Horace Bent: spread the nerd—SFF set to conquer Olympia fair

Here we are, folks, LBF 2024 kicking off before the Ides of March (grazie mille, Bologna Children’s Book Fair!), which is a blow to the people who now control the British rights-trading world—Hollywood super-agents—as it conflicts with awards season’s greatest night: the Academy Awards. To those of you in the UK book trade: the Academy Awards are sort of like the Nibbies, but a slightly less glamorous version for the moving pictures world.

But, goodness me, imagine you are coming in off the red-eye from LAX having had to eschew hanging out with Florence Pugh, Paul Mescal and Billie Eilish at the post-Oscars Governor’s Ball bash in order to spend three days in a grim rights centre searching in vain for a chair—just one damn chair!—and discovering that you can’t buy Ozempic from the takeaway kiosks at Olympia. I mean, the privation.

But if I were to predict who the real stars this LBF will be, it won’t be the Hollywood types like your Swifty Lazars and Abe Lastfogels (they’re still around, right?) but the queens and kings (primarily queens, to be honest) of the Science Fiction and Fantasy imprints

Still, there may be some Oscar substitutes for you this week as I’ve heard tell that Nigel Newton will be replicating John Cena’s “streaking” presenting turn for the duration of the fair, while Sam Edenborough has spent the past few months “getting shredded” in his quest to perform his version of “I’m Just Ken”, with his rights-trading jazz supergroup The Editörial Standards all sporting “abs like Gosling”. Or maybe “a gosling”... I’m unsure.

But if I were to predict who the real stars this LBF will be, it won’t be the Hollywood types like your Swifty Lazars and Abe Lastfogels (they’re still around, right?) but the queens and kings (primarily queens, to be honest) of the Science Fiction and Fantasy imprints. You know, the geeks and nerds over in the corner of the open plan whose desks are covered in My Hero Academia Funko figures, are prone to bringing out their Dungeon Master screen at acquisition meetings and wearing T-shirts you can’t even fathom the meaning of (“Who the hell is Cuphead? And why is he telling me not to deal with the devil?”, you’ll think after bumping into them in the break room.)

Let’s get real: you knew they always made the money that enabled you to buy that début novel in Orcadian verse (excuse me, ancient Orcadian) that might—with a following wind and a Booker shortlisting—shift 500 copies, but you were doing the important stuff, yeah? That’s what you told yourself; and your mates on the TLS and the London Review of Books agreed. But guess what, bub, the SFF nerds have the awards now too, and the likes of Bethan Morgan, Natasha Bardon, Gillian Green and Anna Jackson are riding into LBF like Daenerys Targaryen on the back of Drogon, with Olympia a King’s Landing stand-in.

OK, it didn’t work out so well for the Mother of Dragons in the end. And her turn into genocidal maniac was completely out of character, but that was the TV version and I’m sure Bardon is, as we speak, working with George R R Martin to rectify this in the next books in A Song of Ice and Fire series, due to drop imminently. We’ll doubtless read all about it in an issue of The Bookseller Daily this week! I jest—the odds are the SFF folk acquire or announce a few interesting books over the course of LBF, not lay the venue to waste in dragonfire. But one lives in hope.