Not Quite a Billion Year Spree: Swancon at 40

Ten years ago, I attended Swancon XXX, a strange and wondrous affair held at the Emerald Hotel Perth (now the Rendezvous Hotel Perth Central). I have many memories of that, my first SF convention, but the one thing that stands out (aside from the fact that the con featured a wedding!) is the kindness and […]

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New Zealand

You say New Zealand, most people think The Lord of the Rings. I think a special shade of green, horizontal rain, icy wind, breathtaking views, very scary weta, bilingual sings, kids in short sleeves and short pants when I – who am always so hot and under-dressed at home doctors have been sending me to […]

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Women in Fandom 0.1

Every time some new (or old) misogyny-related scandal shakes up the anglophone science fiction community, I stand on the sidelines, quietly watching the internets explode and wonder how this can be. Thing is, I probably live, day in, day out, in a far more misogynistic society than members of anglophone SF fandom do. And yet, […]

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Reading fan-fiction (and sometimes, more often, writing it)

When you dive into another person’s fiction so deeply that you feel their characters as if they are of your own making, or, if not that, then at least as if you can move them outside boundaries that media like television imposes on them, then you’re a bit like a mad woman, a crazy old […]

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The FINFAR Society Launches a SF / Fantasy Research Journal

Swecon is on this weekend and I am sadly not there. But they have announced something I totally love. I learned about it through Cheryl’s blog but the official announcement, which I am copying in its entirety at the end of this post, is on the site of Adam Roberts, whose work I discovered not […]

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