MetropolCon

Berlin is a city that I have wanted to visit for some time. Of course the main reason I wanted to go was to see the Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum, but that is currently closed for renovation. I did manage to get a morning in the Nuwes Museum, which houses exhibits from Egypt and Troy, including the famous bust of Nerfertiti. That was well worth the trip. But I very much liked the city and want to go back when the Pergamon re-opens.

The convention was held in a place called the Silent Green Kulturquartier which is to the north of the city centre. The area looks very counter-culture, and also has a large number of Turkish kebab shops. It is light on big hotels and restaurants. However, the Berlin Metro (the U-Bahn) is excellent. I chose to stay at the travel hub of Alexanderplatz. It was dead easy to get to from the airport, and only one change for the trip to the convention (the nearest station to which was called Wedding). I didn’t need to be rushing back and fore to my hotel room, so that worked fine.

The venue itself was fascinating. It was part park, part modern conference centre, and part old crematorium. Much of the action took place underground, in what might once have been a car park given the ramp you had to walk down to get there. There was plenty of space for the dealers, fan tables and art show, plus a large room with a big stage that was used for things like opening and closing ceremonies. There was also a room set aside as a fan lounge.

However, as the weather was mostly good, hanging out tended to happen at ground level in the park, where you could also get cheap food and beer. To one side and up a level was a collection of meeting rooms where some of the programme was held. And finally there was the main hall of the old crematorium building, which held larger program items.

Eurocons are always a challenge for programming. They are one-off events, and in addition to the usual problem of guessing how popular each item will be, you also have to guess how many people will want programming in the local language, and how many will head for the English streams instead. It was inevitable that there would be some issues, but the convention coped very well with it on the fly. My talk got moved, which prevented it from being maxed out. I was amused that someone thought the ESFS Business Meeting would be OK in a room that sat 28 people, but that got moved too.

In terms of programming, it was good to catch up with Francesco Verso, who is still enthusiastically promoting translated SF&F. It was also good to hear Neil Clarke sharing his experiences of being one of the first people hit by the tsunami of AI slop. Sarah Rees Brennan on the Gothic Revival was highly entertaining, though she has so much personality that I felt a bit sorry for her fellow panellists. Al Reynolds and Peter Hamilton did what looks to be a regular buddy act. And some Finnish writers bemoaned the necessity of having to choose a gender for their characters before their books can be translated into other languages.

Of particular interest to me was an academic presentation on the Dual Path story structure in Arthurian romances. As you’ll see from the review of The Mabinogion Set, in this issue, Welsh Arthuriana has a fractal structure, but the French stories have a very different structure. In a Dual Path story the hero (and it is usually a he) sets out on a journey, gets to where he thinks he wants to be, discovers that he hadn’t understood things properly, and has to do a second journey to get where he really needs to be. Often the second journey is a mirror of the first in some way. And often the first journey is in search of worldly success, whereas the second is in search of personal happiness.

I’m very pleased to see a growing interest in alternate story structures. It should help wean people off the idea that there is only one correct way to structure a story.

I skipped Sunday’s programme as there was not a lot of interest to me, and instead did some work in my hotel room and headed out to see the Schwules Museum, Berlin’s museum of LGBTQ+ life. I remember meeting someone who was involved with it years back at an event in Liverpool. The museum had a difficult time of it at first, but they now seem very well established and are doing good exhibitions. Currently they had a big one about Susan Sontag, and one on queer life in rural Germany. Most of the material was available in English as well as German.

My thanks to Claudia and her team for doing a great job. It was good to catch up with Neil Clarke over dinner to share publishing issues. I also spent a bit of time talking to people about book projects, but I won’t say more about that until it is all more firm. I ended up having coffee with Al Reynolds at the airport on the Monday. His next book sounds like it will be really interesting.

Next year’s Eurocon is in Lisbon. I have a membership, but I can’t go because FantasyCon has been scheduled for the same weekend and that’s one of my best selling opportunities of the year. I owe it to my authors to be there. Hopefully I can get to the Lisbon SMOFcon instead, as Lisbon is another city I have long wanted to visit.

Zagreb has won the right to hold the Eurocon in 2028. Given that I was a Guest of Honour last time they held the convention, and given that I know how good the Croatians are at con running, I am definitely planning to go.