On the plane over I read Ishtar, a collection of stories by Kaaron Warren, Deb Biancotti and Cat Sparks. It’s wonderful. Review to follow.

In US con terms, Åcon is a literary relaxacon. Rather like SMOFcon, it is as much a holiday for Finnish con-runners as a convention, but it is a holiday that they take in the company of a favourite writer. This year that writer is Catherynne M. Valente.

There will be some programming. I’m on two panels. The first is on post-modernist fantasy. The other is on kick-ass heroines. I shall be referencing this.

But I’ll also reference the blog post on which I found it.

There may also be beer, chocolate and sauna. And doubtless mosquitoes.

I’ll try to blog when I can, but I understand that the hotel only has wifi in the lobby, so tweetage will be limited.

Firstly, my friend Simon Gurr has a new comic out: The Scarifyers. You can read all about it on the BristolCon blog.

Second, I have the first two issues of Alabaster Wolves, the new comic from the fabulous Caitlín R. Kiernan. I love it. A review will hopefully follow soon. Huge thanks here to Tim from the Bristol Forbidden Planet who picked them up from the store for me on Saturday evening because they hadn’t brought copies with them.

And finally I see from Twitter that some people are claiming that the expo was a massive rip off because they had to pay all of £9 to get in. Scandalous!

I guess they view the thing as a giant shop, and because you don’t have to pay to get into a shop you shouldn’t have to pay to get into a convention either. I don’t know what the economics of the event are, but I’m wondering how many of the small press publishers would have attended had their dealer fees had to cover the full cost of the venue rental, event management, guest expenses and so on.

Tim Maughan’s obituary on Tor.com is here.

A couple of Moebius/Jodorowski collaborations are available from Amazon UK at a reasonable price:

• The Incal
• Madwoman of the Sacred Heart

Also the Moebius Silver Surfer story is available as part of Marvel’s Definitive Silver Surfer collection.

There are entries for Moebius and Métal Hurlant in the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia. They note that the English language version, Heavy Metal, contained material from other countries not found in the original French editions.

Bull Spec #7 includes fiction, poetry, interviews, essays and reviews.

Icarus #12 has a similar mix of content, but with particular emphasis on gay characters.

And I think I am now up to date with the shop, at least in terms of what I have. Now to chase things I would like to have.

For more news, find links to your preferred social media network here. And here’s some sample artwork.

This is the first time I have been on a panel at a comics convention, and I gather from talking to Paul Cornell that such things, especially when about a major comics company, tend to be very corporate. Well, we didn’t have any official DC presence at the event. Also we were doing Panel Parity, and neither I nor new friend Stacey Whittle have contracts with DC. So we did something else instead.

On the panel with me were Paul, Stacey, Mark Buckingham (the lead artist on Fables) and Ian Churchill, a British artist who had some fabulous sketches with him from a new DC book, The Ravagers. (You can see more of Ian’s work here). Discussion ranged far and wide. We talked about the New 52 re-boot, about the various feminist controversies (including the bat-bonking and the boob window), and although the boys had to mutter “Non-Disclosure Agreement” occasionally it all went very well.

Along the way Mark and Ian got into some fascinating discussions about art techniques. I was rather surprised that my question about the implications of double-page spreads for an audience reading on iPads caught them both on the hop, but Mark responded with some interesting suggestions as to how comic art might change in a paperless world.

The audience seemed very happy. We got them involved and I was interested to see that they were in favour, by quite a large majority, of the New 52. Those who were unhappy were mainly mourning the loss of well-loved characters. Paul and I were delighted with how many people came up to us afterwards and said how much they’d enjoyed the panel.

Paul, of course, talked about Saucer Country, which inevitably led to discussion of anal probes. I gather that Paul hasn’t yet had a visit from the Men in Black, though as Stacey pointed out he wouldn’t remember it if he had.

Ian, of course, talked a bit about The Ravagers. I am deeply disappointed that DC didn’t go for his butterfly-winged version of Beast Boy. I’ll check the book out when it launches as I really love his art. (And while I’m on the subject, thanks to Tansy for recommending Earth 2, because Nicola Scott’s art is fabulous too.)

