Worldcon
I can't believe it took me to the age of mumblety to go to my first con! The short version: I had a great time even though I only went for a day, and it made me really want to go to Nine Worlds next year.
The first panel I went to was on sex in sci-fi and it was ...OK, though the discussion was surprisingly non-queer and the panellists were generally less positive about sex in fiction than I expected. One panellist (I'm not sure who she was because I was right at the back) kept referring to sexual content as 'squishy bits' which seemed unnecessarily coy, and another stated categorically at one point that there was no sex in mystery novels, and any detective novel that had sex in it wasn't a mystery but a romance (!) On the plus side, erotica writer Tiffini Angus was really frank and funny, and I enjoyed her talking about dinosaur porn.
Next I went to a pretty enjoyable panel on commercialising fans. The most interesting part about it was Carolyn E Cooper talking about how she had been around in zine fandoms back in the early 80s, and what she called the great schism. The way she described it, this involved male literary SF fandom freaking out over women media fans starting coming to cons because of fandoms like Star Trek and responding by starting up cons that banned media fandoms, costuming, and fun.
After a quick lunch with
oliviacirce (who I hadn't seen in YEARS, god damn you, the Atlantic Ocean) and
such_heights I went to a panel on YA in translation. This started badly because two of the panellists hadn't turned up, the audience was scanty and the remaining three panellists just looked like they wanted to run away. However, the moderator was Yasser Bahjatt, the publisher of a Saudi Arabian sci-fi novel that was a bestseller across the Arabic-speaking world, and he had some great stories about publishing in Saudi Arabia including having to fight with the religious police who banned the book once it had already been published, accused him of witch craft, and told book shops they weren't allowed to sell it.
(The book is Hwjn by Ibraheem Abbas and the English version is free on Amazon for the next couple of days!)
Then I went to a panel on British SFzzzzzzzz. The panel was kind of a snooze-fest and I can't remember anything that was said apart from Simon Spanton from Gollancz stating that ebooks were inherently worse quality-wise than print books, which made me roll my eyes. Finally I went to a panel called Reading the Other which featured as panellists Leslie Ann Moore and Wesley Chu, both of whose books I now need to look up.
Afterwards I introduced myself to shaded_sun by kind of ...ambushing her in the hallway but luckily she didn't mind being enthused at by a random from twitter and we went and talked for ages about important topics like how much we love Sam/Steve!
By the end of the day I was tired enough that I gave up on panels and just went and sat on a bean bag in the fan village until I got menaced by small children (cute, but deadly with a hula hoop) and luckily at that point
oliviacirce turned up and I went for a pint with her and met her lovely parents.
The first panel I went to was on sex in sci-fi and it was ...OK, though the discussion was surprisingly non-queer and the panellists were generally less positive about sex in fiction than I expected. One panellist (I'm not sure who she was because I was right at the back) kept referring to sexual content as 'squishy bits' which seemed unnecessarily coy, and another stated categorically at one point that there was no sex in mystery novels, and any detective novel that had sex in it wasn't a mystery but a romance (!) On the plus side, erotica writer Tiffini Angus was really frank and funny, and I enjoyed her talking about dinosaur porn.
Next I went to a pretty enjoyable panel on commercialising fans. The most interesting part about it was Carolyn E Cooper talking about how she had been around in zine fandoms back in the early 80s, and what she called the great schism. The way she described it, this involved male literary SF fandom freaking out over women media fans starting coming to cons because of fandoms like Star Trek and responding by starting up cons that banned media fandoms, costuming, and fun.
After a quick lunch with
oliviacirce (who I hadn't seen in YEARS, god damn you, the Atlantic Ocean) and
such_heights I went to a panel on YA in translation. This started badly because two of the panellists hadn't turned up, the audience was scanty and the remaining three panellists just looked like they wanted to run away. However, the moderator was Yasser Bahjatt, the publisher of a Saudi Arabian sci-fi novel that was a bestseller across the Arabic-speaking world, and he had some great stories about publishing in Saudi Arabia including having to fight with the religious police who banned the book once it had already been published, accused him of witch craft, and told book shops they weren't allowed to sell it.
(The book is Hwjn by Ibraheem Abbas and the English version is free on Amazon for the next couple of days!)
Then I went to a panel on British SFzzzzzzzz. The panel was kind of a snooze-fest and I can't remember anything that was said apart from Simon Spanton from Gollancz stating that ebooks were inherently worse quality-wise than print books, which made me roll my eyes. Finally I went to a panel called Reading the Other which featured as panellists Leslie Ann Moore and Wesley Chu, both of whose books I now need to look up.
Afterwards I introduced myself to shaded_sun by kind of ...ambushing her in the hallway but luckily she didn't mind being enthused at by a random from twitter and we went and talked for ages about important topics like how much we love Sam/Steve!
By the end of the day I was tired enough that I gave up on panels and just went and sat on a bean bag in the fan village until I got menaced by small children (cute, but deadly with a hula hoop) and luckily at that point
oliviacirce turned up and I went for a pint with her and met her lovely parents.