Last year, I had every intention of spending a day at Fantasycon. It was only when a friend emailed me on (what I thought was) the Monday before, and asked me how it had gone… I’d got the weekend wrong, and missed the con. This year, I made certain I had the right date. And so, early on the morning of 22 September, I made my way to the railway station to catch a train to Nottingham…

The last time I caught the train to spend the day in a Midlands city was alt.fiction in Derby. My bank ruined that day for me by cancelling my debit card for no good reason (see here). This time it was Central Trains. My train was supposed to arrive in Nottingham at 10:45. It didn’t get in until 12:15. Signals apparently failed just outside Chesterfield, necessitating a wait of 90 minutes until the problem “resolved itself”.

So I wasn’t in too good a mood when I eventually entered the Britannia Hotel. This was the first time I’d attended Fantasycon, but not the first time I’d attended a convention in the Britannia Hotel. That had been nearly 20 years earlier – in 1989, when the hotel was called the Albany. Mexicon 3, my first ever convention. I was living near Nottingham at the time, and so I drove in each day to see what a sf convention was like. I enjoyed it enough that I kept on going to them.

The journey to Nottingham pretty much set the tone for the day. I rarely attend programme items at cons, and hadn’t planned to do so at Fantasycon. I was there to meet up with friends. Unfortunately, none of them were in evidence when I arrived. I had a wander round the dealers’ room, but it was on the small side and consisted almost entirely of small presses. So my book haul was a bit light – Eric Brown’s new novella from PS Publishing, Starship Summer; The Lost Art by Simon Morden; Postscripts issue 10, a thick hardback-book special issue of the magazine; and The Human Abstract by George Mann, published by Telos. Both Simon Morden and George Mann were at the con, so I got them to sign their books for me – well, George’s was already signed, so he just dedicated it.

I chatted with the Solaris gang, who admitted that British cons were now spoiled for them since they’d recently returned from Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Attendance 40,000! Around mid-afternoon, Neil Williamson and Hal Duncan appeared. I spoke to Jetse de Vries of Interzone, although mostly about music – I recommended he give Blind Ego a listen, a band I’d see play live several weekends before and thought he might like. I also had an interesting conversation with Stephane of French publishers Bragelonne.

And that was about it – a couple of wanders about the dealers’ room, a series of conversations in the bar. For lunch, I went into the city centre. There was a farmer’s market on, so I bought something to eat from a stall.

I left the con just after seven o’clock. When I reached the railway station, I discovered there were no trains running back home. A coach was laid on instead. So I spent a couple of hours on a coach, which of course avoided the most direct route, as far as Chesterfield. There, I changed to a double-decker bus because it was leaving twenty minutes before the coach. Oh, and I learnt that it’s difficult to use the toilets on those coaches. Perhaps it’s easier when on a motorway, but on B roads you get thrown about a bit.

Arriving back home, I rang friends who were out in town. They were in a new pub called The Old House. I jumped in a taxi and met them there. The bouncer stopped me as I was entering the pub, and asked me what was in the bag I was carrying. Books, I told him. He gave me a strange look, but let me in.

I didn’t go home until about midnight. It had been a long, and not entirely happy, day. Fantasycon had been a bust for me – not worth the hassle of getting to Nottingham. Perhaps it would have been if Central Trains hadn’t so thoroughly screwed up a simple journey there and back. But there were also less people I knew at the con than I’d expected, and the dealers’ room had been disappointing. I doubt I’ll bother going next year.

Despite buying a new digital camera in January (this one), I’ve yet to get this taking-photographs malarkey sussed out. Here’s the few I did manage to take at Contemplation, this year’s Eastercon.

Back from Chester and Contemplation, the 2007 Eastercon. It was put together as a replacement for the cancelled Liverpool Eastercon. A good con – the organisers did an excellent job. I didn’t, as usual, attend any of the programme items, except for the BSFA Awards – where I watched Ian McDonald hand out one award and receive another, and Jon Courtney Grimwood hand out one award and receive another… Congrats to all the winners.

The hotel was very good too – conveniently laid-out, and the staff friendly and helpful – albeit a tad more expensive than usual. Its location in the centre of Chester was an added bonus. Lots of nice restaurants within walking distance. We ate out every evening and enjoyed some good food. For me, cons are less about the programme than they are a chance to catch up with friends I otherwise wouldn’t see, make new friends, and network. I managed to do all three.

I can’t remember much of the conversations from the weekend – most probably aren’t repeatable, anyway. There was one with Neil Williamson on the voting habits of cats versus dogs, and which were more likely to vote for David Blunkett (I credit cats with too much intelligence to vote for him). There was a discussion on Stingray‘s Marina and whether it should be considered odd to fancy a puppet. (The answer is probably yes. But still, Marina…) I chatted to Ian McDonald about foreign language films and, of course, raved about Divine Intervention. He told me some of the odd-but-interesting facts he’d picked up while doing the research for Brasyl. There was a running joke on book titles for planetary romances set amongst Saturn’s moons (given that we couldn’t remember which were moons of Saturn and which were moons of Jupiter, there was some confusion). It started off relatively sane, with Warriors of Titan and Wizards of Mimas, turned alliterative and a little odd with Courtesans of Callisto, and then completely off-the-wall with Go-Go Dancers of Ganymede and Eunuchs of Europa. Someone asked, what about Io? Obvious, I said, that’ll be Dwarves of Io Io It’s Off To Work We Go… But perhaps you had to be there.

I did quite well on the book-front. Yes, the dealers’ room was smaller than is typical for an Eastercon, but I still managed to pick up some bargains and/or good books, including a signed hardback copy of Michael Swanwick’s Tales of Old Earth; Soundings, a collection of Gary K Wolfe’s reviews from Locus; a couple of small press titles by friends – Chris Beckett’s The Holy Machine and Gary Couzens’ Second Contact, each of whom signed their book for me; a few cheap Moorcock paperbacks (City of the Beasts I’ve now read and it’s rubbish); Lin Carter’s Down to a Sunless Sea (read this too and it’s even worse than the Moorcock); a Moomin paperback by Tove Jansson (it’s for children, but it’s a damned sight better written than most adults’ books – the first line is “I, Moominpappa, am sitting tonight by my window gazing into my garden, where the fireflies embroider their mysterious signs on the velvet dark”; you won’t find lines like that in Steven Erikson, George RR Martin or Jennings Goes to Wizard School…); Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys (the alien artefact is the most interesting thing in the novel, but Budrys seems more keen on bad psycho-analyses of his characters). I did buy a Leigh Brackett Ace double, The Secret of Sinharat / People of the Talisman, only to discover that both stories are in Sea-Kings of Mars, which I already have. So I sold it to Eric Brown for a pint. Which was more than the book cost.

I didn’t get that much sleep during the con – heading off to bed after one a.m. most nights, and up at seven o’clock the next morning. Saturday night wasn’t helped by some evangelicals singing Hallelujah outside the back of the hotel at 2:00 a.m. At first, I assumed they were just pissed-up drinkers on their way home. Then I realised they were harmonising a little too well. And then I heard the tambourine…

Although there were times when Contemplation felt a bit like a two-day con stretched out over three days, I had a very enjoyable time. A pleasant hotel, convivial atmosphere, good (if occasionally surreal) conversation, and a chance to catch up with people you haven’t seen since the last Eastercon. Good stuff.