The SFX Weekender 2012 – Part 2

Marc and I had a bizarre start to our SFX Weekender. On the drive up to Prestatyn, Wales where the convention was being held, the satnav took us down some strange, muddy tracks in to what can only be described as The Hills Have Eyes – the Welsh edition. We eventually got to the venue though and soon sat down to a breakfast that was pretty much powdered egg, cardboard toast and sausages like the inner tubes of tiny toilet rolls. Safe to say, I was grumpy, which isn’t a good look and wasn’t helped by an hour long queue for our passes, however, a smile quickly hit my face as I watched Stormtroopers and Spiderman all stroll past followed by the one and only Mr Indiana Jones. I turned to Marc and whispered, “I hope they have Boba Fett.” And my frown was turned permanently upside down by a wisecracking Dalek outside:

Guy in the queue: “Hey, what do you think of Twilight?”

Dalek: “Do not get me staaaaaarted on Twiiiiilight. (The buttons aren’t sticking; I’m just trying to convey a Dalek voice.) Edward Cullen lives in the woods and spaaaaarkles in the suuuunlight. He’s not a vampiiiiire… he is a fairy.”

We dropped our coats in the press section (oh yes) and headed down to the main hall for the opening ceremony. This ceremony began with some rather sexy ladies moving hypnotically who were then joined by xenomorphs from the Alien movies who stalked them around the stage. This juxtaposition messed with me royally. Should I be aroused or should I run in fear? I wasn’t sure, so I just stood there shaking slightly, in a wide-eyed state of hormonal confusion. It was brilliant.

“For me, the SFX Weekender is for sci-fi and fantasy what Glastonbury festival is for music. It epitomises and celebrates everything that is brilliant about something that we love.”

After a brief hello from the SFX team who welcomed the room to the event and really built up our excitement for the weekend with talk of all the great guests and panels we could expect, Marc and I headed off in to the fray of Bartertown.

Bartertown was manic and wonderful with stalls from all the great publishers and stores like Solaris, Abaddon, Angry Robot, the Black Library and Forbidden Planet. There were stalls selling signed photos, signed books and movie stills formed in to keyrings, there were bobbleheads and plushies and hand-carved metal notebooks, the list goes on. I suppose many of these items should be considered standard fare for a convention but they were brilliant nonetheless. My only criticism of Bartertown would be that there wasn’t enough bartering going on for my liking. I was picturing some kind of middle-eastern bazaar or Sunday morning car-boot sale where I could beat the seller down in price, feign disinterest in items I wanted and pretend to only have 70p left on me when the item actually costs £2. Yeah… there was none of that. What they did have though were stacks of books that aren’t yet on the market so it’s safe to say my wallet was neatly rinsed.

Moving onwards, we entered the Screening Room, which was home to a great bar and multiple big screens, which is a damn fine combination in my opinion. Here you could catch anything from old episodes of Red Dwarf to classic Sci-fi and fantasy movies like Labyrinth and The Thing. It was also to be the venue for The Kitschies, the awards from our friends in literary crime, Pornokitsch.

Beyond the Screening Room was The Queen Vic Pub venue, which had been converted into the base of operations for all things Star Wars. At one point I found myself having a beer in the Queen Vic sat next to Chewbacca. Surreal? Yes, and for the record, Chewy doesn’t smell half as bad as you would imagine.

We caught some cracking panels in the main hall, the first of which was ‘Elf Preservation’ where the all-star panel of Joe Abercrombie, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Juliet E. McKenna, Graham McNeil and Gav Thorpe discussed whether or not monsters and magic were necessary to making a story, fantasy. The discussion quickly moved on to the idea of how to keep things fresh and avoid creating just another Tolkien rip-off when, at the same time, people want to read about orks and elves. Abercrombie discussed this point as authors having a ‘tool box of the familiar’, which they then have to twist to give the reader something fresh. McKenna then followed up with by saying that the trick is to say to yourself, “If the rules don’t say I can’t, I’ll see if I can get away with it,” which I think should be the mantra for any fantasy writer. I think out of all the ‘discussion’ panels I saw this was probably my favourite as it touched on a point that we at Fantasy-Faction see all the time, ‘how do you keep things new and exciting?’ Really good stuff.

