Confabulation - the 46th British National Science Fiction Convention

Huge deserted buildings, an automatic railway shuttling empty carriages between the steel and glass edifices - London Docklands was an appropriately futuristic setting for this year's Eastercon, in the Britannia International hotel. The guests were Lois McMaster Bujold - award-winning author of the Miles Vorkosigan space operas (Shards of Honour, Mirror Dance) and one fantasy novel, the Spirit Ring - and Bob Shaw, author of Orbitsville and Light of Other Days, who entertained the convention with one of his excruciatingly pun-laden Serious Scientific Talks on the Irish Space Programme (although he confesses he knows little of science, having been thrown out of the Science Fiction Writers of America for assuming that a monomolecular layer was just a very small chicken).

Other SF authors who put in appearances over the weekend included Mary Gentle, Diane Duane, Peter Morwood, Colin Greenland, Jack Cohen, Jeff Noon, Geoff Ryman, John Brunner and Harry Harrison. As this year's World Science Fiction Convention, Intersection, is being held in Glasgow this August and many fans are knee-deep in organising it, the committee planned Confabulation as a long weekend of relaxation, with two sessions of Moose TV, an assortment of interviews, sketches and adverts for future conventions, modelled after breakfast-time TV, sofas and all. One of the more popular programme items teamed John Brunner, Jeff Noon and Mary Gentle to discuss the use of cities in SF, ranging from Brunner's ecological disasters to Jeff Noon's near-present day futuristic Manchester in Vurt. Jeff Noon was also part of a debate on the future of written SF (has the science gone out of science fiction?) which ended up as a lengthy discussion in the bar. Another popular item was a discussion of Babylon 5 - is it good television or good science fiction, or both? - which proved so popular that there was an impromptu showing of several episodes, in addition to the scheduled programme of videos.

Although few publishers or editors were in evidence at Confabulation, Signet launched the Creed imprint, a new line of dark fantasy with books from Storm Constantine, Graham Joyce and Freda Warrington. The winners of this year's British Science Fiction Association awards were announced on Saturday night; Iain Banks won best novel for Feersum Endjinn, best short fiction was Paul Di Filipo's Double Helix in the British SF magazine Interzone and best artwork was Jim Burns' cover for an issue of Interzone (the US cover for Karen Joy Fowler's Artificial Things).

For the first time in seven years, the bid to hold the 1997 Eastercon was contested - with the choice between Illumination 2, a reprise of the 1991 Blackpool convention, or Intervention, a bid from the group that previously ran the highly successful biennial summer Wincons in Winchester. The winning bid was Intervention, and will be held at the Adelphi in Liverpool, with guests Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg and Dave Langford. You don't have to wait that long through - the 1996 Eastercon, Evolution, will do it all again next Easter in the Radisson Edwardian hotel at Heathrow.

(Published in SFX magazine)