Yippie-ya-yeah, *bleep*
Some of our team members were on the road visiting other Cons.
Grit was at DreieichCon: Like last year, DreieichCon 2021 took place on Discord and Twitch (November 20-21, 2021). In numerous panels we discussed topics around roleplaying and fantasy novels. Guests were publishers, writers, producers, and gamers, including Sabrina Keßler (Brand Manager DACH for Dungeons & Dragons), Jin-A Shim (Marketing Europe for D&D and Magic), authors like Markus Heitz, Liza Grimm, Tommy Krappweis, as well as Alexa and Alexander Waschkau from Hoaxilla Science Podcast. We were happy to have international guests like Tony Xia (award-winning Chinese Canadian filmmaker), Jie Chen (International Executive at FFSFC) and Regina Kanyu Wang (Project CoFUTURES University of Oslo), to name just a few. Thanks to the DreieichCon team who really did a Herculean job this weekend to make this project possible.
Ivo and Constanze were at PentaCon: Under the overarching motto "Dreaming of a better future", Pentacon took place in Dresden from Nov. 5-7, 2021. There were a number of lectures and readings for fans of the genre, for example exciting lectures by authors Theresa Hannig, Hans Frey and Karlheinz Steinmüller. But the focus was clearly on "social get-togethers." For the MetropolCon orga team members (Constanze, Sylvana, Ralf and me), the highlight took place on Sunday at the general meeting of the SFCD: There it was decided to declare MetropolCon the 2023 SFCD annual con. It’s very sad that my first PentaCon will probably also be my last. This was the last event in this series. Many thanks to Ralph and his family, who made sure that even as a newcomer you felt at home from the first minute.
Claudia visited IceCon in Reykjavik: Once again the organizers put together a fine program of workshops, panels and readings. Guest of Honor was Mary Robinette Kowal, who received the Hugo Award in 2019 for her novel The Calculating Stars. She was congenial, competent, funny, and constantly making sure that everyone felt comfortable and included. What I found most exciting was the Icelandic perspective: a language that has remained unchanged for a really long time, yet flexible; on the one hand fantasy has always been there (whether in sagas or children's stories), on the other hand it is a very new genre for many people that has to assert itself against the superiority of social realism and dark crime fiction; people living on a volcanic rock in the ocean, where two tectonic plates collide and boiling hot water bubbles out of the ground – endlessly fascinating to me, on all levels.
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