Turku Hopeful for Finncon 2018

There are some folks in Turku who are looking into the possibility of organizing a Finncon in 2018; the main organizer would be the Science Fiction Culture Cabinet at the University of Turku (ie. Tutka, The Turku University sf club). If you are interested in taking part in the discussion, Tutka is organizing an open info event on Saturday, March 19 at Terrakoti, starting at 2 PM, so stop by to hear more and meet the people behind the project.

Finnish Cultural Foundation Grants

The Finnish Cultural Foundation has announced their annual grants, and there are some sf or fandom–related items on the list (and I may have missed some—the list is long).

First and foremost, I‘m of course very happy to see the Tampere Finncon receive a 6 000 € grant to help in organizing the event.

Another bit w00t: Irma Hirsjärvi and her The World Hobbit Project workgroup received 90 000 € for research of meanings of fantasy in Finland. Huge congrats!

Kaisa Kaukiainen‘s doctoral thesis research of religiousness in dystopic literature seems very interesting, and was supported with a 24 000 € grant.

Also congratulations to Juha-Pekka Koskinen, J. Pekka Mäkelä, and Antti Oikarinen who each received a 24 000 € grant (for writing or translation work), and to Iida Simes and Aino Torttila for a 12 000 € grant to improve the visibility of Nordic literature in the Helsinki Book Fair.

New Finnish Fandom Chat

There’s a new Slack chat forum called ‘Suomen Fandom’ for discussing (in Finnish) sf and fandom and all such things—life, the universe, and everything. It’s set up by ESC, but everyone interested is invited—email Jarmo Vainionpää if you want to join the discussion.

If you’re new to Slack, check out this very short introduction to get the general gist of it.

(For those on Facebook, there‘s also a fandom group there that is rather active.)

Tähtivaeltaja Award 2015 Shortlist

The candidates for the Tähtivaeltaja Award (best science fiction book published in Finland last year) have been announced.

On the shortlist selected by the award jury are:

• Uusi maa (MaddAddam) by Margaret Atwood (Otava)
• Kudottujen kujien kaupunki by Emmi Itäranta (Teos)
• Haikaran silmä (The Eye of the Heron) by Ursula K. Le Guin (Vaskikirjat)
• Hävitys (Annihilation) by Jeff VanderMeer (Like)
• Liktorin miekka (The Sword of the Lictor) by Gene Wolfe (Gummerus)

The award jury comprises journalist Hannu Blommila, editor Toni Jerrman, critic Elli Leppä, and critic Antti Oikarinen. The award winner will be announced in May.

New Kosmoskynä Webzine

The website for Kosmoskynä (the zine of the Finnish Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association) has been renewed, and now features a brand new webzine that will publish new stuff not seen in the paper zine (which from now on is published only two times per year). Two new short stories have been published, and columns and non-fiction articles will be published in the future as well. Go check the spiffy new site out!

All’s not that great though—when creating the new website, they’ve made the rookie web design mistake of purging all the old content from the site, including a quite large archive of information about and texts from the zine’s history. A damn shame from a fanhistory perspective, but I’m hoping this was just a cleanup for getting the new zine published, and the historical information will be added to the new site as well.