… or like it’s Fantasycon 2011, although there were times when I did wonder what century we were in. Not, I hasten to add, because of the convention itself, but because of the Royal Albion Hotel.

The journey down to Brighton proved a lot less painful than I’d expected. I disembarked from one train at St Pancras, headed down a series of escalators, and got on another. In fact, I caught the train before the one given on my itinerary. And that took me the rest of the way. Then it was short queue for a taxi to the hotel…

… and a long queue to check into the hotel, a queue that actually started outside the hotel on the pavement. It took me an hour before I reached the front. Apparently, the Royal Albion hadn’t opened check-in until three p.m., minutes before I’d arrived. And even after I’d been given my room, I was told it wasn’t ready and I’d have to wait thirty minutes. So I gave it an hour, and it still hadn’t been cleaned when I found it. Which was an adventure all itself. The Royal Albion is a maze, and the room I’d been given was on a secret passage. Sort of. You had to catch the lift to the second floor, turn two corners, enter a side-corridor, then into a stairwell and up a flight, which took you to a short passage with four rooms on it. (Later during the con, I took that stairwell down to the ground floor, hoping to find a shortcut to one of the bars. Instead, I found myself in a short corridor with a single door on it… which was a cupboard.) My room had a view over the beach, which was nice (see below), although when the plastic things holding the curtains to the curtain rail snapped, it made things a little difficult after dark. It was a surprisingly large room, though it was in need of refurbishment. And it’s been a long time since I’ve slept on a single bed, so I nearly fell out of it a couple of times.

The view from my hotel room window

But conventions are not about the places they’re held, and the peculiarities of the Royal Albion certainly didn’t ruin Fantasycon for me. I had an excellent time. I made only one programme item, Ian Whates interviewing GoH Gwyneth Jones. The room was embarrassingly near-empty, but it was like a sauna and that may have been partly to blame. Perhaps a heatwave during the first weekend of October is unusual, but a hotel with little or no air-conditioning must be just as unusual these days. There were times when it was uncomfortable sitting in the bar and seats by open windows were prized. Not that I spent most of the con in the bar…

I went for a wander on the beach on the Saturday morning after breakfast. I grew up in the Middle East so I’m used to beaches of white sand. Brighton’s beach is nothing like that. It also smells slightly unpleasant. Later that day, half of London apparently came to the South Coast and the entire sea-front was heaving. It was the same on Sunday. Again, I’d gone for a wander by the sea after breakfast, this time with Douglas Thompson. We had a good chat about writing and science fiction and space exploration and science as we tromped along the beach.

The beach, early in the morning

The sea-front, later in the afternoon

I also attended Neil Williamson’s reading (it wasn’t me who fell asleep during it), and a couple of book launches: Newcon Press and Eibonvale Press; and the launch of an entire new imprint, Jo Fletcher Books. There were lots of interesting conversations throughout the weekend, with a number of people. I remember one with Gavin Smith and Jaine Fenn in which I explained that sf needed more nuts and bolts and less magical technology. Gav and Jaine (together): well, thanks… A lot of the conversations revolved around writing. With Terry Grimwood and Sarah Newton; and Laura Lam and Harry Markov. At the Newcon Press launch, I chatted to Gwyneth Jones and her husband Peter. When the awards ceremony was taking place, I had an interesting conversation in the bar with Robert Rankin. There were plenty of others I spoke to, as well as others with whom I’d have liked to exchange more than a handful of words.

I was up until 4:30 a.m. on the Saturday – though I wasn’t dancing in the disco – and up at 6:30 for breakfast (which wasn’t actually served until 8 a.m.). How I managed to survive Sunday on only two hours of sleep is a mystery to me. That night I retired earlier at 1:30 a.m. The following morning at breakfast, the restaurant was full of burly men. They were nothing to do with Fantasycon.

