Convention Reporter

Thanks to a malfunctioning computer I was unable to blog properly from the final two days of Eastercon. Here’s a belated report on those days.

Sunday was filled mainly with panic as I needed working hardware and good Internet access for the various program items I was reporting live from. I did take time out, however, to attend a panel on European SF. This was the second of two such panels. I wrote about them on the translation awards web site.

I reluctantly skipped Mike Carey’s GoH interview (conducted by Paul Cornell) to mess with computers, during which time I did at least confirm that the netbook would work fine with an external screen. That wasn’t much consolation on the day though. Thankfully the hotel had a good supply of power points and I was able to cover the BSFA Awards live using my laptop. You can replay that coverage here. The award winners are listed here.

Thankfully the award ceremony did not take too long, and I was able to get to the Virtual Conventions panel in good time. I wasn’t able to get the laptop connected in that room, but much to my delight I managed to run the Cover It Live session on my iPhone using the public mobile phone network. You can replay that here, and listen to Jim Mowatt’s audio recording of the panel here. I was particularly pleased to see a number of people attending the panel in Second Life, where they were able to watch the coverage on a virtual “big screen”. Here are a bunch of avatars doing just that:

Many thanks to Bill, Spike and Glenn for helping this to happen.

Thanks are also due to Mitch Benn whose live concert drew most of the Eastercon audience off the hotel Internet for the evening and allowed me to get the laptop up and running in good time for the live webcast of the Hugo Nominees announcement. I even had time to record a short interview for Star Ship Sofa, which you can listen to here.

The announcement event was, I think, a great success. The room was packed by the end of the panel, though it did take a while for people to file in after the concert finished. We had 140 people online during the coverage, including many nominees, and a further 61 people have watched the replay. Although it won’t always make sense to have this announcement at Easter, and the next three are liable to take place in the US in meat space, I’m very much hoping that this becomes a regular feature of the fannish year. Many thanks to Vincent Docherty and his team for making it happen.

Star Ship Sofa did a broadcast with a bunch of guests watching the nominee announcements as they went live. You can listen to that here. I got a real buzz out of listening to them commenting on my coverage.

Monday saw my final panel of the weekend: I got to moderate a panel that included Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod. This was about the use of dialect in literature, and the consequences for the accessibility of books. None of the panel really wanted to talk about accessibility, and we spent a lot of the time talking about writing in Scots. With Iain and Ken on board, that was a lot of fun.

I did also attend a panel that Paul Cornell did on religion in science fiction. That was very interesting, and I was lucky enough to have a god speak to me through the Internet during the panel. Fluff Cthulhu tweeted me from Tokyo (he, Feòrag and Charlie Stross are guests at Hal-con this weekend).

There was a dead dog party, but I flaked and got some sleep instead.

Overall I thought it was an excellent convention. I’m sure a few things did go wrong, but I didn’t notice anything serious. The thing that concerned me most was the venue. In many ways it is ideal for an Eastercon. It is a nice space, and very easy to get to both from the M4 and central London. The Heathrow location is ideal for bringing in members from the continent and from across the Atlantic. However, with almost 1400 people in attendance it was starting to get quite crowded. I understand that the same venue will be used in 2012, when George R.R. Martin is due to attend. That could cause major crowd control issues.

Also the hotel food is pretty bad. I only ate in the restaurant once — for breakfast with Anne Murphy on Tuesday morning — and that was bearable. The “buffet” food laid on for con attendees, however, was awful, and by Monday I took to eating in the next-door McDonalds instead because the food was so much better.

The good news is that there are reasonable restaurants within walking distance of the hotel, you just can’t see them from the front door. There’s also a Starbucks in the nearby Sheraton. So it is possible to eat tolerably well.

Crowding, on the other hand, is hard to fix. The con staff did an excellent job of putting up signs encouraging people to do one way flows, not block passages and so on. No amount of signage, however, can fix narrow corridors, and looking at the hotel web site I think the largest room only holds 700 people. A London Eastercon ought to be able to attract 2,000 attendees, and the Radisson is too small for that.

Here are some Eastercon reports from around the blogosphere:

• Danie Ware thinks that fandom has gone digital
• Christian Sauvé reports en Français
• Jim Mowatt has a recording of the Virtual Conventions panel…
• … and a bunch more audio coverage
• Paul McAuley had a great time
• As did Spinks, for whom it was a first convention
• Aliette de Bodard also enjoyed herself
• Al Reynolds was delighted at how busy it was
• Mark Charan Newton met lots of people
• MD Lachlan did martial arts
• Nukapai has a lot of panel reports
• Billy has an extensive write-up of the whisky tasting
• There are some excellent steampunk costume photos here
• WordPunk Radio has more audio coverage

And that only scratches the surface of a very well-blogged and tweeted convention.

Goodness only knows why convention committees have programming at 9:00am, especially if they know that most people will be in the bar until very late. The panel item in question was on Welsh language science fiction, which I will admit is a minority interest, but given that Al Reynolds, Liz Williams and Fran Dowd are all Guests of Honour here, it was a very apposite subject. Most Welsh people who are involved in SF, of course, do not speak the language. Many of us grew up in a time when speaking it was still officially frowned upon. But Welsh science fiction does exist and I get a little annoyed with people saying that it all started with the new Doctor Who.