After this, I was introduced to Nicola Budd an editor from Jo Fletcher Books who has star quality stamped all over her. I have a sneaking suspicion that she’s a name you’ll hear more and more of in the next few years.

Next panel up was ‘Just A Minute.’ For anyone who doesn’t know, Just A Minute is originally a BBC Radio 4 show where contestants have to talk on a given subject for a minute without repetition, hesitation in speech or deviation from the subject. Yeah, it sounds easy but I quickly got the impression that it really isn’t. The panel pitted Sarah Pinborough, China Mieville, Joe Abercrombie and Toby Whitehouse against each other. After some brilliant dialogues and witty interjections (and a touch too much information about Ms Pinborough’s gynecologist,) Joe Abercrombie was crowned the winner of ‘Just A Minute’ and he celebrated with all the humility you would expect from such a humble guy. This show was hands down my favourite piece of entertainment from the weekend as I really haven’t laughed as hard in a long time as I did whenever Joe or China would buzz in on each other for no reason other than to put the other off their monologue and then try to justify the buzz. For a great video of this you should head to Marc’s convention report here.

After grabbing some food we rushed over to catch The Kitschies (the awards from Pornokitsch as mentioned earlier) where we met Ben Aaronovitch who was incredibly smiley despite his book The Rivers Of London losing the ‘Best Cover’ Kitschy to The Last Werewolf. For the record, I thought Ben’s cover should have won, however, I am rather biased as I loved Ben’s book and haven’t yet read The Last Werewolf.

For those of you who didn’t catch them, the results of the Kitschies are as follows:

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd – Red Tentacle

God’s War by Kameron Hurley – Golden Tentacle

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan with cover design by Peter Mendelsund – Inky Tentacle

Graphic novel publishers SelfMadeHero – Black Tentacle.

It was at this point that Jon Weir (Gollanzc) dragged us to the side and asked if we wanted to come and meet a few authors to which we hungrily said yes and expected to head upstairs to the press room. You can imagine our confusion when we found ourselves in a taxi, winding up dark and narrow roads and ten minutes later, turning in to the driveway of what can only be described as a small mansion. In fact, it looked more like a kind of lair inhabited by a James Bond villain, with labyrinthine hallways and a thousand doors to nowhere. It’s the kind of place you imagine you could walk forever or stumble into a wardrobe and wake up in Welsh Narnia. One of the hallways though, concluded in an enormous conservatory overlooking the Welsh hills and inhabited by… oh my… I scan the room and see Joe Abercrombie, Sam Sykes, Mark Newton, Adrian Tchaikovsky and…China Mieville.

For a moment, I lost cabin pressure. We were at the Tor party.

I spent the next four hours mingling with the best and brightest, all the while thinking ‘how did this fan boy get here?’ I spent an age talking to John Wordsworth (If there was a Kitchy for ‘Best Beard’…) and Ben Willis from Headline who were both hilarious. I was then introduced to the wonderful Rose Tremlett and Jenni Hill from Orbit books and I can safely say that if I was a comic book character then there would have been a bubble above my head saying *Swoon* when I met these two.

I won’t keep name-dropping as no one’s a fan of that *Achoo – Adam Christopher,* but it was a *Sneeze – Jaine Fenn,* a beautiful and mind-boggling evening. The question is though, how do you top an evening like this? You can’t right? Actually…Marc and I shared a taxi home with Sam Sykes and Joe Abercrombie. Now friends, stop me if I’m wrong but I believe that is how you spell Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Rose Tremlett, Marc Aplin, Jon Weir and yours truly.

