There was a princess in a tall, tall tower. A prince rescued her and she fell flat on her face. The prince thought she was sleeping and kissed her, but she was actually dead.

I hope she ends up becoming a writer, I do like a bit of dark fantasy

1. Surface Detail, Iain M Banks.  01/01 – 22/01.
2. The Táin: From the Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge, Thomas Kinsella (trans.) and Louis Le Brocquy (illus.)  22/01 – 30/01.
3. The Kraken, China Miéville.  31/01 – 15/03.
4. The Quantum Thief, Hannu Ranjaniemi. 15/03 – 22/03.
5. American Gods, Neil Gaiman. 23/03 – 30/03.
6. Before They Are Hanged, Joe Abercrombie. 31/03 – 06/04
7. Last Argument of Kings, Joe Abercrombie. 07/04 – 16/04.
8. The Lovecraft Anthology Volume 1, Dan Lockwood (Ed.) 17/04 – 20/04.
9. Deep State, Walter Jon Williams. 21/04 – 05/05.
10. At The Mountains of Madness, HP Lovecraft, INJ Culbard (Illus.) 22/04 – 23/04.
11. The Night Sessions, Ken MacLeod. 06/05 – 19/05.
12. Dark Spires, Colin Harvey (Ed.) 20/05 -
13. Zoo City, Lauren Beukes. 20/05 – 16/06.
14. Wireless, Charles Stross. 17/06 -
15. The Quest for Arthur’s Britain, Geoffrey Ashe (Ed.). 25/06 – 30/06.
16. Camelot and the Vision of Albion, Geoffrey Ashe. 30/06 -
17. Rule 34, Charles Stross. 09/07 – 15/07.
18. The Evolutionary Void, Peter F Hamilton. 16/07 – 23/07.
19. Vast, Linda Nagata. 23/07 – 06/08.
20. The Bohr Maker, Linda Nagata. 07/08 – 25/08.
21. The Recollection, Gareth L Powell. 26/08 – 02/09.
22. Damage Time, Colin Harvey. 02/09 – 28/10.
23. Sixty One Nails, Mike Shevdon. 29/10 – 14/11.
24. A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin. 15/11 -

And that’s all so far. I guess I’ll be able to see just how widely, or not, I read by the end of the year.  I often have more than one book on the go, but so far it’s been sequential so far this year.  Link targets vary, some Wikipedia, some author or publisher sites, some reviews – there might be a tooltip if you hover over the link and I remembered to add one.

It was a great day out.  Loads of interesting panel discussions, a range of dealers and artists displaying their work and plenty of interesting and friendly people to talk and drink with.  High points of the day were chatting with Alastair Reynolds during the mass book-signing at lunchtime, Eugene Byrne‘s talk on the fantastic cityscape of Bristol and watching John Meaney and Juliet McKenna terrorise Joe Abercrombie and Cheryl Morgan during the “Writing Fight Scenes” panel.  I enjoyed all the panels I attended (all but two I think), came second in the pub quiz with a group of people I’d never met before (well, except for Mark) and narrowly avoided becoming embarrassingly drunk (at least I think I avoided it…)

Strangely, I was a little apprehensive before the Con.  I’ve been a fan of SF and Fantasy for as long as I’ve been reading, but I’ve never really been into Cons and fandom although it has intrigued me.  I guess my reluctance to take part in the past has been due to my own insecurities as much as anything else; I feared things might be cliquey or exclusive and I’m happy to have been proved wrong, at least by the folks at BristolCon.  I’ve been going along to the Bristol Science Fiction and Fantasy Society monthly meetings on and off for a few months this year and have met a group of friendly and interesting people, many of whom were involved with running BristolCon, so I’ll be going again next year.  Thanks to everyone involved in organising a fun and interesting day!

For the interested, there are a handful of photos on my Flickr page, and a list of links to other BristolCon’10 write-ups here on the BristolCon site.  Search Twitter for the #bristolcon hashtag for a load of associated tweets.

