The Scandinavian SF Association (SFSF in Swedish), a club mostly active in
Stockholm, organised an SF/Fantasy Day in the Culture House unday December 4th.
(The SFSF club was the seed to the SF Bookstore chain and once had one Stieg
Larsson as chairman.)
Vampires and Short Stories
I came a quarter late to Hanna Wallenbro's lecture "Male Vampires as Se
Object", but then I'm not especially interested in vampires. She talked about
those bloodsuckers from popular TV shows. Her speech was a shorter version of
an academic paper which is available here if you're interested:
http://lnu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:823661/FULLTEXT01.pdf ;
It was followed by "Where to ind short stories" by SFSF chairman Carolina
Lagerlöf Gomez and old-time fan Tomas Cronholm. They went through all Swedish
sf magazines (showing Powerpoint pics) from 1940's JVM/VÄ and on and then the
main US/UK ones. They also talked about the leading net-based sf publications
and a few of the small press-published Swedish anthologies - there have been a
number of those in later years - as well as some from bigger publishers (eg
edited by Sam J Lundwall and John-Henri Holmberg...eh, not edited *together* by
them). I made a little input reminding about the SKRIVA list whose short story
contest winners since at least 2007 are on-line in the list archive (since last
year the stories are also in the Short Story Masters E-anthologies, available
in libraries - just google "Novellmästarna bibliotek").
Chinese SF
Then came the afternoon's in my opinion most interesting piece: Anna
Gustafsson Chen's talk about Chinese sf! She had a lot to tell (to Powerpoint
pics) and began with an early utopian story, Flowers in the Mirror (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_in_the_Mirror ;) by Li Ju-chen from 1827.
It is a sort of Gulliver's Travels story where the here comes to
"the Country of Gentlemen, the Country of Women, the Country of Intestineless
People, the Country of Sexless People, and the Country of Two-faced People, as
well as many other countries". Lunar Colony from 1904 (by an unknown writer)
was an early space story which ran as a magazine serial. We also have a book
from 1905 which in English would be titled Mr Bragger or Mr Show-off, a
Munchausen-like story. The hero goes to Tibet and get visions of the future,
learning to produce "brain electricity", causing riots and trouble. New China,
by Lu Shi'efrom 1910, is a story where the hero falls asleep and wakes up 100
years in the future. The novel became a big success when it was reprinted in
2010, and seen as very prophetic forseeing eg the 2010 Shanghai World's Fair,
the metro system and China now in the lead in steel production. We have Lao
She's ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_She ;) Cat Country - from 1932,
translated to Swedish as Kattriket, 1977 - a satirical novel about a world
where the cats rule. Lao She met a tragic end harassed to death by Red Guards
during the Cultural Revolution.
Anna GC said 20th Century Chinese sf is marked by a certain contradiction. On
one hand there was enthusiasm for science and technology, but on the other hand
was the realisation that China had slipped far, far behind. The Chinese tend to
(or tended to) have a "cyclic" view of time, compared to the "linear" view of
the West. Development moves back and forth in cycles and there was an ancient
"golden age". During the communists the sf produced often had a didactic
purpose, to teach the reader about science and technology and it was a rather
uninteresting period.
But the sf genre began to make a comeback in the early 1990's. We have for
instance Yellow Peril ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril_(novel) ) by
Wang Lixiong which was published in Canada and could only be sold in Hong Kong
and Taiwan. China gets a liberal leader but is split in a northern and southern
nation after a series of natural disasters and nuclear war breaks out between
them. For a long time it was forbidden to write dystopian stories in China,
because Communism had created the "perfect society" and it couldn't be
criticised. But in 2009 Chan Koonchung published The Fat Years (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fat_Years ;) of a China where everyone are so
happy and everything is perfect, except there are some months nobody can
remember. It shows that these months was a time when the economy crashed and
the whole society went down the drain, and to cover it authorities just put
chemicals in the drinking water.'
