No post con blues
Last night, as we retired from the Novacon 42 meal and beer tasting, my daughter was tearful for a while because she'd not been able to say goodbye to someone, but more generally, I think, because for her the the convention was over. I explained that you never get to say goodbye to everybody, and that it's normal to feel that way after a good convention.
Except I don't feel that way and it was, I flatter myself, a good convention. I've moaned and grumbled progressively more over the past few weeks to my co-programmer, Ms YR of Sheffield, about programme planning sitting on my back like a monkey, on top of all the rest of my life, but today I am really proud of what we all did. I have a spring in my step and a a sense of accomplishment and, well, completion.
I think that's the best programme I've been involved in since the first time I did it, with Gwyneth Jones as GoH and Nalo Hopkinson and Justina Robson turning up plus NASA scientist Inge Heyer who brought a hundredweight of glossy colour photos from the Hubble. C challenged me: "What about Novacon 40?" but we had more or less every living SF writer in the UK at that (how many conventions can lose Stephen Baxter and shrug it off because the panel still had Hamilton, Grimwood and Stross on it) and I had to shoo Brian Aldiss off stage to get Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen on. It was hard work and a good show - but it isn't the same sort of challenge when Graham Joyce and Chris Evans are content to hang in the bar and that's fine because there's no space for them on the programme anyway. Working with a restricted palette demands more creativity, offers more satisfaction. For me, anyway.
Our science speakers were excellent and I'd like to claim it was the product of meticulous research and hard work on our part, but it was in fact luck, but then my mother always used to maintain it was better to be lucky than rich. From Tony Padilla introducing Schrodinger's Jeremy Clarkson through James Sumner giving us opportunity to adulterate our own beer in the fashion of beer doctors from the 1800s to his Alan Turing talk the following morning that got everybody out of bed, I reckon we put on some damn good stuff.
I always tell science speakers to pitch for an audience who feel Horizon doesn't cut it these days and want something beyond that...
If that's you, you might want to check out -
http://www.sixtysymbols.com/
http://www.numberphile.com/
We even managed a few panels that led to people accusing us of causing them to talk about science fiction in the bar, and I ended up relaxed enough to trundle round to the book room and stock up on some good old SF to pass my next few evenings now I don't have to be checking my e-mails every 30 minutes.
If you were there, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you weren't then that's okay because it'll be happening again in twelve months' time. I am less apprehensive than I was year ago, but then this coming year I will be committee member with special responsibility for pizza at meetings. We've done this before and it is a role I urge other convention committees to explore.
Except I don't feel that way and it was, I flatter myself, a good convention. I've moaned and grumbled progressively more over the past few weeks to my co-programmer, Ms YR of Sheffield, about programme planning sitting on my back like a monkey, on top of all the rest of my life, but today I am really proud of what we all did. I have a spring in my step and a a sense of accomplishment and, well, completion.
I think that's the best programme I've been involved in since the first time I did it, with Gwyneth Jones as GoH and Nalo Hopkinson and Justina Robson turning up plus NASA scientist Inge Heyer who brought a hundredweight of glossy colour photos from the Hubble. C challenged me: "What about Novacon 40?" but we had more or less every living SF writer in the UK at that (how many conventions can lose Stephen Baxter and shrug it off because the panel still had Hamilton, Grimwood and Stross on it) and I had to shoo Brian Aldiss off stage to get Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen on. It was hard work and a good show - but it isn't the same sort of challenge when Graham Joyce and Chris Evans are content to hang in the bar and that's fine because there's no space for them on the programme anyway. Working with a restricted palette demands more creativity, offers more satisfaction. For me, anyway.
Our science speakers were excellent and I'd like to claim it was the product of meticulous research and hard work on our part, but it was in fact luck, but then my mother always used to maintain it was better to be lucky than rich. From Tony Padilla introducing Schrodinger's Jeremy Clarkson through James Sumner giving us opportunity to adulterate our own beer in the fashion of beer doctors from the 1800s to his Alan Turing talk the following morning that got everybody out of bed, I reckon we put on some damn good stuff.
I always tell science speakers to pitch for an audience who feel Horizon doesn't cut it these days and want something beyond that...
If that's you, you might want to check out -
http://www.sixtysymbols.com/
http://www.numberphile.com/
We even managed a few panels that led to people accusing us of causing them to talk about science fiction in the bar, and I ended up relaxed enough to trundle round to the book room and stock up on some good old SF to pass my next few evenings now I don't have to be checking my e-mails every 30 minutes.
If you were there, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you weren't then that's okay because it'll be happening again in twelve months' time. I am less apprehensive than I was year ago, but then this coming year I will be committee member with special responsibility for pizza at meetings. We've done this before and it is a role I urge other convention committees to explore.