Author: Cheryl Morgan

And breathe! The convention circuit is over for the year.

Not that I would have missed Fantastika. While I have been to many Finnish conventions, and made many Swedish friends as a result, I haven’t been to Stockholm since 2011. I did got to the Eurocon in Uppsala last year, but that just gave me an appetite for visiting Sweden again.

My trip out was a screaming disaster. On the night before I was due to fly I got email from KLM telling me that my flight had been cancelled and they had re-booked me on a later flight that did not get into Arlanda until 23:20. As it turned out, the flight has not been cancelled, but it was overbooked and I had been bumped. I have been promised compensation, and I hope I am actually able to get it. Due to the late arrival, I had to get a cab from Arlanda to the hotel, which was eye-wateringly expensive. Also we ran into roadworks on the E4 on the way in. Thankfully the driver turned off the meter while we were sat there, or the fare would have probably hit four figures in GBP.

The hotel was very lovely, though being Swedish the rooms had very little furniture and it was all wooden. Also there was no coffee service in the rooms. I did get some time to work, and I spent much of it down in the lobby where there was a free coffee service and long desks with comfy chairs and power points.

An unusual feature of the hotel was that they served a free meal each night. There was very little choice, though each individual item was served separately so if, for example, you didn’t want a particular vegetable, or a sauce, you didn’t have to have it. I managed to eat there happily most nights, but I can imagine that it would have been a lot more difficult for folks with allergies.

The convention was not in central Stockholm (which would have bene much more expensive), but in a suburb called Sickla. The space we used was in a cultural centre that was conveniently across a small square from the hotel. It contained a bar, a café, and a library as well as meeting space (some of which seemed to double as a concert/theatre venue). There was a cinema next door, and a shopping mall nearby. I’m told that the space was cheap to rent. Possibly it was subsidized by the local council.

Public transit in Stockholm is excellent. Sickla’s main tram stop, which is a terminus, was being renovated, so we had to use a temporary stop further along the line. It was very easy to navigate once you knew where everything was, but was probably a bit daunting if you arrived by tram, especially as it was uphill all the way to the hotel.

Other than love of travel, my primary reason for going was because Juliet McKenna was a Guest of Honour, and as a responsible publisher I do try to support my best-selling author. Of course, thanks to Brexit, it wasn’t possible for me to take books to Sweden to sell. However, a Swedish bookstore was able to order some from the UK and, being familiar with the tax issues, was happy to deal with importing them. The seemed to sell well.

I would have been perfectly happy to sell ebook copies of The Green Man’s War, but the Swedish fans seems uninterested in ebooks. Either that or they were unfamiliar with Juliet’s work and wanted to start with the first book in the series. In the latter case, I’m hopping that they’ll soon be hooked.

My first panel was on Friday night, and was about Strong Female Characters. I was happy to be able to use this it tell people about Fight Like A Girl 2, but I do think that we should be beyond this sort of panel by now. I did a bit of research for the panel and discovered that CL Moore’s first Jirel of Joiry story was published in 1934. That’s 90 year ago, and people are still surprised when a fantasy book has a woman with agency as the protagonist.

Having said that, I do think that there has been a change in recent years, and I think that is because the Romance genre has discovered fantasy. We now have Paranormal Romance and Romantasy as top selling subgenres, which means that everyone is SF&F is forced top notice how well Romance sells.

On Saturday I chaired a panel on The Dispossessed, one of my favourite books, which is now 50 years old. We had an excellent panel with 4 people who knew the book very well, and thanks to Saga for showing that you don’t have to be ancient to know about it. One question I didn’t get to, but which we had discussed in the Green Room beforehand, was whether the book would sell to a mainstream publisher these days. Sadly we all agreed that it would have no chance.

First up on Sunday was a panel entitled “Herding cats”, which was all about how to moderate a panel. Again we had a good group of people, but for some reason the programming folks chose to give us a moderator who had never moderated a panel before. Of course we were all very supportive, and Timothy you did a great job. Hopefully you learned a lot.

