On Friday, I wore my Captain Marvel costume.
The first panel I wanted to go to was the Apollo at 50. I didn't know who the male panellists were, but the female panellists were Dr Jeanette Epps, a real NASA astronaut, and Mary Robinette Kowal, who wrote The Calculating Stars, about the Lady Astronaut, and whose research about the early Space Race is exceptionally good.
There was a little trouble with getting the mics to work, and at one point only Dr Epps and Mary Robinette had working mics, which led to a comment about the people who were traditionally silenced in the history of the space race being the only ones who could speak on the panel! While the tech people were sorting things out, the ladies talked about the problems of peeing and poo-ing in space, and Jeanette Epps confirmed that astronauts are trained to use a camera while poo-ing to make sure they are aiming in the right place so that stuff doesn't float away in the zero gravity.
I was sitting next to a Danish engineer who had worked internationally, including in the Netherlands - he gleefully said that he had a handful of languages - and once the discussion got technical he was quietly making comments to me agreeing with the panellists.
They weren't just talking about Apollo, but what came after, and Mary Robinette Kowal made the point that anyone under the age of 19 has lived in a world where there have been people living in space for their entire lives, for months at a time in the International Space Station.
They also talked about SkyLab, and there was some disagreement about that. One panellist said that, once they had built it and demonstrated it worked, the idea was to bring it down in the Pacific and go on to the next stage of getting to the stars. Another panellist said this had never been the case, but they hadn't thought much beyond getting it up there - once it was up there they had to think about useful science they could do.
The queuing had been a bit chaotic on Thursday, but was much improved with white tape marking out the queues for different rooms, and some energetic volunteers marshalling the queues, on the Friday. There was a particular German volunteer who was exceptionally good at it. They also started to count the number of people in the queues, so they could close the line when the room hit capacity. For one panel I was that last member of the queue who would be able to get in, and I spent a good ten minutes stopping more people from joining the queue, because they wouldn't be able to get in, and they may as well go off now to find another panel that wasn't full yet.
So I came out of the Apollo panel to find that the panel on Dr Who Historical stories was already full - and I went for coffee, followed by a stroll round the dealers' room. A little boy mistook me for Wonder Woman and asked where my Lasso of Truth was, so I told him I was Captain Marvel because I was wearing trousers and Wonder Woman wears a skirt. He knew who Captain Marvel was, so he wasn't too disappointed.
One of the authors I wanted to see while I was at the Con was Kate Elliot, who was doing a reading at 12 noon. She read some passages from her forthcoming "Alexander the Great in Space" novel, which was very enjoyable.
The reading was only 20 minutes long, so I had plenty of time to get into the queue for the next panel I really wanted to see. Peter Morwood was on a panel called Sharp Storytelling, which was about the film sword fighting choreographer Bob Anderson. Peter Morwood knows a lot about sword fighting on screen, and the rest of the panel included Olympic class fencers and sabre fighters, including one chap who is a life member of the Trinity College sabre Club because he was the coach when the University won an important inter-varsity competition. So the panel were experts on how it's really done, with a variety of styles of weapon, critiquing the screen clichés that are how the general public thinks it's done - that great scene in many films, for instance, where the blades clash, and slide down until the fighters are hilt to hilt, at which point they can snarl witticisms at each other before they disengage. One of the women on the panel pointed out that this was fine if both fighters were a similar height - for a smaller woman such as herself, it was important to back out of such a move very quickly!
It was also mentioned that, in sabre fighting, it's very common to set your eyebrows on fire behind the fencing mask!
Bob Anderson was one of the people who played Darth Vader on screen, and there was some discussion of the different intentions dramatically of screen sword fights. "Vader wasn't fighting Luke - he was auditioning Luke!" Peter Morwood said. He also preferred the work of another film choreographer, William Hobbs - a great example of his work is the film The Duellists, and there was quite a discussion comparing the two - William Hobbs tended to be a bit more down and dirty in his fighting scenes, and that, of course had clichés of its own, like turning your basket hilted broadsword round to clout the opponent with the hilt!
Terry Pratchett was also mentioned, writing every film sword fight cliché into one of his books - "Good old Terry - he pulled its leg until it limped!"
And they finished with a discussion of Liam Neeson as Rob Roy, fighting Archie Cunningham, a character "with a sadistic streak so wide you could land a 747 on it". They had been talking earlier about the witty comments that usually pepper sword fights, as in The Princess Bride, and noted that in this film the comments only came at the beginning of the fight.
"Nae quarter will be asked...."
"...or given."
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