TSFS Exhibition at the Turku Library

The new main library of the Turku city library is finally fully up and running. And one of the first exhibitions in their brand new exhibition venue? Sf and fandom in the Turku area!

The themes of the exhibition, which opened today, are the Fantasy Feast (pseudo-medieval festival organized by TSFS), the TSFS fanzine Spin, and a photo exhibition of the Turku fandom activities. The exhibitors are TSFS and Tutka (who for some reason don’t have any information about the event on their web sites at the moment—note to the societies: this is a great achievement which you definitely should advertise).

There will also be an sf event linked to the exhibition. On January 30 to February 1, there will be a theme weekend at the library to introduce sf and fandom to the visitors. Friday is meant for kids, with fun activities, book discussion and recommendations, young author interviews and children’s fantasy short films. Saturday is “Fandom Saturday,” with the emphasis on fandom-related presentations and discussions. Sunday is dedicated to Finnish Swedish-speaking fanac.

The exhibition is open until the end of February. So go take a look—I certainly plan to!

Correction: the exhibition is the first put up by a fan or hobby group, not the first overall (but the third).

Calendar: Tampere kuplii 3

Just a quick note: the third Tampere kuplii comics festival will (according to the announcement in Kvaak) be held this year on the weekend of March 27–29. More info when it becomes available (the web site still has last year’s info).

Atorox 2009 Eligibility

There’s a discussion going on on the FSFWA forum about this year’s Atorox award, especially the eligibility of stories published on the net. According to one comment, stories that have been self-published on the net wouldn’t be eligible to participate in the Atorox voting. This doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, although I understand the fear (if not think it’s justified) that self-publishing on the net is so easy that the total amount of eligible stories would grow too much. But a better way (in my opinion) to handle this would be for example to require that stories published on the net outside the “usual” venues need to be submitted to the Atorox administrator to be taken into consideration.

You could (if necessary) go further and demand someone else than the author submits the story. That way, at least two persons think it‘s worthy of Atorox consideration. Or think about other ways. But I don’t think that just the medium a story is published on should affect the eligibility (self-published on paper is good according to my understanding of the current rules).

More Linkage: Platforms for Discussion

Sari chimes in on the discussion about why and how to make sf discussions on the net more lively with a good and thoughtful post. I find myself mostly agreeing with what she is saying: the discussion is inevitably fragmenting to different forums, blogs, etc. and the best strategy is to go with it instead of trying to fight against the current.

I think the only way to get the often-coveted “one really good fandom forum” for all discussion (even if you supposed you could get enough people to agree what “good” in this context means) would be to take away all other means of communication (other forums, blogs, mailing lists, etc.). And since this isn’t happening, it’s probably not very realistic to try to get any central hub for all fandom discussion artificially going. Not that I object people trying, mind you.

Sidenote 1: One possible (technical) solution for merging blogging and more forum-like discussion than just blog comments might be a LiveJournal-type platform where you could set up topics as communities where people could post their thoughts and commenting would work in a bit more structured manner than on the usual blog. (No, I don’t think LiveJournal is going away despite the current panicking about some layoffs in their US office – on the other hand, I would personally prefer something else, since following LiveJournal discussions with the rudimentary tools they give you is a pain.)

So, all the different blogs and forums probably are here to stay at least for now, until someone comes up with something new people will go with. This is not totally unrelated to what’s going on with fanzines. Every now an then some wide-eyed idealist proposes joining forces to produce one big, really good zine. But since doing your own thing the way you like is more fun, people will keep doing that instead. (Yes, I’m doing that too.)

Sidenote 2: You can make your life following discussions going on in blogs much easier by using a RSS feed aggregator. It will collect the posts from the blogs you want to follow and present them to you in one interface, in chronological order. Simple and easy. If you don’t want to experiment with installing new programs and learning to use them, Google Reader is a good option to test drive using feeds without having to install any of the stuff yourself. It’s almost like having your personal forum where the people you want to read write about stuff they think is interesting.

Linkage

A couple of links to interesting discussions:

There’s an active discussion going on on the FSFWA forum about the activities and future of the association. It’s a long thread but Kati’s message might be a good starting point for the current issues being discussed.

Usva is asking for ideas for the future of the zine. If you read the zine and have an opinion on how it should develop further, go pitch in. (If you’re not reading Usva, there’s no better time to start than now.)

What Makes a Short Story

Interesting discussion on Anne’s blog on what makes an award-winning short story, a good short story, and whether these are related.

Atorox Nomination Starting

It’s time again to compile the list of short stories eligible for the Atorox award. The story needs to be Finnish, and published during last year either in Finnish or Swedish.

The current list can be found on the TSFS Atorox web page, and additions and corrections should be sent to the Atorox administrator Katja Rosvall.

The FSFWA forum has a thread for discussing eligible stories.