Finally I got to do a gig with Juliet. We had been asked to talk amongst ourselves on the state of publishing today. It was a pretty grim subject, and the audience seemed to go away with a much better understanding of how bad things are. Quite why anyone wants to be an author these days, I do not know. Though it is probably not as daft as wanting to be a publisher.

As I’m getting old and don’t know how much more foreign travel I will be able to do, I decided to spent a couple of days in Stockholm after the convention. There are a lot of great museums. I finally got to see the Vasa, which is a jaw-dropping sight when you first enter the vast hall where it is kept. I also spent a lot of time in the Viking Museum and learned a few things. These two and the Abba Musuem – another must see for folks of my generation – were all in the same large park, along with several other museums. I did not get to the Museum of Nordic Life, or to the Museum of Swedish Drinking Culture (which promised free samples). Honestly, I could have spent a week there.

But that is Sweden done for a while. Next year’s Swecon is in the city of Lund, and it is in October so I will not have time to go.

This year saw the 15th iteration of BristolCon, and the first that was a whole weekend long rather than just Saturday. Con Chair MEG was upfront about this being an experiment. Lots of people had asked for it, but the only way to know if it would work was to try it.

From my point of view the con was something of an embarrassment as I was supposed to be launching two new books – The Green Man’s War and Fight Like A Girl 2 – but neither was ready in time so I could only sell ebooks and pre-orders. Thankfully some people did pre-order the books.

I had two panels. The first was on Saturday when I was moderating a discussion on worldbuilding societies. I hadn’t got contact details for the panel in time to check in with them beforehand, but I needn’t have worried. I had GoH, Peter Hamilton, on the panel, and he is more than capable of doing the entire panel by himself. Ditto Penny Hill who was muttering about writing a book on the subject. If she does I will buy it. You might think that it was odd to have Kevlin Henny on such a panel, given that most of his fiction weighs in at 1000 words or less, but the skill and precision required to give a sense of a real society in very short fiction are not easily gained, and Kevlin is a master. Helen Gould wasn’t quite as much of a history buff as the rest of us, but she hangs out at radical book fairs and was more than capable of holding her own in discussions of politics and economics. I think the panel went very well.

My Sunday panel was about climate fiction, which I used as an excuse to enthuse about Sean McMullen’s powerful Generation Nemesis. Doing good climate fiction is hard these days because it is clear that all of the warnings that people have been writing over the past decades have largely fallen on deaf ears. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream in the Science in the Capital trilogy twenty years ago, and now people are asking why science fiction didn’t foresee this possibility. Now it is too late to prevent a whole raft of catastrophic changes to our climate. The panel spent most of its time asking what writers of climate fiction should do now. I’m not sure that it came to any great conclusions save that we should not give up hope.

Anyway, I got to recommend The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner to a bunch of people who are too young to have seen it when it came out. I have included my review of it from Emerald City in thhis issue in case anyone else out there has never heard of it.

Sunday was also my book launch. Juliet read from The Green Man’s War, and if you want to know the sort of thing she was reading about you should check out the podcast interview elsewhere in this issue. I was also lucky enough to have Juliet, Gaie Sebold and Anna Smith Spark on hand to read from Fight Like A Girl 2. There was cake. We sold books.

It is not yet clear whether the two-day convention experiment was a success. Quite a few people only attended on Saturday. A smaller number only attended on Sunday. As far as I am aware, the total number of memberships wasn’t much changed. This meant that there was more room in the function space.

We could have more programme, which was nice. From my point of view, two days meant two book launches. Had we just had the one day, I would have lost out to Macmillan who were doing an event for Peter Hamilton.

The main issue for me, however, was sales, which were up 44% on last year. That was quite encouraging. If I had had paper copies of the two new books I would have done even better.

If there was a downside to the con, it was the number of people who came to my table, looked at the pile of books under five different names (plus two anthologies) and said to me, “that’s an awful lot of books you have written.” Apparently these days it is inconceivable that anyone would be selling books at a convention unless they are self-publishing. The trouble is that if I saw a self-published writer with that many titles I would assume that the books were pretty bad. I’m not sure what I can do about that.

