My first Eastercon

[andrewducker]

I have been advised by one much older more experienced than I that it is a classic mistake to spend the opening 17 pages of one’s con report discussing the various modes of travel one used to get to it. I shall therefore, in the interests of narrative tension, leave this a mystery, and you can fill in the blanks yourself, thus making the whole enterprise sound much more exciting. I shall, in fact, only mention that during my travels I was, at one point, positioned outside a large blue police telephone box…

In any event, due to green_amber having the final class in her screen-writing course on the Thursday evening prior to the con I was forced to shake her more than is usual in order to waken her from her drunken slumbers. This had a bit of a knock-on effect on the rest of our day, meaning that we arrived at the con in a somewhat bedraggled state and collapsed exhaustedly in our room - rather nice, reasonably large and with a mirror over the bed (for some reason only at the head end - an interesting design choice as it enables you to tell that you have bed hair without having to leave the bed, but not much else).

I then lay on the bed, poring over the readme much to green_amber's disgust, as she steadfastly maintained that nobody came to a con to actually see anything – the whole point was drunken 3am conversations and the occasional swim. I continued to mark discussion panels with my pen, making such loud oohing and aahing noises that eventually she was enticed to fish her own copy from her plastic con-bag and see what all the fuss was about. Needless to say she was shortly thereafter gleefully ticking things off and moaning about how the Alan Moore panel “Vendetta Against the Marvellous Watchmen” clashed with “From Trajan to Trigan – Roman proto-comics” panel. We had, in fact, just missed a fantastic panel on Dystopias, so we decided to stagger downstairs and see who was available for general conversation.

We almost instantly bumped into Caroline Mullan, who had invited us out for tapas later in the evening. We were instructed to make our own way there, as she had sensibly decided against organising anything more than a table for us, so we hastily tracked down drflickta and bullied them into giving they offered us a lift. I’ll skip over the meal, except to say that it was delicious, and there was so much of it that it didn’t matter that I don’t eat mussels or sardines.

green_amber then headed roomwards to perform her infamous heap impression and I wandered to see the Obscene Just-A-Minute panel, which was amusing, but would have been more so if the players had been punished for deviating from obscenity. As it was they descended into meta-silliness that was mildly amusing, but not _as_ amusing as I had hoped. I settled for a photo of flickgc in something vaguely black and transparent before performing my own heap impression.

The following morning I got up in time for breakfast, an act which didn’t so much inspire green_amber to astonishment as provoke a series of grunts and a burrowing motion. The breakfast was passable and I chatted amiably about I.D. cards and passports for a while before snagging some fried bread and croissants to take back to the inert lump in the room. I then headed back to take in “The Medium and The Message”, on film versions of SF novels. green_amber even came too (albeit ten minutes late, and a good three minutes after I’d given up on her and given her seat to a random fan). I had intended to take issue with the con-guide’s description of Starship Troopers as a failure but was sadly prevented from doing so when the panel members got in there first. The panel was a complete success, very entertaining and Richard Morgan held his own admirably with some very cogent points (If you haven’t read Altered Carbon then I highly recommend you pick it up – it’s noir SF without being cyberpunk – largely by dint of not being either as druggy as Neuromancer nor so obsessed with cyberspace).

Sadly, shortly after this we had to abandon the convention and head Birmingham-wards – we’d booked tickets for Cirque Du Soleil without realising that (a) Dr Who would be on while we were out and (b) Railtrack had decided that the middle of a bank-holiday weekend was the perfect time to tear up all the tracks between Hinkley and Birmingham. I’ll elide the transport details, but they consisted of Taxi, Bus, Train, Taxi, Circus, Bus, Bus, Train and Taxi, taking in Nuneaton, Coventry, Birmingham, a mini-Vegas just outside Birmingham and far too many little roads. All of which would have driven me into a fury if the actual performance hadn’t been amazing. When I informed green_amber that there would be jugglers, clowns and mimes, the look on her face would best be described as crestfallen, but these were to most people’s conceptions of jugglers, clowns and mimes as the finest wines are to the remains of a stomped-upon grape. We were held completely in awe for the entire two and a half hours not just by the aforementioned performers but by the most incredible acrobats I’ve ever seen. Having stared, open-mouthed as they flew through the air, I can happily state that Zhang Yimou could have saved a fortune on wires if he’d had a word with Cirque’s performers.

We arrived back to hear everyone talking about how marvellous Dr Who was (everyone, that is, over the age of 30 or under the age of 10 – a few young-uns were seen wandering the halls shaking their heads and mumbling “I don’t understand what all the fuss is about.”) and having missed the BSFA awards (River of Gods won – I’ll add it to my list) I peeled off towards “Moral Relativism in a Heroic Tradition” while green_amber decided that getting ready for the James Bond Casino evening was more important. The panel was sadly a tad disappointing, with the panellists all sticking firmly to the Greek definition of hero (violent person capable of smiting armies due to being blessed by the Gods) and thus ignoring any modern usage of the word at all. As this is almost entirely not how it’s used in SF I thought this was a tad pointless, but I did, at least manage to throw a spanner in the works by suggesting that Ghandi would be considered heroic by most people in the audience (murmur of agreement from the audience) but didn’t fit any of the ways the panel was talking about them.

