Fantasycon 2012, Part 1: The Bad

Another year, another Fantasycon.  This year's had a lot to live up to after 2011's glorious, sun-soaked high-jinks, but also a lot to live down after the Gulag-style horrors of 2010.  Not to mention the fact that both the SFX Weekender and Eastercon in recent months have done a lot to raise my personal bar for what a Con can be ... that is, provocative, imaginative, varied, slickly organised and purposefully inclusive.

The good news is, I had a fun weekend, and caught up with some wonderful people.  The bad news is that not much of that had to do with Fantasycon itself.

Truth be told, I've had my concerns about the British Fantasy Society and its pet Con for a while now; it's been getting harder to see what either has to offer me as a fantasy author when the society increasingly seemed to be a clique for certain folks, most of them in the Horror field, with apparently limited interest in promoting much besides themselves.  The embarrassing awards hiccup last year dragged a lot of my own gripes into the spotlight; seeing that plenty of other people had the same issues and hearing society figures respond in what seemed a positive, proactive fashion, I hoped the times might be a-changing.

Unfortunately, what followed involved those hopes getting a lot of dashing.

This year I went with Jobeda Ali, who - as a fan of Fantasy with no interest at all in Horror and no familiarity with the BFS's long and storied history - was bewildered by the under-representation of her genre of choice at an event named Fantasycon.  Though plenty of excuses have been made for this in the past, the fact remains that if you put on an event called Fantasycon and charge people to attend it, it should live up to its name more than a little.

Of course, that wouldn't have mattered half as much if the programming had had more to offer.  It's probably more polite to not specify which they were, but of the three panels I tried, one irritated me enough that I had to walk out, another achieved the same by being painfully dull and straying badly off topic, and I only suffered through the third because one of the five panelists had interesting things to say.  All three panels were badly thought through and poorly moderated.  In fairness, I should say that Jobeda made the Fantasy Fiction: Keep it Real panel, which I missed, and reported back that it was excellent.  Still, not a great success rate, and those were the ones we'd picked because they looked most interesting.  In general, there were too many tired old questions; does the publishing world really need another "Print vs. Electronic" panel?  I've been lucky enough to watch some terrific panels this year, enthusiastic debates that both entertained and tackled significant questions within the industry, and that's the standard I'm coming to expect.

Elsewhere, there were the usual mainstays - readings, a disproportionate number of launches and signings, often scheduled over each other - and not a whole lot else.  The masterclasses are a potentially good idea, but the decision to charge extra for them and severely limit attendance is plain baffling.  What organiser thinks reserving their best content for a tiny minority is a good idea?  I saw some of the Saturday night's entertainment, and the kindest thing I can say is that I probably wasn't the intended audience.  My less-than-complimentary thoughts about the only feature film on offer can be found here.  In general, I spent a lot of time feeling glad that I wasn't there on my own, relying on the conference to keep me entertained.

Finally, there came the British Fantasy Awards.  Whatever hopes I'd had for their not being another shambles after last year's travesty had already been dented by the shortlists - three of the five best short stories from one anthology?  Edited by BFS mainstay Stephen Jones?  Really? - but it was still a disappointment to see an opportunity for the society to get its act together wasted so thoroughly.  Yet again we had an unlikely mash up of an international awards ceremony - I'm sure Woody Allen and Joe Hill are still reeling from their successes - with something so comically insular and mutually back-slapping that every market up for Best Novella, Best Short Fiction, Best Magazine and Best Collection (not to mention all but one of the publishers up for Best Anthology) could be British and no one thought it worthy of comment.  Just because this year doesn't seem to have produced any major scandals, I hope it doesn't fool the BFS into imagining they've finally got it right.

As is probably apparent by now, I struggled to find much about this year's Fantasycon to be positive about (what there is, I'll come back to in a day or two) and found a huge amount frustrating in light of the steady progress being made elsewhere.  It would take a whole other post to discuss the crummy and wholly inappropriate venue, for example, or to talk about subjects like inclusivity and diversity and the staggering disregard for the basics of sustainability (But seriously, I hope that all least some of the proceeds go towards reforestation.)