I also got Mark to talk a bit about the new fables spin-off, Fairest. Ostensibly this features all of the famously beautiful characters from the series, and from the Adam Hughes cover below you could be forgiven for thinking that this was just an excuse for “good girl art” (a comic-world technical term that means “big boobies”). However, the first couple of issues mainly feature Ali Baba (who is rather cute) and a imp called Jonah who is very clearly a geek kid and therefore amusing and annoying in equal quantities.

What’s more, the whole point of Fairest is to provide a vehicle through which other writers can explore the Fables universe. One of the first people to do so will be Lauren Beukes. Oh dear, people are going to die horribly, aren’t they…

Footnote: Paul introduced me to Stacey. She said, “You are a science fiction person? You must know James Bacon then.” There may have been giggling.

Last week Paul Cornell tweeted about a BBC TV program called Do We Really Need the Moon?. It was an intriguing title, and I marked it for later viewing without thinking much about it. It turned out to be a great piece of popular science TV — the sort of the thing that Brian Cox does, only with more science and fewer moody shots of the presenter. It is still available on the iPlayer.

Much to my delight, the presenter was a woman scientist, Maggie Aderin-Pocock. What’s more, she’s a woman scientist who grew up on a council estate in North London and who, inspired by The Clangers and Star Trek, overcame dyslexia on her way to a PhD in physics from Imperial. She’s even got an MBE. See how out of touch I am? And she’s a great TV presenter.

So, is this going to be the new face of popular science on the BBC?

I do hope so.

(Photo by David Rose from this Telegraph article.)

Also, next Ada Lovelace Day, no question about who I’m featuring.

The Science Fiction Novel category was won by Kim Westwood for The Courier’s New Bicycle, while the YA Short Fiction category was won by “The Nation of the Night” by Sue Isle from her collection, Nightsiders. Both of these books feature positive and sympathetic portrayals of trans people as the central characters in the story. This makes me very happy indeed. Thank you, Australia. And thank you Kim and Sue for writing such great stories.

Congratulations are also due to my pals Alex, Alisa & Tansy at Galactic Suburbia who have done so much to promote interesting writing about gender. They won the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award, which is given to people who have done something spectacular for the SpecFic community that doesn’t otherwise qualify for an award.

Part of this, I suspect, is that the Campbell jury sees so little change. As you’ll see from the award’s website, it is pretty much the same group of people ever year. If you change the jury every few years then inevitably there will be a few years in which results don’t go the way people might like, but equally if you hardly ever change them then there’s a danger that the jury will become set in its ways and reward the same type of books over and over again. That, in the current environment, means books by old, white men.

However, Gary touched on something interesting during the podcast when he mentioned that books by women tend to be less scientifically rigorous. Jonathan, quite rightly, chastised him for assuming that the award was for “hard SF”, and pointed out that many male SF writers are equally lacking in rigour. But they never quite got to the end of that line of reasoning.

How we classify books as “science fiction” or “fantasy” does change down the years. Back in the early days of Worldcon all sorts of things that nowadays we see as fantasy would have been called SF. That’s why fantasy has always been assumed to be part of the Hugos. The rise of fantasy as a marketing phenomenon has changed all that. It affects men too. One of the abiding mysteries of SF marketing is why Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun appears in the Fantasy Masterworks series, when it is so clearly set in a far future and the series is based around a real astronomical phenomenon. But these days classification issues appear to affect women disproportionately.

I’m firmly convinced that one of the reasons we see fewer women science fiction writers these days is because if a man writes an SF book that contains some fantastical elements it still tends to be seen as SF, but if a woman does the same it gets categorized as fantasy. I would argue, for example, that Debris by Jo Anderton would be seen as SF had it been written by a man. There is a good chance that The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells would too. I’m sure that some people argue that Kameron Hurley’s books are “really” fantasy. Or there’s Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fear’s Death, which is very clearly set in the future yet won the World Fantasy Award.

I find it hard to solely blame publishers for this. After all, they have to sell books, and if bookstores won’t stock SF by women, or readers won’t buy it in sufficient numbers, they need to react. Currently they are doing so quite successfully by slapping a YA label on SF by women. It’s all a game of smoke and mirrors.

However, when it comes to an award like the Campbell that requires a jury to make a decision as to whether a book is science fiction or not, then such issues come to the forefront. In the case of the Campbell I suspect this might be a question that the jury should talk about.