The big week has arrived: Friday 7th to Monday 10th April is this year’s Eastercon, being held at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole. I’m one of the guests of honour, alongside Zen Cho, Jennell Jaquays, Kari Sperring, Adrian Tchaikovksy, and Ursula Vernon, which is still a weird sentence to write, and also means that I’ll be quite busy. You can view the full convention programme here, and my part in it here; but I’ve also summarised the details below.
Friday 7 April
15.00: Opening Ceremony
16.30: Desert Island Books: Dan Hartland will be interviewing me about some milestone books in my life, with readings by Divers Hands.
Saturday 8 April
13.30: Book Launch: All These Worlds: I’ll be having a short discussion with Nina Allan about the book and about reviewing and criticism in general; there will also be, I’m told, drinks and nibbles. And of course copies of the book.
Sunday 9 April
09.00: Overshoots and Other Anthropocene Narratives: a panel taking off, in part from my essay in Strange Horizons at the start of the year, about narrative structure and climate change. With Anne Charnock, Nick Hubble, and Abigail Nussbaum.
13.30: Thirty-four years, and an interim panel: in 2009, I published a survey of British sf and fantasy writers, which was itself a repeat/update of a survey conducted in 1989 by Paul Kincaid. So the next ‘official’ update isn’t due for a few years yet, but this is a bit of a check-in to see how things stand. With Nina Allan, Anne Charnock, Stew Hotson, Juliet E. McKenna, and Neil Williamson.
15.00: Who, Why and What do we award? A general discussion of awards in the sf ecosystem. With Nick Hubble, Cheryl Morgan, Nicholas Whyte, and Gareth Worthington.
16.30: Table talk: a small-group AMA, come along and chat if you feel like it.
Monday 10 April
09.00: The Past & Future of Vector: that is, the journal of the BSFA that I edited for a number of years. With Edward James, Stephen Oram, and Shana Worthen.
10.30: 3rd Row Fandom, 20 Years On: in which a group of friends and I discuss how came into fandom and what we’ve been doing there over the last couple of decades. With Claire Brialey, John Coxon, Emily January and Abigail Nussbaum.
13.30: Rethinking the History of SF: A panel which partly takes off from the essay on MIT Press’s “Radium Age” series that I had in the Los Angeles Review of Books earlier this year, and partly from a talk Farah Mendlesohn gave at last year’s eastercon (now an article in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts). How should sf history be written now? With Nick Hubble, Edward James, Kate Heffner, and Paul March-Russell.
15.00: Closing Ceremony. And that’s a wrap!
Briardene Books 
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