I was in and out of Beneluxcon this weekend, given that it was just up the road in the Novotel in Leuven and featured three particularly interesting authors, Ken MacLeod, Christopher Priest and Alastair Reynolds. There were 100 people signed up (I myself was alphabetically last at #100) but I didn't see more than 40 there at any given time. I was struck by a couple of features of the event which differed from any other sf con I have attended (not that I have been to all that many).

1) The programming was fairly light: both mornings and afternoons featured an hour-long session with a single GoH (MacLeod in the mornings, Priest in the afternoons) followed by another panel featuring more of the guests (apart from the three already mentioned, these included two Dublin writers, David Murphy and Robert Nielsen, and three Dutch/Flemish writers) to pick up on the themes of the first panel. So that was only four hours of actual discussion on each day, though there were also readings, signings, a workshop, a banquet, and a tour of Leuven, none of which I was able to attend.

I felt that this approach probably did ensure that the discussion panels were of higher quality than I have sometimes experienced elsewhere; there was no sense of "OMG I'm on another panel WTF am I going to say" which I have sometimes seen (indeed, sometimes experienced directly) at other cons. It was, of course, embedded in a wider theme of talking about "Visions of the Future", which the con chair attempted with varying success to channel discussions into. And it happened to suit my own intermittent attendance rather well.

2) The second point that struck me is rather less to Beneluxcon's favour. The eight featured guest authors and the four-strong organising committee were all male. Not a single woman appeared on a panel at any time during the weekend. Unless I missed something, the only woman mentioned in the programme booklet was a local fan who had recently died. Very peculiar. There were certainly women in attendance - I had long chats with Agnes (and Graham) Andrews, and more briefly with ex-crazysoph - but I felt a palpable gap in discussing the future of humanity, as only half of it was represented at the top table.

Anyway, I did generally enjoy it. Ken MacLeod's talk on the future of ideology was as provocative as I had hoped, and indeed I would have felt the con was worth the attendance for that alone. Christopher Priest on the inside story of The Prestige was also an entertaining insight into the processes of writing and then having one's work transferred to the big screen. I did very well in the dealer's room, picking up nine vintage paperbacks for €15, including Mutiny in Space. And I note that the organising committee for next year's Beneluxcon in Eindhoven includes someone I knew twenty years ago, so I'm open to attending it, if the guests are interesting and the everything is right.

4) The Prestige, by Christopher Priest

Haven't read a lot of Christopher Priest - I know three of his earlier books, being a bit underwhelmed by Fugue for a Darkening Island and A Dream of Wessex , but totally blown away by Inverted World. And The Separation was one of the first books I blogged here, back when I was still getting into it. But with the coming con I thought I should renew my acquaintance with his work.

I wondered at first if The Prestige actually had any sfnal content at all, or if it was going to qualify as genre only in the same way as The Syſtem of the World. But by the end of the story it's pretty clear that this is science fiction, though in a particularly creepy and eerie way; the story of two rival stage magicians at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, combined with the technology of Nikola Tesla, and all kinds of questions about family secrets and unreliable narrators. I really enjoyed it.

Ken MacLeod, Christopher Priest and Alastair Reynolds.

I see Cheryl Morgan's roundup from Worldcon includes this comment:

I’ve also heard a few complaints about Chris Priest. I’m not exactly happy about what happened at the Hugo ceremony myself, seeing as it was on my watch, so to speak. But having talked to a number of people who know Chris better than I do I’ve been reassured that he was trying to make jokes. Unfortunately it seems that his particularly dry British sense of humor doesn’t translate very well, and he came over to many people as being deliberately rude.

I completely missed whatever this refers to. Can someone refresh my memory? (Unless it was his joke at the closing ceremony about autopope?)

