I’ve been asked to pass on this news by the inestimable Farah Mendlesohn – there’s a new venue for the 2008 SFF Masterclass in science fiction criticism.

To quote from Farah’s email:

SFF Masterclass:  June 20th, 21st, and 22nd 2008

Class Leaders: Wendy Pearson, Geoff Ryman, Gary K. Wolfe.

The aim of the Masterclass is to provide those who have a serious interest in sf criticism with the opportunity to exchange ideas with leading figures in the field, and also to use the SFF Collection.

The Masterclass will take place in Seven Sisters, London. Each full day of the Masterclass will consist of morning and evening classes, with afternoons free to prepare.

Applicants must provide a short CV of either: academic credentials, essay/book publications, reviews  and writing sample (this may be from a blog); all of these will be valued equally as we are looking for a mixture of experiences and approaches.

Applications will be assessed by an  Applications Committee consisting of Paul Kincaid, Andy Sawyer and Jenny Wolmark.

Completed applications must be received by 31st January 2008.

Due to the cancellation of the Science Fiction Research Association’s conference in Dublin we have decided to relocate the Science Fiction  Foundation Masterclass to the UK. As the University of Liverpool archive will still be closed for refurbishment in the summer of 2008 we have decided to relocate the Masterclass to London, specifically to Seven Sisters where the James/Mendlesohn collection of critical works will be available, and will be supplemented by a visit to the famous Clute Cellar.

Dates: 20-22nd June 2008
Times: 9-7pm each day.

Venue: Kitap Evi Café and Bookshop on Tottenham High Street (underground to Seven Sisters and then a bus—numbers will be provided—, three stops north drops you outside the café).

[The Kitap Evi Café is a Turkish café which is also a bookshop, highly committed to education and with a book lined, large, airy upstairs room which they use regularly for meetings for evening classes. Downstairs there is internet access, and fabulous food suitable for omnivores, vegans, vegetarians,  celiacs and the lactose intolerant. Prices range from £2.50 for soup or mezze, to around £7 for an entrée.

Please note: this venue is not wheelchair accessible for which we apologise profusely. Our regular, Liverpool venue is accessible, but the need to relocate the masterclass and keep the rates down has left us with very few options.]

Evening venue: 23 Ranelagh Road for drinks, chat and general book perusal.

Accommodation: we will make details of hotels in the area available, but we are also actively seeking cheaper accommodation.

Masterclass Fees: £170

As some of you may remember, I went to the inaugural Masterclass earlier this year … and despite some people thinking I was being uncritical (only kidding, Jonathan), I really would recommend it to anyone who wants to get their teeth into the more serious end of lit-crit as applied to genre work.

It’s also a great opportunity to meet people in the field with a similar close-focus interest to yourself, which can be harder to achieve in the social hustle and bustle of a full-blown con. Plus, the chance to check out the legendary Clute Cellar … that’s got to be worth the price of admission alone!

I was going to skip it this time, ironically enough because of the location, but this move makes it a more viable option. That is, if they’ll have me back a second time …

Who says men can’t multitask? While working on some reviews last night, I was also hanging out at a music festival in a dusty junkyard.

As you’ve probably guessed, Scorched Earth (the music festival in question) took place in Second Life, so it was easier for me to work and hang out than it would have been at the fields-and-tents type of gig. That’s yours truly on the far left, stood on the pile of slagged tyres.

The venue was The Junkyard, on a patch of land just south of my own virtual pied-a-terre. The Junkyard is the second of the two sims that make up The Wastelands, a post-apocalyptic themed RPG sim. As a casual visitor to Second Life, I was utterly repelled by the shiny bling-ness of the mainland, so when I finally found somewhere that fitted with my own rather grungy and wrecked aesthetic tastes, I settled there immediately.

To tell the truth, most of the music wasn’t really to my taste. Paranoid Foundation specialised in a sort of droning beatless elctronica, complete with mumbled ketamine vocals, and the Redzone DJ set was fairly murky also - I felt the absence of drums and guitars quite keenly, rock fan that I am. Bela Emerson was a rare act, however - one girl, one cello, and a whole bunch of effects pedals. 

Her music was a landscape of sculpted and sampled bass tones, jittering and looping around themselves, building up and collapsing into nothingness. Again, not my normal thing, but intriguing. It’s good to step out of the musical comfort zone once in a while. It certainly fitted the ambience of the sim!

To be quite honest though, a large part of the festival’s appeal was the chance to hang out with some of my virtual neighbours, and some visiting oddballs from other places in SL. The Wastelands isn’t a clubby sim, or prone to events that attract large groups of people. It’s a quiet neighbourhood, really (unless a fight breaks out over a good piece of salvage), and it’s rare you get many more than five or six people chatting together at any one time. Scorched Earth acted as a nexus, though, and so it ended up being a bit of a social more than anything else, at least for me:

What interests me most about this sort of event is their potential. They’re very clunky at the moment; SL is far from being a mature piece of software, and the streaming of audio and video is still a fairly arcane process that relies as much on luck and the alignments of planets than any skill with code. But give it a couple of years (and an open-source peer-to-peer version of the SL server software), and you’re going to see virtual festivals that will make Burning Man look like the Teddy Bear’s Picnic.

I mean, look at that picture above; that’s a dolphin at the left edge. When was the last festival at which you saw a flying dolphin wearing flourescent beads on its tail while talking about the finer points of electronic manipulation of cello tones? And what had you ingested to achieve such a state?

Welcome to Second Life; the frontier of an unevenly distributed future.

This weekend, I got an email from Farah Mendlesohn (which makes it a red letter weekend by anyone’s standards, no matter what she has to say). Here’s what that email said:

Dear Paul

I am very pleased to say that the Committee have accepted your application to join the Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass, 19th June to 22nd June.

We would be grateful if you could confirm that you wish to accept.

My immediate response (verbally) was a loud and enthusiatic OMGWTFBBQ! I later emailed to accept the offer of a place (pushing aside the awkward thoughts that keep telling me that I’ll need to be selling some major organs this year).

I am absolutely stoked. I applied on the off-chance (I’ve developed a “what have I got to lose” attitude that has landed me an awful lot of reviewing gigs so far), but had no expectation of getting through. Looks like I’d better start upping my professionalism a notch or two. Like, now.