Picocon 33: Origins - 20th February

Picocon is a small convention run by Imperial College Science Fiction and Fantasy Society (ICSF). It is one of the only entirely student-run conventions, and it has been held in late February each year for 33 years – this February 20th marking Picocon 33.

Picocon has a long history of having Guests of Honour, who are famous or up and coming authors in the Sci-Fi or Fantasy genres, including Cory Doctorow, Jaine Fenn, Alastair Reynolds, Frances Hardinge and many more. These Guests of Honour (GoH) give talks about their books and the theme of the year.

This year’s GoH are Michelle Paver, Author of The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, Paul Cornell, previous screen-writer for Doctor Who, and author of several comics and the novels Shadow Police series, and Carrie Hope Fletcher who played Beth in the War of the Worlds musical. Her debut fantasy novel, On the Other Side, is coming out this summer. She is currently playing Eponine in the West End in Les Miserables.

There is an author’s panel where the authors can be asked questions by the attendees, and Turkey Readings in collaboration with RAG, where examples of books so badly written are read out so that people will pay to prevent the reading from continuing (or to make it keep going!).

Silly Games is an event where we imitate various gameshows, and we also have Destruction of Dodgy Merchandise, where examples of terribly misguided merchandise are bid on to be saved or dunked in liquid nitrogen and smashed by the highest bidder. The proceeds from all go to charity. This year, as last year, Stuart Ashens is coming to Imperial from the Youtube domain to chair the auctioning of the merchandise.

Alongside the games and panels there will be a variety of stalls selling everything from our own Picocon merchandise to jewellery and even professionally illustrated prints by Autun Purser.

The Pub Quiz will be in Metric, with teams captained by our GoH! Finally, we also have an event known simply as Harmless Fun.

The theme of this year’s Picocon event is ‘Origins’. Upon investigation, there were two origin stories for the convention – one being that it was a gathering of ICSF members to play board-games at another’s house which they decided to simply escalate; the other being that the first ever Picocon was actually an organised ICSF trip to a different convention in Glasgow, whereupon the group decided that they should make a convention like that themselves! Picocon’s name was reportedly coined by Steven Barnett, when it was observed that it was a very small convention – earning it the prefix ‘pico’!

Picocon has come far over the years, from a trip to a different convention entirely (or board games in a flat!) to a well known London Sci-Fi convention. This year, it will be held on Saturday 20th of February. Registration beings at 9am on the day in Beit Quad. Tickets can be bought from the union website or on the day at registration, with concession prices for students and further reductions for ICSF members.