When it comes to a pedantic obsession with trivia, the average convention membership can hold its own against most challengers. There are few people outside fandom with a greater depth of pedantic and encyclopaedic knowledge of the irrelevant and the obscure, and those of us who work in the civil service have met them. Nevertheless, although many in fandom hold that acquiring this vast mental storehouse of ephemera is a pure art form in its own right, this year you’ll be able to profit from it. The committee has decreed that we’re going to have a “…big, proper pub quiz, with decent prizes…” So on Saturday night we’re thinking of moving the convention wholesale into the programme room, serving drink and testing your knowledge of everything from the career of Anthony Stewart Head to phallic symbolism in the work of Norman Spinrad. Or possibly the other way round.
We’d like to run it on a team, rather than individual basis, so those of you lucky enough to have friends should get together and start thinking of those wacky team names now, which always seems to consume more mental energy than doing the actual quiz.
There won’t be an organised disco, so no smoke machine to trigger the fire alarm late at night this year, unless one of the Last Smokers In Fandom TM can manage to set off a smoke detector. There will, however, be the facility to play music late on Saturday night if anyone’s in the mood…
We’ll have our Guest of Honour, Ken MacLeod, and the usual array of talented panellists (some of whom will be you) to debate the hot topics in science fiction. Ken’s just had
Learning The World reviewed in the main part of the Guardian books pull-out. Is science fiction still a discrete genre, and where does it end and fantasy begin, these days? Meanwhile, will I finally organise the “Novacons of the future” panel I’ve been trying to run since the turn of the century? I’m also curious about the interests that go around being a science fiction fan; do we have common ground beyond the genre to sustain us as a group when increasingly SF is something everyone’s into to some extent? We will, of course, endeavour to maintain the standard for popular science too, after the various erudite, enlightening or controversial guests we’ve had over the past few years.
I will struggle manfully to resist the temptation to schedule yet another Dr Who panel.
Novacon staples such as the art and book auctions remain – with the usual thrill of whether we’ll have far too few or far too many books to sell this year. We’re looking at how and where to carry over the auction if we’ve too much stock this time.
As usual I will plan, recruit and schedule meticulously only for it all to change at the last minute. It was about this time of year - when I first ran the programme - that Nalo Hopkinson asked if she could attend. Last time, Harry Harrison simply arrived unannounced. Who knows what might happen between now and November?
