home > SF > cons > Conspiracy: Worldcon '87

45th World Science Fiction Convention
27 August - 1 Sept 1987, Brighton

GoHs: Doris Lessing, Alfred Bester (unable to attend due to ill health), Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, (film SFX) Ray Harryhausen, (artist) Jim Burns, (fan) Joyce & Ken Slater, (fan) Dave Langford

• Evelyn C. Leeper's Conspiracy Report

My first Worldcon. I thought the whole thing was brilliant, even as I picked my way through the building site masquerading as an hotel, run by the 'Manager from Hell'. This was the year 'Brighton Metropole' became a dirty word in fandom.

Programme highlights

• David Brin: The Case for Optimism. Why the doom and gloom prophets might be wrong.
• Hawkwind concert
• Gerry Anderson. His TV shows, including the newly-in-production Space Precinct.
• Panel: Ten Worst SF Cliches.
• Bob Shaw's Serious Scientific Talk
• Robert Forward: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. "Antigravity: just take a mass the size of the moon, squeeze it into a torus the size of a football field, and spin it nearly at the speed of light. It's just an engineering problem!"[Some of this stuff has since been published in Indistinguishable from Magic]
• The Alan Dorey Quiz
• Guy Gavriel Kay: A Tower in Beleriand -- Perspectives on Tolkein in an Anniversary Year. A very softly spoken, 'more in sorrow than in anger', diatribe against Christopher Tolkien for milking Middle Earth by publishing anything and everything [or, as Dave Langford calls it, the 'Book of Lost Laundry Lists'].
• Dave Langford: The Ansible Review of the Year [now available in The Silence of the Langford]