Five lessons Shweta Taneja learned at Europe’s biggest sci-fi and fantasy convention, a fascinating write-up by an Indian science fiction author encountering the bare-bones DIY approach…

“Authors at Indian festivals are mollycoddled. At one of the first festivals I attended, the Chandigarh Literary Festival, the kind organisers sent an SUV with a teacher and two children and bouquets to the Chandigarh airport. From that moment, everything was managed by an army of literary festival organisers. Not so in Europe.”

I imagine he might have had a somewhat different experience with a more genteel upmarket literary festival, outside the urban areas, of the sort with nominally-paid interns and hospitality budgets. But even then, it would probably be a bit more stripped back than in India.

I wonder what Lovecraft would have been like at an urban mega-vention? I mean, he was used to the demure micro-meetups of amateur journalists and then various later convivial cafe meetings of ‘the circle’. But an enormous fan-o-rama of thousands? I’d suspect he would have been the uber-notorious one in the dark glasses and pompadour hair, being smuggled by a security detail through subterranean access tunnels, to pop up through a trap door beneath the main stage. The big keynote speech given, he’d press the button to auto-sign everyone’s ebook, and then be whisked off to the waiting helicopter. Either that, or he just wouldn’t have gone to such things.