But I am getting head of myself. I have last night to report upon. First up I attended a panel on podcasting. That went very well, and several of us used the hashtag #easterpod on Twitter to report on the panel and carry on a backchannel conversation. If you search Twitter for that hashtag you should get a good sense of the panel.

The panel on alternate sexualities, where I substituted for Farah Mendlesohn, also went well, though it suffered a bit from the classic BritFan disease of wanting to focus on the negative rather than find anything positive to say. We got a lot of useful contributions from the audience.

The big news of the evening, however, was the announcement of the chosen site for the UK in 2014 Worldcon bid. It will, as widely expected, be London, and the reaction in the blogosphere has been very positive thus far. The bid will be chaired by Steve Cooper and Mike Scott. There web site is here. And the venue will be the Excel Centre, which I have included a map reference to below. The Excel is already home to a 35,000 person annual comics convention, so it has plenty of space. It would be great to fill it. I’m hoping to bag an interview with Mike and/or Steve later in the weekend for podcasting on Star Ship Sofa.

Close

Minicon 45 in the Twin Cities this year and the guest of Honour is Brandon Sanderson who can be found on twitter as BrandonSandrson and online as http://www.brandonsanderson.com/ .His first panel should be about now. The Guest Artist is Dan Dos Santos who can be found at www.dandossantos.com
The Minicon has its own twitter feed @minicon

Norwescon is in Seattle where Cory Doctorow is one of the Guests of Honour. His program is up at his website craphound.com and he will be reporting his activities at that event. His twitter is @doctorow. The opening ceremonies were held yesterday and apparently much hilarity was had.

Mary Robinette Kowal is also at Norwescon and gives her schedule on her journal. We’ll make sure you see her updates on events as they happen. You can also get her on twitter where she is @MaryRobinette.

Kevin and Cheryl have brought you the latest from Eastercon in the UK. Once we have updates for WonderCon in San Francisco, and Swancon in Perth, Australia we will bring you those.

Don’t forget you can get the links to the live coverage here

Some people are now starting to blog about the convention. You may have seen Karen Wester Newton as she is on our reporter list, but you might also check out J.A. Pitts, Matthew Kressel and Alan deNiro.

Karen Wester Newton writes science fiction and fantasy stories. Like many writers, Karen read a lot as a child. She was born in Honolulu, the third child of a U.S. Navy officer and his wife. After a peripatetic and bicoastal childhood as a Navy brat, she later became a teacher, a librarian, a project manager, a wife, and a mother, although not in that order.

She currently lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC. Her day job is being an IT manager at a legal publishing company. She is a long-time and active member of The Writer’s Group from Hell, a surprisingly fun and helpful bunch of readers, writers, and critiquers. She often attends conventions such as Capclave, Philcon, Balticon, Worldcon and the World Fantasy Convention.

Karen is represented by Susan Gleason of the Susan Gleason Literary Agency.

See Karen’s reports here.

Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2009 novels are Green from Tor Books, Madness of Flowers from Night Shade Books, and Death of a Starship from MonkeyBrain Books. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

See Jay’s reports here.

Sue Mohn (aka “Twilight” in the world of fandom) has been an con attending fan sine 1987. She’s worked on Worldcons from New Orleans to San Jose, as well as the occasional Baycon, Orycon, a NASFIC and regularly on Foolscap. From ops to masquerades to guest wrangling (from writers to editors to artists), she’s dealt with cons at all levels. She’s run smaller dealer’s rooms, worked on programming at various levels and even done press liaison work.

Susan’s blog can be found on Live Journal on the name “Twilight2000” and she Twitters under the same name. You can find her game strategy discussions on Gamegrene as well. She’s also working on getting her first fiction publication credits.

As one of our editors, Sue will be keeping an eye on the site from home so that our field reporters don’t have to.

I’m an Irish woman, Writers groupie, Gamer & sf fan. I went to my first convention just a few years ago and discovered a world filled with people who are like me. Oh, we disagree about lots of things but we can talk about that for hours.

As one of our editors, Kate will be keeping an eye on the site from home so that our field reporters don’t have to. She’s in Western Europe so she’ll be up a few hours before the convention.

Rani Graff is an editor and a publisher of Science Fiction & Fantasy in Tel Aviv, Israel. He is the head of Graff Publishing, a small press founded by him in 2004. Among the authors published in Hebrew by Graff one may find Robert Charles Wilson, Cory Doctorow, Jay Lake, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfeld, Chris Roberson, Carol Berg, Diana Wynne Jones, George Mann, Naomi Novik, Geoff Ryman, Elizabeth Moon, Rick Riordan, Mark Twain and many others.

Before founding Graff Publishing , and while working as a lawyer and a content manager for a Hi Tech company Rani was also active in the Israeli fan community and during that time was the second chairman of the Geffen Awards between 2001-2003. He is also responsible for writing the awards’ first set of rules.

See Rani’s reports here.