FantasyCon 2024

I hadn’t been intending to go to FantasyCon this year because October was busy enough already. Or, at least, I didn’t think I had a membership and I wasn’t going to buy one. Then, about a month before the convention, I got sent some programme assignments. I hastily checked with the con, and lo, I did have a membership. I must have bought it last year and then forgotten about it. The programme assignments sounded interesting, and Chester is a great place to visit, so I decided to go.

The con was quite small this year, presumably because many people were financially tapped out by having gone to Worldcon. That’s entirely understandable. The dealers’ room was correspondingly small, and seemed to be mainly self-published people. There was no art show, and I didn’t have a banquet ticket, so all that was left was programme. Well, and Chester.

You see, Chester has a whole pile of Roman ruins. And a museum full of more Roman ruins. Some of it is quite important. There are even a couple of images of Attis, proving that Cybele worship happened in Deva (the Roman name for Chester). It is also the city from which Macsen Wledig embarked on his ultimately doomed quest to become Emperor of the Romans. I’m not going to bore you with details here. I spent much of Saturday in town doing research, and buying books in the museum.

But I had panels. Three of them. The first was on Friday evening and was about Cities in Fantasy. That’s what the title said anyway. But the description talked about Urban Fantasy, and there were two Urban Fantasy writers on the panel. Now clearly Urban Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in cities, but it doesn’t represent the totality of fantasy set in cities and I was hoping to bring a different perspective to the panel. Thankfully the moderator was OK with that, and Davd Green backed me up.

On Saturday I’d been put on the queer representation panel. It was scheduled against the banquet. There were four of us on the panel, and three people in the audience. As I was moderating, I invited the audience to join us on the panel and we had a great chat between us.

This was when I discovered that young folks these days, even feminist young folks these days, have never heard of The Female Man. And presumably haven’t heard of Joanna Russ either. Aaargh.

The title of the panel was a bit scary because it talked about role models in fandom. Thankfully the description made it clear that what that meant was fans finding role models in fiction. And we then went on to debunk the concept of role models, so all was well.

My final panel was on Sunday and was about demystifying the editing process. I would have felt a bit of a fraud on this had I not been moderating, but I had a superb crew with a wide variety of experience. They were absolutely brilliant. I learned a lot, and by all accounts the audience did too. You get a real buzz when a convention panel goes really well.

There is no FantasyCon next year because the crew that usually runs it is running World Fantasy instead. I know that I have a membership for that. I also have a dealer table, so I won’t be doing much programme.