Bluelemur.org.uk

Multi-award winning author and all-round nice bloke Neil Gaiman giving a talk at the Orbital Eastercon. He’s possibly my favourite author, so he was one of the main reasons I came to this (although it’s pretty good, I’ll probably go next year even though he won’t be there). He read a short story, called “Orange”, and part of the first chapter of “The Graveyard Book”, which he’s just finishing off at the moment. Very cool.

I’ve also been to a panel on “Writing the Near Future”, where some authors discussed the problems of trying to predict developments that will probably be proved true or false within their lifetimes. Interesting stuff, went into quite a few different areas. Robots seem to be the answer to most things…

I’m at the Orbital Eastercon, a science-fiction convention in London. Just been to a talk by author Charles Stross:

It was a really interesting overview of various forms of technology, where they seem to be going over the next few years, and the implications of that for us. He’s obviously a really knowledgeable guy, who’s done a lot of research on a lot of different subjects. Made me think quite a bit about some areas I’d not considered before, as well as giving me a few ideas of stuff I want to look into further.

(not a great photo though, I was a bit far back, so I took one of the video projection instead)

This prototype four-legged robot can cope with all sorts of terrain. The bit of it slipping on ice and managing to stay upright is especially impressive.