The con opened at 18:00 and the program started at 19:00, which I missed because we were late starting from Zagreb. Late because of me and all the papers I was very slow in getting into order – SFera gets some funding from the city of Zagreb and of course the first day of Rikon was also the last day to post these. Fortunately, Mirko being an excellent driver and Rijeka being not really far from Zagreb, I made it just in the nick of time for the Fantastic Lliterature of Our Youth panel I was on. Ivana Delac, a writer and LARP-er from Karlovac, moderated quite successfully considering the fact that she put three very talkative and opinionated people on the panel. Davor Šišovic and Milena Benini being only two years apart in age still had quite a different path to reading SF. All of us, it turns out, shared one thing in common – we all read voraciously across all genres and across the board as well.
There were not that many YA authors back then, although there were some, as well as numerous childrens authors, but one graduated from Mladen Bjažic and Zvonimir Furtinger to Stepehn King in no time. Davor read a lot of comics and Milena just read an unholy amount of everything. The discussion touched on why kids love horror so much, how much violence is acceptable in YA – because the idea of limiting children in what they drink, watch and read is very recent in Crotia as well as a not entirely welcom “an import of American cutlure”, according to Milena who remembered being taken by her parents to see Hamlet when she was seven years old and “being in love with Rade Serbedzija for a very long time afterward and with Hamlet forever”.
After the panel, I had one of the best burgers ever. Hurrying to get to Rikon we had skipped dinner althogether counting on th fact that the same people would be offering food at the con and to our glee – they were! I got roped into taking part in the Vorqiuzz where I did very, very poorly. Having a partner who had read only half of Shards of Honour did ot help much, nor did the fact that my brain went into strange loops hearing the translations for some of the things from Bujolds books. In an atempt to make myself feel better, I made Dalibor Perkovic, who wrote for this blog here, and his wife for the Evil Perkovic team for the next trivia game called Drzava grad goes SF, a genre twist on a popular rainy day game in which letters are drawn and the contestants must put down as many things beginning with that letter in the pre-determined fields such as state, town, river, mountain etc. In this game the fields were city/town/castle, state/empire, space body, monster/creature, race, vehicle and first name with the proviso that an esefnal source had to named when chalenged. One could not just put down Venus for the letter V, for instance. We were given 10 seconds to think and 60 seconds to write the stuff down. Answers both in English and Croatian were allowed, which made for extra fun and confusion. The first three drawn letters were w, x and y, crancking up the difficulty level, as if the lateness of the quizz was not enough. My team sucked, but SFeras team won, just like last year.
At 2 am the Faculty kicked us out and closed the doors, the majority of people went on to party and talk at a bar, while I went on with Milena to a friends house where we talked about fannish things and Shamrokon and Loncon until 4am.
Had so much fun I hardly took any pictures.
