Archipelacon - The Nordic SF & Fantasy Convention - June 25–28, 2015

Heat brings me down. Everybody is always so happy when it becomes warm, I get irritated, irritable and pissed off. I used to think that it was because I was fat. Although it is not a usual reason for losing weight, I did and discovered to my great dismay that being thin did absolutely nothing for my ability to deal with heat. I still hated it and handled it poory and felt faint, irritated and in no mood to do anything but swim and sleep.

So, I am even more heartbroken than I would usually be because I have had to skip Archipelacon. I would have loved to have been able to go as I am sure this will be THE BEST con of 2015. But, the main reason I am sooo sorry is the fact that is definitely NOT hot in Finland!

I would urge you to go – they have fun programming and a list of GoHs that makes my head spin with joy – George R. R. Martin, Johanna Sinisalo, Karin Tidbeck, Gary K. Wolfe and Parris Mcbride. But they are sold out. I passed on my own membership but that might not be a case with my husbands. Interested?

Archipelacon - The Nordic SF & Fantasy Convention - June 25–28, 2015

When work is a pleasure you can take your kid to: Animafest

This evening, at the Zrinjevac park I am going to have a piknik with my son. And husband. And some friends. And since its Animafest weekend, I am will be watching a cartoon. Fit for kids, fit for adults and great art to boot. Also, it will be in the open. Animafest might be 40 but still comes up with great ideas! Case in point: Animafest Open Air @Zrinjevac. Awesome!

 

When work is a pleasure you can take your kid to: Animafest

The SFera Book Club: Terry Pratchett

The best part of a convention is often the discovery of other people enamoured with the same books, characters and worlds. But I came to the world of fandom late and made friends with those who had similar reading interests regardless of where I met them.

Petra Bulic, who ran SFera and the was Head of Volunteers in London last summer, was one of them. I cannot in all honesty say it was she who introduced me to Terry Pratchett. I had already been handed his books by someone, possibly so early that I have no memory of it. (Or my memory is just bad).

Anyway, I had already read him by the time I met petra in college and I have done so many things with Petra since – SFera, the SFERA Award, all those SFeraKons, trips to Worldcon, a Eurocon, trips to Croatian conventions – that somehow it’s been years since we spoke about books. I have no idea how that happened – I was not even aware of it until the SFera Book Club last Tuesday.

She brought three Pratchett books to the Club – Snuff, Monstrous Regiment and A Hat Full of Sky. The SFera Book Club in 2015 is organized to have a different individual run it every time and they get to name up to three books by an author of their own choosing they would like people to read. And whoever runs the Book Club gets to moderate.

Petra did not just do the three books, she brought pairs. So, the Book Club opened with a discussion of similarities between Snuff and Disgrace. The the inevitable comparison of the number of books sold as in audience reached (Snuff 55 000 in a day! while Disgrace won a Man Booker and never reached anywhere near that number in a day). I have not read Disgrace, but I have a need to now, if nothing else than to pen an essay on the lack of serious themes in genre literature and how it actually does not exist.

 

Unfortunately, there were those among us who had not read Monstrous regiment, so the discussion had to skirt around a bit in order not to reveal any spoilers. I was able to recommend a book of essays I had discovered, read and enjoyed so very much that I will insist this particular Book Club receive an extension once everyone gets up to speed with Monstrous regiment – and that would be Pratchett’s Women: The Books, the Bad and the Broomsticks by Tansy Rayner Roberts. I am eager to see what would develop in that conversation.

The A Hat Full of Sky discussion centered around Tiffany as one of the very well rounded characters while Marko Štengl, one of the biggest Croatian Terry Pratchett fans proclaimed it an awesome parenting manual. Totally did not see that coming and now I have to reread the book to see why.

