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.
