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Con or Bust 2012Kate Nepveu has announced this year's Con or Bust auction: I am pleased to announce this year's auction to support Con or Bust, which helps fans of color/non-white fans attend SFF conventions. Bidding starts Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 12:01 a.m. EST (GMT -5) and ends Sunday, February 25, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. EST. You may post auction offers and make donations now. Con or Bust is run by Kate under the auspices of the Carl Brandon Society, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, and which helps people of color attend SFF conventions. More background here, and see here for details of how to offer something for auction. We've put up three bundles of books for auction: some young adult novels, some epic fantasy novels, and some short story collections. Browse the main community page and tags to see what else is on offer.
Jeff VanderMeer RecommendsJeff VanderMeer's books of 2011, at Locus online. Given that it includes God's War, The Sacred Band, Osama and Mr Fox, even I have no quibbles.
Rachel Swirsky RecommendsModel awards voter Rachel Swirsky has posted her lists of recommended short stories, novelettes and novellas from 2011, with discussion of each. Nothing from Strange Horizons this year, but lots of good reading from elsewhere.
What I Did At The WeekendI spent the weekend just gone at the Pontins holiday camp in Prestatyn, North Wales, for the third SFX Weekender. This is an odd, hybrid event, approaching the size of a Worldcon but with only two streams of programme: literary/thematic panels (with very broad topics: steampunk, space opera, urban fantasy) and media guests (this year including Sylvester McCoy, Eve Myles, Brian Blessed), plus entertainments such as the Area 51 Cabaret and Craig Charles DJing. It's reasonably cheap, as conventions go, because you pay for accomodation and ticket (not membership) in one go, so you're unlikely to pay more than about UKP150 all-in unless you go for the really expensive rooms or buy the most expensive signing passes. And these days it's attended by a reasonably large chunk of British sf fandom and prodom. I had a good time. Highlights include Paul Cornell hosting Just a Minute with Joe Abercrombie, China Mieville, Sarah Pinborough and Toby Whithouse (video on YouTube starting here), the pub quiz (our team, The Chivalrous Knights of Archaic Dimensions, came third), dinner at a fine Thai restaurant in the town centre on Saturday night with Juliet McKenna, Lavie Tidhar, Saxon Bullock, Liz Batty and Nic Clarke, and the Kitschies award ceremony (about which more below); and in general the social side of the convention came through strongly. Most feedback I've seen has been positive. Indeed Mark Charan Newton thinks "There’s a strange energy about the SFX Weekender which no other UK genre convention possesses." Jaine Fenn thinks it could be "the future of geekdom." The demographics of the convention certainly support that: noticeably younger and more mainstream than other conventions I attend. More than one person opined to me that Eastercon, the de-facto head of the UK convention circuit, might want to look to its laurels. Ian Sales dissents somewhat, and it hasn't entirely won me over yet, either. Set against all of the above are some negatives. The substantive panels were generally pretty weak; the best I saw was a panel on magical races in fantasy with Juliet McKenna, Joe Abercrombie, Graham McNeill, Gav Thorpe and Adrian Tchaikovsky, moderated by Jared Shurin: an interesting mix of authorial styles and perspectives, and a discussion that actually started to touch on some of the thorny issues inherent in the premise. But few of the others really came together. A panel on the value or limitations of maps in fantasy novels struggled to escape the problem that the assigned moderator really should have been one of the panelists (but it did prompt this interesting follow-up post from Adrian Tchaikovsky); a panel on the end of the world (featuring several novelists who don't notably write much about the end of the world, like Ken MacLeod) suffered terribly from a round-robin format in which the moderator would ask a question, get an interesting answer from someone, then completely ignore it and start the next person off on an entirely different aspect of the topic. And by all accounts the steampunk panel, which I didn't attend, was a disaster in just about every way it could be. Meanwhile, as Sophia McDougall rightly blogs (the same issue is raised by Anne Perry), the representation of women on the panels was appalling, while the scantily clad ladies of the Area 51 Cabaret paraded around the con for our, er, entertainment. Personally I was rather uncomfortable. Complaints about this aspect of the event are not new -- here is an SFX forum post from 2010, in which the organisers attempt to justify the presence of the Cabaret, and compared to previous years there was at least a woman on most panels -- but there's quite a long way to go. [EDIT: Sophia McDougall has received an encouraging response from SFX editor Dave Bradley.] It's a context, actually, that made the presentation of The Kitschies -- for the year's "most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works" -- seem rather incongruous, although the event itself was fine. My final guesses for the winners, if you'll recall, were Osama for the Red Tentacle (best novel), God's War for the Golden Tentacle (best debut), and A Monster Calls for the Inky Tentacle (best cover). In the event: Black Tentacle (special discretionary award): SelfMadeHero So one out of three, but I can't claim to be disappointed, particularly since I had the honour of accepting the Golden Tentacle (plus associated rum) on Kameron Hurley's behalf. You can find the acceptance speech I read out here. As for the other categories, Liz questions whether A Monster Calls is really the most progressive, intelligent and entertaining novel on the Red Tentacle shortlist; it's certainly the latter two, but I'm not sure it scores particularly highly on the first. Still, it's a wonderful novel, and aside from anything else it's satisfying to see the Kitschies recognise two novels that are otherwise unlikely to get much awards play in the UK genre field. Roll on next year. I might even head back to Wales to see them presented again.
