My first Finncon — Turku, 2026

Last weekend I attended my first Finncon. I haven’t been part of the fancon scene but I’ve been hanging around people who have enough to know that con reports are an important part of the culture.

I have only read one though: Tero’s report from 2005 Swecon in Göteborg that he re-published in his Egopuu zine’s Jyväskylä 2024 edition. It’s an event I’ve heard so many stories from even with my limited exposure to this world.

Anyway, here’s my story of my first con: Finncon 2026 in my hometown of Turku.

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How did I get here?

We need to back up a couple of months. It’s May 7th. The day before was my last day at my then job which had unfortunately turned into quite a miserable experience that was weighing on my mental wellbeing. On this day however, all that misery was distant history: I was teeming with an abundance of energy and wanted to put it to a good use.

I had invited aforementioned Tero for an afterwork to catch up with my news and because I knew that having a chat with him over drinks always leads to something new happening. He’s great at sneakily planting seeds of ideas into my head. He’s been part of this scene for longer than I’ve been alive.

He was the one who initially encouraged me to start writing a zine and we had discussed zines over time many times. In January, trying desperately to find something to do that would bring joy to my life, I had started working on my first zine.

We talk about zines and Tero asks:

What if we’d go to Finncon to have a discussion about zines?

Like a good lawyer, he knows to ask questions he knows the answer to.

Absolutely, I’m in.

I’m always up to discussing my hobbies and passions whenever an opportunity arrives so it was an easy yes.

Tero got Jukka, another veteran who has been making zines way before I was born involved and we started scheming. Finally, H-P joined us and we had a four person panel discussion booked for Sunday morning of my first Finncon experience.

While I haven’t found my way into the fancon scene before, I am a life-long scifi nerd who also had a particular fantasy era in my childhood and teenage years. Doctor Who, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Star (Wars|Trek|Gate), Babylon 5, Farscape and countless other scifi movies, series and books have been part of my life for as long as I remember.

Finncon 2026 in Turku, Finland

For my first experience, Finncon unfortunately was cut a bit short as it happened to land on a weekend with a family celebration I wouldn’t miss on Saturday.

Friday, July 10th

The weekend started with an old nemesis of mine: the Stairs of Knowledge (Tiedon portaat) that lead to the university campus. I used to study in this university between 2010 and 2013-ish and have taught a few lectures here as well so I’m intimately familiar with the dread of climbing these stairs.

They are especially nasty on a rainy, cold November morning when heading to an 8 o’clock morning math lecture after a student party the previous night. They weren’t exactly forgiving on a summer afternoon in heat either, especially given that my physical form has — let’s say — specialised in other things than climbing stairs.

While I’ve been to dozens of tech conferences around the world, I didn’t quite know what to expect from Finncon. I arrived at the main building to pick up my speaker badge and I was surprised by the amount of booths with artists selling their crafts.

Later, I made my way to the other building and there were floor after floor, corridor after corridor of these booths. Stickers, pins, paintings, books, jewelry, and so much more. We’ll talk about these in more in a bit.

The Friday afternoon program was short but excellent.

The first session I joined was Kirjoittajan oppaat scifiin ja fantasiaan (Writer’s guides to scifi and fantasy) with Saara Henriksson, Anne Leinonen and Jani Saxell. I’m an aspiring writer of scifi in that I think about one day wanting to write some stories but I haven’t actually written fiction since high school when I took part in NaNoWriMo.

I enjoyed the panel discussion (a side note: coming from a tech conference world where 95% of the talks are individual presentations and very rarely panels, it was interesting to see how Finncon was mainly panel discussions) and picked up a few good new ideas.

Saara showed a couple of interesting books that circulated around in the audience. I made notes of them and later turned the initial notes into a published note combined with the other writing guides I have either read or heard about.

The second thing on Friday I listened to was a panel discussion On writing with the guests of honour Adrian Tchaikovsky and Reetta Vuokko-Syrjänen with Cheryl Morgan (who was already a familiar name to me from the only con report I had ever read).

While I admit I haven’t (yet) read any of the works of either one, it was fascinating to hear about their processes of writing and especially how Adrian’s strong world building process aids him in writing books so fast.

Another interesting discussion was about how they both have written about the connection of mind and body in their stories but from very different perspectives.

During their discussion about which age groups they are writing for, I loved how Adrian mentioned

My audience is “people who read my books”

It resonates a lot with my approach to this blog. Instead of doing some sort of market and SEO trend analysis on what people want to read, writing what I have to say and the readership forming from people who want to read that is liberating.

His audience is of course quite a bit larger than mine.

An interlude on writing and publishing a zine

Already in early May when we discussed the upcoming zine panel, I had decided to make a Finncon special edition of my Roll the Zine zine for the event and focus on scifi games to be thematically appropriate.

