As you probably know, I was at Metropol Con, a new SFF convention in Berlin, last week. For my pre-con wanderings around Berlin, check out this post. And now, let’s get to the con itself.

Day 1: Thursday, May 18, 2023:

Thursday, May 18, 2023, was a public holiday (Ascension Day) in Germany. It was also the first day of Metropol Con. I got up around half past eight and got dressed, including attaching my Hugo pins to my t-shirt. Then I had breakfast at one of the Turkish cafés in the area. There was a great Turkish bakery and café called Simit 24, operated by three generations of Turkish Berlin women (we jokingly called them “the new three ladies of the barbecue” after a popular 1980s German TV show about three generations of Berlin women operating a sausage stand), right across from the con venue.

Turkish breakfast, courtesy of Café Simit 24.

After breakfast, I headed for Metropol Con. It was not a long trip, all I had to do was walk through a public park named after Max Josef Metzger, a Catholic priest executed by the Nazis who was the parish priest of the St. Joseph Church directly opposite the park.

The Catholic St. Joseph Church in the Wedding neighbourhood of Berlin, completed in 1909.

The so-called Ruin Column in Max Josef Metzger Park in the Wedding neighbourhood of Berlin commemorates the rebuilding of Berlin after WWII. The column consist of rubble of bumbed out houses and businesses.

Just in case you missed Metropol Con, someone drew this chalk sign onto the pavement outside the venue.

The con was held at the silent green cultural center in the Wedding neighbourhood of Berlin. Now is probably as good a time as any to talk about the very unique con venue. Cause before it became a cultural center, silent green used to be a crematorium.

Another sign points towards Metropol Con.

There’s a detailed history of the crematorium on the website of the silent green cultural center. The short version is that cremation was considered controversial in Germany for religious reasons well into the 20th century. An atheist group lobbied to build a columbarium and mourning hall next to the Wedding cemetery. The columbarium and mourning hall were completed in 1909 and expanded with a crematorium in 1912. The crematorium was expanded several times since then, the last time in the 1990s, until it was shut down in 2002 and converted into cultural center and events venue. The result is a striking and ever so slightly morbid ensemble of buildings.

But see for yourself:

The former Wedding crematorium, now the silent green cultural center, seen through the entrance archway. Note the stylized flames on the gate.

The domed mourning hall and columbarium of the silent green cultural center with the chimney of the actual crematorium rising behind the building.

A closer look at the mourning hall and courtyard through the gates of the complex.

Griffin gargoyles guard the gate to the mourning and columbarium.

The domed mourning hall of the silent green cultural center.

A female figure in a long robe adorns the entrance to the domed mourning hall of the silent green complex. The figure was kept deliberately neutral and might depict a Christian saint or a pagan goddess or a female mourner.

The mourning hall and columbarium complex is certainly an evocative and fascinating building and made for a great con venue.

Viewed from the walkway of the adjacent building, the silent green columbarium looks almost like a medieval castle.

Since my hotel was only about 350 meters from the con, I arrived fairly early, when the line at registration was only two people ahead of me. I also ran into the first people I knew before I even got the registration desk, which is always a sign that you’ll have a great con.

The Metropol Con banner adorns the former administration building of the crematorium that has now been converted into panel rooms.

Since I’m the first and so far only German person to win a Hugo, I got several in person congratulations. I was also asked to sign things – a laptop, that was later auctioned off, two postcards and a book (not one of mine, but someone had everybody he met sign a book purchased in the dealers room). Of course, people also wanted to see the trophy – which of course was at home, because it weighs 4.5 kilograms – but luckily I had photos on my phone. Though I should probably find a better way to organise them, so I don’t have to scroll through umpteen unrelated photos to get to the Hugo.

My Metropol Con badge with ribbons and a Glasgow 2024 button.

Once I got my badge and wristband, I descended into the bowels of the silent green cultural center – quite literally, since much of the complex is underground, accessed via a ramp wide enough for a truck. It’s very practical and also easy enough to descend… at least until you remember what the ramp was originally for.

The ramp leading down into the bowels of the silent green cultural center.

At the bottom of the ramp, there was an area with notice boards, a freebie table and a giant Playmobil Mr. Spock who greeted con goers. The Mr. Spock figure was later auctioned off to help pay for the con.

