“What I did on my Summer Vacation”, or how an accident caused me to be the 2017 DUFF Fan Fund representative.
One of the hats I’ve picked up and worn this year is to have been nominated and won the 2017 Down Under Fan Fund. As a result of that, I am currently the Fan Fund Administrator, and as a result I attended Lexicon and Continuum, the National Science Fiction conventions of New Zealand, and Australia, met fans and writers from the Antipodes, and got to see some of the countryside as well. But I sense you may have questions, and I am here to answer them. What’s a Fan Fund? Even in the early days of SF Fandom, fans communicated across the globe. A couple of fans pooled funds in the 1940s for some transatlantic exchanges between England and the US, bringing fans together, sharing our love of SF. These exchanges led to the formalization of the exchange, the Trans Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF), in the 1950s. In alternating years, a fan travels from North America to Europe, and a fan travels from Europe to North America. The goal is to attend conventions, meet fans, and exchange knowledge and love of science fiction. In the days before the internet, where slow postal exchanges of fanzines meant that knowing what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic was a slow process, TAFF helped bring fans face to face.
Question of the Week: What was your best conference/convention experience?
There’s a good reason for this question: if you haven’t already noticed, we’ve been hanging out at the Eaton Conference in Riverside, California; if you have noticed, then I’m not contributing anything interesting and will move on. The entire conference was absolutely amazing and we thought it would be a great idea to see what other kinds of experiences folks have had at conferences or conventions. Thanks to John Ottinger and Patrick Hester for their responses! Now for the answers: Shaun There are so many to list. Really. I’ve walked through an anime convention with cat ears and a tail, my brother alongside me in the same garb. I’ve run RPG campaigns at conventions which turned out to be slightly insane and a whole lot of violence and fun (you should ask my brother about the time he played Rifts with us and kept getting knocked out every two seconds). Heck, I’ve even met the guy who created Evangelion and watched Star Wars fan films in scary back rooms! But I have to say that, thus far, my experiences at the Eaton Conference have been the best. Not only did I get to meet a great deal of people I greatly respect, whether as scholars (John Rieder, Carl Freedman, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., De Witt Douglas Kilgore, and others) or authors (China Mieville, Greg Benford, Karen Tei Yamashita, etc.), and hang out with one of my bestest best friends of best-ness, but I also got to meet the person I was actually presenting on: Nalo Hopkinson. My first encounter with her involved me essentially embarrassing myself: I quite literally went up to her, stopped for several seconds, and blurted out “Hi, you talk to me on Twitter.” I got the impression that she deals with such things quite often, as she took it in stride as Jen rescued me from my bumbling self. More normal encounters followed (to be honest, by the time the conference was over, I had mostly normalized, which is kind of a little late to get over your fanboy nonsense) and I had a lovely conversation with her after my presentation about her work, general nice things, and other writers. It was awesome! Similar things happened with other authors, such as China Mieville, who also had to deal with my fanboy nonsense until early Sunday, in which I was apparently coherent enough to hold a conversation. The only exception was Karen Yamashita, who actually teaches at my alma mater (UC Santa Cruz); for some reason we had quite a lot to talk about already, since we had both experienced the amusing antics of one of my previous professors. Overall, though, I think the experience was a good one, because I haven’t been in a single space with so many people who I have read, loved, and so on. Needless to say, the experience was pretty much all kinds of awesome. Unfortunately, the second person I was talking about in my paper wasn’t there (where were you, Tobias S. Buckell?), but since I basically stalk him on Twitter anyway, I can at least pretend he was there in spirit. That said, one day I will have my bumbling fanboy moment with you, Mr. Buckell. One day… Jen I realize we’re coming off of a very exciting weekend at a conference, but my best conference/convention memory is actually from my childhood. My father started attending a gaming convention called “Conquest” when I was fairly young. He went for the dungeons and dragons and when I got a bit older he started running gaming sessions for my friends and I. Those were some very formative experiences for me and I remember them very fondly. Anyway, eventually my parents started taking a whole crew of us up to the convention and let us run wild. I think we were the only kids in these early years, as my father was one of those early adopters of role-playing games and, likewise, an early attender of gaming conventions. Anyway, the most memorable moment for me is actually running through those halls (it was at a hotel up near San Francisco that looked vaguely castle-like) and generally creating havoc – creating our own live d&d adventures. The specific moment though was probably when we decided it would be fun to stop the elevator between floors and open the doors. I have no idea what I read on the wall, at that moment, but I do remember knowing, with absolute certainty, that it was written by a geek and that they had written it for US. Second most memorable experience was driving around with a dear friend of mine during a Dundracon and imagining that all the corporate buildings that surrounded the hotel were straight out of Stephenson’s Diamond Age. I miss you, Anicka. I’ve had a number of cool con moments since then, but they’ve all been very personal moments that didn’t necessarily require a con for them to have occurred. The things that make Cons special though are those moments that do require the convention to bring together a geographically disparate group that are all so strongly tied together by whatever that con happens to be about. That meeting of minds is truly Epic. Patrick Hester Hmmm… Well, there’s favorite and then there’s memorable. Memorable first. I grew up in Fresno, California. Fresno… There’s not a lot to do in Fresno when you’re growing up. I spent a lot of time in the comic book store or at the Fresno State Student Union (where all the kids hung out…) shooting pool or bowling ($3/hr all you can play…). Anyway, I saw a flier that Creation was coming to town to do a Star Trek convention. This was when The Next Generation was hot. I really wanted to go so I talked a friend of mine (who had a car, which I did not) to drive me (it was further out in the country than I could go on my mountain bike, which was
