[SKRIVA] Imagicon 2 (ny testpost)
- From: Ahrvid Engholm <ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:57:36 +0200
(Nedan ett nytt försök att få styr på formateringen av min
Imagicon-rapport. Det enda sätt jag tycks kunna se om det
blir rätt är att faktiskt skicka ut skiten! Det tycks hända saker
vid mailingen som påverkar radfallet. Vad Hotmail eller
Microsoft hittat på vet jag inte, men det blir Bara Problem!
Det finns några småändringar i texten här och där, också. --AE)
Imagicon 2 - the 2009 Swecon (16-18/10)
"Oh Ghod, you placed this close to the South Pole!" was my
exclamation to Gunnar of Radio Futura fame, as I sweaty and in a
mood to kill entered the Skarpnäck culture centre quite delayed.
Skarpnäck is the end station on one of the southern stretches of
the Stockholm underground system and feels like billions of
lightyears away. I went there on my little scooter, and got lost
on the way. The southern, Antarctical suburbs have lots of turns
and bends where everything looks the same. I finally found an
underground station without a ticket collector and it was only
this way I finally made it. And it rained too. Transportation
problems had lots to do with that I only went to the con one day,'
but that would be a more than full day. (I missed Lars-Olov's
slideshow, though. Hrumpf.)
Liz W and program jumping
Imagicon 2 - www.imagicon.se - was the designated Swecon 2009,
with GoHs Graham Joyce and Liz Williams, both writers from Britain.
The Liz Williams GoH interview was among the first things I
attended. Except for writing she also runs a witch shop,
www.witchcraftshop.co.uk, in her hometown, we learned, and she
has also been into academica (with an PhD in the philosophy of
science, and also as teacher of English as a foreign language). I
asked a question from the floor and learned that her book sales are
very moderate and that the book market is going down. (The
intention of my question was to get a grip of today's bookmarket. I
told Liz she could answer very approximately about her own sales
figures.) Falling sales is the fate of many struggling writers
today in the shadow of Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson. It doesn't
help that one of them is a fan, and dead.
I did a lot of program jumping, eg at 1400 hours when I managed
all three ongoing items. First a little bit of "Did the right book
win?", Hugo-evaluation 20 and 25 years back with among others Jukka
Halme. Then a bit of "Is there a chance for Swedish fantasy?" with
eg Karolina Bjällerstedt Mickos (which we recently had as a juror
on the SKRIVA - www.skriva.bravewriting.com - story competition,
which we discussed a bit during a break). If I remember correctly
the answers to both panel questions were Yes and No. Last this
program hour I listened to old-time fan Lennart Svensson speaking
on "The joys of self publishing". If you know Swedish you can
find his blog at lennart-svensson.blogspot.com (which also goes
for some other URLs splattered in this conrep).
I know everything about so called "small press", naturally (my
own publisher isn't exactly the biggest operation in Scandinavia -
www.zenzat.com - but more later). One thing discussed was that as
a small-time writer and publisher you want to concentrate on your
art, not on filling in forms and beaurocracy. And Sweden isn't
exactly know as being light on beaurocracy. Extreme taxation levels
generate forms and beaurocrats, for instance.
People, no mutants or robots
I should say something about all the people present. Including
GoHs I counted to six Brits, twelve Finns, four Norwegians, one Dane
(Lise Andreasen, her first visit to Stockholm - I spoke to her about
eg Danes in space) and one Latvian (Martin Umants, who has published
Orson Scott Card in Latvian - his website is www.aranea.lv, but it
seems at present to have the shortest message possible). Total
attendance was ca 175. AFAIK no mundane newspapers or other media
covered Imagicon, and part of the problem is probably the far away
location. Media attention is always good, attracting some newcomers
and giving a con some morale boost. (The newspaper Aftonbladet had
something about Imagicon on their web pages, I'm told.)
Johan Jönsson (who does eg www.vetsaga.se) has adapted a new
hairstyle which makes him a deadringer for the famous political
columnist Johan Norberg. He looked angry at me as I pointed this
out (but I was *only* talking about the hairstyle - nothing else!).
Norway's PC Jörgensen had gotten himself a Navy SEAL haircut, I
noticed. Talked to Tobes, the only Jersey fan; talked about the
Channel Islands history and peculiar status. Met finnfan Karolina,
who is also chairperson of next year's interesting Åcon 4 (13-16/5,
www.acon4.info).
