This is a series of articles to give a flavour of this year’s 15^th Bristolcon and its first two-day event through the eyes of one often returning attendee – me. With 52 Programme items of which I made it to just 8, it is a somewhat limited view, but hopefully the following accounts of panels and events will be of some interest to those who were there and those who might have wished they could be!

As winter closed in at the end of October, with the clocks poised to go back once more, the clans gathered in the Doubletree by Hilton on Redcliffe Way for another fun-packed Bristolcon SFF Convention. The convention started back in 2009 with a modest half-day gathering at the Mercure Hotel sharing the venue with a Women’s Institute event. Since then it has migrated to the nearby Doubletree at Hilton hotel on Redcliffe Way (equally convenient for Bristol Templemeads station) and settled into its temporal groove at the end of October each year. Over the years it has also grown to be a fixed point in many people’s fantasy and holiday (or fantasy holiday?!) calendars.

To embrace its loyal following, friendly reputation and growing popularity, 2024 saw Bristolcon expand to a two-day event with panels and activities on the Sunday 27^th October as well as the Saturday 26^th.  The programme ran to 52 numbered events, with the 50 minute panels punctuated by 10 minute readings from a variety of authors. There were also the dealers’ and the artists’ rooms offering an intriguing variety of books and artefacts, as well as some diverse workshops offering support on different aspects of speculative fiction writing.

The convention involves a significant amount of work from a committee of Volunteers led by Meg as Chair and ably assisted by Bav who was a most spirited vice-chair (and I don’t just mean the Penderyn Whisky that he was dishing out!).

The two-day event was a bold experiment by the committee and no-one was quite sure how it would work out. However, the majority experience seemed to be decisively positive. Bristolcon’s very sociability can make it a somewhat conflicted event at times. The formal programme activities are in constant rivalry with the lure of Barcon, where the online friendships of a diverse international community can be celebrated in a frenzy of in-person catching-up. With the one-day events of the past, I always felt at risk of either not doing justice to the array of panels and workshops, or of missing out on a rare opportunity to talk books and catch up with friends free from the constraints of message based social media interactions.

Spreading the convention over two days seemed – for me at least – to have perfectly addressed that conflict. I attended more panels than I ever have before (8 events and 9 hours in total) yet still caught up with old friends and made some new ones in the best tradition of this most friendly SFF con. I mean, the fact that this report will have to be delivered in multiple instalments surely proves that there was plenty going on to fill the whole weekend?!

While some con-goers with young family commitments, were restricted to a bare two night stop-over, others took the chance to stretch the experience into a longer holiday and catch up. So there was the usual Bristolcon bell curve of attendance as some people arrived as early as Wednesday and others left late on Monday. For the early arrivals Bristol offered plenty of opportunities for scenic walks, shopping excursions – with book shops being unsurprisingly a big favourite – and other meetings with friends and family unrelated to Bristolcon itself.

Friday night in previous years has been something of a hectic struggle to find an impromptu table for 25+.  Who can forget Kareem in 2018 feeding starving con-goers into one establishment just a couple at a time, much as Gandalf gently pressured Beorn into taking on 13 dwarves and a hobbit?

However, since then various groups have refined their strategies with worthy individuals taking the lead in booking restaurants and co-ordinating pre-orders so that we could all disappear for a fun Friday night feed.  The only downside was that the committee had scheduled the Karaoke session for Friday night when it turned out that most of the would-be singers were either too sober or too dispersed in various eating houses to give the Karaoke event its essential critical mass.

However, with the initial gathering, touristing, shopping and catching up done, we were poised for the first day of panels.

And in my subsequent posts I will try to make sense of my phone jotted notes to give you a feel for what was discussed and how, which – in the next post means

• The Panel on Beyond Arthur and
• The Guest of Honour Interview with Joanne Harris