At the bottom of the ramp, this giant Playmobil Mr. Spock greets visitors.

Notice boards with information about other upcoming cons. Dave Lally painstakingly set these up.

Another notice board with information about upcoming cons.

Beyond the notice boards and freebie tables, there was a subterranean bar called the “Betonbar” (concrete bar), because this part of the silent green cultural center is very much a concrete bunker. It would probably survive a nuclear strike and would also be an excellent place to hole up during the zombie apocalypse. Yet another level down was a large open space that was once used to store bodies and now served as the dealers room, exhibition space and gaming area.

A look across the gaming and exhibition area at Metropol Con.

The exhibition space hosted a travelling exhibition about literature in East Germany as well as an exhibition dedicated to the late Austrian science fiction writer and computer art pioneer Herbert W. Franke.

“Leseland DDR” (Reading country GDR) is a travelling exhibition about literature in East Germany that was displayed at Metropol Con.

The “Leseland DDR” exhibition had sections on various genres, including an extensive section about science fiction in East Germany.

More of the science fiction section of the exhibition about East German literature at Metropol Con. This exhibition just won the Kurd Laßwitz Preis.

An exhibition dedicated to the pioneering computer artwork by Austrian science fiction writer and artist Herbert W. Franke.

Because it was still fairly early and there wasn’t a lot of programming yet, I took a stroll through the exhibition area and the dealers room. I chatted with people and also purchased yet more books, though once again I womanfully restricted myself to only two books. If you’ve been keeping count, means I had six books to take home now versus two books I’d bought to Metropol Con to donate to the auction.

I also bought a Metropol Con mug, which meant that I also had two mugs to take home now, since I’d bought a souvenir as a present for my Dad.

A look across the vast dealers room at Metropol Con.

Another look at the Metropol Con dealers room

One last look at the Metropol Con dealers room.

Once I emerged from the catacombs of the silent green cultural center, I realised that I was lugging around two books and a mug, so I took them back to the hotel. Then I returned to the con, had a coffee and a chicken banh mi sandwich and attended a panel on science fiction in East Germany.

Now I do have a bit of experience with East German SF as a reader. Because when I was a kid, my Great-Aunt Metel, who lived in East Germany, would send me books and records for my birthday and Christmas, because books and records were fairly easily available in East Germany. Once she figured out I liked “space books”, she sent me science fiction books. Some of them were translated editions of East European authors like Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers. Others were SF novels by East German authors. However, I don’t really have any systematic knowledge of East German SF, I just read whatever my aunt (or whoever went book shopping on her behalf, since Aunt Metel hardly ever left the house) could snag at the bookstore.

So in order to learn more about something I only have a cursory knowledge of, I not only bought a non-fiction book about East German science fiction in the dealers room, but also decided to attend a panel on the subject. The panelists were science fiction scholar Hans Frey, science fiction writer, critic and scholar Dietmar Dath, science fiction writer Emma Braslavsky (international readers may know her as the author of the story upon which the movie I’m Your Man was based) and science fiction writer Karlheinz Steinmüller, who co-wrote Andymon, voted the best East German science fiction novel of all time in 1989, with his wife Angela Steinmüller. Braslavsky and Steinmüller grew up in East Germany, Dath and Frey in West Germany. Below you can see my photo of the panelists, which isn’t very good. A better photo of the same panel by Roger Murmann is here.

The panel on “Science fiction in East Germany” featuring – from left to right – Karlheinz Steinmüller (half hidden behind someone’s head), Emma Braslavsky, Dietmar Dath (also half-hidden behind someone’s head) and Hans Frey.

The panel was very interesting and went into what distinguished East German science fiction from West German and Western science fiction in general. One of the points made was that since East Germany has an official vision of what the future would look like, namely a Socialist utopia, the questions East German science fiction asked was not so much, “What will the future look like?”, because they already knew, but “How do we get there?” and “How do we do this?” The above-mentioned novel Andymon by Karlheinz and Angela Steinmüller is actually a good example for this, because it’s about some young people landing on a planet they’re supposed to colonise, only that the planet is not as advertised, so they have to figure out how to make it habitable anyway.