New VectorThe latest issue of Vector is out, and it's partly a women-in-sf issue featuring pieces by Cheryl Morgan (on women writing sf in general), Tony Keen (on Justina Robson) and me (on the Exodus trilogy by Julie Bertagna). See also Martin Lewis' BSFA review editorial column in which he discusses God's War and Soft Apocalypse.
The Judgment of the Tiny MedievalistsCatherynne Valente attempts to explain King Arthur to a five-year-old: Me: *thinks of awesome thing to interest child in England* And also that’s where King Arthur lived! *does mental TA DA* Things go a bit awry in tremendously entertaining fashion. Elsewhere, Valente is guest-blogging at Charles Stross' place; see interesting posts on sf as mythology and post-scarcity sf.
This Week ...In this week's issue we have for you the first part of Joy Kennedy-O'Neill's story "Aftermath", W. C. Roberts' poem "Tesla's Waltz", plus reviews of Chronicle, Ali Shaw's The Man Who Rained and, first of all, Marina Berlin's take on Songs of the Earth by Elspeth Cooper. But wait, there's more! Today also sees the kickoff of our 2011 Readers' Poll, in which we ask you to select your favourite stories, poems, articles, columnists and reviewers from last year. You have until Sunday 19th February to cast your votes.
Strange Horizons, w/c 30th JanuaryIn this week's issue we had:
On the blog, Susan Marie Groppi is stepping down from the fiction department after over a decade. We wish her the best of luck with whatever she chooses to do next! We also have some Hugo recommendations whilst the awards race continues. A couple of SH authors revisit their stories, some with regret, and there is some consideration of the sins of the travel writer. Also, an interesting reflection on teaching Carriger's Soulless.
Teaching SoullessThe Steampunk Scholar reflects on teaching Gail Carriger's novel: Ultimately, the majority of students thoroughly enjoyed the experience of comparing and contrasting Dracula and Soulless. There was one particularly outspoken naysayer, but he admitted disliking the text because Alexia reminded him of a former flame, which gave us the chance to discuss how a text "reads" us, even as we are reading it. One male student related his embarrassment at reading it on the bus: being an Albertan male with what appears to be fully chick-lit was a challenge, though he was quick to add, not deterrent enough to keep from reading to see what happened next. This allowed us to do a cover comparison, which is also an excellent study. We talked about how the original cover plays off the design of the Marie Antoinette film's marketing; we discussed how covers play into audience expectations, and construct a horizon of expectation, which many remarked Carriger subverts. While they expected "a sappy romance," they were surprised to find adventure, mystery, and comedy.
The Sins of the Travel WriterRushthatspeaks has a superb write-up of Jan Morris' Last Letters From Hav: 'Jan Morris' has, in this book, in her exquisitely careful sendup of exactly how not to deal with the aftermath of WWII, given the most beautiful demonstration I can possibly imagine of what it would be to ignore the political responsibilities of the travel writer. For in Hav there lives a man who is wanted by Israel, for war crimes. A friend of hers says that the reward is huge; she interviews the man; his guilt is indisputable. Does she consider reporting his existence and where he lives to the relevant authorities? Does she, hell! And the Nazi, at the end of her interview with him, suggests that her friend was a collaborator with the Vichy government, that he sold out members of the Resistance. Does she look into it? Of course not. Because she is a travel writer and therefore to her this is all theatrical pageantry, is the subtext. She's the observer so none of it is any of her business. And how amazingly well-calibrated the racism of the way she will reveal, or not reveal information: this is a book in which she calls the British Agent in Hav by a pseudonym, despite the fact that he has not asked for anonymity, but gives the full address and telephone number of a Muslim leader who has told her in so many words that he is under threat of assassination. She insists that there must be an artistic connection between the indigenous Havian culture and that of Wales, on extremely flimsy evidence-- both 'Jan Morris' and Jan Morris are Welsh. Morris, of course, returned to Hav a few years ago; see Matthew Cheney's review of the collected Hav in these pages (and Abigail Nussbaum's take at Infinity Plus).
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