There's been a recent study showing that 50% of the burials at a particular Viking site were women who had come from Scandinavia - they can tell this by isotopes in the bones - and some of those women were buried with weapons.
This does not mean that half of all Viking warriors were women. For a start, the sample is too small to extrapolate like that. It does mean that people should stop making assumptions and start looking at the evidence.
Previously, it has been assumed that a man buried with a sword was a warrior, and that a body with a sword was always a man. Occasionally, it has been shown that women were buried with weapons, but instead of making the same assumptions as one would if it were a man, the excuses begin - oh, it didn't mean she fought; it was just a symbol of authority. There's a burial from the Isle of Man which is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon Women by Christina Fell which always cheers me up when I re-read it, because there is no doubt that this was a woman who fought, and did embroidery as well. Why shouldn't that be true? And why shouldn't men be allowed to both fight and do embroidery?
Not everyone fits into neat little gender-assigned boxes, and things which are "obviously" feminine in one generation or in one part of the world can be "obviously" masculine elsewhere. I once saw a documentary which included a group of people in Madagascar or somewhere similar where only the men did embroidery, because the women "obviously" didn't have the fine motor skills necessary for the best work.
There's another class of burials which are obviously of women, but who have a "sword-like" object with them. And instead of saying "It's a sword", this has been interpreted as being a tool for weaving. Having done a bit of weaving, frankly I doubt it.
Let's look at the evidence, rather than the assumptions, which will undoubtedly show us that the past was more interesting and with greater variation than we ever assumed.
Thursday, 11 September 2014
Monday, 8 September 2014
Enjoying Witch Prime Beer
I've been supporting the makers of The Minister of Chance audio play (available on iTunes) in their efforts to make the series into a film. One of the ways they are raising money is to ask for sponsorship from local firms in Cheshire, where they will be doing the filming - there is already a 10 minute Prologue, filmed at the beautiful Little Moreton Hall. One of the firms sponsoring the film is Woodlands Brewery, and they have brewed a special beer in honour of one of the characters in the Minister of Chance - the wicked Witch Prime, ruler of the technologically advanced but superstitious country of Sezuan, which invades scientific but less technological Tanto, where most of the action takes place. In the audio play, the Witch Prime is played with gusto by Sylvester McCoy.
So I sent off for some of the beer.
I had hoped it would come before I went to London for LonCon, so I could share a bottle with my Young Man, but it didn't arrive. It hadn't arrived by the time I came back, either, so I sent a slightly concerned email to the brewery. When they got back to me, they told me that the beer had got broken in transit, and the courier hadn't told them - so a new case was on the way, along with an extra case to make up for any inconvenience!
I am now awash with beer!
Fortunately, it is very nice beer, light and hoppy, and made with pure Cheshire spring water and magic, as the label says.
Believe! As the Witch Prime himself says (or maybe "Keep Calm and Drink More Woodlands Beer").
So I sent off for some of the beer.
I had hoped it would come before I went to London for LonCon, so I could share a bottle with my Young Man, but it didn't arrive. It hadn't arrived by the time I came back, either, so I sent a slightly concerned email to the brewery. When they got back to me, they told me that the beer had got broken in transit, and the courier hadn't told them - so a new case was on the way, along with an extra case to make up for any inconvenience!
I am now awash with beer!
Fortunately, it is very nice beer, light and hoppy, and made with pure Cheshire spring water and magic, as the label says.
Believe! As the Witch Prime himself says (or maybe "Keep Calm and Drink More Woodlands Beer").
Saturday, 6 September 2014
The Masquerade at WorldCon, and Crafts
One of my fondest memories from Conspiracy in 1987 was the Masquerade - the costumes were wonderful, and there seemed to be lots of groups taking part - the Elric group which won, and the High Deryni, and Masters of the Universe.
This year there seemed to be more solo masqueraders - though the worthy winner was a group of eight depicting gods of the Silmarillion. The other big group was 1970s Doctor Who monsters, some of whom had to be guided into position by stage staff because they couldn't see out of their masks!
The youngest contestant was eleven, with Elsa's costume from Frozen - she got a prize for Most Beautiful. Another Elsa costume was worn by a ballet dancer who danced on points. It's always good when the beautiful costume is combined with a performance, and there was also a woman who danced with a spear, and a Native American dancing costume, as well as an Ood girl. There were a couple of Game of Thrones costumes - the Harpy of Astrapor and Cousin Tony Stark, and another Doctor Who one - entitled A Glamorous Evening of Galactic Domination, an inventive version of a Dalek.