I remember Lavie Tidhar ranting on the Saturday morning because he couldn’t get a coffee in the hotel, so we followed directions to a café, The Mock Turtle, and bought drinks there for £1 each. Lavie went back later that morning, and they charged him £1.50. On the Sunday morning, I was incensed because they’d removed all the seating from the lounge in preparation for the banquet. They’d also locked the bar. So there was nowhere sit in the public areas until eleven o’clock. This wasn’t helped by people trying to check out before 10 a.m., as they had been told to on checking-in, only to learn that for the con they didn’t have to check out until 4 p.m.

I ate well in the evenings, but not so well during the days. I took some sandwiches with me in a plastic container with a freezer block. But it was so warm the freezer block thawed during the first day, and the sandwiches were too ripe to eat on the Sunday. On the Friday night, a gang us were led to Mushi Mushi by Dominic Harman, where I had a free meal. They gave me the wrong dish, and so told me it was free; but they took so long to bring the right one that we’d all finished. Saturday night, I ate in the hotel. The food was better than I’d expected. And on Sunday, another group of us – Neil Williamson, Michael Staton, Sam Moffat, Paul Skevington and myself – had an okay Thai meal. We were actually looking for a Lebanese restaurant, but failed to find the one we’d been directed to.

I understand there was a bit of fuss during the British Fantasy Awards ceremony. I didn’t attend at last year’s Fantasycon, and I wasn’t bothering at this one. I spent the ceremony in the bar, as mentioned above. I will say that if people have issues with the results, they need to fix the system, not attack those who won.

I bought remarkably few books – only three, in fact – but I was also given several free ones. The low number is because I’d carted half a dozen books by Gwyneth Jones to the con for her to sign, and I didn’t fancy hauling a suitcase over-filled with books back home.

These are the three I bought: Roy Gray’s chapbook from Pendragon Press, The Joy of Technology; Bloody War by Terry Grimwood from Eibonvale Press; and Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith from Newcon Press.

And these were the freebies. Gavin Smith gave me a copy of War in Heaven, his second novel, only just published. The Immersion Book of SF was given to me by editor/publisher Carmelo Rafala. That’s an ARC from theExaggeratedPress of Douglas Thompson’s Apoidea. It also features my first ever blurb on a book-cover, taken from my Interzone review of Douglas’ Sylvow. Fame at last. Finally, Full Fathom Forty was free to all members of the British Fantasy Society. There were, as usual, some free books in the convention pack goody bag, but I didn’t keep them as they weren’t the sort of fiction I read. But thanks to the above for the freebies – they were books I wanted.

The journey back home was not as painless as the trip there. Five of us caught a taxi to the railway station. We lost one person, who decided she’d sooner spend an hour or two wandering around the town than in Gatwick’s departure lounge. Then the train tickets for two of us proved to be valid only on a specific train… which wasn’t the one myself and Lavie Tidhar were catching. Which had twelve carriages. I don’t recall ever seeing such a long train in the UK before. The ones I normally catch have half a dozen carriages at most, and often only two. I changed trains at East Croydon, and arrived at St Pancras ninety minutes before my train. After getting a bite to eat, I decided to catch an earlier train. Thanks to the amazing fuck-up the Tories made of the railways when they privatised it, such decisions can often prove very expensive. As the train pulled away from the station, the purser pointed out that certain tickets were invalid. I was fairly sure mine was okay, but I had bought it online. Fortunately, it was. But long gone are the days when you can buy a ticket at a reasonable price, and jump on any train to travel to somewhere else in the country. So exactly how has privatising the railways improved things? It’s more expensive, less reliable, less convenient and – not so long ago – less safer. The British railway system is an embarrassment, and we can thank the Tories for that.

So, in all, a good weekend. I met lots of friends, made new ones, had many interesting conversations, bought or was given a handful of interesting books, spoke to my favourite sf author, Gwyneth Jones, and generally had an excellent time. I didn’t see much of Brighton – given the weather, it was packed throughout the weekend – but never mind.

Next year’s Fantasycon is in Corby, and I plan to attend.