Emma Braslavsky pointed out that by the 1980s, when East Germany was visibly declining and falling apart (which tracks with what Aunt Metel told me, namely that East Germany continued improve and progress, albeit slowly, into the 1970s, then it stagnated and gradually fell apart), the Socialist Utopia was more of a promise, much like Christmas. Just sleep one more night and Christmas – Socialism is here and everything will be wonderful. Emma Braslavsky also noted that when she watched things like Star Trek on West German TV (a large part of East Germany could and did watch West German TV), someone muttered some complete nonsense like “Reverse the polarity” and it actually worked.

Even though the panelists grew up in two very different countries and systems, there were some things that united all of them. For example, it was never easy to be a budding SF fan in a small rural village or town, whether in East or West Germany, because library selections were limited and books or comics not always easily available in local shops. Karlheinz Steinmüller talked about what an important influence the Digedags from the Mosaik comics (I wrote a little bit about Mosaik and the Digedags in this Galactic Journey article) were on him and how the comics were often hard to come by, because they were hugely popular (due to being actually good) and quickly sold out. Karlheinz Steinmüller also talked about how he was eager to learn Russian (which was the first foreign language taught in East German schools), so he could read American science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov or Clifford D. Simak in Russian translation! Asimov or Simak were available in German, of course, but the translations were published in West Germany and therefore difficult to access for East Germans.

The panelists also discussed mistaken ideas and assumptions they had picked up from reading science fiction from an early age. One point made by both East and West German panelists was the assumption that religion would cease to matter and that the future would be largely atheist. I found myself nodding along to that point, because that was also very much my assumption. After all, in US science fiction of the so-called Golden and Silver Age, religion is either a scam (Foundation by Isaac Asimov, Gather Darkness by Fritz Leiber) or for aliens or both (The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs). Or it involves nubile beauties being sacrificed to some tentacled monstrosity. And in East European science fiction, the future was atheist for obvious reasons.

One assumption that I’m surprised no one brought up is that as a teenager I was absolutely certain that this whole Cold War nonsense would eventually stop – provided that the politicians didn’t manage to blow up the world first – because I’d seen Pavel Chekhov on the bridge of the Enterprise and Tamara Jagellowsk on the bridge of the Orion. Meanwhile, East Germans would have seen the American nuclear physicist Harringway Hawling defying the evil capitalists (TM) to travel to Venus aboard the Kosmokrator in The Silent Star. So I at least was totally convinced that this whole Cold War nonsense would eventually cease and we’d all go to space together – after all, I’d seen it happen on TV. And of course, I did see the Cold War end and the Iron Curtain fall as a teenager, only for both East and West to promptly put space exploration on the backburner. Because I had also never believed that the space race was a real thing – I assumed that “The Soviets or respectively Americans will get there before us” was just an excuse used to get funding from politicians who believed in that sort of nonsense and that the true reason to explore space was because space was cool. Yeah, joke’s on me.

After the panel, I hung out some more at the con. Then I returned to my hotel, rested a bit and went out for dinner. For some reason, there were several Korean restaurants within walking distance of the hotel and the con, so I headed for one of them and had a very tasty tofu bibimbap.

Tofu bibimbap

I returned to the hotel and went to bed fairly early by my standards, because my two panels were both on Friday, the first of them at 9:30 AM. And I did want to have a coffee and some breakfast before the panel.

Day 2: Friday, May 19, 2023:

The title of my first panel was “Translation: What is lost and what is gained”. One unexpected thing we lost was two panelists. German writer and translator Bernhard Kempen had a scheduling conflict and Czech writer and translator Julie Nováková fell ill just before the con. So we were down to three panelists, Claudia Rapp, C.D. Covington and myself. Luckily, Julie Nováková recommended a replacement panelist, Czech translator (she translated the first six of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake books into Czech) and fantasy writer Lucie Luka?ovi?ová (I hope I managed to persuade WordPress to spell her name correctly, since WordPress hates carons), so we were four panelists after all.