All told, I suspect it's a good thing that there's no Fantastcon next year.  I'm hanging onto the hope that the extra year will give the BFS an opportunity to regroup, put aside a little of their complacency and figure out what it is they're trying to achieve here.  I genuinely believe that both the society and Fantasycon have something to offer, and I'd love to see them do it, but with others doing the whole genre convention thing so much better, they have plenty of catching up to do if they want to remain a meaningful date in the Con calendar.

SFX 2012: Part 2

Saturday I was up early once more, encouraged by the irrepressible Mr Lavie Tidhar.  A good job too, because Saturday was my actual work day, where I did stuff to earn my magic get-into-Pontins-free card.  Saturday, in short, was the day where all the scary stuff piled up like a motorway pile-up of scary.  Partly my fault, of course, for running into the Fantasy Faction lads at the previous night's party and arranging my first ever face to face interview with them for after my first ever panel and my first ever book signing.  I mean, there's an argument for jumping in at the deep-end, right?  What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and all that?  Absolutely.

Less likely to kill you than you might think.

I'm not entirely sure what I did for the first half of the day.  I know I hung around the bar quite a lot, was hugely impressed by Jonathan Green's vast and varied writerly CV and  wandered over to Lavie's signing of his new House of Murky Depths-published picture book Going to the Moon!, which from the flick I had at it while trying to work out if I could afford to buy any more damn books, looked tremendous.  I remember going for lunch and somehow - I really have no clue how - managing almost to be late for the panel and having to peg it back to Pontins amidst some classically welsh weather.

So.  The panel.  It was called It's Not a Story, It's a Map!, and I was there with Gaie Sebold, Sam Sykes, Ian Whates and China soddin' Mievelle, with moderation provided by the terrific, great-blurb-providing Juliet E McKenna.  So no pressure.  None.  Reliable people had assured me that although China is a living legend and looks like some kind of mythical giant-squid-hunting badass, he's really a lovely guy, (he was), and that although Juliet could talk the legs off a giant squid, she would no doubt make a top class moderator (she did.)  All was good.  My cool remained more or less intact - even when, on my third pass through the green room* I realised that the elderly bearded chap regailing all and sundry with some lengthy and bizarre anecdote at enormous volume was Brian bloody Blessed.

The suggestion to sit in name order was my only contribution, but it was a good'un.

None of this, however, dinted my surface calm - mainly because the hangover was kicking in quite hard by that point and I was mainly focused on making sure my body didn't do anything to embarass me.  And as it turned out, despite hopelessly inadequate technology that rendered it impossible for anyone on the panel to actually hear what the others were saying, I fared quite well.  I made a couple of comments that didn't seem too brazenly idiotic, no one tried to laser anyone else's face off with a clockwork heatray and we managed to come to the unanimous conclusion that maps are the ultimate evil in fantasy literature and must be burned upon the altars of our dark gods.

(Personally, I quite like maps in fantasy books, but sometimes you've just got to pick your battles.)

Next came my signing, sitting me once more besides the mighty Mr Ian Whates, and the brilliant-yet-alarming news that Giant Thief had already more or less sold out.  Great on the "wholly crap, Giant Thief has sold out" front, not so hot on the "what am I actually going to do for the next hour?" one.  But it worked out pretty well, since a couple of people came back with previously-bought copies and enough punters arrived that we managed to flog the last few.  (Huge thanks, by the way, to everyone who sought out my illegible squiggle.)

Marc, me, Paul.  Say what you like, but I shined the hell out of those Docs.

With all the really terrifying stuff over with, I was pretty relaxed by the time Marc Aplin and Paul Wiseall arrived to wisk me off for my Fantasy Faction interview.  It was a lot of fun, and I got to burble about a ton a stuff close to my heart, like why short stories are great and what a complete asshat Easie Damasco is.  Of the two live interviews I've done recently, I think this is the one that's less likely to embarass the hell out of me when I hear it.  Cheers to Marc and Paul for being almost unbelievably nice and enthusiastic, and for managing to comandeer a passing spaceship just so that we could all have our photo taken together.