I always come home from conventions feeling mentally refreshed but physically drained. It’s the near-constant input of ideas in conversations and programme items. And so too – in part – for alt.fiction in Derby this weekend just gone. This year’s was the fifth alt.fiction, but the first time it has stretched over two days. It was also my fifth alt.fiction, and I thought it worked well as a weekend event.

I am not, I admit, the target market for alt.fiction. It’s the workshops which draw most of those who attend, and they don’t interest me. The general programme is usually of more interest, though being a fan primarily of sf I don’t bother with the fantasy and horror items. Unfortunately, this year the item which appealed most was on at 10:00 am on the Saturday, and I didn’t time my arrival appropriately. One item I did attend was Al Reynolds’ GoH speech. He said at one point during it that, in common with a lot of writers he’s spoken to, he had a period of childhood illness, and it was the enforced inactivity of that which prompted his love of books and reading. I wonder how true that is. It’s certainly not what happened to me. I was ill several times as a kid, with the usual diseases: chicken pox, measles, German measles… But I’d been a voracious reader from a really early age (and before discovering science fiction, it was mostly books about marine mysteries, such as the Marie Celeste).

I dragged Al Reynolds and Keith Brooke along to the raffle, promising them it was worth attending to hear Guy Adams in full flow. I’d seen him MC the raffle at Fantasycon last year, and very entertaining he was. I also won some books. At alt.fiction, the raffle was presented by a double act comprising Guy Adams and Sarah Pinborough; and they were indeed highly entertaining. And I won some books too. A cardboard box full of Angry Robot’s releases to date in 2011, in fact. I gave away several to friends – while the new editions of KW Jeter’s steampunk novels, Infernal Devices and Morlock Night, are very attractive books, I already have earlier editions of both. And some of the fantasy or horror novels simply don’t appeal to me. But Dan Abnett’s Embedded definitely looks like it’s worth reading (I asked him to sign it for me). The other books were: a Kaaron Warren; Guy Adams; the third book of Andy Remic’s Clock Vampires series; a couple of urban fantasies; the second book of Ian Whates’ City of 100 Rows; Aliette de Bodard’s Servant of the Underworld (which I bought at the Eastercon); and some others. I also received a copy of Lavie Tidhar’s The Bookman in my registration pack, but gave that away as I’d bought a copy at the Eastercon.

In the year since the last alt.fiction, the coffee shop / bar in the forum of the QUAD had been refurbished. Before it’d had soft sofas and low tables; now it has 4-seater tables more suited for a coffee shop / restaurant. Unfortunately, this meant that the room now contained only flat surfaces, and so the acoustics were terrible. When the place was full, you could barely hear the person next to you for the background noise. Which, of course, did not stop us talking.

I’m not going to be able to name everyone I spoke to over the weekend, but it was good to catch up with some people I’d not seen for a while, to meet in person for the first time some people I know only online, and to meet people I’ve never met before. I spoke a lot, and some people actually listened to me. I also listened to lots of people speaking. I don’t think the ideas bank was quite as well stoked afterwards as it was at the Eastercon, but then the nature of the conversations at alt.fiction, a writing-oriented convention, are sure to be different anyway. To be honest, it’s only a day later and I can’t remember many of the conversations I had. But they were all good, interesting and enjoyable, and if I was in the habit of name-dropping I’d thank all those I chatted to by name.

I caught the train home on the Sunday evening feeling tired and brain-dead. The following morning, the day felt weirdly silent as I travelled to work – since the previous two days had been so filled with noise and conversation. I don’t think I heard more than a dozen words spoken from the time I awoke until the moment I arrived at the office and sat down at my desk. I think the world will continue to feel strangely quiet for another day or so. Perhaps we should adopt that as a standard of a convention’s success? Certainly, using it alt.fiction can be said to have succeeded very well.

So that was the 2011 Eastercon, Illustrious. It might very well have been a train-wreck – hotel in the middle of nowhere, military sf theme, disorganised programme… – but it actually turned out to be a blast. In a good way, of course.

