Odyssey aftermath

Final day of Odyssey 2010 was a run-around to pack non-essentials, get my bags into hotel luggage store, and checkout before 11. Jobs done, I went to see La Menace Vient de l’Espace (aka: The Menace Comes From Outer Space, 2009), a 19-minute short film with English-subtitles introduced as a ‘lost’ sci-fi classic, which is really a highly amusing pastiche, complete with female robot and portable phone, of low-budget 1950s' cinema (including This Island Earth and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers). Directed by Pierre-Axel Vuillaume-Prézeau, this envisions a modern French society radically changed by using a numeric language, and this ‘protocol 123’ is revealed as prelude to an invasion by aliens, but…

It’s very funny, so if you missed it search for the download version on You Tube. The noon panel about novels provided some insightful comments from Caroline Mullan, Graham Sleight, and Jetse de Vries, moderated by Ellen Datlow. I missed lunchtime programme item about ‘climate scepticism’ but watched and listened to first part of They Walk Amongst Us Here created by ‘Old Time Radio’ enthusiasts in the Commonwealth hall.

Left that early for a Green Room meeting before my last panel, ‘Dollhouse: Ethics and Identity’, where Steve Kilbane moderated our views on this somewhat (mildly!) controversial TV series, though I disagreed with a few of Liz Batty and Paul Cornell’s opinions about the show’s SF content. At 4pm, the closing ceremony's attendees packed the main hall, although many people from the con (including top guest Iain Banks) had already gone home.

Overall, a very well organised weekend event, with significant improvements to various tech services, despite the architectural oddities of some hotel conference rooms (a few of which were simply numbered, this time, instead of using the names they had for Orbital two years ago).