I do not have very much experience of attending conventions. I did once attend one in Glasgow to keep my daughter company; I can't even remember which con it was, although I do remember the guy in the very convincing Pyramid Head costume. (Apparently people put Pyramid Head on their hear-me-out cakes but I'm not going to be doing that any time soon. Brrrr.) Anyway, I decided I really ought to dip my toe in the water. I love so much of the stuff that is celebrated and I actually write horror and fantasy, for goodness' sake. So last weekend I went to EasterCon in Belfast.
The journey there was a bit of an Odyssey. I decided to travel in an eco friendly way, so I opted for the ferry from Cairnryan. This would have been fine, except I rang the ferry company to check there would be parking at the terminal, and they said they couldn't guarantee it. It was Easter weekend, after all. So my long suffering husband had to drive me down there. Then the ferry was late (and quite raucous). I arrived in Belfast feeling a bit the worse for wear, to find that the bus had left 90 minutes before and there wasn't another one for ages. Eventually I shelled out for a taxi. I suppose I could consider that entire journey a penance to Gaia or something. On the way home I had to fly; I just couldn't make the logistics work.
I had two panels arranged for the weekend. When I looked at the programme I realised that other people had scheduled far more events, but being a newbie I didn't want to overdo it. One of the panels was "Lost Films, Old Tech: The Appeal of Analogue Horror" and the other one was "X Never, Ever Marks the Spot: Archaeology in Speculative Fiction".
Anyway, here's the Old Tech panel. Left to right: friendly tech person, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Williamson, Lynda E. Rucker (moderator), me, Ben Unsworth.
One of the things Aaron Worth highlighted was the uniquely ominous character of outdated technology: the grainy images, the crackling soundtrack. I have to agree with this; I think, for example, that Nosferatu (1922) is still frightening in spite of being superseded by modern special effects, because it is palpably ancient. There is a dark griminess to it, as though it is something excavated from a bad place. Film technology is now old enough to take the place of handwritten documents and antique engravings in supernatural fiction, particularly given that we do not necessarily want to put apparitions and phenomena too far into the past: M.J.James himself commented "It cannot be said too often that the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective." His phantoms are often of relatively recent date, and nowadays that would put them firmly in the era of the moving image. Arguably also film is the latest form of the "uncanny valley"; the moving image looks exactly like a person but isn't a living person.
As mentioned, there is a surprising amount of tech in M.R.James's stories (cameras, trams etc). But undoubtedly the most unsettling piece of technology is the magic lantern show which Mr. Karswell puts on for the village children in "Casting the Runes". It prefigures the terrifying moment in The Ring (2002) when Samara crawls out of the TV screen:
"He switched on another slide, which showed a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other he made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience; and this was accompanied by a sort of dry rustling sound which sent the children nearly mad."
"Casting the Runes" was published in 1911, by which time movies were well established. Magic lanterns were still in use but had been technically overtaken by more sophisticated media, so they were already old tech.
Anyway, that was a massive digression! As you can see, the problem with this topic is not getting me to talk about it; it's getting me to shut up...
The Archaeology panel took place half an hour after the Old Tech one ended, and alas, I do not have a picture of it. It was moderated by Liz Bourke and featured David Hodson, Sharan Volin, Kari Sperring (Maund) and me.
I have a lot of thoughts about archaeology in speculative fiction and films; far more thoughts, in fact, than I was able to squeeze into my panel contributions! So I might blog about those separately. The general consensus (unsurprisingly) was that archaeology in books and films isn't much like real life archaeology. My son is a field archaeologist working here in Scotland, and as I remarked during the panel, if anyone made a realistic film based on what he does, it would be about three weeks long and the protagonist would spend most of that time standing next to a trench in a hard hat and steel toe capped boots; in the last reel they would discover a few places where the earth was a different colour, indicating that wooden posts had once been there. Those Indiana Jones-type movies where archaeologists rush about grabbing precious artefacts, or have to decipher arcane scripts at high speed with everyone screaming at them, are not true to life. But you know what? The excitement is real. I can get very passionate about petrospheres and Viking burials, even if nobody zoomed in and snatched them from under the nose of a bunch of villains.
A propos, I have written several stories featuring archaeology in one way or another, and you can listen to one of them in this recording by David Longhorn: "Gold" - two others, "The Valley of Achor" and "The Edge of the World" (in which I offer an explanation for the mysterious purpose of petrospheres) can be found in my collection Atmospheric Disturbances from Swan River Press.
Other highlights included attending a very interesting panel on the topic of "Irish Mythology and Horror" (had to be done, didn't it?) and bagging a signed Adrian Tchaikovsky book for my daughter.
I also spent quite a lot of time hanging out at the Swan River Press stand in the Dealers' Room, where the indefatigable Brian J. Showers (below) presented some truly gorgeous volumes and could also be persuaded to blether for hours and hours about books, publishing, and conventions.
Anyway, that was my first proper Con - let's hope it's the first of many!
