This weekend has seen BaltiCon 50 in full flow, where George R.R. Martin is one of a number of guests attending. During a signing, Martin confirmed a fan theory that's been doing the rounds ever since A Feast for Crows was published.
"Read the bo...screw it, I'll give you an answer on this one."
Note that this is not a major theory (it's not one of the "Big Ones") and will mean little to TV viewers, but it's a nice minor theory that has engendered a lot of discussion over the last decade.
Last month I attended the fifth TitanCon, a science fiction and fantasy convention in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was the first TitanCon I'd attended, although I had gone to a fan "moot" in 2009 during the filming of the pilot episode of Game of Thrones. Several cast and crewmembers attended that moot, along with George R.R.Martin, and everyone had a great time (reports can be seen here, here and here, and you may recognise some of my photos from memes that have since sprung up online).
TitanCon itself started as a Game of Thrones-oriented event, although it's always had a strong literature track. This year, the international demands of filming for Game of Thrones and the growing expense of attending actors meant that none of the current cast was able to join us. Several crewmembers - most impressively Will Simpson, the show's senior concept artist and visualiser-in-chief - did attend and we were joined by returning actors Miltos Yerolemou (who played Syrio Forel in Season 1) and Aimee Richardson (who played Myrcella Baratheon in the first two seasons). With the GoT participation reduced, the literature track had to step up and it did in style.
The attending authors included Joe Abercrombie (The First Law Trilogy, The Shattered Sea, Best Served Cold), Sarah Pinborough (The Death House, The Dog-Faced Gods, The Nowhere Chronicles), Pat Cadigan (Synners, Fools, Mindplayers and numerous short stories), Peadar Ó Guilín (The Bone World Trilogy, The Call), Laurence Donaghy (The Folk'd Trilogy), Debbie "DJ" McCune (the Death and Co. series), Jo Zebedee (Abendau's Heir) and debut author Zoë Sumra (Sailor to a Siren). On the Friday evening (25 September) the authors read from their new books (or, in Joe's case, from The Heroes). Laurance Donaghy made a notable impact by reading an excellent and witty short story about God making an adoption application, which he'd only written the day before.
The main day of the convention was Saturday 26 September. I moderated a panel on Season 5 with Miltos, Aimee and Will. We discussed fan reactions to the divisive (putting it mildly) season, Will's feelings when the show won its glut of Emmy Awards and the circumstances behind Myrcella being recast (and maximum credit for Aimee handling that potentially awkward discussion with good humour and grace). Will also outlined the process how a sequence such as the Battle of Hardhome started with the script, was then expanded by his concept art and ideas and then turned into a detailed battle-plan on how to film it, before effects are added. He hinted that similar big scenes may lie ahead in Season 6, but was unable to say more.
Season 6 proved to be the main discussion point for a second panel later in the day, hosted by the mighty Peadar Ó Guilín (with myself as a guest). Due to the lack of actors currently on the show this was adjusted on the fly to involve the audience more and there was a lot of entertaining discussion about the divergence between the books and the TV series what plot points the upcoming season might develop further.
On the literature side of things, I attended an amusing panel about sex and how to write and handle it. The highlight of this panel was Joe Abercrombie reading a particularly...vivid sex scene from Morrissey's new novel.
There was also a quiz drawing on 1980s gameshow Blankey Blank pitting, which I did miserably at (although I did win membership of next year's convention as a consolation prize), but was hilarious, mainly for Joe Abercrombie winning a prize of George R.R. Martin's face.
Things wrapped up with a performance show put on by Brutal Ballet and then some karaoke and partying. A great time was had by all.
The Sunday was reserved for a special event: a coach trip around Northern Ireland to visit locations used on Game of Thrones. These included Ballintoy Harbour, where Iron Island scenes were shot for Season 2, and Portstewart Strand, where scenes were filmed for Dorne in Season 5. We also visited Larrybane Quarry, where scenes involving Renly and Stannis meeting in Season 2 were shot. The day was marked by a brutal rivalry between the two coaches, with escalating comments made on Twitter and Facebook. Things were wrapped up at Clandeboye Estate where the travellers on Coach One staged a brutal mock-Red Wedding on their Coach Two comrades. Then it was back to the hotel to watch the lunar eclipse. We took advantage of the coach's intercom system to hold a mobile panel on Aragorn's economic policies against the orcs post the War of the Ring (a topic much-discussed by GRRM recently), which was both random and fun.
