Monthly Pub Thursday Reminder

Tomorrow is again the first Thursday of the month, so there will be the traditional Turku sf pub meeting. Bar Bremer, at six.

Swedish NOFF Delegate Selected

The Swedish fandom has selected their NOFF delegate for the year. The winner is Jonas Wissting, who will be traveling to the Tampere Finncon in July.

Jonas comes from Linköping where he’s been active in fandom since the beginning of the 2000s. He was involved in organizing this year’s Swecon as well as a couple of earlier Linköping conventions, and is also a member of the Åcon 3 committee. He’s coming to Finncon “because it’s nice to go to a convention with Finnish fans,” so say hello to him in Tampere!

Finncon Accommodation Available

Hotels in Tampere during Finncon are pretty hard to get any more, but if you need accommodation, Tampere fen have promised to offer accommodation to a few travellers. Contact Ari Seppi (@uta.fi) for more information.

The Lord of the Rings Symphony Comes to Finland

The Tampere Filharmonia will play Howard Shore’s The Lord of the Rings Symphony in Tampere-talo (the same place that hosts this year’s Finncon) next spring. There will be two concerts, on May 1 and 2. The concert is accompanied with illustrations by Alan Lee and John Howe.

Tickets went on sale on Monday and are available from Lippupiste and Tampere-talo.

Tähtivaeltaja Award 2008

The Tähtivaeltaja Award for the best science fiction book published in Finnish in 2007 has been announced. The winner is Olen legenda (I Am Legend) by Richard Matheson, published by Vaskikirjat.

The jury commended the novel’s timeless quality, dark atmosphere, and scientific approach that effectively separates the book from the vampire fantasies. The award jury were: critic Hannu Blommila, editor Toni Jerrman, critic Elli Leppä, and journalist Vesa Sisättö.

Rajaniemi Represented

SFScope reports that Hannu Rajaniemi is now represented by the John Jarrold Literery Agency. Congratulations, Hannu!

Hannu is a Finnish author, nowadays living in Edinburgh, whose texts have appeared in Futurismic, a few anthologies (including two Year’s Best SF anthos) and in several zines (including Usva International 2006, available online as a PDF) and who has been described as the next big name of sf by Charles Stross. I’m a big fan of his writing and hope this move means we’ll be seeing more of his texts, and hopefully longer ones too, in the not too distant future.

New Fandom

Huge congratulations to Anne Leinonen (and Tapsa too, of course) who last night made a brand new human (of the boy variety)!

Zines Get Cultural Grants

This is already old news (from the beginning of June), but I’ve been a bit busy and thought it still worth reporting. The Ministry of Education has given grants to support cultural magazines, and among 109 publications getting grants there are a couple of sf zines too (these are zines published by sf clubs, and probably best classified as semiprozines).

Kosmoskynä (the Finnish Science Fiction Writers Association’s publication) got 500 €, Spin (published by the Turku SF Society) 3 000 €, Portti (Tampere SF Society) 15 000 €, and Tähtivaeltaja (Helsinki SF Society) 16 000 €.

Sinisalo Sturgeon Finalist

Johanna Sinisalo’s short story Baby Doll is a finalist for the 2007 Theodore Sturgeon Award. The English translation of the story was published in the SWFA European Hall of Fame anthology. It’s been previously also published in Year’s Best SF 13. I’ve said this before, but it’s worth saying again: Go Johanna!

(Thanks for Toni Jerrman for noticing this.)

Finncon 2008 Program Announced

This year’s Finncon has announced its (preliminary) program. The English program items have been marked with (en). The English-language programming at the moment looks like this:

• Sat 12 PM: EVE Online—builders of virtual worlds
  video game creators talk
• Sat 3 PM: Science fiction and fantasy genre criticism
  panel discussion
• Sat 4 PM: Masquerades—different masquerades in different conventions
  show and tell
  
• Sun 12 PM: Charles Vess Guest of Honor Speech
• Sun 1 PM: Intertextuality and Allusions in Russian Contemporary Fantasy
  presentation of books and authors
  
• Sun 1 PM: EVE Online—fan fiction made real
  the video game creators are back
  
• Sun 2 PM: M. John Harrison inside the “Actors studio” (I think that should be the Authors studio)
  GoH interview
  
• Sun 3 PM: Diana Wynne Jones—a rebel amongst children’s fantasists?
  panel discussion
  
• Sun 4 PM: Latin American science fiction
  presentation by Peruvian sf writer Tanya Tynjälä

In addition there are Guest of Honor kaffeklatches. Remember this is still a preliminary program and will probably develop further as the con approaches.