We talked about false friends, translation pitfalls, accuracy versus poetic licence, what to do if there isn’t an equivalent in the target language, how to deal with quotes from religious and other texts and why machine translation can’t replace a human translator and often leads to nonsense such as translating brand names (a lot of webstores use machine translation, since they apparently believe that customers can’t make sense of English and want garbled nonsense) which a human would never do. I also shared my favourite example, the Masters of the Universe character Snout Spout (who is already pretty silly in general, because he’s a guy with an elephant head) which an overzealous translation program decided to turn into “Schnauzen Auslauf” for a German webstore.

I’ve done a lot of translation panels over the years, because I tend to get put on translation panels, even though I’m not a literary translator. Therefore, I have plenty of experience with translations panels and this was a really good one. The audience seems to have enjoyed it as well. At any rate, several audience members told us afterwards how much they enjoyed the panel. After the panel, the discussion also spilled out of the program room onto the walkway outside, which is always a sign for a good panel. The translation panel was recorded and someone took photos, but I can’t find either the recording or the photos online.

The former administration building of the crematorium has been turned into program rooms connected by a walkway.

The translation panel ended at 10:30 AM and my next panel was at 12:30 PM, so I theoretically had two hours of time between panels. However – as mentioned above – we continued chatting after the translation panel, so the two hours were closer to one. I wanted to have lunch before the panel, so I headed to a Pakistani restaurant next to my hotel, which supposedly opened at 10 AM. Alas, it turned out that the sign on the door was inaccurate and the restaurant only opened at 10 AM on Sundays. On weekdays, it opened at twelve, which was a little tight for my taste. So I had a poga?a filled with feta and dill at a Turkish café instead.

My second panel was entitled “SFFH around the globe: developments, themes, trends” and took place in the great domed mourning hall. The other panelists were Metropol Con GoH Mary Robinette Kowal, Peter J. Maurits, a scholar specialising in African, specifically Mozambiquan literature, and Spanish horror writer Jesús Cañadas. The moderator was SFF writer Sabrina Železný. Once again, I hope that WordPress did not butcher Sabrina’s surname. And actually, this would have been a good subject for both the translation and world SFFH panel. Because how can it be that one of the most widely used blogging and content management systems keeps butchering East European names and words containing carons, even if you use the HTML character code workaround? There actually are photos of this panel, though none of them are mine for obvious reasons. You can see a few of them below, credited to the respective photographers.

The global SFFH panel also had a last minute panelist switch, because Ugandan SFF writer Dilman Dila, who was supposed to be on the panel, didn’t get a visa, so Jesús Cañadas took part in the panel instead. Unfortunately, this also led to a panel on world SFF with five white panelists, which is a less than ideal situation.

This isn’t my photo, obviously, but was taken by German science fiction writer Theresa Hannig and shared on Twitter. You can see the weird light in the domed hall, which turned everything and everybody purple. From left to right, we have Jesús Cañadas, Mary Robinette Kowal, Sabrina Zelezný, yours truly and Peter J. Maurits. Also note the gallery and the recesses originally intended for funeral urns, though they’re empty now.

The original tweet by Theresa Hannig is here BTW. Roger Murmann also took some great photos of this panel such as this one, this one or this one. Here’s also a great photo of me by Roger Murmann.

One aspect that we discussed was that SFFH from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East is a lot more visible now, because e-mail submissions, self-publishing, print on demand, webzines, etc… have made submissions more accessible and also given writers from all over the world the chance to publish their work, though there are still plenty of hurdles. Peter J. Maurits pointed out that African SFF is actually a huge field of different national literatures written in a variety of different languages and that his specialty is actually SFF from Mozambique, which is written in Portuguese. He also plugged Omenana as a free venue to check out English and French language SFF from Africa, while I noted that the anthology Africa Risen, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, was available in the dealers room right there at the con.

