Fantasy’s Present Pasts

One of the things I miss most about not being able to travel to the USA is the International Convention on the Fantastic and the Arts (ICFA to its friends). Being American-run, the “International” bit means being held in Florida every year and furriners being invited to attend. I believe that these days they are starting to look further afield, but in the meantime Europe has decided to do something.

The European Conference on the Fantastic is a very similar event: an academic conference, but it is run by a consortium of academic organisations from around Europe. This was the inaugural event, and it was hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. Next year it will be in Sweden, and there are already expressions of interest from Germany, Poland and Denmark. I fully expect Finland to join that list soon, and I hope that some more southerly countries will also join up (though as the event is held in mid-summer that might present problems).

The attendance was very encouraging. There were scholars there from the USA, Canada, Australia and India, in addition to a wide variety of European countries.

Glasgow University is not blessed with a lot of on-site hotels. The SEC is not that far away, and the University is on the Clockwork Orange (the Glasgow metro), but mostly we stayed in student accommodation. It was basic, but very cheap (£40/night). Fortunately there were plenty of food outlets catering for people on a student budget nearby.

There were three plenary sessions, all hosted in the Sir Charles Wilson building which is a converted church. It makes for an impressive lecture theatre, and was appropriately gothic for the event. The first speaker was Helen Young from Deakin University in Melbourne who is an expert in the appropriation of fantasy literature by the far right. The second was Sophia Samatar, whom you should all be familiar with. And the third was Stefan Ekman, whose book on Urban Fantasy I reviewed here.

Because of the size of the event, there were six parallel programme streams. This led to a few difficult choices, but everything I attended was good. Here are a few highlights.

My friend Nick Hubble (newly appointed the editor of Foundation) did a paper on Scottish SF, primarily focused on Banks, MacLeod and Naomi Mitchison. In the same panel was MJ Naylor, looking at SF in Scots (and Orcadian). Feersum Endjinn and Deep Wheel Orcadia are favourite books of mine, and I was delighted to see them getting critical attention.

My Finnish friend, Esko Suoranta, had a magnificent paper explaining how the golem magic used by Judah Low in China Miéville’s Iron Council is based on the literary theories of a Russian poet called Velimir Khlebnikov.

My own paper (on the use of trans history in fantasy) was in the same panel as Taylor Driggers’ piece on Le Guin and Tiptree, and a fascinating comparison of the work of Vernon Lee and Angela Carter by Elizabeth Howard.

Inevitably I ended up in the panel on gender politics. That featured great paper by Grace Worm about the difference between Revising your work (as Le Guin and Tamora Pierce have done) and Retconning it. The key difference is that Revising means being open and transparent about what you have done, whereas Retconning means trying to pretend that you haven’t changed anything, which brings the wrath of your fandom down upon your head.

There was also a fascinating paper about the attitudes of feminist philosophers to fantasy fiction. As the young woman given the paper was French, this was full of references to French feminists whom I had never heard of, and who seem mostly to have been Marxists. You can guess how condescending they were about fantasy. Thankfully Manon Berthier had Stéphanie Nicot, and rather delightfully Helen Merrick, to draw upon as counter examples.

I bunked off on one day because I needed to visit Category Is Books, and catch up with my Czech translator friend, Isabel Stainsby. I also discovered that Glasgow now has a specialist SF bookshop called Sector 7, though I didn’t have time to visit.

I was mostly left to my own devices with regard to food, but I noticed that one of the Glasgow people was Mexican so I asked her for recommendations. I ended up at a restaurant called Mezcal, which I will definitely visit again. Rather delightfully they had a cocktail called Priory of the Orange Tree.

I had a great time at this event. I recognise that academic conferences are not for everyone, but if you do like that sort of thing then please consider a trip to Sweden next year. The venue will be in Karlstad and the dates are June 15-17.