The train journey there took me less time than I’d expected, so I arrived feeling quite cheered. Registration was a bit of a faff, but never mind. I dumped my bag in my room – which was very nice – and then went looking for friendly faces in the bar. Of which there were many.

And that is where I spent most of the weekend.

As is usually the case, I spent most of the con talking to various people in the bar, both with and without beers. I always tell myself I should go to the programme items – and I always afterwards spot ones I would have liked to have gone to – but… This year, I was on three. The first was cancelled, perhaps because it was scheduled against the BSFA Awards Ceremony. The other two were part of the con’s Women in SF programme stream.

“Women in SF (versus Fantasy)” took place at 10:30 am on the Sunday. I’d been up until 4:30 am the previous night, so I was probably not at my sharpest. I seem to remember it went quite well, however. “Great Women of SF” was late on the Monday afternoon, just before the con ended. It too was good. Kev McVeigh had produced a hand-out listing 150 female writers of sf – based in part on my two meme lists here and here – and the discussion covered many of the authors listed (and a few that had been missed off). Several people asked for the correct spelling of authors and titles, so I’m happy the books we mentioned will be read.

The only other part of a con I visit often is the dealers’ room. This year, I didn’t actually buy that many books. I’ve no idea why. I saw many I wanted. But the ones I bought were…

Among the many people I met over the weekend were Lavie Tidhar, Lauren Beukes and Aliette de Bodard. So of course I bought their books. And they signed them for me.

The Compton is for the collection, and the two Sellings are British SF Masterworks reads.

The Steph Swainston is for this year’s reading challenge. Toiya Kristen Finley is a writer whose fiction I’ve liked a great deal since reading her story in Text: Ur a couple of years ago. The book of reviews by Gary Wolfe will go with other two books I own.

Some more for the British SF Masterworks reading list: Rex Gordon, Kenneth Harker and Charles Eric Maine. I bought Metropolis because I’d not known it had been novelised. The Wells, The World Set Free, amused me as the back-cover blurb praises Wells’ accuracy in predicting the future… including the nuclear war in 1956. Moon Zero Two… well, I like reading novels about pre-Apollo Moon landings.

I can’t remember every conversation I had over the weekend – but most were about writing and science fiction. I recall chatting to Gav Smith and Pete Hamilton – and Pete asked me if I’d reviewed A House in Space by Henry SF Cooper Jr on my Space Books blog. I was somewhat surprised to learn he knew of the blog.

The title of this post comes out of several conversations with the usual suspects – Mike Cobley, Paul Cockburn, Gary Gibson, Andrew J Wilson, Neil Williamson, and newcomer Tracy Berg – from the Glasgow and Edinburgh writers’ groups.

There was apparently a painting in the art show of a woman with unfeasibly large breasts. Tracy pointed out that the weight would prove painful. But not, we suggested, if the implants contained helium. Then the conversation turned silly.

While queuing up for food on the Saturday night, I asked one of the servers if the rogan josh was dairy-free. (It was; it was also not very nice.) Neil asked me if I could drink coconut milk. I pointed out it did not come from coconut cows… which led to a series of extrapolations in which cows lived in palm trees and were eaten by huge coconut cow crabs.

The Flying Eyes refers to a book of the title which had a perfect piece of cover art for Good Show Sir. Foolishly, I didn’t buy it straight away, and someone had beat me to it when I went back to do so.

Others I spoke to included: Paul Cornell (the ageist), Tom Hunter, Ian Mcdonald, Ian R Macleod, Kev McVeigh, Cara Murphy, Roy Gray, Philip Palmer, and my agent John Jarrold. Plus those on the two panels I was on. And probably many more I’ve forgotten to mention. It’s the people who make a con, and they made Illustrious a very good one indeed.