Some of the crowd that SFera draws on Tuesday nights did not take part in the Book Club, they were busy discussing film. But as the evening drew to a close, we discovered that they also thought Pratchett was “just fun” and thus felt disinclined to have a discussion about him. This created another lively discussion which resulted in a new Book Club reading assignment. proposed by one of the younger members. I love it when that happens – that is why SFera is important all year round and not just as the society that organizes SFeraKon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.google.hr/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f0/A_Hat_Full_of_Sky_Cover.jpg&imgrefurl=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hat_Full_of_Sky&h=475&w=301&tbnid=QV-1vZ9G97WdEM:&zoom=1&docid=ZjWp8HWxBjC9RM&ei=Oxl4Vcy4Fcz8UqSjgJgB&tbm=isch&ved=0CCEQMygHMAdqFQoTCIzCh_j8hMYCFUy-FAodpBEAEw

 

The SFera Book Club: Terry Pratchett

Post-con depression: the Zagreb Book Festival

Post-con depression is best cured by attending  – or indeed organizing – another event. Shamrokon taught me that! (Liburnicon taught me that maybe three con weekends in a row might not be the brigthest idea in the world even if the third on is at the beautiful Croatian seaside).

So that’s exactly what I did. I took part in the organizing of the first ever Zagreb Book Festival, starting today. On the organization end of things, I am handling the kids’ workshops happening daily until Sunday that range from Museum treasure hunts – today is International Museum Day and ZBF’s venue is the beautiful Museum of Arts and Crafts – to early reading, internet security and literary detective workshops.

I am doing these at the ZBF, but on behalf of RODA, Croatia’s most famous and most successful parenting NGO that has changed and improved the lives of many parents in the country. Alas, its very successful promotion of breastfeeding has led it to be associated  with aggressive promotion of this very important but small part of parenthood in the eye of the public.

This is why it makes me so happy that taking part in ZBF has given RODA a lovely chance to show that it does not feel that parenthood begins and ends with breastfeeding alone.  There are many facets of parenthood RODA is actively working on and ZBF is an awesome opportunity to showcase some of them.

On the attending another event end of things, I will be going to a number of adult programming of the festival that is this year dedicated to crime fiction and Sweden. There are some new Croatian books – Balkan noir and Zagreb noir – in the crime genre and there are very interesting foreign guests.

One of them is – to circle back to kids again – the Swedish children’s author and illustrator Sven Nordqvist whose Pettson and Findus picture books my son is literally crazy about.

Ulf Stark has been recently translated and is also one of the guests, as well as Jens Lapidus, Kristina Ohlsson, Anders Roslund i Stefan Thunberg, Sven Nordqvist, and Ece Temelkuran. And a huge number of Croatian authors, among whom is Darko Macan, Croatia’s foremost writer and editor of SF.

So, post con depression? No time for that – there are festivals to run. And attend.

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Post-con depression: the Zagreb Book Festival

SFeraKon 2015: Friday

Photo by Zvonimir Ferina

The first day of SFeraKon, one would think, is when the organizing team is most crazy. Nope. But the day does start for them a lot earlier than it does for all the members who start coming in larger number around 18:00.

One of the SFeraKon tradition is to look for volunteers outside of fandom, among the newbies. This year we’ve had record interest in volunteering at SFeraKon which in practical terms meant that registration was ready and sorted hours ahead of time.

Programming started with the presenetation of TranSFerzala, a stamp collecting activity for fans going to Croatian conventions that offer free membership to all the numerous Croatian SF conventions in 2016. At the same time, the Croatian translation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman was presented, the cosplay got going, as well as the vendor hall.

Photo by Zvonimir Ferina

For the first time in Croatian fandom, we introduced ribbons. For now, most of the squee over them comes from all the people who’ve attended Worldcon but it is catching on. We made a special ribbon for the oldest members of Croatian fandom, the people who created SFera and SFeraKon. We call them the SFeroSaurs, so that’s what their ribbons say. Those who’ve been coming to SFeraKon get to wear s SFeraKon Veteran ribbon. As we are celebrating 150 years of Alice in wonderland, 50 year of Dune and have Sir Terry Pratchett and Leonard Nimoy as Ghosts of Honour we also made ribbons to celebrate them.

