#conversation 2023

19 DAYS TO GO! Debut Spotlight: we're super excited to be welcoming some new authors who'll be reading from their first novels at Eastercon for the first time!

A. Y Chao @ay_chao

will be reading from their debut novel Shanghai Immortal, a fantastical Chinese adventure!

M V Melcer @MVMelcer

will be reading from her debut novel Refractions, a wild space opera tale!

Lucy A McLaren @lucyamclaren

There were quite a few panels this year about gender in SFF, and also on the panels that weren't about gender, panelists were identifying as queer in some way.

There's so much bad news for the queer community in the real world at the moment that it was wonderful to be in a space where queerness in all its rainbow varieties was being celebrated. There were even gender neutral toilets near the art show and dealers' room (labelled "with urinals" and "with sanitary bins").

I kept seeing Trip Galey ("I'm too queer to be hired by Disney") on panels, including the one about my comfort read The Dark is Rising, where he was the token American, looking at a quite alien British Christmas story.

In another panel someone commented on the pinky-purple lighting behind the panelists' table - was it deliberately in the bisexual colours? The member of the panel who had identified as bisexual waved a hand and said: "Oh, this? I thought it was normal - it follows me everywhere!"

And there were the authors who made a point of mentioning that they wrote gay characters, like Aliette de Bodard, and the artists, and the fan fiction writers reading out stories about gay encounters (the Discworld one was very funny).

So there's a lot of queer representation in SF and Fantasy if you know where to look for it - in various panels people recommended looking for the small presses rather than the large publishing houses.

The other thing that I noticed was the number of people who said they are autistic - there were a lot of authors and at least one artist. Again, there are books out there that are on my list to get now because they include autistic characters (thanks, David Green), and various people that I've been looking for on tumblr or twitter now that I've seen them on panels.

Thanks to our hard working tech team a staggering ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE programme items are now available for Conversation 2023 members to watch on catch-up, at least until the end of April. Step by step instructions for accessing the catch-up are on the Conversation 2023 website

Whenever you watch an item, do take a look at the programme item forums on the con Discord as they remain open and there’s still active discussion going on. You could even organise a watch party with your friends and use the Discord forum to discuss the item you’re watching!

Catch-up gives you the opportunity to watch many more programme items than you would otherwise have had time to do (including watching all six items from the same time slot if you so wish). It's a real boon for our volunteers who worked so hard during the con, as well.

Hello, and welcome to Eastercon, the annual British national science fiction convention that’s run by fandom, for fandom, every year since 1955 (and started a few years before that, but then a world war got in the way).

I figure there’s a good chance you’re at least a little bit interested in science fiction, history, fantasy, art, and all that good geeky stuff - which we’ll have, in person and online, in abundance for all FOUR days of 7-10 April 2023.

And if that’s not enough, I (the Programme lead, open to suggestions for what you want to see on programme) will definitely share photos of my cats on demand:

But if even Titus Pullo’s big round face isn’t convincing enough, here’s a ton more reasons to attend:

Here's some of the items on sale in our wonderful Dealers Room!

I completed all my side quests and rewarded myself by buying six books

People at the NEC gaming festival appear to be camping literally inside one of the expo halls and that just seems weird to me?

Aliette de Bodard won the BSFA award for best short, and THE RED SCHOLAR'S WAKE won best cover!!

Adam Roberts and Garth Nix accidentally cosplayed as each other