I spent the weekend just gone at the Pontins holiday camp in Prestatyn, North Wales, for the third SFX Weekender. This is an odd, hybrid event, approaching the size of a Worldcon but with only two streams of programme: literary/thematic panels (with very broad topics: steampunk, space opera, urban fantasy) and media guests (this year including Sylvester McCoy, Eve Myles, Brian Blessed), plus entertainments such as the Area 51 Cabaret and Craig Charles DJing. It's reasonably cheap, as conventions go, because you pay for accomodation and ticket (not membership) in one go, so you're unlikely to pay more than about UKP150 all-in unless you go for the really expensive rooms or buy the most expensive signing passes. And these days it's attended by a reasonably large chunk of British sf fandom and prodom.

I had a good time. Highlights include Paul Cornell hosting Just a Minute with Joe Abercrombie, China Mieville, Sarah Pinborough and Toby Whithouse (video on YouTube starting here), the pub quiz (our team, The Chivalrous Knights of Archaic Dimensions, came third), dinner at a fine Thai restaurant in the town centre on Saturday night with Juliet McKenna, Lavie Tidhar, Saxon Bullock, Liz Batty and Nic Clarke, and the Kitschies award ceremony (about which more below); and in general the social side of the convention came through strongly. Most feedback I've seen has been positive. Indeed Mark Charan Newton thinks "There’s a strange energy about the SFX Weekender which no other UK genre convention possesses." Jaine Fenn thinks it could be "the future of geekdom." The demographics of the convention certainly support that: noticeably younger and more mainstream than other conventions I attend. More than one person opined to me that Eastercon, the de-facto head of the UK convention circuit, might want to look to its laurels.

Ian Sales dissents somewhat, and it hasn't entirely won me over yet, either. Set against all of the above are some negatives. The substantive panels were generally pretty weak; the best I saw was a panel on magical races in fantasy with Juliet McKenna, Joe Abercrombie, Graham McNeill, Gav Thorpe and Adrian Tchaikovsky, moderated by Jared Shurin: an interesting mix of authorial styles and perspectives, and a discussion that actually started to touch on some of the thorny issues inherent in the premise. But few of the others really came together. A panel on the value or limitations of maps in fantasy novels struggled to escape the problem that the assigned moderator really should have been one of the panelists (but it did prompt this interesting follow-up post from Adrian Tchaikovsky); a panel on the end of the world (featuring several novelists who don't notably write much about the end of the world, like Ken MacLeod) suffered terribly from a round-robin format in which the moderator would ask a question, get an interesting answer from someone, then completely ignore it and start the next person off on an entirely different aspect of the topic. And by all accounts the steampunk panel, which I didn't attend, was a disaster in just about every way it could be. Meanwhile, as Sophia McDougall rightly blogs (the same issue is raised by Anne Perry), the representation of women on the panels was appalling, while the scantily clad ladies of the Area 51 Cabaret paraded around the con for our, er, entertainment. Personally I was rather uncomfortable. Complaints about this aspect of the event are not new -- here is an SFX forum post from 2010, in which the organisers attempt to justify the presence of the Cabaret, and compared to previous years there was at least a woman on most panels -- but there's quite a long way to go.

[EDIT: Sophia McDougall has received an encouraging response from SFX editor Dave Bradley.]

It's a context, actually, that made the presentation of The Kitschies -- for the year's "most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works" -- seem rather incongruous, although the event itself was fine. My final guesses for the winners, if you'll recall, were Osama for the Red Tentacle (best novel), God's War for the Golden Tentacle (best debut), and A Monster Calls for the Inky Tentacle (best cover). In the event:

Black Tentacle (special discretionary award): SelfMadeHero

Inky Tentacle: Cover of The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

Golden Tentacle: God's War by Kameron Hurley

Red Tentacle: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

So one out of three, but I can't claim to be disappointed, particularly since I had the honour of accepting the Golden Tentacle (plus associated rum) on Kameron Hurley's behalf. You can find the acceptance speech I read out here. As for the other categories, Liz questions whether A Monster Calls is really the most progressive, intelligent and entertaining novel on the Red Tentacle shortlist; it's certainly the latter two, but I'm not sure it scores particularly highly on the first. Still, it's a wonderful novel, and aside from anything else it's satisfying to see the Kitschies recognise two novels that are otherwise unlikely to get much awards play in the UK genre field. Roll on next year. I might even head back to Wales to see them presented again.