| Welcome to Flycon, midnight 13 March 2009 |
[Mar. 14th, 2009|12:10 am] |
So it’s the middle of the night here, the witching hour. Friday the 13th in some countries. Could there be a more auspicious time to begin our trek through the realms of imagination?
Friday the 13th is considered unlucky by many; it is a widespread superstition but one that has a murky past. It is likely that the combination of two unlucky entities into one foreboding day is a relatively modern doing. Indeed, the number 13 isn’t unlucky in all cultures; some, like the Chinese (and even the ancient Egyptians), consider it a number of good fortune.
According to superstition, if 13 people sit down to dinner together, one of them will die within the year. There are many cities that do not have a 13th street, or a 13th floor in a building. Then of course there are the unlucky coincidences; Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy, Albert De Salvo—they all have 13 letters in their names...
And Friday? What could possibly be so terrible about Friday, the end of the working week for many? Good Friday in Christianity, the day of the crucifixion. It was the day of executions in pagan Rome. Hanging Days in England. A ship that set sail on Friday was destined for an ill-fated voyage. In Norse mythology, Friday was named after Frigga, the goddess of love and fertility. But when Norse tribes converted to Christianity, Frigga was labeled a witch and banished to a mountaintop. Every Friday thereafter, she would gather with 11 other witches and a devil (13 in total) to plot evil doings on what became known in Scandinavia as a Witch’s Sabbath.
Such facts, myths, and legends give us a foundation but it’s the imagination that takes us further.
‘A butterfly flaps its wings...and an alien lands on the other side of the world nine months later.’
Welcome to Flycon, the free online convention of speculative fiction. The logo, an alien butterfly hovering over the Earth (designed by Pamela D Lloyd; ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) pdlloyd depicts a scenario that could go in so many different ways... How broad is your imagination?
Flycon came about during a discussion on how expensive attending cons were, especially in this current environment of financial gloom. A comment made by Sherwood Smith (aka sartorias, “If only I could figure out how to have an online Con,” caught the attention of Sharyn Lilley (aka eneit), and the seeds of invasion were planted.
Online cons are not new. They have been successfully run in Australia before, notably by Gillian Polack (aka gillpolack and her publisher at Trivium Publishing with the Women’s History con. The Conflux committee has also held two successful virtual mini-cons to promote Conflux in 2007 and 2008.
So the means was there. All that was needed was someone prepared for the hard work, because running a con, even an online con, is not easy. There are panels to build and panelists needed to run them, a schedule to arrange, volunteers to find, authors and publishers to contact, backup options to devise for when the inevitable happens, and the word to spread. Fortunately, Flycon had at its helm Sharyn Lilley and Sherwood Smith, two dedicated souls not afraid of directing such an adventure.
And what an adventure they have planned. Special thanks also goes to Nyssa Pascoe of www.awritergoesonajourney.com and Pat Fogarty of www.sff.net, who helped with technical advice, time, and allowing Flycon to spill over onto their websites. Thanks also to Eneit Press, who gave the dark side of the con its own space to grow. And to everyone else who gave up their time to make this happen; thank you.
Can an online con such as Flycon succeed? Absolutely. The internet has given our voices a mechanism for which to make ourselves heard; it has provided the link between distances, the bridge between cultures and societies, between countries and races. The Australian Horror Writers’ Association is proof of this. The AHWA is a vibrant network of ideas and discussions, a guiding force to those who love writing about all things dark. Our members span Australia and indeed the world.
Horror is a genre that is thriving in Australia, maybe because the continent itself forces us to look deep within; it challenges us to stand up to what we find and wear it down. But let’s do one thing first. Let’s remove the stigma that is still associated with the word ‘horror’ and clean it up some. We won’t remove all of the blood but enough for you to see the truth; horror is not what you think it is. Horror is personal; it is a story that affects you in some emotional way.