Finally for me, it was great to catch up with Peter, Geoff Ryman, whom I have not seen at a BristolCon before, and Joanne Harris, who was the other GoH. Harris is a very fine fantasy writer, and it surprises me that she doesn’t get more attention from the community.

I hadn’t been intending to go to FantasyCon this year because October was busy enough already. Or, at least, I didn’t think I had a membership and I wasn’t going to buy one. Then, about a month before the convention, I got sent some programme assignments. I hastily checked with the con, and lo, I did have a membership. I must have bought it last year and then forgotten about it. The programme assignments sounded interesting, and Chester is a great place to visit, so I decided to go.

The con was quite small this year, presumably because many people were financially tapped out by having gone to Worldcon. That’s entirely understandable. The dealers’ room was correspondingly small, and seemed to be mainly self-published people. There was no art show, and I didn’t have a banquet ticket, so all that was left was programme. Well, and Chester.

You see, Chester has a whole pile of Roman ruins. And a museum full of more Roman ruins. Some of it is quite important. There are even a couple of images of Attis, proving that Cybele worship happened in Deva (the Roman name for Chester). It is also the city from which Macsen Wledig embarked on his ultimately doomed quest to become Emperor of the Romans. I’m not going to bore you with details here. I spent much of Saturday in town doing research, and buying books in the museum.

But I had panels. Three of them. The first was on Friday evening and was about Cities in Fantasy. That’s what the title said anyway. But the description talked about Urban Fantasy, and there were two Urban Fantasy writers on the panel. Now clearly Urban Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in cities, but it doesn’t represent the totality of fantasy set in cities and I was hoping to bring a different perspective to the panel. Thankfully the moderator was OK with that, and Davd Green backed me up.

On Saturday I’d been put on the queer representation panel. It was scheduled against the banquet. There were four of us on the panel, and three people in the audience. As I was moderating, I invited the audience to join us on the panel and we had a great chat between us.

This was when I discovered that young folks these days, even feminist young folks these days, have never heard of The Female Man. And presumably haven’t heard of Joanna Russ either. Aaargh.

The title of the panel was a bit scary because it talked about role models in fandom. Thankfully the description made it clear that what that meant was fans finding role models in fiction. And we then went on to debunk the concept of role models, so all was well.

My final panel was on Sunday and was about demystifying the editing process. I would have felt a bit of a fraud on this had I not been moderating, but I had a superb crew with a wide variety of experience. They were absolutely brilliant. I learned a lot, and by all accounts the audience did too. You get a real buzz when a convention panel goes really well.

There is no FantasyCon next year because the crew that usually runs it is running World Fantasy instead. I know that I have a membership for that. I also have a dealer table, so I won’t be doing much programme.

While I have been to many Worldcons, this was the first one at which I have been a dealer. The experience is very different. It is also my first post-COVID Worldcon, which also changed things a lot.

Usually Worldcon for me has meant attending a few panels during the day, browsing the Dealers’ Room, Fan Tables and Art Show in the gaps, then going out for dinner and attending parties in the evening. This year, with one small exception, I was in the Dealers’ Room from when it opened until it closed. After that I was so tired that on most days I grabbed a quick meal from the food trucks and fell into bed. Not that I actually wanted to spend time in bars or at parties, as I was pretty sure that they would be prime sites of infection.

From a COVID point of view, the Dealers’ Room was a good deal. The hall had a high ceiling, lots of ventilation, and some doors open to the outside. This was a relief because I needed to spend a lot of time talking to people and I’m not easily understood when wearing a mask as my voice is quite quiet.

Not having attended a Worldcon as a dealer before, I didn’t have much idea of what to expect. I just stuffed my car with as much as I could carry and hoped for the best. As it turned out, I sold around 170 books, and sold out of a number of titles. I was very pleased. That was despite being given a pitch way at the back of the hall where some people never ventured. I noticed that I was placed close to Bona Books, AK Faulkner and Sandra Bond, which made our part of the hall something of a queer ghetto. But The Portal Bookshop was much nearer the front so I don’t think this was anything deliberate on the part of the convention.