Ancient shows
I talked a bit with Dave Lally about ancient TV shows, and later
listened to him in the panel about old sf/fantasy TV series. I tend
to like *old* TV shows. New shows have too many meaningless
explosions and too little scripts. I mentioned to Dave that I was
glad to find episodes of the 1960's series "My Favorite Martian",
which I remember from TV when I was Very Young. I earlier also found
the German "Raumschiff Orion", but without subtitles (I had
some use for my school German, finally!). Dave had found it with
English subtitles. Dave Lally is a packet of pure energy, I think,
and a lightspeed mouth.
Speaking of subtitles, I happened to fall into a debate with the
Swedish subtitling queen Brita Planck (B5 and other stuff) about the
Basis of Scientific Knowledge. But as it felt like a bit too heavy
stuff for a day like this, I soon retreated. Nils Segerdahl had lost
some weigh and Ben Roimola hadn't yet had time to read my essay
about the Nobel winning space poet Harry Martinson. (He does the
only Swedish language Finnish skiffy rag - www.enhorningen.net .)
The Academic Jerry Määttä is almost becoming a Regular At These
Events. He's author of the best study of sf (and to some extent
fandom) in Sweden in later years, Raketsommar ("Rocket Summer"),
PhD on the subject, and I mentioned to him that I am at present
taking the Creative Reading/Writing Science Fiction course at the
Gävle College (part time, distance, done over Internet).
SF DNA in the Next Generation
The new phenomenon in Swedish fandom, is that Young People
you remember from way back, now come to the conventions with their
own Young People, already in their teens and recruited to fandom
(skiffy is probably in their DNA). Karin Lundwall is the original
example (daughter of Sam J, who is seldom seen today) but old news
in this genre Here here we also saw Susan Hende, John Sören
Pettersson and Tony Elgenstierna with kids. It's scary to think
what these young innocent people have ahead of them.
John Sören also bought a copy of my story collection Mord på
månen, which is a good deal since I bribe buyers with a copy of
the 1940s Swedish sf pulp Jules Verne Magasinet that comes from my
publisher's surplus (and it's a good way to get rid of copies!).
Saw space journalist Anders Palm and chatted a bit with Wela
publisher (and writer) Cecilia Wennerström, www.welaforlag.se.
She published eg the books by the excellent writer (and fan) KG
Johansson, who seem to always do well in the SKRIVA competitions.
At the reception, people could sign a Get Well card to Harry
Harrison, who apparantly is ill. (I signed with a pun, "Harry varit
med om det nå'n gång!", which I won't explain except that "Harry"
can be read as "Har du". Harry reads Danish and might pick it up.
The languages are close enough, except that Lise choose to speak
English to me, even if I swore I understand Danish hvergang.)
Revived dinosaurs!
Saw some unexpected people. Lena Jonsson was big in the local
SFSF club 30 years ago, and I met her last year on the big literary
conference WALTIC (remember my reports from it?) but she now also
turned up here on Swecon! Didn't have much time to speak with her,
but it was nice to see her. Totally unexpected was Lars Sydolf!
Now we're talking about Vintage Ahrvid.
In the autumn of 1976 or so, we used to have book circles in SFSF,
which I remember very fondly, and they were hosted by Lars Sydolf.
A nice man, who this way contributed much to the serious side of
sf and fandom. I went to those book circles for probably a couple
of years.
I spent quite a lot of time chatting with Martin of Latvia who
was able to attend because he works for the Swedish telecom company
Tele2, and could co-arrange one of his regular business trips with
Imagicon. One thing we had to discuss was Swedish Banks and the
economic crisis in Latvia. (Martin also brought me greetings from
our common friend Imants.) Except Iceland, which seems close to sink
below the Atlantic waves, no country has been harder hit by the
recession than Latvia. And one sour reason for this is Swedish Banks.
After Latvia's accession into the EU, Swedish Banks decided it was a
good idea to expand into the Baltic states. The way to "gain market
share" is to lend out money - huge amounts of it, with unsecure
security. When real estate drops, the banks suddenly sit there with
very shaky credits, and the ordinary population in Latvia sits
there with huge loans they in many cases can't pay back. It's
devilish. The Latvian government has been forced to very tough
economic programs (paychecks, pensions etc have been cut ).
