Eastercon
I’ll be at Innominate, the 2017 Eastercon being held in Birmingham over the Easter weekend. There are terrific guests of honour – Pat Cadigan, Judith Clute, and Colin Harris – and I’ll be doing a couple of programme items too. I’m especially happy to be hosting this year’s George Hay Lecture, sponsored by the Science Fiction Foundation and given by Prof Debbie Chachra. My full programme is:
Mosaic Novels
Saturday 11:30 – 12:30, Churchill (Hilton NEC Metropole)
The Shore by Sara Taylor, Central Station by Lavie Tidhar, and Clade by James Bradley are all novels made of short stories. Our panelists explore this form of writing, the craft that goes into creating them, how to read them, and what they can achieve that conventionally unified novels cannot do.
John Clute, Pat Cadigan, Tom Hunter (Moderator), Graham Sleight, and Ali Baker
Timeless Speculative Technology. Or Not.
Saturday 14:30 – 15:30, Kings (Hilton NEC Metropole)
SF reflects the technology/design of the time. On screen this can be rather amusing as ‘futuristic’ control rooms are overburdened with tape drives, buttons, and blinking lights. Our panel of scientists, authors and scholars explore the complications of speculating about technology and effectively presenting it in fiction without it appearing obsolete as the reality of technology overtakes it.
Graham Sleight (Moderator), Matthew De Abaitua, Debbie Chachra, Anne Charnock, Pat Cadigan
George Hay Lecture: 3D Printing, Biology, and Futures for Materials
Saturday 16:00 – 17:00, Earls (Hilton NEC Metropole)
While 3D printing (and digital fabrication more generally) is capturing the imagination of creators worldwide, it has some subtle limitations, even as the resolution and range of materials increases. Understanding these limitations sheds light on how the physical properties of objects result from what they’re made from, how they’re made, and the interaction of the two. In contrast to the top-down approach of 3D printing, biological systems create materials from the bottom up. Recent advances in this emergent field of bionanotechnology mean we may soon be able to harness organic machinery to create materials that don’t exist in nature.
The George Hay Lecture is supported by the Science Fiction Foundation.
Graham Sleight (Moderator), Debbie Chachra
Graham Sleight 