Also, as the examples of Dilman Dila or Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki or almost every African SFF writer who wanted to attend the Dublin Worldcon in 2019 show, increasingly restrictive and – yes, racist – visa policies make in-person cons very difficult to access for writers from Africa, the Middle East, parts of Latin America and Asia, etc… This is also an issue that the SFF community can’t resolve on its own, because it’s part of the larger political issue of restrictive visa policies and the tendency to view any traveler from certain parts of the world primarily as a potential illegal immigrant or terrorist. Worse, writers, artists and musicians are often denied visa, because they often have no employer, are often young and have no partner or children and don’t fit into visa criteria for e.g. business travelers. Organisers of music festivals, art shows, theatre festivals, SFF conventions and any cultural event have been complaining for years now how difficult it is to get visa even for invited artists. However, less restrictive visa policies aren’t something that wins elections – quite the contrary, sadly, with all the panic about illegal immigrants and refugees – and usually not a political priority and there is little the SFF community can do about it. One thing we can do, however, is make sure that more cons have virtual components, virtual guests of honour, etc… Virtual cons exploded in popularity due to the covid pandemic and even though in person cons are great, we shouldn’t neglect the virtual elements, especially since virtual cons benefit not just people from non-western countries but all people who have problems participating due to disability, family commitments or jobs which make travel difficult, etc…

We also briefly got into the hostile reception that non-western Worldcon bids such as Chengdu or the bid for Jeddah in Saudi Arabia sadly still often get from the western and particularly American SFF community. This was partly in response to a question if Middle Eastern SFF might be the next to become more visible on the global stage. I pointed out that while the Jeddah bid wasn’t viable at the time, the treatment that the people behind that bid – fans like us – received was appalling. Referring the failed Jedi Con bid actually got me into a nice conversation with someone who translates Arabic SFF into English after the panel.

Furthermore, we also talked about the accessibility of writing workshops. Mary Robinette Kowal talked about the Writing Excuses cruises cum workshop and how the participants were still very white and very American, in spite of attempts to make them more accesible to people of colour via grants and to European participants by holding one during a Baltic cruise. However, cruises – and the reason the workshops are held on cruise ships is because the costs are actually lower than a residential workshop like Clarion or Viable Paradise would be, plus cruise ships are accessible for disabled people – have a certain reputation such as that they’re for white people or – particularly in Europe – they’re for old people.

On a more general note, we also discussed how science fiction, fantasy and horror are perceived in various countries – which is often still negatively – and also how that perception has changed over the years. Jesús Cañadas and Sabrina Železný had both been at the Leipzig Book Fair earlier this year, which had a special science fiction, fantasy and horror section… kept safely apart from the main Book Fair. I talked about how SFF was dismissed as “trivial literature” or outright trash literature, when I was a teenager – to lots of nodding in the auditorium, because I suspect every single German person in there probably hates the term “trivial literature” (which was and sometimes still is the official scholarly term for popular fiction in Germany) as much as I do. I also pointed out that things are changing and that e.g. Dietmar Dath (who actually may have been in the audience) actually made the longlist for the German Book Award a few years ago, as have other SFF works (most recently Theresia Enzensberger for At Sea in 2022), but that those books are usually considered to – another hated phrase, as we agreed – “transcend the genre”.

In general, it is notable that if you take a stroll to the dealers room at Metropol Con or check out a bookstore with a good SFF selection such Kulturkaufhaus Dussmann or an SFF specialty shop like Otherland, that there is a lot of German SFF, much of it published by small specialty presses. We also have a lot of younger German SFF authors in their 20s and 30s, including a lot of women, non-binary and LGBTQ authors, though SFF writer Alessandra Reß notes in her Metropol Con report that the membership skewed older, whiter and more male than the current German SFF scene. Nonetheless, the current situation is a far cry from the situation in the 1980s and 1990s, when I started reading and writing SFF and there was very little in the way of German SFF beyond Perry Rhodan, John Sinclair and Professor Zamorra as well as a few established, older male authors in West Germany and some SFF in East Germany. But the vast majority of what was available was British and American SFF in translation, which is also the reason I started to write in English – because there was no market in Germany at the time. And I pointed out that I probably would never have been nominated for, let alone won a Hugo, if I wasn’t writing in English.

I also mentioned German science fiction writer and Perry Rhodan co-creator Walter Ernsting, who had to invent a fictional American science fiction writer named Clark Dalton and pass himself off as the translator of Dalton’s works in order to get his own stories published. Walter Ernsting also came up in the translation panel BTW (he was a very prolific translator of golden and silver age science fiction) as an example of a translated title spoiling the plot of a story by Rosel George Brown.