We resume on Sunday afternoon, when I returned from lunch to find myself witnessing the official photograph of the official signing of the official contract for the new edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, by John Clute, Dave Langford and Peter Nicholls. I was pleased to learn later from Dave Langford that he is fairly optimistic it can be completed fairly quickly (whatever that means), and positively thrilled to hear that the new Encyclopedia will be primarily a low-cost subscription on-line resource, capable of being continually updated. OK, I do like dead trees as a medium, but for a work like The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction the extra benefits of on-line searches and perhaps also hyperlinks to external information will be huge.

I mainly just hung around for the next few hours, bumping into nmg (at last!), Conor Kostick, and davesangel and her mother who had come over to present the James White Award. Had a good chat with brightglance, mylescorcoran and sammywol. Then it was time to go to the Hugos.

I've already written up the Hugo results, but just want to note that I felt a small lump in my throat at the ceremony. I've been writing various web pages about the Hugos for five years now, and at last I was actually there. More prosaically, as well as a particularly high percentage of UK-bsed winners, I have a suspicion (which I will check some time) that a higher proportion (or at least number) of women won Hugos this year than is usual. (I calculated three years ago that a third of Nebulas in the fiction categories had been won by women, but only a quarter of Hugos.) More number-crunching to follow.

Met up with annafdd for a post-Hugo drink, and we witnessed the cheers and applause of the Moat House bar as a kilted autopope strode in bearing his Hugo. We then repaired to the Hilton, admiring of natural20's success at crowd control, and looked around for parties. The Hugo nominees party was rumoured to be a) the place to be and b) opening to all after half an hour; neither of these rumours turned out to be true, and we tried out the Spruotlore/Irish party before eventually gravitating to the Finns. Somehow the Finns had managed to put together the ingredients of a fine time, lots to drink (including a particularly addictive liquorice flavoured vodka), lots of people, and what appeared at the time (though my memory as time goes on is increasingly blurred) to be good conversation. I eventually found my room mate (whose blog I have now syndicated as marusek) talking to Ken and Carole MacLeod, and we returned to our lodgings.

On Monday morning I bumped into autopope and feorag on my way in, and wandered round the dealer's room with feorag (who was somewhat the worse for wear) to buy presents for my family (sadly the picture of the Very Hungry Cthulhu had already been bought) before my 11 o'clock panel. This was supposed to be on the future of politics, chaired by Caroline Mullan, but wandered off a bit into the decline of the Swedish social model, since there seemed to be a lot of Scandinavians both on the panel and in the audience. It was also my last panel as a participant.

My one comment on programming - which in general I greatly enjoyed - would be that, if possible, moderators should have a bit more input into both the description and personnel of their panels. I did seven panels throughout the con; the one I myself moderated had an extraordinarily ambiguous description which left it unclear as to what it was supposed to be about; another had a moderator whose views were completely different to those of the other three panellists, which distorted the discussion; two had at least one panellist who really had no interesting ideas about the topic of the panel (and in one of those two cases the panellist in question was me). I appreciate that it's not an exact science; also in comparison to the many many such events I do for work, I'd say that Worldcon panellists are without exception (of the panels I attended) clever enough and articulate enough to rise above the petty problems I mention, and that Worldcon audiences are among the most forgiving, appreciative and intelligent I have ever addressed. In terms of the logistics of the panels on which I myself appeared I have no complaints, but we were all just talking heads; I noted problems elsewhere with overhead projectors and slide projectors.

Wandered into a conversation with brisingamen and peake, who introduced me to ticking_fool and purplepooka. The latter persuaded me to attend an extraordinary presentation by Duncan Lunan about the Green Children of Woolpit, a 12th century mystery which he reckons points to a high-level conspiracy involving Henry II and the Vatican to conceal the fact that the children had been transported from a human colony on another planet. I shared with those present certain information I received earlier this year from an Eastern European foreign minister which seems to me to undermine one of the key arguments of Duncan Lunan's thesis, but I will say no more of that here.

brisingamen and peake were still at the same table an hour after I'd left them, and we were joined by Julian West as we munched on sandwiches. Then it was time for the Closing Ceremony. As Robert Sheckley was absent through illness, and Jane Yolen had already left, it was up to Chris Priest to respond to the convention on behalf of the professional community, which he did eloquently and gracefully. Though he finished with a good-natured dig at autopope - "I think that in years to come, we shall look back to Charlie winning his Hugo last night, and say to ourselves that that was the moment when science fiction changed for the w- I mean, when science fiction changed forever!"

