This is the last in a series of articles to give a flavour of this year’s 15^th Bristolcon and its first two-day event through the eyes of one often returning attendee – me. With 52 Programme items of which I made it to just 8, it is a somewhat limited view, but hopefully the following accounts of panels and events will be of some interest to those who were there and those who might have wished they could be!

As Sunday drifted into its afternoon, I headed to my own moderation task with the panel on Climate Change fiction, before taking in a panel on the business of writing sex or death!

Cli-Fi: Subgenre or Necessity?

Environmental issues have often found expression through speculative fiction but climate change is arguably the ultimate boss-level environmental challenge that humanity faces. How can we imagine a future when the world is literally on fire. Do we need a Bedchel-style test for SF? Can fantasy deal with climate change without bringing magic in to save the day?

Panel: Rebecca Fearnley, Tim Kindberg, Rexx Deane, Cheryl Morgan

Moderator: TO Munro

The peril of moderating a panel is that it leaves you less freedom for noting down the many pithy observations which my erudite panelists delivered – and what I did note down was in my own incomprehensible (even to me) handwriting, so my apologies for missing far more than I caught in this important discussion.

The general consensus was that literature can and has changed the world – particularly speculative fiction – through the empowering imagination of alternative futures.

The panel were aware of the perils of doomerism in fiction, in how it can prompt despair or apathy in the reader. It’s important to foster hope and action as well as apprehension. They also rejected depictions of the climate crisis as a single event rather than a complex process of transition. Stories needed to show how we can fix ourselves and change our leaders. We don’t need the visions of dark dystopian futures, we need to explore what will happen – or what could happen – with society.

Given that speculative fiction is often full of exceptionally advantaged protagonists – either by personal power or political position – the panel felt there was a need for smaller scale stories, fairy tales and tales of everyman. In offering models of action or activism, Tim’s advice was “find a court case” – support legal action against fossil fuel overreach and political corruption, it is one of the few levers of power left to us outside the far too intermittent and easily corrupted ‘democratic’ electoral process.

Rebecca, having written books about The Last Beekeeper and a future where the Earth has all but lost its most precious pollinators felt there was a need for fiction to show empathy with the non-human, de-emphasising technology and re-emphasising our co-existence with nature.

Cheryl robustly highlighted the virtues of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future with its mix of didactic educational sections, fictional narratives and more esoteric riddle like reflections which emphasises the capacity for a kind of hybridisation between fiction and non-fiction.

Ultimately the panel felt we should, in our fiction, our reading and our activism disavow any sense of helplessness. After all the quote “It’s just one toothbrush said 8 billion people” sums up the weight of numbers we potentially have that the 1% should ignore at their peril.

Sex Or Death?

From chopping off heads to… well, this is a family convention… Which is more fun to write? And more challenging? Are we more squeamish about sex or death in our fiction?

Panel: Piotr Swieylij, Diane Duane, Anne Corlett, S Slottje (aka Saskia)

Moderator: Steven Poore

Given that “sex ‘n violence” have gone so often together in the censor’s mind at least – and that violence has been given more of a free pass than sex seems to have, it was interesting to explore how those two subjects looked from the writer’s perspective.

Steven began, simply enough by asking which is easier to write?

Saskia felt writers were exposed to less judgement when writing death, and it was easier to get emotional response right

Anne – felt that sex is harder (insert your own innuendo here!) because of the embarrassment effect

Diane found sex easier to write given her history of career in nursing and seeing lots of death which coloured one’s perspective on the subject.

For Piotr, quality of the writing was the issue, better to write good sex than bad death.

Steven then asked, why are we so squeamish?

Saskia pointed out that a lot of people have had sex and have an experience to frame their reading – and possibly critique the author’s writing of it. Very few readers have died and then been in a position to complain how we write about death.

Anne thought this might be a particular British issue, and other nationalities may not have that kind of cultural hang up. In other countries people probably aren’t reading particular passages and thinking “This is how that author does sex!”

Piotr didn’t think it was so much cultural limitations, as the fact that it was a lot easier to overshoot in one way or another with sex (which felt like an unfortunate way to phrase it)

Diane thought there was a fear of having been “doing it” (or writing about it) wrong! And felt there were quite a few examples of this with (often) male authors some of whom don’t seem to have spoken to a woman let alone seen one naked! (Again there are some spectacular self-owns by some twitter politicians suggesting such ignorance can be a life-long experience – looking at you Brad Andersen  )

Diane observed that Fanfic is full of some spectacularly tone deaf sex but also some lyrical sex (especially the gay end). “Some Sherlock fan-fic is so spectacular that you cannot read them and fail to walk away without a full body flush and I’m not talking about anything colonic!”

One panellist had written a sex scene that their mother was happy with, though they were more more worried about torture scene

Piotr runs his sex scenes past his wife!

Anne thought one had to be careful to avoid putting unconvincing technical detail into the teenager character voices (given at that age it was a bit more fumbly).

Steven asked, should we read more romantasy?

Saskia simply responded “if you like it, read it!”

Diane notes that romance is so much more structured than fantasy! You have to give them a happy ending(!) and wondered aloud “Can I operate in such a structured box!?”

Saksia acknowledged that “Romance is a huge genre but I don’t like writing it and I don’t want people to expect a couple to inevitably end up shagging!”

The strange double violence/sex standards in Warhammer and other game systems was alluded to with a note that the platforms were perfectly happy with “visceral release of bloody viscera on show but you can’t show a single nipple!” Which did lead Piotr to express some worry at the casual violence of some media /shows

Diane noted – at the other end of the violence spectrum – how Disney has “death” and “killed” as taboo words – “You can drop someone in a volcano, you can say we dropped him in a volcano, but you can’t say we killed him, he’s dead!”

Steven asked is there a national cultural difference in the handling of sex and death?

Saskia pointed out that nudity is handled more openly in the Netherlands than other countries. For example, characters may sleep naked and be seen naked in just the same way as other characters in other countries might be depicted in pyjamas.

Diane felt that the US is incredibly prudish! Citing an example of Jam cookies censored by algorithm for resembling breasts!

Anne thought the British are not good at handling death either!

When open to the floor the panel were asked if they had ever done a public reading with a sex scene and while my notes suggest Diane might have admitted to it, the general consensus was that this would be a level of awkwardness akin to watching sex scene on TV in presence of family members!

At which point time had run out and Steven expressed the aspiration that “We’re going to leave you hopefully satisfied!”

Closing Ceremony

It was in the nature of a weekend event that some congoers had left on Sunday Morning, but attendance at the closing ceremony was still good with Meg expressing thanks to a large and hardworking committee who had worked tirelessly to make this first two day Bristolcon a success. In the best traditions of self-evaluation there was a request for feedback slips to be filled out. Baz industriously doled out various rewards and gifts including a glass dome enclosed sculpture of the iconic Bristol mascot (surely the spacefaring love child of Concorde and Blake’s 7’s Liberator) as gifts to Guests of Honour Joanne Harris and Peter F. Hamilton. It was then left only for the Joanne and Peter to sign Bristolcon’s banner of fame and then we could retire to the Bar for more gently lingering partings.

Whether it is one day or two days in 2025 has yet to be decided but either way – like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator “I’ll be back” (albeit with less guns and more whisky than Arnie!)