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.

Back from Swecon

ConFuse is over and we’re back home. And what a great convention it was!

On Saturday evening, after the programming ended, people stayed at the con site drinking beer and chatting (and some of us having a cigar in honor of the half-Finnish team that was victorious in the quiz program), when suddenly the door started beeping menacingly at us. Apparently the burglar alarm had been set so that after one o’clock going back and forth through the door wasn’t a terribly good idea. I think some people still stayed for a while, but shortly after witnessing Tommy sprint from the building with Pasinen in tow (presumably to catch the bus, not to escape from the scene before security came to investigate the alarm), we decided to call it a night and left for the hotel. Jukka entertained Ben and me well into the night with obscure sf trivia questions from a book he had bought.



Sunday started, again, with the Guests of Honors on a panel; this time they talked about blogging and all the ways modern writers are expected to promote themselves. In addition to mentioning that a blog can be a useful tool for a writer, one that can be used for creating a personal connection to ones readers, it was noted that we may once again be entering an era of performing creators and that these things go in cycles (when audio recordings were invented, performers were furious that their art would be reduced to mere “clerking in a studio,” and now authors are lamenting that they can’t necessarily do their work secluded from the audience again but are “required to be performing monkeys” to promote their work.

Sunday was more quiet than the earlier days, as these things tend to go. In addition to not sleeping enough the previous couple of nights, the mood changes a bit when people start to leave already during the day. So did also we because we needed to catch the evening ferry from Stockholm: after Jukka and Mari were done with their Evil in Fantasy panel, we said our goodbyes and headed for the railway station for the train to Stockholm. The train left almost on time despite Juha’s timetable-bending warp field being present. On the way home we stopped four or five times to grab a quick bite (I swear Dr. Pasinen has a Tardis stomach; it must be bigger on the inside—and if you don’t take him eating when he’s hungry, he’ll just stare at you with his puppy eyes until you cave), got a lot of bad ideas (and some good ones too), learned what mozzarella is really made of, educated Ben, Jukka, and Marianna on certain unmentionable horrors of the Internet (they’d rather not had learned about), and reminisced about the con.



So what was so good about it? The location was excellent, very close to the city center, the hotels, and many restaurants. And the venue worked very well for a convention this size. Everything was close together, with the second-hand book tables and the bar on the entrance level, and a lounge area, the art show, and the program rooms half a floor down, close enough for easy access but not too close to the bar to disturb each other. There was a notable amount of interesting programming (a lot of it with the GoHs), and it run admirably on time—mainly thanks to Britt-Louise, who kindly but firmly announced when the items were supposed to start winding down.

Swecons aren’t know for their t-shirts and other merchandise but this time the organizers had made stylish ConFuse mugs. In addition to being very inexpensive, they included free coffee or tea for the duration of the convention. Exellent! And as Sten said, every convention automatically becomes 30 % better with an ice cream buffet.



Did I already mention books? The Alvar Appeltofft Foundation had their traditional book sale, and were they selling! In addition to the normally impressive selection of books they had just had a sizable donation of books they wanted to move—and they were priced as such. There was a lot of fluff, but also real finds on those tables, to be had from 5 crowns up (that’s about 50 cents).



According to the organizers there were 95 warm bodies present, which made this the biggest ConFuse ever. Huge thanks to the Linköping fandom for a great time, and hope to see many of you at a Finnish con also! And congratulations to Anders Reuterswärd (two-time Swedish agent of Åcon, among other things) for the Alvar Appeltofft memorial award!

I’ve put up some more photos of the con on Flickr.

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Swecon: Saturday

After yesterday’s festivities (at midnight, the whole city center seemed to be full of happily drunk teenagers celebrating finishing their school) the streets seemed very quiet this morning. Some people went on a walking tour of medieval Linköping. (They told me later that they saw a lot of beautiful decaying old buildings and places where a lot of people had been killed which was interesting and fun. I have strange friends.)

I went to prepare for my program item. I had a suspicion that 11 AM isn’t really a good time to have book discussion, and my suspicion turned out to be correct. Ten minutes after the item was supposed to start Jukkahoo walked in, and we chatted about this and that. Marianna came in about five minutes after that, so we continued chatting. At about 25 minutes past 11, Tommy and Carolina arrived, and we decided there were enough people and had a short but fun discussion.

The Guests of Honor are really being worked today. They’ve both taken part in at least two program items in addition to their speeches, and Cory Doctorow was interviewed today for the second time (this time about his other activities than writing fiction). At the moment they are talking on stage about the craft of writing science fiction. Neither of them confessed to wearing a tiara while writing.

I have to say the Swedes have once again managed to pick excellent Guests of Honor for their convention. Both Roberts and Doctorow have been constantly interesting and entertaining, and very approachable to the fen. Cory Doctorow started the day’s GoH programming by discussing the future of books. The discussion was interactive, the audience having many questions and comments. It didn’t stay on one topic very well, partly because of all the comments and opinions, but also partly because I don’t think they had decided whether “the future of books” meant the future of the book as a physical object or the novel as a literary form (which I think are two completely different, but equally interesting topics). The discussion had many good points for (and against) electronic books, and also some speculation about the future forms of fiction and reading.

Adam Roberts talked about his research and opinions on the history of science fiction, a topic that was also discussed a bit in his interview yesterday, but which he was now able to go deeper into. He had very interesting opinions on the differences between science fiction and fantasy, and the connections these might have with different religions and materialistic world views. He also observed how modern science fiction (and especially the general perception of it) has been influenced by film. Later on the day he again continued and expanded the topic on his Guest of Honor speech with for example some definitions of what he views as the science fiction literature. The topic of the speech was “Encyclopedic SF,” and he raised some excellent points about the birth of sf around the same time encyclopedias were invented, and further connection between these. He is an interesting and intelligent speaker you really want to pay attention to, because he regularly makes insightful observations (among the wonderfully wry comments about things).

Cory Doctorow’s interview about technology, civil rights, and activism didn’t really contain much new information for anyone who’s read his columns and other writings before, but I think these things are very relevant in today’s society and it’s important they are talked about. Besides, he’s such a captivating speaker with really sound arguments that he’s a pleasure to listen to and it’s very easy to get swept along with his enthusiasm. He started his GoH speech with a short short story that nicely tied up with his earlier discussion about the future of books. The other part of the speech on the other hand touched the same issues as his interview, but from the point of view of how important it is to have control over your tools and the things you own to be happy, and how important it is that people are allowed to use their creativity and make stuff themselves even in this era of “no user-serviceable parts”.

It‘s been a long day, but there’s still some programming left. There have been many good and fun conversations with other members of the convention. Ben and Jukka went to defend Finland’s honor in some kind of a frog sport. I think I’ll head for the bar.

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