Welcome to Irish SciFi News Newsletter #22

Hello, and welcome to Irish SciFi News newsletter #22. There haven’t been as many newsletters this year as I would have wished, but Real Life intruded into my time in an appalling way! Hopefully my schedule will be much quieter next year, and I’ll be able not only to write these newsletters more regularly, but find time to put a lot of new stuff on the website attached to the newsletter, which is here.

News on all this here as it happens.

From now on, all email addresses quoted in this newsletter will be in this format: name at host dot suffix. Or, to put it another way, the email address for this newsletter would be irishsfnews at yahoo dot co dot uk. This is to confuse the spambots, which are making life so difficult for us all. URLs will be quoted as they are, for now.

So, on to the news…

Royal Marine Hotel to Close

For a few years now there have been persistent rumours that the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire is to close down. The RMH was the home of Octocon for many years, and more recently the regular venue for the regularly held Dublin Toy & Train Fair. I grew up around Dun Laoghaire, too, and went to a number of things in the RMH. Discos in the seventies, god help us, were amongst the earliest events I went to, but I spent a lot of good times there, between one thing and another. So, out of curiosity, and bearing in mind that I knew that they weren’t taking any bookings beyond the summer of 2004, I decided to write to them to ask what the story was. Michelle Costelloe replied to my query thusly:

Senior Common Room Closes in Queen's Belfast

The Senior Common Room in Queen’s University Belfast, up ‘til now the regular venue for Mecon, ceased trading on Friday 20th August, and the contents were auctioned off. It is stated that QUB are to proceed with their plan of creating a 'replacement' of sorts on the ground floor - with refurbishment to take 6 months, reopening scheduled for Easter 2005.

Where this leaves Mecon 8, scheduled to occur there for the 11th to 13th of March 2005, is anyone’s guess, although the con committee assures me that they are going ahead regardless. However, with 5 months to go to the con, and no venue or GoH, they perhaps need to start to feel some sort of sense of urgency if they expect anyone to actually be able to schedule the time to go along.

Octocon News

As I write this, Octocon is about 5 days away. If you’re not going, you should be! You can find out more about the con at their website at www.octocon.com.

Con guests are always subject to sudden changes to their schedules, and this year is no exception to that. Both Kim Newman and Gordon Rennie have had to pull out of Octocon at the last minute, but the con has a new guest in the person of Peter McCanney, who was involved with the running of the very first Octocon, and also produced some fine small press comics over the years.

Although they don’t have a date or venue yet, Octocon have put their marker down for 2005, with a sub-site for it at www.octocon.com/2005/ Watch that space!

P-Con News

Various bits of news on P-CON are being held back until the next newsletter…

Chris de Burgh buys Alien Chestburster

Irish-based Argentinean-born singer-songwriter Chris de Burgh beat off all comers to win the bidding for a latex "chest bursting" Alien model. The prop was one of the items on sale at the Rock and Roll and Film Memorabilia auction at the Knightsbridge saleroom of auctioneers Bonham’s. The auction also included items from The Beatles and letters from Richard Burton to Elizabeth Taylor, as well as the original costume worn by Kristianna Loken in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines.

De Burgh won the auction, which had an original estimated price of around £12,000, against stiff international bidding, for a final price of just under £29,875. The item, described by the auctioneers as "an iconic piece of science fiction film history,” eventually went for more than twice that. The model, which de Burgh describes as a "defining moment" in movie history, was seen bursting from John Hurt's chest in the movie Alien, and de Burgh commented, "I know John Hurt very well, and of course I will give him natural visiting orders being the mother of this creature."

Website for Toy Fairs

Brian Kelly of the Dublin Toy and Train Fair wrote to me to tell me that they now have a website at www.dublintoyandtrainfair.com

The dates for the toy fairs for 2005 are:
Sunday 6th February
Sunday 15th May
Sunday 18th September
Sunday 20th November

… all to be held in the Clontarf Castle Hotel in Clontarf, Dublin 3, and running from 10 AM to 5 PM.

Brief Hiatus for Crow Street Comics

Liam Webster, who runs Dublin’s only secondhand comic shop, tells me that he has vacated his shop, located on the corner of Crow Street and Cecilia Street, for a short while. "The landlord is putting windows in," he said, "so I’ll have to get myself and my stock out of the way for a while."

Although Liam insists the business doesn’t currently have a name, it is known to all and sundry as Crow Corner Comics. Perhaps when he moves back into his newly refenestrated premises, he’ll finally choose a name for himself, and put a sign up.

Liam has also got himself a new email address, so if you’re looking for any old comics, and I can assure you from personal experience that he has a *lot* of good stuff, his new address is liamlobster at yahoo dot com.

Hopefully Liam will be reopening the shop around the end of October or the beginning of November, but doesn’t want to put a firm date on it until he’s certain.

Maltese Falcon Spotted on Dawson Street

Although Dublin doesn’t have a specialist SF bookshop (Forbidden Planet on Crampton Quay being more of a general SF shop…), it does have one shop dedicated to a single genre of fiction, and this is Michael Gallagher’s wonderful Murder Ink, which you can find on Dawson Street, and which is, as you might imagine, a crime and mystery fiction shop. It is, as far as I know, the only store in Ireland that specializes in mystery books, and has several thousand different titles in stock, mostly American, with most of those especially imported from the USA in their original American editions. If you’ve never been, you really need to go and have a look.

Besides all the books, however, what really caught my eye as I passed the shop recently was the facsimile bust of the Maltese Falcon in the window for only €80. This appeared to be an exact replica of the black bird as featured in the 1941 Humphrey Bogart movie The Maltese Falcon, based on the Dashiel Hammett novel of the same name, as well as in the 1975 parody version starring George Segal, The Black Bird.

You can find Murder Ink at 15 Dawson Street, Dublin 2, by telephone at (353 1) 677 7570, or by email at murderbk at iol dot ie.

New Website for Brenb

For those of you wondering what happened to Brendan Byrne of Toenail Clippings, wonder no longer. Although the innovative Irish anthology comic Toenail Clippings ran to four issues, the people behind it, Big If Publications, eventually decided to concentrate on their website http://www.bigifpublications.com , and gave up the print version of the comic. Since then Brendan Byrne, now going under the name of Brenb, has started a website of his own, at www.brenb.net. He has even produced remarkably attractive postcards to advertise the fact, on which he ironically refers to himself as "Ireland’s greatest living artist." At least, I think it’s ironically…

You can get in touch with him at hello at brenb dot net.

I’ll be back before the end of the month with more news, including a website or two for Peter Queally, the ‘Fourth All-Ireland Scientific, Therapeutic, and Educational Ghost Convention/Festival,’ as well as news about Crazy Dog Audio Theatre, Interaction, Brian Nisbet’s new book, a new SF club, and all the other stuff I’ve been promising to write about for the past year. It’ll all finally get nailed down in the next issue! And the winners of the recent Forbidden Planet competition, in case you think I’ve forgotten, will also be announced.

Best wishes,
Pádraig Ó Méalóid
Irish SciFi News