I made plans, I chose games, I wrote a bit but I hit a really hard brick wall. It was a combination of a debilitating stress over the well-versed fandom who visits Finncons and the dread of a deadline for a hobby I chose to be an exact opposite of that.

Between the talks and an evening party on Friday, I went to have dinner, determined to finish writing the zine before the library would close. I wrote the last couple of pages, made the layout consistent, ran my scripts and behold: I had a finished digital version of Roll the Zine #5 - Finncon Special.

I rushed into the library and made a run of 5 printed issues and tooted (translated from Finnish):

My credibility to speak about zines in the zine panel discussion is restored. Roll the Zine’s Finncon special is fresh out of library’s printers.

I was so happy to get it out. The bit about “credibility” was written in jest but it was truly important for me to have this zine come out at during the event and especially before the panel discussion.

I ended up saving one copy for myself, gave one to an interested audience member, one to the board game table at the con and snuck the others to the magazine shelf at the local pub. Digital copies are available.

Back to Friday evening’s scheduled programming

I’ve heard so many stories of how fancon people are great at partying. On Friday evening, I joined a book publishing party at a local pub. As a first time visitor, an introvert and someone who didn’t know a lot of people at the event, I felt quite socially shy (throughout the entire event actually) so I listened to book intros, bought a copy of Matkaopas mahdolliseen writing guide and drank a few drinks.

I did end up having a couple of discussions with the few friends I did know there but I ended up going home earlier than I had planned.

Saturday, 11th of July

As I mentioned earlier, my Saturday was mostly spent on family celebration so I missed the main program.

I joined the Saturday evening party for a while, had a couple of good discussions but felt even more socially shy and being a smart boy, went to bed early to maximise the odds of waking up early enough to not miss the Sunday morning panel.

Sunday, 12th of July

11.00 Mustetta ja niittejä zine discussion

Our panel discussion Mustetta ja niittejä (Ink and staples) was the opening act of Sunday. We had a nice small audience and spent 45 minutes talking about the history of zines, how each of us got involved in the hobby, why we do it and we shared recommendations for where to find zines.

I wrote about the panel and related ideas on Monday’s blog post.

It was a lot of fun and it was great to be part of the program in a fancon with such a long history and wonderful community. Big thanks to my fellow panelists and the participating audience.

Other Sunday stuff

A couple of other great discussions I participated were a discussion about the beginnings of fandom and another about the sea.

In Suomi-fandomin alkuja (Beginnings of Finnish fandom), a group of old school fandom people talked about the history, sharing stories and learnings from over 40 years of Finnish fandom. It was so cool to see so many people who had been active in the fandom from 1970s being present in the audience and participating in the discussion.

As a community builder myself, this discussion gave me so much to think about: how to build long-lasting communities, how to bring people together and give them opportunities to participate through contributing and how to document the early days before it’s too late so later generations of the community get to enjoy those stories as well.

In Meri on Maan avaruutta (Sea is the space of Earth), I listened to a nice discussion of how authors have explored different seas and oceans in their stories, drawing parallels between sea and space: the massive, never-ending uknown with its own life-forms and dangers.

I spent most of the other part of the day roaming around in the venue.

For a free event, it was surprisingly expensive

Finncon is a free event to participate. It’s organised by volunteers and I love the event and community for it.

What I and my wallet weren’t prepared for was how much temptation there was for a geek like me.

I picked up a copy of Matkaopas mahdolliseen from the book publishing party to learn from and a random copy of Tähtivaeltaja from 1999 for zine inspiration.

I’m a couple of essays into the book and it’s been wonderful. So many thought provoking ideas and insights and it’s a gorgeous book too. The magazine is such a fun time capsule into the summer just before the theater releases of Star Wars Ep 1: Phantom Menace and Matrix. That was quite a summer for scifi movies.

Looking back, knowing how big of an impact both these movies have had on the genre and how much they are still discussed 27 years later, it’s fun to see what the discussion was at the time. Reading through commentary and reviews, I feel the expectations were way lower than what it ended up becoming.

I also got some stickers.

This chonky trans Pikachu was the first thing that caught my attention and I bought a couple of copies of it to give out to friends too.

On Sunday, I bought these:

as they were too spot on and cute to skip.

I also picked up random collection of other stuff, mainly for inspiration.

Finncon was a lot of fun

I had such a wonderful weekend. Even with missing the Saturday program and feeling quite shy to talk to people, it was definitely a good weekend. Big thanks to all Finncon organisers, volunteers, presenters, panelists, artist and participants for making it such.

Who knows, maybe next year I’ll return one year more experienced and and with a few new friends from this year.

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