Jesús Cañadas pointed out that there is a lot of speculative fiction and horror published in Spain and Latin America, but that very little of it is translated. And what is translated – Jesús specifically recommended Mariana Enriquez – is often not really packaged or marketed as science fiction, fantasy or horror. In general, many countries around the world have vibrant, active and fascinating SFF scenes – which are completely invisible to people from other parts of the world due to the translation gap and language barrier. Mary Robinette Kowal pointed out that trying to read a books in a foreign language would be an ethical application for machine translation in the absence of a translated edition, though official translations done by human translators are still preferable.

All in all, it was a great panel and I’m thrilled to have been a part of it. Directly after the World SFF panel, Mary Robinette Kowal held her keynote address about lady astronauts in fiction and reality in the great domed hall.

After the panel, I switched on my phone again to find that my Dad had tried to call me. He tends to call my around noon and the panel was at 12:30. However, a ringing phone on a panel is a distraction, so I switched it off. I talked to my Dad and got some coffee and a chocolate chip cookie.

Mary Robinette Kowal had finished her keynote address by now and we wound up chatting in the line at the Little Mars coffee shop in the former gatehouse of the crematorium and later at one of the tables set up outside the Little Mars. That turned into a rotating group of people chatting about all sorts of topics and actually made me miss the panel I wanted to see in the afternoon. Though I was later told that I didn’t miss much with regard to the panel.

Later that afternoon, I ran into German fan Peter Schmitt, who blogs about sword and sorcery and other topics at Skalpell und Katzenklaue and we wound up chatting for an hour or so, which unfortunately meant that I missed the other event I’d planned to attend that afternoon, too. That said, the conversations with people you just happen to meet are one of the best things about in person cons that hybrid and virtual cons can’t really emulate.

I left the silent green cultural center around 6 PM. By now, I was running a little low on cash, because the dealers room vendors as well as the cafés in the neighbourhood didn’t always accept cards. So I hopped into the subway and headed for Friedrichstraße station, because there is a branch of my bank on Friedrichstraße. Supposedly, there was at least one branch that was closer, but since I knew where the Friedrichstraße branch was, I went there. Since I was already in the neighbourhood, I took a brief detour to Gendarmenmarkt, which is one of Berlin’s most beautiful squares – flanked by two stunning and nigh identical baroque churches, one Lutheran and one for the French Huguenots who’d settled in Prussia escaping persecution in France.

Alas, Gendarmenmarkt is currently in the middle of a massive reconstruction project. The concert hall is hidden behind scaffolding and the entire square has been torn up and is cordoned off, though at least you can still access the German and the French church. I also managed to get a few nice photos.

The German church at the Gendarmenmarkt in the foreground and the French church in the background. Neither church is still active and both of them house museums today.

A look at the French church on Gendarmenmarkt.

The French church on Gendarmenmarkt with a strategically placed con trail behind the dome.

After that little detour to Gendarmenmarkt, I returned to the Wedding neighbourhood to have dinner. Of course, there are plenty of restaurants around Friedrichstraße and Gendarmenmarkt, but they’re also quite pricy, so I decided to have dinner in the Wedding area instead. I went to another Korean restaurant – there are several in the area – and had yet another bowl of bibimbap.

Day 3: Saturday, May 20, 2023:

On Saturday, I woke up fairly early, had breakfast and headed for the con once more. Since I had no panels of my own that day, I checked the schedule and decided to listen to German science fiction author Emma Braslavsky talk about her upcoming novel Erdling (Earthling), because I happen to like her work. International readers will probably know Emma Braslavsky best for writing the story “I’m Your Man” upon which the eponymous 2021 German science fiction movie is based.

Emma Braslavsky waves a phaser around during her presentation at Metropol Con.

Erdling sounds fascinating and I’ll probably get the book, when it comes out in November. However, the presentation also inadvertedly showed another issue of bringing German (or any other language) SFF to a global audience. Because a lot about the book is very German. Will audiences understand why it’s funny that leftist firebrand Sahra Wagenknecht has been abducted by aliens and that the protagonist, washed-up would-be private detective Emma Erdling, is recruited by Wagenknecht’s husband, leftist politician Oskar Lafontaine, to find her and embarks on a romp through time and space, accompanied by German weird fiction author Hanns Heinz Ewers. For a non-German audience, a translator would not only have to explain who Wagenknecht, Lafontaine, Ewers and a host of other characters are, but also the connotations these people have to a German audience. Because almost every German person will immediately have an image in their head, when they hear the names Sahra Wagenknecht or Oskar Lafontaine, and their minds will supply speculations what might happen if one of them were abducted by aliens. Will Sahra Wagenknecht lead the aliens to revolution? Or will she annoy them so much that they return her? A non-German reader simply doesn’t have those associations, unless they have followed German politics extremely closely.

