Sunday at FantasyCon

I started gently on the Sunday, in the dealers' room, chatting to people like Ian Whates, who runs Newcon Press, about the Tanith Lee collection on his stall, short stories chosen by her friends (and which I must get at some point....).

The first panel I went to was From Fanon to Canon, moderated by Cheryl Morgan, who mentioned that she had interviewed Joanne Harris for her radio programme the day before, while demonstrating good mic technique.
This was about ideas that grew up in the fan community which might (or might not) make the leap across into official show canon - such as Kirk and Spock being more than just good friends....
This led to a discussion of the literary canon being authoratitive - and who gets to decide? Who gets to enforce canon? In the early days of the Christian church, it was the Council of Nicaea, choosing which books and scriptures to keep in the definitive Bible and which to discard, or move to the Apocrypha.
Adjusting the canon to suit the fan is a subversive act.
In The Number of the Beast Heinlein suggested that all fictional universes existed in the same multiverse or fictional space, so anything can cross over with anything else. So it totally makes sense that there were hieroglyphs depicting R2D2 and C3PO in the Indiana Jones films, or that E.T. was a Jedi.
Historically, the King Arthur stories written in the Middle Ages were fan fiction of the original Welsh legends, and so were most of the Robin Hood stories, being added to over time with new characters (Lancelot, Friar Tuck).
On the video game front, there's the question of who actually stole the Death Star plans? One of the panel was adamant that it was him! Never mind the "many Bothans".
Video games encourage people to invest themselves in the characters more than traditional story telling did, which is why it's important to have more characters who look like the players, and why people feel so intensely about their pet theories about the world they're playing in.
Authors who are writing licenced fiction for established universes, like the Star Wars and Star Trek ones, are not allowed to read fanfic, in case they use an idea that a fan has come up with, and then get sued for royalties. This has happened. So that makes it difficult for fan theories about characters to make that leap to official canon.
And in Avengers: Civil War, many fans were disappointed that Tony Stark didn't go to Peggy Carter's funeral, because in fandom it was widely accepted that Peggy had become Tony's honorary auntie, because of her (canon) friendship with Howard Stark and Jarvis. But then, as another panellist said, maybe Tony was just being a dick!

The Mythologies panel was next, with a late substitution of Jeannette Ng for Micah Yongo.
To the question of what mythology was, the best answer from the panel was that mythology is the best we can make of history - showing the highest ideals, for instance King Arthur being the ideal King. Mythology can also be the spiritual tellings of a culture - but there is a difference between mythology and folklore.
Tolkein was trying to create a mythology of England when he started writing Lord of the Rings.
There's an online game called Smite, in which gods of different pantheons fight each other - but some of the gods in the game are actually still worshipped in some parts of the world, so is that really okay?
This led on to a discussion of the Norse pantheon, with the point being made that the records of the myths are incomplete, so the evidence we have about the different gods and goddesses is skewed in favour of the ones (like Odin) who were written about most. Thor, for instance, was not only a god of Thunder - he was also a healing god, on the evidence of a charm which asks Thor to kill the invisible elves who cause headaches!
The Prose Edda is an example of myths being written down as a way of defining a group identity - and also writing stories down when it seems that they're about to be lost, which was an important incentive for Snorri Sturluson in the 13th century.
As Jeannette Ng was on the panel (showing a comprehensive knowledge of Arthurian myth, among other things) her book Under the Pendulum Sun was mentioned, with the comment: "Come for the fairies, stay for the theology!"
She also talked about how Chinese religion is contradictory, between Tao, Buddhism and Confucius. She called herself a Source-lander, a term I hadn't heard before (but which makes perfect sense when I think about it) as opposed to Diaspora - so stories change when the people of a Diaspora tell them compared to how the people of the Source land tell them, and that's okay. American Gods is a good example of how this works. It's also important to pay attention to the sources you're drawing on when writing a story with cultural diversity, and paying attention to the voices of the people of those cultures.
They also talked about the mythic trope of the Damsel who basically leads the Knight through his Quest, and explains it all for him.
And also, Hawai'ian dwarves are known for their skill in building canoes.

Then it was upstairs to the Gladstone room for the panel on Renaissance Fantasy. Jeannette Ng was also on this panel, and it was impressive how she mentally changed gears in the ten minutes between one panel ending and the next beginning.
The panellists were first asked about their recommendations for good Renaissance fantasy, and came up with Marie Brennan who writes about Tudors and fairies, Mercedes Lackey, and Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards. Mary Gentle's Rats and Gargoyles was also mentioned.
And, why Renaissance? The coolness factor of having both guns and swords was a definite plus.
They all agreed that Renaissance stories needed more contact with the East, and more trade (all that silk had to come from somewhere).
And apparently the Elizabethans invented the drive-by shooting!
There was some discussion of societies where the authorities say "this is the way it's always been" but which are actually changing, in some cases quite quickly, and some of the authors on the panel had examined that idea in their writing.
Printing presses led to an explosion of books, because if a press isn't printing something, then it's not making money, so all sorts of things were put into print.
At the end of the panel I managed to get to the corridor at the same time as Jeannette Ng so that I could ask her to sign my copy of Under the Pendulum Sun.

One of the panel for Renaissance Fantasy had to leave early because he was going to the Banquet in the Jubilee Room. This lasted from 1pm to about 3pm (I went off for a more modest potato and leek soup in the hotel bar, which was very nice) and by 3pm I was outside the Jubilee Room with an increasing crowd as the waiters cleared the plates away and more chairs were brought to seat everybody. The room got very full indeed! But it was well worth it to be there for the presentation of the British Fantasy Awards. The complete list is widely available online now, but I was very pleased to see Under The Pendulum Sun win the Best Newcomer Award. It was lovely to see Francesca Barbini and Noel Chadwick going up for awards too, as I'd been chatting to them in the dealers' room - Francesca for the Best Non-Fiction Award and Noel for Shoreline of Fantasy, the Best Magazine.

And so the Con ended. I had an absolutely brilliant time, and met lots of really interesting and lovely people, and my brain has been stretched with new ideas. I'm not sure I'll be able to get to Glasgow next year (and my main Con next year will be WorldCon in Dublin anyway) but I'll certainly try to get to another FantasyCon in the future.