Blog of Paul Cornell - writer of Doctor Who (and other stuff, of course!)
Casual Fridays: ReduxSo I felt so ill and exhausted last Friday that I let myself off the hook of doing this blog. I don't think it was actually post-convention crud, but the downer of no longer being surrounded by lovely friends and an audience of 6000 didn't help my condition. Now I'm feeling a lot better, but still kind of tired, after (before this week) two of the busiest work weeks I've ever had, plus the SFX Weekender. And this week has also been huge, life-changing, in fact, in a number of ways, some of which will only become clear in the long term. Before we get to the meat of this blog, though, with a report on the Weekender, some important announcements...
This year's Eastercon still seeks female panelists, particularly in the areas of science and comics. Everyone should do Eastercon this year: see George R.R. Martin! Tricia Sullivan! Cory Doctorow!
There's a new edition of the SF Squeecast out now, without me in attendance, but with the gang discussing each other's work (including some flattering words about my stuff). Probably a good thing I wasn't there, I'd have blushed and looked at my shoes.
Last Saturday, I popped along to Big Finish Day in Barking. Brilliant to see such a large turn-out, to have so many BF writers in one building, and to meet Benny's new companion (well, more of a best friend really), Ayesha Antoine. (Who is such a sweetheart, and such a geek!) Onstage, me, Ayesha, Lisa Bowerman and Benny producers Gary Russell and Scott Handcock (hey, two out of five, close enough for Panel Parity!) talked about plans for the character's twentieth anniversary this year. There are two special projects. Firstly, there's a new audio adaptation of Bernice's first appearance in Love and War, with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred (here's the full cast list). It's especially pleasing to have James Redmond (who was in some of my Casualty episodes) playing Jan.
Secondly, and this is very exciting, there's Many Happy Returns, a new Bernice audio adventure written by, and starring, every major Bernice contributor. This is that secret project I visited the BF studios a few months ago to take part in, and it was like Bandaid, with writers and actors coming in to do their bit and hanging around in the green room to chat about old times. We've come together in aid of Let's Do It For ME, a charity dear to all our hearts, furthering awareness of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by funding research into this terrible condition. We all donated our time for free (the studio included), so every penny goes to the charity. The drama is also a proper celebration of Bernice's history, visiting every aspect of her life. I'm very proud of my bit. (And as you'll notice if you visit either of the BF links, Scott's even running a marathon for the cause. Do chip in.)
In other news, The Sensible Folly, the story I had published in booklet form to support the Folly Trust in my old hometown of Faringdon, has been made into an audio book. You can hear me talking about the project on this edition of Faringdon Local, and my whole fifteen-minute reading is here. It's a pleasure to actually record one of my own stories. I hope I get to put my voice to similar use again sometime.
My lovely publishers, Tor Books, have a new blog, which includes a competition relevant to the interests of those of you who were at the Weekender. I suspect as November approaches I'll be sending you in their direction often.
The latest issue of Esli, the Russian SF magazine (#228) has arrived...
Containing a translation of my Jonathan Hamilton novelette 'The Copenhagen Interpretation', with an illustration of this rather dashing 1980s-style Hamilton...
Which actor does he remind me of?
If you're a member of the British Fantasy Society (and if not, you should really think about joining), voting has started for this year's BFS Awards. For the first time, these awards include a category, the Robert Holdstock Award, for Best Epic Fantasy Novel, a change designed to move the Society away from being a dark fantasy/horror group and embracing all kinds of fantasy. Epic fantasy has, oddly, not many awards to its name, and I hope this one will be welcomed.
And finally, I'm proud to be one of six judges for the Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Film Challenge, which, as the title suggests, is a contest involving making a short film in two days (you need to have a representative in London to announce your work on April 14th). If you've ever fancied getting behind the camera, this wouldn't be a bad place to start. I look forward to seeing your entries.
Following the delivery of the novel (and how easily do I dash off that phrase now!), last week was all about Demon Knights for me, as we get to two-thirds of the way through the next arc, about which I can reveal nothing. But there are loads of connections with the wider DC Universe becoming apparent. And this week, I plotted out a Saucer Country arc, and went back to work on the new Hamilton story.