I got caught up with some old friends, gave Kate Elliott her grand tour of the convention and helped present the SFera programme – SFerin scenaristicki inkubator. It’s a scriptwriting workshop Irena Krcelic held in 2014 and 2015 in which two scripts have been developed that have won the support of the Croatian Audiovisual Centre.

And I went home waay to early.

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SFeraKon 2015: Friday

SFeraKooooooon!

SFeraKon 2015 has just begun. Here is a photo of this year’s organizing team! The photographer did not think it was the best of the bunch he made, but I think it’s great – the laptop in the centre just the right kind of appropriate!

Photo by Miroslav Šilovic

SFeraKooooooon!

Unintended consequences & literary awards

The Hugos, voting systems and supporting memberships are a hot topic in SF fandom these days. I have a lot to say about it, but running a con while working full-time hours as a freelancer will severely limit one’s free time (translation: I have 3 different Hugo-related articles pending that might or might not ever see the light of day). But reading a post by K. Tempest Bradford with a title that is almost exactly the same as one of mine, I decided I had to post this one.

Croatia is a small country – New York City has more people than we do. There may be only four million of us but in that four million there are a lot of active SF fans and writers. We have seven annual cons, three annual anthologies, two magazines, three or more fanzines, more than a 100 genre authors and two genre awards… We are rich. We are also rich in strife, as small towns tend to be and a small town is what we are the equivalent of on a global scale, albeit one taking up some of Earth’s prime real estate.

I administer SFERA, the oldest Croatian national SF award and I have a Sad Puppy type of person, thinking they’ve written the next Tolkien or the Croatian Asimov every other year spouting shit all over me personally and the award I administer for not recognizing their genius. Online, as well as live, gossiping relentlessly behind my back. Such is the nature of awards.

Some years it’s not even a Sad Puppy kind of person, it’s my friends, colleagues and past winners of the award creating a ruckus. Small towns, as you might have read in a Stephen King novel, have their own ways of dealing with such things. Sometimes it’s gruesome and unfair and Carrie-like (see Balkan wars), and other times it’s more of an Oscar Wilde or Saki kind of thing.

So let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, the SFERA Award jury gave the best novel award to a famous Croatian photographer. It was the photographer’s first book ever. It was also the best novel among the nominated works, which also happened to include not only names known and well liked in Croatian genre literature and fandom but also names quite well-known in Croatian mainstream literature.

As I said, the photographer won. The SFERA Award winner in each category is decided by consensus, not voting. Either the entire jury agrees something deserves a SFERA 0r it’s better luck next time for everybody in the category.

A big chunk of Croatian fandom was outraged when the photographer won. His photos may be great, but his novel was certainly not! I chaired the jury and my personal bent toward PR was blamed for this particular win. The jury, with me presiding over it, was accused of putting promotion potential before quality. Worded a bit less politely, of course.

The outrage was such that immediately, in that very year, a new genre award was established. Its independent and secret jury read all the same books the SFERA Award jury did, the jury members worked under an entirely different – better and improved and much more quality oriented – system of rules, awarding the best works in three categories. One of the categories was best novel. The photographer won. Because he had written the best novel in that year.

I could be ironic in a number of ways now. Or point out in how many nuances that situation is different from the shitstorm the Hugos are going through right now. (And it is, in many ways). Thing is, it did look like a pretty big shitstorm to us as it was happening. And now?

Now I get to go to Pyrkon and Swancon and Loncon and any Worldcon and say:

Croatia is a small country – New York City has more people than we do. There may be only four million of us but in that four million there are a lot of active SF fans and writers. We have seven annual cons, three annual anthologies, two magazines, three or more fanzines, more than a 100 genre authors… And TWO genre awards. We are rich.

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Unintended consequences & literary awards