Eastercon 2010 Report

This year's Eastercon, the 61st British National Science-Fiction Convention (aka Odyssey 2010), was held at Heathrow in London. It was my first proper science-fiction convention, apart from a few GenCons (now sadly demised) which were basically just gaming events.

Eastercon can trace its roots right back to 1948 and since then different groups have bid to run it each year. This means it moves around quite a lot, with one venue sometimes becoming a favourite for a few years before the whole thing changes. The advantage of this system is that if one team does a good job organising it they are more likely to win the bid for other years, and vice versa.

The first problem for me was that, due to the not inconsiderable expense of going to one of these things, I was going on my own; nobody I knew was willing to shell out the £200 plus for a ticket and accommodation. I have occasionally gone to GenCon on my own, but haven't really minded as the nature of games means that you quickly meet up with people, or groups of people, who you like and get along with. I also know a few people in the gaming community, especially a few of the London clubs, but for some reason at Eastercon this didn't happen and I was faced with a whole new gang of strangers.

I have often wondered what type of people go to Science-Fiction conventions and so watched and listened to a few groups in the various activities with interest. It seemed like most of them were exactly the kind of stereotype you would expect. In fact, if you were to draw a Venn diagram and add the sets 'Overweight' 'Male' 'White' 'Bearded' and 'I.T. Professional', you would find about 85% of the attendees right in the middle, with the other 10% in four out of five of these categories. (ie. Overweight, Female, White, I.T. Professionals.)

The programme for the 5 day event wasn't as limited as this demographic might suggest though. Topics as wide ranging as 'World-building', 'Towel Origami', 'Writing Video Games' and (most controversially) 'Rope Bondage' were all on the list of events. In fact, for me this illustrated the other main problem for the con; there was just too damn much going on. At any one time there were anything up to eight events running simultaneously throughout the hotel and the venue's layout was such that most of it happened in function rooms tucked away down narrow corridors where you would never find them if you didn't know they were there. To give you some idea of just how much was going on at once, even though there were in excess of 1,300 people attending you never saw more than about 50 at a time, the others presumably being hidden away in hundreds of tiny rooms. (Er, actually that's what a hotel is right?) Just finding an event was exhausting, pushing through groups of people up or down stairs, so that after about half a day I felt too worn out to care whether I wanted to miss 'Information Decay' in order to see 'the Physics of Weapons' and simply retired to the games room (where I was happiest.)

The hotel, the Radisson Edwardian, being right next door to Heathrow airport, was extraordinarily 'posh'. I did feel more than a little out of place simply walking through the wood-panelled hallways and along marbled corridors. This place felt 'expensive' and under normal circumstances I think I would have been skilfully intercepted about 20 metres from the entrance and politely but firmly thrown back out onto the street. 

The events themselves were not entirely what I expected. Most of the ones I attended involved a panel of 4 or 5 "experts" talking on the subject on the programme unscripted for a few minutes before interrupting each other and inviting comments from the audience. This gave most of the panels a sort of conversational feel, with no real direction in mind. Occasional prompts from the moderator would pull the discussion back on track but all too often it seemed like we weren't really doing much more than exchanging information between audience and panel, rather than listening to the experts tell us what they knew. With the time limit for each of these being set to 55 minutes, there didn't seem to be an awful lot of time for any in-depth analysis either and so most of the time I came away no more knowledgeable on the subject than when I had gone in.

One notable exception was the panel on '2000ad and its Influence'. This was originally to have featured the 2000ad artist Carlos Ezquerra, but sadly due to family health problems he was not able to attend the Convention and so SF author Alastair Reynolds was drafted in as a last minute replacement. The other two members of the panel were David Bishop, who edited the comic during the 2nd half of the 90s and into the 'eponymous' millennium and the writer Mike Carey who had worked on 2000ad among other comics.

This event was much improved for the fact that the panel talked at length without any intervention from the audience and we learned a great deal of insight on the comic, from the early days of Carlos' work on Dredd and his falling out with the editor, the Judge Dredd movie, the lawsuit with the makers of Hardware and right up to the passing of 'that date'. Because there were just three members on the panel, two of whom actually had first hand knowledge of working on 2000ad, I felt that I was hearing something really insightful that I would not have heard anywhere else. When the panel did eventually open up the discussion to questions from the audience, they were good questions which I wanted to know the answers to, possibly because I plucked up the courage to ask a couple myself! (I am hopefully going to turn the notes I took during this discussion into an article on the subject, watch this space.)

The other high-point of the whole weekend for me was the screening of the new Doctor Who. At 6pm a huge crowd of about 600 people packed into the big hall where a screen and sound system had been set up in preparation for the big event. As we sat gazing at a muted 'wipeout' the anticipation mounted and when the titles for the new series finally rolled a huge cheer went up! The sensation of watching the episode was amplified as every gag got a big laugh and you could feel that the crowd had a lot of affection and good-will towards the new Doctor. The feeling grew through the episode and when it got to the part where all the previous Doctors are shown in sequence, with Matt Smith bursting through the image of David Tennant and advising the aliens to "Run!" the levels of enthusiasm were practically hysterical (well, hysterical for British people at least). I overheard a few remarks after the screening was over and every one of them was positive.

By Sunday I had pretty much had my fill of sf geekery and was feeling more lost than ever among the large groups of strange I.T. Professionals (or perhaps I mean the strange groups of large I.T. Professionals). I had singularly failed to make friends with anyone and was still wandering around on my own not really sure what I was doing there. I also felt as though I had 'missed out' on a lot of stuff simply because I hadn't physically been able to be in 3 or 4 locations simultaneously (maybe Quantum Computing for Beginners could have helped me learn to superimpose my quantum states.) I hadn't attended the Masquerade Ball as I hadn't prepared a costume and anyway, didn't fancy standing in the corner pretending to look interested in a pot-plant (Lieutenant Barclay style.)

I think had the whole convention been a bit smaller, with less going on and fewer, longer, events focused on one or two things, it would have been easier to cope with. As it was, it felt like attending 7 conventions at once. Too much breadth and not enough depth seemed to be the problem for me.

Next years Eastercon is already being planned and will be in Birmingham, which is doable as a day-trip from Leicester or perhaps an overnight stay for a weekend, which will hopefully make it a little bit more affordable for my SBL buddies. There's also Redemption '11 which will be in Coventry and not too far for a little away mission.