Last week we went to see The Phantom of the Opera, something Caroline's wanted to do for some time, and it was... okay. Great music. But the amount of cross-singing meant that the plot was often obscured, and... I just didn't get onside with the Phantom. The owners of the theatre are nice guys who find themselves saddled with the mother of all health and safety issues. ('Sir, nowhere in your bill of sale did you mention a Phantom!') The program made much of this version of the tale getting rid of Hollywood's 'revenge on copyright thieves' motivation for the Phantom (now that I would have cheered for), and going back to the novel's approach. But if the owners are cool, and the Phantom literally kills people just for making fun of him... why am I meant to think he's tragic and misunderstood? I was waiting, thus, for his own opera to at least be a work of genius, but actually it's as cliched as all the others. And the Phantom writes such dull, prosaic threatening notes. This is quite an accurate study of the behaviour of an obsessed stalker, but... he's sort of the hero? Is he meant to be annoying? And the whole thing's framed as a flashback at the start... which doesn't get closed at the end. After twenty-five years, you expect a production not to feel like a work in progress. But I should mention the marvelous production design, and the entirely up for it cast, and again, the quality of the music. And if this uber-Goth show had heightened its reality by just a couple more notches, I might yet have bought in to the tragedy of it all.
I went on from Phantom to Nick Harkaway's launch party for his new novel Angelmaker, a gathering which included a (real) priest with a Phantom-esque black hood over his features. In my feverish circumstances, that rather freaked me out. The do was held at an extraordinary Sumerian-themed nightclub in Camden (how often do you get to say that?) and it was cool to meet both Nick and Patrick Ness for the first time, and to catch up with Ellen Datlow, John Clute, Pat Cadigan, and the continuation of the Weekender social whirl.
So, yes, now we come to it, the SFX Weekender, where to begin?
I drove down to Prestatyn on the Thursday (listening to Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint), and booked in for my one-night stay in my Pontins chalet early. Which, as it turns out, was a good idea, because soon an enormous queue built up outside reception, lashed by freezing winds like penguins in Frozen Planet. (I think it's the temperature differential between the boiling interiors and the chill outside that creates those conditions.) There have been some major complaints about queues and facilities and about the lack of gender equality onstage and in terms of dancers, and some of them (including all the gender parity complaints) are entirely justified. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't go into much of that here. The SFX gang are my friends, and I know that plans are in motion to make next year better. And, you know, following on from my last blog, I'll be extending my year of doing that to include their next event and provide one litmus test of that change.
My own experience was: best convention ever. A sheer joy. It isn't just that there were so many friends present, or that there was such a big audience to perform to, but that that audience formed some sort of platonic ideal for me of what a genre audience should be. This lot were nearly fifty per cent women, ordinary people, who regarded SF as something one could sample as part of a balanced diet. They weren't locked inside a self-built ghetto. They were in the world, and in SF, at the same moment. And because they were mainstream, they were more diverse in general than the regular convention audience.
That audience showed up for authors. So many authors, this time. All experiencing bigger panels than they'd ever encountered in the UK. The thematic panels did better (as 101s for newcomers) than attempts to encourage debate, because said debates were new to this audience. Marc Gascoigne of Angry Robot books told me, in terms of book sales: 'best convention ever'. Danie Ware at Forbidden Planet reported the same thing. This is the Dragoncon effect at work: you put interesting books in front of a 'media' audience and they'll buy and read them. In truckloads. The FP stall sold out of everything of mine they'd brought along. Several authors I knew reported the same thing. Lavie Tidhar is a brilliant, edgy, writer who challenges mainstream thinking. That he should get a convention book sellout is testament to the fact that this lot were here for a bit from column A, a bit from column B: some Brian Blessed; some Dan Abnett; some Lavie Tidhar.
I think I'm only going to be able to describe the weekend in snapshots. It seems such a long time ago now.
There were a bunch of Scottish lads in the bar on the Thursday night, who were (ostensibly) there to support their fanboy mate, saying things like 'I don't know anything about sci-fi', but obviously interested, positive, and quite surprised to be in surroundings which already felt like an enormous party. It was thanks to them, I believe, that I got lost on the way back to the chalet, and had a sudden and unfortunate encounter with a tree, which led to me sporting, for the rest of the weekend, a split lip which resembled a very small moustache.
