Eastercon 2026

One of the disadvantages of having a dealer table is that you don’t get to see much of the convention. You spend all day behind the table, and in the evening, once you have eaten, you are probably too tired to do anything else. However, I did do a few panels, and I tried to keep up with what everyone else was saying about the event on social media and the convention Discord. Here’s what I saw.

The Birmingham Metropole is possibly unique in that it is easier to get to by air than by land. In theory it is right off the M42, and a short walk from Birmingham International train station, but over Easter all land-based transport in the UK grinds to a halt. I tried to minimise the pain by driving up on the Thursday and back on the Tuesday, but I still took 19 minutes to travel the last 4 miles on the M42 on Thursday afternoon.

The good news about this is that we get a lot of foreign visitors. There were quite a few Americans at the con (and possibly some didn’t go back). There were also people from all over Europe. I got to meet Cora Buhlert in person. Besides Germany, there were people from Norway, Sweden, France, Ireland, and probably a few places that I missed. This is very welcome.

The Metropole has plenty of space for an Eastercon. Indeed, there is so much space that they hosted another convention alongside ours. This was Haruhicon, a Japanese Culture convention. The Eastercon committee and the Haruhicon folks got together and made a deal whereby they could come to our Dealers’ Room and Art Show, and we could visit some of their spaces. This worked very well. Amusingly we were told that Haruhicon spaces were adult only, and there were some small children among the Eastercon crowd, but mostly your average Haruhicon member looked to be of the right age to be a child of the average Eastercon member.

Everyone seemed very pleased with the experiment. The Haruhicon folks definitely took advantage of our Dealers’ Room. Some of them bought books. And our people ventured the other way, if only because there was a sake dealer in the Haruhicon space. On social media both conventions’ members were saying how happy they were with the arrangement.

I managed to get time to make a quick tour around the Art Show. It looked very impressive. Jim Burns, Fangorn and Anne Sudworth were all there, so there was some very high quality art on display. I bought a small and very spooky piece which the artist, Sophie Jonas-Hill tells me was inspired by David Barnett’s novel, Withered Hill.

My panels were mostly in the Pavilion Room which was next to the hotel swimming pool and smelled strongly of chlorine all weekend. Thankfully my nose is not very sensitive. The programming team did an excellent job of scheduling me around Dealers’ opening times, for which I am very grateful. The panels all seemed to go very well and, as is customary these days, the discussion on Discord was really interesting. It was a pleasure to be on a panel with Karen Lord, and I’m sad that I had so little time to chat with her.

Quite a few of the panels are available on replay, but if you see this paragraph it means that I haven’t had time to watch any of them yet.

We did a book launch. The room was way too small, and the hotel was so unreasonable about catering that I can only conclude that they were trying to put us off, but it went very well. My thanks to everyone who came long, and apologies to anyone who was put off by the crush.

After the dismal experience of World Fantasy I was not expecting much in the way of sales. I am pleased to report that I was dead wrong. I should have brought a lot more copies of Fight Like A Girl #1 and #2, and The Sword Garden. We sold out of some of Juliet and Chaz’s books as well, and all of The Sea-Stone Sword. I think some of the other dealers were less happy. Quite a few people left on Saturday evening, but that could well have been because they had other things to do over Easter.

What we were missing was a mainstream bookseller. Books on the Hill were there, but they left early and did not seem to have a lot of new books. I was hoping to pick up the new Paul McAuley, but they didn’t have it.

I didn’t attend the award ceremony because I was tired and hungry, and we had no books in the short lists. People seemed happy with the results. I am especially pleased for Beth Faulds as she has a story in Wiz Duo #2.

There were a few small complaints about the badges not having any means of differentiating types of members. I don’t think this can be blamed on Alan and Colette as they regularly produce differentiated badges for BristolCon. I guess it must have been a cost-saving measure by the convention. But other than that there were very few complaints. Indeed, most attendees seemed to be very happy.

This is important. We have had several years in which conventions were recovering from COVID, and there were serious questions as to whether in-person events would ever recover. Last year, while an excellent little event, was hamstrung by the idiocies of Brexit. But this year was absolutely hopping. What’s more we have firm bids all the way out to 2030, and a possible for 2031. I have not seem Eastercon look so healthy in years.