Work done, I retired for dinner and then more drinkage ... and finally, late in the early hours, the delirium tremens-like flailing that must pass for dancing if you happen to have an XY chromosome.  Needless to say, it isn't a sight that needs to be inflicted on rational beings (not that there were many around by that point), so it's a damn good job I managed to switch to pained glaring mode before Jonathan Green unleashed something we'd all regret.

Four thousand people?  No problem, mate!

Sunday I was up bright and early once again, after a refreshing five hours sleep (damn you Tidhar!) and ready to brave the machinations of the British train companies - who, god bless 'em, had completely failed to notice that they'd sold about a thousand times as many tickets out of Prestatyn as they would on a normal Sunday, and had cancelled the train out in favour of shuttling everyone to the nearest city in half-hourly milk floats.  Cue a chain of events that nearly led to us being pumelled by Storm Troopers and a couple of hundred irrate, hungover con'ers. 

But that's a story for another time...

Lastly, while I remember, cheers to old friend, master comics creator and soon-to-be Solaris novelist Al Ewing for keeping my company on the journey home - and indeed to everyone who hung out with and / or and bought me drinks, the Angry Robot gang for a great first signing, and of course the SFX folks for a con par excellence.  Roll on 2013!




* See!  Celebrity terminology!

SFX 2012: Part 1

Yes, that's Lavie Tidhar with Monkey.

Honestly, I have no idea how to make sense of the SFX Weekender.  Just mentally sifting through the haze of drink and fried breakfasts and steampunks and crazy welsh weather is a feat in itself.  It's tempting to just pull a lazy Best. Con.  Ever gag and leave it at that.  Which, after all, it was - because however great last year's Fantasycon was, at no point did it include a Storm Trooper fighting with a Dalek or Bananaman in crime-fighting conference with Spiderman or ... er ... Lavie Tidhar with Monkey.  And from here on in, such things will be my measure of Con greatness.  Because it turns out that everything in life is better with cosplay.

I got in at about half three on Thursday, and was kept company by the station cat while I waited for my hotel-roommate-to-be, the aforementioned Mr Tidhar.  Then we trooped over to our hotel, the Beaches, which it was abundantly obvious even from a distance would be much nicer than the rundown holiday council estate that was Pontins Prestatyn.  (This would turn out to be a generous assessment in favour of Pontins, which by all accounts was a dire hellhole - whereas the Beaches was all-round lovely.  Good call on leaving booking too late to get a chalet, Tidhar!)

Yes, that's Stormtroopers doing car checks.

We made our way around the barbwire-topped fences, snuck past the Stormtroopers doing car checks on the gates (I kid not!) and somehow blagged our way inside to hunt down Angry Robot co-editor Lee Harris, who had our passes, slyly smuggling in Ian Sales on the way.  If the Stormtroopers hadn't been a giveaway of what was to come, the fact that the lobby had been turned into a spaceship interior - complete with Aliens - sure was.  Then we tracked down Lee in the bar-cum-cinema that was the Screening Zone, and I was pleased to find him and the other Angry Robot-ers sitting with Alasdair Stuart and Ro Smith, old friends from my York writing group that I don't see nearly often enough.

Then Lee opened the celebratory book-launch champagne. Then Paul Cornell turned up.  Then, apropos of nothing, they started showing Labyrinth.  And truly all was right in the world.

The rest of the night is a bit of a blur - of the catastrophically drunken kind - so jump forward to Friday morning.  Friday morning began bright and early with Lavie forcing me to get up for breakfast at some ungodly hour, after about a fifteenth of the sleep my body would have needed to break down all the alcohol in it - an event that, against all reason or mercy, would be repeated over the next couple of days.

