orbital
One otherwise unallocated Sunday afternoon nearly ten years ago, while I was living in York, I cycled round to see my friend Tim in case he was running one of his occasional board games sessions. He invited me in and said "Nick, this is my friend Chris. Chris, this is Nick, the chap I told you about". "Jolly good", said Chris, and added "You're coming to Eastercon". Then things went a little bit hazy and I seem to remember handing over a cheque (it turned out Chris was on the 1999 Eastercon committee).
The following Easter, I traipsed up to Liverpool for ReConvene, where at various points I found myself attending lots of fascinating talks and panel discussions on a whole range of topics (some of which were only tangentially related to SF), meeting lots of splendid new people, discussing magic realism with Jeff Noon and John Clute, hearing Iain Banks read excerpts from his books, and generally having an excellent and fun time.
So naturally I went back the next year, the year after that, and indeed every year to date (and also went to other conventions over the years: a few Novacons, a couple of Picocons and a Unicon). At various points over the decade (gosh) I heard people mutter darkly about somewhere called the 'Radisson Non-Euclidean', a legendarily confusing hotel in Heathrow whose corridors doubled back on each other and intersected in a way that surely couldn't be possible in ordinary Euclidean 3-space. And this year I got to go there (for Orbital 2008) and find out what all the fuss was about. Indeed, it was a maze of twisty passages, all alike whose topography and topology I never quite managed to figure out. (We're going back there in 2010 so perhaps I'll have to get one of those clever π-meter things they use in Greg Bear's book Eon.)
I made it to a range of programme items this year (and missed at least twice as many more that I wish I had made it to):
Friday 12:00: So You Want to be an SF Writer (John Jarrold, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Jaine Fenn, Anton Marks and Ian Whates)
I went to this panel discussion not because I necessarily have any currently active ambitions to be an SF writer, but because I was interested to hear what was involved in the process. Useful advice from writers ("join a writing group and get someone to criticise your work") with John Jarrold giving the publisher's/editor's/agent's side of the story.
Friday 13:00: How to be a Panellist at Orbital (Iain Coleman and Stephen Kilbane)
Thought I'd better go to this one, since I was going to be on my first ever panel discussion on the Monday. Lots of useful advice.
Friday 22:00: Guest of Honour: Rog Peyton (with Greg Pickersgill)
Many entertaining anecdotes about Rog's long career in UK SF fandom.
Saturday 11:00: Guest of Honour: China Miéville
"For God's Sake It's Just A Story! A Reader's Guide to Ruining SF"
A fascinating and erudite talk on whether or not interpretation of literature 'ruins' it in some way. Amongst other things, Algernon Blackwood's story The Wendigo was summarised as "Brokeback Mountain with monsters", reference was made to "The Star Wars film - the first of the recent awful ones", the phrase "vibrating aboutness-cluster" used without eyelid-batting, and H P Lovecraft's story The Horror at Red Hook interpreted as "You know foreigners and working-class people? They're ******* horrible!"
Saturday 12:30: Fantastic London (Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman, Louis Savy and Graham Sleight)
A very interesting discussion on depictions of London in fantasy, and the various real but fantastic bits of London's geography and history. It turns out that the traffic lights and bollards on the Mall are bolted, rather than concreted, in. This is so that with about 25 minutes' notice, they can all be removed, and the Mall turned into a functioning airstrip in order to evacuate Buckingham Palace.
Saturday 15:30: George Hay Memorial Lecture (Prof David Southwood)
The Hay Lecture has now established itself, for me, as one of the unmissable highlights of an Eastercon, and this year's was no exception. David Southwood gave a fascinating presentation on "Space Programmes in Fact and Fiction", drawing on the 1950s vision of the future presented in the adventures of Dan Dare and the various missions organised by ESA and NASA.
Sunday 11:00: Guest of Honour: Charles Stross
Sunday 14:00: Guest of Honour: Neil Gaiman
The membership count this year was somewhere around the 1300 mark, roughly twice as many as usual, and I think Neil Gaiman had at least something to do with that. He didn't disappoint, either, giving some very entertaining reminiscences about his first convention ("I got in through the front door of the hotel, and John Jarrold called to me from the bar: 'Neil! I'm fan guest of honour. I've got an open bar tab. What are you having?' Then it was 26 hours later and I still hadn't checked into the hotel") and reading a short story Orange and an excerpt from the forthcoming The Graveyard Book.
Sunday 15:30: Writing the Near Future (Matt Browne, Paul McAuley, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Justina Robson and Charles Stross)
Sunday 20:00: The Death of UK Physics (Simon Bradshaw, Dave Clements, Inge Heyer)
Panel discussion about the current funding crisis looming over UK physics research (especially astrophysics and particle physics).
Sunday 21:00: Mitch Benn Entertains (introduced by Neil Gaiman)
Excellent, as ever. I thought he was going to do the Ikea song at one point, and hoped he'd be able to fit in his brilliant Eminem pastiche Macbeth (My Name Is) as well, but it turns out there's an upper bound on the number of songs and jokes you can fit into an hour, and something had to give. I laughed for pretty much the entire show, and I certainly wasn't the only one. Mitch also seemed to be having a great time, so hopefully we'll see him at another convention or two in the future.
Monday 11:00: The Mathematics of Knots (Nicholas Jackson)
After nine years of attending interesting talks and panel discussions organised by other people, I thought I should probably contribute something, and offered to give a talk on knot theory: one of the few topics I feel confident talking about in public. I was expecting maybe 5-10 people to turn up, but in the event there was quite a decent-sized audience. It seemed to go quite well - there were some interesting and insightful questions, and lots of people said very nice and encouraging things afterwards. The only drawback was that I'd enthusiastically overestimated the amount of stuff I could coherently talk about in an hour, and kind of ran out of time - although at what I felt was a fairly natural stopping point (I'd talked about the history of the topic, the mathematical notion of a knot, the idea of a knot invariant, and then given a couple of examples of the latter: n-colourability and the Alexander polynomial). The slides are available here if anyone's curious.
Monday 13:00: Infinity Welcomes Careful Thinkers (Iain Coleman, Colin Fine, Nicholas Jackson and Susan Stepney)
This was also a lot of fun. It was originally supposed to be Iain and me together with someone else, but unfortunately she had to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances. Fortunately, Susan and Colin very kindly joined in at fairly short notice, and we ended up with quite a fun panel. Susan talked about numbers that are mind-stunningly, ungrokkably big but nevertheless finite (eg Graham's number) and various methods for representing these, and then Colin and I explained different sorts of infinity (especially countable vs uncountable). I gave Cantor's proof of the countability of the rational numbers, and then ciphergoth kindly joined us from the audience and proved the uncountability of the real numbers. I don't think we were quite expecting that level of audience participation, but it was great nonetheless. Susan explained a useful search heuristic for navigating one's way back home through a maze of parallel universes: minimise the number of zeppelins, because parallel universes always have more zeppelins than ours does.
Recommended reading: Anything by Jorge Luis Borges (especially The Book of Sand, The Garden of Forking Paths and The Library of Babel. Also Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker.
Excellent fun all round. Thanks in particular to everyone who made it happen: the committee, the tech crew, the gophers, the guests, the people who gave talks and took part in panel discussions, and everyone else who did stuff behind or in front of the scenes. I even took a few photographs.