"Yeah, well, they usually travel in pairs."

Currently reading The Sky Is Filled With Ships - Richard C. Meredith, Ballantine Books, 1969.

Sigh...you know, I'm confident that I could re-read my entire (and fairly comprehensive) Ursula K. Le Guin collection without finding a single high, firm, jutting or defiant breast - let alone two.*

- Sid

P.S. Not only that, but it's very poor form in typesetting to have a single word on its own line at the end of a paragraph.

* Okay, there is a scathing reference in her essay Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction from The Language of the Night to "pointy-breasted brainless young women", but it's really not the same thing. **

** Well, actually, this is exactly what she's talking about, so it is the same thing, but not really. 

VCON 44: "I'm doing my part!"

It seems appropriate to use the "I'm doing my part!" meme from Starship Troopers to announce that I decided to volunteer to assist with the upcoming VCON44 convention being hosted by the West Coast Speculative Fiction Association.

 I still wanted to be able to attend the event, so after some thought I asked if any help was needed with the Vcon.ca website.  The response was positive, and I've since done a lot of work on putting together site content. The design template was already established when I started, so I didn't have any creative input into the process, but I'm happy to just be a production person, that's how I spent a lot of my professional life anyway.

The site is built in Wordpress, which has been an interesting learning process - I'm much more familiar with Squarespace and Wix for site management - but it's not a complicated site, and I'm starting to get a handle on how things work.  (After all, there are only so many ways to assemble blocks of HTML content.)

I assume that there will be some kind of gratuity for volunteering to help.  I've already purchased my ticket, so that's not an option, but a t-shirt would be a nice thank-you - fingers crossed, I do love a t-shirt.

- Sid

Vancouver Writers Fest 2026: Fan Options.

https://www.tomgauld.com/

This year's Vancouver Writers Fest has some interesting options for fans of fantasy and science fiction.  Emily St. John Mandel, best known for her breakout novel, Station Eleven, is appearing next week in a pre-Fest event to talk about her new novel, Exit Party - sadly, the event is sold out, but there's always the standby line if you're feeling lucky.

Award-winning author Amal El-Mohtar will be talking about Seasons of Glass and Iron, her new short story collection, at a couple of program events, and veteran author Nalo Hopkinson is part of a creative writing workshop presented in collaboration with the UBC School of Creative Writing.  Cory Doctorow will discuss his most recent book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, and how we can change the situation so that AI is working for us, rather than the opposite. 

Of Magic and Monsters, featuring YA authors Rachael Kin, Coltrane Seesequasis, and Elle Tesch, will look at how each of the authors create their fantasy worlds, and trans authors Vivek Shraya and Kai Cheng Thom will talk about their new dystopian/utopian novels, The Hystericals and The Shapeshifter's Guide to Gym Class, in The World We Long For.

I can't say for certain that the above is a comprehensive list.  A polite request to the VWF organizers: it would be enormously helpful if there was a specific Genre search field in the program guide - Fiction is a useful start, but still leaves a lot of options to explore!

- Sid

UPDATE: Ticket purchased for Good Reads, featuring Amal El-Mohtar. Apparently one of the other two works being discussed in the session, Catherine Chidgey's The Book of Guilt, is an alternate history story set in a world where World War II was a draw - two speculative fiction authors for the price of one! The third book, Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, is set during the Peloponnesian war - I'll reserve judgement on its status until I know more.