Yes, that's Robert Rankin about to heatray Lavie Tidhar's face off.

Still, it meant I got to attend the Elf Preservation panel - starring Joe Abercrombie, Juliet E McKenna, Graham McNeill, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Gav Thorpe - and then promptly almost nod off in it.  No representation of how interesting it was, I promise, just sheer sleep deprivation ... it would have taken the guests attacking each other with ray guns to keep me awake after the previous night.  Which, fortunately, was exactly what (okay, very nearly) happened when Lavie was contentious enough to suggest that the Victorians may not have been the loveliest people in history to Robert Rankin during the Steampunk panel.

After a brief diversion to attend the Kitschies ceremony (Lavie's Osama being deservingly up for Best Novel), we resumed our acquantance with the pub.  As evening settled in, reasoned debate and polite ultraviolence were abandoned once again in face of good, honest liquor.  But things took an unexpected turn when we got invited to / possibly inadvertently gatecrashed a party held by one of the big publishers at their big-publisher author chalet (I think it was Pan Macmillan, but the answer seemed to vary on who you asked.) Under the firm supervision of our agent John Berlyne, Lavie and me soon found ourselves somewhere that looked a lot like nowhere in the Welsh countryside - only to be rescued from likely death by our taxi driver coming back to admit that the address we'd given him probably wasn't that of the cat sanctuary he'd dropped us off outside.

And yes, that's Benedict Jacka's first non-YA novel

The party started well.  My particular highpoint was being a colossal geek by helping Adrian Tchaikovsky explain the apt / inapt concept from his Shadows of the Apt series to Benedict Jacka*, despite his quite obviously not needing my help because he, you know, invented it.  But it quickly became apparent that there were dangers lurking beneath the still party waters.  Because, where was all the booze?  By the time we arrived, there were two boxes of beer, half a dozen bottles of wine and a dangerous amount of rum between fifty or so people.  Lavie had had the good fortune to discover a hidden stash of lager, but it soon became apparent that even that wasn't going to save us.  Left with no choice - unless you consider sobriety a choice, I suppose - we set out back to the internment-camp horrors of Pontins, where there was at least fizzy alcohol-water on tap.

TBC...


* Whose first non-YA book comes out next month, and looked good enough that I picked up a copy despite my famous cheapness.

Road to SFX

Just a note to say that I'll be at the SFX Con in Prestatyn this weekend if anyone feels like saying hello, along with a veritable army of Angry Robot authors - Ian Whates, Andy Remic, Adam Christopher, Gav Thorpe, Anne Lyle and Lavie Tidhar.

Actually, the truth is I'll be a little more than just attending.  I have my first ever signing - at five in the afternoon* on the Saturday, along with Ian - and my first ever panel right before that at four, entitled It's not a story it's a map - does Fantasy set worldbuilding over character? Discuss and featuring such folks as Ian (again!), Gaie Sebold, Sam Sykes and China ("holy crap it's China Mieville") Mieville.  So that's - y'know - terrifying.  But in a good way.

A terrifying good way.

Anyway, while I'm here, why not share a bit of Giant Thief news?   It's coming in thick and fast, after all.  Over on the left there is a copy on the "Classic Fantasy and Sci-fi table" at the Waterstones in Cambridge, a dramatic rise to fame that may have had something to do with my friend Bill S. Brennan.  But hey, it serves them right for misfiling me (since when does TA come after TH, eh, Waterstones Cambridge?)

Then there are a couple more reviews up.  Keith West at Adventures Fantastic says that "With his debut novel, David Tallerman has succeeded in doing what few authors have done.  He has written a story ... that made me laugh out loud," and concludes that "Tallerman is not an author with whom I was familiar before reading this book ... I'd be willing to be his name will become more prominent if he writes more books like this one."  Meanwhile, over at Tor.Com, Stefan Raets impressively thorough review winds up with the heart-warming suggestion that "If you’re in the mood for something fast-paced and entertaining, not too challenging but instead light and, well, simply fun, Giant Thief is a great choice."

