sci-fi

Hello everyone!

We here at Octocon Towers (and our colleagues beavering away in the OctoCave to find OctoGold™ in order make limited edition foil-embossed collectors' comics) are so very, very excited to be only two weeks away from Octocon 2009!

Just in case there are people out there still not sure what they'll be doing on the 10th and 11th of October (you know who you are!), we thought we'd tease you with a few little things to whet your appetites!

Firstly, in an homage to message boards all across the Internet, we shall have lots of reasoned and interesting discussions, that will ocassionally devolve into lolcats before getting back on topic. Among the panels we have in store, we will have a discussion on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) issues within the genres of speculative fiction, a debate on whether music can really be a storytelling medium, and a question of fans' ownership of the people that create their books, comics, movies and TV shows brought on by this blog post by Neil Gaiman.

Secondly, we'll have many mini-events happening throughout the weekend. There are of course The Golden Blaster Awards, at which we will show you several short films, you get to pick your favourite and just maybe win a prize yourself! But there are also such goings-on as our Saturday night events, at which you shall be entertained like some kind of royalty, and this little thing we like to call...

In a war-torn near-future, three soldiers fight to survive an enviroment that is out to kill them with booby traps, snipers and something very, very different.

The Silent City is a wonderful Irish film that captures the horrors of a post-war environment perfectly.

John Vaughan says, "Starring Cillian Murphy (of Batman Begins and Sunshine fame), Oscar-nominee Rurairi Robinson shows in this visually astonishing short that through the use of both digital FX and traditional film making that it is now possible for short film makers to acheive an epic breadth and scale in their productions, even when it's lacking in most features."