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Talbert
Pipes  Life in France Adventures Utopiales
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 Welcome to Utopiales, the French Sci-Fi convention in Nantes. Note that, unlike past pics, these are clickable to see larger versions.UtopialesBack in the US, I spent several years attending sci-fi conventions and exhibiting my artwork there. These gatherings are a bizarre surreal world of costumes and colors and films and art and special guests, some of whom are stranger still than their fans. If 2005 was the year that we finally sort of got our footing, 2006 was the year where we started looking around (cautiously) and seeing what might be out there to enjoy in this strange new country. One thing I was curious to see was the state of genre fandom - I'll leave the endless and ungodly-boring task of poking through French wines and cheeses to the other, more generic, expats - I wanted to see some French fantasy & horror & SF. thus, a short bit of Googling brought me to Utopiales, a huge French SF convention that takes place yearly just down the road from us in Nantes!  Above, Kim Stanley Robinson does an interview and expounds on writing science fiction.I had to see what a French SF con would be like. Answer - Great fun, though in many ways a very different experience from US shows like DragonCon. DragonCon was a flat-out, exhausting, totally bizarre balls-to-the-wall experience that consumed several entire days and spat one out at the end of it drained and loaded with weird dealers' room junk. Utopiales was, in the words of author Lucius Shepard (with whom I chatted for a few minutes as, "Hey, another American!"), "A lot better behaved". (Meaning that Harlan Ellison wasn't forced to hide behind planters in the lobby lest he be followed into the bathroom by mobs of geeks) There were no costumes - none! Well, with a few random exceptions... Kirsten Bishop chats en anglais with Laurent Kloetzer, a French SF author of many books who has yet to be translated outside France I have no idea who these folks were, but their corner of the show was the one spot that looked the most like something out of DragonCon... which is to say, a disorganized costumed mess, but fun! The show was larger than I had hoped. It wasn't the size of DragonCon, yet it was plenty to keep one entertained for a couple days and I left feeling I hadn't seen all of it, which is always good. Better still, they only had three ongoing timelines of events, so unlike at the US show, one wasn't constantly having to choose between six different things that one wants to see that are all going at the same time. Conspicously absent were hordes of costumed Klingons, storm troopers, ten foot long Jabba the Hutts crawling the halls, and legions of shrieking ten years olds in cutesy Yoda outfits running everywhere. There were plenty of children and young folks, but they were pretty much kept to themselves in side-rooms occupied by things like miniature-painting classes and seemingly a hundred ongoing table-top games.   It was a nicely-timed show for me since I'd just finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's first Mars book, Red Mars, so it was fun to meet the author and get an insight into the thinking behind his books. I'd felt the book suffered a little from too much time passage and too many disparate things going on, and it was interesting to hear him talk about the reasons behind this and the difficulties of writing "broad scale" sci-fi - charting events grounded in real science that cover hundreds of years, instead of "ray gun SF".  The art show was excellent and at the same time disorienting, because it pointed out in very clear terms just how much has happened in the years since I participated in this scene - in my time, computer art was in its infancy (I knew a fellow who did professional technical illustrations via computer graphics, and had to use a very hot-rodded 486/50 with an unimaginable 128 meg of RAM.... costing $20,000, no less!). At Utopiales, we were immediately confronted by an immense display where professional graphic artists were demonstrating their skills painting with computer graphics tablets. The results were quite amazing, putting my own skills with old-fashioned pens and brushes very much to shame.  There was also a huge bookstore totally devoted to genre stuff, as well as a dealer in used books and film stills, posters, etc. My French has progressed enough that I can now read (slowly) most bande dessinée (graphic novels), so for once this wasn't wasted on me, thankfully. I'll leave off with a few more photos:  Emily meets the dancing robot  Superhero movies have come a ways in the past thirty years...   This lady, though not a full-timer, was a truly amazing "illustratrice".  I thought I was the only human being on the planet to have seen this as a child.... Imagine my surprise! |