spark
There Were No Elves at Helm's Deep
Worldbuilding Tips and Tricks - this was great.
The Economics of Fantasy - had a lot of actual history discussed, so was much more interesting than I was expecting.
Book launch/signing
GoH interview - Liz Williams. Hugely entertaining.
Reading by Cavan Scott
And of course the War Never Changes panel. Which went brilliantly. Dom Murray was incredibly nervous because it was his first ever panel, and refused to believe he was doing fine.

The only downside of Bristolcon is the bar gets INCREDIBLY NOISY so for people with damaged hearing (me) and age-related hearing loss (me) it is almost impossible to hold a conversation. I should have nabbed a committee member and asked if there was an option to use the Dealers Room or Art show for chatting after those had been dismantled.

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Fanfic - the Wraeththu Mythos novel is on AOOO

The novel length Wraeththu Mythos story I wrote is finally up on AOOO. Tribal Identity: archiveofourown.org/works/41074653/chapters/102950109 It has a mature readers tag. Nothing gratuitous or graphic, but it is for mature audience rather than general ones.

I was hoping to submit it as a 'spinoff' novel to Immanion Press, since Storm Constantine had always been very supportive of fanfic, and had published several fanworks. However, first Real Life interfered with me finishing it. Then second, it grew long enough for two novels. Then very sadly, Storm died.

So it is finally on AOOO for Wraeththu fandom to have a gander at. I divided it up into 5 parts, each representing a year of the story.

Year 1: Infiltration

Year 2: Incursion

Year 3: Interdiction

Year 4: Insurrection

Year 5: Invasion

I really enjoyed writing these characters, so I might return to them sometime. Hopefully the next story won't take 16 years from first putting paper to final edits! Also, next time I think 'I could write a short story about these guys', it won't end up being 143,000 words... :-)

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Eastercon 2022

Belated witterings about Eastercon 2022 (Reclamation).

It was wonderful. Seeing people I hadn't seen for 2 years, chatting, running to and from panels.
It was exhausting. Seeing people I hadn't seen for 2 years, chatting, running to and from panels. :-)

The 30 mins gap between panels was awesome.
I went to Mary Robinette Kowal and Tasha Suri's GoH interviews and they were both fabulous.
The 3 hour queue to check into the hotel was horrendous. (They did give us a 25% discount on that night's room rate as an apology).

The bit I was dreading the most was the coach journeys to and from Heathrow. But the coaches were not at all crowded and the terrible traffic the media was predicting never materialised.

The cheap con food was never available in the real ale bar when I went looking for it. So I survived on their sandwich meal deals and eating the nice, but expensive, hotel bar food. And grazing on the free chocolate eggs left out by one of the bid sessions.

Everyone was being very good about masks. But two of the people I hung out with at the con tested positive for Covid when they got home. I tested negative.

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Bristolcon 2021: con report

I've mostly gone back into lockdown again because the southwest is a Covid plague pit. And I have to trek to Scotland at the end of Nov to prevent my Mum from travelling down here. But I ventured out to go to the Bristolcon one day convention at the Hilton Doubletree. I'd offered to be a minion/gopher a while back, and more recently they'd asked me if I could work on the reg desk first thing, because the committee member who does Membership had a doctor appointment and wouldn't be able to get to the con until after the reg desk had opened.

I didn't go to the 'unofficial' Friday night events and 'bar con'.

COVID VS THE CON
I arrived at 8am on the Saturday and there was a headless chicken feel to start with, as the Chairman had gone down with Covid. So there was a lot of folk running about saying "Where's the signage for the panel rooms?" and "Who has a key to X room?" because with 2 committee members missing, the logistics were crumbling a bit. Insert your own swan metaphor here.

Reg desk had been pared down to handing out badges, and programme schedule only. Covid meant no goodie bags, no souvenir booklet, etc. We also were not taking walk ins, so there was no cashbox, card reader or receipt books etc. And the dealers got sent to the Dealers Room to get their badges etc. So the reg desk queue moved REALLY fast. Everyone was very good at doing socially distanced queuing, and hovered out of the way until we waved them forward.

In fact, masks and social distancing was very much a Bristolcon thing. Apparently there were minions tasked with politely asking people to use masks or display their exemption lanyards... and they complained to the Committee that they were bored and had nothing to do! Go Bristolcon membership!

And one public spirited panelist turned up at Ops/Reg Desk in the afternoon to say that she was dropping out of being on her panel, because she was starting to lose her voice and didn't want to make people paranoid that she might have Covid.

PANELS ETC
There wasn't actually a huge amount of panels I wanted to see at the con. There was a heavy fantasy bias this year. At least it seemed that way to me, given that I prefer SF to fantasy. I went to:
1. GoH interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky - a superb chat about space opera with Gareth Powell. Highlight of the con!
2. New Weird Britain - UK folklore and how it is being used in fantasy & horror.
3. Why is there no democracy in epic fantasy?
4. How well does science fiction predict the future?
5. For the Empire! Are SF&F stories of fantasy or galactic empires tackling colonialism & exploitation?
6. A bit of the closing ceremony - it took 40 mins to get my food from the hotel bar, so I missed the start.

I also meant to go to Anna Smith-Spark's GoH interview, but got chatting in the bar and list track of the time. Ditto going round the Art Show (though I have looked at all the online art displays). I did, as usual spend far too much money in the Dealer Room.

SOCIALISING
It was lovely to see various people in the flesh for the first time in 18 months to 2 years. There were lots of "what geeky stuff got/is getting you through the pandemic?" chats.

I only stayed about half an hour after the Closing Ceremony finished, because I didn't want to spend an evening in a crowded bar, even if people were being good about masks. I struggle enough to hear what folk are saying in crowded bars when they are not muffled by a mask.

