Frankfurt Book Fair

The main event of last week was Frankfurt Book Fair and, successively, BuCon, the Book Fair Convention. The actual fair saw me only for one day. But this was enough to show my face and to meet some nice people. Towards the evening it was getting even more interesting. After the traditional fantasy authors’ Chinese food run, we continued to party at the Galactic Forum. This promising name has been given to the annual Perry Rhodan Publisher’s Party. It was the second time they invited me – Thank you, I hope you will invite me again, folks!)

I’m not really an ardent party goer and tend to feel lost and overwhelmed very quickly at big dos. But this party is really nice: cozy enough to feel welcome and frequented enough to meet everyone who is someone in this scene and in this genre. I won’t go into name-dropping mode here. Favourable result: a new and interesting short story project did come my way, because at this meeting you have more direct contact with your “peers” than at the huge trade fair itself.

As always, the Saturday belonged to BuCon the “Buchmesse (=Book Fair) Convent”. If you are used to calling this type of event a convention, please be advised by veteran German SF fans that this is all wrong (in German). At this point I will refrain from joining a time-worn (and very boring) discussion about grammar and etymology. Whoever organises the event is free to decide what it should be called. However, the term “Convent” to me always tends to convey the image of colourful young men in full 19th century student union regalia or non-colourful old women with a pious mien.

Neither of the aforementioned were present, though. Gathered here was the speculative fiction family for their very own kind of autumn rite. If I started name-dropping at this point, I would have to expand this blog post by several pages. Let’s try a different approach. Had Noah wanted to save all German speculative fiction writers from the flood he would have been able to tick off his list here without having to hunt around for stray specimens. And he would not even miss out on the dinosaurs.

I did a reading at lunch time and enjoyed it quite a bit. So, I hope, did the audience. Well, they bought quite a number of my books afterwards, so one can assume that they might not have been too bored.

Eventually I lost track of the event a little. I still had fun, though. Mind you, maybe I should plan my conversations a tiny bit more diligently in the future, because for some reason I obviously succeeded in NOT making it onto a single photograph or video clip, let alone managed to engage the media people for an interview or article (newspaper or blog). I am still a little miffed at that – or rather at me for my sudden PR-unawareness. Obviously I am good at being invisible. Should I need to establish an alibi for Saturday the police would scan the photos and report material and not find any hint that I was there at all. So: go to jail, directly.

But I was there. Honest.

The highlight of the evening was, as always, the German Speculative Fiction Award (Deutscher Phantastik Preis) Ceremony. The winners are listed here . I congratulate all those who won and of course all the final nominees.

As an additional event Tom Finn got awarded the “BuCon Preis”, which was given out for the first time this year. It is a kind of general creativity award for lifetime achievement (to date. We hope Tom Finn goes on being creative many more years.).

Later that evening I went out to dinner with the short story authors of “Eis & Dampf” (Ice & Steam), who I would like to again congratulate for winning the German Speculative Fiction Award for the best anthology. Nice people. Nice food. Dreadful drive home.

Now it is over again, that fifth season for book lovers. So now we can once again focus on the aspect of book-biz which is closest to our hearts: the actual writing.