Eastercon report

During the course of the nineties, various people from Helen S, WINttbomkOLJ to rysmiel tried to persuade me to Eastercon. At first, I was not interested, and then I was not able, and by the time I finally was able, I had faffiated and was no longer attending cons.

Then livredor told me Eastercon was in Heathrow this year, and she'd be going, and green_knight said she'd go if I went, so I booked my place, and then both of them pulled out. So I ended up heading off yesterday not sure whom I'd know there, but expecting I would meet several people I knew.

And indeed I did, including autopope, neonchameleon, deborah_c, whom I'd not met before, but recognised from her LJ icon, and Huw W., whom last I saw, in 1999, was being told by papersky to buy the copy of 1066 And All That they'd found on the shelf at that year's Wincon, and being told he'd like it. (Apparently he still hasn't read it, though!) Also, Owen D., whom I haven't seen in a decade or more; and aardvark179, who it turns out had been toying with me the whole time, not letting on that behind that handle was a person I've known for fourteen years. I failed to see Andrew W from my old writers group, but there were the best part of two thousand people there, apparently, so I suppose I'm lucky I saw as many as I did.

Neil Gaiman's GoH speech was most entertaining; he's a good speaker. He included in it readings of a SF short story of his, "Orange", and the first chapter of his new book. autopope's by contrast, whilst well delivered, told me little I didn't know already, having known him for ten years and reading his blog as I do. Still, it was worth it, at the very least, for his description of the most inventive advertising spam ever.^*

* In MMORPGs, people in the likes of China have been spending all day fighting nasties and accumulating treasure, to sell to people in the west too lazy to do the hard work themselves. The problem is they have to advertise their services, and that's spam. They tried spamming chatrooms, and got banned, so some enterprising company created a whole load of gnome characters, positioned them carefully on the landscape, used a hack to teleport them 200 metres into the air, and let them drop onto the landscape, where they went *splat*, creating a dot-matrix image of the goldfarmer company's URL.)

I also attended a panel on Politics in Young Adult Fiction, with panellists including China Miéville (whose name, due to the fact I wasn't paying sufficient attention, I still don't know how to pronounce) and Cory Doctorow. Also a panel on writing medium-term futures, with panellists including autopope, Justina Robson^† and pnh; I'd thought Paul McAuley was on the panel too, but to my disappointment he was the moderator, which meant he refrained, largely, from giving his own opinions.

† Whose writing I may try out again: I read her first novel Silver Screen after meeting her at abovementioned Wincon (and being impressed at the way she carried a pen and paper pad everywhere, ready to take notes of anything that could be used for her writing), but found that, whilst well written, it grabbed me insufficiently for me to go to the effort of reading anything else of hers. But Paul McAuley introduced her as one of the UK's leading hard SF writers, so maybe she's improved with experience.

I also attended a talk on "Myth, History and Dream: Greece and Rome in the Sandman", and a presentation on "Physics Mistakes in SF". (neonchameleon: I should have brought popcorn for this one.)

I would have expected, at an event of this nature, there to be people in unconventional attire. Indeed, on seeing a strikingly-attired girl at the bus station at Heathrow, I felt sufficiently certain that she was heading to Eastercon to go over and make conversation. (Hi, cobweb_diamond.) However, to my surprise, I was the only person I saw there with bright green or similar hair. And indeed, I was rather amused when a couple of teenaged goth girls^‡ were all wowing over my hair and insisted on having their photo taken with me: if the three of us had been walking along the street, I'm sure it would have been their appearance which got heads turning, not mine.

‡ You can't be goth, and giggly. It's just wrong.

At Wincon in 1999, there was a panel item on "Is Fandom Ageing?" At one point, they asked everyone below thirty to put their hand up, and I was the only one who did (zorinth not yet having arrived). However, I saw plenty of evidence of young people at this year's Eastercon. I don't know, though, whether this reflects a change in fandom since, a difference between Eastercon and smaller cons, the fact Eastercon was in London, or the fact I gather Eastercon leaned a bit more towards media-SF (as opposed to literary SF) this year.

Finally, rather to my amusement, I bumped into some Israelis there, and got a little bit of a chance to practise my Hebrew. :o)