schneefink

I'm home! I had an amazing vacation, but now I'm also very glad to be back again. Which is how it should be.

I finally have time to write about my fantastic time at Worldcon! It was so great, I'm so glad that I went, and I'm already looking forward to going again one day. Aaaah I don't even know where to begin. So many great panels, and games and concerts etc., and it was so wonderful to just look around and see all these people in nerdy t-shirts (and some in cosplay!) and know that we're all here because of similar interests. So many brief meetings and conversations with interesting strangers, and great authors - and, most importantly, friends! I met up with dhampyresa and dolorosa_12 and extrapenguin and naye and doctorskuld, it was wonderful. And I even kept unexpectedly running into them despite the size of the convention, which was very nice.

I brought back some souvenirs – a d20 necklace, and an "I don't believe in humans" unicorn coaster for DD, and a print of Finding Fantasy by the very nice Rob Carlos which is now hanging in our kitchen, and the Myriad Lands anthologies which I have not had time to read yet but am already happy about because the covers are gorgeous (illustrations by Likhain). I also got some books signed, and I'll keep my name badge with the ribbons. Unlike some people, who collected dozens of them, I "only" have five: "My First Worldcon", "Volunteer" (though I only volunteered for two hours on Sunday), "Endor Scout" (from the TinyD6 Guardian RPG game I played one evening, as a stuffed toy bear wizard), "Murderbot doesn't love you, it just wants to watch its shows" from a panel with Martha Wells, and "Complete & Total Wordo" from someone I happened to share a hostel room with.

The hostel was only a 10-15 minutes' walk away from the convention center btw, which was very convenient. Apart from one short walk through Trinity College and the science gallery on Wednesday after I arrived, and walking between the locations and looking for food, I saw pretty much nothing of Dublin, but that's fine, I wasn't there as a city tourist. (That came later, in England.)

I made very detailed notes on all panels I visited. I'll probably (more realistic: maybe) type them all up eventually, but in the meantime, I'll post a list of panels/activities here (you can look up more detailed descriptions in the program) and if you're interested in hearing more about particular panels and/or want the notes, tell me. (extrapenguin also posted very detailed notes for the panels she visited, and naye and dolorosa_12 also posted reviews.)

Day 1, Thursday:
Crime and punishment in the age of superheroes
How to build an evil empire
A portable kind of magic: Why we love books-about-books
How to manage finite natural resources
Talking animal characters in SFF
After this was the RPG, which I'm also happy to talk about ^^

Day 2, Friday:
Space opera: boldly going where no genre has gone before!
Bridging the language barrier: translated SFF (half of it)
Is epic fantasy conservative?
Cultural appropriation: a product of a shrinking world?
Using SFF as sandboxes for ideas on politics and society
Let's do the time loop again
In the evening I went to the orchestra concert, which was great, I really enjoyed the movie/series pieces and also the flutist. After that I went to the second half of the media sing-along (which imo would have gone better if the people singing on stage had prepared and known the lyrics/music.)

Day 3, Saturday:
Nonhuman and interspecies communication
What fanfiction can teach genre writers
Children's books: the gateway drug
Future financial systems and transactions
I went to readings by Adrian Tchaikovsky and Martha Wells, both were hilarious and great. And in the evening I went to the dance, that was fun too.

Day 4, Sunday:
The lack of technological progress in fantasy
What writers need to know: physics and space travel
Wands at the ready! Magical worldbuilding in SFF
Invented mythologies in SF
Thanks to patient queueing on Saturday (I'd had much practice by then), on Sunday I went to the kaffeeklatsch with Adrian Tchaikovsky, which was lovely. I didn't go to the Hugo award ceremony since I wasn't that interested, so I went to the gaming room (which was very cool, so many games to try out!, though I only played some I already knew) with dhampyresa and we only found out a few minutes late that AO3 had won - I'd totally forgotten it was even nominated, so that was a nice surprise. Then we went to a pub quiz, which was fun and our team did quite well (though the difficulty level of the questions was, let's call it uneven, I don't think I contributed much.)

Day 5, Monday:
In the morning I was too tired for the talk I'd originally planned and instead finally went to one of the smaller concerts, by the Library Bards, which was a lot of fun.
Dragons, wyrms, and serpents: why the myth endures
Then I went to a reading by Genevieve Cogman, and then to the closing ceremony, and later to the afterparty at the pub.

And that was it :) There were plenty of other panels that I wanted to go to but couldn't, either because they overlapped with other things or because the queue was too long and I didn't get in. To my own surprise, I even got enough sleep throughout, because when I came back to the hostels in the evening my head was too full to do what I usually do in the evenings, i.e. read and/or procrastinate. Maybe I should do that more often…

Another very nice thing at the con: I was often asked "are you a writer?" The first time I replied "No, I just write fanfic," but every.time. I was then told that that counts, so by the end of the con I said "yes, I write fanfic" and it felt very good. In general, even though I haven't written anything in weeks, after the convention I felt really encouraged about my writing, and motivated too - let's hope that it lasts!
The acceptance of fanfic in general is changing, as also demonstrated by the AO3 winning, but for me the most surprising proof of that was when two authors separately told me that yes, they read fic for their work and they love it. Which is cool! (And I've been meaning to write something for those books anyway…)
(Odd moments: when people talked about "fandom" and meant all kinds of fans gathered at the con - I'm so used to using "fandom" for transformative fandom! Probably also why, at first glance, I was so surprised to see so many men there ^^ )

Overall it was a fantastic experience, A+ :D And I got so many book recs - so many books, so little time...

Coming soon: posts about the second part of my vacation in Oxford&London, "The Untamed", and "oh no I left my D&D party alone for two weeks and Things happened."