The traditional Dirk Gently’s Holistic Picnic takes place next Saturday (August 18). The gathering is at the Helsinki railway station, under the departing local trains sign, at 2 PM. Free attendance; you’ll need some money, the Helsinki trains timetable, and salted peanuts. The destination will be determined using the Helsinki maps in the phone book and flipping a coin. For more information, contact Vesa Sisättö, tel. 050 534 7747.
050 534 7747
The Turku kirjakahvila puts on a series of outdoor movie shows this autumn. On Wednesday, September 5 they’ll be showing the movie Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster from 1955.
There will be a couple of new sf series on Finnish television. The first, a Swedish series called Hubotit - melkein ihmisiä (Äkta människor, or “real people”) starts this Thursday on Yle 2. In the series mankind has developed very humanlike robots, and the series handles the issues society will have as a consequence.
The new J.J. Abrams series Alcatraz starts on Sub September 2. The premise is that in 1963 Alcatraz really wasn’t closed down because of the reasons publicly stated, but instead all the prisoners and guards just vanished without a trace, and now they return in modern-day San Francisco.
On Mondays, starting September 3, Mtv3 will show Better off Ted, a comedy series about a guy working in a very weird r&d department, and who also can break the fourth wall and control events in the series.
Also on September 3 will start an interesting series called Misfits (Yle 2). It centers around a group of delinquents that end up having superpowers (but do not instantly become heroes as a result). I’ve seen some of the series, and Heroes it isn’t. Recommended.
This weekend, the Turku Science Fiction Society hosted the Fantasy Feast, a pseudo-medieval, fantasy-themed gathering held in the Tippsund campground.
The Fantasy Feast is a long-standing tradition (the first Feast was held in 1991, and this was the ninth time it was organized). The recipe has remained pretty much unchanged since the beginning: people dress in loosely medieval style, fantasy-inspired garbs, gather together in a remote location, and spend the weekend playing games, socializing, eating a feast, sitting in a sauna, playing (and listening to) music, and in general just having fun.
Although the people organizing the Feast are new (I don’t think many—if not most—of the organizers this year were even born during the first Feast), the spirit of the happening was the same. A lot of effort had gone into the arrangements this year: there was the traditional tournament (with inventive games to play), the battle of the bards (I only visited one day, so I missed that), and the feast itself, but also lots of programming for the kids (there seem to be more children attending every time—which is not surprising since there are many people who’ve attended the Feast from the beginning, and quite a few of those have children nowadays), and also a “ritual” calling the spirits of the forest (which tied into the earlier events and contests during the weekend). Plus a wonderful twist in the best costume competition: instead of costume photographs, gorgeous drawings were made of the contestants. Unfortunately I forgot to photograph these, but you can see some of the works of these very talented artists (who were also organizing the event) on their website.
The feast seemed to me somewhat smaller than in the days of yore, but maybe this was just because so many of the attendees were kids; I think the number of attendees was all in all not that different. Although I’m not that interested in the fantasy setting and dressing up (and in all the fighting with foam weapons going about—in my days we had steel swords, but considering how many kids there were it’s probably best the times have changed) any more, it was very nice to see lots of old friends, some of whom I haven’t talked to in a few years. And it was of course fun to see the next generation run around and enjoy themselves (both the figurative one—the organizers—and the literal one—I attended the Feast with my daughter) at the event. A big thank you to the organizers and here’s hoping the tradition continues!
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen announced on his blog a while ago that he has sold the English rights for his debut novel Lumikko ja yhdeksän muuta to British Pushkin Press, and the novel will be published in English sometime in the future. Yay!
Since quite a few people nowadays seem to be interested in such things: there are no panel parity or other such gender equality programs in effect in Finncons, but I’ve previously claimed the con is pretty equal, or in fact has more women participating in program items than men. I thought I’d do a quick count to see if my assumption was correct.
As counted from the published program book, this year’s Finncon program participants included 73 women and 69 men (not all program items listed all participants, and there may have been changes, but this was as close as I could get from online documentation).
Oh, and looking at an earlier Finncon in 2010 (2011 was combined with Animecon, and I think looking at a science fiction convention is more interesting; also 2010 was an interesting year for me since I was one of the organizers), there were 71 women and 58 men in the program. So I don’t think my quip that if we were to strive for panel parity, we’d have to drop quite a few interesting women from the program was totally unfounded.
Looking more closely at this year’s figures, one can make some other observations, though. In the science programming, there were 10 men to only 2 women participating in the program items. So that might be something to pay attention to in the future. On the other hand, in the program items where writers discussed writing sf, there were 32 women and 11 men. So I think it’s fair to say that women writers aren’t discriminated against at Finncon (not that I’ve heard such claims in Finnish conventions).
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...
