Finncon 2008 Announces GoHs

Next year’s Finncon (in Tampere) has announced their guests of honor.  The foreign guests of honor are author M. John Harrison, scholar and author Farah Mendlesohn, and illustrator Charles Vess. The Finnish GoH is comics creator and illustrator Petri Hiltunen.

New Fandom

Congratulations to Frans for the new baby! Also to Tytti & Jani for their own newfan born a couple of weeks ago!

Ian McDonald GoH of Åcon 2

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)

Eurocon Signup Deadline is Here

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!

Old & New

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!

Pub Meeting on Thursday

Where did July go? And where was the scorching hot weather we’re supposed to have now that the global warming has taken effect (if you believe all the people ranting about that last summer)?

Come discuss the sfnality of the world as we know it (or any other interesting subjects that come to mind) on Thursday at Bar Bremer (six o’clock). This month’s mafia zine has stuff about books and tv (an introduction to Heroes + others) for example, plus con reports from this year’s Finncon.

(By the way, if you’d like to have a copy of my zine, and can’t come to Bremer but are coming to the Roadside picnic on Saturday, drop me a note and I’ll bring you a copy.)

Usva Camping

The Usva summer camp for sf writers was last week. Anne has collected notes from participants’ blogs (and has a few of her own too).