There were a couple of Steampunk costumes, one in the junior class, a Lady Loki and a drow, and A Message from the Ministry of Magic, which featured that nasty teacher at Hogwarts - simple, but very effective. The most creepy costume award went to the Slender Man, who had been wandering round the Con on stilts during the day.
We were lucky enough to see some of those costumes up close the following day in a Show and Tell session, where we also saw the electronics on the costume of the 1930s dancers (they brought their own neon signboard that said Dine at Joe's), and various head dresses and other accessories were passed round. The lady who had worn the dress depicting the Odyssey was also there - she was wearing a version of a 17thC court dress which looks as if the skirt has swallowed a fence panel, so it's very wide, but narrow fore and aft, and a good shape for applique of Odysseus' ship - with him tied to the mast so he can hear the song of the Sirens. And it had a cloak part which folded back to reveal more panels.
The drow was there, too - he uses the costume for LARPing in Germany, and he was also on the panel of the make-up session, explaining how to get that solid black all over his face. It took him two hours to start with, and he's now got it down to fifteen minutes. He was also on the arms and armour panel.
There was also a slide show showing how they had made another girl on the panel green - there are lots of reasons to be green in fandom, going right back to the Orion slave girl in the very first pilot episode for Star Trek, where she dances for Captain Pike, and right up to date with Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy. The makeup they used, which was theatrical makeup, is good even for dark skins.
The panelists said that they had got a lot of good advice from local theatres, who had always been happy to help. The lady who had made most of the Silmarillion costumes said that she had been advised by a local theatre where to get a particular type of material which stretches in three directions, but not at all in the fourth direction, which was useful for portions of the winglike parts of her costumes which spread out and lit up at the end of their stately dance.
It reminded me of a girl who portrayed an Orion slave girl at one of the Star Trek cons I went to in the 1980s - she thought it would be a good idea to get the green skin effect by using food dye. It took two weeks for the dye to wear off - she couldn't wash it off - and she had to go to work like that.
The SCA were in the Fan Village during the day - they did some fighting practice, which we missed, but we did see their weaponry. They use padded foam stuff, which is a bit of a disappointment - re-enactment groups in the UK use blunted steel. Still, the chainmail was nice.
At several of the panels we went to, there were a couple of people knitting, or embroidering as they listened. There was also a good panel on medieval textiles in London, which I went to. It was given by a German lady who also had a stall in the dealers' hall, and the next day I went down and bought one of her hand-spindles, as it's a different design from any of the others I own. She took the yarn making process right the way from carding the wool and putting it on the distaff, through spinning and weaving and a bit about dyeing.
Textiles do not survive well in archaeological contexts, and plant based fibres like linen or nettle are almost impossible to find remnants of, so throughout all Europe in the whole of the middle ages there are only 180 examples of cloth - most of them dirty brown and the size of a postage stamp! Even so, there's something to be learned from them, and we do know quite a bit about different weaving methods, and the Viking art of naalbinding - a sort of knitting with only one needle (there was a whole sock done in naalbinding found at York). One of the good things about the Crossrail excavations across London at the moment is the vast wealth of archaeological material it's bringing to light, including artefacts related to textile production.
This year there seemed to be more solo masqueraders - though the worthy winner was a group of eight depicting gods of the Silmarillion. The other big group was 1970s Doctor Who monsters, some of whom had to be guided into position by stage staff because they couldn't see out of their masks!
The youngest contestant was eleven, with Elsa's costume from Frozen - she got a prize for Most Beautiful. Another Elsa costume was worn by a ballet dancer who danced on points. It's always good when the beautiful costume is combined with a performance, and there was also a woman who danced with a spear, and a Native American dancing costume, as well as an Ood girl. There were a couple of Game of Thrones costumes - the Harpy of Astrapor and Cousin Tony Stark, and another Doctor Who one - entitled A Glamorous Evening of Galactic Domination, an inventive version of a Dalek.
There were a couple of Steampunk costumes, one in the junior class, a Lady Loki and a drow, and A Message from the Ministry of Magic, which featured that nasty teacher at Hogwarts - simple, but very effective. The most creepy costume award went to the Slender Man, who had been wandering round the Con on stilts during the day.
