This week will be all about the women!Ā Tomorrow, I will be talking about Ursula K. Le Guin and feminism on a public panel following the screening of the ? Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin documentary as part of the Vox Feminae Film Festival and on Sunday I will be on a panel about Feminism in Croatian SF at Rikon.
I am experiencing slight stage fright about the first one. It just dawned on me that this particular talk will be public, as in catering to and visited by a non-SF-fandom crowd. I will be talking to people who will have met Ursula’s work and voice not through Earthsea and Omelas, and poetry, and fans crazy in love with her every word because language, and linguistics and style and sooo much depth so poignantly, but through gender politics and anarchism. Gasp! I might get eaten alive. Good thing I have fellow panelists to hide behind – the ever eloquent Milena Benini, who has taught me how to relax and be myself at panels, no matter how little I know and Irena RaÅ”eta,Ā who actually cooked up the entire thing up by being a die hard Ursula fan and by signing us up for the Vox Feminae Festival in the first place, saying – it is just a repetition of the panel we did at this year’s SFeraKon, adjusted for a wider audience.
As I prepareĀ for giving statements for TV tomorrow, I am wondering how underprepared I can one beĀ for the wider audience. I am very much looking forward to seeing the movie on the big screen.
The Feminism in Croatian SF is a panel that I came up at the last second, and Rikon were kind enough to fit it in. Only later did I remember that Irena RaŔeta organized a round table on the topic at SFerakon 2018, with Milena Benini and myself. That one was a lot of fun, and came to a conclusion that I had, to be perfectly honest, forgotten: that the panel needs to be a traveling one, just like we had a traveling the state of Croatian SF panel.
For a number of years, a panel with the same title and (mostly) the same panelists would be a part of the programming at (almost) every local SF con. A lot of nice initiatives got started and got traction at those panels, among them Ad astra, Croatian Novella Anthology 1976-2006, covering 30 years of Croatian SF writing and Sirius B, an SF magazine which publishes both translations and local authors.
I may have forgotten that Feminism in Croatian SF should be one of those traveling topics, but my subconscious obviously did not. I am looking forward to Sunday and the stories I will hear on that panel. I aim to record it and finally start that podcast I have been thinking about for 5 years.
