Detcon1 Day Two

John Scalzi, Jim Hines, Steve Silver, Roger Sims, and Nicki Lynch at Detcon1. Photo by Rich Lynch.

John Scalzi, Jim Hines, Steven H Silver, Roger Sims, and Nicki Lynch at Detcon1. Photo by Rich Lynch.

Friday’s Detcon1 program item “Fanzines and Professional Writing” found Jim C. Hines, John Scalzi, Nicki Lynch, Roger Sims, and moderator Steven H Silver seeking the 21st century’s answer to a question raised at Detention, the 1959 Worldcon in Detroit (which Sims co-chaired):

At Detention a discussion by the editors of amateur magazines was sparked by Ed Wood asking, “Why weren’t fanzines as good as they once were and why were their writers no longer becoming top quality pros very often?” The panel lasted from about 11 p.m. Sunday until 4:30 a.m. What is the state of fanzines today? How have digital formats affected fanzines? What role do they have now in the career of a professional writer, especially compared to 50 years ago?

Rich Lynch and his camera captured the moment.

10 thoughts on “Detcon1 Day Two

  1. Wonder how many attendees thought something like:
    “Wow, Ed Wood also published fanzines and went to conventions between making movies??”

  2. Yours is funnier than my first thought, which was “How did anybody tear a PDF file?”

  3. And Ed also published books, as a member of Advent:Publishers, and if I’m not mistaken, he and his wife Jo Ann were also the organizers of a few very nice small cons held just outside of Hartford in the mid-1970s, whose name (the cons’) I can’t remember.

  4. Morris,
    Perhaps the con was A-Con, with idea being the next one would be B-Con, etc etc. Except too many A-Con badges had been printed so the next one(s) were also A-Con …

  5. Yes, A-Con was the con I was thinking of. As I recall, during its first year many of us were speculating about whether the next year’s con, if there were one, would be A-Con 2 or B-Con.

    And in any case, not to be confused with NotJustAnotherCon, aka NJAC, which was held at UMass Amherst, about 50 miles north of Hartford, and appears to have run from 1985 through 1995

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