We were lucky enough to see some of those costumes up close the following day in a Show and Tell session, where we also saw the electronics on the costume of the 1930s dancers (they brought their own neon signboard that said Dine at Joe's), and various head dresses and other accessories were passed round. The lady who had worn the dress depicting the Odyssey was also there - she was wearing a version of a 17thC court dress which looks as if the skirt has swallowed a fence panel, so it's very wide, but narrow fore and aft, and a good shape for applique of Odysseus' ship - with him tied to the mast so he can hear the song of the Sirens. And it had a cloak part which folded back to reveal more panels.
The drow was there, too - he uses the costume for LARPing in Germany, and he was also on the panel of the make-up session, explaining how to get that solid black all over his face. It took him two hours to start with, and he's now got it down to fifteen minutes. He was also on the arms and armour panel.
There was also a slide show showing how they had made another girl on the panel green - there are lots of reasons to be green in fandom, going right back to the Orion slave girl in the very first pilot episode for Star Trek, where she dances for Captain Pike, and right up to date with Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy. The makeup they used, which was theatrical makeup, is good even for dark skins.
The panelists said that they had got a lot of good advice from local theatres, who had always been happy to help. The lady who had made most of the Silmarillion costumes said that she had been advised by a local theatre where to get a particular type of material which stretches in three directions, but not at all in the fourth direction, which was useful for portions of the winglike parts of her costumes which spread out and lit up at the end of their stately dance.
It reminded me of a girl who portrayed an Orion slave girl at one of the Star Trek cons I went to in the 1980s - she thought it would be a good idea to get the green skin effect by using food dye. It took two weeks for the dye to wear off - she couldn't wash it off - and she had to go to work like that.
The SCA were in the Fan Village during the day - they did some fighting practice, which we missed, but we did see their weaponry. They use padded foam stuff, which is a bit of a disappointment - re-enactment groups in the UK use blunted steel. Still, the chainmail was nice.
At several of the panels we went to, there were a couple of people knitting, or embroidering as they listened. There was also a good panel on medieval textiles in London, which I went to. It was given by a German lady who also had a stall in the dealers' hall, and the next day I went down and bought one of her hand-spindles, as it's a different design from any of the others I own. She took the yarn making process right the way from carding the wool and putting it on the distaff, through spinning and weaving and a bit about dyeing.
Textiles do not survive well in archaeological contexts, and plant based fibres like linen or nettle are almost impossible to find remnants of, so throughout all Europe in the whole of the middle ages there are only 180 examples of cloth - most of them dirty brown and the size of a postage stamp! Even so, there's something to be learned from them, and we do know quite a bit about different weaving methods, and the Viking art of naalbinding - a sort of knitting with only one needle (there was a whole sock done in naalbinding found at York). One of the good things about the Crossrail excavations across London at the moment is the vast wealth of archaeological material it's bringing to light, including artefacts related to textile production.
Friday, 5 September 2014
The Doctor at WorldCon
Here I am, outside the Tardis, which was parked in the middle of the Fan Village. Some time during the Con, a second Tardis appeared at the other end of the Fan Village - but there was a note in the Con newsletter, Pigeon Post, declaring that there obviously were NOT two Tardises in the Fan Village, because that would cause a rupture in the space time continuum (or something).
We weren't the only people having our pictures taken beside the Tardis, of course.
The best Whovian costume I saw - well, it's a tie, I think. There was an amazing Lady Sixth Doctor in a patchwork dress, and a superb Cyberman.
There was a Dr Who Party on the first evening in the Fan Activities tent. We all got blue wristbands marked "Wholapalooza@LonCon3" when we went in - and a raffle ticket.
I won the raffle!
I never win raffles!
I got a copy of Doctor Who The Essential Guide - I was delighted!
We couldn't stay very long because we had to get the DLR home, but what a lovely end to the first day that was.
Thursday, 4 September 2014
Kaffeeklatches and Literary Beers
I don't think this had been thought of back in 1987, but it's certainly a thing now - you could sign up at the information desk the day before to have coffee in a small group with the author of your choice, or in the case of a literary beer, hang out at the bar with the author of your choice. I put my name down for Kim Stanley Robinson - I greatly admire his work, but then I had a bit of a panic because I haven't actually read any of his books for long enough that the details had got a bit fuzzy. I wondered if I should do some homework to get up to speed.
As it happened, none of that was needed. It was a very relaxed affair, with people chatting around a table - and there were so many of these scheduled that there were two tables going at the same time in the London Suite where we were. It was also quite interesting that everyone around the table, as they introduced themselves, was either a writer, aspiring writer or computer programmer!