Initially I was planning to attend an interview with Karen Nölle, who has translated Ursula K. Le Guin’s works into German, after the Emma Braslavsky presentation. However, towards the end of the previous program item, I suddenly got very tired. And because falling asleep on a panel is very rude, I decided to skip the Ursula K. Le Guin translation panel and get a coffee and a blueberry muffin instead.

Enjoying a latte macchiato and blueberry muffin at the Little Mars café.

The next panel I attended was about dubbing movies and TV shows and how the process works. Now in Germany, every movie or TV show is dubbed into German. But while dubbing is ubiquitous, though in the age of streaming and DVD you increasingly have the option to watch the original version, with or without subtitles, I found that I know very little about how the process actually works. Therefore, I found this panel incredibly interesting. The presenter was Stefan Kaiser who is a dialogue director responsible for dubbing e.g. Wellington Paranormal or Parasite into German. And in fact, Stefan Kaiser used a scene from Wellington Paranormal as an example for how the dubbing process works.

Once again, the panel spilled out into the café area afterwards, where I realised that my phone showed ten missed calls from my Dad. As I said above, he tends to call me around noon, which was exactly when the panel took place. Though this time, I didn’t switch off my phone, because the dubbing panel took place in the so-called cinema, which was in the concrete reinforced bowels of the silent green complex, where there is no cell phone reception anyway. So I excused myself to talk to my Dad and then returned for a continuing of the dubbing industry.

Around three PM, I took a break from the con to go on an errand. I wanted to buy a comic, which had just come out that week, so I asked in the dealers room where to find a comic shop that carries all the latest US comics in Berlin. I was recommended Black Dog Comics in the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood, which turned out to be only two S-Bahn stations away. So I headed to Black Dog Comics, only to find that they didn’t have the comic I wanted, because since the pandemic they get new comics one week later than the US. That said, I still found something to buy and also had a nice chat with the owner. BTW, Black Dog Comics are curently running a 50 percent off sale on all Red Sonja comics to celebrate Red Sonja‘s fiftieth anniversary.

After my little excursion to Prenzlauer Berg, I headed back to the silent green cultural center, where the con was gradually winding down.

Con goers emerge from the domed hall, where various items were auctioned off to support the con.

I bade good-bye to plenty of people, returned to my hotel and then went out for dinner. This time I had Pakistani food, namely vegetable pakora and chicken biryani, because my train home left the following day. I’ll probably do a part three about my post-con odyssey around Berlin on the first hot day of the year, where everything was either closed or overcrowded, while waiting for my train home to go at 4:38 PM, because that’s a different story.

All in all, I had a great time at Metropol Con and I’m glad that I attended. And even though I’m wholly in favour of virtual cons due to their accessibility, in person cons are another matter altogether. The Metropol Con website includes links to several other con reports – mostly in German, though this one by Wenzel Mehnert is in English – as well as videos and photo galleries.

The next Metropol Con is planned for 2026 and I’m looking forward to going, even if it means braving Deutsche Bahn again.

Finally, take a look at my Berlin trip haul, some of it purchased at the con and some in various shops around Berlin. And yes, I’m terrible at getting stuff signed, even if the author is right there in front of me. Largely, my problem was that the author was there in front of me, but the book was back at the hotel.

My Metropol Con haul includes the first three issue of the Masterverse comic mini-series by Tim Seeley, Eddie Nunez and various other artists, The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Board, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal, which I failed to get signed, Doomsday Morning by C.L. Moore, Tales of Nevéryon by Samuel R. Delany, the non-fiction book Vision und Verfall: Science Fiction in der DDR by Hans Frey, which I also failed to get signed, a presenter gift in the form of cute candy and two mugs.