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.

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
Inky Tentacle: Cover of The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
Golden Tentacle: God's War by Kameron Hurley
Red Tentacle: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

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.

Me: *thinks of awesome thing to interest child in England* And also that’s where King Arthur lived! *does mental TA DA*

Serenity: Who’s King Arthur?

And three things happen. I make the shock-grin-gasp thing that I do whenever someone hasn’t heard of a thing I love. Almost simultaneously I remember that she’s five, and it’s not really surprising she doesn’t know who King Arthur is. And then my brain goes OMG I GOT THIS and gets all excited that I am literally the BEST PERSON EVER to explain King Arthur to a little girl for the first time. I wrote a book about it! I AM ON THIS.

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.

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.

• John Clute's column, "Scores"
• "The Chastisement of Your Peace", a short story by Tracy Canfield
• "Ariel", a poem by Erik Amundsen
• And reviews of Vernor Vinge's The Children of the Sky, by Andy Sawyer, Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men, by Maureen Kincaid Speller, and Anne Sheldon's The Bone Spindle, by Sofia Samatar

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.

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.

'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).

Hal Duncan reads his story, "Styx Water and a Sippy Cup."

Grady Hendrix regrets his story, "The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu":

I wrote “Guiyu” in English with Cantonese inflection and phrasing, and overall that worked out better than I had hoped; I’m happy with the writing in the story. What I’m deeply unhappy with is the politics. In the story, the trash pickers of Guiyu work for local Chinese companies who exploit them to the hilt in order to squeeze every cent from their labor. The big bosses are one part factory owner, one part gangster, which I think is accurate. But I left the issue there, and that’s where I failed. It’s like I wrote a story about Dahomey and Oyo slave traders competing to sell their enemies into slavery at Porto Novo on Africa’s West Coast and I ended the story before those slaves were exported overseas.

In 1962, when “A Wrinkle in Time,” after 26 rejections, was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, science fiction by women and aimed at female readers was a rarity. The genre was thought to be down-market and not up to the standards of children’s literature — the stuff of pulp and comic books for errant schoolboys. Even today, girls and grown women are not generally fans. Half of 18- to 24-year-old men say that science fiction is their favorite type of book, compared with only one-fourth of young women, according to a 2010 study by the Codex Group, a consulting firm to the publishing industry. And while a sizable portion of men continue to read science fiction throughout their lives, women don’t. Thirty-two percent of adult male book buyers are science-fiction fans compared with only 12 percent of women. When Joanna Russ, one of the few successful female science-fiction writers, died last year, her obituary in The New York Times referred to her as a writer who helped “deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen — women.”

(Although I'm a little sceptical of those numbers, I have to say.)

I'm also leaving the Strange Horizons fiction department. This decision has been a long time coming, and I've been hesitating over it for months. I've been a fiction editor here for over a decade, and it's been a really important part of my life. Stepping down from the fiction department is the right decision for me, though, and now is the right time.

I'm not going away entirely -- I'll be staying around in an advisory role for the magazine, and I'll be actively involved in the process of selecting new fiction editors. Our goal is to put together a strong and fabulous editorial team that will continue to publish groundbreaking fiction from all over the speculative fiction spectrum -- and represent all of the voices in our community. We've already started speaking to a few promising candidates, but we're interested in hearing from applicants who we might not have already considered, so we invite anyone who's interested in what we're doing at Strange Horizons to consider applying for a position as a fiction editor. (Full details about the application process available here.)

This is a big transition that we're going through, and as a result we're going to have to ask you for a little bit of extra patience -- because we're working through this change in the editorial team, we're going to need another couple of weeks before we can open to fiction submissions.

Everyone here at Strange Horizons has confidence that we're going to find a great new editorial team, and that we'll continue to be the magazine you know and love. Thank you for staying with us through these big changes.

Perhaps, then, science fiction is just doing what it has always done in reflecting its times. It may be that all we can hope for from the science fiction of the early twenty-first century are ever more brutal restatings of science fiction’s response to modern capitalism’s first wild rush to disaster at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries. The poor Morlocks, always rising from their subterranean lairs to smash the comfort and civility of the world created by the effete Eloi, may be doomed to return in ever more graphic orgies of destruction, becoming ever more monstrous in their habits while appearing less human, less capable of self-expression than even Wells imagined. The mass of humanity, visible only as the sludge that lubricates the vast machines in Lang’s Metropolis might smash the engines of their oppression but they will never become their masters.

Or, then again, perhaps we should hope for more from our speculations.

Some excellent discussion in the comments, too.