LonCon3 is Here!

The day has finally arrived: Worldcon is in town! LonCon3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention commences today at the ExCel Centre in London’s docklands and runs until Monday 18th.

In addition to a plethora (that’s an imperial plethora, by the way, from when the term actually meant something; none of your puny metric plethora) of visiting authors, artists, fans, editors and agents, there is a roll call of Guests of Honour of the highest order:

The late, great Iain M. Banks is (sadly) Guest of Honour in Memoriam.
Encyclopedist, critic and SF über-scholar, John Clute.
The artist whose titanic spaceships defined the genre for readers coming to SF in the’70s, Chris Foss.
The Hugo-nominated fan and Jeanne Gomoll, who has, among many other achievements, been involved with the highly-regarded WisCon since its inception.
Bestselling author of the Farseer Trilogy (again, among many other achievements), Robin Hobb.
Creator of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, the multi-talented writer and artist, Bryan Talbot.

And . . . last but far from least, Gollancz‘s own Malcolm Edwards, publisher, fan, BSFA Award-winning author, editor extraordinaire and one of the founders of the influential Interzone – among (you guessed it) many other achievements, one of which is the establishment of the prestigious SF Masterworks list.

And speaking of the Masterworks list, it has come to our attention that the clearly-tireless Peter Young has put together two issues of his fanzine Big Sky that are entirely devoted to reviews and commentary on the SF Masterworks series, as part of a special project to tie in with LonCon.  The list of contributors is, obviously, enormous, so rather than attempt to list them here and risk leaving someone out, we’ll simply exhort you to read them yourselves. The SF Masterworks special issues are numbers three [PDF] and four [PDF], but while you’re there, you might as well read ’em all.

Happy Loncon, everyone!