I seemed to spend the afternoon helping with the dismantling of the Science Fiction Foundation stall, then, long chat with greengolux and various other luminaries of British fandom. fjm very kindly invited me to join a literary dinner, but my plane flight did not allow for this, and I ended up finishing my worldcon with a slightly grotty chicken tikka masala in Glasgow airport in the company of ianmcdonald and Enid.

Minor logistical complaint - I put a bid in on one of the scanner/printer sets that the con was trying to get rid of, but come the crucial moment nobody seemed to be able to tell me if I had won the auction or indeed where the equipment physically was, so I dropped the issue. I would certainly have had difficulty humping it onto the plane, so perhaps it's just as well.

Apart from the two very minor grumbles noted above, I had a great time. Apologies to those weren't there and who've had to endure these ramblings over the last few days. Apologies to anyone I met and haven't mentioned. See you all again soon.

3) England Swings SF, ed. Judith Merril

This was one of the influential sf anthologies of that long ago time, the 1960s, being Judith Merril's project of familiarising an American audience with the British sf authors of the New Wave. I spotted it with glee in Boston in October, but also it fits in with my planned re-reading of the other rival great 60's anthology, Dangerous Visions (supposedly even now on its way to me from the book dealer).

It would be very easy to make fun of this book. The gutter is too narrow, especially given the experimental placing of some of the margins. Some of the stories are very bad. One author admits that to write his story "I had to draw in some places on my acid/pot experiences as I think you will detect". The introduction is earnest and breathless:

Introduction

You have never read a book like this before, and the next time you read one anything like it, it won't be much at all.

It's an action-photo, a record of process-in-change,

a look through the perspex porthole at the

momentarily stilled bodies in a scout ship boosting

fast, and heading out of sight into the multiplex mystery of inner/outer space.

I can't tell you where they're going, but

maybe that's why I keep wanting to read what they write. The next time someone assembles the work of the writers in this - well, 'school' is too formal

... and 'movement' sounds pretentious...

and 'British sf' is ludicrously limiting -

so let's just say, the work of these writers and/or others now setting out to work in this way,

it will probably have about as much resemblance to this anthology as this one does to any other collection of science fiction, social criticism,

surrealism - BEM's, Beats, Beatles, what-have-you -

you have ever read or heard before. Meanwhile,

I think this trip should be a good one.

Judith Merril

Some of the authors have disappeared with little trace: the stories of "John Calder" and John Clark here apparently represent their only published work; the output of Michael Hamburger, Michael Butterworth, Bill Butler, Roger Jones, and Graham Hall has been pretty minimal.

However there are some fascinatong pieces as well: Kyril Bonfiglioli's only recorded sf story (that is, recorded by ISFDB and Contento, though slovobooks helped me track down another by him a few years back); also Chris Priest's first published story; also a bit of Brian Aldiss' Barefoot in the Head; also three stories by J.G. Ballard, including "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race", and two by Michael Moorcock, with Thomas Disch, Keith Roberts, Barrington Bayley, David Masson and Pamela Zoline all represented. Each story has an afterword in which Merril cuts between the authors' own supplied autobiographical material and her commentary. In the case of the Michael Moorcock afterword, this turns into a fascinating little narrative of how the Arts Council of Great Britain was persuaded to give a grant for the perpetuation of science fiction.

Merril's decision to front-load the collection with the weakest of these was brave, and the less dedicated reader is likely to give up. But it's worth the slog, even now that the New Wave has pretty much receded. I think I'll definitely be looking out for Merril's autobiographical notes, as edited by her granddaughter.

7) The Separation by Christopher Priest - excellent stuff, dopplegangers, altered timelines and the second world war, as if Philip K Dick had been English and sober.

Website - 120 predictions of the election results now - whew!