Lastly, I've done another interview - this one's with Sally Janin from the Qwillery, and covers such controversial topics as Plotting vs Pantsing and my guaranteed-or-your-money-back cure for writer's block.

Right, then.  I may or may not see you at the SFX weekender.  I'll be the one looking as though he's about to wet his best undercrackers at the thought of attending his first panel.


* Not, as Darren Turpin at AR was good enough to point out, six like I originally said.

Sunday, Lots of Unconnected News

Like the man said ... a newsful week, but I don't seem to be able to cram it all together under some kind of logical or meaningful heading, and I don't have the time or energy to break it into lots of wee mini-posts.  So here I am, just kinda news-vomiting all over the place.  Normal service will be resumed ... well, probably when I've finished all the guest posts I've signed up to do.

Which probably counts as news in itself, right?  In the last stretch of the marathon towards Giant Thief's release, I've been out meeting and greeting and signing on for things like guest blogs that in the cold light of day sound like an awful lot of work but hey, it'll all come good no doubt, and in the meantime, my first Giant Thief-related interview's up.  As a big fan of Lewis Caroll, headware and books, it seems appropriate that it should be with The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf and Book Review.

Meanwhile, on the reviews front, SFX seem to approve of Giant Thief.  They say that "...the breathless pace brings to mind the Pirates of the Caribbean movies - Damasco resembles a landlocked, literary version of Jack Sparrow, cracking wise while dodging guards or jumping off walls..." (I think the unspoken implication here is that it brings to mind the good Pirates of the Caribbean movies) and "it's incessant, but you're never bored and the prose is witty, plus there's no intrusive info-dumping employed to give the world its depth and authenticity."  And they give it 3 1/2 of 5, which on the SFX scale makes Giant Thief only a touch less great than Troll Hunter, one of my favourite films of last year.  I'm calling that a win.

Almost even more exciting, though, I've received my first bad review.  And it's really, really bad!  Thanks to Dan Franklin at Libris Leonis for catapulting me over that scary first-bad-review hurdle in style.  Dan comments, "All in all, Giant Thief is an incredibly disappointing book; with some interesting ideas, Tallerman has written a book that is boring and characterless, conspiring to throw us out of the action repeatedly and with menace aforethought*, and characters who don't stand up to scrutiny." In what little defense I can muster, I should point out that what Dan describes early on as "huge plotholes" seem to stem from him not realising Damasco doesn't have a certain object in his posession, let alone know what it does, for about two thirds of the book.  Other than that, he may very well have a point.

At least I can draw a little comfort from the fact that Bards and Sages Quarterly have picked up my story A Stare From the Darkness.  I had a flash piece in Bards and Sages way back in October 2010, and was impressed enough to want to hang out there again, so it's nice to have the opportunity.  As for A Stare ... well, asides from the ghost stories I've done, it's about as close as I'll ever get to writing straight-up gothic horror.  But, y'know ... with a twist...

Finally, some non-me related news.  Although I guess it is a bit, since it involves me, if only as a viewpoint character to narrate the stuff that isn't to do with me and ... so, anyway, I was lucky enough to get an invite to the launch of Alison Littlewood's debut A Cold Season on Thursday.  It was  plenty fun, with free wine (my preferred vintage!) and nibbles at a bar in Leeds and then a reading by Alison at Waterstones, followed by some questions and an equal number of answers, and then a signing - at which point I picked up a copy and realised I was listed amongst the folks thanked in the back.  Which was a lovely moment, and probably not entirely justified, since my only contribution has been to routinely enjoy Alison's excellent short fiction since we were introduced a few years back.

Still, like I say, lovely - and perhaps fortuitous, given that review up there (not the SFX one, obviously.)  For A Cold Season's just been picked up for the Richard and Judy Book Club, and I have a feeling Ali's about to become all sorts of famous...



* I'm not one hundred percent sure what this means, but it sounds really bad.