Easter Time is Here Again

Easter rolls around on its mad-god-inspired schedule, and so too does Eastercon, the British National Science-Fiction Convention.

This year, as it was two years ago, it’s in the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, near Heathrow. Not the most pleasant or interesting of locations, but it does have the large advantage for me of being relatively close to home. An hour and forty minutes by bus and tube, if TFL is to be believed. And curiously, not much less time overall if you take the crazily-expensive Heathrow Express.

Anyway, the whole family are coming with me this time, which should be fun. We’re just staying for the Saturday and Sunday nights, though some of us may pop back on Monday.

I don’t have any particular plans to see anything on the programme, except the big ones: Iain Banks’s guest of honour speech, and Doctor Who. Looking forward to that one a lot. And it’s going to be interesting watching it with a few hundred other people.

Speaking of guests of honour, the other one is Alastair Reynolds, and i’ve never read any of his stuff (well, maybe a short story or two). So I thought I should do some homework. I’ve been meaning to check him out for a while anyway.

I’ve started Revelation Space, but I’m having a hard time getting into it. It’s just a bit slow to get going. I hope it’ll pick up soon.

Magnetism

On Monday I took my son to the Barbican to see The Magnetic Fields. It was his first proper gig. And an experience quite unlike most gigs I've been to before.

For a start it was entirely seated, and I’ve not been to one of those in a long time - and not just the audience, the band too. Secondly, it was in the Barbican Centre. We’ve been there a few times in the last few months for classical concerts and a dance performance, but it’s a strange venue for rock ‘n’ roll.

But then, rock ‘n’ roll isn’t exactly what The Magnetic Fields play.

Their 69 Love Songs is, as I was tweeting recently, one of the finest albums ever. It’s from 1999, it turns out, but I’ve only known it for a year or two. The first half of Monday’s show contained a good number of songs from it, and also some from the recent Distortion.

The highlight for my boy wasn’t even a Magnetic Fields song at all, but rather one by The Gothic Archies, one of their several alter egos. It also featured the only instance in the evening of singing along with the band; and that was just him, quietly singing ‘Shipwrecked’.

We were right up at the back of the balcony, but despite the distance and low volume, we could still hear everything perfectly. Well, except when they spoke between songs. The vocal mix wasn’t really designed for making that kind of thing audible at the back.

In fact Merritt’s vocals were at their best during the final song, when he took the mike off the stand and walked about. That got him closer to the mike, which suits his croonerish voice.

So they sent us off into the night with a fabulous ‘Papa was a Rodeo’.

Next-Door to a Sequel

Last night I finished Living Next-Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson. I enjoyed much of it, but found it kind of frustrating and annoying, in ways that were hard to define. The main one, though, was that some things were insufficiently explained.

Now, as SF readers we are used to jumping into new worlds, not quite knowing what’s going on, and picking it up as we go along. Indeed, that’s part of the toolkit for reading it (SF reading protocols at Tor.com).

But here, there was something just not quite right, I felt. It was as if there was too much understanding assumed. Had the writer spent too long with her world, I wondered? So long that she could no longer tell what the reader would and wouldn’t know, since she knew it so intimately?

When I finished it I went looking for reviews, to see whether others had the same feeling as me. And what I found proved that, in a sense, I was right about her assuming too much knowledge.

It turns out the book is a sequel.

Oh yes. It’s the sequel to her previous book, Natural History.

Which is fine. But nowhere on the book itself does it tell you that. Nowhere. I’ve checked again and again: it’s not in the blurb, it’s not on the title page, it’s not in the front matter.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have liked to have known this little detail before I started reading. Sure, you can pick things up as you go along; and now that I know it, I realise that she gave us the necessary backstory very well. But really, Pan MacMillan: next time, let us know, OK?

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