DetCon 1 Names Guests

DetCon 1, the 2014 NASFiC in Detroit, will be held July 17 to 20.

The Guests of Honor will be author Steven Barnes, artist John Picacio, multi-talented fans/academics/pros Bernadette Bosky, Arthur D. Hlavaty and Kevin J. Maroney, scientist Helen Greiner, filkers Bill and Brenda Sutton, plus ConChairs Emeritus Roger Sims & Fred Prophet (chairs of the 1959 Worldcon, Detention).

Memberships are $55 adult $25 child $35 supporting through end of 2013. Voters who pre-supported automatically get attending memberships.

[Via Kevin Standlee.]

3 thoughts on “DetCon 1 Names Guests

  1. I am very happy for my good friend Steven Barnes to be getting some of the recognition he deserves.

    (Of course, if I mentioned I was going to attend, Arthur Hlavaty would be pressing the committee to not allow me to attend, so this will be a non-choice for my returning, if ever I do, to convention attendance.)

  2. http://www.rawilson.com/quantum.html

    In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the “is of identity” from the English language. (The “is of identity” takes the form X is a Y. e.g., “Joe is a Communist,” “Mary is a dumb file-clerk,” “The universe is a giant machine,” “Klaus is a shit,” “Mr. Hlavaty has been bamboozled by an Internet bully conducting a Vendetta,” etc.) In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words “is” or “to be” and the Bourland proposal (English without “isness”) he called E-PRIME, or English-Prime.

    A few scientists have taken to writing in E-Prime (notably Dr. Albert Ellis and Dr. E. W. Kellogg III). Mr. Bourland, in a recent (not-yet-published as of this writing) paper tells of a few cases in which scientific reports, unsatisfactory to sombunall members of a research group, suddenly made sense and became acceptable when re-written in E-Prime. By and large, however, E-Prime has not yet caught on in learned circles, popular speech, or science fiction fanzine weblogs.

    (Oddly, most physicists write in E-Prime a large part of the time, due to the influence of Operationalism — the philosophy that tells us to define things by operations performed — but few have any awareness of E-prime as a discipline and most of them lapse into “isness” statements all too frequently, thereby confusing themselves and their readers.)

    Nonetheless, E-Prime seems to solve many problems that otherwise appear intractable, and it also serves as an antibiotic against what Korzybski called “demonological thinking.” Most of this book employs E-Prime so the reader could begin to get acquainted with this new way of mapping the world; in a few instances I allowed normal English, and its “isness” to intrude again (how many of you noticed that?), while discussing some of the weird and superstitious thinking that exists throughout our society and always occurs when “is” creeps into our concepts. (As a clue or warning, I placed each “is” in dubious quotation marks, to highlight its central role in the confusions there discussed).

    — “E and E-Prime”, Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson, Ph.D.

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