Monthly Archives: March 2015

Gen Con Responds to Signing of SB 101

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Gen Con CEO and owner Adrian Swartout issued a follow-up letter today after Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed SB101.

Backers describe SB 101 as ”religious freedom” legislation that could protect business owners who don’t want to provide services for same-sex couples.

The key message of CEO Swartout’s letter is that Gen Con will fulfill its contract, attendees may get an even warmer response from the host city, and the decision to stay or move is far from made –

We have a contract with the city of Indianapolis through 2020. Gen Con is an economically impactful event for locally owned businesses in the Indy community which for more than a decade have embraced us as guests. Due to specific dialog with long-time partners in Indy, we believe that Gen Con attendees not only will receive the same great service and hospitality in 2015, but an even warmer response from the city. For as long as we stay in Indianapolis, we will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with this community, expand our efforts to bring more diversity to Gen Con, and welcome all.

I hope that you’ll join us at Gen Con, which will be inclusive and fun. Prospective attendees, if you don’t feel comfortable attending, based upon your principals, we invite you to make the decision that feels right for you, your business or group. We support your decision, regardless of the outcome.

What does the future hold for Gen Con in 2021 and beyond?  Planning and bidding for our convention is a long-term process that begins five years prior to contract-term commencement. Discussions, whether to remain in Indy or move elsewhere, have begun.

The full text of the letter follows the jump.

Continue reading →

Gould on SFWA Reincorporation

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SFWA President Steven Gould, responding to questions from File 770 about grants SFWA administers, and public money it might pursue in the future, elaborated on some of the reasons for the organization’s 2013 reincorporation in California.

Gould: One of SFWA’s motivations for becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation is, indeed, to be able to give outright grants for medical and legal aid rather than make loans. Another benefit is that now the donations we receive are fully tax-deductible for the donor. There are other non-monetary reasons. Under Massachusetts corporate regs, we could not hold officer elections via electronic/digital/online ballots, nor could we hold a general business meeting in another country (say if the WorldCon was in Canada.)

We do make grants for many purposes. We support AboutSF, the educational outreach program at the University of Kansas’ Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction and we’ve given a grant to the LaunchPad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. We also give a grant to the University of Northern Illinois for their Special Collections, though this is because they are SFWA’s official archive, so in a way we’re paying for services. We are implementing a program to provide technology grants to aid members whose ability to write has been impacted by a major hardware/software disaster and can’t afford to replace, repair, or upgrade their system.

A large amount of the organization’s income come from payments received from the Author’s Coalition of America, which distributes foreign non-title specific royalty payments for American works photocopied abroad. This is the closest thing we receive to “public grant money” and it is private fees paid by individuals outside of the United States.

We are certainly investigating the possibility of applying for appropriate grants from public and private sources when the purposes of those grants line up with our existing mission programs. But we have yet to do so and I seriously doubt it will ever be a significant portion of SFWA funding.

Comic-Con: No Room at the Inn?

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Javascript, not Java, is being blamed for the blowup this time.

Javascript, not Java, is being blamed for the blowup this time.

If inviting tens of thousands of people who need hotel rooms at San Diego Comic-Con International to simultaneously click a link at 9 a.m. on a given morning is the best solution for everyone involved you couldn’t tell it by yesterday’s results.

Kerry Dixon describes the scene in “Hotelpocalypse 2015: A Tale of Two Forms” at the San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog.

At 9AM PT, the link provided by Travel Planners and Comic-Con International was to open to to the General Hotel form, where attendees could rank their top six hotel choices in preference, and fill in all of their required information (like name, e-mail, arrival and departure date, how many people would be staying in the room, etc.) Things got off to a very bad start from the second the form opened, when most users, including us, reported the form taking longer than normal to load. How long it took varied person to person, with some reporting 20-30 seconds, and some reporting minutes. This obviously slowed down everyone’s time in being able to submit the form at all.

But that was only the beginning. It took a few minutes for news to filter down that users actually saw two different forms when they submitted – either the “good” form, with a drop down menu of all the hotel choices….

Or the “bad” form, which didn’t include a drop down menu, but rather a scrollable text box. You could select one, or all six hotels if you held Ctrl down on your keyboard, but there was no way to rank them.

An indigestible bit of Javascript may be to blame –

https://twitter.com/kenwicked/status/580416461115678720

Read Dixon’s post to see screenshots of both forms, plus analysis of other problems reported by users.

As she observes, trying to get a room for the con is even more stressful than trying to get a badge during Open Registration (where she estimates fans using the system have only a 6% chance of success!)