There was no programming for the Monday, and with my flight not leaving until late the day was instead spent in the hotel bar with a surprisingly large number of other attendees. Comedy was invoked when an actual wedding party showed up, so one of our attending musicians decided to provide an appropriate soundtrack:
Overall, TitanCon was enormous fun. Belfast is a fun city (and unexpectedly great for burrito restaurants), the surrounding countryside is beautiful and the coach tour was a great way of both seeing the sights and also bonding with fellow attendees, some of whom went on to attend OctoCon in Dublin a couple of weeks later.
This was my first TitanCon but certainly won't be the last. With the chaotic shooting schedule of Game of Thrones likely to continue and the show likely to end in 2018, TitanCon is going to continue its evolution into a more general SFF convention for Northern Ireland, which is a good move. In 2016 it will likely be held earlier in the year (possibly early August) and I will certainly be attending.
This will be the fifth TitanCon, which is held every year in Belfast. The convention is primarily dedicated to Game of Thrones, which films its studio scenes in the city at the nearby Paint Hall Studios, but also has a strong track dedicated to literature.
This year will feature authors Joe Abercrombie, Sarah Pinborough, Pat Cadigan, Peadar Ó Guilín, Laurence Donaghy, Debbie "DJ" McCune, Zoë Sumra and Jo Zebedee, as well as appearances by the Medieval Combat Group. Miltos "Syrio Forel" Yerolemou and Aimee "Myrcella Baratheon" Richardson will be representing for Game of Thrones, along with some other castmembers (not confirmed until the day as the filming schedule keeps changing).
There are also workshops on papercraft, claymaking, leather crafting and even waterdancing. Things are rounded off with a quizz and a party (of course!). There's also a coach tour on the Sunday which takes in various filming locations in and around the city.
I haven't been to TitanCon before, but I went to its predecessor, the 2009 Belfast Moot when they were filming the pilot and Kit Harington and Maisie Williams could walk down the street without being mobbed, which was great fun. I will also be moderating the "Season 5 in Review" panel which will be very interesting.
If you're interested in coming, there are still some tickets available and the congoers know how to throw a great event!
Next week I'll be in New York City for the NYC Comic-Con, where, courtesy of Wikia, I'll be on the only Game of Thrones panel at the event (Thursday 1.30-2.30, Empire Stage 1-E). I'll be joined by actors Kristian Nairn (Hodor) and Natalia Tena (Osha) to talk about the show, the upcoming fifth season and more.
This is my first time in the Big Apple and I have a bit more free time than I did in Chicago earlier this year, so I'll actually be doing some sightseeing! I have been informed that I will be tasting New York pizza this time around, as well as doing some rather unfortunately obvious touristy things. There will, I imagine, be photos.
Update: Natalia Tena has unfortunately pulled out of the panel, but Daniel Portman (Podrick Payne) will kindly be taking her place.
On Friday I ventured across the pond for the first time. Thanks to Wikia, I travelled to Chicago (via Toronto) to take part in a Game of Thrones fan panel at the C2E2 convention.
Eleven hours after leaving home (including the stop in Toronto) I finally arrived at Chicago's O'Hare Airport and was whisked by taxi the 20-odd miles to McCormick Place, where the convention was being held. For those unfamiliar with, C2E2 is a mass media SFF convention, essentially a Comic-Con, focused heavily on comics, movies and TV shows. There is a small book track as well, and I was briefly able to stop and say hi to John Scalzi and Patrick Rothfuss before pressing on with the Game of Thrones stuff.
One of the several other hats I wear is the founder and admin of the Game of Thrones Wiki, which has reached a high of 12 million hits per week during this season. Wikia, which runs the whole network, wanted me to join in a panel on the show. Initially it was just going to be myself, Jamie Hari of the Marvel and DC Database Wikis and Alfie 'Theon' Allen, but we were eventually also joined by Kristian Nairn (Hodor) and Natalia Tena (Osha). The actors were fashionably late, which left myself and Jamie to hold down the fort with several hundred fans for the opening minutes.
The panel seemed to be successful. Alfie talked about the process of playing such a damaged character as Theon and Kristian the various ways the directors have got him to act with such restricted dialogue. Natalia talked about the importance of the TV show as a separate entity to the books and the urgent need for male/female nudity parity in the show. I mused on the fan theory that Littlefinger is turning into Batman (the voice) and we threw it out there that Joffrey had faked his own death.
After the panel I had a chance to look around the rest of the convention. I got to see the original Ghostbusters ambulance and meet SFF legends Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters, The Crow) and Tony Todd (Candyman and Worf's brother Kurn from ST:TNG and DS9). There was a lot of spectacular costumes around as well. The money and craftsmanship people put into their costumes was nothing short of jaw-dropping.
