How about a castle in Spain?

By Urbano Suárez via Wikimedia Commons

Sometime in January I bought a collection of speculative fiction in Spanish (here, should you happen to be interested). I figured I’d muddle through is somehow or other, I did study Italian, after all and if I apply myself…

Well, so far I have read none. I still might. I am very glad I supported the book in some way. Non-anglophone SF, as I belong to it myself, is something I try to seek out and read as much as possible.

In the middle of January I also got an e-mail telling me about this crowdfunding campaign to translate Spanish genre stories into English. I loved it, just did not have the time right then to write about it. Yes – life, sinuses, chickenpox and kids get in the way of everything. Work especially.

But luckily, it is not too late (three more weeks til closing time!) to help the Spanish into English and yourself to a castle in Spain! Just follow me there.

Like this:

Like Loading...

How about a castle in Spain?

PoRtaL 2015

Next weekend – February 28- March 1, 2015 – Zagreb is hosting a regional LARP convention, PoRtaL 2015, run by larpers for larpers, with free entrance. The name might look strange, but, as is the custom in geeky pursuits, has meaning: P stands for “play” and for “PoRtaL”, R for “role-play” and L “Larp”. Their website will tell you more and you can also find them on Facebook.

The Croatian LARP scene is not very big, I think around a hundred people actively take part in its quite numerous events and campaigns today, but it is diverse and present at almost all SF conventions. I know that I have been aware of it since I discovered fandom. I vividly remember seeing vampires at Essekon, the now defunct Osijek SF convention that was my first con ever.

I would probably not even be aware of this con either if it weren’t for the fact that some of the finer young genre writers in Croatia also happen to be avid larpers as well. The year of my GUFF trip – 2013 – was also the year of the first Croatian LARP convention. That PoRtal became first in a series of events: last year a convention was held under that name in Budapest, Hungary.

Even though the first one was held in Zagreb, I was so totally immersed in my GUFF preparations that I missed it entirely. I will certainly go take a peek this year.

 

 

PoRtaL 2015

Poklade

  It always seemed so wrong to me, seeing kids in American movies don scary costumes in the middle of autumn and go trick or treating. Ringing at doors to get donuts is a winter practice and one could go as whatever one wanted to be. A ballerina, a princess, a typist or a rocket scientist. Scary was not mandatory. Dancing, fireworks and a burning effigy were. Still are.

I called it maškare and poklade as a kid, both Croatian words for Carnival. There are many names for what remains of the ancient Roman Bacchanalia in the predominantly Catholic Croatia:  poklade,  fašnik, krnjeval, krnoval, pokladi, pust, fašnjek,  maškare. Which one you get to use, and what customs you get to follow, depends on which part of Croatia your family calls home.

I have no idea what my inherited family traditions would be. If there were any at all, my family has long since stopped practicing them. They are from southern Croatia, but having grown up in Zagreb, my childhood consisted of doing the maškare thing, halfheartedly as I was shy and wistfully watching the Children’s Carnival in Rijeka, home of the possibly biggest and certainly best known Croatian Carnival.

“Zvoncari viskovo 2008 3″ by Roberta F.

I had always wanted to be a part of it. As an adult, a few years back I fulfilled that dream to go see it live. It was awesome! Zvoncari, the traditional bellmen dressed in sheep skin with huge bells hanging from their wastes who take part in a folk custom maintained in the region around Rijeka by doing a dance and ringing the bells in order to scare away evil spirits of winter and stir up new spring-time cycle – let me tell you it is every bit as scary live as you can imagine. And then some.  The custom has been added to the UNESCO‘s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

Before I discovered the world of SF fandom and SFera’s weekly Tuesday meetings, I only knew for certain what I was doing on one Tuesday a year – the Fat one.  In high-school, I exchanged ringing my neighbors door bells for the local tradition of getting into costume & character and visiting Samobor, the small town near Zagreb famous for its custard slice cakes and for its Fašnik.

Celebrating the Carnival in northern Croatia usually means having a multiday festival of some sorts with a very rich and varied program, and lots of partying and drinking in the evening. It all culminates on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday in dancing, fireworks and the ritual burning of the Prince of the Carnival.

Samobor, 2015

Samoborski fašnik has a tradition of its own, it’s been going on for 189 years. It was the first big gathering I ever drove to all by myself. It was the first place where I seriously scratched my car and where I froze a lot, standing in the cold, waiting for them the burn the Prince. I even got the SFera meetings transferred to Samobor on at least two occasions in my early years in fandom.

