UK Eastercons

Although the 2020 UK Eastercon was cancelled, the bidding session for 2021/22 has been held online. We have just voted on 2021: the only bid was to go back to the Birmingham NEC Metropole (with many of the same committee members who had been working on this year's convention). GoH will be Dan Abnett and Fan GoH will be Dave Lally.

Just now taking a break for refreshments, etc., before hearing about (a) bid(s) for 2022.

>1 RobertDay: Dan Abnett and Nik Vincent, mind you.

UK Eastercons are supposedly subject to two-year bidding cycles, though in recent years this has been honoured more in the breach than the observance. A bid was prepared for 2022, but the committee were in negotiations with the venue when everyone went into lockdown, and so those negotiations are on hold. The con chair nonetheless did a presentation (despite him still recovering himself from COVID-19) and so he was only able to make general statements of intent.

Preferred venue will be in the north of the UK (there are backup plans just in case); the committee hope to launch their bid at Novacon and have it voted on at the 2021 Eastercon.

The virtual bidding session was well attended: attendees peaked at around the 200 mark, which is as good as past bidding sessions and better than many! (Indeed, one person said it was their first bidding session ever...)

>2 anglemark: Blame my fading short-term memory there :-)

>1 RobertDay: Hey, thank you for posting this.

As an on-and-off con runner I find this sort of thing very relevant. The local convention I'm involved with, Capclave, is still on but there are a lot of crossed fingers! As for the 2021 Worldcon who knows!

I really hope that Discon III will happen. I might even consider attending myself, although I generally don't attend non-European Worldcons.

>6 Shrike58: Then you'll appreciate what the committee had to go through because the con hotel kept them hanging on for about two weeks after they first suggested that they might have to cancel, waiting for official Government instructions that would force their hands. One of the GoHs cancelled about two days after the committee posted online that they had had discussions with the hotel but the hotel were insisting that the event go ahead because the contract was inviolate.

Had the UK Government taken a similar line to Sweden, the committee would have been in the unenviable position of possibly having to run a convention where a good half or more of the attendees, and possibly quite a few of the guests, didn't turn up, just so as to avoid getting sued by the hotel. Then they might still have been sued by some odd attendees for not delivering the convention they promised. I realise such a case under such circumstances wouldn't have much chance of succeeding, but even defending against such a case costs money, and convention organisers aren't corporates who could stand the cash-flow implications of such an action. I'm sure there was massive relief when the hotel bowed to the inevitable - and only then because the order went out to close all bars and restaurants. Had the instruction been vaguer, or less prescriptive, I'm reasonably certain they would have hung on.

(No criticism of Sweden was implied, BTW. The virus has had different impacts on different populations, and we are a long way yet from understanding why some countries are affected differently to others. And I suspect that public health policies will turn out to only be part of the explanation.)

>8 RobertDay: Just as an aside, as Eastercon has a lot more than 50 attendees they would have had to cancel here too, just like our national con did.