So we talked about the inadvisability of basing major characters in your book on members of your own family, as KSR did in Forty Signs of Rain. The toddler is heavily based on both his own sons, and for the later books he shifted the focus from that family to another character because it was a bit awkward at home.
He also talked about the new lease of writing life he's got from writing outdoors, which he's been doing for five or six years now. Of course, he lives in California, rather than Wales, and has a tarpaulin to shelter under if it rains, and bird feeders with humming birds visiting them right by where he's sitting. He wrote Galileo's Dream like that, and it had been the most enjoyable writing experience he'd had for years, which made me happy because I'd just bought it at the dealers' hall.
Later, I bought Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable, critical essays edited by William J Burling and published by McFarland, who had a stand in the dealers' hall with a range of scholarly works about SF authors and subjects. I was tempted by several there, but they weren't cheap. I think I made a good choice with this one, though.
As it happened, none of that was needed. It was a very relaxed affair, with people chatting around a table - and there were so many of these scheduled that there were two tables going at the same time in the London Suite where we were. It was also quite interesting that everyone around the table, as they introduced themselves, was either a writer, aspiring writer or computer programmer!
So we talked about the inadvisability of basing major characters in your book on members of your own family, as KSR did in Forty Signs of Rain. The toddler is heavily based on both his own sons, and for the later books he shifted the focus from that family to another character because it was a bit awkward at home.
He also talked about the new lease of writing life he's got from writing outdoors, which he's been doing for five or six years now. Of course, he lives in California, rather than Wales, and has a tarpaulin to shelter under if it rains, and bird feeders with humming birds visiting them right by where he's sitting. He wrote Galileo's Dream like that, and it had been the most enjoyable writing experience he'd had for years, which made me happy because I'd just bought it at the dealers' hall.
Later, I bought Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable, critical essays edited by William J Burling and published by McFarland, who had a stand in the dealers' hall with a range of scholarly works about SF authors and subjects. I was tempted by several there, but they weren't cheap. I think I made a good choice with this one, though.
Tuesday, 2 September 2014
Hugo Awards
It was quite exciting to be in the audience of the Hugo Awards this year. We could even see the press table, where journalists were tapping away on their laptops as the awards were given. The ceremony was also making the most of the big screens behind the stage to put up live action and art and clips of film - all the Short Form Dramatic Presentations had clips shown before the award was given - which was quite Doctor Who heavy! Two Doctors were actually there - David Tennant attended the Hugo Losers party after the event, and Peter Davison was in the audience, in the reserved seats at the front, in case his short film The Five(ish) Doctors won the award.
Sadly, many winners were unable to be there in person, but they had all written speeches to be delivered by proxies.
The Hugo statuettes themselves were displayed in a mock-up of the White Tower at the Tower of London, which slid aside to show the shelves where they were standing, and at the beginning of the evening the whole thing was guarded by two men in the uniform of the Yeoman Warders, or Beefeaters. Later in the Con, the shelving was on offer to whoever could take it away - and it was pretty big!
The first award was not a Hugo - it was the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and that went to Sofia Samatar.
Then we had the best Fan Artist. Most of the fan art I saw in the Hugo package was pretty much on a par, but one artist stood out head and shoulders above the rest, and I wasn't surprised when she won. I learned later that this was the only category in the Hugos this year where the first vote was decisive - it's a form of proportional vote where the votes for the one who comes last are re-distributed until there is a clear winner. Sarah Webb won hands down - and apparently she's only nineteen! So she's got a great future ahead of her.
The best Fan Writer was Kameron Hurley, which I was pleased about, because I follow her blog, and her work at A Dribble of Ink blog, which won Best Fanzine and the Best Related Work category, in part because of Kameron Hurley's essay We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative (which is excellent - I recommend it). Kameron Hurley's acceptance speech is also well worth reading, and there was a good podcast on tor.com about the awards featuring Aidan Moher and Foz Meadows, too. Other Fanzines up for the award included two I follow regularly - The Book Smugglers and Pornokitsch, both of which are also excellent. There's a lot of talent out there.
The Best Related Work category had a lot of good stuff in it. I rather enjoyed Queers Dig Time Lords: a celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans who love it, and I was also very impressed by The Wonder Book by Jeff Van der Meer. In fact, I started taking notes from the extract that was included with the Hugo packet, and I bought the book at the Con. It's a writing manual, and I'm picking up a lot of good tips from it about constructing scenes and so on.