Today, Samobor is the place where I still go for Carnival every year but on Saturdays, when my kid is not too tired from kindergarten and to participate in the children’s masked orienteering race Srakotrk. People really get into it and the walk and the cold are so worth it, if nothing for the awesome masks one gets to see. This year I loved this one:

Tonight’s Fat Tuesday I spent at SFera, with my friends, planning a convention, the annual program, some workshops and a documentary film. I  was too busy attempting to make donuts to make a mask, but acting like a responsible adult always feels like I’m wearing a mask anyway. Although my donut making project failed royally, this morning I managed to improvise a mask of Sven Nordqvist‘s Findus the Cat for my kid in 40 minutes, making him happy and my entire day great!

 

 

“Zvoncari viskovo 2008 3″ by Roberta F.. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zvoncari_viskovo_2008_3.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Zvoncari_viskovo_2008_3.jpg

Poklade

Australians at Eurovision!

I remember Eurovision being a big deal when I was a kid. It was a very exciting event; one simply did not spend it NOT watching the TV programe which brought so many hit songs. Croatia, of course, competed as  part of Yugoslavia since its début in 1961.

I am old enough to remember when Yugoslavia entered the top 5 with this song. Than in 1987, the Croatian pop band Novi Fosili (New Fossils) bested that by reaching the fourth place with “I’m up for a dance”.

Only two years later, Riva, a band from the beautiful city of Zadar actually won – with the song Rock me. I never liked the song much but I do remember the lead singer’s bangs very well – I kept seeing them on girls and women around me for months.

By the time I started high-school, the war in Croatia was about to begin, and a blond pop princess and Zagreb teenage idol who annoyed the hell out of my grunge loving teenage self was the Yugoslavian entry for the contest. That effectively ended my personal love for the contest, and no amount of national pride or opportunity for being derisive in company could compel me to watch it again. (And a bunch of fun-loving bikers tried really hard some time in 1998 or so).

When I realized that none of the Australians professing their undying love for Eurovision were being ironic, sardonic or anything else but DEAD SERIOUS, I was floored. Flabbergasted. I laughed. And asked questions. And nothing could sway them!

So, when I read that Australia had been invited to take part, I was, to be honest, as gleeful as my Australian friends are. Most of my Facebook feed was full of WTFs by Croatians, but when I asked Aussies if they were ecstatic, the answer was “Hell, yeah!” (Thanks, Cat!)

“So blown away by being included in Eurovision that it’s slightly sad. All the Finns were looking at me as if to say “Wait, you guys seriously like this? What?” I’m waiting for my call-up to sing cover versions of Elton John!” my very witty friend Nick Falkner, whom I met at the GUFF party in Adelaide, told me.

When he continued to describe how they “regularly have a Eurovision song contest dinner party for the finals. A big group of friends to sit around and watch the spectacle, listen to the music and mutter dire things about incestuous voting schemes and the implications of someone not giving Russia 12,” I became totally jealous!

It’s like he was describing part of my childhood I can never get back. Or have again, because, my love of all things Australian notwithstanding, I am not watching Eurovision again. Ever. But I can appreciate how much Australians love Eurovision and I can be very happy for Nick and all of my other Australian friends. Yaaay you! May you win!

Also – because I know Australians will love it – here is a brief history of Yugoslavia’s entries.

I learned something surprising while writing this: a summer neighbor of mine, whom I spent half my childhood being terrified of while terrorizing his younger child, sang at the contest twice.

Like this:

Like Loading...

Australians at Eurovision!

Kontakt!

It was a year ago today that Wizard’s Press published the e-book edition of Kontakt, the Croatian SF Anthology that the SFera Society – namely Darko Macan and Tatjana Jambrišak as editor and translation editor respectively – produced as the international version of a two-decade-old SFeraKon tradition for the Zagreb Eurocon in 2012. Which we also named Kontakt, just to confuse everyone.

SFeraKon gives a gift to all its members every year, whether they pay the full, three-day membership or any of the combinations. The gift consists of a short story collection of recent Croatian SF fiction. Some years the call for stories stipulates a theme, some years not. When we hosted Eurocon in 2012, we not only produced the usual annual collection but also an anthology of Croatian SF stories in English and gave those as a gift to all our international members.

I took one of the few remaining copies with me to Australia for my GUFF trip and I told everyone about it. I am sure I also bugged everyone about it when it came out last winter. Still, now that the Barcelona Eurocon is also doing an anthology (love that!), I feel I should write about it again. The first anniversary of the e-book edition is a great excuse. Go buy it, then!

