up in the hills above Bradford, outside the napalm factory

It being the first Thursday after the Paschal full moon last week, I caught the train up to Bradford for a few days to attend LX 2009, this year's Eastercon - believed to be the sixtieth such event (modulo a semi-mythical convention which may or may not have taken place in Kettering in 1957).



I went to (and participated in) some programme items. Nowhere near as many as I'd intended to - there were lots of interesting things on, but there were also lots of interesting people to chat to too.

Friday 17:00–18:00: The Poincaré Conjecture (me)

Several people said they liked my (somewhat disorganised and incomplete) talk on knot theory last year, so I thought I'd have another go at something similar this year. My aim was to give a brief introduction to the topology of low-dimensional manifolds, and explain basically what the Poincaré Conjecture is about, and why lots of mathematicians care about it. It seemed to go quite well - I got a decent-sized audience and several of them came up to me later and said they'd found it interesting, so that was nice.

Friday 19:00–20:00: Bad Biology (ang_grr, Paul McAuley, adelheid, Alastair Reynolds)

Discussion about inaccurate biology in SF. Very interesting but I was still a bit tired after my topology talk so I bailed out on this one after a little while and went to have a rest.

Friday 22:00–23:00: The marketing of novels (Ian Whates, Danie Ware, Pete Crowther, Colin Brush)

Interesting discussion about how publishers go about marketing novels.

Saturday 11:00–12:30: George Hay Memorial Lecture (Adrian Bowyer)

Fascinating talk about the RepRap project, an open-source replicating rapid prototyper (a kind of 3d printer). It uses a light, cheap, biodegradeable starch-derived polymer (polylactic acid) to build up three-dimensional items layer by layer, and can be built for about £500. And once you've got one, you can use it to make most of the parts for another one.

Saturday 14:00–15:00: The Music of the Spheres (Ricardo Pinto, Doug Fazzani, emmajking, me, Gary Lloyd, Andrew Patton)

Panel discussion about how music and our understanding of the universe have developed alongside each other. I think we were a little apprehensive about this, but in the end we had plenty to talk about, and the audience seemed to find it all interesting.

Saturday 18:45–19:45: Doctor Who

The now traditional mass watching of Doctor Who on a big screen on the Saturday evening. I rather enjoyed this one - certainly more than some Easter or Christmas episodes, although obviously not quite as much as the first episode of the new series back in 2005.

Saturday 22:00–23:00: Bad Sex in SF (lproven, dougs, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Gali Golan)

A reading of various samples of entertainingly bad descriptions of sex in SF novels. Including the classic Houseplants of Gor, helpfully provided by watervole. Some excerpts were amusing, some I found a little disturbing.

Sunday 12:30–14:00: Spring-Heeled Jack (David Clarke)

A fascinating talk about the Victorian legend of Spring-Heeled Jack, discussing its origins and development, tracing it from its first appearance in 1837 through to the present day, and looking at a few theories of Jack's identity.

Sunday 15:30–17:00: BSFA Lecture (owlfish)

The first annual BSFA Easter Lecture, a kind of arts and humanities counterpart to the SF Foundation's scientific George Hay Lecture, was entitled "Visualising Time in the Middle Ages". The series got off to a strong start with a very interesting talk about the way our measurement and depiction of time has evolved over the last several hundred years. In 14th–16th Century France, for example, the year began on Easter Sunday (which had the awkward side effect of some years having more than one March or April). Days were at one point divided up into twenty-four hours, but these weren't always of equal length, consisting of twelve hours of daylight and twelve of darkness. Shana traced the different ways of measuring time (sundials, water-clocks, candles, mechanical clocks, etc) as they developed, and finished with a discussion of allegorical depiction of time, taking in the "New Iconography of the Virtues" (or "The Virtues Went Shopping"). I hope to hear more about the Hedgehog of Nineveh at a later date.

Sunday 23:00–24:00: A Brief History of the Universe (emmajking)

Entertaining and interesting talk about the cosmology of the early universe, followed by a brief but (due to light pollution and overcast skies) ultimately undersuccessful attempt at astronomy.

Monday 10:00—11:00: University Challenged (johannes_d, me, ceb, Ruth O'Reilly)

Discussion about university SF societies and their connections with the rest of fandom. I found this one quite interesting, and came away with a couple more ideas to suggest to the rest of the Warwick SF&F Society committee. Also, thanks to nmg, I now have a copy of the first issue of New Fusion, a fanzine produced at Warwick in the late 1980s.

14:00–15:00: Beginner's Time Travel (emmajking)

Another entertaining and interesting talk about theoretical physics, this time about time travel.

All in all, a splendid convention - thanks very much indeed to everyone involved in running it: the committee, the staff and volunteers, everyone who took part in a programme item, and everyone else who went. I'm very much looking forward to Odyssey 2010 next year.