Sci-fi London Convention

Ten years of fantastic film: SCI-FI-LONDON celebrates its tenth anniversary with a bigger festival than ever
The UK’s leading science fiction and fantastic film festival, SCI-FI-LONDON (The London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film), will host film screenings, special events, workshops and celebrations during its 10 day festival across the capital in 2011. For the first time, the BFI Southbank and BFI Imax will host festival events.
The festival runs Saturday 23 April – Monday 2 May, 2011. In the current climate, SCI-FI-LONDON makes no apologies for its defiantly carnival attitude. In addition to the core film programme, highlights include:
• The Royal Wedding all-nighter The night before Will and Kate’s wedding we celebrate the wonder of weddings with Veronica Lake, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The evening features five black-and-white classics including: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, BRIDE OF DRACULA and I MARRIED A WITCH. Midnight ‘til 9am... cheaper than a hotel and a stone’s throw from The Mall!
• 20th Anniversary of MANGA UK Celebrate with screenings of the classic AKIRA in glorious HD and brand new animé feature, EDEN OF THE EAST.
• 48 Hour Film Challenge With Edgar Wright and Gareth Edwards on the jury, our 2011 challenge has a first prize of a feature development deal with Vertigo Films. The challenge takes place 2–4 April, 2011.

• SCI-FI-LONDON LAB Our real science thread examines subjects including long distance space travel and synthetic biology. Thinking caps on please.
• Fantasy Easter Parade along the Southbank From the BFI to the London Film Museum on Easter Sunday, featuring Stormtroopers, zombies, superheroes and more. All genres, all costumes, all-comers welcome to this free event!
Festival Director, Louis Savy says:
“It is a tribute to our volunteer staff and the support of our sponsors and venues that we are here today. When we started ten years ago it was to challenge preconceptions about science fiction and bring a few independent movies to London.
I never imagined we would become a key fixture in the international film festival calendar, and be a well-known genre event. This year’s festival will certainly be bigger and bolder but, equally, a celebration of those 10 years of fantastic film.”
Full details will be available soon and on www.sci-fi-london.com.

SCI-FI-LONDON, now in its 10th year, is the UK's only dedicated sci-fi and fantasy film festival. It screens world and UK film premieres, documentaries and a selection of classic SF titles. SCI-FI-LONDON also has a strong international shorts programme and screens a short film with every feature screening. It also holds a film school and filmmaking competitions to encourage more science fiction films to be made in the UK

Engineering Infinity Review

I have to confess that when I hear the term ‘Hard Sci-fi’ I usually give a bit of a shudder.

I'm not, as a rule, a fan of this subgenre. To me, the name Hard Sci-fi conjures up pages of long dry discussion on the physics and science of FTL and time travel. These are things that I am interested in, I’m just not interested in reading about them in a novel- I like hyperspace and flashing purple laser beams in space!
This is not to say I don’t read any. I am a big fan of Clarke, for example, and his ability to communicate astonishingly complex science in a few simple words is wondrous in itself.
But reading this collect has got me re-evaluating what I think of as Hard Sci-fi. There are tales in here that I wouldn’t have classed as such- but on reflection, of course they are. If you take hard Sci-fi to be any story that has real science as a base to it, then you’re opening the market up to almost anything short of Star Wars and most of Doctor Who.

So, on to the collection.
Editor Jonathan Strahan has assembled quite a formidable roster of writers for this Solaris book- most eye catching among them being Stephen Baxter and Charles Stross. Actually, Stross is another writer we can add to the list of Hard Sci-fi authors I have enjoyed reading previously.

As with all collections, this is a mixed bag. There were some stories I didn’t enjoy as much as others, and even one I’ll hold my hands up to admitting I didn’t understand at all.

I suppose you’ll be wanting a blow by blow account of the various stories? Well, I’m not going to. I’ll mention a few though.

The opening tale, Malak by Peter Watts is an interesting, if downbeat, opener, telling the story of an automated flying weapon in war in the Middle East. Thought provoking stuff, as good sci-fi should be.
Some are brilliantly character driven, in a way that some readers (yes- I mean me) don’t usually associate with Hard Sci-fi. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Charles Stross and John C Wright provide tales that are pretty heartbreaking in their own way.
The Server and the Dragon by Hannu Rajaniemi is a nice modern, well not modern, future fairy tale.

Actually, looking through the book again to write this, I can honestly say that almost every tale hit the mark for me, apart from the aforementioned one I didn’t understand. And that is, of course, not to say it was badly written. It clearly wasn’t.

Ahhh... I was about to launch into another paragraph mentioning story after story again! I shall limit myself to two more, and two more only.
The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter. I like stories that remind us of our place in the universe, and this is one such tale. We had a similarly themed alien invasion of Earth tale in a recent issue of FutureQuake (I hasten to add that the stories are in no way similar- they just explore the same themes).
And finally, possibly my favourite tale in the book, The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees by John Barnes (not the ex-footballer, I’m guessing). I loved this for two reasons. Firstly, it got me with a marvellous semi-twist. I saw where things were going with this narrative and he outfoxed me by not only changing the tack of the tale and having one of the characters address it.
The other is the sheer scope of the idea driving the story. Seriously, it is massive and thought provoking and, of course, this being a Hard Sci-fi book, all too plausible. I say ‘all too’ as if it’s a bad thing, but the bigger part of me would think it really really cool if something like the events depicted in this story actually happened. Again, as with the Baxter story, this one really puts us in our place as a species.

All in all, an excellent collection of stories, and one that will have me seeking out more work from the authors featured here. One thing though- an inordinate amount of them seem to live in Edinburgh...