It is in the paradoxical nature of the Eastercon that it physically drains you but creatively recharges you. And so for this one. Talking about stories makes you want to rush away and write them straightaway. It is my theory that the constant barrage of ideas, conversation and beer so stuns you that your brain no longer realises your reach exceeds your grasp. But at least you’re going to have a damn good try.

Of course, I spent the entire weekend handing out Rocket Science flyers to all and sundry. The response was amazingly encouraging. I expect to be bombarded with excellent fiction and non-fiction come August.

I’m very glad I didn’t write-off Illustrious because if its location, theme, or confusions over the programme. I had an excellent weekend, and can’t wait for the next convention.

It occurred to me reading my last post on Fantasycon 2010 that the convention was more than just the hotel and the books I purchased. I spent the weekend in the company of a couple of hundred people, all of whom are interested enough in genre fiction to spend a weekend dedicated to it in a hotel. So I really should mention a few of those people. Unfortunately, my memory is not what it once was – well, obviously, it’s still a memory, but it’s no longer as effective as it once was. Or at least, no longer as effective as memory insists it once was…

I arrived at the con around mid-afternoon – it’s an easy journey for me to Nottingham. There weren’t many people about but after about an hour sat in the bar I spotted my first friendly face: Mark Harding. He admitted he’d been in the hotel since the night before. Over the course of the evening, the bar began to fill with con-goers. I spoke with: Mark about projects we were each working on; Gavin Smith, author of Veteran, about role-playing games, underwater holidays and technical diving; Allen Ashley about Catastrophia and collaborations; Neil Williamson and Andrew Hook and Jasper Kent, author of Twelve and Thirteen Years Later, about writing… and no doubt other subjects, and with other people. See above re memory.

Most of Saturday I spent in the bar and in the dealers’ room. When I wasn’t browsing through the stocks of the various dealers, I was chatting to Roy Gray on the Interzone table. Andy Remic turned up for the day, as did Mark Charan Newton. Andy finally saw my review of Ian Whates’ anthology Conflicts in Interzone. In response to my comment on his story, he asked, “What’s wrong with low humour?” Nothing, Andy. The review of Conflicts generated a couple of conversations over the weekend (that might even be ironic…) – it was interesting seeing how different people preferred different stories. But that’s the nature of anthologies. I also chatted to Colin Harvey, author of Winter Song and Damage Time (which was launched by Angry Robot at Fantasycon; as was Andy’s Soul Stealers), some of the Angry Robot people, Chris Teague of Pendragon Press, Gary Couzens (who’d attended the Worldcon in Melbourne), and a few members of The T-Party, a writing group in London.

After we got back from the Thai restaurant, we waited for the banquet to finish so we could attend the awards ceremony. But we discovered that would mean standing up for the duration as all the seats were taken by those who’d attended the banquet. So we went back to the mostly-deserted bar. Which soon filled up, once the awards ceremony was over. I remember an interesting conversation with Terry Edge about writing workshops and the way in which rules of punctuation are often broken by successful writers. I lasted until about midnight before calling it a day.

The Sunday was a much quieter day and, like the day before, was spent mostly in the bar or dealers’ room. I forget how I spoke to and about what, although I do remember discussing poetry with Gaie Sebold. I’d planned to leave about three p.m., but the raffle took longer than I’d expected, so I didn’t actually catch a train until 4:40 p.m.

That was Fantasycon (redux): a series of conversations on a variety of topics (most were writing-related), some of which were lubricated by beer, some not. I don’t generally attend programme items – I keep promising myself I’ll go to more of them, but I usually fail. Because I enjoy sitting in the bar, chatting to friends and meeting new people.

And buying books, of course…

I spent yesterday, as did a number of other people, at alt.fiction, a one-day genre writing convention in Derby. This was the fourth alt.fiction and the first in a new venue, the QUAD. I had a good day. Chatted to some friends, met some new people. The two programme items that really interested me were unfortunately both scheduled at 10:00 a.m., and I missed the train I’d planned to catch so I arrived too late to attend either. At previous alt.fictions, I’d arrived early, but they’d not opened the doors to the venue until it started, so I wrongly supposed they’d do the same this year. I should have caught a much earlier train. I’ll know better next time.