The one thing that was slightly annoying about the arrangements was the issue of at-table events. We were told very firmly before the convention that we were not permitted to hold events at our dealer tables. This was to avoid queues for author signings clogging up the alleyways between the tables. Nevertheless, some larger publishers did arrange such events, advertised them widely, and were allowed to get away with it. I totally understand the concern about space, and have been at Worldcons where queues at tables would have been a massive problem. But in Glasgow we had a huge amount of space. There wasn’t any need for that rule, and enforcing it selectively just penalized smaller dealers.

I had one panel. Roz & Jo kindly looked after the table for a couple of hours while I was away. The panel was on Gods and Faith in Fantasy. Besides me it featured Dr. Meg MacDonald (who has a PhD in the very subject of the panel) and Wole Tabali, with Ehud Maimon as moderator. It was great fun, and we good some really good feedback. I hope to catch up with some of the other panels on replay, but this far the only one I have seen is the History of LGBT+ SF&F one, which is hilarious, at least in part as Trip and Chris were asleep on their feet when they did it.

I did also briefly attend one fan party. That was because Pride Space is a project backed by San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions Inc., and Wizard’s Tower was sponsoring the party. I didn’t stay long. I was too tired.

Kevin spent almost the entire convention in the Business Meeting. How he managed to do so and yet remain sane and free of COVID is a mystery to me. Apparently it went about as well as could be expected, given that executing people for engaging in Recreational Parliamentary Practice while people are trying to get important stuff done is not allowed. Most importantly it appears that none of the miscreants from Chengdu have been given an excuse to sue the Worldcon. Hopefully they will eventually be dealt with in a manner that doesn’t put any conventions at risk.

Aside from move-in and move-out, the one thing we got to do together was attend the Hugos. Of course the last time that Worldcon was in Glasgow (2005), the ceremony took place in the starship WSFS Armadillo, and Kevin and I were running Events. The time before that (1995) we went to the Hugos for our first date.

Attending the ceremony when you have been in charge of it means that you see it in a very different way to the average punter. Things were done differently; sometimes for the better, and sometimes not so.

One big change is that Glasgow did away with the role of Toastmaster. There was no overall host for the ceremony. Various presenters rotated through the evening, each controlling the stage in turn. The slot at the beginning in which the Toastmaster normally tells some jokes was replaced by John Scalzi doing a 5 minute history of the Hugos. John is very amusing, so it went pretty well, though because it had to be very quick he inadvertently added to the suggestion that Kevin and I were somehow partly responsible for the Hugos in Chengdu. He also seemed to mangle Cheryl’s Second Law of Fandom. For those who have forgotten, here are the Three Laws again. I think you’ll agree that they are even more true now than they were in 2008 when I first devised them.

1. Never accept accident or incompetence as an explanation when a bizarre and complex conspiracy can also be advanced to explain the known facts.
2. One data point indicates a dangerous trend that must be resisted; two data points indicate a sacred and holy tradition that must be preserved.
3. If a tree falls in Central Park, New York, is seen to fall by 100 New Yorkers, is captured on film by CNN and the video of the fall is broadcast around the world, but I wasn’t there to see it, then it didn’t fall.

I’m not sure that doing away with the Toastmaster adds anything to the ceremony, but it does free up money to have a more varied set of GoHs so it might be worth doing.

Something that may be a really good idea, and I understand was first done in Chengdu, is to have the roll-call of the names of the finalists pre-recorded. This relieves the presenter of the need to learn how to pronounce all those names. They just have to get the name of the winner right. The downside is that, having been relieved of the need to read the names of the finalists, some of the presenters clearly did no prep at all, and one badly mangled the name of the winner despite having just heard it read out.

The thing that everyone at the ceremony will remember is the tech failure on the pre-recorded video. One of the presenters, Catherine Heymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was unable to be at the convention in person. She had pre-recorded some video, and tech was unable to play any of it. Because of this, there was no envelope on stage, and the people doing their best to cover ended up reading the plaque on the trophy to find out who won.

Kudos is due here to Meganne Christian, who had presented some awards earlier and came back on stage to take control of the chaos. You can tell she’s an astronaut, she was utterly calm and decisive in a crisis.