The Tor Books 'cottage' this year, where my editor Julie Crisp and her team accommodated myself, Peter F. Hamilton, Mark Charan Newton, Adrian Tchaikovsky and China Mieville, was more of an enormous fortress. Located on a brow several miles from the venue, it boasted an observation deck, several kitchens, and enough party space for the publisher to host the mother of all soirees on the Friday night.
(Photos of Fort Tor by Mark Charan Newton.) I wandered from conversation to conversation with the ease of someone who looks like they've been roughed up by experts, and we finished the night with champers and my Mum's apple crumble.
We only had eyes for Julie's very small and perfect baby, who Julie and her husband had brought to her first convention. To be honest, the party of our friendly rival publishers, on the following night, was not up to the same standard, being in Chalet 40.
A rolling game of Apples to Apples in the Queen Vic pub involved the Angry Robot drinking team (Marc and Lee), Juliet E. McKenna (whose kung fu powers allowed her to slink out of her convention wristband), Emma Newman (dressed as a Skyrim Tavern wench, with a little card indicating her allowed range of responses), and the guys from Third Row Fandom, as well as many authors who popped in for a round or two.
The Kitschies went down very well, in a packed screening area (the secondary sit down area, with pub tables, a bar, and an enormous movie screen, the most sociable hang out that weekend), with the attitude of the SFX audience being rather like that of the magazine itself: we don't know much about the books that are being feted here, but this is clearly the high end of what we're into, so we want to participate and we want to know more. That's the lesson I think fandom always comes away from the Weekender with: the mainstream are just like us now, there's nothing to be afraid of. I like an award that one can cuddle, and I did some of that with a Kitschie 'inky tentacle', so much so that I nearly absconded with it.
I did a really fun panel with Ben Aaronovitch, Benedict Jacka, Stacia Kane, Mark Charan Newton and Same Stone about urban fantasy. Again, a bit of a 101, but with a big audience who were clearly up for it, and with all of us on the panel with experience of, and something to say about, the subject. Stacia was hardcore, one of several cool authors I met for the first time this weekend, like Maria Dahvana Headley (the girl with the Horus tattoo), Sophia McDougall and David Tallerman. One of the interesting effects of having something approaching a 50/50 gender balance in the audience is that when a female panelist makes a feminist joke, or calls out a male panelist about something (like when Jaine Fenn threatened Alastair Reynolds' gonads), there's supportive laughter and cheering.
It was also great to introduce Mark Buckingham and his wife Irma to my author friends, my comics and SF worlds meeting. I like it when the media get along with each other, it makes it feel less like I've got one foot on one boat and one on the other.
That woman I met in Cardiff was going round, you remember, the one in the top hat who asks creators about their favourite cheeses and is compiling the results for her website. Whenever I was in conversation with someone she hadn't 'got', she'd zoom up to my shoulder and ask for an introduction. The world of cheese fancying benefited hugely that weekend, with input from Mark Newton (a typically connoisseur answer), Phil Ford (cheese of the people) and Lavie (five minutes about the impossibility of such a choice).
Oh, and Phil Ford, he's the man to go to if you want to share the chips of the star of the Sarah Jane Adventures. Very welcome at that point in the evening.
There are guests to spare at the Weekender, they just show up. Like Brian Aldiss, introduced onstage by Stephen Baxter at the Awards, there to pick up a lifetime achievement gong, and feted, absolutely feted, standing ovation from the biggest crowd he's probably ever encountered. There, again, is one of the reasons why the Weekender is a force for good. They can also put on an Awards ceremony where those who can't be there send videos, and those who can pop in just for the evening, so one learns to expect surprises.
I didn't see many of the actors. I got a hug from Sophie Aldred (the world's sunniest person, whose verdict about being trapped on a train for seven hours was 'it was great, I got to read!') I was in the Green Room with Brian Blessed, enjoying the Presence. (He did well, as many other blogs have told you.)
So, okay, the two panel games. These packed out their rooms. This audience are also here for comedy. I have never seen a Just A Minute panel that was so nervous beforehand. But Toby, China, Sarah and Joe got into it right away, and, well, see for yourself...
One of the best, I think. And I'm now talking to three different conventions about doing the game for them.
