Eastercon Retrospective

This is me outside the caravan the morning after Eastercon LX. Notice the dark glasses which hide the bleary-eyes that half a night’s sleep hasn’t managed to fully erase.
So, how was my first experience of a SciFi convention? Would I do it again?
Well, I’ve already booked for 2010. So that probably also answers the first question.
What were the highlights?
It’s hard, but I’d have to say, for me, the George Hay Memorial Lecture, given by Dr Adrian Bowyer, about the RepRap project was the talk I’ll take away and remember. Here’s the link. (http://reprap.org/) The whole concept just blew me away.
The trouble with doing just one day is that so much is going on you are scared to miss anything, and there are so many panels at any one time. And when do you eat? You have to stop sometime and then you fret about the panels you’re missing by pausing to eat.
But then, at about six o’clock you realise that your head is filling up and there’s a data buffer overload thing going on, with knowledge escaping out of your ears in the form of both steam and ectoplasmic goo, and the latter is dribbling down your neck. So that’s when you have to stop. And so at that point you may as well eat.
But then there’s more to come. Because events go on into the night – on this night there’s a full sized orchestra playing Wagner and film theme music and Beethoven.

Sarah puts up with a lot. I thought that twelve straight hours of SF geekdom just might cause her to crack, but she surprised me by declaring that her favourite was the session on small-satellites, (because we’d recently been to a lecture on satellite technology at the Wrexham Science Fair, and this had set up the context for her).

“So, are we going next year,” she said.

“Wow!” I said.