The Best Fancast was SF Signal Podcast by Patrick Hester.
The Best Semiprozine was Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams, Rich Horton and Stefan Rudnicki, and then it was time for the Professional Artists. Julie Dillon won this one (I like her work, too) but the quality was incredible, and I liked a lot of the work that I saw.
I didn't feel I knew enough about it to vote for the Best Editor. The Long Form editor award went to Ginjer Buchanan, who came up in person - and she's about to retire, so what a wonderful thing to get at the end of her career. The Best Short Form Editor was Ellen Datlow.
In the Short Form Dramatic Presentation category, none of the Doctor Who related work won - it was The Rains of Castamere episode of Game of Thrones that took the (Iron Throne) prize. The Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation was Gravity, which some people have quibbled isn't really science fiction at all.
There was more Doctor Who in the Best Graphic Story category, The Girl who Loved Doctor Who by Paul Cornell - I liked it best, although it was clearly aimed at a younger audience than I am, but the winner was Time, from XKCD. One of the other nominees was Volume 13 of Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio, which is now on my wish list the next time I get to a Forbidden Planet.
The winner of the Best Short Story award was John Chu, for The Water that Falls from Nowhere, and he was a very emotional winner - he'd obviously encountered a lot of resistance to his work in the publishing business, some of it racist, and the Hugo was a huge vindication of his work. I went back and re-read the story after the Con, and he really is a superb writer - and I just wanted to give his main character a big hug at the end! He's an author I'll be looking out for in future. One of the other nominees in that category was Sofia Samatar, who won the John W Campbell award, with Selkie Stories are for Losers.
We were getting near the end of the evening now, and to the longer fiction. Best Novelette went to Mary Robinette Kowal's The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which was the one I liked best of the selection, though I also rather liked The Exchange Officers by Brad Torgersen.
The Best Novella went to Equoid by Charles Stross, who looked very smart in a dark kilt, and the Best Novel went to Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, who has been sweeping all before her in the awards this year.
Sadly, many winners were unable to be there in person, but they had all written speeches to be delivered by proxies.
The Hugo statuettes themselves were displayed in a mock-up of the White Tower at the Tower of London, which slid aside to show the shelves where they were standing, and at the beginning of the evening the whole thing was guarded by two men in the uniform of the Yeoman Warders, or Beefeaters. Later in the Con, the shelving was on offer to whoever could take it away - and it was pretty big!
The first award was not a Hugo - it was the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and that went to Sofia Samatar.
Then we had the best Fan Artist. Most of the fan art I saw in the Hugo package was pretty much on a par, but one artist stood out head and shoulders above the rest, and I wasn't surprised when she won. I learned later that this was the only category in the Hugos this year where the first vote was decisive - it's a form of proportional vote where the votes for the one who comes last are re-distributed until there is a clear winner. Sarah Webb won hands down - and apparently she's only nineteen! So she's got a great future ahead of her.
The best Fan Writer was Kameron Hurley, which I was pleased about, because I follow her blog, and her work at A Dribble of Ink blog, which won Best Fanzine and the Best Related Work category, in part because of Kameron Hurley's essay We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative (which is excellent - I recommend it). Kameron Hurley's acceptance speech is also well worth reading, and there was a good podcast on tor.com about the awards featuring Aidan Moher and Foz Meadows, too. Other Fanzines up for the award included two I follow regularly - The Book Smugglers and Pornokitsch, both of which are also excellent. There's a lot of talent out there.
The Best Related Work category had a lot of good stuff in it. I rather enjoyed Queers Dig Time Lords: a celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans who love it, and I was also very impressed by The Wonder Book by Jeff Van der Meer. In fact, I started taking notes from the extract that was included with the Hugo packet, and I bought the book at the Con. It's a writing manual, and I'm picking up a lot of good tips from it about constructing scenes and so on.
The Best Fancast was SF Signal Podcast by Patrick Hester.
The Best Semiprozine was Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams, Rich Horton and Stefan Rudnicki, and then it was time for the Professional Artists. Julie Dillon won this one (I like her work, too) but the quality was incredible, and I liked a lot of the work that I saw.
I didn't feel I knew enough about it to vote for the Best Editor. The Long Form editor award went to Ginjer Buchanan, who came up in person - and she's about to retire, so what a wonderful thing to get at the end of her career. The Best Short Form Editor was Ellen Datlow.
