More random-ish Worldcon thoughts...

I must say that while my sample is fairly small, that was one of the most enjoyable Worldcon's I've been to.  And glancing at the usual suspects my feeling is being echoed by plenty of people who've a much broader range of experience than I.   There was oodles of good programing, but I missed much of it, mostly because I was usually engaged in something more enjoyable.  The "bar" was somewhat odd for a Brit, but they served awesome, if spectacularly strong, beer and I found myself there on several occasions having extremely long and pleasant conversations. ianmcdonaldyou know what I'm talking about.


I had planned to do less work in the evenings but actually quite enjoyed myself helping to ensure that the London party bar ran smoothly - but a special nod must and should go to the Klingons down the corridor who really had pushed the boat out with their "black hole" party.


I've calculated I made something like 50 litres of Pimm's, all of which was drunk and, I suspect, we could have been serving Pimm's even longer if we'd had it.


I met a lot of interesting new people, including a bunch of British Fen that I'd previously managed to miss having much to do with, so into that column go Alice Lawson, Steve Cooper and John Dowd.


Memories that will stick - annoucing at the Match Game; moderating a couple of excellent panels where the audeince were really left wanting more; trying and failing not to be the only man/big mouth on the Doctor Who panel; running around with jug after jug of Pimm's, watching the effect of Pimm's on many, many ladies falling under the spell of various OTHER Brits (M if you're reading this!) and finding myself in a deep and mostly coherant conversation on potential British future Hugo novel winners with DUFF winner Dave Cake at about 5am...


As a few of you might have noticed, the run up to the con was pretty fraught - with a lot of back and forth on the app.  While it wasn't perfect, I'll admit that it was pretty useful at the convention and we're intending that the source is made available to all conventions moving forward - we do want to work out how to handle an offline database though, as that was by far and away the biggest problem.  That said, at the con we got pretty uniformly good feedback, which was nice for the ego.


And, while on the subject of ego-boo - a huge thank you to all the people who came up to me to thank me for doing various things around the con.  Most of you really did honestly work harder than I did, but it is awfully nice all the same.


So what next?  I would really love to do more Convention's, and I was asked to attend several others over the next couple of years as we move towards London in 2014 turning into the awesome convention I think it will.  But reality is, I'm starting my own business and until that starts to settle down I'm rather constrained on what I can do.  I will, probably, be in Chicago next year, but less likely to go to San Antonio...  I can see Westercon's in my future, especially Westercon-66...  but as for other things, we'll have to see....


Oh and fringefaanyou REALLY need to do the Chunga MADE all these fan winners Hugo edition!

Hugo's... Yes, those....

So... the fan categories seem to have gone well - general approval from me all around there anyway.  Watching Chris was a joy and seeing James Bacon be the grown up in the room, having spent a chunk of the con being the grown up for him was amusing too...

Inception won - which was good as the only actual adult movie on there.

I voted hard *against* the Dr Who block because I really didn't think they were particularly strong stories and there was something amusing about how apoletic some people were getting over F**k Me Ray Bradbury that meant I had to vote for it.  Yes people, I am *that* immature really.

I didn't much like For Want of a Nail, but I did Vote for Emperor of Mars, so that's all good.

However, Best Novel.  What on earth were people thinking?  Dervish House was the best Novel on the list by far, with Feed and 100,000 Kingdoms both excellent novels too.  I was pretty shocked to enjoy Feed, and also shocked at my emotional reaction to it.

Any hoo... it's a popular vote and it tends to get skewed to the US when the Con is in the States...

Which gets me thinking...  The UK has a talented crop of authors who've yet to win a Best Novel Hugo and, rightfully should...  Assuming London wins their bid, and I can say comfortably that the team running the bid are unlikely to fall foul of a Westercon 66 situation now...  this means that British Authors will have probably their best chance in a while with the books in market in 2013, so, based on my fuzzy understanding of the process - probably books beining written next year.

I would like to see a strong British field for a British Worldcon and would like, in no particular order, to see Ian McDonald overcome the travesty that was 2005; or Al Reynolds recognised, because his latest works are full of awesome; Charlie Stross to come out strong with an SF novel; even, on the outside edge something new from Peter Hamilton, or for Steven Baxter to remember what he *used* to write.

Anyway, given the nature of the Hugo's I think the best chance for some of these world class authors to get the win they deserve is going to be by having a home ground advantage.

Something to think about chaps!

Which also makes me think, sexist git that I have been - Justina Robson, Liz Williams, you should be focused on this too... and I'll stop now before Farah Mendleson and/or Cheryl Morgan spot this and give me a list of other British writers to pimp.

The Family... The last 1000 years...

Over several beers at Renovation I regaled ianmcdonald with some stories of my family.  He threatened to use the material, so I just want to make sure people know where it came from first... and, also, because I find it mildly fascinating and wanted to write it down.


My aunt, who, in later life became known as the mad cat woman of Dublin-10, a fact the internets taught me, was the first to tell me the story of the first O'Neill.  It goes like this.  Word got out that the first person to put hand or foot on the soil of Ireland would be its rightful king and heir...  so many set out to win this race.  As the boats neared the shore, the O'Neill's realised they might lose and one of them hacked off his hand and threw it on the beach, thus claiming the nation.  To be honest, in some respects, this sets up a pattern of behaviour that's been the bane of my family for a long, long time.


