Eastercon’d
So Illustrious, the 62nd British National SF convention is done and dusted, and I’m back home, procrastinating and stretching out the nerd buzz from the weekend to the bitter end. I want to thank everyone who came along to my panels, who bought books for me to sign and especially those who came to hear me read some original short fiction (despite the fact a sore throat made me sound somewhat more sexy than usual). I had a great time.
Despite an ill-starred opening (which included programming glitches, torn trousers and other challenges) the watchword for my con experience was “relaxing”. Maybe it was the 30 minute buffer zones the organizers slotted in between each panel, but I never got the usual Worldcon/Eastercon vibe of constantly being in a rush to see something, of only seeing friends in passing in corridors when you were on your way to somewhere they were not.
As well as hanging out with m’colleague Dan Abnett and his lovely missus Nik for a while, I reconnected with my former editor Marc Gascoigne, now master of the machine army at the Angry Robot imprint, as well as hanging out with fellow authors Phillip Palmer, Juliet McKenna, Jaine Fenn, Paul Cornell and GoH David Weber. Shouts going out also to cobrabay , danacea , gaspodex , jonnynexus , ksbpooks , mingmerciless , miniosiris , aeshna_uk , steverogerson and all the other LJ'ers.
Highlights of the weekend included Through A Gunsight Darkly, where I moderated a discussion of SF mirrors of real-world conflicts, panels on audio drama and a brilliant hour extolling the virtues of the Warhammer 40,000 universe with the incomparable Ian Watson. And the real ale bar provided splendid lubricant for the weekend’s events. If I had to reach for anything bad to say about the con, it’d be the glitchy programming of some panels/events - but Illustrious was put together on a comparatively fast turnaround, and given the fun I had, this became a non-issue as the weekend went on. About the only thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was being in the audience on a couple of discussions, where some panellists seemed more interested in being seen to be terribly clever and/or patronizing, rather than actually engaging with the subject...
But in spite of that (or perhaps because of it?) by the end of the con, I was stirred with a renewed love for the kind of SF championed at Illustrious - the kind of old-school epic space opera that first enthused me a reader. So, I had a great time hunting through the bargain-packed dealers room for old novels. One odd thing I noted was that every single table seemed to have a copy of the exact same Pan edition of Brian Stableford’s space opera Halcyon Drift (see right); the great Angus McKie cover would catch the eye of anyone who remembers the TTA art book series. I bought one, a mint-condition copy for the 1976 cover price of 50p, and read it on the trip home, losing myself in cool starships and exotic worlds.
It’s like I never left.