It’s Chicon 7

The winning bid for 2012 has now officially morphed into Chicon 7.

The Guests of Honor will be author Mike Resnick, artist Rowena Morrill, astronaut Story Musgrave, fan Peggy Rae Sapienza, and “industry” (it says on the website) Jane Frank.

Mike Resnick has been a dominant figure on the SF scene for many years — just how dominant you can tell from the list of accolades on the Baen site, which begins:

[He’s] the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction; and when you add in novels and non-fiction, he’s fourth on the all-time list. He is the winner of 5 Hugos (from 31 nominations), [and] a Nebula (11 nominations)…

Rowena Morrill is a highly acclaimed artist with a career spanning over 20 years.

Story Musgrave was an NASA astronaut for over 30 years and flew on six spaceflights:

He performed the first shuttle spacewalk on Challenger’s first flight, was a pilot on an astronomy mission, conducted two classified DOD missions, was the lead spacewalker on the Hubble Telescope repair mission and on his last flight, he operated an electronic chip manufacturing satellite on Columbia…. He is a concept artist with Walt Disney Imagineering, an innovator with Applied Minds Inc. and a professor of design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA

Peggy Rae Sapienza chaired Bucconeer, the 1998 Worldcon, and has provided leadership at lot of other Worldcons. She assisted Nippon 2007 in many ways while serving as its North American agent. Her father, Jack McKnight, machined the first Hugo Awards in 1953. Peggy Rae was active in the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society in the late 1950s. She won the Big Heart Award in 1983.

Jane Frank has been a collector for decades and has run WoW-Art since 1991, selling illustrative genre art.

John Scalzi will be Toastmaster.

Update 09/05/2010: Aussiecon 4 later issued a very nice press release, which I have added after the jump.

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