Loncon 3 was my first big convention. I attended Friday to Sunday. Needless to say I had a great time. The only down-side was the fierce competition between "must attend" sessions. I missed so much that I desperately wanted to see. Ah well! A sign of a successful Worldcon, I guess.

One of the great pleasures for me was chatting to editors who've published my stories over the years, including Pete Crowther (PS Publishing, formerly editor of PostScripts, which is now in the highly capable hands of Nick Gevers); Henry Gee (Nature Futures, former) and Colin Sullivan (Nature Futures, current). I also enjoyed a brief chats with Luigi Petruzzelli, editor of Italian SF magazine Quasar, who has accepted my story The English Dead for translation and reprinting, and Ian Whates (NewconPress), whose anthologies I'd love to appear in one day (unsubtle  hint).

Some panels I particularly enjoyed: Lablit, SF and the Great War, anything to do with the sadly missed GoH Iain Banks.

Some readings I loved: Aliette de Bodard--a dear friend and great writer; Christopher Priest--one of my writing heroes. To interact with him, however briefly, about Spitfires was... Well, only aviation buffs will understand that one.

The Hugo Awards: slickly and concisely done. I did vote in a few categories, picked the short story category winner. All the fiction category winners were thoroughly well deserved. In fact a splendid roster of winners overall, showcasing the new, the diverse, the important. Those clinging to the old can go whinge in the corner, as far as I'm concerned. Something  of a shame that Doctor Who didn't win the Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form category in its 50th year, but having several nominations, it suffered from Split Vote Syndrome.

There were some great panels for those like me who obsess about archive television: Missing Believed Wiped (Dick Fiddy for the BFI), The (Doctor Who) Restoration Team. I was disappointed that the showing of Nigel Kneale's The Big Crunch was cancelled due to its non-availability in a projectable format, but the SciFi London people replaced it with the wonderful Red Shift (a superb Alan Garner novel filmed for Play for Today). Good work, folks!

But the most fun to be had was simply chatting to friends old and new, which is exactly as it should be.

I greatly enjoy reading flash* science fiction stories, as well as writing them. One can find some terrific examples in the Futures column of Nature magazine, also in Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online, amongst others. Yet despite its increasing market presence, especially on-line, flash SF suffers from a less than stellar reputation, especially amongst author organisations. Clear evidence of this is supplied by the Science Fiction Writers of America's recent decision to change its membership qualification rules. As a consequence, the usefulness of pro-rate flash fiction sales for qualification has been significantly downgraded. To me, this seems an odd thing to do. It's almost as if someone on the SFWA board has thought "You cheeky blighters, trying to palm us off with these easy-to-write micro-fictions. Well, let's put a stop to your little game..."

I can assure any doubters reading this piece that flash fiction isn't intrinsically easy to write, at least not well, any more than, say, miniature portraits are easy to paint, or tiny clockwork mechanisms for wrist-watches are easy to design and build.

Don't get me wrong: there's plenty of bad flash fiction out there--dependent on cliché and twist-endings--but that's true of any mode of fiction. There is nothing intrinsically stale, trite or undemanding about flash fiction. I shudder to think how much more intellectual effort I'd have to put into writing ten good flash stories, compared with a single story of comparable quality in the 5000-10000 words range.

Rather than simply complain about this state of affairs, I'll make a specific proposal. As far as I'm aware, there is currently no specific award for SFF flash fiction**. I think there should be. I don't know how a new award might be funded or administered, but perhaps the Hugo and Nebula committees could ponder the matter. And while they do that, perhaps they could also ponder the longstanding short fiction categories, namely short story (<7500 words), novelette (7500-17500 words) and novella (17500-40000 words). Are they still fit for purpose? To my mind, there is no intrinsic difference between a long short story (say, 7000 words) and a short novelette (say, 10000 words), whereas flash fiction is rather different in kind: a miniature short story***. In that respect, it is every bit as meaningful a category as novella (a short novel).

I'd be interested to hear what SF writers and readers think about this.

* Some still refer to such pieces as short-shorts.

** Please correct me if I'm wrong!

*** There's no widely accepted definition for flash fiction's maximum word-count. Some would argue for 1000 words, others 1500. I've also heard the argument that anything below 2000 words is not a proper short story.