Already mentioned columnist Norberg - who in fact is a Trekkie - has
written the book Financial Fiasco, about all this. Martin also had
some whiskey he secretly distributed (don't tell anyone...except by
now everyone on the Internet) and that maybe helps through the
crisis.
Nuclear scientists and prozines
The site had a free wireless network, but I didn't use it this time.
I was too occupied with talking, and walking between program items.
I eg listened a bit to the Time Travelling-panel with among others
professor Jan Wallenius and doctor Mikael Jolkkonen, the couple that
surely any day now will build Sverifandom's very own nuclear bomb
(had it existed in the 80's WWIII would have ensued). The panel
recommended time-travel stories by eg Wells, Heinlein, Lafferty,
Anderson. From the floor I mentioned the not very well-known
time-goes-backwars story Segnälkab ("backwards", in Swedish,
backwards) by Johannes Ekstrand from 1930, a forerunner of eg
Counter-Clock World (PK Dick). Mikael said he didn't like backwards
stories. They are highly illogical. I was too far away to see if
his ears assumed a pointy shape.
Then I rushed away to hear the end of the Nova SF (Swedish sf
magazine, www.replik.se/novasf/ ) panel. Old typesetters in the form
of Bellis and Roger told anecdotes about how they put in internal
jokes in the text, because the work was so boring. (I think such
behaviour is an absolute a no-no! Don't play around with other's
literary sweat.) I edited Nova SF for a couple of years and there
wasn't much news to me. The magazine re-appeared 1,5 decade
later, now perhaps more literary but much smaller in print-run, a few
hundred copies. It is soon to be the only Swedish prozine, since Sam
J Lundwall has decided to discontinue Jules Verne Magasinet - the
last issue is due this month. JVM was in its turn a re-appearance of
the 1940's pulp, already mentioned.
Carlos and Cretins
Heard the Graham Joyce GoH interview, which was excellent (con
interviewer was Johan Anglemark). He really had the gift of gab. He
told how he began writing in earnest, which involved quitting his job
and moving to a hut on a Greek island without heating or electricity.
There he became very creative. One day the Greek shepherds came
rushing: "Carlos, you have telephone!" (They called him "Carlos",
because they couldn't say Graham. And the only Brit they knew was
prince Charles = Carlos.) After much ado when the shepherds tried
to communicate with London Graham got to the phone. It was a
message from a publisher: manuscript accepted! And they also
asked: Who were those strange guys on the line earlier? Graham
answered: They were Cretins... (Do you get the pun?)
I didn't attend the Swecon 2010 voting, but Gothenburg won. I
simply had to listen to the talk about Sture Lönnerstrand by Bertil
Falk. He runs the small press Zenzat and has recently published a
collection of short stories by Sture Lönnerstrand. Sture was the
perhaps most important person in starting Swedish science fiction.
Sure Store Sture
Not only did he write a series of excellent sf short stories in the
1940's sort-of pulps (his market was Levande Livet, a competitor to
JVM; a total of 65 stories appeared under the heading "Between
Fantasy and Rality"), create the first Swedish comics superhero
(Dotty Virvelvind = Whirlwind), and one of the first sf clubs
(Futura, 1950). But he also won the big 1950's Bonniers manuscript
competion with Rymdhunden (Bonniers is the leading publisher, and he
won ca 3000 1950's dollar, a big sum at the time) but he was also
interested in Indian religion/philosophy (he eg translated ancient
scripts), wrote radio plays and was a interesting modernistic poet.
He published several collections of poetry, of which eg Den
oupphörliga (incestrala) blodsymfonin has been hailed by many as a
forgotten classic. He wrote poetry about space and time *before*
already mentioned Harry Martinson, and already mentioned Nova SF
recently had a special issue about Lönnerstrand. He died in 1999 (I
met him several times before this, eg in connection with previously
mentioned Radio Futura, where he read poems and stuff) but his
daughter Annika was there and I chatted with her a bit about that
her father was a truly important person.
Sture Lönnerstrand has perhaps been a bit forgotten in fandom
circles, because except being invited to speeches sometimes
(I heard him in SFSF arrangements) he didn't have active contacts
with the fans. (There was some bad blood created when some neofans
- compared to Sture they were neos! - made a coup d'etat in the
Futura club in the 1950s.) Good speech, with nice slides,
unfortunately with only half a dozen in the audience. Sture
Lönnerstrand is, as said, a bit forgotten - but he deserves better,
and Bertil does a great job in making his often excellent stories
available again.
