Bristolcon intro

Up early for a run before heading off to the station and the train to Bristol. The journey was problem free — a rare thing in my recent experience — and I arrived at the venue in good time for Bristolcon. I really enjoyed the event — much more so than Loncon, which was a bit overwhelming — and the sessions were great but for clarity, I'm going to split out my session notes — where they exist — into separate posts which means I'm totally going to be spamming you. Sorry.

I bought more books than I'd intended. I've been meaning to pick up Jaine Fenn's most recent Hidden Empire since it came out and decided to take advantage of the opportunity to get it signed. I also decided I absolutely had to get a copy of Emma Newman's anthology From Dark Places, on sale at the front desk, because how could I possibly resist?

Bristolcon: Discoverability and Representation

The first session I attended as a discussion on discovery and representation of writers, particularly how female and minority writers — essentially anyone who isn't white and male — are under-represented in bookshops; how, recognising this to be true, fans and writers and publishers can push back against this; and how, in the age of Amazon and algorithmic selection, they can break free of their own preferences and discover new writers and books that aren't simply more of the same.

( Discussion... )

Bristolcon: Modelling the Climate of Tolkien’s Middle Earth

An extremely nice piece of outreach work from Dan Lunt, a palaeo-climatologist from Bristol University, who took various maps produced by Karen Fonstad based on Tolkien's works and used them as the basis for a climate simulation using the Unified Model. The work captured peoples' imaginations, generating articles in the newspapers and going viral online. The presentation included a high level discussion of the assumptions applied to the model — including their justifications in Tolkien's works — a consideration of the results, and a discussion of the implications for our Earth.

( Notes... )

Since the presentation touched on something related to my chosen profession, I made a point of going up and saying hello afterwards — not difficult because it was a fun bit of work and I've been to enough climate presentations over the years that I don't sound completely clueless.

I also got talking to one of the book sellers who, it transpired, had studied palaeo-climatology and had applied for a summer internship with the Hadley Centre and was keen join our happy little band...

Bristolcon: Interactions

I then went to the interactions session — one of the sessions where I didn't really take notes — but I'm going to mention it because it was such good fun. The panel — Claire M Hutt, Peter Newman, John Baverstock, David Gullen, and Jaine Fenn — talked about convention experiences and how to interact with writers. In the Q&A afterwards, someone mentioned that it sometimes felt hard to go up and talk to groups of writers in the bar. The panelists agreed that this was actually OK — Jaine Fenn & David Gullen agreed that you could do a lot worse than offer to buy them a drink! — while Peter Newman said that he though a lot of writers would actually enjoy being fanboyed by someone in front of their colleagues — "Excuse me for a moment George..."

Most of the panel (Jaine Fenn is off to the right, hidden by the audience)

Inspired enough to get over my chronic shyness, I went up after the panel and rather incoherently fanboyed the Newmans, both of whom were nice as pie — I'm such a fan of Tea and Jeopardy that it was almost responsible for me missing my train to Coventry last week — and enthused about Peter's reading — his debut novel is out next year and on the strength of the first chapter, I'm definitely adding it to my to-read list. It also encouraged me to go and get my book signed by Jaine Fenn later in the afternoon — when I discovered that the session had been John Baverstock's first time as moderator, not that you'd have known from extremely smooth way he led the discussion.

Bristolcon: The Fragmentation of Fandom?

The Fragmentation of Fandom session, which Karolina Leikomaa, Myfanwy Rodman, Stark Holborn, Ian Milstead, and Jasper Fforde, is a hard one to characterise or write-up because it covered a pretty wide range of subjects. Rather than be comprehensive, I'm just going to pick out a few interesting items from the discussion.

( Notes... )

Bristolcon: Emma Newman in conversation with Gareth Powell

Skipping over a few things, the last thing I attended was Emma Newman's guest of honour interview with Gareth Powell, followed by an excerpt from her forthcoming novel.

( A rough reconstruction... )