This past weekend was the 2026 Eastercon, Iridescence, at the Birmingham Hilton Metropole. It seems to have been generally received as a very good Eastercon, and certainly that was my experience. The programme was strong — I particularly appreciated the way the organisers picked a few key topics and scheduled multiple panels on aspects of those topics. I was on “Imagining Ourselves Out from the Dystopian Present”, for instance, but there were also adjacent panels on “The Politics of Hope”, “Changing Climate, Changing Stories”, “Writing About Darkness in an Ever-Darkening World”, “We Will Rise Again” (discussing the anthology that GoH Karen Lord co-edited, and two others in similar vein) and “Near Future Fails”; another strand, which I didn’t see much of during the convention, but hope to catch up on via replay, circled around history, archaeology, religion, anthropology and related topics. The whole thing seemed to run very smoothly, as well, and I have yet to hear of any major issues.
And from a Briardene point of view, it was a doubly successful event.
We had a table in the dealers’ room, and had a good convention from that point of view, but the main event was the official launch of The Recollections on Sunday evening, for which Paul Kincaid and Una McCormack had kindly agreed to participate in a short discussion about the book and about Priest’s life and work. However, the launch was scheduled immediately after the BSFA Awards; and both Paul and Una were finalists (Paul for Colourfields, Una for Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution in Best Fiction for Younger Readers; and I was scheduled against the awards on another panel. As a result, what happened was that I high-tailed it from my panel to the launch room for set-up, with occasional updates on the awards via a) Bluesky and b) a few kind souls who turned up early and helped with the set-up … and then both Paul and Una won!
So, the launch had an extra-celebratory feel, with some discussion of Paul and Una’s books at the start, before getting down to the business of discussing The Recollections, complete with Una’s dramatic reading of the Martin Amis section from ‘Where Am I Now’ (IYKYK, as they say), and additional recollections of Priest from people in the audience.
All in all, a very satisfying evening. Thank you to everyone who voted for Colourfields, and everyone who’s purchased and read it! If by some chance you’ve made it to this post without knowing anything about then book, allow me to direct you to reviews by Ian Mond at Locus, Shinjini Dey at Strange Horizons, Adam Roberts on his Substack, and Roseanna Pendlebury at Nerds of a Feather. As its publisher, I commend it to you as the best grounding in the debates about SF’s history and nature that you’re likely to encounter in quite a while.
Up next: a trip to Glasgow for an event at Waterstones Argyle Street, with Nina Allan and Camilla Grudova, to celebrate both The Recollections and The Illuminated Man, a biography of JG Ballard started by Priest before his death, and completed by Nina in the way that only Nina could. I’ve read it, but can’t properly review it; it feels much too personal for an evaluation. What I will say is that it is one of the best books of any kind that you are likely to read this year. Nina’s approach to biography is very different to Priest’s, so the finished book was never going to be the book Priest would have finished; but the parallax is fascinating, and most strikingly, Nina has woven their personal experience into the fabric of it, the story of Priest’s illness, in ways that are beautiful but painful to read. A compelling, difficult, and singular, book, and I urge you to seek it out when it is published in a couple of weeks’ time.
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