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Worldcon was fun

Arrived very stressed from RL stuff, and then failing to get into the very first panel I tried for made me even more stressed. However, I soon met up with friends and had nice chats with strangers, so became de-stressed very fast. The overall conclusion: Dublin 2019 was chilled.

The Thurs queuing was chaotic, but the fans and the organisers gradually got everything streamlined and sorted. In fact in some cases the queuing was as entertaining as the panels - especially the young German man who was queue marshalling dressed as an android, and the lady with the clipboard who was doing "a survey on your queuing experience". The survey questions contained such gems as "On a scale of 1 to 5, what day is it?" They even continued the joke in the newsletter, with a 'block chart' of the results - a photo of a pile of Lego!

Things I went to:
Horse Sense
Space Opera: Boldly Going Where No Genre has Gone Before
The Impact of Kickstarter on the Gaming Industry
GoH Interview - Steve Jackson
Medical Effects of Biological Weapons
Speculative Biology - an Evolving Field (panellist)
Biology and Hard SF: Predicting the Future
There be Dragons: Crafting Maps for Fantasy Worlds (mod) - we had tech issues at the start, but everything went swimmingly after that
Non-human and Interspecies Communication (panellist) - I was offline and at the con before the moderator made contact, so I didn't see any of the questions or topics in advance. All of us panellists flailed a little as a result.
What Fanfiction can Teach Genre Writers
Send in the Crones: Older Women in SFF
The Lack of Technological Progress in Fantasy
The Importance of the Fanfiction Community
Trailblazer: Anne McCaffrey's Legacy & Legend -
Is There Any Other Life in the Solar System? (a fantastic double act from two scientists)
Games for Science (mod) - I got to be on a panel with Steve Jackson. Squee! Squee!

Slightly miffed that I couldn't go to the Women Write About War panel, because I was moderating right afterwards and would have had to leave partway through.

I also went to the Art Show (terrific) and the academic posters exhibit (very cool).

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Follycon report

Follycon was last weekend but I've only just gathered enough wits and free time to do this report.

Travel there was trouble free, though the first train (of 2) was packed. Fortunately I had booked a seat. As she was checking tickets the conductor remarked that Maundy Thursday is the busiest day of the year on the rail network. I chatted to Rosie Oliver and other fans on the 2nd train.

I was in the Majestic, which is old enough NOT to have air conditioning (yippee!), to have windows which open (yippee!), and a radiator which remains off when you turn it off (yippee!). So finally an Eastercon without me coming down with con crud! Thew downside of the room was:
(1) The only decently bright light was in the bathroom. I had to read my con programme by standing at the window using daylight, and thank Grud the kindle has an illuminated screen.
(2) My room was above main programming, which meant my Cunning Plan to get an early night on Friday was scuppered by the dum-dum-dum of bass from the band. Ah well, they quit about 23.00 and neither the Ceilidh nor the Disco was as loud as the band.

Went out to eat at a very nice Chinese on the Thurs evening. I stuck to hotel food the rest of the time, mainly because there weren't big enough gaps between panels I wanted to see to do a restaurant meal. The method by which you obtained and paid for con food seemed to vary every time I was in the dining area (pay first, pay afterwards, table service, self service). Quality varied from terrible to really very nice. All the staff were lovely. I was a bit bemused by the warning signs which said things like "Pork - contains meat" or "Eggs - contains eggs".

Lots of fun chats with folk I hadn't seen for ages and with some people I'd never met before.

Stuff I went to:
- The Future of Cities
- Games: Story vs Mechanics
- Transgressive Sexuality
- Generations: Bioscience
- Generations: Ecology
- Putting Science in Your Story
- Nnedi Okorafor GOH interview
- Christina Lake GOH talk - Utopianism & Eugenics in Fiction
- BSFA Awards (I failed to vote because I didn't find the BSFA desk in the dealers' room. I realised later it had been hidden behind a gaggle of people every time I'd been there).
- Economics of Terraforming
- Eastercon bid session
- How to Finish Your Novel (where David Wake finished his live on stage by typing 'The End' and hitting Save).
- Christina Lake GOH talk on her early years in fandom
- Negotiating the Otherworldly
- Reproductive Technologies. It was great that they had an anthropologist as well as scientists on the panel.

I was busy fretting about snow, floods and train cancellations on Monday (Andy Bigwood of Bristolcon was texting me with tales of reversing trains and replacement buses) so I didn't go to any panels prior to giving my talk: Aliens Ate My Baby.

The speaker giving the talk prior to mine didn't stop at 11.50 like she was supposed to. And she didn't stop at 11.55 ish when the gopher waved the Stop sign or at 12.00 when the gopher came back and waved it more vigorously. As a result, the laptop which tech had loaned me wasn't set up on time... and the only tech guy who knew the password to it had dashed off to do tech in another room. I started without pictures, whilst the room tech sped off in search of John-Who-Knew-The-Password. Note to previous speaker REHEARSE YOUR TALK and TIME IT. It isn't rocket science.

Fortunately I HAD rehearsed my talk and knew it was 36 minutes long in a 50 minute slot, so Ms I'm Too Pretty & Special To Stick To My Allocated Slot wasn't the complete disaster it could have been. I did, however, only have time for 3 questions, and that was only by finishing at 12.53 instead of 12.50. The audience laughed and cringed in all the right places, so it went well.

Grabbed a quick lunch, toured round saying bye to people and then left a couple of hours earlier than I had originally planned, in case there was more weather chaos on the railways. Met Ian Millsted on train 1 of 2 and had a nice chat there and while we waited for connections at Leeds.