Sunday at Eastercon

The rebellion panel was well-attended, but maybe because it had two of the Guests of Honour --David (V for Vendetta) Lloyd, and John Courtenay Grimwood-- as well as uber-critic John Clute on the panel, it was too respectful, not remotely rebellious.

The Future Bristol launch was really well attended considering we'd been scheduled against Lloyd on V for Vendetta, and BSFA Award finalist Nick Harkaway. I learned something: it doesn't matter how well you think out the order, something will surprise you. In this case, I'd sat next to Steph Burgis, and as she started reading, I realized that both of our stories featured winged protagonists! Someone suggested that we renamed it Winged People of Bristol, so it was with some relief that Chris Lake demonstrated an admirable lack of flapping in her story. Gareth Powell rounded off, and even got a disappointed groan when he finished with a cliff-hanger. Sharon won third prize in the raffle, and since she already owned one of the prizes, kindly put it back in. Nik Whitehead won the Interzone subscription, and Aliette de Bodard won the print of the artwork.

From there, via a chat in the bar with Shine editor Jetse de Vries, I moderated the SF-Savvy Criminal, with Grimwood (the man is superhuman -- he was on fifteen different events), supernatural novelist Mike Carey, hard SF writer Tony Ballantyne, and criminologist Sabine Furlong. I expected a reasonable turn-out, but the room was absolutely jammed, and just kept filling. The panel consensus was that evading detection was virtually impossible, but it was possible to play with identity, by concealing it or through misdirection.