altariel | Orbital 2008 (Reply)

Back from Eastercon, where many excellent conversations were had with many excellent people.

Both the panels seemed to go well, thank you for great modding to

nickeyb and Piers Beckley. I came away with plenty to think about and more to say, which I think is the sign of a good panel. The audience at the TV tie-in/novelizations panel entirely agreed with panellists that OF COURSE they are proper books, which meant that the most potentially contentious topic was dealt with quite briskly, but that in turn meant that we could get straight into other avenues of discussion. I think I spoke mainly about the similarities and differences in writing fanfiction and profiction, but I never remember what I say in public places, which is surely a disaster waiting to happen. I'd been reading in this feature on Chumbawamba about the immediacy of folk music, and there's a line in that which I think is a good description of posting fanfic on the internet: "A lot of folk music is about writing a song on a Tuesday and standing up in a club on a Wednesday and singing it". This contrasts to the longer production processes of profic (and zine production, for that matter).

nickeyb finished by asking us which universes we would most like to write in should the gods be listening: Firefly and Rome, FWIW.

At the Star Trek panel there was, IIRC, general consensus that the franchise has plenty of future in a variety of formats, but needs to nurture a new and younger cohort of fans and, depending on the success of the forthcoming film, this might take a generational shift of 10-15 years. I had a quick look through the copy of Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers which

jmswallow had brought along. It's set during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, it looks epic, and I can't wait to get my hands on my own copy.

Other panels at which I was an audience member of varying degrees of mouthiness: the Doctor Who panel on The Doctor: Saviour or Trickster God dealt with the extent to which the Christian imagery of the last season implied an endorsement in the writing of an interventionist god: I think "not at all", and that the last season in particular was strongly anti-authoritarian, although I do see that of course this says nothing about the various ways in which the series might be interpreted. Lots of interesting things said about the Doctor as a great British amateur in the tradition of Peter Wimsey et al.; I thoroughly like the idea of an amateur god and would quite like to play one on the telly myself. We were just getting onto the archetypes which Daleks draw on when the panel sadly had to wrap up (obviously they're fascists, but I hadn't thought of them before as WW1 tanks and part of that national trauma). Great discussion all round.

I got to the late-night Saturday panel on Martha Jones: Most Heroic Companion? halfway through, by which time con fever (and possibly drink...?) had apparently turned everyone in the room quite mad ("Troughton simply does not have the raw sexual energy of Hartnell..."). This panel wound up with a great series of pitches by each of the panellists as to why their favourite companion was the most heroic, these being Ace, Steven, Barbara, and Martha, all of which were very convincing, although

calapine swung it for me with her passionate love for Barbara Wright (and her earlier paean to Polly).

Also went along to a panel on the UK SF short fiction market. The mood seemed quite despondent about the amount of fiction coming through and also about the future of publications like Interzone. I suspect everyone's busy podcasting Stargate: Atlantis slash. We touched briefly on new media outlets for short fiction; I'd loved to have heard more on this - perhaps a topic for Redemption?

Monday morning I went to a fascinating small panel on fanfiction: the first time I've ever been to a discussion of fanfic at which the participants were predominantly male. The specific topic under discussion was why there was very little fanfic based on SF books: there's plenty based on film or TV SF, and a respectable amount based on fantasy or romance books - but next to nothing based on SF books. (An honourable exception being Bujold.) We didn't really come to a conclusion about why this was the case. One suggestion was that SF as the literature of ideas tended to be character-lite... and yet we agreed one could easily imagine writing fanfic based on certain settings or universes using underdeveloped or new characters (in the way people write Tolkien appendix fic, for example). So it was hard to come to a conclusion why. I was very interested to hear the teenaged experiences of the men (and some of the women) in the room who had pretty much all done story-telling in shared universes when they took up role-playing. Myself, I would have loved to have role-played as an adolescent, but I was pretty much the only remotely geek child at my all girls' school, and consequently spent my time in solitary thinking up B7 stories and mapping fighting fantasy gamebooks. Thank god for university and, of course, eventually, the internet.

Mitch Benn did an hour on the Saturday night. Mitch Benn! I'm used to smaller cons, so when I saw his name on the programme, I thought it was someone doing some of his routines for the cabaret, but it was the real live thing! He is one funny fucker. The routine about people who have full-sized Daleks in their homes was of course very close to my heart: apparently we do not cut it because we didn't build ours from scratch.

In between all this I did a few stints on the Redemption table in the dealers' room. The people at the next table were selling fabric book bags and, to my delight, one of them bore the legend: "BOUCHERCON". (No, I've NO idea, it seems to be about something to do with cattle - the other tagline is "Longhorns of the Law", which is pleasingly Star Cops-ish.) To my further delight, the lovely

katlinel presented said bag to me on Monday morning. That one's coming to Redemption.

Hotel: I was staying over in the Marriott, which was the excellent plan I knew it would be; it's always good to have a quiet place to go to, and there was a Costa in reception to provide the necessaries of life (i.e. Not Hotel Coffee). Only gripe was that I couldn't quite get the aircon low enough in my room: I think I may have been the only person at the convention who felt too hot most of the time. However, I'll stay in the Marriott by preference for Odyssey 2010.

A very special thank you to

muuranker, who brought weights and a barbell along for me - and thanks to

glitterboy1 for carting them back! I'd never have got them home otherwise. There were tube shenanigans both ways (Piccadilly service not stopping at King's X because presumably we WON'T NEED THAT ON A BANK HOLIDAY). I was resigned to this for the homeward journey; inevitably when I got back to King's X station it was to see the fell words: "BUS SERVICE FROM ROYSTON" - so glad I invested in that first class ticket! A rickety double-decker clattered me home and it turned out to be a unexpectedly cheerful ride: the snow had all but melted, apart from the occasional sad lump of departing snowman, and with the early evening sun on the wet green grass it was as if Cambridge had been washed clean while I was away.

This morning I've watched the end of The Passion, and ordered

jmswallow's Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers via Amazon's SEND IT TO ME THIS MINUTE one-click service. And now I'm going to finish Ruddy Gore by Kerry Greenwood.

Very well done and a big THANK YOU to the Orbital committee: here's to