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In another life, Alastair Reynolds was a Doctor of Astronomy and an Astrophysicist for the European Space Agency, a job he gave up to become a full-time writer. Reynolds is a well-kent face on the British Science Fiction scene, having been nominated for the Clarke Award several times and winning the British Science Fiction Association’s Award for Best Novel for Chasm City. He’s also won a Locus Award and seen some of his short stories appearing on screen in Netflix’s Love, Death and Robots series. ' As you would expect, apart from attending the aforementioned Fantasycon staples, Reynolds appeared on panels about “Futures and Science Fiction” and “Science! Pseudoscience! Science Fiction!”
Ian Whates is one of those sort of polymath people – not so much knowing a lot about a lot of things (although he probably does), but doing a lot of things, from being a writer of stories, novels, and novellas as well as being the editor of many anthologies, editor of PS Publishing’s ParSec magazine and founder of Newcon Press. Not surprisingly, he found himself on panels to do with writer’s experiences, publishing and editing.
Almost 400 people attended Fantasycon this time, with the programme starting off on late Friday afternoon, although registration opened in the morning and the Dealer’s Room opened at noon. What followed was a mixture of launches (from the likes of PS Publishing and Newcon Press), panels, and readings, with particular highlights being the Friday Night Poetry event run as always by Allen Ashley, which yours truly attended. Partly in disguise as a poet, and partly in disguise as the BFS’s poetry editor looking out for new talent. For those with stamina, a good set of lungs and perhaps poor hearing (or ear plugs), the Karaoke ran until 11pm.
Saturday saw the bulk of the programme running from 10am to almost midnight. Again, the programme ran across a number of events, from launches (from the likes of Luna Press, Darkness Visible Publishing, Flame Tree Press and Titan Books), Guest of Honour interviews, panels, talks, and readings. Many of the panels and talks were concerned with the “business” side of being a writer so there were panels on such things as building your own website, marketing and promoting your work, agents, doing the research, contracts and self-publishing. Yours truly sat on two panels entitled “The Muse” and “Writing for Younger Readers”. But of course, there were also fun panels covering things like detective fiction, Doctor Who, monsters and writing fighting.
Ramsey Campbell
Sunday is always a shorter day at Fantasycon. Sadly, gone are the days of the Sunday morning horror panel, enlivened by Ramsey Campbell, who was then the President of the British Fantasy Society, picking up a “bad” horror novel from the readers room and treating us to a reading. This year, Sunday included the traditional BFS AGM, a BFS launch (from stories produced by attendees at the Society’s writing retreat), an interview with Tasha Suri, panels about neurodiversity, audiobooks, publishing and editing, as well as some more fun panels about role-playing games, marmite characters, different forms of warfare, and making your characters suffer.
And that was it, Fantasycon was over for another year, and would be the last for a while under the wing of organisers HWS events who are running the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton in 2025, where it was back in 2013 and need to devote some time and energy to getting that organised, so the British Fantasy Society have stepped up to the plate (like they did for the convention in London last year which was under the threat of cancellation) to organise Fantasycon 2024, back in Chester where it was in 2018, but slightly later than normal, taking place in October, to give attendees of the Glasgow SF Worldcon some time to recover. I hope to see you at both of those.
Ian Hunter
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