purplecat

As mentioned in my previous post the Eastercon hotel was rather over-priced for what it was. That's not to say think many of the complaints being posted on various Eastercon communities are particularly realistic but I've stayed in a lot of hotels over the years, and I've stayed in a lot of "conference" hotels over the years and the basic standard of the rooms and the food in the Hilton Metropole didn't justify the prices they were charging. They weren't bad, by a long shot, but they weren't £100 per night and £10 per pint good either. The staff, on the other hand, were very good and the actual convention space was excellent.

In the end we skipped "How to Build a Nerf Gun" on Saturday because we figured it was probably primarily aimed at kids and went to Marcus Rowland's talk on War in Victorian Science Fiction. It was a fascinating talk, marred slightly by a few technical matters, in which he looked at the various appearances of military engagements in these early stories and their tendency to present one side as overwhelmingly superior to the other, with relatively few instances of wars being waged between equals. He showcased in particular a fascinatingly batty story in which plucky British anarchists end up running the world and fighting the combined forces of the Tsarist Romanov heirs and the Muslim Caliphate. I'm still mentally grappling with the concept of anarchists running the world and indulging in large infrastructure projects (such as building bunkers to protect the population against meteorite strikes). I'll plug Marcus' web site here. I've not explored it properly but it would appear to be a gold mine if you want to actually read some Victorian SF.

In the afternoon we attended the excellent George Hay Lecture by Dave Clements on the work of the Herschel space telescope. After the disappointments of the Science programme at Eastercon 2010 we were much more impressed with the bits of it we attended here, though I think we also chose our sessions more carefully. This was a very accessible talk on the work of the space telescope, and I even got a free fridge magnet!!!

We then went to a panel session on Infrastructure in SF which was interested in which SF predictions haven't been realised and why. Probably the most interesting thing about this panel, to be honest, was the difference a well-prepared panelist can make. Simon Morden had clearly bothered to do his legwork, prior to the panel, coming up with a list of predicted technology and looking into whether they were possible with current understanding, almost possible, or just scientifically miles away. Pretty much everything someone raised he had an answer for whether the failing was in political will/organisation or science. He was also an entertaining speaker, and kept extolling the benefits of "command economies" (at least if you want big SF-style infrastructure) and pretty much ended up declaring we needed a global dictatorship if we were ever going to have a space elevator.

In the evening B and I headed for the games room. Having extolled the virtues of the layout of the convention rooms, I do have to say that the games room was less well placed this year, being tucked away and reducing the chances that someone might just wander past and join in. B. and I picked, at random, what turned out to be a very entertaining game, in which you had to pile misfortune on your own characters until they met an untimely demise and you could harvest their lack of self-esteem while simultaneously doing nice things to your opponent's characters. The rules encouraged you to tell a story while doing this to explain precisely why the brain in a vat was terrified by topiary. After a couple of games we were joined by several random teenagers for a group game which took about five times as long as the one we'd been playing together. It would seem that age allows you to decide much more rapidly how you intend to play your cards.

On Sunday morning B went off to Tai Chi while I joined lil_shepherd and inamac for the fanfiction panel. This was notionally going to talk about the outsider's view on fanfic but that was clearly never going to happen and the panel was content to happily chat about writing fanfic and interacting with fanfic communities. I felt it was much better than last year's panel, though whether that was through a better choice of panelists, the earlier time slot, or the removal of the emphasis particularly on slash, I couldn't say.

We stuck to the main lecture hall for most of Sunday afternoon with "Space Art v SF Art" which would probably have been more interesting if we were more informed about art, and if the panellists had been interested in treating the topic as a springboard for discussion, rather than simply complaining that they didn't like being set up in opposition. "Through a Gunsight Darkly" was vaguely billed as a discussion on how SF allegorises current conflicts but turned into a more wide-ranging discussion of the nature of various conflicts, the differing perspectives of the military, the politicians and the general population and the extent to which these have been explored in SF. Once again the panel was improved by the presence of one clearly very knowledgeable (or at least opinionated) panellist, in this case novelist David Weber who had some very interesting things to say about politicians' tendencies not to formulate an "end game" in advance and so have no real idea how long a conflict may last, what resources are actually needed or even how they will tell when it's over. Lastly we went to the BSFA lecture on "Prolegomena to a Steampunk Catullus: Classics and SF". I thought this was a fascinating talk by classist Gideon Nisbet though B, sitting next to me, kept muttering about classicists reading from their notes instead of talking freeform. As a talk it wasn't terribly focused but it covered several interesting topics such as how Nisbet's own hobbyist interest in Comics and, broadly speaking, story-telling mixed media and narratives that are not necessarily linear, helped him in interpreting papyri which were fragmentary and combined both pictures and writing. It then drifted into the different perceptions of the presentation of classical topics in the media from hobbyist and professional classicists. Nisbet seemed to feel that professional classicists had a much less rigid notion of what constituted a "correct" presentation that was rooted in an awareness of how few actual facts there were and how rapidly the academic consensus on a topic changed compared to the "lay" consensus as presented through school textbooks and the like. He also mentioned, in passing - and harking back to my previous post about Steampunk - a writer (Lucian, I think) who is generally considered to have been writing speculative fiction in ancient Rome.

We also spent a fair bit of time on Sunday just hanging around in the dealers' room and the fan lounge chatting to people, including John Naylor, one of the founders of Fools and Heroes, who now runs the Victorian Steampunk Society which he combines with professional work providing props to TV companies. He and B. were able to swap war stories on the vagaries of TV production.

In the evening we went to the Admiralty Ball. We were both in costume, mine worked up from a Simplicity pattern and B's purchased from eBay. He got quite a bit of comment on how it was both modern and genuine, though people didn't seem to mind. It's a Warrant Officer uniform and now I've informed him that Benton eventually got promoted to Warrant Officer he's thinking of getting a UNIT beret to go with it. I have a couple of photos. The one of both of us I've snerched from Lil's flickr stream (I hope she doesn't mind!).