Art Submissions Sought By World Fantasy Awards

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The World Fantasy Awards judges are seeking materials to consider in the Artist category reminds Peter Dennis Pautz, President of the World Fantasy Awards Association —

As always, this seems to be the category with the fewest submissions from either publishers or artists.

Please remember this category, like the others, is for work published in 2014.

If you have materials you wish considered, the judges for the 2015 World Fantasy Awards are:

Gemma Files, 313 Richmond St. East #768; Toronto Ontario M5A 4S7; Canada (*)
Nina K. Hoffman, P.O. Box 10858; Eugene, OR 97440; USA (**)
Bénédicte Lombardo 50, rue du Clos; 77670 Saint Mammes; FRANCE (***)
Bruce McAllister, 528 E. Palmyra Avenue; Orange, CA 92866; USA (*)
Robert Shearman, 65 Telford Avenue, Streatham Hill; London SW2 4XL; United Kingdom (***)
(All judges prefer hard copies, but those marked * can accept pdfs; ** can accept mobi; *** both)

Tom Loback Passes Away

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Art by Tom Loback.

Art by Tom Loback.

Tom Loback, a widely appreciated creator of artwork and figures for gaming and Tolkien fans, died March 5 at the age of 66.

An accomplished Elvish linguist, he incorporated characters from Tolkien’s languages into illustrations for such magazines as Beyond Bree (he produced its logo), Vinyar Tengwar, Mythlore, Parma Eldalamberon, and Little Gwaihir.

Loback also created the fantasy line of Dragontooth Miniatures, and later Thomas’ Tin Soldiers, a popular line of Civil War miniatures. He was a partner in the Aulic Council board game company and co-designer for Mohawk, a game of the French and Indian War.

Irish Brigade: 69th NY Regimental Color
Figure of a giant by Tom Loback.

For a time Loback also worked anonymously erecting sculptures along the Hudson River made with driftwood and other found objects. Eventually his identity was discovered and the New York Times profiled him in 2007.

Who was creating the sculptures had been something of a mystery, even though he was not doing it on the sly. His identity remained a secret, at least to the world beyond the edge of the river.

In July 2005, parks department cleanup crews removed the sculptures as if they were trash. Mr. Loback, 57, simply made more.

He is survived by his wife Susan.

Flying Saucer Archive at Georgetown

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The very thing fans were worried about....

The very thing fans were worried about….

It seems perfectly reasonable today that a winner of the Philip K. Dick Award might have a collection of UFO and alien contact literature named after him, as is the case with the Jack Womack Flying Saucer Library at Georgetown University.

It was not always so. Science fiction fans spent decades craving respectability in a world prone to dismiss their favorite reading as “That crazy Buck Rogers stuff.” One of the cornerstones of respectable fan culture was an interest in science, how future technology might lead to starships and encounters with alien civilizations. To be scrupulously avoided was any taint of flying saucers or alien abductions.

As Patrick Nielsen Hayden phrased it when he asked Womack a question on The Well in 2001 —

Science fiction insiders are, of course, habitually sniffy about this stuff. I am; and I remember being a kid in the 1960s with my own copy of Flying Saucers: Serious Business [by Frank Edwards]. Probably that’s why.

Womack took that as his cue to reassure fans he still walked their side of the street:

When it comes to woo-woo, I believe in the people who believe in and write about woo-woo; I don’t believe in the woo-woo itself.

Let me repeat that. I don’t believe in the woo-woo itself.

In certain times and places, studying the woo-woo was as close as a person could get to that sought after Sense of Wonder. There was no one more respectable than Takumi Shibano, co-founder of Japanese fandom, who said his fascination with sf drew him to join the UFOs Flying in Japan’s Skies Research Group in 1956. “It wasn’t that I was so enamored of UFO research, but that I was interested in those basic, fantastical science ideas, so I wanted to do sf.”

