Tomorrow, the 22nd of February 2014, the 31st Picocon will be taking place in London, at Imperial College, and your host Charlie is one of the guests.
Picocon is a one day SF convention organised for the past three decades by the Imperial College SF Society. As a student-run convention, it has certain traditions which make it different from the more residential conventions such as Eastercon and the like. It has a light — and light-hearted — program, with a single thread. The social part of the convention takes place around Beit Quadrangle where the College Union bar is, and the sessions usually occur in Lecture Room 1 across the road.
There are two guests apart from Charlie. The factual part of the program is being underpinned by Professor David Southwood, a space scientist associated with the University. As a former director of science at the European Space Agency, he knows a lot about launching spacecraft and, in the case of the Huygens probe, landing them (on Saturn's moon Titan).
The third guest is Sarah Pinborough, a writer from West London who works in the Crime and (usually Dark) Fantasy fields. She's particularly interested in the intersection of the occult and crime, and her Dog-Faced Gods trilogy landed in the same arena as Paul Cornell's London Falling and Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London novels, with a London policeman protagonist coming to terms with the world being not as he thought. She has also reworked the world of fairy tales, with her books Poison, Charm and Beauty, a triptych riffing off Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty but with a somewhat more adult treatment than usual. In the pure Crime area, she was the script writer for an episode of New Tricks.
For more details, including where, when and how much (full membership is £10 on the door), see their site here.