The various conversations I had were much more about sf and the business of writing sf than is usually the case at conventions. But then that is what alt.fiction is about. I did chat to some people about book reviews, and was a little surprised when someone told me they’d bought James Lovegrove’s The Age of Ra and The Age of Zeus based on my review of the latter in Interzone. I’d not been all that effusive about the book, although Solaris has pulled out the line “Lovegrove has fun with his premise, and he’s not afraid to get in a few digs at the real world” and posted it on their blog here. Perhaps they’ll put it on the next edition. Which would make it my first cover quote.

(I also plugged my review of Bruce Sterling in Interzone 221 several times, and even persuaded a couple of people to buy copies of that issue.)

I had a good talk with Andy Remic and Gavin Smith about the state of the genre. And another about literary mashups with my agent John Jarrold, Jasper Kent and Tony Ballantyne, in which we tried adding “and Zombies” to various literary classics. We also included other supernatural beings. When I jokingly suggested A Christmas Carol and… Ghosts, John pointed out that Adam Roberts had already done something similar. And Jasper admitted that his novels Twelve and Thirteen Years Later are essentially War and Peace and Vampires.

Myself and Mike Cobley, as is traditional when we meet at cons, compared our MP3 player collections. Later, he, myself, Tony Ballantyne, Roy Gray and Jyoti Mishra went to the Slug and Lettuce for dinner. It was nice, but spoiled a bit by these loud rowdy people watching some strange arcane ritual on the televisions scattered throughout the room.

I didn’t buy any books. Which is unusual for me. But then there were no second-hand book sellers in the dealers room, and I’ve pretty much bought most of the new titles I want. Since the TBR pile is already stupidly high, this was not a bad thing.

Other people I spoke to included Ians Whates and Watson, Mark Chitty of Walker of Worlds book blog, Stephen Palmer, Brian Turner of SFF Chronicles, Lee Harris… and I’ve no doubt there were others whose names I’ve forgotten or never learned. And far too many people I never got to actually chat with, although we said hello every time we passed each other.

This year, alt.fiction carried on for much later, but I wasn’t staying overnight in the city. So I caught a train back home, with fellow writing group member Steven Poore, around half past nine. I was home an hour later.

I’ve been to all of the alt.fictions so far, and I’ve enjoyed them. I wasn’t too keen on the QUAD as a venue. The second-floor foyer outside the two cinemas – where the panels items took place – was too small, so people congregated in the café/bar on the ground floor just inside the entrance. Previous alt.fictions took place in the Assembly Rooms, and the bar was in the centre of the function rooms. Besides, I like 1970s Brutalist architecture. Despite that, I certainly plan to attend next year, if there is one.

So that was LX, the 60th British science fiction Eastercon. It took place over the Easter weekend in Bradford. I enjoyed it a great deal more than the previous year’s Eastercon.

I arrived in Bradford around three p.m., and checked into my hotel, the Hilton. The actual con hotel was the Cedar Court Hotel, but this had very few rooms, so most of us attending LX were scattered in other hotels about the city. This proved less than ideal. The Bradford Hilton is a nice hotel, although I spent the entire weekend having to call down to reception for someone to come and open my door since my keycard would never work. By the end of the con, housekeeping knew me quite well, and even the maintenance engineer was greeting me by name when we met in the corridor.

LX laid on a free coach to carry attendees between the hotels. It was supposed to run every thirty minutes, but failed to maintain the schedule. It also didn’t run during the afternoon. So most people ended up using taxis if they needed to return to the hotel in which they were staying. Since the last coach left at midnight, I usually caught it, rather than stay in the bar until the small hours and get a taxi back. I don’t think I missed much, since a lot of others did the same.

