Eastercon Diary – Good Friday 25th March 2016 – Twisting The Story

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The first panel item I chose to attend at the Mancunicon convention looked at the nature of stories in literature and movies with a twist in the tale. Gillan Redfearn (moderating)Susan Bartholomew, novelist Charles Stross, David Tallerman and Chris Wooding asked whether stories really need to have a surprising twist to satisfy the readers fully. Other genres are more dependent on twists than SF, especially Agatha Christie style whodunnits. It was noted that sometimes multiple hints at the clues to a twist are needed or readers can miss the pointers that are needed to make a twist truly work. In the Q & A session I asked if twists should seem credible and the readers / viewers should feel they ought to have seen it coming or if there is a preference for the unguessable leftfield twists as in The Usual Suspects and The Prestige, though some panellists felt that the use of the real scientist Nikola Tesla (David Bowie in the movie) did actually give this away. Arthur Chappell