She also went through other modern Chinese works, like Liu Cixin's The
Three-Body Problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem ;),
Death Fugue by Sheng Keyi (
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/sheng-keyis-death-fugue ;),
Pathological ( https://www.amazon.com/Pathological-Jinkang-Wang/dp/1503942058 ;)
by Wang Jinkong and Ball (
http://www.tor.com/2016/09/13/cover-reveal-ball-lightning-cixin-liu/Lightning ;)
by Cixin Liu.
Chinese science fiction has definitely grown the last couple of decades and
much is translated to English. Anyone interested could try the recent anthology
Invisible Planets ( kenliu.name/translations/collection-invisible-planets/ ),
edited by Ken Liu, and you can read more in this strange thing called
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_science_fiction
After her very interesting lecture I told Anna Gustafsson Chen about my visit
to a Virtual Reality seminar, were we learnt that a Chinese minister had
declared that VR will become a prioritised area in China. Maybe we'll see many
Chinese novels in virtual worlds in the future. I got so many impressions from
her speech I totally forgot to ask about her opinions on the Swedish-Chinese
(Swedish citizen) Gui Minhai who last year was kidnapped by Chinese
authorities - but I'll mention it here instead! He had a bookstore and
publishing house in Hong-Kong, doing books that embarrassed the Chinese regime,
was kidnapped during a vacation in Thailand and later paraded on Chinese TV
"confessing" to made-up crimes. See eg:
https://networks.h-net.org/.../hong-kong-publisher-kidnapped-thailand-and-taken-china
, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35338484 and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gui_Minhai
Book Recommendations and Web, Con Info
The day ended with Cronholm and Gomez making book recommendations, any of them
from the book reading circle that SFSF organises. I'll just mention some of the
authors: Ursula Le Guin, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Anna Hesserus, Rhuddem Gwelin,
Frances Hardinge, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Octavia Butler, Naomi Novik, Katherine
Arden, Mats Strandberg (Swedish writer, about vampires on a Finland
ferry),Emily St John Mandel, NK Jemisin, Aliette de Bodard, Hao Jingfang, Nedi
Okorafor, Elizabeth Hand, Lavie Tidhar. As you might guess they went through
their books in great speed. Sadly, about every second title seemed to be
connected to feminism, an ideology my enthusiasm has limits for.
And Mårten Svantesson then went through sf resources on the net, like
isfdb.com, sf-encyclopedia.com, esseffessef.wordpress.com (SFSF's site),
sfbok.se (The SF Bookstore Chain) and told about future conventions,, "but OUR
type of conventions organised by fans who read sf", like Worldcon 75 (Helsinki
August 9-13 ), Swecon/Kontur (Uppsala May 28-26), U-con (Eurocon, Dortmund
16-18 June). Carolina said that "Swecons cons are of high quality, so we should
be proud of them." She also dared to predict that the "2019 Worldcon will in
all probability be in Dublin" (we'll have to see).
As the program started there were ca 20 people in the audience, growing to ca
25 in the end (but as people came and went it could have been 35 or so
attending). There were tables from Serieteket selling comics and a paperback
giveaway table - a grabbed a few - from the Culture House library. It was the
last day it was open, because it will temporarily close due to renovation work
(that's why they got rid of some books). The library also treated us with
ginger cookies and that carbonated malt drink for X-mas, called Yule Must (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julmust ;). Rhudden Gelwin was also there, selling
the yet two volumes of her Merlin Chronicles (she's a Swedish self-publishing
writer writing in English).
Before leaving (some finished with going to a local tacos joint) I mailed
Tomas Cronholm the latest editions of my Sverifandom History Bibliography and
my EAPAzine, where I write about the early 20th Century somewhat skiffoid
supplement Between Fantasy and Reality, a recent historical find which unlike a
publication named Stella did exist (
//www.freelists.org/post/skriva/Allersbilagan-Mellan-fantasi-och-verklighet
).
The record early 1.5 foot November snow - a forerunner of a coming Ice Age! -
had by now melted in the Swedish capital. And it is quite possible that the
culture elite's resentment towards scientifiction has also melted somewhat, so
that the main culture palace in Stockholm could host an sf day.
--Ahrvid
Ps. Skriver på engelska så texten kan användas på flera ställen. (Det här om
kinesisk sf är rätt intressant och fler kan vilja höra om det.)
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