A few hours after posting the July issue of Clarkesworld, I headed to the airport to attend the 2026 Eurocon in Berlin. I’ve never been to a Eurocon before, but have wanted to for a while. A combination of meeting the con-chair at Bulgacon last year; so many of our European fans and authors not coming to US-based cons; and an expanded travel budget as part of our twentieth-anniversary plans encouraged me to take the leap this year and I’m glad I did. In fact, I’m hoping to find a way to attend again when it’s in Portugal next year.

For me, a convention is much less about the panels and more about the conversations. It was great meeting so many new people and discussing what things are like in their local SF communities. Even when I attended panels, they were greatly enhanced by the conversations that followed. Translation was a big subject, but not in the way it is here in the States, where we’re mostly monolingual and translation is still less common. It was often recognized that translation is just a simple part of the equation for them, a part of life. The topic was also occasionally colored by frustration of English being the primary bridge language, echoing fears of losing what language contributes to the culture and literature of a region. The benefits of a bridge are not without their disadvantages. It’s good to remember that.

An overlying question of many of the panels and discussions I attended was “What is European science fiction?” Its attitude towards translation aside, I wonder if that is actually something that can be answered neatly, or if it even should be. If I were to try to define United States science fiction, where would I draw the lines and why? To me, no matter where it hails from, it’s science fiction. The regional influences are just flavoring. Isn’t every SF community a patchwork of styles and themes influenced by the personal histories of the authors participating? Sure, some flavors are more regionally dominant than others, but that doesn’t mean that authors or stories that don’t conform are not part of the community. The way translation has been treated in this country should be a warning not to draw the lines too tightly. For much of my life, that resulted in isolating our community from some absolutely fantastic stories and authors by treating what came from outside some lines on a map as lesser.

In the end, their repeated question went largely unanswered. What was more important was the conversation, which angled itself much more towards how they could support one another’s communities and help further the cross-pollination that happens so much more often there than here. It was inspiring to be among so many people interested in making that happen, particularly across languages. It’s a conversation I rarely encounter here and never with the number of participants I experienced there. That alone encourages me to get back to Eurocon in the near future.

As a participant, I was assigned to two panels: “Generative AI and Publishing - A Bad Mix?” and “The World of SFF Magazines.” Perspectives can change with location, but they remain strikingly similar. There was nothing particularly unexpected here, but the on-panel conversation and hallway chatter that followed were inspirational. I noted that one of the side-effects of the arrival of generative “AI” was a 25% increase in workload. While I’ve always understood the cost, this was the first time I verbalized specifically what I had to give up to cover that increase. Admitting that verbally pushed me into finding a way to bring some of them back. It also irritated me. Never a good combination.

Right before we were hit with the first wave of generated submissions, we had successfully wrapped our first open call for Spanish-language stories and had every intention of doing another, either in Spanish or some other language, to work out the remaining kinks in the process. It was always the intention that this would become an annual activity on our part, cycling through different languages where possible. That never happened because we’ve had to spend so much time dealing with the “AI” problem. That is not acceptable to me, so I used the opportunity Eurocon presented to build some bridges that could help further that along. I haven’t settled on a language, but I have a short list and people I can talk to. I’m not sure how fast we’ll be able to move, but I’ll be damned if I let some techbros pet project take mine away.

There is another item on the list that I’m not ready to mention yet, though it did come up at Readercon the next week. While this one has fewer moving parts than the translation project, it is not without its complications. I will say that this is a massive undertaking given the short amount of time we have to pull it off. Where am I finding the extra time? I’m not, it’s all been overtime. I doubt this would be possible without the spite-fueled energy coming from realizing who had taken it away. Keeping it going will require more strategic planning or partners. Perhaps more on this in the next editorial . . .

So, in short, Eurocon, and to a lesser extent Readercon, were particularly energizing this year. Since 2023, we’ve been in some form of crisis mode or another (be it “AI” or Amazon or something else) and it’s easy to fall into the trap of living that way. It doesn’t have to stay like that. The storms aren’t over, but they aren’t a surprise anymore either. That presents some opportunities to adjust and take back some of what we’ve lost. I look forward to doing so and hope you’ll enjoy the fruits of those efforts.