In the Short Form Dramatic Presentation category, none of the Doctor Who related work won - it was The Rains of Castamere episode of Game of Thrones that took the (Iron Throne) prize. The Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation was Gravity, which some people have quibbled isn't really science fiction at all.
There was more Doctor Who in the Best Graphic Story category, The Girl who Loved Doctor Who by Paul Cornell - I liked it best, although it was clearly aimed at a younger audience than I am, but the winner was Time, from XKCD. One of the other nominees was Volume 13 of Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio, which is now on my wish list the next time I get to a Forbidden Planet.
The winner of the Best Short Story award was John Chu, for The Water that Falls from Nowhere, and he was a very emotional winner - he'd obviously encountered a lot of resistance to his work in the publishing business, some of it racist, and the Hugo was a huge vindication of his work. I went back and re-read the story after the Con, and he really is a superb writer - and I just wanted to give his main character a big hug at the end! He's an author I'll be looking out for in future. One of the other nominees in that category was Sofia Samatar, who won the John W Campbell award, with Selkie Stories are for Losers.
We were getting near the end of the evening now, and to the longer fiction. Best Novelette went to Mary Robinette Kowal's The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which was the one I liked best of the selection, though I also rather liked The Exchange Officers by Brad Torgersen.
The Best Novella went to Equoid by Charles Stross, who looked very smart in a dark kilt, and the Best Novel went to Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, who has been sweeping all before her in the awards this year.
Monday, 1 September 2014
Urban Fantasy at WorldCon
I was sorry not to get to any of the panels or reading that Paul Cornell was on, as I enjoy his Doctor Who work, and some of his comics - and his London Falling urban fantasy series. I did pick up a hardback of The Severed Streets, the second in the series, though. I also enjoy Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series, and I'm now awaiting the fifth book, Foxglove Summer, in which PC Peter Grant comes to Herefordshire. I'm looking forward to seeing what he makes of Merrily Watkins/Phil Rickman territory.
But there's more to urban fantasy than those two series, though like Steampunk a lot of it is set in London. That was the title of the panel we went to on the Friday, with introduced us to the work of Tom Pollack and Russell Smith, among others.
I was quite impressed by Russell Smith. Not only has he moved from London to Manchester (and seems to enjoy living in my old home city), but he's a Tudor re-enactor as well as an author, and an entertaining speaker.
This was the second panel that we saw Russell Smith on - he also took part in Liechester Square: Getting London Wrong on Thursday, which was very amusing, being about all those mistakes about the city, like a certain Norse god trying to get back to Greenwich on the Tube in a recent film, for instance. After the Con, we spent a day in Greenwich, and tried to work out exactly where at the Naval College Christopher Eccleston's dark elvish spaceship had torn up the lawns - worryingly close to the Meantime brewery!
There was a lot said, in both panels, about the history of the city and its many layers, as well as the good advice (I think from Tom Pollack?) "Look up!" There are all sorts of details lurking above eye level that can be very interesting indeed. And there was some discussion about other cities that might lend themselves to urban fantasy - why should London have all the fun? It made me want to go back to my own urban fantasy about Norwich, which ground to a halt after three or four chapters - but I might be able to resurrect it with a bit of thought.
But there's more to urban fantasy than those two series, though like Steampunk a lot of it is set in London. That was the title of the panel we went to on the Friday, with introduced us to the work of Tom Pollack and Russell Smith, among others.
I was quite impressed by Russell Smith. Not only has he moved from London to Manchester (and seems to enjoy living in my old home city), but he's a Tudor re-enactor as well as an author, and an entertaining speaker.
This was the second panel that we saw Russell Smith on - he also took part in Liechester Square: Getting London Wrong on Thursday, which was very amusing, being about all those mistakes about the city, like a certain Norse god trying to get back to Greenwich on the Tube in a recent film, for instance. After the Con, we spent a day in Greenwich, and tried to work out exactly where at the Naval College Christopher Eccleston's dark elvish spaceship had torn up the lawns - worryingly close to the Meantime brewery!
There was a lot said, in both panels, about the history of the city and its many layers, as well as the good advice (I think from Tom Pollack?) "Look up!" There are all sorts of details lurking above eye level that can be very interesting indeed. And there was some discussion about other cities that might lend themselves to urban fantasy - why should London have all the fun? It made me want to go back to my own urban fantasy about Norwich, which ground to a halt after three or four chapters - but I might be able to resurrect it with a bit of thought.
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