Sci Fi Day in Falmouth

I've been busy writing recently, and there hasn't been much time for blog posts - even the delights of BristolCon had to pass unblogged, although nearly everybody who else who was there seems to have blogged about it, so hopefully mine won't be missed.  It was an excellent day as always, and I suppose I should take this chance to announce that one of the Guests of Honour next year will be (ahem) ME, which is very flattering and a bit unexpected. More on this, and on the thriving Bristol SF scene, in future posts.

There were further Science Fictional goings on yesterday at University College Falmouth in Penryn, where Rupert Loydell, the senior lecturer in Creative Writing, and some of his colleagues had organised a one day Science Fiction conference. I gave a presentation about how I came to create the world of Mortal Engines. Oh, and there was a visualiser handy, so I did a quick drawing of one of the evil Gollarks from Murderous Maths, too...

I also got to sit in on talks by film studies lecturer Kingsley Marshall on the role of robots in SF cinema and by Chrisy Dennis on space opera - both very interesting, and potentially quite useful, since the main thing I'm busy writing at the moment is a mammoth space opera with a robot as one of the central characters.  Chrisy's talk was partly illustrated with excerpts from the David Lynch film of Frank Herbert's Dune, which took me back a bit. Released in 1984, Dune is possibly the worst film I've ever foolishly paid actual money to see at a cinema (and I've seen Prometheus), but it does have some extraordinary futurist/Ruritanian production design, which had a bit of an influence on Mortal Engines.

As well as a lot of the students from Falmouth's highly regarded creative writing courses the conference was attended by some of the members of Writing Squad Kernow, a group of talented young writers aged from 13 to 19 from right across Cornwall. One of them, Alice Vickery, came dressed as Hester Shaw...

...but without the hideous facial disfigurement:

After my talk I signed a lot of books. While I was at it, wrter and 'iphoneographer' Benamon Tame took this picture of me and did mysterious filtery things to it on his phone to create this image...

Many thanks to Rupert, Sam, Kingsley and their colleagues, and to everyone I met in Penryn.

Oh, and I cam home to find a copy of The Phoenix waiting, featuring Jinks & O'Hare - Funfair Repair, the comic I drew with Sarah McIntyre. Sarah's colours look fantastic!

While I was in Cornwall, Sarah was at a party in London to celebrate The Phoenix, and she met a young comics fan there who has already done his own Jinks & O'Hare sequel. I wish I could work that fast!