As usual I didn’t attend many programme items. I’d intended to, but could never quite work up the enthusiasm. One I did attend was “Classics That Aren’t” on the Friday night. I had to – I was moderating it. On the panel were Rog Peyton, Kev McVeigh and Chris Hill. It went better than I expected. The room was surprisingly full, and afterwards I was told it had been “entertaining”. Rog Peyton wanted to bin the entire oeuvre of Philip K Dick, Kev McVeigh picked Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Chris Hill went for ER Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. Also mentioned were Isaac Asimov, alternate history, Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Dune, and Tolkien.

I also went to the NewCon Press launch for Eric Brown’s Starship Fall, a sequel to his Starship Summer; The Beloved of My Beloved by Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia; and The Gift of Joy, a collection by Ian Whates. I bought signed copies of each of the books.

The BSFA Awards Ceremony on the Saturday evening was entertainingly emceed by Paul J McAuley and Kim Newman. McAuley’s Arthur C Clarke impression probably has to be heard to be believed. Somewhat embarrassingly, Guest of Honour Tim Powers mispronounced Ken MacLeod’s name when announcing the winner of the best novel award.

For the record, the winners were:

• Best artwork: Andy Bigwood, for the cover of Subterfuge
• Best non-fiction: Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn
• Best short story: ‘Exhalation’, Ted Chiang (Eclipse 2)
• Best novel: The Night Sessions, Ken MacLeod

I’d sooner McAuley had won the short story award, but The Night Sessions was my first choice for best novel. Congrats all round.

After the awards ceremony, Eric Brown led a group of some fifteen of us to the Kashmir. He claimed this was the best curry house in Bradford. It was certainly the cheapest. Getting back to the Cedar Court Hotel, however, proved easier said than done, and we walked a fair distance before finding a taxi company. One of the perils of hosting cons in hotels outside city centres….

Sunday was a repeat of Saturday – bimbling about the dealers’ room, and sitting in the bar and chatting to friends. It was a quieter day as some had only attended the con on the Saturday. I sat through half of the programme item on Iron Sky, a Finnish film about Nazis on the Moon. But the room was very warm, and after twenty minutes of reading subtitles, I was nodding off. The film-makers are raising capital by selling “War Bonds” for €50, which includes a DVD containing two documentaries on the making of the film. It was these documentaries which were shown at LX.

That evening was the launch party for Ricardo Pinto’s The Third God, the long-awaited final book in the Stone Dance of the Chameleon trilogy. Ricardo had said beforehand he was nervous and didn’t know what to say – it was the first time he’d done this sort of thing. In the event, he gave a very honest and informative talk for thirty or so minutes on what writing the trilogy had meant to him. I bought a copy and got it signed. (Incidentally, why is The Third God not available from Amazon? Have Transworld pissed them off or something?)

The Cedar Court Hotel was a good venue, although one of the bars tended to clog up with people and make access to the dealers’ room difficult. And the dealers’ room itself wasn’t that large. But the beer was cheap, and the hotel laid on cheap food for much of the day. It’s the first con I can recall where finding something to eat – other than nasty bar sandwiches – was easy.

Cons, of course, are about the people. It was good to catch up with friends, and meet some online friends in the flesh for the first time. And meet new people too, of course. Several people I only saw in passing and never quite caught up with again. Sorry. There were many conversations – some serious, some not so serious. Highlights included Roy Gray and his “disco shower”, Tony Ballantyne and his “step numbers”, Eric Brown telling us about forgotten sf writer Herb Sage, discussing story ideas with Mike Cobley….

In the coach heading for the Cedar Court one morning, I overheard someone mention that they’d been attending Eastercons for twenty years. And it struck me that I wasn’t far off doing the same. My first con was Mexicon 3 in Nottingham in 1989, and my first Eastercon was the following year: Eastcon in Liverpool in 1990. Which is a bit scary. But I certainly plan to keep on going to them.

I spent the weekend in Bradford at LX, the annual UK science fiction Eastercon. Here are some photos. Full report to follow.