General Programme - Writers' Workshops - Masquerade - Awards Ceremony - Banquet
George Hay Lecture - Bidding Session - Beyond Cyberdrome - Bead Workshop

General programme

Helicon will feature the usual Eastercon mix of discussion panels, author presentations, game shows and so on. The Hotel De France offers one excellent room. The Main Auditorium in the Lido seats 600 theatre style and comes with a full set of lights and PA. This will obviously be our grand set and will hold the Opening and Closing ceremonies, Guest of Honour solo spots and Masquerade. In the main building we have one 120 seat room, The Golden Bar, one 80 seat room, The Giffard, and one 40 seat room with a large TV, the Verclut. We also have a room for Gaming and another for Chaos Costuming. See the Read Me for full room allocations, and for amap of the hotel in PDF format, click here.

OK, we confess to having changed the programme schedule around again. It is an Eastercon. What did you expect. However, the latest version has gone to print for our con publications so we are reasonably confident. There may still be some errors in the programme since we had to make a number of last-minute changes. We will make every effort to notify you of the current state of the programme through noticeboards and the convention newsletter. If you are on the programme and didn’t expect to be, please contact Programme Ops in the Verclut Room and we will try to sort things out.

The program grids are available here in PDF format:

Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday

And the full schdules for each day (in HTML) are here:

Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday

Writers' Workshops

These will be run by Liz Holliday, who held the popular workshops at Intuition a few years ago, and the highly successful One Step Beyond residential workshop in Devon in 1998. We are planning a two-hour session on each of the four days of the convention, time and room still to be announced.

A maximum of 12 people may participate in the workshop. so please email Liz (liz@sff.net) if you are interested in attending, or write to her at:

31 Shottsford House
Wessex Gardens
London W2 5LG

You will need to provide a piece of writing of up to 5,000 words - either a part of a novel or a short story - which will be circulated to all participants. This must reach Liz by March 25th at the very latest, but earlier if possible. E-mailed submissions (much preferred) should be in Word or .rtf format. If you cannot supply your story by email, contact Liz at the above address for further instructions.

Read more about Liz Holliday at www.sff.net/people/Liz.

Masquerade

"Yes, there will be one," we said.

But it won't be a very long one unless we start getting a few entries! We'd even like to have some bad puns, standards have been slipping for a while in this department.

There will be chaos costume workshops so you will have plenty of opportunity, not to mention expert advice, fabric, sewing machine and glue gun ("Cheat!" shouts the purist in the corner, pricking her finger yet again as she hand-sews everything.).

We'd like to see previously-entered costumes too, for a retrospective, so dust off those old fairy wings and robot suits and bring them with you.

If you'd rather make something new, you've got a month - show us what you can do!

For more information and a description of the venue, contact Alice Lawson, fab@zoom.co.uk

Awards Ceremony

Helicon 2 is proud to be presenting the following Awards:

The British Science Fiction Association Awards
The Doc Weir Award

There will be an Award Ceremony. The plan is to do it while the masquerade is being judged (or instead of the masquerade if no one brings any costumes - come on folks!)

Banquet

The Banquet is scheduled for Saturday night. The cost will be £30. We only have a limited number of tickets available. To reserve one please write to hotel@helicon.org.uk. There are both omnivore and vegetarian options, so please state which one you want. The menus are:

Omnivore

Chicken Liver and Foie Gras parfait (on a port wine jelly with mango relish and farmhouse bread
Champagne sorbet
Braised rump of lamb with navarin vegetables, parmesan mash, red wine jus
Platter of chocolate desserts
Coffee and truffles

Vegetarian

Tarte Tatin of caramellised shallots and goat's cheese, served with a roasted fig salad
Champagne sorbet
Baked cheese souffle en croute, asparagus salad, red onion compote
Platter of chocolate desserts
Coffee and truffles

George Hay Memorial Lecture

This year's headline science presentation will be given by astronomer and science fiction writer, Alastair Reynolds. As usual the lecture is sponsored by the Science Fiction Foundation.

CATCHING STARLIGHT

For thousands of years, astronomers made all their measurements using the naked eye. Even after the
invention of the telescope, the fundamental limitation on their observations was still the sensitivity of
the eye. Only in the last 150 years - very recently in the history of astronomy - have observers
have been able to use other methods of recording light from the heavens. Photographic techniques
came first, and have only really been supplanted by the invention of the CCD camera. Now astronomers are poised on the brink of the next revolution in the detection of starlight, using ultra-sensitive quantum devices which can reveal almost everything you'd ever want to know about the light from distant objects. ESA, the European Space Agency, has led this advance by constructing the most advanced optical camera in the world. In the lecture I will discuss the background of the instrument, and present - with the aid of animations - some of the observations we have
already made with it. These include new studies of some of the most exotic objects in the universe: cataclysmic variables (binary stars which whip around each other in only 90 minutes!), the famous Crab pulsar, and quasars whose light has taken more than 10 billion years to reach us. I will finish by
talking about some of the prospects for future developments of this kind of technology.

Alastair Reynolds is a scientist within the European Space Agency, and part of the team
that has been developing the new detector.

Bidding Session

Helicon 2 is the venue for choosing where the Eastercon will be held in 2004. Eager bidders will (we hope) be encouraging you to vote for them. The bidding session is your chance to grill the prospective committees about their plans and to vote for your preferred choice.

Beyond Cyberdrome

SMS tells us that the Beyond Cyberdrome website is now up and running at http://www.beyondcyberdrome.org.uk with lots of information on rules, how to build robots, full-frontal Sprokette pin-ups and much more. Anyone can play. Not to be confused with Robot Wars which is a very different sort of a beast.

Bead Workshop

Anyone who wants to take part in this should please register an interest in advance with the office (main convention address) so we know how much stuff to bring with us.