Next weekend, June 8-11, I will be attending Continuum 8, the 51st Australian National Science Fiction Convention, in sunny Melbourne, Australia. And, as happens, I will be appearing on some panels over the weekend. Here’s my schedule:

• The Forgotten Frontier?, Friday 5pm,  with m1k3y and Alexandra Pierce. This one’s about space opera.
• Masters Of Podcasting, Saturday 10am with Terry Frost, Alisa Krasnostein, and Kirstyn McDermott. We chat about, well, podcasting, I guess.
• Good Things Come In Small Packages, Saturday 4pm with Stephen Dedman, George Ivanoff, Kelly Link, and Cat Sparks. The art of the story. Writers and editors discuss.
• What’s It Worth?, Sunday 11am with Alan Baxter, Kate Eltham, Jason Nahrung, and Steven O’Connor. We discuss ebooks. Particularly delighted the other panelists, who actually know something on the subject, will be there. We will likely have a hashtag.
• Where Has All The Sci-Fi Gone?, Sunday 4pm, with David Golding, Ian Nichols, Michael Pryor, and Cat Sparks. Another panels on the dark age of Australian SF :)

All in all, it should be a great weekend. I’m also ducking over to an event organised by Twefth Planet Press at Embiggen Books on the Saturday evening, which sounds like fun.  I hope to see you all there!

Well, travel planning time is upon me again.  One event I wish I could attend is the annual Locus Awards (I’ve only attended once, and that was back in 1997).  This year’s awards are being held June 15-16, 2012 in Seattle, Washington. Basic info is below the cut… Continue reading Locus Awards Weekend →

In just  over a day the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Kickstarter project has been funded! This is wonderful news, as it means that the photo and ephemera collection at Locus will now be digitized and properly archived.  Having spent time with the archive, I know what an important resource it is and how valuable this is going to be to the SF community.

I hope, though, that people will consider keeping supporting the project now that it has been funded. The Foundation says as part of its Kickstarter that:

Should we exceed our funding goals, there are several projects waiting in the wings:

•     digitizing and storing Locus’s immense and historic collection of audio author interviews, currently only on microcassettes and in imminent danger of degrading
•     cataloging the current book, pulp, and periodical collection housed at Locus
•     a fantastic but as-yet-to-be-announced project, one that would benefit many in the SF/F community from authors to fans to publishers

I think these are terrific projects and the first on the list – digitizing the audio collection, is a spectacularly good project. I’ve spent a lot of time at Locus HQ and Charles would always tell us that he had the original recordings for all of the interviews he did for Locus. It would be a spectacular primary resource for the field if they could be preserved for the future.

The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the conservation of Locus’s Photo and Ephemera collection (ie the Locus “morgue”).  The Collection encompasses a historically significant archive of photographs from Locus founder Charle Brown’s more than five decades working in the science fiction and fantasy fields, as well as letters from authors and publications from conventions, conferences, and more. The archive, amounting to roughly 44 linear feet of materials, is currently housed in filing cabinets, and provides records for approximately 4,000 individuals, including virtually every author of note in the science fiction and fantasy field for the last 60 years, such as Isaac Asimov, Octavia E. Butler, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, etc., as well as editors, publishers, book agents, and convention organizers.

The goal of the project is to preserve these historic and irreplaceable materials, by stabilizing the archive and at the same time digitizing the photos, letters, etc., and creating a viewable gallery of as many of the materials as possible. The funding that the Foundation is seeking for this project will cover the cost of archival and preservation supplies such as acid-free tissue for interleaving documents, plastic sleeves for preserving significant photographs, acid-free folders for organization, acid-free labels and pens, a mid-range document and film scanner, long-term archival storage boxes, and finally, the cost of website construction to create a viewable gallery of the Photo and Ephemera Collection.

A collection like this is too important to be allowed to fall into disrepair. Please consider supporting the Kickstarter Campaign and the Locus Collection!

It’s getting towards that time when I really have to commit to some 2012 travel plans. I’ve bought a plane ticket to Melbourne, so I’ll be there for the NatCon, even though I’m still to make hotel reservations or buy a membership. I’m also genuinely torn between Toronto for World Fantasy Convention and Chicago for WorldCon. I think, even after all of the discussions I’ve had lately, that I will likely opt for Toronto. I am thinking about changing things up on that a little, but I suspect that’s how it will play. There are also family breaks for April and December, but we’ll see about those.

Hm. Now I think about it, there is one argument to go to WorldCon in August instead of World Fantasy in November: the best of the year. The WFC trip always plays havoc with prep for that. Something to ponder.