Like this:

Like Loading...

Kontakt!

Interview: Milena Benini

Photo by Mirko Bulaja

Milena Benini is an award-winning  Croatian speculative fiction author who writes short stories, serialized novels and very interesting theoretical essays on SF genre, feminism and vampires. (Wow, that was easy, once I got it out of my system!) She lives in Zagreb with a husband, two daughters and lots of pets. This summer she was one of the people who have hosted Gillian Polack, the 2015 Australian GUFF delegate on the Croatian leg of her grand European GUFF trip.

How do you manage balancing work, 2 kids, 3? pets, a husband, academic research, fiction writing and reading for pleasure?
I start from the assumption that sleep is overrated. Well, on one hand, having two kids is an advantage, because they can keep each other company, and the same goes for three pets, although the older cat doesn’t much like company anyway. But the younger cat and the dog are great friends.

As for the rest, well, honestly, I don’t know. I’ve been writing and doing other things all my life — I started writing when I was 12, I started earning at least part of my living at 16 — so I guess I just don’t know any other way to live. And my husband is also a writer and translator, so he understands the meaning of the word ‘deadline’, and that helps, too.

Your first story, published by the ESFS Award winning magazine Sirius when you were 14, was pure SF. You write stories in all genres, and your latest novel, which sold in Croatia only after it sold in Canada, is fantasy. Which do you prefer – SF, fantasty or horror?
In Croatian fandom, everybody knows that I’m a great proponent of the expression “speculative fiction” instead of specific sub-genres, and sometimes people laugh at me because of that, but there’s a reason why I’m so stubborn when it comes to the expression. I think that, particularly today, the borders between speculative genres are blurred, and the best the genre has to offer has always at least played with them. I love writers such as Michael Moorcock, China Mieville, Roger Zelazny, Ursula Le Guin. Are they SF, fantasy or horror?

In my own work, I have a bunch of stories taking place in a parallel history universe where technology is advancing rapidly, but magic exists, too, and a lot of the stories spring from the tension between the two. So is it fantasy, because the industrial spy is descended from a fairy, or is it SF, because the whole plot hinges on stealing the technology for wireless telegraphy? I don’t know, and, frankly, I don’t care. I think, among other things, that it’s more fun to write things that are not strictly limited.

What are you working on now?
Fiction-wise, I’m currently rewriting one novel, a sort of urban fantasy with witches and warlocks and cats and a dragon (and some other things, too), and I’m trying to finally complete the synopsis for part two of my epic fantasy novel, since part two is already out in two languages and, with a little luck, people will want to find out what happens later. And even if they don’t, I want to find out for myself. This project has been on the backburner for a long time, so it’s taking me a while to get back into the world and the characters properly, but I really like that world — it was inspired by Roman and Greek cultures — and I’m actually having a lot of fun returning to it. And later this year, I’ll have to finish the edits for another novel, currently with the editor, which is more science-fiction than anything else, but it still includes people who sell dreams for a living, and an alien race whose technology, as far as humans can figure out, consists mostly of half-rotten pieces of wood on a string. But they use it to travel through space, so humans are a little confused about it. To return to your previous question, some might think that it’s more fantasy than ‘true’ SF — but then, FTL travel in general is fantasy and not SF, as far as our current science can tell, so why not achieve it in a more interesting way, without unobtanium cores and reversed polarities?

What do you do for a living?

All kinds of things, although, at the moment, I’m mostly working as editor and community manager for Lumen izdavaštvo, one of Croatia’s most prominent publishing houses, specialising in translated literature. But I also translate, teach, do web-design, and even dabble in graphics. I’ve been a freelancer most of my life, so I like to have a lot of different skills to offer. Oh, and did I mention that I’m editor in chief of Croatian Weekly Economic Bulletin, which is an electronic publication bringing economy-related news from Croatia in English? I’ve been doing that for… a very, very long time.

***

You can find Milena’s short fiction online at the Daily Science Fiction and on the now sadly no longer active World SF blog  or you could buy a copy of Kontakt, the Croatian SF Anthology in English. If you like novels, then go for her Priestess of the Moon.

Interview: Milena Benini

More ŠTRUMF 2015 photos

Photo by Zvonimira Ivaniševic

As I keep repeating, I am a lousy photographer and it does not look like that might be changing any time soon. Luckily, Croatian fandom has no lack of talented people with good cameras.

Zvonimira Ivaniševic attended her first ŠTRUMF and these are her photos.

Like this:

Like Loading...

