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Incidentally ...

The reason I was away from home over the previous weekend (hence the venting about IT and travel) is that I was in Dresden, for Penta-Con 2009, an annual convention run by the Stanislaw-Lem Klub, a local SF group that's been running for forty years. (Yes, it was started back when Dresden was part of the GDR.)

Why was I at Penta-Con? Well, aside from it being a really good excuse for tourism/research into the former East Germany, I was there to receive the Kurd Laßwitz Preis for best foreign work [translated into German and published in] 2008, for Glasshouse. Which really calls for a round of applause for my translator at Heyne, Usch Kiausch! (And if you want to get a handle on how well I speak German, there's a YouTube blooper reel video here.)

Incidental note: SF was extremely popular in the GDR, and SF novels saw large print runs — but relatively few were published. So fans began to meet up and form clubs to swap books. This fell foul of the Party, who aspired to run every aspect of public life, and had a big problem with students spontaneously organizing societies with memberships in three digits, especially to discuss literature that party officials found difficult to understand. Consequently the SF clubs were broken up in the early 1970s, and fandom in the former East Germany to this day exists in scattered, small, ad-hoc local groups. Whereas in the former West Germany, there's a huge, national level top-down organization with local chapters and branches ...

6 Comments

1:

"Whereas in the former West Germany, there's a huge, national level top-down organization with local chapters and branches ..."

Laughed out loud, inhaled coffee and woke up my wife in one mistimed snort. As if Science Fiction didn't get me in enough trouble already...

2:

Congratulations to you and to Herr Klausch! Nice to see Glasshouse receiving a well-deserved award.

And kudos to you for keeping your acceptance speech brief... :-) Mann braucht viel mehr Silben, um fließendes Deutsch zu sprechen. [One needs far more syllables to speak fluent German.]

3:

Christopher: Usch is short for Ursula ...

4:

The language of Goethe and Schiller has never sounded sweeter!

Related videos, according to Youtube: Space: 1999 TV intro. Derren Brown lottery prediction. Randy Newman on political science. Fleetwood Mac - the Chain. Marilyn Manson - This is Halloween. James Burke - The day the universe changed.

I'm sure it all makes sense.

5:

Congratulations, that award is surely deserved. And with "Blindsight" and "Metro 2033" (I don't know if that one came out in english yet, but I can recommend it) you got nice competition there with you on the podium.

Though they got the part about the glasshouse being set in a "computersimulation" wrong, iirc.

6:

facepalm

My apologies to Frau/Fräulein Klausch. Guess my German isn't so hot, at that.

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This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on September 16, 2009 10:06 AM.

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