Here in Zagreb, the convention has started. Bella Pagan has a photo of the opening ceremony featuring all of the Guests of Honor. They are (from left to right): Russian author Dmitry A. Glukhovsky (who says this is his first ever convention); Tim Powers; Me (with Aloysious Squid on my shoulder); Charlie Stross; Croatian writer Darko Macan; and Bridget Wilkinson for ESFS (because Dave Lally missed his flight — he’s here now).

The first panel I went to was a Moebius retrospective by translator and publishers, Marko Fančović. I am so going to steal parts of that for the Bristol Comics Expo next month.

Next up was an interview with Darko Macan, the Croatian writer guest. I’m hoping to be able to write about more about him, and Croatian SF in general, for Locus, so for now I’ll just mention that you can read him in English because he has written comics for (amongst others) Dark Horse, DC and Marvel.

Charlie Stross also did an interview. It was hugely popular. Making it the last item of the day was a smart move by the convention, because it meant it could go overtime without messing up the schedule. Charlie talked a lot about various private space initiatives, including the recently announced Planetary Resources company. Charlie’s position is that it is good that all of these billionaires are putting their money into space research, but he thinks their ideas have come from reading Analog as a kid and they may have underestimated the difficulty of their projects. I was thinking of the Toby Buckell book that I reviewed recently. It features two Silicon Valley billionaires who decide to save the world… from cl*m*te ch*nge… by terraforming the planet. Just because people are rich and geeky, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be dangerous.

There were several questions about the Laundry series. Charlie mentioned that there is a forthcoming story in which Bob Howard meets a unicorn (apparently this is all John Scalzi’s fault). Also there will apparently be nine novels in the Laundry series. There’s a Modesty Blaise inspired book due up soon, but after that Charlie will have run out of classic British spies and will go his own way.

Then I went to dinner, which deserves a whole extra blog post. And there was a party in a local brewpub, which featured a Croatian folk group playing beer drinking songs and who would have gone down really well with those of my friends who love bad Eurovision entries.