Welcome to the November Newsletter (Part III)

Hello, and welcome to yet another November newsletter, the third so far this month, but almost definitely the last…

Someone wrote to me to ask why I don’t carry news on TV, movies, and book releases.The thing is, I really set up this newsletter to primarily cover whatever events are going on in Ireland. This is not to say that I don’t plug books, or comics, or various other things, but I am first and foremost interested in highlighting what’s Irish. I’m writing this NL mostly because no one else is, I suppose is what I’m saying.

There’s a lot of stuff happening out there, although I’ll have to admit that most of it is happening here in Dublin, rather than being spread around the country. There are a number of newsletters, as well as thousands of websites, which cover books and media stuff, but I’m honestly not qualified to do it myself.

Anyway, if I were to cover the thousands of books that are published each year, there’d be no room for anything else!

Two extremely good places to start looking for information on things SF further afield are David Langford’s multi-award-winning Ansible, and the superlative TheAlienOnline, which is edited by the erudite & charming Ariel.

Tell them I sent you…

DMZ One-Day Event #2

After the success of the first of their new crop of events for this season, the folk at DMZ (who run media-related events) are having another one-day extravaganza in Wynn’s Hotel in Dublin’s Abbey Street on the 1st of December, which is but a week away.

This will consist of showing a total of 9 episodes of TV programmes, consisting of 3 Smallville, 3 Buffy and 3 Angel, and runs from 10AM until 7PM or thereabouts.

The whole thing costs €11 for the whole day.

I dropped in to the last event briefly. That was me who went up to the control desk, tripped over a wire, and disconnected the video feed to that lovely big screen they were using. The shame of it all! More information can be had by joining their newsletter, which you can find here.

Old Comics

I am indebted to Johnny McMonagle for bringing this to my notice.

The Banba second-hand bookshop in Capel Street has found a load of old comics in its basement, dating from 1959 & 1960.

These appear to be mostly romance titles from various American publishers, but at a price of 20 cent each, or 6 for a Euro, how far wrong can you go?

If anyone is really keen to get some of these, but can’t get to the shop, I may be persuaded to go get them for you, if you ask nicely…

Darryl Sloan

Darryl Sloan is a new SF writer from Portadown in Northern Ireland, and he has recently published his first young adult SF novel, which is called Ulterior. Besides writing, Darryl is involved in an independent filmmaking company, Midnight Pictures Ltd, who make low-budget horror movies.

He says:

If you’re interested in knowing more, go look at his website, where you can download the first 60 pages of the book.

Nice website, too.

DMZ One-day Event

It seems that I have been unkind to ConFusion, the SF con in UCC next March. They have finally announced a number of guests for the convention, foremost amongst whom is Simon Furman, who wrote the Transformers UK comics for Marvel in the late 1980s.

I blush to admit that I had to say "Who?" when first informed of his name, but, even back then, I was too old for Transformers by about twenty years.

There are other guests too, but I have mislaid my copy of their flyer, so I will have to follow up on this as soon as I find it. As ever, their website is at confusion.ucc.ie, although it is a little out of date.

P-Con 2003 Update

P-CON, which is the SF convention in Dublin next September, now has a mailing list, as well as a goodly number of guests.

The guests so far are: Eugene Byrne, Diane Duane, Katherine Kurtz, Juliet E McKenna, Peter Morwood, Kim Newman, John W Sexton & Ian Watson, with more to come, hopefully. We’re not ready to announce a Guest of Honour yet, but hope to soon.

Anyone wishing to know more about the con can join the mailing list by writing to phoenixconvention at yahoo.co.uk, where, I’m afraid, you’ll find me at the other end… (Remember to substitute the "@" for the "at" in the above address.)

We hope to have a website up before too long, too, and are working away on it as I write this.

A number of people have asked how they can help support the convention. I’d have to say, at this early stage, the single best thing people can do is join up. Various expenses have to be met early on, and the con can use all the money it can get. If you’re not sure how to join up, write to ask, and I’ll be more than glad to let you know!

Newsflash 12 December 2002

The Phoenix Convention website is now online. Go to www.slovobooks.com/phoenix/ to see it.

SubCon

I was at SubCon, the comics’ fair, in Wynn’s Hotel on Abbey Street, last weekend. I had taken a table selling books, which I mostly do to give me an excuse to hang around for the day. I was fortunate to be directly beside Brian Nisbet, who is much involved in gaming, who was demonstrating various RPG things (would you be able to guess from the foregoing that I have absolutely *no* idea about gaming?) Brian is an old friend, and we managed to do some fairly high-level gossiping, a thing very close to my heart. More to the point, Brian is involved with Game Eire, who are trying to provide a listing site for gaming events in Ireland. You can find the Game Eire website at gameeire.comgameeire.com.

Amongst the other people I got the chance to talk to was Bob Byrne, who had just produced the second issue of his comic MBLEH!.

Again, I unreservedly recommend this to you all, even though you’d better check to see that you’re over 18 first, just to be on the safe side. You can see a lot of his stuff at his site, www.clamnuts.com.

Also at SubCon was Gerry Hunt, whose In Dublin City I was rhapsodising about recently. There were only a handful of copies produced at that time, but Gerry has since been talking to Rob Curley, owner of SubCity and main man behind Atomic Diner Comics, about the possibility of Rob taking In Dublin City under his wing, and you can now expect to see a lot more copies of this appearing on shelves early next year.

Both Gerry and Rob are giving the proceeds of the sale of the comic to the Simon Community, so you have no earthly excuse not to buy yourself a copy. I’ll be reporting on this again, don’t you worry! I’ve since seen the original artwork for this comic, which Gerry does on sheets of A2 card, and it is simply beautiful. I’m going to try to buy myself one of the pages, if I can.

What with Gerry Hunt’s stunning In Dublin City, Bob Byrne’s quirky and fabulous MBLEH!, and the two Irish language graphic novels I was on about recently, as well as Robert Curley’s own comic Freakshow, which I’ve seen some very impressive advance pages of, we now seem to have a fully fledged home-grown comics industry, which is a wonderful thing to see. Well done to all concerned!

In Brief

• The Forbidden Planet shop on Crampton Quay continues to have problems caused by the flooding of its basement, and I have not heard a tentative date for the reopening of that part of the shop as of yet.
• A number of people I know are involved in the National Novel Writing Month project, or NaNoWriMo, as it’s known. If you want to see how the Irish folk are doing, go look at the NaNoWriMo website, and play around with the controls until you find them. I see James Shields of LostCarPark , Ireland’s *other* source of SF news, has passed the halfway mark on his novel. Go James!!
• In the unlikely event that any of you want to send Christmas cards, review copies of books or comics, or indeed good old-fashioned cash, to the hard-working editor of this newsletter, the snail-mail address for this newsletter is still:
  Irish SF News
  C/O Yellow Brick Road
  Bachelors Walk
  Dublin 1

  And that’s my lot until sometime in December, at the earliest.

  No, really.
  Regards,
  Pádraig Ó Méalóid