The Guest of Honor at Åcon 2 is the British science fiction novelist Ian McDonald. McDonald is a PKD and BSFA award-winning author whose latest novels are the acclaimed River of Gods and Brasyl. His novella The Djinn’s Wife is currently nominated for the British Fantasy Award and the Hugo Award.
Åcon 2 will be held in Mariehamn on May 1–4, 2008.
(picture from McDonald’s Wikipedia page, licensed under GFDL)
If you’re thinking about going to Eurocon in Copenhagen next month, and haven’t registered yet, now is the time to act! The deadline for pre-registration is tomorrow, so sign up at the convention members page now!
At latest count, 15 Finns (+ 3 children) are going, but there is of course room for more. I’ve put up a Finnish-language info page at euroconiin.googlepages.com, and will be updating that about things that come up as the convention approaches.
Update Aug 8: The last-minute campaigning seems to have worked: I’m happy to report the total number of pre-registered Finns is now 18 + 3!
An anniversary mafia today: congratulations to Harri on his 50th! We had wine in honor of the birthday boy and it was sweet. The book fair planning progressed promisingly; it looks like there will be some sf programming at this year’s Turku book fair.
Also, some new people! Welcome to Riina & Jukka who’ve just moved to Turku from Joensuu (and to Maarit who also recently came from there)! Their loss, our gain.
Biggest mafia zine ever: 18 pages! In my time, I’ve edited several issues of Spin that were smaller than that… Must restrain myself better in the future.
The Viikinsaari picnic is in two days. See you there!
If you’re coming to the Viikinsaari picnic a week from now (and why wouldn’t you be), you will have an opportunity to purchase some official Finncon 2007 merchandise there (see pictures). The friendly Finncon organizers are bringing some over just for you.
Although this was the first Finncon shirt ever I didn’t purchase myself (because I think they are just fugly), you should of course judge for yourself. And if you like them, seize the opportunity and get some!
The (probably) most active Finnish sf forum, Risingshadow, has just published a sister site in English. Like its Finnish counterpart, the site is going to host sf news, discussion forums, and a sf book database. It’s not quite clear—at least to me—what the site is hoping to achieve (the book & writer database won’t concentrate on books published in Finnish; I’m not sure why the world needs yet another sf book listing, and I remain sceptical that the Risingshadow users would want to discuss things in English on another forum in addition to their usual hanging-out place), but hopefully that will become clear in the future. It remains to be seen also, if the discussion forum will focus more on sf than the Finnish one (where you have to wade through a bunch of general-interest-to-young-people topics to get to any discussion related to sf at all), but I’d say that this might be a promising place if you want to get in touch with Finns who read sf.
The English-language site can be found at en.risingshadow.net, and the Finnish one has moved to fi.risingshadow.net.
The Finlandia Award nominees for this year have been announced, and there are a couple of familiar sfnal names in the mix. Magdalena Hai’s K...