More ŠTRUMF 2015 photos

ŠTRUMF, the Croatian version of SMOF

Snow Bemmet, Platak 2008

After a few years in Croatian fandom, when I finally got to know most of the people crazy enough to do esefnal things such as conrunning, writing workshops, publishing and such as a hobby, I realized how awesome all these people were. (And I will present each one of them separately on this blog so you can get to know them, too!) Mostly, my realization came from the fact that as I got more and more involved in the actual running of cons, I saw less and less of them. Although some of the older members of Croatian fandom already knew about SMOF cons, I was introduced to the concept at Denvention and was thrilled to have such a good excuse to see all the people I never had any time to talk to during a con. So in winter 2008 Croatian SF fandom came up with its own version of SMOF – and we called it ŠTRUMF.

It’s a Croatian word for smurf. And 2008 was the 50th anniversary of Smurfs we liked it so much we did not stop until we made ŠTRUMF stand for štuffi rezignirani ujedinjeni majstori fandoma, meaning Fed-up Resigned United Masters of Fandom. The last three words are pretty self-explanatory and, obviously, modeled on SMOF. We dropped the “secret” part because everybody knew who ran stuff, if only to be better able to write all kinds of shit about them on internet forums, as is, I found out later, also quite usual in international fandom. No, Croatians are not immune nor exempt from this phenomenon. We are, however, rather small, not matter how loud, so we do all have to learn how to get along in the end, like all other kids who wish to in a restricted sandbox.

Mmp i Mcn, Platak, 2008. Štuffi.

In order to illustrate that, and some other things that go hand in hand with organizing cons for years on end, we picked štuffi because we were all fed up with the fact that we greatly unappreciated both by the wider Croatian SF fandom as well as the mainstream public. (This has gotten better in the mean time, but being pessimistic is a national trait so there will be no change here.) It is a dialect Istrian word with Italian roots – fitting for the first word of a concept that we came up with in Pazin, the capital of Istria and the site of two SF events every year. It was during the Festival of Fantastic literature in August that we came up with ŠTRUMF.

Rijeka & Slovenia, Platak, 2008

Rezignirani  is there because we felt resigned to the fact that quality staff for conrunning will always be difficult to find, more difficult to animate and motivate and even more difficult to keep. We are still there. Ujedinjeni was added because that was a time in Croatian SF fandom when hot debates were raging online and IRL about which con is better – the old-school SFeraKon with GoHs and lectures or Istrakon, the new kid on the block full of fun games, treasure hunts, silly geeky contests and beer. Of course, organizers of both cons volunteered for each other’s cons, but somehow that always escaped everyone’s notice. Also, at the first ŠTRUMF in 2008 we had Slovenian delegates as well.

Snow Jabba the Hut, Platak, 2008

That first ŠTRUMF was held on the weekend of November 29- 30 2008 at one of only three skiing sites in Croatia, Platak. We rented a large chunk of the mountaineering home Mali dom, where they cooked a lovely dinner for us and made us breakfast with lots of tea. There was enough snow to play in and there was no programming but what came of on the spot inspiration. So there were all kinds of games and film screenings. It was wonderful. You can see the photos here.

The idea was that each team of conrunners will take over the running of ŠTRUMF for a year and then pass it along. I have no idea how that went as I gave birth in 2009 and have zero memory of the second two ŠTRUMFs ever happening. People assure me that they did happen. Alas, I cannot find any pictures.

Mali dom, Platak, 2015

The fourth one happened on the penultimate weekend in January 2015, back at the same site, Platak. The food at the Mali dom was still very good, the rooms as they were, the atmosphere – different. For some reason this time we did not get a separate dining room, which resulted in us sharing the larger dining room with some other people who wanted to listen to really loud hillbilly music. Problem was, 30+ of wanted to talk and game.

Again, there was no programming, but there was sleighing, and walks in the snow, and fun conversations. We spent the night playing a huge, very funny version of Taboo and that continued into the wee hours of the morning. I only went to sleep around 7 am. Got up at 9 am and the conversations, walks and plans continued. Lots of plans, some of which were thought up two years ago at a post-con lunch and look like they will finally happen this year.

Patrik Zufic, Aleksandar Žiljak, Monika Tresk Platak 2015

I used to think it was a great idea to close the year with a ŠTRUMF but now I love the idea of beginning the year with one. The weekend was relaxing and much fun, despite the freezing cold room and lack of any water in the morning. (Find the photos here!) That buzz a successfully run con was there, with a lot less effort and stress on everybody’s part. It feels like maybe we have found a way to stay motivated in the boring bit of conrunning that needs to be done months in advance, when panic has not set in yet and everybody tends to tend to their private lives.