Alvar and SFSF
I'm sorry I missed Anders Allander's speech about classic sf (I
know him from the Jules Verne E-list), but I had to non-attend
programs sometime. I did hear the announcement that Patrik Centerwall
won this year's Alvar Award (the main Sverifandom fan activity award
- Patrik's speech was short and to the core: "Thanks!") and heard
at least the second half of the SFSF and SF-Forum panel. The
Stockholm club SFSF, sfsf.fandom.se, has it's 50th anniversary this
year and their publication SF-Forum next year.
We heard about how SFSF gave birth to the today huge
SF-Bokhandeln (SF Bookstore) chain in Stockholm, Gothenburg and
Malmö. Who could imagine that when we could see the then board
member and later chairman Stieg Larsson help building
bookshelves for the first SF Bookstore on Pontonjärgatan 45?
Saw only the end of the book auction (there were also many book
tables, eg from small press publishers - me and Bertil put our books
there - and also second hand books from the Alvar foundation) but
the whole Jukka Halme show called "Never mind the buzzaldrins".
Never mind the buzzaldrins
Two teams - kidnapped as they innocently walked into the room -
competed in a quiz. It was a bit confused since Jukka had instituted
the rule that an answer to *any* question received a point. When he
for instanced asked a team "Are you ready?" they got a point if they
said Yes or No or anything. Later came more traditional sf quiz
questions and the whole thing was quite entertaining. Dave Lally's
team won, with a narrow margin (CD Skogsberg proved to be a
walking sf encyclopedia and Dave himself knows everything about
films and TV). I'm sure Jukka will have funny and interesting
surprises for us when he fan-GoHs the Stockholm Eurocon in 2011
( www.eurocon2011.se ).
After this there was no Pressing Program. There was a couple of
hours of chatting and hanging around as people slowly shrunk (in
numbers, not in size). Magnus Rhedin saved my worthless life by
buying me a plate of chips and sauce (yummy!) and we talked a bit
about politics. He works for the conservatives ("the Moderates") in
the Swedish parliament, and I have become semi-active in questions
relating to the famous Swedish Pirate Party. Magnus as an old hacker
thinks the Pirate Party is interesting. There's a general election
next year, PP might have a chance to get Riksdags seats
(they already have two europarliament seats) but unfortunately the
leading outsider are some bigots called the Sweden Democrats
(think Front Nationale, Forza Italia, Danish People's Party, etc -
pure populists, of the anti-immgrants type).
I hang out until almost the end. Around 0100 hours I joined a group
of mainly Finnish fans who intended to find any still open downtown
bar (many bars in Stockholm has a license until 03) as I crashed the
gate of the underground (very discreetly, though), but since I was
tired I went for the bed.
With Lally to the end
But it was not the end, not even the beginning of the end - but
perhaps it was the end of the prikinning? Dave Lally
is soon turning 60, or 38 Martian years, and invited fans to his
Stockholm hotel Sunday evening. I had hoped for a real room party,
but room size and too many people (about 12) placed us in the hotel
bar. Both GoHs and for instance Lise Andreasen (here's the Danish
space program: www.copenhagensuborbitals.com ) and Herman
Ellingsen of Norway were there.
Dave talked about his interest in weird borders, like for instance
the Dutch-Belgian town of Baarle (see more on eg
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Hertog) and I talked with Liz W about
witchcraft, Stonehenge and such things.
And if you have followed me this far in my tale about Imagicon 2,
outlined in much more detail than anyone can bear, I'm sure that
you are relieved that this report is now finally over!
Eh, not just yet...
Now it is.
Over.
And out.
--Ahrvid Engholm
But let's not forget con pics! Even More will come, given time, but
here are those by Hans Persson:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hanspersson/sets/72157622602913878/
By Tero Ykspetäjä
http://partialrecall.blogspot.com/2009/10/swecon-is-go.html
By Nhora:
http://www.myskoteket.se/bocker/fantasy/imagicon-2
By Jim Persson-Melin:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/imagicon2/
Nicklas Andersson:
http://fotnotsnoja.se/post/218552888/hostfolje-en-kongressrapport
And by various:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Imagicon2&s=rec
--
ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxx / Gå med i SKRIVA - för författande, sf, fantasy, kultur
(skriva-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, subj: subscribe) YXSKAFTBUD, GE VÅR WCZONMÖ
IQ-HJÄLP! (DN NoN 00.02.07)
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