TAFF Switches 2016 Race, Now East To West

TAFF logo westTrans-Atlantic Fan Fund administrators Nina Horvath, Curt Phillips and Jim Mowatt, after considering the advantages, have decided to switch direction, running another East/West race for 2016. This means TAFF is currently looking for nominees from Europe to be the TAFF delegate to North America in 2016 and attend MidAmericon II (the Worldcon in Kansas City, August 17-21).

Jim Mowatt explains, “The knock on effect of this decision is that the 2017 race will be West to East so that we can send someone from North America to Helsinki. This would also mean that we are going in the right direction to aim for New Orleans or San Jose in 2018 and Dublin in 2019.

“So onwards we go: to Kansas City and Beyond. It’s TAFF nomination time.”

9 thoughts on “TAFF Switches 2016 Race, Now East To West

  1. Here’s 1 vote for Contraflow VII / DeepsouthCon 55 being the 2018 Worldcon.

    Silly But True

  2. Third?!

    Here’s hoping that there won’t be continual tweaking/readjusting in the years to come as we have more and more non-NA Worldcons.
    Because we should, and will, have more non-NA Worldcons.
    It also looks like Eastercon as the destination on the European side is being left behind, at least temporarily.

  3. The SF community may well fragment even as it appears to grow into a global community. Does anyone really beleive fans will be equally conversant with the genre published in every language … or, in the case of American fans, more than one or two languages (English and perhaps Spanish)?

  4. Taral Wayne, the SF community is already fragmented; it’s a community of communities. (Or a fandom made of fandoms, if you will.) Anime fans may or may not be furry fans. Gaming fans may or may not be book fans. Filk fans may or many not be movie fans. It’s the attitude, more than the expertise, that’s important, I think. “Here is this thing that I love: let me show it to you!”

  5. @Cassy,

    Exactly! I think there is an obligation of fandom to resist “othering” fans we might disagree with on taste which furthers that fragmentation.

    It always struck me that for genres which had to fight tooth and nail for legitimacy based merely on arguments of taste and art that it is a profoundly self-defeating when we tear apart our own wider family based on arguments of taste and art. We do the job of those who didn’t want to legitimize suffer for them.

    If I got some time at a con with PNH, I’d pick his brain on matters of editing; if it was Wright, I have a ton of questions on the creative process.

    Silly But True

  6. If anything, things like TAFF and Worldcon bring together otherwise separate fandoms. But with or without that contact, people all over the world are reading, writing, watching, and talking about genre fiction.

    Anglophones can reject sf just because it’s in translation, or we can remember that the early days of our genre include Borges and Verne. (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea is still a fun read, and I’m nominating “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” for the retro Hugo next year.)

  7. I had to break the news to Pat McMurray who is chair of the next Eastercon in the UK and he was understandably disappointed. It was a heart wrenching thing to have to do as I dearly love Eastercon and feel that it does add a great deal to the convention to have a TAFF delegate in attendance. However, I had to think of the delegate and the aims of the fan fund. Worldcon does offer access to more fans and networking lies at the heart of the Trans Atlantic Fan Fund. The more people that the delegate can reach out to, then the more effective that delegate has been in networking between the North American and European fan groups. It was a close call but we (Nina, Curt and myself) decided to tie TAFF in with the forthcoming Worldcons so that the reach of the delegate was that much stronger. History will show whether we made the right decision and future TAFF administrators may choose a different emphasis.

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