The other panel game was one I was taking part in, Ready Steady Flash, hosted by Lee Harris. The idea here was to write a story in five minutes to a given title. I was playing against Stacia Kane, Tony Lee and Juliet E. McKenna, and while we frantically wrote, the audience were kept entertained by Lee's monologues, and by comedy from Donna Scott (hey, Panel Parity again!) I was so focused on the writing I have no idea what they said. Here are the three titles given to us, and what I wrote for each...
The Old Gods
'My back is killing me,' said Odin, rubbing his lower spine with his Odinhands. 'Sorry, that should be my Odinback.'
'My arms are killing me,' said Kali.
'Well,' said Pan, 'if you have more of something, then it's bound to hurt more. I may have mentioned my own particular ache.'
Odin glanced his Odinglance up at the clock on the wall of the Happy Cloud Rest Home for Old Gods. 'I wonder,' he said, 'what's for dinner?'
'I hope it's not bloody Ambrosia,' said Kali.
'We should never have got old,' said Pan. 'Why did we allow it?'
The others looked -
And that's where that one finishes, as the five minutes were up and I had to grumpily throw down my pen. You can see some obvious attempts at crowd pleasing smut with that one, but as you can see on her blog, it was Juliet's excellent entry that won the day. The next title was...
The View from the Future
There was once a town called Prestatyn here, built by coal and blood and work.
But it vanished. It's not there any more. And the thing that stands in its place now, well, you've seen how empty the space is, especially when you look down on it from those lookout posts on the hills, where the rich have fled.
Prestatyn died, I'm told, in 1983.
Ouch. I put down my pen early, very smug about that ill-advised attempt at social comment. (I don't even know if there was coal mining in Prestatyn!) I had my arse handed to me on that round by Tony Lee, who went for a poem about Anthony Head's absence owing to a train derailment. Which suited the mood of the crowd perfectly. The last title was...
Unicorn Sandwich
'I can't believe,' said Isolde, 'that you'd think I'd cheat on you, Tristan. I am in fact still a virgin, and I will take any magical test to prove it.'
'Well, you see,' said Tristan, 'that's why I invited you to lunch.'
'You mean to clear the air?'
'No, to establish your innocence. You managed to eat the sandwich.'
'Oh,' said Isolde, picking the horn out of her teeth. 'I thought that was unusually crunchy.'
Which was okay, I thought, until Stacia, who until this point had been hitting us with serious slices of urban fantasy, decided to take the audience to another level of smut entirely, with, well... check it out. Lee decided that we were all the winners equally (which he told me later was because he couldn't face announcing that each of the other contestants had won a round, leaving them all the joint winners, and me... well, let's call it second). As you'll see from the length of those entries, most of writing, even in those circumstances, is thinking. Juliet, Tony and Stacia all made very quick and useful calculations about story shape and audience expectation.
The phrase 'unicorn sandwich' cropped up a lot after that.
I don't get Pat Sharp (we love to dance to cheese, but he plays cheese you can't dance to), but Craig Charles, showing up just to DJ, was awesome as always. It didn't feel like a fan disco, with that tremendous release of wanting to dance but being afraid to, and then finally giving in when it feels safe. This lot had arrived with the absolute certainty of boppage. It was a costume ball, and there were loads of them, wall to wall, fun and well crafted and above all omnipresent. That's another huge lesson: visible geek unity, here are our people, and they're having fun within the culture of being our people, and there are 6000 of them, and everybody's cool with that. I wandered happily from camp to camp, just gazing around most of the time, finding groups of my friends talking in different corners. Every conversation you came to, everyone was already smiling. It felt like geek victory. My wonderful agent put on a domino mask and enjoyed the romance of anonymity. Ambassador Kosh turned out to be able to really cut a rug. I finally drove China back to the Fort at 3am, blissed out on fan sweat.
No guest today because, hey, look how big this post is already. But, signing off, here's another piece of my favourite music. This time, it's Bobby Darin, with a prime piece of the theatrical in popular music. I love how the jolly form conceals the horrifying lyric. 'We're all people of the world,' the song says, 'we're cool with how things are. It's kind of glamorous. Isn't it?' And that depicts America in the early 1960s so well.
I hope to see some of you at Picocon tomorrow (just popping in, not on any panels). Until then, Cheerio!
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