Cheryl on TorCon
The latest issue of Cheryl Morgan's Hugo-nominated Emerald City is out, giving a long and detailed con report for TorCon. Cheryl has biases (as does everyone), but she's also got a lot of experience in fandom and convention-running, and she provides a much more detailed behind-the-scenes look at what went wrong (and what went right) in putting TorCon together than I've seen elsewhere. I know that at least one of you was involved in working for the con, so be prepared: Cheryl's comments are not kind to the ConCom in general. But she does praise some of the people who did the low-level work of making things happen.
(It seems to me that trashing WorldCon is a traditional fannish hobby; I remember people saying at MilPhil that that con was the worst-run convention ever, and so I didn't pay much attention to people saying the same thing about TorCon. But it appears from Cheryl's report that TorCon did have more than the usual number of organizational problems.)
She also discusses attending the academic sf conference that preceded TorCon and talking with Margaret Atwood, who claims, quoting Cheryl, that "the whole dispute [about whether Oryx and Crake is sf] has been a misunderstanding," and that The Handmaid's Tale isn't feminist sf, because (as Cheryl puts it) "it depicts a world in which men still rule." Cheryl suggests that perhaps Atwood simply suffers from the common fannish obsession with extremely precise and limited definitions of terms; as someone who's rather too definition-bound myself, that sounds plausible to me.