What I consider horror you might not but that doesn’t mean either of us are wrong. Horror is not a genre that can be easily defined and labeled. Hidden away in fantasy books and science fiction, in tales of crime and adventure, horror is there in one facet or another. Why? Because horror is a part of life. It’s what we’re afraid of most. It’s what we’re afraid of happening to our beloved characters. Horror is confrontation. But not all confrontation has to end in blood or death. Some can be as simple as words, and the effects those words have on our lives.
Words. That’s our craft. And the imagination is our playground. With these tools we can venture into the far reaches of space, visit other dimensions and civilizations, trek through long forgotten forests filled with medieval magic, journey into lands of adventure. They can take us across barren wastelands and scorching deserts, where the eroding winds steal breath and voice.
A butterfly flaps its wings...
Australia is a vast continent, with cities ringing an interior of sand and fire. But there are voices to be heard across that land, voices that reach one another despite the distances and the stark landscapes between. Those voices are loud and clear though the power of the internet. They reach out across the world to link with others, growing louder and louder, demanding people listen to their stories. The Australian Horror Writers’ Association has grown in that cyberspace to over 200 members since its inception in 2005. The AHWA runs hugely successful annual competitions and awards, annual general meetings, a mentor program, a website of resources, and has just published the first issue of its own magazine, Midnight Echo. How broad is your imagination, because the internet allows us endless possibilities. Australian writers, on a continent far adrift from the rest of the world, can reach across vast distances and tell of their confrontations, and they are doing so successfully.
In Australia, horror fiction dates back to colonial times. The first Australian ghost story was “Fisher’s Ghost: A Legend of Campbelltown.” It was written by John Lang, although originally published by an anomalous author in Tegg’s Magazine in 1836. Since that tale based on a real life murder, the country has provided the inspiration for many frightening short stories written by some of Australia’s literary greats—Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton... Colonial Australia was a harsh apocalyptic landscape filled with wonders and terrors. It was an unknown place of wild savages and terrible fires, great killing expanses, convicts, and madness. It took many years before people came to understand and learn how to appreciate such a new world.
Fantasy was another growing genre in colonial Australia, and why not? Australia was a fantastical world. ‘Phosphor’ by J. Filmore Sherry was published in 1888, about a man who stumbles upon an underground civilisation and has to kill to get away. Such ‘lost races’ stories were widely popular in Australia and across the world during the late 19th/early 20th centuries (even Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan ventured to the centre of the Earth). Science fiction rose to prominence in Australia during the early 20th century with tales of giant intelligent ants, space adventures to planets of terror, horrors from alternate dimensions, murder and time travel, and the end of the world. These stories were built upon the paranoia and fear of World Wars and the atomic age, and of course the space race.
The history of the genres differs from country to country but one thing remains the same; horror, science fiction, fantasy—three genres that are, at heart, linked though their characters. Living beings. Those with families and feelings, emotions. Dreams and aspirations. Fears. No matter the setting, be it fantastical or science fiction, horror will not be far away.
But these are just my words, grown from the seeds of my own imagination. You might disagree with the invasion of my ideals, you may not. No doubt we could argue til next Friday the 13th over what I have said but we will only achieve a stimulating conversation of opinions. And at the end, it doesn’t matter how you define a story, a comic, a poem or a movie, only that you enjoyed it. Be it horror, fantasy, science fiction, dark fantasy, dark urban fantasy, new weird—forget the label and simply enjoy the tale.
‘A butterfly flaps its wings...and an alien lands on the other side of the world nine months later.’
Welcome to Flycon. A world of wonder; two full days of panel discussions (both live chat and bulletin board), half-hour open sessions with authors, editors, agents, artists, writers, ventures into the Dealer’s Room where wonders abound, a masquerade with the theme Out of this World (kicking off at 8pm Sydney AEST on Saturday the 14th and closing at 10pm Los Angeles time), a lounge room—all waiting in hyperspace. So make yourself comfortable, put on your dressing gown and slippers, and let the journey of adventure begin.
Marty Young
AHWA President
www.australianhorror.com |
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