What most people in the audience probably didn’t notice was that there was no other recorded video. That means no clips of the Best Dramatic Presentation finalists. That’s probably a good thing as they eat up a lot of time in the ceremony, and devour an absurd amount of volunteer time trying to get permission to show them. It also meant no acceptance speeches from people who could not attend the convention. It seems highly unlikely that none of the absent winners would have wanted to say anything, so I have to assume that Glasgow did not give them the opportunity. That seems churlish, except that presumably those videos would not have worked either.

The new Best Game or Interactive Work Hugo seems to have gone down well. Unlike the last time this was trialed, there was a lot of interest in the category. Also the winners, from Larian Studios who produced Baldur’s Gate 3, turned up in force to accept the trophy. This was a big shock. Most of us Worldcon veterans had assumed that video game companies, like Hollywood studios, would not care about the Hugos. Larian were clearly delighted to have won.

I’m not going to comment on the results much. They are what they are, and they are voted on by fans. Besides, the novel that I placed first actually won this year, which is a rarity. Of course the best novel of last year, The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson, barely made it onto the “also ran” list in the Lodestar. Your mileage may vary. I am, however, deeply delighted that Juliet McKenna’s Green Man series was on the “also ran” list for Best Series. Thank you, everyone who voted for it.

The Emerald City Best Dressed at the Hugos Award went to Adri Joy for her magnificent jellyfish hat. I’d like to see someone try to top that.

That’s about all I have to say, because I didn’t see most of the convention. I understand from other reports that it was generally very well received. The two major areas of complaint were the usual suspects complaining about Worldcon having “gone woke”, and people upset at having caught COVID. The former were likely to complain no matter what happened, and I suspect that the only way to attend Worldcon and guarantee not to get sick is to attend virtually. UK fandom is probably less rigorous about masking that Americans, but it is in bar spaces where everyone is packed together and is unmasked because they are drinking and talking that you are most likely to catch the virus.

It is great to be back. One of the worst things about the pandemic was that I could not make my regular trips to Finland. I have been suffering sauna-deprivation.

This year Finncon was in Jyväskylä which meant that my good friend Irma Hirsjärvi was involved in the organization. I absolutely could not miss that. Also one of the Guests of Honour was Ursula Vernon, and I’ve been wanting a chance to chat to her about the Sworn Soldier books, and about weird animals.

Talking to Ursula was easy. It turned out that she and her husband, Kevin, were taking the train from Helsinki to Jyväskylä. I needed to do the same, so I volunteered to go along as a “local” guide. As it turned out, we only made it as far as Tampere, but that was because Irma came to collect us and take us to the Moomin Museum. They have done a lot of work on it since I was last there. I warmly recommend it.

First up for me at the convention was the academic conference, which is how I ended up reading Ghost Stories for Darwin (reviewed elsewhere in this issue). That was Friday morning sorted.

In the afternoon I headed off to the Writers’ House for the traditional “On Writing” panel. This part of the con is supposedly aimed at professional writers, but a lot of fans come along too. I got to interview Ursula, which meant that we got to talk about Sworn Soldiers and weird animals in public. As I recall, Ursula knew about the paper nautilus, but the Spanish mole story was new to her. I live in hope of it turning up in a Hugo acceptance speech one day. (If you are not familiar with these animals, you need to buy Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction from Luna Press and read my essay on “Worldbuilding with Sex and Gender”).

Finncon proper was very much as expected. There were lots of young people in costume. There were many interesting panels. The good folks from Rosebud had tables groaning with books. It was all very pleasant. I gave a lecture entitled “Wales in the Time of Arthur”, which had an audience of around 120. I also participated in the LGBTQ+ Fiction panel. And of course I got to help judge the masquerade.

Much fun was had. Much sauna was had. I got to eat at Harald. And I went to a really interesting panel on Hopepunk, which I shall write about separately.

After the con I delivered Ursula and Kevin back to Helsinki Airport, and then spent a week at an Assyriology conference at Helsinki University. That was also fun, but in a very different way.