(Posting this, I look through my sf posts and realise I don’t write enough on this topic. My degree thesis centred on SF, so I must be able to come up with something interesting to say on the subject. BTW, I’m not going to publish the dissertation here. The word “postmodernism” is used far too often for comfort.)

The parade, which ran all the way through the centre of the city, made me think of a US ticker-tape parade or a Royal occasion back in the UK, but with far less security than you’d expect given the numbers involved. Interspersed between groups of costumed extras, the stars of the film slowly made their way to the cinema for a round of speeches and the Premiere itself. They all looked pretty blown away by the whole event, and all seemed to have big smiles on as they drank in the adulation surrounding them.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get any good shots of the stars themselves. I had a reasonable vantage point, but the sheer frenzy that greeted them proved beyond my capabilities to penetrate. I’m not too bothered really, as I’m sure we’ll all see plenty of them all over the coming weeks as the hype continues to build for the film’s general release. In the mean time here’s another shot of some of their escort.

The parade was fun, and seemed to live up to the city’s expectations. There was a general sense of carnival throughout the day, and I don’t think anyone really expected to get a lot of work done (I had a job interview rescheduled for Tuesday). Even the phone company got in on the act (I hope you can make out the screen, it says we’re in ‘MiddlEarth’)

Should you think that the whole country was united in LotR celebration, I should mention a few signs of dissent that were present, albeit almost swamped, on the day. As the band which concluded the parade marched past the spot I’d found for myself, a handful of people unfurled a large banner:

A little further down the road was another small group standing around some graffiti-covered cardboard boxes haranguing the crowd on the same issue. There was some debate with a few of the surrounding crowd, but I didn’t stay to watch for long. There weren’t many people protesting – a tiny number compared to the crowds happily watching the parade go past – but it’s worth a mention, especially as the latest issue of The Package mentions something similar in a short piece on some of the consequences of increased tourism to NZ. There is some concern over these issues here, even if it doesn’t seem to rate much of a mention in the mainstream media outlets.

We watched the speeches in a bar, although for some bizarre reason the local media kept interrupting their coverage of the days events – even in the middle of the speeches – to report on mundanities such as the sports results, or some piece of dull local news. This was actually the subject of complaints in the letters page of the paper later in the week, so it wasn’t just us that found this a bit odd. After the speeches were concluded and the stars enjoying the fruits of their labours in the cinema, the crowds began to disperse. We headed down to Taranaki Wharf to watch some of the entertainment laid on, but it quickly became pretty cold and we ended up heading home to bed rather than sitting up to watch the Two Towers yet again – after all the bloody hype, we plebs still have to wait until the 18th to watch the damn new film ourselves!

I expect to see a few more before the day is out! Right, I’m off to join the fun.

A set of commemorative stamps have been released to mark the occasion and these are the source of much of the more obvious decoration – from banners adorning the street lights to billboards to vast sheets tied across the fronts of office blocks. The largest depicts Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf, hangs down about eight floors from the front of the NZ Postal Service building and has become an icon of LotR-obsessed Wellington, but I prefer the (slightly) more subtle approach embodied by this three-dimensional billboard:

There are two cinemas associated with the Premiere, the Embassy and the Reading Cinemas complex, and atop each building perches a Black Rider astride his dragon-like winged steed gazing down balefully on the passing throngs.

There is to be a great big parade on the day of the Premiere winding it’s way through the city to the final stretch of Red Carpet leading up the steps to the doors of the Embassy Theatre. Most of the inner city hotels and hostels are completely booked up and have been for weeks and weeks; had we not sorted a flat this week we might have faced a night in the park on monday!

It’s quite fun being in a city the size of Wellington when something like this is happening – it’s small enough for the excitment to get everywhere, and you can’t help get a bit caught up in it all even as a visitor. We even had a moments excitement ourselves the other day when we realised that we’d just strolled past one of the hobbits!