Now Playing: Ash - 1977
I just got back from an enjoyable weekend in Belfast, as one of the guests at this year's Mecon convention. It was great to hook up with some people I'd met only briefly before (Ian McDonald, Paul Cornell), as well as some I'd never met - CE (Catie Murphy), Leah Moore and John Reppion, and the great Iain Banks - all of whom turned out to be lovely people, making for an excellent couple of days. The convention organisers did a good job of creating a relaxed and sociable vibe, with the panels tending to be free-form things where the participants more or less made it up as they went along. We'd not been to Belfast before (or NI for that matter) and we liked it a lot. In a couple of months I'm off to Maynooth (near Dublin) for Octocon, where I'll get the chance to meet some of the Mecon attendees and guests again - I'm already looking forward to it.
I don't normally go in for this sort of thing, but my main purchase of the weekend - apart from a Weather Report CD and an Early Doors DVD (remember - crime can't crack itself) was a massive, lavish hardcover entitled "The Making of Star Wars". I got it for 18 quid because it was supposedly a bit damaged, but almost invisibly so to my eyes. This is a monster of a book which contains a wealth of interviews and production sketches detailing the making of the film (you'd never guess it from the title, would you?) including story boards, early script ideas, and much insight into the shifting identies of the main characters before they were nailed down - Luke as a girl, for instance. It also includes lots of geek-specific data which I will treasure, such as the fact that the model of the Rebel ship which comes in at the beginning was six feet long, whereas as the supposedly much vaster Imperial Cruiser which swallows it was only three feet long. You can also see, in germinal form, much that later fed into the sequels and even prequels - there's an early mention of Mace Windu, for instance. Or is it Mace Windy - hard to tell. We also learn that the trench on the Death Star isn't (supposedly) the equatorial band which goes around the whole moon, but one of several grooves converging on the pole. Learning this, I really felt as if a fundamental aspect of my worldview had just been unhinged.
Being a serious SF writer, I'm not supposed to like Star Wars, but I do, so there.