And on to Saturday, I woke up slightly bleary headed with pretty stiff legs from the bunk bed but a smile was smeared on my face in permanent ink. After a far better breakfast than the previous morning, Marc and I were interviewing, and oh my, was it fun.

If my inner fanboy hadn’t been exposed the night before then it almost certainly flew out of my eyeballs as we started inviting authors up to our neatly prepared end of the press area. I was really impressed actually with the press area that SFX had arranged, it was completely removed from the event areas and offered a perfectly quiet opportunity to interview, and interview we did.

I found myself sat in front of Graham McNeil of Black Library fame asking him about the popularity of the huge Warhammer universe and other questions, such as did he picture Mark Strong when writing the Ultramarines? (Faction points to anyone who gets why I asked this.)

Us with the great Graham McNeil

We then were met by Mr Joe Abercrombie who was simply hilarious. We discussed everything from his next book A Red Country to Skyrim. Marc and I had a quick listen back to the Abercrombie recording and we were wetting ourselves with laughter. Keep an eye out for it, you won’t be disappointed.

Next we met the great Adrian Tchikovsky who was every bit the gentleman I had heard he was. We spoke primarily about short stories and I was chuffed to candyfloss that he mentioned Mieville’s The Ball Pit when discussing truly great examples of short stories, as The Ball Pit is a personal favourite. We then continued this theme of short stories with David Tallerman whose debut book The Giant Thief (Angry Robot) was officially launched at SFX. Tallerman is an absolute gent and gave us a brilliant podcast with a fun mix of short stories and giants. If you were at SFX but didn’t manage to pick up a copy of The Giant Thief, it’s because Angry Robot sold out of every one but it is definitely worth finding in a bookshop as it is a cracker.

With the brilliant Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Sadly I can’t tell you too much about the panels from the Saturday line-up as we were far too busy with the interviews. But feedback from other people is that the panels were especially brilliant, and I am particularly gutted I missed the ‘What is Urban Fantasy?’ one and the 2000AD panel as SFX was their point of celebrations for the 35^th anniversary of all things Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and 2000AD.

With the very cool Mr David Tallerman.

So that’s it ladies and gents, The SFX Weekender as concisely as I could make it. I’ve got to say that considering it was such a huge event it was executed fantastically. Even when a train derailment meant many guests couldn’t arrive in time, the SFX team laughed in the face of fear and re-arranged events expertly meaning the crowds were never left without entertainment despite external issues. Okay so the queuing at the start was a pain in the bum but queues build anticipation and man, did it pay off. In all fairness, SFX managed 4,000 people this weekend and with average queue time at a maximum of 30 minutes, I’d say they deserve more than a few dothed caps. Yeah okay, some have complained about the accommodation and the smell of feet that permeates some of the rooms, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s just nit picking. They put on a cracking show that people will be talking about for a long time and in my opinion, you don’t go to SFX to sleep in a comfy bed or to sniff the floor. You go there to celebrate the things you love with people who feel the same and hopefully pick up a few friends along the way too. You go to sit at a panel and find yourself next to R2-D2 or sit at the bar and end up in conversation with a wonderful lady whom you only later realise is one of the biggest authors out there. For me, the SFX Weekender is for sci-fi and fantasy what Glastonbury festival is for music. It epitomises and celebrates everything that is brilliant about something that we love.

Since writing this, I’ve read Marc’s report on the weekend and there was no doubt in my mind, that his report would be as positive as hopefully mine has been because, like he said, the whole drive home (five hours due to snow related delays) we fizzed and bubbled with how incredible everything had been. I shall definitely, without a doubt, fo’ sho’ be there next year.

Oh, and by the way, I met Boba Fett!

If you are looking to go next year then tickets are already on sale and I would recommend getting them booked early as this year’s event sold out months and months ago. To keep up to date on all things SFX check out their website at https://www.sfxweekender.com/.

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