BristolCon 2023: observations by Rosie Oliver (convention report).
BristolCon is an annual ‘one-day’ Science Fiction and fantasy convention held at the Doubletree Hilton Hotel, literally a ten-minute walk from Bristol Temple Meads railway station. This year it was held slightly earlier than normal, on 21st October. While there were around 270 members, travel chaos managed not only to stop some people coming from the north of England, but also in some cases, from London. This, unfortunately, included a few panellists. It is a credit to the organisers that they were able to find suitable replacements at such short notice.
Friday evening is not really part of BristolCon, but this year entailed a book launch for Juliet E. McKenna’s ‘The Green Man’s Quarry’ published by Wizard’s Tower Press. This is another thing BristolCon is good at, encouraging and promoting local Science Fiction and fantasy interests, as both the publisher and the author are based in South Wales and the South West. The launch was followed by the now traditional Open Mic evening. Admittedly, both had to contend with the attractions of the BarCon!
BristolCon comprises two streams of panels, two streams of workshops or kaffeeklatsches, an art show, and a dealer’s room.
The art show was well-populated with artists with a great variety of arts and crafts for sale. One artist, Mike Hardwick, had a nice surprise for Bristolcon, as he’d made Andy Bigwood’s Speedbird icon for BristolCon in the traditional craft of pargeting (lime mortar in relief sculptures).
The dealers’ room was full. Many were selling books, though there was the occasional bit of craft to be had. I had a couple of interesting conversations with book dealers as they love to chat. I had a particularly interesting one with Alan Frost where we compared notes on the writing style and science behind space opera books. There were so many things we had in common! It developed into a kind of camaraderie that this friendly convention likes to encourage. Below is just one corner of the dealer’s room.
With four concurrent streams of activity, I needed to choose what to attend. As my interests lean heavily towards Science Fiction, I picked those items in preference.
First up for the day was the ‘I had a book launch and no one came’. This panel agreed very quickly that book launches were a thing of the past, replaced by book celebration parties these days. The discussion rapidly turned to how to do a successful book launch. It has become accepted that the author has to do their own publicity, which means developing a following. This includes choosing the social media platforms that are best suited to the type of book you are trying to sell, arranging a blog tour, or getting people who know social media to arrange a blog tour for you at a price, going out to get yourself seen.
The ‘Ethics Of A Fictional War’ panel quickly agreed it’s best to leave the really horrible parts of the war to the imagination of your readers. A hint of what goes on will do. The interesting thing is the way fictional war has changed over the decades. It went from the gung-ho colonial doing your duty and heroically winning medals, no matter what, to giving the baddies an emphatic reason for going to war.
The ‘Why Did It Have To Go Political?’ panel immediately agreed nearly all Science Fiction and fantasy is political. So, it quickly reverted to politics in the genres. A particular emphasis developed around Marvel’s Thanos. What right did he have to kill off half the population? It would have been better to triple the resources for the population. Also, what right did the Avengers have of bringing back the dead half of the population five years, especially as those who had survived had moved on?
The last panel of the morning was How To Make AI Socialist?’ The panel decided to concentrate on the near future and limited themselves to developments in machine learning. One issue discussed was the way AI uses so much in the way of power, water for cooling and rare earth minerals. Another was the prevalence of right-wing politics on social media that AIs have as their learning set data, which is why they may tend to end up being right wing. A way to counter this is to feed AIs with more left-wing data. One interesting point is AIs are good at doing tasks that have well-defined narrow aims, rather than more general wider and greater number of aims. Maybe AIs should be limited to these kinds of tasks?
Lunch time was the Pandemic Publications book launch, where six of us authors gave a reading from our books launched during, or because of, the pandemic. The other authors were the Guests of Honour, Ida Keogh and G R Matthews, and Siobhan Logan, Kate MacDonald and Will MacMillan Jones. All I’m going to say is that when concentrating on reading, the large room in front of you literally disappears behind the page!
The afternoon’s ‘Am I SciFi?’ proved interesting. One panellist described how one of her bone implants actually unscrewed itself push upwards against her skin. Fascinating. She had had other such implants and therefore considers herself a cyborg. Where does one draw a line on the number and type of body implants leaving a person still a human? A good discussion on that point alone. The panel went further to explore the issues of the brain-in-a-box, versus being copied as data onto computer, and how might these futuristic ‘life-extending’ procedures change a personality?
The final panel I attended in full was ‘…With A Twist!’, which discussed how much writers adapted real world or historical settings and science to fit their novels. The consensus was that so long as your work ended up being consistent, you could in theory do anything. However, when it comes to science, the author needed to have an explanation of how they got from the science of today to the science in the future world of their story.
I did attend the closing ceremony, where the BristolCon committee thanked everyone who helped make this convention a friendly success. They announced they are considering making BristolCon a two-day event next year, and mentioned next year’s Guests of Honour, one of whom is local author Peter F. Hamilton.
All in all, this turned out to be a very friendly well-run convention, despite the country’s awful weather keeping some unfortunate people away.
Panel Room One is on stream below for those who missed it.