However, in Womack’s case it wasn’t a placebo, but one of many interests attached to his wide-ranging curiosity about the weird. At the time of the interview in 2001 the “Womack Collection of the Human Mind at Work and Play” included thousands of items cataloged in a variety of topics:

“Beginning with Advertising, going on through Amusements, Animals (in relation to people)Anthropology, Archeology, Architecture, Art, Assassinations, Astronomy, Atrocities, Bibliographic, Bibliophilic, Cannibalism, Cities, Comics, Cranks, Crime, Cryptobotany, Cryptozoology(including sea & lake monsters, yetis, yowies, bunyips, Surrey panthers, ghostly mongeese, Owlman (Mothman falls under UFOs), Cults (including Scientology, People’s Temple, Elvis), Death(including Forensics and Funerals), Disasters, Disappearances, Drugs, Eccentrics, Fairies (traditional sort), Film, Forteana, Frauds, Gastronomy, History, Hoaxes, Holocaust, Japan, Kentucky, Literature (outre/puzzling/incomprehensible), Lost Continents, Lycanthropy, Magic (stage, cultural), Manias, Medicine, Military Blunders, Mind (altered states), Music, Nature, Nazis, Occult, Pets, Photography, Popular Culture, Propaganda, Racism, Rumors, Russia,  Satanism (pro and con), Science (so-called i.e. Tesla et. al.) Sea Mysteries, Sex, Skepticism, Stripping, Subcultures, Teeth, Teratology, Transgender, Travel, UFOs & related (cattle mutilation, crop circles et. al.), Vampires, Witches, Women (badly behaved), Zombies.”

The Flying Saucer archive at Georgetown is just a fraction of that — 242 books, typescripts, pamphlets, tracts and magazines published primarily from 1948 to 1980.

The collection includes most of the major 1950s works on flying saucers, the works of all major contactees, bibliographies, compilations of so-called photographs, and a number of publications from the Saucerian Press. 19 of the books in the collection are inscribed or signed by their authors. Several books have supporting letters, ephemera, and press materials laid in.

Some of the most amusing visuals from the UFO publications in Womack’s collection can be seen on Boo-Hooray’s Tumblr page. And Boo-Hooray will publish a visual history of the genre, written by Womack himself, later this year.

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the story.]

Gen Con Threatens To Move If Indiana Governor Signs Religious Freedom Bill

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Indiana’s governor is expected to sign ”religious freedom” legislation this week that could protect business owners who don’t want to provide services for same-sex couples, despite a threat by Gen Con to move out of state if the law is enacted.

Gen Con is held annually in Indianapolis and bills itself as the ”best-attended gaming convention in the world”, drawing 56,000 last year, and with an annual economic impact on the host city estimated at over $50 million.

Gen Con chair Adrian Swartout’s public letter to the governor stressed the benefits of welcoming people of all backgrounds:

Gen Con proudly welcomes a diverse attendee base, made up of different ethnicities, cultures, beliefs, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, and socio-economic backgrounds. We are happy to provide an environment that welcomes all, and the wide-ranging diversity of our attendees has become a key element to the success and growth of our convention.

…Legislation that could allow for refusal of service or discrimination against our attendees will have a direct negative impact on the state’s economy, and will factor into our decision-making on hosting the convention in the state of Indiana in future years.

We ask that you please reconsider your support of SB 101.

Few sf conventions have the clout to make demands. In America’s largest cities a major science fiction con may not even be the biggest convention in town on a given weekend. In contrast, Gen Con is evidently the Indiana Convention Center’s biggest annual show.

However, Gen Con is under contract to hold the conference in Indianapolis through 2020. Conference spokeswoman Stacia Kirby told the Indiapolis Star there are no plans to break the contract, merely that the state’s adoption of the measure would factor into future decisions.

Gen Con’s strong appeal on behalf of diversity may come as a surprise to fans who only know about it from the kerfuffles it has inspired. In 2014, Tor.com pointed to the convention as an illustration of gaming’s “race problem”, triggering Larry Correia’s massive takedown “No Tor.com, Gen Con Isn’t Racist. A Fisking”. By calling out the governor over SB 101, Gen Con shows Correia’s faith in them was justified.

Cats Laughing Again

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Cats Laughing, a psychedelic folk rock band with authors Emma Bull, Steven Brust, and Adam Stemple, plus Lojo Russo and new addition Scott Keever, will play a reunion concert Friday, April 3 at Minicon.

Livestream audio and video from the concert, presented free on ConcertWindow, begins at 9:00 p.m. EDT. SisterTree, featuring Kerri Joy and Dee Brust, will open with a short set. Richard Tatge will provide a light show.

David Dyer-Bennet, part of the concert’s Beyond Conventions team, is spreading the word. “We don’t get paid for number of people connected, but it would still be cool if people wanted to have Cats Laughing parties at conventions or elsewhere, or even go so far as to present the stream in a program item.”

The reunion was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign that Neil Gaiman promoted in this amusing video —

The Cats Laughing Facebook page has plenty of photos of the band. And here is a clip of Emma Bull singing a bit of “Signal to Noise” at a recent rehearsal.