Then on to the casino, where flickgc volunteered me as a card dealer (luckily someone else had got in first), I made a fair amount of chips, green_amber lost half of them for me, and I then lost the rest (thankfully, all in a good cause, and not too expensive either). We then retired to a room party, full of people like lproven, whotheheckami and the_mendicant, where we indulged in (elided) and (censored) until 3am (or 4am, as the clocks had gone forward) and then fell face-first into the mattress.

We were woken briefly at 10am by the arrival of room service, green_amber having insisted on drunkenly filling in the form for full brekkie the night before. We stuffed our faces (without really attaining anything you might actually call consciousness), vaguely attempted to rehydrate with the aid of the orange juice and then fell unconscious again until 1 in the afternoon. Only later did green_amber realise she had in fact eaten breakfast not only naked but without her glasses on, which possibly explained why she had spent ten minutes trying to pour tea out of a pot whose spout had been firmly sealed with cling film. The rest of the day was spent largely in a daze, ending up in “The Hero as Villain” for 10 minutes before deciding it was largely a re-run of the previous day’s “Morally Ambiguous Heroes” panel and heading to the Hitchhiker’s Guide Remake discussion, which was sadly so full that not only was it standing room only but three people were watching through the doorway. At which point I retired disconsolately to the bar, where I was informed that I was going out for Chinese with Anne Wilson and Mike Abbott – which cheered me up no end, Mike’s penchant for bad puns being on the same scale as mine.

Before that, however, was a repeat of Dr Who on BBC3, where I finally got to see Christopher Ecclestone give the Autons a jolly good thrashing (7/10 for being a good update of Dr Who – 3 points knocked off for still being Dr Who and aimed squarely at the 8-14 year olds). I then dashed down to inform Mike & Anne that green_amber considered “quarter to eight” a somewhat fluid time and was just drying her hair post-swim. Fortunately we arrived in fairly good time, the food was delicious and there was enough to kill a small elephant. There was another room party, this time with many long-time con-goers (tamaranth, gummitch, swisstone and ladymoonray, bugshaw and major_clanger), who then proceeded to put the world (and future cons) to rights over several glasses of wine, a task I left them to shortly after midnight.

Monday was the final day of the con – and this time we actually woke up slightly before breakfast arrived (although I think the two girls who brought the food would have preferred me to have managed more than a towel when opening the door to let them in). I then packed swiftly and left green_amber to maneouver her 17 changes of clothing into a teeny tiny suitcase while I dropped off my bag and attempted to persuade various people in the lobby that “Marketing: A Mirror for Observers” would be a fascinating panel – which it in fact turned out to be, being a look at the way that characters and stories are reinvented at different times for different audiences, so that, for instance, our Battlestar Galactica is not the 80s one. Being a comics fan, I was used to someone reinventing a franchise every few years and the general consensus seemed to be that it didn’t matter if the basic idea was stolen so long as something good was done with it.

We then retired to something that I have been assured is called ‘outside’ where both the lighting and the air-conditioning had been turned up far too high. The hotel had, by this time, run almost entirely out of food (probably a good thing, by all accounts), so we ate bags of Quavers, read green_amber’s ancient 80s fanzines (which she’d plucked triumphantly from an abandoned slagheap in the dealer’s room) and watched wandering ducks until I went in for my final panel (the Alan Moore one mentioned 73 paragraphs previously) with Mike – determined to heckle them for not inviting either of us onto the panel. In fact the panel was pretty good, with some nice discussion over which bits of Alan Moore different people preferred (green_amber raising the general erudition levels with her battle-cry of “Too po-mo!”). green_amber then dragged Richard Morgan bodily into the bar, where she discovered that they’d both worked at Strathclyde University and shared a hatred for the bureaucracy of academia. This kept them going until I had to drag her away to catch trains, planes and buses back to sunny Edinburgh, where it was, of course, raining.

Next up WorldCon – which is, of course, a lot closer, praise be to Doc Smith.

Comments

Sounds like a good time, anyway

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

...it is a classic mistake to spend the opening 17 pages of one’s con report discussing the various modes of travel one used to get to it.

True. OTOH, one can rationalize almost anything in a trip report, including that, by pointing out that it's a fine fannish tradition to discuss it. (Not that that will prevent Connie from giving you grief about it, but it's one possible response to any criticism.)

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

What exactly is this report for?


And 17 pages....1800 words.....what font size are you using!

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

(If you haven’t read Altered Carbon then I highly recommend you pick it up – it’s noir SF without being cyberpunk – largely by dint of not being either as druggy as Neuromancer nor so obsessed with cyberspace).


Pretty good, though the central premise is rather silly, scientifically speaking. If you suspend the right amount of disbelief, though, it's an entertaining enough read.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

the central premise is rather silly, scientifically speaking

though I must add that as a plot device, and a vehicle for musings on this and that, it is pretty good (if not exactly earth-shatteringly startling, or original).

[andrewducker]

a) Anyone who was either at Eastercon or wants to know what I got up to at Eastercon...

b) hyperbole old chap...

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

a ) Ooh, yes, of course, *reads*

b ) I know, I jest, dear fellow :P.