Fantastika 2024
And breathe! The convention circuit is over for the year.
Not that I would have missed Fantastika. While I have been to many Finnish conventions, and made many Swedish friends as a result, I haven’t been to Stockholm since 2011. I did got to the Eurocon in Uppsala last year, but that just gave me an appetite for visiting Sweden again.
My trip out was a screaming disaster. On the night before I was due to fly I got email from KLM telling me that my flight had been cancelled and they had re-booked me on a later flight that did not get into Arlanda until 23:20. As it turned out, the flight has not been cancelled, but it was overbooked and I had been bumped. I have been promised compensation, and I hope I am actually able to get it. Due to the late arrival, I had to get a cab from Arlanda to the hotel, which was eye-wateringly expensive. Also we ran into roadworks on the E4 on the way in. Thankfully the driver turned off the meter while we were sat there, or the fare would have probably hit four figures in GBP.
The hotel was very lovely, though being Swedish the rooms had very little furniture and it was all wooden. Also there was no coffee service in the rooms. I did get some time to work, and I spent much of it down in the lobby where there was a free coffee service and long desks with comfy chairs and power points.
An unusual feature of the hotel was that they served a free meal each night. There was very little choice, though each individual item was served separately so if, for example, you didn’t want a particular vegetable, or a sauce, you didn’t have to have it. I managed to eat there happily most nights, but I can imagine that it would have been a lot more difficult for folks with allergies.
The convention was not in central Stockholm (which would have bene much more expensive), but in a suburb called Sickla. The space we used was in a cultural centre that was conveniently across a small square from the hotel. It contained a bar, a café, and a library as well as meeting space (some of which seemed to double as a concert/theatre venue). There was a cinema next door, and a shopping mall nearby. I’m told that the space was cheap to rent. Possibly it was subsidized by the local council.
Public transit in Stockholm is excellent. Sickla’s main tram stop, which is a terminus, was being renovated, so we had to use a temporary stop further along the line. It was very easy to navigate once you knew where everything was, but was probably a bit daunting if you arrived by tram, especially as it was uphill all the way to the hotel.
Other than love of travel, my primary reason for going was because Juliet McKenna was a Guest of Honour, and as a responsible publisher I do try to support my best-selling author. Of course, thanks to Brexit, it wasn’t possible for me to take books to Sweden to sell. However, a Swedish bookstore was able to order some from the UK and, being familiar with the tax issues, was happy to deal with importing them. The seemed to sell well.
I would have been perfectly happy to sell ebook copies of The Green Man’s War, but the Swedish fans seems uninterested in ebooks. Either that or they were unfamiliar with Juliet’s work and wanted to start with the first book in the series. In the latter case, I’m hopping that they’ll soon be hooked.
My first panel was on Friday night, and was about Strong Female Characters. I was happy to be able to use this it tell people about Fight Like A Girl 2, but I do think that we should be beyond this sort of panel by now. I did a bit of research for the panel and discovered that CL Moore’s first Jirel of Joiry story was published in 1934. That’s 90 year ago, and people are still surprised when a fantasy book has a woman with agency as the protagonist.
Having said that, I do think that there has been a change in recent years, and I think that is because the Romance genre has discovered fantasy. We now have Paranormal Romance and Romantasy as top selling subgenres, which means that everyone is SF&F is forced top notice how well Romance sells.
On Saturday I chaired a panel on The Dispossessed, one of my favourite books, which is now 50 years old. We had an excellent panel with 4 people who knew the book very well, and thanks to Saga for showing that you don’t have to be ancient to know about it. One question I didn’t get to, but which we had discussed in the Green Room beforehand, was whether the book would sell to a mainstream publisher these days. Sadly we all agreed that it would have no chance.
First up on Sunday was a panel entitled “Herding cats”, which was all about how to moderate a panel. Again we had a good group of people, but for some reason the programming folks chose to give us a moderator who had never moderated a panel before. Of course we were all very supportive, and Timothy you did a great job. Hopefully you learned a lot.
Finally I got to do a gig with Juliet. We had been asked to talk amongst ourselves on the state of publishing today. It was a pretty grim subject, and the audience seemed to go away with a much better understanding of how bad things are. Quite why anyone wants to be an author these days, I do not know. Though it is probably not as daft as wanting to be a publisher.
As I’m getting old and don’t know how much more foreign travel I will be able to do, I decided to spent a couple of days in Stockholm after the convention. There are a lot of great museums. I finally got to see the Vasa, which is a jaw-dropping sight when you first enter the vast hall where it is kept. I also spent a lot of time in the Viking Museum and learned a few things. These two and the Abba Musuem – another must see for folks of my generation – were all in the same large park, along with several other museums. I did not get to the Museum of Nordic Life, or to the Museum of Swedish Drinking Culture (which promised free samples). Honestly, I could have spent a week there.
But that is Sweden done for a while. Next year’s Swecon is in the city of Lund, and it is in October so I will not have time to go.