Co-chairs of ŠTRUMF 2016

And, of course, somehow I managed to volunteer to run ŠTRUMF next year. Luckily, my co-chair went to Germany for work so I will not be spending the next month working on it (which is where our enthusiasm would have taken us). But I really look forward to the next one. I know it will be great.

ŠTRUMF, the Croatian version of SMOF

Milena Benini

Occasionally, I get asked to speak on TV. A couple months ago it was about the awesome Russian SF film Kin dza dza! which was aired on Croatian TV, today it was about the fictional worlds of Milena Benini, one of the best and most versatile Croatian SF writers. As I was trying to squeeze as much interesting info into the 4 minutes they allowed for the interview, I realized just how late I was with what I tend to call my “SF authors posts”.   So here goes.

I have no idea how long I have known Milena – I think I met her at Essekon in 2005 or thereabouts, but it feels like I have known her forever. I knew of her long before that: she was the 1999 SFERA Award winner for the fantasy novel Kaos (Chaos) serialized in the Croatian SF magazine FUTURA where she was later also the editor-in-chief and consequently the person who published the ad for SFera seeking new SFERA Award Jury members that got me into fandom.

Receiving a SFERA @SFeraKon 2010 Photo by Zvonimir Ferina

Milena went on to win three more SFERAs: for the novella “McGuffin Link” in 2006, for a short story “Plešimo zajedno pod polariziranim nebom” (“Let Us Dance Together Under the Polarized Sky”) and one in the non-fiction category, for “Divide ed morere”, an essay about vampires published by a Croatian mainstream literary magazine, Književna republika. Yes, in addition to being an author, Milena is also up to her neck in theory. Having graduated English literature at St. George University at Oxford she went on to become a teacher, a translator of famous SF authors into Croatian (Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King), an editor (we have her to thank for Croatian translations of Gail Carriger, N. K. Jemisin and Kate Eliot), and a theoretician. She is also one of the authors of The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy vol. 1 and The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction vol. 1: First Contact, which one the Eppie Award as the best e-book of the year.

In her spare time, which I believe she creates in ample amounts by having written some kind of a time-traveling loophole into the walls of her apartment in the very center of Zagreb, Milena is a member of the Croatian Women’s Studies Centre where she researched the position of women in Croatian SF (and found it to be excellent!), romance novels and vampires. About which she not only writes essays, but also novels.

In 2012, Milena’s vampire novel, Djelomicna pomrcina (Partial eclipse)  came out to bring us a different take on the immortal life where the girl is bored, the man is a photoreporter and the world is oh so very Croatian. I’s give you details, but then you’d want to kill me – the novel is not translated into English. Her latest novel – Priestess of the Moon – is a whole other story, albeit a slightly complicated one. It was published in Canada in 2013. In Croatian, however, it came out in book form a whole year later. But long before that, back in 2008 when I was alternating panicking about the possibility of a Zagreb Eurocon and having a child, Priestess of the Moon was another innovative experiment Milena conducted in the world of Croatian SF. She first published the novel in a series of weekly posts on her blog Milerama. True to form, only the recent Croatian edition of the novel is what prompted the TV people to do a story on her.

For me, it is always stories, and so it is with Milena Benini as author, too. You can sample some of her style by reading “The  Marrakech Express” or by buying Kontakt, the Croatian SF anthology that came out for the eponymous Zagreb Eurocon in 2012. It is her story “Bloodhound”, in which the main character’s name is a combination of a common English name, Johnny, and a Croatian surname made famous in the Balkans by a rock’n’roll singer, frontman of Psihomodo pop and an all-round bad boy, Damir Gobac, that opens the anthology. I loved it when I read it the first time, precisely for this cheeky nod to the Croatian reader, who as a rule belongs wholeheartedly to the tribe of  ‘I do not want to read about adventures of anyone Croatian in any space or time since it is a truth universally acknowledged that any American (i.e. Johnny) can do it better’ and thus will appreciate anything foreign sounding more than the domestic product. This is just a tiny example of  the lovely subversiveness in details Milena’s stories enrich the world with.

I could go on but I seem to have turned what I had planned as a short introduction into a whole blog post! So, I will finish by saying that Milena Benini was an awesome Guest of Honour at SFeraKon 2010, is an excellent friend and a exceptionally capable writing instructor. Go read her and come back for a short interview with her on Friday!

Milena as GoH @SFeraKon 2010
Photo by Mirko Bulaja

Milena Benini