Guest of Honour: Stephen Baxter



Stevenage: easily accessible by road, rail and Martian Cylinder


PROGRESS REPORT TWO

APRIL 1999

Welcome to PR2! Since PR1, we’ve had a lot more people join (see below - but why do half our members have surnames in the first 3 letters of the alphabet?) and have gone a long way towards getting the Seccon programme sorted out. So, without further ado, on to our news:

We’re looking to run our (single-stream) programme from about 7-late on Friday, 11-6 on Saturday (see opposite) and 11-late on Sunday.

Stephen Baxter will of course be giving us a Guest of Honour talk, entitled All Aboard for the Eschaton; he will also be appearing on several of our panels. Talking of panels, the ones we have planned for you include the following:

• Cosmic SF Steve Baxter and the rest of our panel explain just what’s so much fun in squashing the complete history of the universe into your new novel.
• How Do You Tell If The Future’s Here? It used to be obvious how you could tell when the future had arrived: personal hoverplanes and holidays on Mars. What about now?
• Sharp Dressed Fan If SF fans are all geeks with no dress sense, where does the increasingly traditional Convention Saturday Night Sartorial Extravaganza come from?
• Isn’t It About Time You Gave SFX Another Chance? In the vein of SFX Magazine ’s own regular feature, we ask if mass-market ‘sci-fi’ glossies can bridge the lit/media divide.
• The Third Age of TV SF The Obligatory B5 Item: now it’s over, has there been a real sea-change in TV science fiction?

We’ll also be running Ask Stephen Baxter - you supply the questions as you register, and our interviewer picks them out of the hat and grills Steve accordingly. Other planned items include quizzes, fan auctions, What’s My Line for Mad Scientists of SF, and more…

As we mentioned in PR1, owing to a long-standing prior booking we don’t have the use of the main function space on the Saturday evening of the convention. We will still have full use of the bar (the hotel tell us that the other booking should not interfere with this); nonetheless, we are going to strongly suggest that if you want to have a night out on the town (eating, 10 pin bowling, going to the cinema) during Seccon, then Saturday night should be it.

Now, if you’re all going to be out on the town on Saturday, what happens about the "…increasingly traditional Convention Saturday Night Sartorial Extravaganza…" mentioned earlier? Well, we suggest having it on the Friday night, ‘cos that’s when we plan to run the ‘Sharp Dressed Fan’ panel in question

So, to summarize: If you’re planning on getting your best togs on at some stage during Seccon, we suggest doing it on Friday. If you’re planning on going out for a slap-up meal, it’s probably best to aim to do it Saturday.

Rooms All our members should have had a room booking form with PR1. We are beginning to run low on single rooms, although we still have plenty of doubles and twins. If you haven’t had a room booking form yet, please let us know.

Volunteers If you are interested in helping with the running of the convention, or in being on the programme, please drop us a line. All volunteers welcome!

Attending membership of Seccon costs £23 until May 15^th 1999, then £27 on the door. Cheques, payable to 'Seccon' should be sent with name (plus badge name if you wish) and contact details to:

The Seccon Committee are Simon and Bridget Bradshaw. For further details of Seccon, contact us at the above address or via our email or Web site as below: