tamaranth | Eastercon: Fantastic London

I'm writing up and posting, separately, notes on each panel that I attended at Eastercon. They're date-stamped with the date of the actual panel. I'll post an entry with links to all of 'em once I've finished writing up notes.

Saturday 12:30 Fantastic London. From Dickens to Iain Sinclair, London is one of the most imagined cities in the world. Why is that, and what does a fantastic imagination add? (Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman, Louis Savy, Graham Sleight)
GR: London is a palimpsest of fiction and imagery. Writing needs a strong sense of place and London is instantly recognisable.
NG: London is layered in time: one foot down = one century back. "Any pattern you want to find, it will give you."
Looking for patterns in Sinclair's Lud Heat but didn't have the datum to complete the pattern: 'Lud Shed', he discovered from the author, is Sinclair's own house.
LS: filmmakers have fun playing with and destroying landmarks
GR: The London Eye is now an icon for London in the way that the Eiffel Tower is for Paris.
GS: J G Ballard's London is drained of meaning -- alienation. (Like Heathrow!)
GR: talking about the complex under the Shell building -- tunnels for transporting wounded troops to St Thomas' Hospital, a theatre designed by Cecil Beaton with stars in the ceiling, a railway branch to Necropolis.
NG: The Mall has removable traffic lights -- so it can be converted to an airstrip in 25 mins, should evacuation of Buckingham Palace be necessary. (Also why it's so wide.)

- Fantastic Cities Based on London (New Crobuzon, Viriconium ...): how do we recognise London?
GR: globalisation has lessened London's individuality. Still not a 24-hour city.
GS: the Blitz, a traumatic event that has left visible scars
NG: plague pits. The dead past is not dead.

- Audience asks for fantastic London in film.
LS: London in The Golden Compass is based on Wren's original designs

NG on the golden age when it was safe on the streets: 'always 35 years ago'

GS: steampunk is a very London genre whether specifically set in London or not.
NG: lots of brass things that ratchet, and possibly some steam. No punks.

Audience to NG: Has moving away from UK changed your imaginative relationship with London?
NG: Neverwhere was the first novel he wrote in the US. Recreating what he'd left behind. There's still a big London novel he wants to write -- nearly started it in 1998 but wrote American Gods instead. A book in which London reconfigures itself temporally: 'Covent Garden will always be in the 1770s'.

Audience asking about darker side of London, plague / Ripper etc, does that influence London's popularity in the fantastic?
NG: it makes everything credible.
GR: Toronto a thriving city (NG: 'very clean') but not somewhere to explore the dark side of humanity.
Tourist London is the celebrity side -- nothing like the real city.