From the start of the recognisable family name through to the 1500's it was mostly the usual, cheerful internecine and clan fighting that one can imagine, along with a heathy number of bastards and family lines.  Things had got pretty complicated for the O'Neills by the mid 16th century and to cut a LOT of history short, the Tyrone O'Neills ran away.  Rather quickly.  What became my branch of the family got out of dodge somewhere between 1550 and 1600, close as I can tell - and by 1700 were pretty well established in the dairy lands to the east of Limerick where they, the Gleasons, the McNamarras, Coffey's and Keatings pretty much dominated the local bank of surnames.


Things are, frankly, pretty dull until about 1800...  which is when I have to change direction and talk about the McNamaras, who are, frankly far more interesting and where a lot of the cool stuff in the recent family history come from.  Amusing really, because the Tyrone branch of the family had spent a lot of effort about 500 years or so earlier trying to kill the lot of them.


Anyway, it was the time of the potato famine, 1840s or so, and William and Margaret McNamara were living happily in Cappamore, Limerick, assumingly gorging themselves and their family on the local dairy produce which, frankly, saved the village from the worst of the potato shortage but assumingly didn't do a lot for their heart health.  Sometime around the 1840s, they found an old guy struggling by the road.  He was unwell, starving and obviously not from Ireland.  So they took him in and poured cream and butter down his throat until he felt better.  He was a professor of mathematics from Switzerland who, for some weird reason had thought it interesting to see Ireland during a famine.


In exchange for this he took their sons Tim and John under his wing and taught them what he could before heading off into the distance and never being heard of again.  I have reason to suspect that he was actually a time-traveller... which would make this FAR more interesting.


Tim became a master blacksmith, John an engineer and inventor...  Tim travelled the world extensively, spending at least two tours in the gold fields of Australia shoeing horses for the miners and, I suspect, fleecing them something rotten before returning to Ireland in his 50s and fathering a bunch of children including my grandmother.  John remained a batchelor, tinkering with radio, x-rays and a bunch of other cool stuff, and generally spoiling his nephews and neices absolutely rotten - rumour has it my Aunt used to get more than the equivalent of a farm labourers wages in pocket money from him.


Tim's daughter Mary then married Martin O'Neill, of the local farming O'Neills... Martin, being of solid and typical O'Neill stock, then spent the next few years proving there wasn't a lame horse, a drink or a bad farming investment he couldn't make while Mary had to travel the world earning money for the family.  She died during WW2 leading to a small issue for my father of needing special permission, as a serving sailor in the Royal Navy to return home without getting interned for the duration of the war.  My grandfather, OTOH, managed to make it into his mid-70s and died, one Sunday afternoon in 1954 when he got back from the pub.


Does it end there?  Well, not really, the story expands somewhat but I might save my notes on that for another time.  Martin's oldest son went on to be head of the Irish Milk Marketing board - except due to an incident involving my spinster aunts and his wife at my grandmother's funeral, he was never spoken to again.  His oldest daughter went on to be secretary to the Minister of Defence in London and did many weird and varied jobs including observing the information transfer on rocket technologies from the US to British scientists and, apparently, having an affair with Nassau... (I am not joking)  She died in her 80s having adopted 30-50 cats for whom she would travel by bus to Marks and Spencers in Dublin twice a week and buy minced beef for.


His youngest Son, Martin, always known as Paddy, left home at 15 and ran away to London and joined the Royal Navy as a radio operator.  In 1948 he joined the Metropolitan Police, spending several years patrolling the streets not all that far from the site of the London in 2014 bid and, due to some overt anti-Irish feeling from a member of an interview panel, found himself in the fingerprint branch in the mid-1950s.


He retired from the Met in 1981 at the rank of Commander, having had to turn down a promotion to Assistant Deputy Commissioner due to his health, the last police officer to run the forensics branch.  He had, in his carrer worked on the first fingerprint computer identification system; been the London Area Flood Reponse Manager; engaged in negotiations with organisations in the North of Ireland that absolutely never happened; represented Britain at multiple international forensic conferences; told US TV that Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character and been the Scotland Yard/British liasion to the FBI, RCMP, RUC, Garda and Interpol.  He got drunk with both Terry Wogan and Sir Patrick Moore.  As a scout leader in London in the 50s he used trucks "donated" by the Kray twins to take the cubs and scouts to camp.  He knew the train guard who was clubbed during the Great Train robbery and visited him up until his death, never forgiving the robbers for what they did to the man.  He passed the food bucket down to the terrorists in the Balcombe Street seige.


More than 70 serving and retired fingerprint branch officers turned up at his funeral 15 years after he retired and wept telling me that there would never be another like the Gov'nor...  he made John Thaw look like a wimp.


He was a flawed man and I've a million stories I could tell.  About how Richard Power and I deliberately ditched a kid we'd been stuck with at the Windsor Royal Show only to cause a major security alert (apparently he was the head of MI5's son....); how I had dinner in the Interpol canteen; being smuggled out of the Yard by my drunk father; how he had to be smuggled across the border into Northern Ireland by a terrified team of Garda handlers when somebody annouced on open radio that they had him in the car...


That's 1000 years of family history folks.



Scary really.