Eastercon: Odyssey 2010

I’m back from my first full Eastercon, and what an experience it was. For those who don’t know, Eastercon (to borrow an idea from Gareth L. Powell) is something like a Glastonbury Festival for science fiction, only in a hotel. Probably, no two attendees experience quite the same thing, as an Eastercon can seem less like one event than an amalgamation of four or five different ones. But there are programmed items of various kinds (such as panel discussions, talks, and workshops), mixed in with plenty of socialising.

It was great to catch up with old friends (Nick, Gary, Tony, and everyone else) and meet new ones. There was quite a lot of meeting new people, including those I already knew from online, some I knew of but hadn’t interacted with personally, and others I hadn’t known in any capacity — but I am glad to have met them all. In alphabetical order: Liz Batty, Claire Brialey, Nic Clarke, Niall Harrison, John Jarrold, Gareth D. Jones, Caroline Mullan, Abigail Nussbaum, Alison Page, Paul Graham Raven. And I know there were other people there I know online whom I didn’t get a chance to meet — some other time, hopefully.

Though I’ve been to other conventions before, this was the first where I was a participant — in Niall’s panel on the conlcusion to the BSFA survey, along with Claire, John, and Caroline. Naturally, I was nervous to begin with, but in the end I rather enjoyed it, and now like the idea of doing another one. I’m not going to attempt to summarise what we discussed; Niall intends to post a transcript in the near future — I hope you’ll find it interesting.

Other events I attended included: various panels on topics such as reviewing, anthologies, the Clarke Award (whose consensus was that The City & the City should win), grammar (the most heated of all discussions to which I went), and the definition of ‘mainstream’ (which is likely to inspire a separate blog post from me); an apple-tasting workshop (from which I conclude that, indeed, apples do not all taste the same; a gig by Mitch Benn (‘this is the closest I get to a homecoming gig’), and the BSFA awards (congratulations to all the winners, but particularly to Nick Lowe, who won for his Interzone film column — great to see that being recognised). [EDIT, 9.20pm: Somehow I omitted to mention Ben Goldacre‘s excellent talk on bad science. Consider that rectified!]

One of the things that sets conventions like Eastercon apart from other kinds of literary festival is that authors (including the Guests of Honour) are as much a part of the crowd as anyone else — which means you never quite know whom you’ll encounter, or how. I had a couple of those surprising moments: looking through the Dealers’ Room, I came to the TTA Press stall, where I saw a copy of Marcher by Chris Beckett. I very much enjoyed his story collection The Turing Test last year, so I decided to buy the novel — and did a double-take when I realised that the person currently staffing the stall was Beckett himself.

But my biggest surprise of the convention came when I went to the launch of Jetse de Vries’ new anthology, Shine — and Alastair Reynolds (who was a Guest of Honour) walked up to me and said, ‘You’re David, you just reviewed Terminal World, didn’t you?’ I didn’t expect that to happen…

So, I returned from Eastercon having had a great weekend, with many more books than I intended (this has been the case with every sf/fantasy convention I’ve been to), and looking forward to next year’s. My thanks to everyone involved in Odyssey for all their hard work in staging the event.