On the last day I got to meet Wheel of Time superfan Terez, who had a special surprise: a look at Robert Jordan's notes and papers that he had donated to the university of Charleston. There'll be a specific blog on this later on, but it was fascinating to see how the story evolved from the earliest outlines that Jordan wrote in the mid-1980s to the story that we got.
One major regret is that, after numerous restaurant and sightseeing recommendations, I didn't get out of the convention and hotel centre for the weekend, so I didn't see much of Chicago itself.
Then it was time for home (direct, this time and thankfully). Which would have been more fun if the plane hadn't suffered a partial electrical failure on the runway and then been delayed by 15 minutes by a brief groundstop for the whole airport, which left a lot of the passengers on-edge for the eight-hour flight home.
Still, a terrific experience. I enjoyed my first trip to the USA, brief though it was, and looking forwards to going back, hopefully for more than forty-eight hours next time.
This weekend I attended Eastercon 2012, the largest annual British science fiction and fantasy convention. This year it was held at a hotel adjoining Heathrow Airport. For the first time in its history, the convention was sold out in advance, likely due to the presence of George R.R. Martin (although having authors such as Joe Abercrombie, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Chris Wooding, Lisa Tuttle, Pat Cadigan and Cory Doctorow didn't hurt either).
Finally!
Time and budgetary constraints meant I could only attend for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, though I did manage to catch the Game of Thrones TV panel, featuring actors Miltos Yerolemou (Syrio Forel) and John Bradley West (Samwell Tarly). Gethin Anthony (Renly Baratheon) and Natalia Tena (Osha) could also be found around the convention, though they didn't take part in the panels. This was followed by a Wild Cards panel where GRRM talked about the long-running shared world setting with John Jos. Miller, Pat Cadigan, Paul Cornell, David Anthony Durham, Gail Gerstner-Miller and his wife, Parris McBride (who played in the original RPG games that led to the creation of the setting).
The meat of the convention, as normal, happened at the bar and the late night parties. I met Adrian Tchaikovsky (author of the highly enjoyable Shadows of the Apt series) for the first time (he's halfway through writing the tenth and final book in the series) and caught up with a whole raft of other contacts. No massive exclusives, although Joe Abercrombie is heavily into the edits on A Red Country and confirmed that it looks like the UK edition will keep the 'A' in the title whilst the US edition will drop it (as seen on the already-revealed cover art). Gollancz also announced that they are bringing the Wild Cards series to the UK, with the original three books to be published before the end of the 2012 and then the 'new generation' books starting with Inside Straight to follow next year. A plan for the 'middle books' (including the long-missing iBook volumes) hasn't yet been decided upon, aside from the possibility of releasing them as ebook-only editions. Elsewhere, Chris Wooding confirmed he was just about to start working on the fourth Ketty Jay book as well.
The Gemmell Award nominations were announced, to much frowning (there definitely seemed to be a consensus amongst many present - though not the award organisers to my knowledge - that the award could do with being moved to a juried format), and there was much discussion of the Hugo shortlist, not least the renewed GRRM vs Rowling contest caused by Game of Thrones Season 1 going up against the final Harry Potter move in the Long-form Dramatic Presentation category. Previously, The Goblet of Fire bested A Storm of Swords to the 2001 Best Novel Hugo Award, so it'll be interesting to see how it falls out this year. Otherwise the main topic of interest regarding the Hugos was that the novels on the list were books people had actually heard of, with particular positive surprise over the presence of Leviathan Wakes on the list.
My biggest moment at the convention was interviewing GRRM on the Sunday. We talked for about an hour about his career, from short stories through ASoIaF and the TV series, before he fielded questions from the floor. Some interesting stuff there. The interview was recorded and live-streamed, although it seems to have vanished from the Internet now. Once it resurfaces I will link it here.
Overall, it was an interesting - not to mention nerve-wracking - experience. But good fun for catching up with old friends and contacts and making some new ones.
Tor UK are sponsoring a new science fiction and fantasy convention being held in Leeds in the UK on 12 March 2011, named ConJour. A number of high-profile authors are attending and the event looks like being a lot of fun. So if you're in the UK and are looking to meet some of the best writers around at the moment it, might be worth a look.
The currently-confirmed guests are:
Richard Morgan
Suzanne MacLeod
John Meaney
Mark Charan Newton
Kate Griffin
Mike Carey
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Freda Warrington
Justina Robson
The event is being held at the Leeds Park Plaza Hotel. Up until 30 November tickets cost £25 and rise to £30 on 1 December. It looks like being a lot of fun, so check it out if you're interested!
